It is under appreciable mental strain that I am writing this accounting. What began as a typical vacation transformed my previously immutable reality. Officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions along the Carolina coast in the summer of 2026. The public was first made aware of this after a series of raids and arrests occurred. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on immigration. Though keener followers of current events might have questioned the prodigious number of arrests and the sheer number of personnel used in the operation. No charges were ever made public, no trials were ever held, and there was complete silence on where these prisoners were ever taken. There were vague statements made about disease, crime, and the potential for domestic terrorism.
There was a great deal of local muttering about the events and the people who were taken, but no comment was made to the outside world as a whole.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. It was my family and I who fled frantically from the Carolina coast in the early morning hours of late July and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode.
We had never visited the far southern reaches of the Carolinas lowlands before this particular summer. We had always stayed farther north, in the more sophisticated areas of Duck or Corolla. On this trip, our ultimate destination was the city of Savannah, but we had decided to spend a day or two in the southern end of the coastal barrier islands.
As we crossed the bridge from the mainland over to the island, something immediately seemed off. Some odd juxtaposition that I could not quite put my finger on. Human commercial development spread across the landscape like a cancer. Little to nothing was left untouched. Yet that was not what seemed odd.
One evening during our short stay on the small barrier island, we decided to visit the local fishing pier, a place they called Calcutta Point, where the feeling of peculiarity seemed to increase. As we approached, the houses lining the street leading down to the pier stood out for their dishevelment and neglect. All were small and in need of major renovations and repairs. The yards were full of weeds, and trash was strewn about everywhere. Reaching the parking lot, I first noticed a small, densely packed RV park surrounding it, something I had not seen from the main drag leading over to the pier area. These RVs seemed to have the same level of unkemptness as the houses approaching the pier. I only heard fragments of muttered conversation and caught a few glimpses of shadows moving among the RVs. Somewhere off in the maze of trailers, wiffs of smoke from a fire could be caught, but one could not imagine where it might be with the tight placement of the trailers. There was also a growing smell of fish. Though it seemed as if no one else noticed any of this.
The pier was bustling with activity, but as we continued further out, I began to notice a certain segregation between what I first imagined to be between the tourists and the locals. In many vacation locales, it becomes easy to spot the tourists from those who live there full time. There is just a difference in demeanor, a difference in dress. But here there was something more. What I first would have described as locals were skinny and lanky, wearing old clothing that did not seem to fit properly. They seemed to have large, bulgy, staring eyes that did not seem to blink at all when they looked at you. Their hair was thinning, and many of them were completely bald. There was something not quite right with their skin. They had obviously spent too much time out in the sun, but their skin color was wrong, aside from being extremely sunburnt. It was rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks were slightly shriveled or creased up. The shape of their heads was not quite normal either. The females shared many characteristics with the men, except that the men were tall and lanky, and the women were short and squat. They all seemed to enjoy fishing. Though it seemed as if these odd fellows were the only ones catching any fish. I swear I saw one of these fellows throw a small fish into the air and swallow it whole. Though I am not sure whether I imagined it happening ot not. The further we walked out onto the pier, the more and more of these odd fellows there seemed to be.
At the end of the pier was a raised observation deck with a large set of steps leading up to it. Here and there, one would spot the occasional carving in the wooden railing at the sides of the pier. At first, it was just what seemed to be people’s initials or a year, but the further out the pier we went, the carvings became more and more dense. Intermixed with the initials and numbers, various figures started to appear. The pictorial carvings all appeared nautical in theme, or so it appeared. Fishes of various types, whales, squid, octopuses, and sharks.
As I climbed the staircase to the top of the observation deck, the pictorial carvings became more and more frequent. It was once I reached the top of the stairs that I first noticed the two pure white columns mounted to the decking. If mounted is the right word to use, they almost appeared to grow forth from the decking like two trees. These columns were covered in pictorial carvings along with some unknown runic script. But there were more than just fish and such on these columns. They depicted what I first thought were men, but after gazing at it longer, I realized they were not right. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination. They were easy to mistake for humans at first, but the longer one stared at them, the more one would realize their hands and feet were webbed. In contrast to the pure whiteness of the columns themselves, the carvings had a more crimson sheen. Near the top of each column, about six feet from the deck, were two chains with shackles on each. What was the intended use of these chains? The shackles seemed to have the same crimson sheen as the carvings.
I reached out to touch and investigate one of the columns, and the instant my fingers touched it, a dizzying vertigo overtook me; the bright sun seemed to warp and curdle into an oily darkness, and the distant murmur of the tide swelled into a rhythmic chant. Strange stars filled the sky with a brilliance I have never seen. The tourists and odd fellows all seemed to be gone just as suddenly, though I could still hear some stranger murmur in a language I could not quite make out, or simply did not know. There was one word that has stayed with me since that event, one that seemed to be repeated over and over again in the course of this chanting, “Dagon, Dagon, Dagon”.
It was then that my attention was drawn to a long promenade of odd-fellow types walking down the pier and ascending the stairs to the top of the observation deck. At the head of this line was a young adult woman, clad in the tragic, skimpy remnants of modern beach attire, a mockery of modesty but wearing some sort of crown made of seashells. Her eyes seemed to be staring right through me, glassy and distant. She seemed as if she had been a tourist from the beach at some point in time, barefoot and in a red bikini bottom. Several necklaces also made from seashells and what appeared to be beach trash hung around her neck and covered her bare breasts. Two odd fellows guided her over to the white columns, took her hands, and locked her arms into the shackles. The crowd of other odd fellows formed into a “U” shape around the columns, but about 5 feet back, leaving an opening to the side facing the open dark ocean. A dark amber colored full moon was just cresting over the calm dark ocean surface. It was then that the chanting stopped, though it was replaced with a distant drumming of some odd instrument. I could not place where this so-called drumming sound was coming from at first. Then I realized where the sound was coming from. It was coming from the depths of the ocean. Drumming from the deep.
The calm, glass-like surface of the ocean waters in front of the pier began to churn, and it was then, I fear, that the last fragile bastions of my sanity crumbled. The words I can strain to find to describe what happened next are difficult to piece together. A thing, for lack of any better term, a colossus of pale, gelatinous flesh, a blasphemy of nature, began to heave itself from the black abyss in front of the pier. It was Polyphemus and beyond grotesque. It rose to stand in front of the pier like some stupendous nightmare of a creature. It flung one of its gigantic scaly hands toward the woman now shackled between the two white carved columns, who only now seemed to be coming out of whatever unholy, hypnotic somnambulism she had been in. Her scream shall live in my nightmares till my dying days. I’ve never heard anything like it before. The creature’s almost tentacle-like fingers wrapped around the woman and tore her loose from the shackles, leaving a spray of blood from her broken wrists that I now realized was the source of the crimson color of the shackles and other carvings. How many people have been sacrificed to this beast by these odd fellows? I fought the urge to be sick as the monstrosity raised its arm into the air to drop the still-screaming woman into its mouth. With a sickening crunch, a merciful and abrupt silence fell upon the deep.
It was at that moment, as I fought the urge to be sick and to run, that my hand fell from the column and I was once more standing under the sun, still on the pier. I frantically searched for my wife and daughter and pulled them to follow me as we rushed off the pier. But as we ran, every odd, large-eyed fellow we passed turned to look at us, raising one hand to point. I swear they were still chanting “Dagon, Dagon”. As we reached the shore end of the pier, a flash of red caught my eye, and as I focused on the object, I realized it was the top of a red bikini. Nearby, I could hear several twenty-something beachgoers frantically yelling “Jenny” over and over, as they frantically searched for their friend. We hurried into the car and left that place, never to return.
