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Oh, they spoke of the iron road where puffing machines pulled people and goods at speeds exceeding the fastest horses, of cities so large one could walk all day and still not reach their limits, but he did not know any of these things. He did not know, and he did not want to know. They frightened him.

However, he had enough of curiosity and wonder to go down to the sea after worst of the storm was over and see what it had brought in.

He had found things before. He had found half-rotten old timbers which, dried, made good firewood and which fetched fair prices when he sold them in town. He had found wondrous brass globes, only slightly scratched and dented, from some wreck. He had found – twice – isolated gold coins, which he had retrieved and which still stayed buried under the floor of his hut. He had found fishes and other creatures, some commonplace, yet some of kinds the fishermen in their fragile boats never brought in. Some of them he brought back and sold to the fishmongers. Some he ate himself, roasting them over fires of driftwood behind the hut. Once or twice he had found something still gasping its life out in some puddle of water between rocks, and he had returned it to the ocean. He had never thought twice about this. There had never been anyone to tell him it was a silly thing to do.

This morning, he came down past a huge pile of rock that stuck like a pimple on the face of the coast. It was sheer and slick with seaweed and at low tide, in good weather, he frequently scrambled up on it and looked for things stuck in the crevices. Now the waves crashed on it and sent sheets of spray so high that they fell around him like a fine drenching rain. He licked the salt from his lips and smiled. His teeth were worn down and brown, but so were everyone else’s. Only the new priest had white teeth, and the schoolteacher, but they did not count.

There was a hollow in the shingle just past the rocks. He knew it well. There had been no hollow the year before, or earlier. There had been a large rock, big as a small house, rounded and tilted on a narrow scooped base, with a puff of grass growing on the summit and blowing in the wind like a green flag. The great hurricane of the previous year had plucked the rock like a stump from the ground and taken it out to sea. There was now a deep hollow in the shingle, and each time the wind blew hard enough the hollow filled with water. Pedro had found many things in it at various times. He always checked it after every storm.

It was a stormy coast, this. Whoever lived here was used to the wind, had learned to respect it as an elemental force of nature, something against which even muttered Hail Marys and counting rosary beads achieved nothing. There was not a man born and brought up along this coast who did not, at times, if only in his inmost heart, invoke the old, unforgotten Pagan gods for help and succour. It was only the priests who did not know of this. But the priests were, after all, almost all outsiders; and any of the natives who took holy orders had the old wisdom programmed out of him in seminary, so he did not count.

Today, then, as Pedro walked down the shingle towards the hollow, he glanced hopefully at it. The sun came out suddenly, and reflecting on the water in the hollow, sent back a glare which made it impossible to see a thing. He squinted, blinked involuntarily, and when he had opened his eyes the clouds had covered the sun again and the hollow was full of gunmetal grey water in which something long and black rolled.

At first he thought it was a log. He thought it was a log until he was standing next to the hollow, staring down at it, and even then he took a while to persuade himself that whatever it was, it was no log. It took even longer for him to accept that he was seeing what he was seeing.

The object lay in the hollow, from which the water had already largely drained away, so that it was only partly covered. Its smooth blackish skin was already beginning to dry and turn grey in the fleeting sunlight, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Its large, paddle shaped tail beat at the gravel at the edge of its prison, weakly. But that was not the worst of it. Its clawed, vaguely reptilian hands with their delicate fingers waved at the air, but that was not the worst of it, either. As it heaved itself desperately, its flat mammaries broke the surface and sank again, grotesque parodies of a woman’s breasts, and that was bad enough, but nowhere near the worst of it. Its mouth, triangular and slung under its bony face, opened and closed, showing small, sharp, peg-like yellow teeth, but even that was not the worst of it.

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