In the late summer, before the storms began to roll in, Mary Antoinette Athelard drowned herself, or so the police said and the newspapers reported. And, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, that is what happened.

In the small hours of the morning when the world is darker than our forgotten nightmares and old fishermen are drunk in the tavern by the docks, the oldest of them tells a very different story. It is a much darker story and one that reaches back to the entwined roots of the oldest family in Blackpool Bay and the beginnings of the town itself.

Many years later and a world away, I write these words in my diary as a cautionary tale. You may or may not believe me, but trust me when I say that you should fear the music at sea.

***

I had schooled with Edward Junior Athelard, who had convinced me to spend summer vacation with him at his family home in Blackpool Bay. Both him and I had a fascination with diving, having done some scuba and spelunking around various places, and he had convinced me about the fascinating underwater ruins dotted around his ancestral shoreline back home.

Junior was the youngest of two siblings and the last in a line of Athelards stretching back to his great-great-grandmother who built both the family fortune and, arguably, their home town. He rarely mentioned his father or what had happened to him; the Athelard family was interspersed with tragedy in each generation and he tended to gloss over many other aspects of his family. Years later, these seemingly innocent omissions make my skin crawl and I find my ears straining to hear if there is any hint of music in the wind outside.

Junior had, though, spoken fondly of his elder sister. They had been a key source of companionship for each other growing up in such a small, isolated town penned in by a dark, brooding ocean on one side and the Old Mountains on the other. With the curiosity of children and the leisure of the wealthy, the two of them had spent many hours looking through these self-same underwater ruins that he wanted to show me and, thus, our first trip to Blackpool Bay was born.

Once we had jumped off the creaking, old boat at the smelly docks, we grabbed our bags and wandered up into town. Residing at number 2 Main Street, the Athelard family home was a wonderful old Victorian house that had probably seen better days but still carried itself well in this quaint setting.

A decrepit, piscine-looking butler with slightly bulging eyes opened for Master Edward and me, taking our bags and showing me to my room. Dinner was served shortly after that and, in this old wooded and quaint Victorian setting, I first met Mary. It would be the first of many times as, all those years ago, we grew close in our innocence as Junior, Mary, and I all explored those ancient, silent ruins so far below the brooding, stormy waters of Blackpool Bay.

We would spend weeks swimming around vast crumbling ruins of strange rock, carved in strong, flowing lines. There were pillars running in the deep from ancient times and for forgotten reasons with architectures intimating a great city with vast buildings and roads that ran up and through the town–if you knew where to look and what to look for–towards the darkest part of the Old Mountains where the bizarre Black Pool is rumored to lie.

We would throw around wild theories about the ruins and, on more than one occasion, I could swear that I heard strange, haunting music in the wild wind or vibrating through the waters far below the surface. But, I am uncertain whether I have merely fabricated these memories, as those eerie, crumbling, seaweed-infested ruins played on one’s minds long after you left them, as did my subsequent experience.

After all, those crumbling ruins were the strange, foreboding structures that distant, alien hands had lade while chiselling dark, twisted decorations with warped fish-like human forms amongst other horrors, all writhing through and around a great civilization whose very name has been forgotten to our mild, modern history books.

***

Those years flew by, but Junior ended up at a different college to me, though I hear that he dropped out after only a year and returned home. Not just the distance but also as he grew older I sensed him pulling away from me and, perhaps in hindsight, the rest of the modern world as he slipped back into the dark, isolation of Blackpool Bay.

For a while, Mary and I also maintained sporadic communication, but slowly, the dark, mysterious ruins below the waters Blackpool Bay receded into my memory and the Athelards receded back into their old Victorian home with all their secrets, money and isolation.

Slowly, I forgot the old, crumbling ruins and their haunt visage and horrific carvings. Slowly, I forgot the music I thought I heard sometimes in the howling, bitter ocean wind or vibrating deep underwater…

If only this had stayed that way. But, alas, the distance was shattered when the phone rang late one night and, on a crackling line, Mary’s voice breathlessly whispered out three short, panicked sentences before the line cut:

“Come, James, come quickly! It is happening to us again. It is hungry and I am not sure how long I can keep Junior safe!”

***

Less than a fortnight later, I was walking out to the docks with a pale, thin, babbling Mary pulling my hand and pushing me into one of the family boats. Junior was gone and I was too late.

Too late for what, I recall wondering?

I was shocked at how much Mary had aged and how empty their had home felt. The old, fishy butler was gone and shadows lurked everywhere in that building. As she cast off from the docks and we ploughed her family boat through stormy swell and cutting, bitter wind against the dark sky and hateful sea, she told me the strangest, most disjointed tale I have ever heard:

“James,” I still remember Mary, her voice edged with hysteria and her eyes wide with fear as she called above the sound of the boat, the wind and the water, “James, we Athelards have been here since the beginning. Did you know that? Did Edward tell you that we were the beginning? They made–we made a deal with them and it has a cost. I did not know, but the butler did–I think he is one of them. I think he keeps cutting the phone lines. Oh, god, James, what a cost! One every generation is taken. They never forget because they have to feed it. It began with Great-great-nan’s husband. He was the first to pay it. Some of the townsfolk are them, you know? They sometimes breed, but we–no, no, god, no, we are pure and just, just, just… You see, James, they took Junior and we have to get him back We have to get him back, and I found the old map in Great-great-nan’s old room and we are going to where the pillars end and their city starts and, god, James, how are we going to get him back? Nan’s said the music calls them but how? Why? God, James, god…!“

At this, Mary broke down crying and I jumped up and put my arms around her. She slumped back and I took over the boat’s steering, though I had no idea where we were going. She sat down, burying her face in her palms and began to sob.

The Athelards are a sturdier bunch than most old minted families, and soon she stood up, pushed me away from the wheel, and took over. Her eyes narrowed, jaw clenched and all she did was to point to the open maws of the Bay where the open ocean started with its wild, primordial water and say:

“That’s where we are going, James, that is where we are going.”

***

From this point, a lot of my tale becomes a blur, though I will try to recount it as accurately as possible.

Once we arrived at what appeared to be a very specific place, Mary took out a strange, metal whistle or flute and, amidst the howling wind and sea spray, she blew deeply into it. Perhaps it was growing on me, perhaps it was an old memory blurring with the strangeness of the present, or perhaps it was truly happening, but suddenly I became faintly aware of that self-same haunting music hidden in the hateful wind howling around us.

Gradually, I realized–and recognized!–that there was a strange, high-pitched melody in the wind. The waves were pounding against the boat became or were caused by drum beats; bass-filled echoes that the haunting, ethereal notes pitched and rolled against out in that vicious sea. It was growing louder and clearer, and my old memories came flooding back to me.

I recalled the strange, foreboding structures far below and around us that distant, alien hands had placed while carving dark, twisted decorations of fish-like horrors, all writhing through and around a great civilization whose very name has been forgotten to our shallow, self-centered history.

My head lolled back and I recall closing my eyes. The music was around me and filled me with unexpected thoughts and alien feelings from a forgotten place. Somehow the inhuman music reminded me of places I had never been and secrets that I did not know. Its darkly evocative and elusive melody was coursing through my vanes and the wild wind, waves, and stormy sky all fell away as I lost myself in it…

“James!”

The cry snapped me back to reality. My mouth was open and I had been singing or humming–or chanting!–and realized that my arms were outstretched for some reason with palms facing up like I was worshipping something.

“James!“

The second cry snapped me into action and I opened my eyes.

Mary was clutching me, shaking and pointing and I was hit by a sickening stench of rotting fish. I had no idea how they got there, but standing in the boat, facing us were two of the most bizarre terrifying beings I had ever seen. While certainly humanoid in shape, their thin, gaunt forms were covered in glistening slimy scales with webbed, wicked-looking claws on both hands and feet with fins running down parts of their bodies. They stood a little taller than me, though their builds were slight and they looked less comfortable on land than I suspect they would be underwater. All these details receded into the background when presented with the cold, fish-like faces that rose up from their gilled necks. Cold, unblinking inhuman eyes of uncalculatable intelligence stared at the two of us from across a gulf that my reason and all my knowledge could not cross without going insane.

These were the fish-men carved into the ruins we had dived through as children. And then it struck me, the ruins were not merely carved with their ancient, wicked forms, but the ruins themselves were the fish-mens’ own! At that moment, I knew as I know now, these ancient abominations from the depths of the sea were the builders and architects of those crumbling, eerie ruins through Blackpool Bay.

But, before I could do anything or speak, Mary darted forward and bowed before them, laying the strange metal fluit at their feet. The haunting, inhuman music on the wind was crescendoing as drums in the deep pushed out like the heartbeat of some giant horror awakening far below us where even the light of the brightest day does not reach.

“Please, please,” Mary begged, “Please can I have my brother James back. Please! Take me instead!”

“Now wait!” I remember shouting at Mary, stepping forward to stop her, but it was too late. The music at sea was crescendoing hellishly as the waves were getting bigger and a lightning bolt suddenly flashed from the blackening heavens, “Now wait, you, stop! Don’t touch her!”

I recall screaming, my voice lost in the music at sea as a fish-man grabbed poor Mary and I lunged at it. The one fish-man–surprisingly strong–batted me off like some buzzing insect while the other scooped up a sobbing Mary and leaped smoothly from the boat into the dark waters of where Blackpool Bay meets the wild, primordial open-ocean.

What happened then? This is a question that I struggle with.

I do not know but, in the darkest hours of the stormiest nights when I sometimes think I hear that strange, inhuman music on the hateful wind, I sometimes recall flashes of images from the moments following this.

I recall struggling with the remaining fish-man but being flung aside like I was nothing. My head hit something and the world began to darken. But something large and dark–sometimes I recall tentacles and teeth but sometimes it is worse–rose from that wild water and towered over the boat and me. I recall Mary screaming and the horrors of the cosmos itself reaching out with the hunger of countless millennium, the hunger of cold, inhuman space and the black depths of the ocean’s hidden floor…

And then I recall being woken by an old, weathered fisherman who helped me steer my listlessly drifting boat back to shore. The wind was silent again but I swear I could feel dark drumbeats rolling in the depths far below those primordial waves.

***

The Athelard family is no more but this is old news. After Junior’s reported disappearance, a piscine-looking policeman with bulbous eyes ruled that a grief-stricken Mary had thrown herself into the sea and drowned. This was despite my protests to the contrary. The newspapers had then reported her drowning, and the old family estate and the rotting town around it had receded back into isolation and brooding silence.

Years later, I write these words from far inland on another continent. Even this far away, I sometimes worry that the inhuman music at sea still lingers on the wind around here, its reach far longer than we can ever imagine. The fish-men and their horrors still haunt my waking dreams as I move towards the same fate that befell the Athelard family.

I am dying and am not long for this world. Junior is gone as is Mary and the entire Athelard family line. Soon, I will be too, though for more mundane reasons. One day, I think–or hope!–that Blackpool Bay will also rot away and disappear from our world.

But, I suspect, the strange, crumbling ruins of the ancient, inhuman civilization that lies below the dark waters of Blackpool Bay shall remain. The fish-men with their wicked, webbed claws and unblinking eyes shall probably slip from our age into another and, perhaps, even another, taking their secrets with them as well as their need to sate that nameless hunger that resides far below and at the center of their twisted lives and at the heart of the music at sea.

He had been following her for three months as her trail cut across the country. She had started by the coast, moved inland, hit the other coast, and then veered North in what began as a zigzagged-dawdle that steadily picked up pace, intent and ferocity.

He had started about a month or so behind her and, as she went further North, her trail seemed to straighten and her speed to accelerate. He had no idea where she was heading but as she went further North, what had started as a con artist’s crime-spree became a serial killer’s rampage. The trail of bounced cheques that had landed the case on his desk had become a trail of destruction and then murder.

And then something horrifically more…

The murders started to become more vicious, more brutal and more violent. A strangled one-night stand in a dusty motel where a cheque had bounced became a body with multiple stab wounds in the next town.

Her ritual was evolving at a terrifying speed.

As she moved further North, the bodies started to become dismembered, torn apart and cast around the motels and lodges that she stayed in along the way. Bloody stained beds with sliced torsos were her centerpieces and torn-off limbs her ornaments around the room.

And then she started writing with her victims’ blood on the walls. Mad, crazed scrawls repeating the same phrase: IT HAS NO FORM. IT HAS NO FORM. IT HAS NO FORM…

Again and again, she scrawled this on walls and mirrors using her victims’ gnawed-off fingers as grotesque paintbrushes and their blood as the paint.

Even as a federal agent, chasing down someone like her was out of his job description but back-up was far behind him. There were no airports around here and they were about a week or two’s drive back. He rarely did much fieldwork but as the trail grew more violent, his will to catch her grew, and the Directors all agreed with him that he was best positioned to catch her.

He had picked up her trail about a month or so behind her movements but he was now gaining on her. Cheque fraud took a while to pick up–it needed to work its way through the system before getting flagged and reported by the banks–but murders were found and reported within days, thus allowing him to leapfrog forward across multiple small towns and start to gain on her movements.

Her trail was also getting straighter and straighter. It was like something was pulling her into its dark gravity, like a distant black hole sucking her in. The abyssal pull had been soft and indirect when she was far away but as she got closer, the gravity grew stronger, her path grew straighter and her descent into the darkness grew faster.

He had never seen her and, despite vague accounts from sleepy motels clerks and odd cashiers, he also had no idea who she was.

She only ever paid fraudulent cheques or cash, had nothing registered in any name that actually existed and had an uncanny ability to avoid cameras and other recording devices. Despite the growing violence, she had never left an identifiable fingerprint at any scene nor any shred of evidence as to where she was from or where she may be heading to.

But as she went more North, she was starting to run out of country.

He spent more and more time pouring over maps and–purely accidentally when a diner’s waitress asked him if he was heading to “the hippy festival”–it started to dawn on him that she might be aiming for the All-light Freedom Fest. This was an annual festival held in the southern foothills of some mountains that ringed the last dinky little town left this far north along the coast, Blackpool Bay.

The annual “Hippy Fest”–as locals called it–would be perfect hunting grounds for her and he felt his skin crawl at the thought. Naive, intoxicated kids dancing in fields and sleeping with strangers would be easy pickings for a predator.

His knuckles turned white as his grip tightened on the steering wheel of his rental car. His skin crawling and his heart pounding, the steering wheel began to shake slightly as he sped along towards god-only-knows-what…

But he was too late.

When he arrived at the Hippy Fest there was a small crowd of bewildered, hungover kids loitering around. The collection of loosely dressed hippies–a couple of the girls weeping softly, most of the boys pale white with expressions of various degrees of disassociation displayed–were standing around an old, slightly dinged-up campervan in the middle of a wide green field dotted with tents.

He flashed his badge and pushed through the crowd. They parted without a word and one of the guys started weeping too.

The campervan’s door was partially open and he could see a trickle of blood dripping out from it. He mentally prepared himself for what lay inside and carefully pushed the door fully open, stepped over the pooling blood, and entered a scene of frenzy and violence matched only by his inability to describe the horror with adequate adjectives.

The victim has been torn into so many pieces that he had no idea if it was a man or a woman. Blood splattered every surface in that cramped campervan of nightmares with flesh, guts and parts of limbs hurled everywhere.

And, on every surface splattered with blood and gore, she had violently scrawled her phrase that had now expanded to a full, terrifying sentence: IT HAS NO FORM SO NEITHER SHALL WE. IT HAS NO FORM SO NEITHER SHALL WE...

After a few minutes, he stepped from the campervan back into the light of day. Despite this, a part of him would never truly leave that scene. A part of him would always be standing in the cramped campervan amidst that horror. In the darkest of nights and the depths of his soul, he would never quite leave that antediluvian scene of unimaginable savagery.

He closed his eyes and, pinching the bridge of his nose, he breathed deeply trying to calm himself. He knew what he had to do now.

She never stayed in a place after killing, and there was only one place left to go. Why? Why did she want to go there? What darkness there could be pulling her towards it?

He did not know but he did know what he had to do now. He ran from that campervan of horrors to his car, leaped into it and began to drive on the single, winding, old road that cut through the mountains and down towards Blackpool Bay.

She had to be going there. He had no idea why? Who or what was in Blackpool Bay?

***

It was nearly midnight when he descended from the old road into Blackpool Bay. Even on the village’s main road, few lights were on and he slowed the car down as he scanned his surroundings. He was not sure what he had expected? She was not just going to jump out. It was nearly midnight and she had probably found a motel or somewhere to sleep.

Looking around him, he saw what appeared to be a small motel at the bottom of the road near the pier and the ocean’s edge. It was a cloudless, moonless night and the stars looked cold and distant far above. The ocean looked dark and brooding and, as he pulled up beside the motel and got out his car, he found his gaze being pulled to its primordial presence.

And that was when he saw her standing on the edge of that cold, dark pier staring straight out into Blackpool Bay itself.

His heart started pounding in his chest and the hair on the back of his neck started to rise. He did not know how but he knew that it was her. He could almost feel her standing out on the edge of that strange, dark pier at midnight. Despite all he had seen on her violent trail, he suddenly felt like a voyeur peeking at some secret or ancient mystery that he should not be witnessing and he found himself holding his breath.

He swallowed these thoughts, tried to calm his nerves, and grabbed his gun. The cold metal felt real and it calmed him down a little. Her back was still to him and so he quietly crossed the road to stand at the edge of the pier. She had nowhere to go and no one around to harm.

Her trail ended here.

Checking his gun’s safety was off, he started down the pier towards her.

That was when he saw them. How had he missed them? How had they gotten there? Had they been there all along and he had just not seen them?

They were hard to describe and had forms that your eyes struggled to focus on. But, when the horrors of the campervan woke him up at night and before his conscious mind was fully in control, his subconscious would remember that they had looked very much like piscine horrors with scales, slimy limbs and tentacles that could have crawled up from the darkest depths of the ocean itself. Where human heads with human features should have been, slimy, scaled fish-like faces stared out at him with inhuman, unblinking coldness. Long, thin limbs and tentacles in strange places juxtaposed with a bizarre aura of intelligence around them. An inhuman, alien and cold intelligence that revealed itself when one of these strange, slimy fish-like beings lifted a strange, curling trident and emotionlessly pointed at him.

And then he had reached the end of the pier and was standing behind her. He gasped a breath, realizing that he had been holding his breath this whole time and almost gagged as a strange, sharp vileness pervaded the cold, salty coastal air.

She had red hair.

He blinked. Yes, she had red hair and–surrounded by such strange, darkness and alien nightmares–he found his mind latching on this single detail for its normalcy.

All the piscine horrors around her began to raise their wicked tridents, their tentacles and arms swaying in a nightmarish throng around her. The wind began to howl, ferocious waves suddenly smashing against the pier as the surface of the ocean frothed and bubbled like some hellish seascape.

But–calm and cold–she turned to look directly at him. Surrounded by a maddening throng of swaying piscine limbs and tentacles, she smiled slightly and said:

“It has no form for It is hunger. The Great, Old Hunger, and the Chosen must feed It for if we do not, then It will surely consume everything again.”

And then she was gone.

***

He awoke the next morning on the pier, covered in frigid sea spray and cold sweat. His head was throbbing and his body aching. All the bullets were still in his gun and his gun was still in his hand. He got up and looked around.

He did not know how he had fallen asleep or passed out, nor could he remember anything other than a vague horror when trying to recall what had happened after she had spoken.

What had happened?

He did not remember how she had gone or where she had gone. Somehow, though, he knew that she was gone. Somehow he just knew that her murderous trail had ended and he shuddered as a single, horrifying thought crossed his mind.

What antediluvian nightmare could exist whose dark influence could reach across the very land to pull her to the edge of that pier jutting out into the ocean? What dark forgotten god could exist that inspired such a violent trail as she fled into its hungering maw? What horrific leviathan may be lying in the deep and how long had it quietly slept hidden far below the cold, dark waters of quaint little Blackpool Bay?