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.