The tide in Lampport had been coming in wrong for three weeks, and nobody would say so out loud. Sometimes saying something out loud made it more real.

Earl Plyler noticed it first, hauling traps off the Seafoam. The water came up the pilings in a rhythm that didn't match the moon anymore--came up like it was breathing, holding, breathing again, just a beat too long between each swell, as though something enormous and patient had taken over the ocean's currents but hadn't quite gotten the hang of the job yet.

By the second week, the gulls had stopped screaming. They still circled the harbor, wingtips catching the gray light, but they were silent, and that silence sat over the docks like a held breath.

Reverend Harlow found the fish. Hundreds of them, beached at low tide in a shape too geometric to be chance--a spiral that tightened toward the breakwater, each fish facing the same direction, eyes open, gills faintly moving though they'd been out of water for hours.

He didn't tell the sheriff. He told his wife, and then he stopped telling anyone anything. He spent his evenings standing alone at the end of the dock, listening to the tide come in, feeling something vast and old turning its attention toward Lampport. He turned toward whatever moved in the water, whatever moved the water. Something he almost recognized.

It was a feeling as much as a sound, like a long-held breath finally being let out.

Ms Fisher was a lighthouse owner. For many, this was considered a solemn duty, a hermit’s sacrifice, a lonely life lived in a tower like an all too treacherous Rapunzel perfumed with sea-salt and storm clouds. For Kathy however, it was nothing short of a dream job: the early mornings and late nights in her bunk, sleeping in shifts with her good friend Veronica, a strong pot of coffee on the stove. Of course, being considered a local hero didn’t hurt.

She had barely sank her teeth into the fluffy delight known as Mrs Harlow’s famous cupcakes, which she always delivered, 9am, every Tuesday, when Veronica’s shrill screams roused her. Kathy found her pale-faced and slumped against the rounded walls on the spiral staircase, clutching a rapidly falling chest with no breath left to speak. A heart attack, they had called it, one that required some time in observation, and, in an act of medical miraculously, rendered poor Veronica mute.

Kathy did not believe it, just like she didn’t believe the stories being traded between fishermen and nervous wives. What she did believe, however, was compounding evidence: Mr Pyler, the fish on the beach, the low metallic thrum in the air they had all been dismissing as the tides of a storm, with no storm in sight for months. She trudged back down to the greying beach that afternoon, boots sinking into sea-softened sand, slate coloured composite that stank of salt and fish guts. The sea sat before her like an endless, roiling blanket of brownish blue, bobbing lazily with the breeze, and Kathy turned her coat up against the current.

The feeling was back, the feeling of something dead awakening. And Kathy was sure, certain, that beyond the horizon, she could see something rising up out of the water like the spine of a hill.