The Stroke of Midnight

Silas was no longer just damp. He was drenched. Black, oily water poured off his clothes, pooling on the kitchen tiles. His jaw hung slack, unnaturally low, and his eyes had dilated until there was no white left, only endless, terrifying black.

In his hand, the silver pocket watch clicked loudly.

"What did you do?" Elias whispered, his voice trembling as he backed up against the open basement door. "What is this?"

"An offering," Silas said, his voice gurgling with seawater. "A debt that was owed long before you or your mother ever stepped foot on this cliff. The ones below are ancient, Elias. They are hungry. And they grant safe harbor only to those who pay."

Elias’s heartache, the crippling grief of the last three weeks, suddenly crystalized into sharp, jagged terror. "My mother... she wasn't sick."

"She was the down payment," Silas said, his lips curling into a grotesque, too-wide smile. "Her lungs filled with the sea because she belonged to it. A beautiful sacrifice. But the pact requires two."

Upstairs, the heavy, antique grandfather clock in the hallway began to chime.

* Bong.*

"It is midnight," Silas rasped, raising his arms. He didn't look at Elias; he looked past him, down into the black water of the flooded cellar.

* Bong.*

Silas resumed the chant, louder this time, screaming the impossible syllables. The house shook violently. The wood groaned and splintered.

Elias turned the flashlight down toward the basement.

The black water was no longer still. It was frothing, boiling with an unnatural heat. Huge, sickening bubbles breached the surface, releasing bursts of noxious gas.

* Bong.*

Something was rising from the depths.

It was a mass of pallid, rubbery flesh. Huge, gelatinous eyes, blind and glowing with a sickly bioluminescence, breached the surface of the dark water. And then came the appendages—thick, muscular tentacles lined with razor-sharp suckers, uncoiling from the deep like terrifying serpents.