It Came from The Sea

It was the smell that the locals noticed first. Like a bloated corpse. The noxious stench invaded their nostrils and overwhelmed their senses. Men and women doubled over in the streets gagging. The stink came sudden and with malice.

That day was like any other. The townsfolk were living their lives. The cannery was ever busy. Fisherman unloaded the day's yield at the market. The children walked back to their homes from school laughing loudly and full of energy. The sky was overcast. A slow breeze drifted between the short buildings.

Then a choked wail broke through the monotony of the day. At the end of Wells Street, at the entrance to the beach head, an infant was bawling. Its mother was on her knees, one hand gripping her throat. The stench came down like a wave and swept through the town.

Finally, it began to die down, replaced by the familiar ocean spray. As the citizens collected themselves, a group of anglers took to the shore to investigate. While the foul odor had been greatly diminished, it was still present. And as they walked closer to the sand, it grew stronger again. They plugged their noses with clothe and continued forward, eager to find the source and be rid of it.

On the beach access they found the body of a seagull lying belly up in the grassy sand. They wondered if the stench had killed it. Being so close to the shore, the strength of it must have been enough to knock the creature from the sky.

They continued to debate the causality while the bravest of them knelt closer to the dead bird. Grains of sand were stuck under the folds of feathers. Its wings were splayed open. One was angled to the side, a hint of the joint bulging at the corner of its shoulder. The fisherman noticed that the animal was also quite large. He was used to seagulls on his long days out at sea, but this was unnatural. Easily double the size of a normal specimen.

The midsection was especially broad. Its shape was grossly spherical like that of a child's ball. The top feathers were pointing in all directions as the flesh underneath stretched outwards. While his companions talked amongst themselves, he went to search for a stick. Finding one of good length, the fisherman brought it back to the dead thing and stood a good distance away. He gave it a poke to the sternum and the thing let out a wheeze. The fleshy balloon deflated from all orifices, letting out more of the noxious gas. Even with the plugs, the group gagged at the sudden odorous assault. The bravest of them ran up and kicked the stinking body away. A gelatinous gray blob shot out from its beak and landed at their feet.

It was soggy and thick. Like a chunk of blubber. Maybe it was? A poisoned meal the bird ripped from a whale's corpse. It could have come from a long-dead beluga that may have washed up on the shore. It could have been infected by waste from the cannery and caused the horrendous smell and immense bloating. "Just a reaction from the chemicals," they told each other assuredly. They pushed the rotten flesh off the side of the path and buried it beneath the sand, hoping no other fauna would find it.

The group trekked further down the trail while the sky fell darker overhead. An ominous cloud was expanding in the distance, bellows of thunder carrying with it. They needed to finish this quickly before the weather forced them back to town.

They came around the bushes and stood on the beach beholding an unholy sight. The beach was littered with all manner of dead things. Seagulls, rats, dogs, cats, coyotes, possums, raccoons. Any local creature with an appetite for meat was present in the crowd of decaying animals. Each one as bloated as the last. One of the fishermen made the sign of the cross, another emptied whatever content was left in his stomach.

The anglers stepped around the swollen carcasses and headed further down the beach. They noticed that each had a chunk of the gray meat in its mouth or stuck in the crevices of its paws. How big was this beluga for all these animals to have a piece?

As they pondered to each other the meaning of all this they came upon another monstrous sight. A giant dead thing of leathery complexion. Its skin was almost scaly, and yet it was not. It was more like boiled cow hide. The pigment was too light to be from death alone. Whatever this decayed brute was, it was either an albino or lived far from the rays of the sun. There were large tears in the tough skin wear it had been ripped open. Beneath that was the gray gelatinous flesh with generous chunks missing where the scavengers presumably tore it away.

So, they had found the source. But was this thing? Where did it come from? What happened to it? Most importantly, how were they to get rid of it? This creature was far too large for the four of them to move alone. And none dared touch it for fear of sharing a similar fate to that of the animals that surrounded them.

The bravest of the group wandered around the unnatural corpse, looking for any familiar signs of its origin. It was the oddest whale he'd seen. Besides the strange color of its flesh, the shape of the creature was all wrong. Not bloated like the other animals, and not a usual shape for a whale. Like someone had taken a normal beluga and stripped it of its humps. In fact, its contour was more similar to an eel. The body stretched all the way to the grass line and ended in a curious point. He searched for an orifice. A nose, mouth, eyes, gills, but came up short. The angler walked down to the other end and found only a stump. No blood or sinking organs, just more of that gray mess. He took a few steps back and took in the creature in its entirety. It was such an unfamiliar beast. No discernable features whatsoever. What kind of whale was this? That's when he realized. This wasn't a whale at all, or an eel. It was a tentacle.

That's right, this was the missing appendage of some depth-dwelling sea monster. He had heard stories of creatures from the sea as big as a house. Creatures large enough to tear ships apart from beneath the dark waters. Ignorant folk would blame it on the weather, or the foolhardiness of the crew for the vessel's demise. But this was proof. He screamed in terror at the realization. This was only a small piece of some gargantuan monstrosity. He dropped to his knees. His mind raced at the thought that the limb's owner was somewhere beneath the waves.

But an even more horrifying notion flashed through his head. What manner of demonic atrocity caused this? To rip the arm from a monster of this size? It must dwarf this creature in comparison. He shuddered at the thought. With the arm appearing on shore so suddenly, he was terrified at what this meant.

The angler turned towards the crashing waves. The water was roaring in a cacophony of splitting booms that intertwined with the thunder. He looked past to the endless sea beyond the shore. His gaze lifted to the sky and the dark storm clouds above. He looked closer and saw a horrible figure. A being so large it tore the heavens. The sea rose to meet only the disjointed knees of its unnatural shape. Paralyzing yellow eyes peered down at him. The silhouette of thrashing tentacles snapped in the sky like lightning. The unholy goliath took a step forward past the gray fog and a chasm of infinite teeth peered out threatening to swallow the world.

It was here.