By YungSeti aka Adam Abdur-Rahman
It’s been almost eight years since I’ve sat down to retell this story, so forgive any…I don’t know,
stumblings in clarity on my part.
Even now, sitting in front of my laptop, a lit joint burning closer to the filter in my right hand and a
bottle of whiskey just beside me on my left – half of both already consumed, as I recall the
events of that day, I can feel the familiar tremor starting in my hand – one that I know will only
grow more pronounced and difficult to stifle as the memories are brought to the surface.
Still, I’ve spent enough years battling with the decision to share what happened, and more than
that dealing with the consequences it can have, and, ultimately I now know the decision to share
my story is the right one. I believe people have the right to know what’s out there, and if there’s
a possibility that I can stop anyone else from going near that place, from going near the shores
of Crabber’s Bay, I can perhaps prevent that thing that took my brother from hurting anyone
else.
The fact that other people have fallen victim to the evil of that place, that anyone else has met
the same fate as my brother lingers with me, haunting me nearly as much as the final seconds I
saw him, and ultimately saving lives means more to me than the prospective ridicule this may
garner, or the pain reliving it will cause.
I suppose I should start, lest I manage to convince myself against it or fall apart before I
complete the story. I’ve got a job to do now, a warning to give, that I wish my brother and I had
had when playing near the shores of our beloved lake house.
If ever you find yourself in the area, beware the shores of Crabbers Bay, and do not be lured by
its strange phenomena, those shores teeming with little arthropods, for they are little more than
an omen of something far darker.
Beware the Cloaked Woman who wanders along the shore.
.
“I call top bunk!”
“No fair, you got it last time! It’s my turn, dad said!”
“Gonna have to beat me to it then!” my brother, Ryan, said breaking into a full sprint from the
front door and up the stairs before he’d even finished speaking.
Ryan was the younger of the two of us by a year, though you wouldn’t be able to tell given our
appearances or dynamic.
He was always the more outspoken and brazen of the two of us and paired with the fact that he
was unusually big for his age, and in more cases than one finding himself in scraps with and
beating some of my bullies, all of whom, like me, were a grade older than him.
By the time of our final trip to the lakehouse, though he was only 11, he stood taller than me and
had grown into a pretty brazen kid, never one to want to back down from any challenge, and
seemingly goaded by the idea of risk. I suppose, because of his size and how he was often
treated as a kid much older than he truly was, Ryan felt the need to be the tough kid, to be my
protector, even though I should have been his, and because of that he’s gone and I’m here
when it should’ve been the other way around.
It was mid-August, and the end of summer was hurtling closer, evident by the waning hours of
sunlight, and the subtle creep of the winter chill in the air, most apparent at night – and our
mother and father decided that we ought to take advantage of the rapidly fading benefits of
summer, allowing my brother and I one last hurrah before school began and the unforgiving
northeastern winter settled in.
My brother and I had thrown our bags together, practically loading the car ourselves when our
parents told us that we would be departing that night for our last lake house visit of the summer.
The beach house had been in our family for generations, constructed by our great grandfather,
who was also the first person to settle on the shores, the first member of the very community in
which it sat – which became Fiddler’s Grove, a small, but wealthy little village built behind the
cover of a thick northeastern forest that entirely hid the several acres of discreet, private shore
that would come to be known as Crabber’s Bay.
The reason for the name was simple, Crabber’s Bay had a unique quirk, a phenomenon really,
that made it quite unlike any other, and was responsible for the community that had grown
around it.
When the sun sets the shores of Crabber’s Bay becomes teeming with creatures, of all shapes
and sizes, utterly unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
It was something of a tradition of our families ever since our grandfather had died, to make the
drive out to the house that our father had grown up in within Fiddler’s Grove, and appreciate the
environment in a way he never had growing up.
For my brother and I, it was a time represented by one thing and one thing only.
The beach. Our father had grown up with a father who was a kind man, but demanded respect
and maintained one rule with which he was oddly strict, that our father was not to be found
anywhere near the shores of the bay, especially near sunset, due to it being dangerous.
Reportedly our grandfather’s warm and personable attitude would grow unrecognizably dark the
few times my father was caught sneaking out to play near the shores when he was our age, and
the punishment that would follow was uncharacteristic.
I suppose that’s partly why he made such a point of allowing us that joy, and we did find such
joy in it.
By the time we were passing the city limits of the small coastal town nearest the little village
where the beach house was, my brother and I were practically buzzing with excited energy. The
scent of sea salt was growing more pronounced, stoking the flames of our excitement even
more, as the wind whipped in through my brother’s side window, opened only halfway at our
parent’s request, our mom not wanting us to catch something, due to the very present chill in the
air.
As we neared the house, the sight of the shore ahead and the large grey expanse of water
beyond it disappeared behind the trees, and within minutes we had driven up the long driveway
winding driveway, that coiled up the hill towards the house like a great stone serpent, and into
the shadow, the massive old colonial mansion, parking the car under the archway extending
between of the house and garage.
Within minutes, my brother and I had practically tumbled out of the car, and after taking in a
breath of salty seaside air, mixed with the sweet smell of forest greenery that served as the
signature scent of the area, we sped into the house, falling right back into the same argument
we had every time we arrived as my brother sped ahead, to the bedroom that had once
belonged to my grandfather – and now served as our guest room.
The old house seemed to groan its welcome as our arguing voices and racing footsteps across
the old wooden floors and up the winding staircase echoed through those halls, which still felt so
cavernous as a child, inundating the sleepy, creaky old colonial on a hillside by the shore with a
life it hadn’t had since our the last visit.
My brother raced ahead of me, speeding past hopelessly taking full advantage of his greater
height and athleticism, nodding up the spiral staircase and down the halls overhead, showering
me with dust from the old light fixtures, swaying under his footfalls.
I cried out another complaint to the air he’d previously occupied, quickening my pace while
trying not to lose my footing scrambling up the stairs, backpack in hand.
I raced through the upstairs hall, making such a sharp left into the first open door that I narrowly
avoided running into the doorframe.
The room was just as we’d left it, with perhaps a bit more dust, and the addition of my brother’s
stuff somehow already scattered messily around. Ryan sat atop the bunk bed nearest the wall
and the massive window with a view of the gray shores below – a smug grin of satisfaction
prominent on his face as I trudged across the room, making certain hand gestures at him as I
threw my bag onto the lower bunk.
Ryan leaned over the side of the bed, holding himself up with one hand gripping the window
frame, clicking open the two locks on either side of the window, and sliding it open with a grunt.
A cloud of dust wafted from the sides, as the window groaned its protest at being opened for the
first time in months.
The familiar and ever-present scents of saltwater and morning dew rolled in on a breeze,
transforming the thin white curtains on either side of the window into bed-sheet ghosts, and
filling the room. I caught my brother’s eye, the same thought occurring to us both simultaneously
as we breathed in the scent, a swell of nostalgia and excitement rising within us.
The beachfront.
From our childhood, the portion of shoreline behind our house has been my brother and I’s
playground on many a summer night, and the setting of many of our best memories together as
a child. During the day it would transform into an imaginary battleground as we fended off
legions of pretend pirates docking ships with massive black flags looming overhead all along the
shore.
And during the evenings, when the peculiarities of that particular beach became apparent, and
the sands became covered in legions moving black things that seem to reflect the light off of
slick shells – blank crabs scuttling across it, emerging from under rocks and shells and fallen
branches, and out of the water seemingly claiming dominion over the beach, my brother and I
could always be found out in our beach attire with sand buckets at our sides, collecting and
subsequently freeing the strange land spiders.
Looking back through the always clear lens of hindsight, I suppose the strange phenomena of
our property should have been more…daunting to us.
I’d never seen anywhere as abundant with the creatures as our property would become when
the sun began to set, with so many of them so abnormally large, if ever any one of us had
chosen to dig deeper, to peel back the layers of what we had so readily accepted as normal,
and understand just what it was that made these shores different, just what drew these legions
of animals here.. who knows. Perhaps, somehow we’d never have gone back, and Ryan would
still be here.
We were just kids though and as curious as we were it had never truly occurred to us to
question the nature of the shore, that in the late evening grew teeming with crustaceans, since it
had always just been that way it became ordinary to us, and it wasn’t until the events of that
final trip that we would be forced to face the horrifying reality.
Without skipping a beat upon reaching the room we’d torn the bags open, thrown on our
swimsuits, and grabbed our plastic beach buckets, and were out of the room in a blur, racing
down the hall just as we had moments prior. Ryan, running out to the lead as usual, narrowly
missed colliding into our father, arriving with his and mother’s luggage at the top of the stairs as
we sped by.
Ryan reached the backdoor that opened up onto the patio first, grabbing the plastic bucket we
used to use for sandcastles as children from the pile of beach toys kept near the door, and after
a few moments of fumbling with the locks, we were racing down the stairs of the deck, and
down the path to the beach.
The sound of my brother and I clamoring down the wooden porch steps and our excited chatter
filled the air, along with the continuous whooshing sounds of the water against the shore as it
approached and receded.
The beach was clear of any wildlife at this point, with the exception of the lone seagull flitting
through the sand or circling overhead, not quite yet the time of day at which the namesake
peculiarity of Crabber’s Bay became apparent.
At that point in the day, with the late afternoon sun still sitting high above in the sky, the beach
was just like any other private beach in a quiet community, and while we waited for the shores to
fill with their namesake creatures, the beach was ours, and we would enjoy it as was typical for
kids – racing to see who could swim farthest out without passing the buoys, flinging balls of mud
and sand at one another, and building, and subsequently destroying each other’s sandcastles.
That was how we spent the next hour, watching the sun disappearing beneath the horizon –
painting the sky wondrous hues of yellow and orange until the time drew near.
I glanced at the sky, taking note of the approaching darkness. It was almost time, that time in the
late evening during which the odd phenomena of Crabber’s Bay became apparent. Behind me,
Ryan splashed about in the water, trying to catch some small fish that had wandered too close
to shore by hand – as I scanned the beachfront and the sandy hills leading up to the greenery
spilling forth from the forest above, searching for even the slightest sign of movement in the
sand.
“It’s almost time,” my brother called from behind me, standing with his face towards the setting
sun hands cupped over his eyes for protection. He trudged forward out of the shallows,
grabbing the plastic bucket from the sand in his right hand, and cupping his eyes with the left
until he was right beside me, back turned, scanning the beach just as I was.
“Race to see who finds one first?” he finished, shooting me a grin with a familiar, competitive
glint in his eyes.
A smirk made its way across my face as I continued my visual search of the area for the tiniest
shuffle of movement in the sand, or flits of darkness speeding out of the brush of the forest
spilling over the sandy sides of their hills towards the water, hoping to spot one and accept the
challenge all in one breath, likely the only way I’d beat my brother in any sort of raceI suppose this is the point at which the story begins to seem odd to you. From my experience,
this is the point in the tale when the psychiatrists stop and mention never having experienced
anything similar, despite plenty of time on the beach. My reply is always the same.
‘You haven’t been to Crabbers Bay.”
It was the very reason the community had come to exist, a strange, seemingly unexplainable
phenomena of nature that happened to make those original proprietors, the first fishermen and
crabbers who settled here – supposedly stumbling upon this goldmine of land by chance,
claiming this strip of shore and the surrounding forest as their own, my great grandfather among
them – a generational wealth.
The stories of the original crew who discovered the bay always seemed to shift and change
based on when it was being told, my father himself admitting he’d never received a consistent
answer, but the basics were the same. A group of crabbers struggling to make ends meet set
out for a day of work, when a record-breaking storm hits the area, throwing them off course and
nearly capsizing them on the rocky shores. The storm would begin to wane as the sun started to
dip below the horizon, and as the men floated gently into a bay none of which had ever seen
before, and upon bringing up the nets to check for tears, they found it overflowing with an
abundance of crabs, of a myriad of species.
Turning their attention to the beach surrounding them, jaws dropped and hearts skipped beats
as they observed the beach seemingly overcome by legions of the creatures. Without any
intention, they’d stumbled onto a veritable goldmine, and all of the men on that boat that day
swore a vow of silence to each other, keeping the location and its phenomena a secret until
they’d made a sizeable fortune, quickly becoming the most successful crabbing operation
anywhere, and taking them all from average crabbers and fishermen to quite wealthy men, most
of them anyway.
As lucky as it all seemed to be, not everything was perfect. It seemed with the discovery of the
bay a dark omen seemed to follow, and in the weeks and years following, a few members of the
crew would return to the bay alone and never return, seemingly disappearing into thin air.
Only traces of one would ever be found – a shirt found floating just feet away from shoreominous but ultimately inconclusive, and far from enough to prevent the rest from taking
advantage of the land’s gift.
The rest of the crew, all of whom were richer now than they’d ever thought they’d be, go on to
purchase the land, developing a strange affinity for the place, constructing the massive homes
and manors that would become the neighborhood of Fiddler’s Grove, around Crabber’s Bay.
Crabbers Bay is like most other private shores during most hours of the day, quiet and calm,
silty shores along the green borders of the forest, like any other Massachusetts shore.
It’s when the sun begins to dip, disappearing behind the sealine, and the sands and earth along
the shore seem to shift in places with strange sentience, and the crevices and spaces between
the rock formations on either side of the shore seemed to teem with tiny forms and hundreds of
spindly legs pouring forth, that the place unveils its strange nature.
“There!”
By the time my head had snapped in his direction prompted by his shout, Ryan had already
taken off in pursuit of something, kicking up a cloud of sand for me to run through in his wake.
Shit.
My eyes searched ahead while running, settling on a fist-sized point of movement and color,
purple and black like a bruise, reflecting the final rays of the setting sun, scuttling forth from a
freshly opened hole dug out of the sand.
A crab. Purple Marsh to be specific, had unveiled itself from its resting spot under the sand and
began roaming the beach absentmindedly, the first raindrop of a coming storm.
Ryan had already covered more than half the distance to the thing, which seemed to realize it
was being pursued and veer off to the left towards the little sand slopes leading up to the
forestland ahead, then quickly scuttling off to the right, repeating that pattern along the sand. My
brother remained in pursuit, nearly losing his footing several times as the sand slid from beneath
him, but eventually managed to close enough of the gap to leap forward and drop the bucket
over the fleeing crustacean.
“Gotcha you speedy little jerk!” he cried in frustrated triumph, raising the bucket and grabbing
the crab in one swift motion, holding the creature under the armpits of both claws to prevent any
pinching, as we’d done so many times before.
I can’t tell you why we did it, or what we found so entertaining about it, but it was sort of
tradition. Truly, I’ve spent years asking myself, damn near punishing myself for it solely for the
events of that day, but ultimately it seems like collecting small animals is just one of those things
that little kids seem to do. Be it frogs from a nearby creek, or fish in the local pond, there’s
something intrinsically exciting about catching and collecting little animals. Even more than that,
it was tradition, and something my brother and I loved.
Nothing was as rewarding as a kid, as the excitement of tasting the fruits of our labor when we’d
rush back to the deck with full buckets to excitedly show our parents, and Dad would find a good
blue or Dungeness crab, fire up the boil, and we’d spend that night on the deck cracking shells
and enjoying the fruit of our labor together, listening to waves along the shore as our father
regaled us in some familiar tale his father had told him of Crabber’s Bay.
Ryan and I would take turns seeing who could fling their empty shells the furthest and standing
there on the edge of the balcony, the gentle song of the water in the distance, eating our catch
of the day we liked to imagine we felt just like our great-grandfather had when he was out on the
sea.
“I win, again!” Ryan whooped, raising the purple and black-hued crustacean overhead like an
Olympic medal before placing it in the plastic bucket he’d carried with him.
“I hope this is one we can eat. It’s huge, this thing could feed the whole family with one leg!”
The creature seemed to wriggle its legs with a mechanical slowness in protest before it was
deposited into the buckets dismissively.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever” I muttered dismissively at his victory, leaving his question unanswered.
“Look, it’s almost time, they’re coming!”
Ryan followed my gaze to the tide rolling over the shore, the water seeming to ripple and shutter
with movement and disturbance beneath the surface, as the waves recede into the sea leaving
the sand, which was usually clear save for the occasional dregs of seaweed, broken seashells,
and rocks that would wash ashore was now littered with jagged shells and shapes from the
deep.
At first glance, it would appear that the tide had washed in a great heap of sea trash, empty
shells, rocks, and general ocean garbage, but the longer one looks, they’ll quickly notice that the
‘empty shells and rocks’ are making strange jerky movements. They’ll spot the myriad of
spider-like appendages that extend from beneath them, and watch as they scuttle away from
the water with a speed and insectoid jiltedness.. for lack of a better word in their movement
pattern that’s inherently disconcerting as they begin their ritual invasion of the beach, quickly
overwhelmed by their presence.
At the mouth of the bay, small fist-sized portions of mud and sand began to move, seemingly
autonomously, at first pulsing slightly with some minor signs of disturbance as though something
was set to burst forth, the points of motion quickly growing more pronounced and obvious as
small-clawed pinchers of varying types emerged from the earth, shoveling away the mud and
sand with a practiced quickness in a way that always reminded something out of a zombie
movie.
All around us what appeared to be hundreds of small stones left by the tide shifted, the drift
border of the water depositing more and more of the little six-legged creatures on the beach,
and small clusters of mud and sand parted to reveal all the Atlantic blue and purple marsh crabs
that had embedded themselves into the earth around us.
“C’mon let’s go, I’ve never seen some of these ones before!” Ryan cried out, sprinting alongside
the water, dancing around the occasional crustacean emerging from the wet ground, bucket
held out beside him to avoid swinging around its occupant.
He stopped, kneeling beside a particularly large purple marsh digging itself from its cover on a
portion of the beach usually dry, that was now affected by the rising waters of high tide.
All six of its legs splayed out to either side, wriggling with a strange, labored sort of motion, jerky
and odd, as though it were mechanical or some poorly piloted marionette. My skin crawled, and
a shudder ran down my back. As interesting as I’d always found the creatures, and enjoyed
catching them, I could never shake just how alien and inhumane they looked up close. It was to
be expected though, my grandfather had always said the creatures were from another world,
evolving to survive both on land, and life in the darkest depths of the oceans in conditions
almost otherworldly comparatively.
Watching as the tiny pincher-like mouth of the crab splayed open and shut, its stalked eyes
searching for escape, I could almost believe it was really from another world.
“Jesus, look at that one!” Ryan dropped the purple marsh into the bucket and pointed a bit
further down the shore at another crab towards another scurrying forth from the edge of the
water, this one a fiddler, named such for their having one giant claw that dwarfs the other, like a
man holding a fiddle.
The poor thing seemed to hesitate for a moment as if truly taking a second to take in its new
environment on land until quickly taking note of my brothers approach as he barrelled down on
it, and attempting to make a hasty retreat which was encumbered by the sheer size of its claw
which it had no choice but to drag at it’s side.
All around us, the shore that had once appeared untouched from a distance was covered in the
creatures, sand, and dirt shifting under movements of hundreds of emerging shells and legs
scuttling forth from wherever they’d emerged, crowding the beach like a flock of birds, on their
strange, inexplicable schedule.
This was the phenomena of Crabber’s Bay, ‘the magic of the land’ as my dad said our great
grandfather used to call it, the very reason for Fiddler’s Grove’s existence, and the reason for
the fortunes of the families who’d called it home. Even for us, having grown up in the city,
outsiders of the community and ignorant to both the depths of their beliefs and the true nature of
the phenomena, there was a strange sort of reverence in which you held the place, a feeling
that there was something more at play there.
A strange, otherworldly sort of atmosphere reminiscent of the way one felt standing outside in
those quiet hours before morning when the world adopts an uncanny silence. Perhaps it was a
result of how silent the shore was usually, the canopy of the forest surrounding the bay muffling
any outside noise, leaving nothing but the sound of the waves most hours. Though, when the
sun began to set, and the beach came alive with all of the faint shuffling and movements of
hundreds of moving legs, it grew to something of a strange natural cacophony – like the summer
song of cicadas.
The hunt was on.
I wouldn’t begin to realize it until the initial excitement of returning to the beach for the first time
that year had stirred in me, drowning out my other sense, had faded that I felt it. Standing there,
as my brother observed his most recent catch, another crab of unusual size, my ears seemed to
perk inexplicably, the hair on my back rising inexplicably along as I caught a glance of
something farther along the shore of the bay, at the far end of the beach where the shores of the
inlet approached the forest and sand began to give way to patches of grass again.
I furrowed my brow, squinting in hopes of better viewing the notably large shape on the other
end of the shore, something I was sure hadn’t been there when we’d arrived on the beach.
My heart skipped a beat, for reasons I couldn’t explain, something about seeing the unexpected
shape sending a ripple of discomfort through me.
At first, I took what I saw to be a massive deposit of seaweed and other detritus of the sea given
its strange shape and color, perhaps washing up along with the crabs on the receding tide – as it
wasn’t unheard of to have trash wash ashore from the various bodies of waters that emptied
into the surrounding ocean, but even with that thought in mind the chill I felt almost as soon as I
laid eyes on it seemed to linger stubbornly, my gaze brought back constantly to the dark shape
at the far end of the beach.
Ryan’s excited chatter seemed to fade to background noise as he bucketed another crab, my
focus on the strange, dark, amorphous shape at the end of the shore. I squinted, as though to
bring clarity to what I was seeing, sure I must be mistaken.
It seemed to be moving, rising steadily in its place.
A shock rippled through me at the utterly unexpected sight, a strange, electrifying side effect of
the utter surprise at watching something I’d thought to be inanimate rise with a strange
steadiness. Of the immediate flood of explanations and expletives that tore through my mind in
that instant, I began to settle in on the idea that it must have been the wind blowing what had to
be a massive tangle of seaweed wrapped around something in a way that almost appeared to
make the mass seem alive, something in my mind unwilling to accept that the oddity at the end
of the shore was anything to worry about, unwilling to be distracted from my brother and I’s fun
on the beach.
Yet the longer I looked, utterly unable to break my gaze from the unidentifiable mass, the
greater the cold, eerie sensation in me began to grow like the swelling tide, and as it began its
glacial approach, my belief in the wind theory was destroyed as quickly as it had been formed.
“R – Ryan,” I began, my voice breaking slightly, curiosity with an inexplicable hint of fear audible
in my tone.
“Yeah?” he breathed, sand all over his hands and his left cheek as he turned to face me one
eyebrow raised as if to ask why I wasn’t digging through the sand with him.
My stomach turned as the shape seemed to shuffle forward, its movement slow, methodical,
and uneven. I could practically feel the gears turning in my head as my mind throughout
suggestion after suggestion to identify just what I was seeing, all of which seemed to fall flat
only furthering the cold feeling emerging within me.
Ryan picked up on the hesitancy in my response, his face shifting from excitement to a look of
bewilderment and confusion, until he followed my gaze along the shore. His expression shifted
quickly, utter confusion giving way to bewilderment and curiosity in an instant.
“What the hell…” he muttered, rising to his feet, brushing off the remaining sand from his knees.
“What is that?”
His question made something drop within me, plummeting into the strange pit opening in my
chest, something about hearing what I was seeing confirmed eerily disturbing. I nearly jumped
out of my skin as I felt something brush along the top of my bare foot, then again against my
legs, letting out a yelp of surprise as I leaped back, finding what felt like the one clear patch of
sand in the area as I fell, narrowly avoiding stepping on the briny shell of a massive blue crab
underfoot, just one of a slow, but noticeable trail of crustaceans flowing towards the opposite
side of the shore.
Something seemed to have washed ashore while we were distracted with our catches,
apparently, the last dregs brought up by the waning tide at the far side of the beach.
From such a distance the shape of the thing approaching was indiscernible, and my mind shot
forth a myriad of suggestions, convinced of each for only the couples of seconds it took to
realize it was false, shifting from a large dog, somehow emerging from the water to a pile of sea
debris carried strangely along with the breeze.
None of the suggestions my mind threw forth seemed to stick, each theory as to what I was
looking at having some glaring issue, before settling on the only thing that made sense, though
for whatever reason it still felt off.
“I – I think it’s one of the neighbors, you know how weird they get around here.” I offered, though
I couldn’t tell how much of that I believed, and the tremble in my voice signaled the doubt I felt.
“Yeah,” Ryan began, eyes narrowed as he watched the slowly approaching figure.
“There are a lot of weirdos around here but, still, don’t they usually avoid us?”
I knew he was right. Call it another quirk of this place, but the community of Fiddler’s Grove has
always been a rather insular one, likely a result of the days when the original fishers elected to
keep it a secret, morphing into an odd insular attitude and apparent unwillingness to even
socialize with outsiders – which I guess we were. They always seemed to watch us from a
distance, an unreadable, but surely unwelcoming expression on their face as if they knew
something we didn’t.
It was far from uncommon for us to catch sight of a neighbor eyeing my brother and me playing
on the beach from their porch or balcony, a practically uniform frown carved into their
expression, who would respond to our friendly waves by turning their backs and disappearing
into their home.
Now here we were, apparently watching one of those people shuffle towards us in such a way
that made my skin crawl and raised my hairs on end.
Near whoever it was at the end of the beach, shambling closer.
At that point, any doubt I had about whether or not what I was seeing was just some pile of
seaweed or trash, held together and swayed by the wind faded, as with every second it
continued its approach, moving with obvious intent.
“Usually,” I started – in delayed response to my brother’s question as I settled on the most likely
and plausible of the guesses to spring to mind, which still felt wrong, like a puzzle piece that
almost fits into a space – but just isn’t quite a match.
“Let’s just ignore them, if they say anything or stuff gets weird we can go inside.”
The suggestion seemed to satisfy Ryan, who gave the thing a final sideways glance before
shrugging and turning his attention to a fiddler crab who’d been moving to join the strange trail
of crabs moving down the beach, giving chase as it broke away to avoid him.
A cold chill ran down my back, and I could all but feel the person from the other end of the
beach’s approach, an uneasy guardedness welling up in me as if any second a hand would
clasp my shoulder.
That sensation grew until I could practically feel the clammy breath of someone at the back of
my neck, growing unbearable until eventually, I turned, my eyes locking back on whoever it was,
now halfway across the beach from us.
A strong breeze rolled across the water and onto land, forcing me to shield my eyes from the
sand it kicked up. I could see the fabric whatever it was the person was wearing, appearing from
this distance to be a cloak of some sort, with grass and seaweed and other plant life clung to it,
as it moved with the breeze, creating an even eerie, phantom-like sort of appearance.
There’s something about someone making a slow approach towards you that is deeply
disturbing. Something about their feeling no need to move with any sense of haste or secrecy,
trudging forward uncaring of whether or not they’re seen, that can make you break into a cold
sweat.
I tried to return my attention to my brother and our crab catch, but the unshakable feeling of
being watched, and someone drawing ever closer was unshakeable, and I found myself
muttering half-hearted responses to my brother’s questions, as I continued peering down the
beach.
The person, as shaky as that description felt for what I was seeing, as I struggled to identify it
shambled nearer, growing slightly less amorphous, going from an unidentifiable shape in the
distance and gaining some recognizable form making it possible to make out certain aspects of
their body beneath that unshakably odd cloak.
Though its shape was strange, the slight, recognizable figure of a human – woman by the look of
it – beneath all the strangely colored coverings was beginning to become somewhat clear, at
least from her lower half, though there was something undeniably off about it that I couldn’t quite
place. Something I felt must be so obvious, yet managed to evade notice.
There was one strange detail I noticed, as it was impossible to miss, and likely the reason I’d
misidentified them as something else to begin with – a hunch, caused by something large and
unwieldy on their back like a bookbag beneath the cloak,
Despite that, the slow drip of unease like water from a broken tap was growing more intense,
the atmosphere on the beach seeming to shift, an odd surrealism hitting me, as though I were
walking in a dream, that sensation one gets typically followed by the question “is this really
happening”, as though my mind already knew something was deeply amiss.
Ryan seemed to take notice of how distant I was, quickly putting two and two together, turning
his attention back towards the figure growing nearer.
“They’re still coming, huh?” he asked, his brows furrowed.
“Look how they’re moving, it looks like they’re limping or something, Andrew. Maybe they’re hurt
and looking for help, should we…do something?”
He hesitated when asking the last part, and I could see that the strange shift in the atmosphere
had gotten to him too, a hint of anxiety breaking through his usual mask of confidence. Still, the
look in his eye was a familiar one, I’d seen it many times throughout our childhood – like just
before he’d scaled the tallest tree in our neighborhood to retrieve the neighbor girl’s cat after
hearing her crying. He fell halfway through his descent, while I was left to watch from the ground
in horror, time seeming to slow as my brother approached the ground. He never dropped the
cat, and though he broke his arm, he smiled at the hospital, proud of what he’d done.
Ryan was always more than just a daredevil, he was a sweet kid who would help someone in
need regardless of how much his coward of an older brother attempted to dissuade him or
convince him of the dangers.
Still, I think at that moment, even he knew better than to just approach the person, despite his
helpful nature there was so much about what was unfolding – beyond the usual weirdness of the
beach to which we were accustomed – that was unshakably weird, teetering dangerously on the
border of simply odd and intimidating.
He stepped forward, then stopped, his motion stuttered as reluctance seemed to wash over him.
The figure at the opposite end of the beach had yet to cease its glacial forward charge towards
us, growing more defined though little detail could be made out from beneath the cloak-like
garment draped over it and we began to hear a noise, made faint by the distance between us.
Over the faint murmur of the waves, and whisper of the breeze I could hear something;
breathing, quite labored by the sound of it, a rasping, desperate noise that sounded as though
someone was struggling for air against failing lungs – and intertwined with it a haunting, pitchy
wail like an older woman in distress sent an icy chill down my back despite the relative warmth
of the day.
“Ma’am?” Ryan called inquisitively across the beach, his voice shaking uncharacteristically with
a hint of the same unease I felt.
My entire body cringed as Ryan’s call shattered the silence, every nerve in my body seeming to
jolt in response, a light, but steadily growing stream of dread trickling through my chest as we
awaited some semblance of a response from the odd person, who was undoubtedly making
their way towards us.
His words seemed to hang in the air, punctuated by the constant clacking of tiny chitinous legs
darting overtop shells, as they scuttled over one another and through the sand, which, as I
began to truly listen more, my hearing growing more sensitive as I strained to hear a response –
a whispered greeting, or anything from the person approaching – I noticed for the first time how
much louder and eerily uniform the sounds had become.
For the first time since their appearance on the beach, I managed to pry my attention away from
the disturbingly captivating figure in the cloak feeling almost mesmerized by its strange sway,
and began to notice something wrong with the crabs covering the beach.
They’d all but ceased their typical behaviors, instead, coming together in masses of legs and
shells of varied size and appearance, forming shuttering dark masses, moving waves with
hundreds of spindly legs and grasping claws, that seemed to move with a single mind – like
some massive ant colony.
Even the perpetually skittish hermits which typically avoided the larger, sometimes more
aggressive crabs, now neglecting their typical feverish digging of safety holes in the sand to join
the others. It wasn’t an isolated event either, and as I turned to observe the rest of the shore
behind us I saw the same strange sight repeating all along the beach.
They swarmed and circled en masse, moving like a living whirlpool, a constant hail of chittering
clicks audible as they stampede over one another in their strange guided frenzy.
Something was wrong.
My heart skipped a beat as I processed the sight before me, the sheer wrongness of what I was
seeing wash over me, my mind well aware that it was observing something extraordinary.
Opening my mouth to speak proved useless at first, and it felt as though the air had been
sucked out of the immediate vicinity, leaving me to produce only the smallest sounds of surprise,
shock still robbing me of my functions.
The swirling masses on the beach behind us were beginning to coalesce and grow, forming
massive dark monoliths dotted with dull grays, greens, reds, various colors of shells from the
countless species amongst the shifting form, which almost appeared a single entity, moving in
concert with such fluidity.
If you’ve ever witnessed the mesmerizing murmuration of a flock of birds in the sky, swooping
and shifting as they move amongst each other with perfect coordination, in total unison and
harmony almost creating the illusion of a shimmering effect amongst the living cloud of avians or
the shoaling of a massive school of fish, where they form a single mass shifting morphing as
one, occasionally splitting off into separate clouds only to coalesce again with the awe-inspiring
grace of nature, then you’ve got an idea of what I was seeing, except on the ground and with far
less breath-taking beauty and more of that jerky, robotic-like insectoid sort of movement typical
of the animals.
“Excuse me? Ma’am!?”
My head snapped in Ryan’s direction, the question spoken with far more alarm than previously,
momentarily distracting me from what I was seeing. He’d backed up, drawing closer to me and it
was clear why – the woman had gotten considerably closer in the time I’d been distracted,
moving at a steady pace towards us, disturbing, confusing details growing more visible with her
approach.
The cloak she wore appeared to glisten at a distance, either wet or coated in some reflexive
substance, reflecting the last vestiges of fading light piercing the horizon, and though it was
growing darker, and I felt as though I surely must have been mistaken in what I was seeing. It
appeared as though her drapings were comprised entirely of some strange blend of seaweed,
moss, and other plant life, still sopping wet, covering all but the hand holding the strange shawl
closed across her, and a portion of her head stooped forward as she walked.
“Christ,” I breathed, everything about her appearance filled me with a terror so whole, I could
feel a jolt in every cell of my body.
Her skin made my stomach turn, baring a sickly, mottled gray appearance reminiscent of a living
corpse from a Romero film, and her head was the same with a few clumps of long sopping wet,
black hair hanging from it, filthy, cloudy water dripping from its ends.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, its final rays reflected across the cool, gray surface of the
water, and caught her ghastly figure exposing yet another oddity that made my blood run cold.
All throughout her strange garment, almost imperceivable due to natural camouflage, shells
embedded like strange decorative gems were crabs
The thought that they were dead passed my mind momentarily, my frightened minds loose
attempt at rationalizing a clearly irrational situation, but the thought was dashed as I noticed the
occasional rise of a claw or movement from a long, thin leg from the fabric, and I realized that
somehow they were all alive, and moving.
The almost rhythmic sound of the shifting sand as she moved had nearly faded to background
noise, but as she’d almost covered more than half the original distance between us, I began to
wonder just what caused such a sound.
A moan, low and gravelly, as if coming from a voice that hadn’t been used in years rose above
the sounds of the beach barely audible above the steady crackle of the teeming legions of crabs
behind us, thousands of legs and shells swarming over each other that made my skin crawl.
Ryan’s wide eyes met mine, unspoken messages passed between us in an instant, both feeling
the same primal terror pleading desperately for us to run., to get as far away from the present
strangeness as possible.
Still, something about that night, the strange, silky dream-like quality of it all, kept us in place for
just a few moments longer.
A thick, pungent odor filled the air, coating the inside of my nose – sea salt and rot, and I
swallowed against the ominous rumble in my stomach it caused. I took a step back away from
the wave of stench rolling forth from the ghastly woman I stepped back inadvertently, desperate
to escape from the wave of stench rolling forth from the ghastly woman when a sharp pain
exploded through my ankle sending a wave of nausea rippling through me, and I fell to the
ground with an ominous crunch.
“Fuck!” I cried out, pulling my legs close and gripping my now throbbing ankle.
The pain was extreme, at least for a child-like I’d been, lacking much of a pain tolerance, so
much so that – for a moment – I didn’t notice the strange consistency of the ground I was laying
on, parts of it hard, and slippery and wet under my arms, while in other places jagged points
seemed to dig painfully into my skin. It was a combination of the pain settling into reality,
allowing my senses to return and Ryan’s horrified, stunned expression as his eyes stared past
me, glazed with fear as he saw what I’d landed on.
“An – Andrew, are you okay? G – get up..” his voice was small and frightened in a way I’d never
heard from him before, for the first time truly sounding like my frightened younger brother.
He was clearly worried about my wellbeing, sensing that I was hurt, but I could tell that wasn’t
his focus, his eyes glazed as he stared past me.
What I’d assumed to be the earth beneath me had shifted, practically moving me along with it,
and as one hand shot away from my ankle in response running along the hard shells and
pointed claws of the swarm beneath me, now a single moving wave of pinching claws and
moving limbs completely covering the ground beneath me.
Ryan’s head shot back and forth, eyes darting between myself and the legion of crabs beneath
me, and the woman who couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away from us at that point, the
stench wafting off of her growing suffocating.
The ground around our feet was covered within seconds by the impending mass now moving
across the beach like a wave, and I managed to roll myself over the shells beneath me, finding
a patch of open sand with the help of Ryan who grabbed my arm, pulling me up onto my good
leg.
On the ground all around us, numerous crabs, some impossibly large – almost the size of small
dogs, flowed past like a living river, the continuous prickle against my legs making my entire skin
itch with the sensation of little legs crawling across me – reconvening past us in a single stream
moving for the same point.
The ‘woman’, if we could even still call her that, was so close we could hear each one of her
slow, labored breaths and the sickening gurgling sound her throat would emit with every attempt
to inhale. Though still covered by her garment, the construction of which stumped me as it
seemed entirely composed of things I saw no way to fashion into clothing – seaweeds, and
various greenery stitching together reminiscent of some natural Guille suit.
Her visible arm seemed to dangle before her uselessly, and as she approached even with the
sun now firmly behind the horizon, I could see the sickly condition of her skin more clearly, and
my mind raced with questions.
It was the arm of a drowning victim out of a movie, or a waterlogged corpse, pruned with the
skin seemingly ready to slosh off the bone at any moment hanging loose from the body. I
couldn’t imagine what the rest of her would look like, nor did I want to find out.
The black mass of shells and legs moved towards her like a living river, pooling around her,
individual crabs crawling up her form, their legs disappearing into the strange mossy coverings
draped over her as they embed themselves like sick jewels.
I don’t know why I kept looking, everything in me begged for me to turn my head, or close my
eyes, screaming out to me that whatever stood before us was something unexplainable, and
that I should be fleeing.
Still, my legs felt frozen, my feet locked in place in the sand by some misfiring in my brain, eyes
locked on the approaching figure, staring deep into the darkness beneath her cowl horrified – yet
waiting for whatever was concealed beneath.
I couldn’t have been prepared for what I was going to see.
The sky had turned from the deep purple and orange of the twilight to the navy blue of night, the
moon hanging overhead serving as a brilliant source of light, illuminating the beach below, as
she shuffled forward, barely a few feet away from me at this point the face concealed beneath
her hood became visible, a morbid blend of humanity and something else… I struggled to
comprehend.
Whatever this was, this thing we’d been sharing the beach with, it was not human.
Her face, above the nose anyways, was the most human-esque aspect of her appearance with
undeniably feminine eyes that would have been striking if not for their lacking any sort of whites
or iris, twin pools of wide, inky blackness that seemed to pierce me with their gaze.
That was the extent of the things humanity in her appearance, her nose merely two pulsating
slits in her face at first glance, but a flash of motion from them caught my eye…then a second,
and a sick feeling flooded through me as I began to process what I was seeing – two little
mandible-like things flitting out of her nose on occasion seemingly tasting the air around her.
The mouth was no better, almost imperceivable when shut, it splayed open as she hissed, two
separate sets of fleshy, pale pincers covered in what seemed like human skin separated like
parts of a mask to reveal a circular opening riddled with a mouthful of teeth protruding from all
directions, a steady stream of saliva running down her chin, spraying across the sand as she
began to emit strange, excited chitters.
My mind reeled, and a violent wave of dizziness struck with such force my vision seemed to
shake from it as the strange sense of surrealism, of being in a waking nightmare, grew
overwhelming rising up in my chest threatening to make me vomit.
Ryan tugged at my arm, returning my senses, as he tried desperately to pull me in the direction
of the deck. Terror etched into his features as I’d never seen before. I tried to follow, entirely
forgetting the injury to my ankle, which gave way almost as soon as I placed my weight on it,
sending me sprawling face-first into the sand.
I cursed at myself, both from the pain, and an incomparable rage I felt at being rendered
helplessly in such a situation. The deck and the stairs leading up to it couldn’t have been more
than 30 yards away, but in my current condition and with that thing practically on us.
I turned back to gauge the horrible woman’s distance from us, regretting it immediately as I got
my first view of what was hidden behind the strange cloak.
For one, what looked like a cloak, from a distance, was actually net – a standard fishing net
entangled with a variety of ocean plant life, like some make-shift Guille suit, serving as home to
a dozen small crabs that seemed to have made a home in the thing. As she drew nearer,
parting the seemingly self-made garment, a cool, strangely still dread gripped me entirely, and
the almost jarring feeling of warmth running down my legs, pooling in the sand beneath me
made it clear I’d relieved myself.
I wanted to try to stand up again, to run, or crawl – but I remained frozen in place, staring up at
the approaching nightmare waiting at any moment for myself to wake up. But there would be no
jarring moment of shooting up from my bed, realizing it was all just a dream, and with each
passing second the horror I felt seemingly threatened to burst my heart.
The thing was an abomination, the top of its head, by far the most human part of it, seeming to
rise up from out of some sort of pale shell around the top half of her body, peering out with those
endless black eyes as though taking the measure of me.
Its torso and was human-esque in shape, but not in design, covered in a clear, yellowish
carapace, beneath which its fleshy insides were visible, a pulsating mess of pink and white with
streaks of red blood vessels and covered with six long, fleshy tendrils two of which ended in
points, the other four of which ended in small, useless little hands that appeared malformed or
incomplete, like something you’d find on a fetus, with white muscle and bone visible under
ripped skin that didn’t seem to fit – all stabbing and prodding at the air in front of it with a
sporadicness reminiscent of a hermit crab trapped on it’s back.
One of her arms ended in a human hand, the skin of which appeared ordinary, and the question
of whether the thing before me had once been a human occurred to me, drowned out by the
deafening fear – the other was clawlike, but clearly made up of fingers stretched or malformed to
appear like a claw, with bony ridges running through the inside of the thumb and index.
As my eyes traveled down the creature, every detail seemingly worse than the last, my stomach
turned and bile shot into my mouth as I saw its legs, immediately understanding the strange
limp in their gait.
With the exception of one vestigial human leg, with 4 stubby, webbed twos, and no bones,
dragging uselessly behind her, the thing had 4 crab-like stilts for legs, on which it teetered and
moved with a marionette-like quality to it.
The fleshy, arms continued to shoot forward, reaching for me desperately, and the creature
picked up speed, moving towards with a quick, spastic, uneven motion that triggered every fight
or flight response I had.
“Help us! HELP!” Ryan’s desperate cries only served to make my heart beat faster, as I felt his
hands grip under my armpits as he began to desperately attempt to pull me towards our house.
The thing hissed and chittered loudly in response, its body beginning to twitch violently as it
shook off its strange fishing net garment, grasping it firmly in its human hand, revealing itself
fully to us.
It looks as though some horrible god had taken a woman, a beautiful one maybe at some point,
and stitched her into a massive crab shell, replacing what should have been her back and
shoulders, which I realized was the mass I’d seen on her back.
There was something almost hauntingly beautiful about her eyes, and for some reason, all that
came to mind was the mental image of a gorgeous mermaid, with pixie-like dark eyes, and for
the split second I could afford to be distracted, I wondered if the creature before me had always
been…this.
A faint, wet scratching noise came from the hole where her mouth should’ve been, its mandibles
splayed out to either side to reveal the hole full of jagged human teeth. It took me a moment to
realize what was happening, she was speaking, her voice a horrid raspy singsong whisper that
made my blood freeze.
“crack the shell, eat what’s inside…crack the shell, suck out the meat…crack the shell, taste the
sweet, tender fleshy bits..,”
The creature sang its spine-tingling tune to itself as it scuttled towards us, impeded only by its
own useless leg tripping up its progress. Globs of drool dripped from the ends of its mandibles,
running down the exposed muscle and flesh of its neck and disappearing beneath its carapace,
an undeniable hunger present in its expression.
Crabs from every part of the beach seemed to take notice of the creature, seemingly attracted
to it in droves, crawling over my brother’s feet, and running along my entire body as he pulled
me until a continuous swirling mass of legs and shells had formed beneath the creature, like
some freak hurricane of which it stood in the eye.
Its eyes, two wet, dark orbs on stalks rose from the center of its face like snakes from a den,
and I could feel them staring through me, an intense, horrible hunger seeming to roll off of it in
waves.
“Crack the shell, suck out the soft tender meats, crack the shell, have a taste inside..”
It began to dawn on me that she wasn’t talking about the crabs, and a split second spent
wondering what she meant by shells practically set me afire with panic.
It was going to eat us or try anyways. This thing, this monster from the depths of some sick
creator’s mind, was going to devour my brother and me alive.
The thought was dizzying – like staring over the edge of a skyscraper, but it provided all the
motivation I needed to try and push myself up onto the one good leg, using Ryan as balance,
and try to flee as best as I could, though the root of unease had grown into a forest of
inescapable dread within me, knowing that she was closer to us than we were to the house, and
moving much faster.
We’re not going to make it. We’re going to die on this beach that we’ve loved all our lives at the
hands of something I can’t even understand.
I knew I should turn away, to focus on the house ahead of me and put my every effort into
escape but something in me refused – utterly, horrifically transfixed with the cause of my
imminent demise.
“Andrew, hurry man!”
Ryan pleaded from ahead of me, as I lagged behind, my injured ankle screaming out with a red
hot pain that radiated through my entire leg, pulsing like a heartbeat. He’d stopped running,
several feet ahead, staring back between myself and our pursuer with an unreadable
expression. From behind me, I heard the awful croon of the thing grow nearer, along with the
almost rhythmic sounds of its massive crab-like legs slamming into the earth as it scuttled forth.
I tried to stand, and collapsed again into the sand beneath me, shouting out in pain and
frustration as I’d never felt before as my leg gave up on me once again.
“Just go please, go get Mom and Dad!” I cried out to him.
My face fell into the sand, a dejectedness spreading through me like nothing I’d ever felt, as the
fact of my imminent demise weighed on my young mind.
I knew there was no way he could do that, no way for him to reach our parents and get back in
time but I wanted to protect him and get him as far away from the danger as possible.
I just wanted him to live.
But Ryan was always the brave one.
The sound of continued footsteps in the sand brought a surge of relief, overwhelmed almost
immediately by a shockwave of dread as I realized they were approaching.
My head shot up, and my heart fell as I confirmed what I’d heard.
“No, GO!” I shouted at my brother, barrelling towards me.
Tears streamed down his face, yet his expression was one of rage and determination.
He’s going to try and drag you back. And neither of you will make it.
The thought almost killed me itself, as I begged for my brother to turn back, to leave me.
“You can’t carry me fast enough, it’ll get us both!” I shouted.
Ryan was strong, stronger than me at least, and like I’d said, he was a big kid, but even he
wouldn’t be able to drag me back faster than the horror behind us was approaching.
“Crack the shell, chew the flesh, feed the sweet children…” The sickening croon was almost
singsong now, though the voice was a horrid mix between a deep wet gurgle, and something
reminiscent of a grandmother singing to her loved ones.
“I know.” my brother spoke, his response unusually firm, with a finality that made my blood run
ice cold.
“Get up, and go as fast as you can!”
Ryan shouted, running past me.
Towards the nightmare of a being that had emerged from Crabbers Bay.
I heard someone call his name, a horrible, sorrowful shriek – as my throat grew raw I realized it
was my own, as I watched him grow closer and closer to the ever-thrashing, vestigial hands of
the woman on their long fleshy crab-like arms reaching out desperately for my brother.
I can’t imagine what he had hoped to do, I suppose he’d thought he was going to grab the thing
and overpower it, battling it heroically leaving me the time to crawl to safety. Perhaps he thought
he could even escape the thing, and we’d both make it back.
Neither was the case.
I watched on in horror as my younger brother came within reach of the longest of the creatures
grasping arms. Time seemed to slow as the small, vestigial fingers ending in sharp points on the
end of the longest leg protruding from the side of her chest, found hold of my brother, digging
into the exposed flesh of his shoulder with a wet sound.
Everything seemed to stop for a moment, as small drops of blood began to trickle Ryan’s back
from where the creature’s claws were dug in, leaving pale trails of red in their wake. Then, with
the quickness of a striking spider, the rest of her limbs followed suit, all finding purchase in my
brother’s skin, the large clawed arm grasping his own with obvious brutality, a few of the thinner,
more insectoid limbs reaching around to plunge into his back – pulling him into something of an
awful hug. The chitinous outer shell creaked with effort, as the thing pulled him nearer.
I opened my mouth but found no words as she pulled him closer, an awful, excited moan rising
from her, as Ryan fought and struggled against her, kicking up sand as he tried desperately to
pull himself free, to no avail.
“S – Stop..” He began to plead, all of the bravery once present in his voice was now gone and at
that moment, he sounded like the kid he was, just a scared eleven-year-old.
His pleas were cut short by another round of excited chittering from the creature, as it raised its
head opening its mouth, gnashing hungrily with rows of human teeth. The mandibles extended
out from either side of it, viscous drool running down their ends.
She pulled Ryan into her, pressing him against her exposed chest, cold and hard where the
shell covered it, seemingly wet and fleshy where the strange human components remained
exposed.
By the steady streams of blood running down his arms and back, I could tell her grip was strong
and only getting stronger, the pointed hooks and small prying fingers at the ends of her arms
were deep in Ryan’s flesh, making sure there was no way he was going to escape her grasp
without leaving a significant chunk of himself behind.
The being affixed my brother with a look, her eyes blazing with a hunger I couldn’t comprehend,
before glaring over his shoulder at me. It’s impossible to be sure with a mouth like that, but..well,
I swear, she smiled at me before she spoke.
“Crack the shell, taste the meat inside…” her voice was a whisper of death over the breeze, the
only audible sound it seemed, besides the wind and water and nonstop clatter of crabs over
each other, and her words rang with an audible finality.
Then, with a final haunting shriek, that raised the hairs on my back, she reared back and bit, her
mandibles gripping him on either side of his head pulling him close.
The sounds in those following few moments have remained with me, haunting my thoughts like
a vicious phantom, for years. I hear them ringing out from the darkness in my worst nightmares,
and awake in a frozen chill with them echoing throughout my mind for hours to come.
A sickening crunch rang out across the sand, starting a hurricane in my stomach as my lunch
rushed up my throat threatening resurgence, followed by an equally gruesome cracking squelch
– like the sound of someone biting through a soft apple.
Ryan…his body rather, began to convulse, a shower of red erupting from the center of his head
as that fucking thing reared its head back again, chewing noisily, its mandible’s capturing and
shoveling what loose bits of meat fell right back into its mouth. Its body shuttered with an
undeniable pleasure, its beady eyes shutting for a moment in an alien expression of pure bliss,
and its many arms clattering like teeth in the cold, as it ate a part of him… A part of Ryan…of my
little brother, right in front of me.
The feeling of powerlessness that spread through me like a cancer, hurt far greater than any
physical pain I was in.
I’d like to believe that killed him instantly, saving him from whatever else it had in store for him.
An injury like that should have been instantly fatal, but the way he moved…the way he seemed
to struggle against the vice grip that demon around him even then… I don’t know.
Its grip never seemed to loosen, quite the opposite, its spasm of excitement seemingly causing
those awful, little almost human hands to dig in hungrily, disappearing into Ryan’s back, arms,
and wherever else they’d made contact as if merging with him.
Fuck, I knew this was going to be hard but Christ, this is hard. There’s no amount of drinking
that could have made this easier, that much I’m coming to realize.
My sight grew blurry almost instantly. Maybe it was the tears, maybe it was the dizziness,
probably both. I tried to crawl forward, any concerns for my own pain, safety, or survival turning
to dust with the sight of Ryan, my only thoughts of getting to him – of reaching my little brother
and holding him, of making everything okay.
It seemed aware of my intentions, scuttling back away from me, dragging his feet in the sand
leaving a trail from the pool of blood beneath where he’d been that was quickly swarmed by
some of the crabs, who seemed to fight voraciously over it and whatever else fell, uneaten by
the creature.
I don’t know how far I made it when my vision began to go, orbs of darkness burning their way
into the picture like damaged movie film, growing until the dark was almost all I could see, the
world around me and the scene in front of me disappearing into an ever-shrinking pinprick as
my consciousness waned.
“N – nuhh-ohhh,” my tongue seemed almost as heavy as my eyelids, and speech felt
impossible, as I attempted to protest the inevitable.
It was taking him, this thing was taking my brother away.
It was every stranger danger scenario I’d feared as an older brother growing up, merged with
something from my most depraved nightmare, and the panic seemed to sear my mind beyond
sensibility.
The fact that Ryan was almost assuredly dead seemed to constantly escape me as that thought
rang out through the dreary mist settling over my min, motivating my pathetic crawl forward,
growing slower and more labored by the second as the world around me began to fade into
shades of black.
The thing scuttled back towards the shoreline, moving with its awkward gait as its useless
human leg dangled between the massive crab legs carrying it, dragging Ryan along with it.
It was strange, the coolness that seemed to flood through my body as it began to part from
consciousness, and when combined with the feeling of the water against my fingers as I
reached the edge of the shore, I almost felt as though I was floating.
I raised my head with what strength I had left, my eyes struggling to adjust against the now
darkened sky, with only the faintest rays of moonlight piercing the cloud cover to illuminate the
night.
It stood there with its back to the moon, uproarious winds whipping the strange cloak of living
things that had covered her off to the side, and she stood tall, arms outstretched in something
that seemed like a show of dominance- her stilt-like legs carrying her several feet above the
waves, as the legions of crabs across the beach seemed to pour into the water after her in a
massive tidal wave of movement.
As the world around me began to fade into a pinprick, I watched as the creature began to wade
off from the shallows of the bay, a beach full of crabs around it following suit disappearing one
by one beneath the water, which seemed an inky black mess in the darkness.
She was the last to be submerged, a measured carefulness in her descent, casting a final look
back at me, and the surrounding shores. An unreadable glint present in those black eyes as
they disappeared beneath the water, and the darkness seemed to envelop me.
The following hours were excruciating.
My father found me passed out on the beach at the edge of the water while the tide was rising
and seeing no sight of my brother, he knew immediately that something was wrong.
I’d nearly drowned, hell, as the night continued I wished I had. I told them everything I knew.
Everything that happened from start to finish, my brother and I seeing something strange at the
moving end of the beach and thinking it must be a neighbor, all the way to the strange behavior
of the crabs and how they seemed to respond to the thing.
I suppose I don’t have to tell you how well that went.
Grief is a powerful, awful thing. It can warp the way you think, crack the lenses through which
you view the world, and utterly transform a person. It certainly did for my father. I don’t think he
truly believed I had anything to do with Ryan’s disappearance, we were best friends, and a part
of me has to believe my father knows I’d never hurt him, that he was just a grieving father
beyond his wit’s end, and I was the only one on a beach where my brother’s blood was found.
By the time the police had come, he’d grilled me past the point of tears himself, and had to be
calmed down by my equally bereaved mother, and I recall believing I was going to go to jail
myself for my own brother’s death at the hands of something unexplainable when the cops
came.
There were two of them, a woman – stern, and matter of fact with her questions despite my
obviously emotional state, and a man a bit taller, with dark skin and a rather bushy mustache,
and curious expression in his eyes that seemed to be searching for something.
The woman cop had left the room to meet an approaching car of incoming officers and show
them to the beach, where my brother’s blood still sat. The place we’d played at for years now a
crime scene.
When the room was empty, save for our family and himself, he spoke up, confirming what the
expression on his face gave away. There was something he’d wanted to say since arriving.
“Excuse my partner, she’s not from around here, just transferred in. Look, I’m truly sorry, and
we’re going to do the best we can to find your boy,” the officer had told my father after they’d
arrived and been filled in on the situation, as well as my account of the events.
“But, well, I imagine you know this is a weird place, Crabber’s Bay. Most folks that aren’t from
here, or haven’t been here for a long time don’t come around here, and especially don’t go near
that beach.”
“I know,” my father began, his voice dripping with venomous grief I’d never heard from him
before, which made me shrink away.
“The crab thing freaks most people out and the people here are just as weird, believe me, I’ve
heard it from my wife enough, what has that got to do with the fact that my son is missing?”
The officer sighed, shooting a look at the partner who’d arrived with him to make sure he wasn’t
listening too closely.
“Look, I shouldn’t be saying any of this but you lost your son and I feel you’ve got a right to know
about the history of this place. If this comes across as disrespectful I’m sorry, but this isn’t the
first time a call like this has happened. I grew up twenty minutes out from here and there have
been stories about this place for as long as I can remember. It’s not just ‘the crab thing’, people
go missing sometimes on that beach, and are never seen or heard from again. It’s happened for
as long as that first group of crabbers settled here. You’d get local kids going to visit the ‘weird
crab beach in that creepy rich neighborhood’, only for one of em to never return, and the ones
who did come back with stories…wild, impossible stories about things coming from that stretch
of shore.”
The officer adjusted his belt and shook his head, as though trying to knock loose an unwelcome
old memory.
“My old man used to blame it on the first people to move there. Used to say they made a pact
with something dark, that something, I dunno, gives birth to all those damn things, or makes that
place like that. That they must have agreed to let it take from them just as they took from it, or
just accepted the consequences.”
He paused for a moment, seeming to consider what he was saying.
“I dunno, it’s all just ghost stories, and this state is full of em but if I were you I’d wanna know. I
can’t say for sure what happened to your son, and like I said, I know we’ll do our best to find him
but don’t be too hard on your son there,” he said, casting a glance at me.
“There may be something to that story of his.”
.
.
.
We never returned to that house, and despite my parent’s best efforts, and constant fruitless
attempts at gathering a rescue party of the unwilling neighbors to go search for him, Ryan, or
his body, was never recovered.
I’ve been content to try and handle this trauma as best as I can over these years, maintaining a
state of homeostasis in my permanent discomfort, doing my best to forget that place, and come
to terms with my brother’s demise in a way that didn’t make me feel insane.
That was until recently when a headline caught my eye while scrolling Facebook, shared by a
family friend who’d grown up in one of the towns near Fiddlers Grove, that sent my heart
plummeting into familiar depths.
“Divers discover human remains in hidden underwater cave system within infamous Crabbers
Bay”
I’d never clicked anything quite as fast, nor felt that same sense of breathlessness waiting for
anything to load as the page came into view. The article was short, and I finished it in minutes, a
strange sensation – as though the weight of gravity had changed around me – flooding through
me in those moments. It was a short piece, but it left a weight like nothing I’d read before.
The disappearance of a fourteen-year-old from a small coastal town had become a frenzy in the
local news after he and his friends planned a beach day on the shores of a rather infamous local
beach. It was the last time anyone ever saw him, and each of the boys who’d been with him
returned with similar stories, all of which shared key details that made the whole thing seem
quite suspicious.
The Coast Guard was brought in soon after, and a team of divers was dispatched to scour the
bay for signs of a body.
What they discovered instead was an intricate system of caves carved directly beneath the
shores of Crabbers Bay, caves that – if they didn’t know better, almost seemed intelligently
designed.
Within these strange tunnels beneath the shore, the divers found the human remains, the
shattered skulls and broken bones of several bodies, some of which dated back for several
years.
Most disturbing of all, was the fact that many of the skulls appeared cracked from blunt force
trauma, and had come to serve as impromptu homes for some of the shell-seeking species of
crab found on the anomalous beach, morbid shells made from repurposed human.
I felt something in me for the first time in years as I processed what I was reading, what it must
mean about that place.
I wondered if my brother’s remains were among those found, serving as little more than a
boneyard for sea insects to build homes in. The thought…hurts, more than I think I care to
express in this post.
At least, I know I’m not crazy.
Sometimes, when sleep gives way to nightmares, and I sink into the darkest depths of my mind
I can still hear that awful crooning voice mocking me, and that stomach-wrenching crack like a
shell being broken, as if those sounds are burned forever into my psyche.
On those nights, I dream of a cloaked woman, and the brother I couldn’t save
