Another jumped off the bridge last week. That bridge had taken 34 in the last 5 years. If local legend was to be believed, the bay held fantastical creatures that granted you free passage to heaven if you were daring enough to jump. The theory was absolutely ridiculous, and it spoke volumes that it was the leading hypothesis.

Smith had been working as a detective at the police station for 26 years now, and in all that time, nobody had ever figured out how to tackle that bay. Anytime someone tried to measure, scan, or tamper with the bay for any reason, it went wrong. Equipment malfunctions, illogical readings, nothing had ever worked. And no bodies had ever been recovered.

The bay mystery had been Smith's pet project for months, but he'd made no headway whatsoever. It simply didn't make sense.

The most recent death had been one Matthew Enman, a law student visiting family for spring vacation. He had a well-off family, good friends, and a fiance that was to become a spouse in only a few months. Smith didn't claim to know about this boy's mental state, but by all accounts, he seemed to have been living a good life.

None of the deceased seemed to have anything in common. Wildly varying ages, backgrounds, and lives.

The bay was nothing if not a mystery, and Smith was set on figuring it out.

The locals say there's something in the water.

Something older than the town itself, or at least older than records of anyone living there. A folk tale, he was certain, and not even an especially convincing one.

In some, the bay itself had been constructed by a Great Serpent, erupting from the sea and biting off a piece of the coast before sinking into the seabed to slumber for another thousand years.

In some, mermaids or sirens sang songs that rang sweetly out over the water late at night, so enchanting that people would take leave of their senses, desperately trying to reach the water by any means necessary, like a man lost in the desert fot days upon seeing an oasis.

Some said it was the water itself, cursed by the devil to ask the poor victim a question so baffling that they'd be kept awake with fatal insomnia, night after night, until, with heavy eyes and a heavier head, on the sixth sleepless night, they would heave themselves out of bed and drag themselves down to the shore, whispered promises of the answer ringing in their heads all the way into the water.

Other stories were out there too – darker ones. One man had told Smith that if you looked into the water for long enough, you'd suddenly experience the sensation of having been hooked, like a fish, right behind the eyes. That you could feel the barb of the hook ripping its way through your skin somewhere near the bridge of your nose, but for all that you could feel blood running down your face you couldn't raise your hands to check or tear your head away from your own reflection. He'd told him that no matter how far away the water was, the same thing would happen to your face.

Whether you were a six-year-old kneeling at the rocky shoreline staring into a puddle only a few inches from the end of your nose, or a grown man staring off the side of the bridge into the water, the same horror would occur. Your face would be as clear in the water as you'd see it in a mirror. High definition clarity through which you could appreciate the sight of your mouth turning up in a smile even as your face remained still, and your eyes becoming nothing more than dark pools of water, blacker than the midnight sky.

Until you blinked, and the spell vanished, of course.

Smith didn't believe a word of any of it, naturally, but it didn't half turn his stomach sometimes. Maybe if he'd been born and raised in this town, he'd be less sensitive to it, but not in the decades since he'd moved here with his family had he ever become accustomed.

Moreso than how chilling it could be, it didn't make for an attentive and helpful population to assist in his investigation when every tenth person stayed away from the bay entirely, and every third person would put down all strange occurrences as the work of some ghost tale.

After this latest death, Smith was bound for the scene of the incident to do some investigating, excited to get his hands on some hard evidence at last maybe. Still, even as he walked down to the bayfront, it was hard for him to bring his eyes to water. Sometimes it did feel like something might look back.