The child had no eyes but he still stared up at the sky as he floated some thirty meters in the air. He was lit periodically when the lighthouse's beam caught him each rotation but that didn't seem to bother him. Nothing did - not the light nor the storms nor the countless attempts of the lighthouse keepers to bring the child inside.
He simply couldn't be moved.
In the morning he'd be gone, he was always gone around the light's final sweep only to appear again not long after sundown. Always in the same position and always staring up at something only he could see. The keepers called him Charlie and began to talk to him instead of trying to reach him.
Until the lighthouse briefly showed them what the child was a part of.
Nature loves to adapt and nature loves to mimic before it kills. That was the only rational explanation the keeper's could come to after seeing row upon row upon endless row of yard long teeth and the gargantuan tongue that attached to Charlie's back.
The sky was especially bright that night - bright enough for them to see it sink back into the ocean.
They'd noticed how dark the waters were first thing in the mornings but they'd never put two-and-two together before. Not like this at least. Not in any way that would suggest that the floating child was the lure of some colossal angler-fish type creature that had developed a taste for human flesh over its unfathomably long lifetime.
It knew enough to give the child hair and clothes but not enough to give him eyes.
They continued to wonder to themselves if Charlie was actually a human trapped in the maw of a giant predatory fish or if he really was just a lure meant to keep on drawing them out until they were comfortable enough and close enough for his tiny hands to grab them and drag them into the eager embrace of thousands of teeth.
He still appeared by the lighthouse every night, only now the rest of the creature no longer bothered to hide.
No comments:
Post a Comment