A boy and a girl skip rocks into the ocean as they walk along the shoreline. The boy turns the stone about with his long, graceful fingers before throwing it with a practiced flick of his wrist, as through he has been doing so his entire life. Millie is not nearly so fluid, so she watches the tall, pale figure of the boy with a sort of fascination. She sees him at the beach every day, slipping in and out of the waves with the grace of an eel.
Millie’s steps falter as they walk along, perhaps because of a shift in the sand, but more likely because of a shift in the water, which has stayed silent all day in repose for its sins. The knot tightens again in her stomach, a low growl of guilt for her inattention. It was her job to watch the quarter mile stretch of beach, and when the screams started—
The girl looks up at her companion Dane’s dark face, searching for a shard of comfort in his veiled eyes. The night shadows play off his rough skin, thrown by the light reflected from the ocean like fractured spirits.
He seems to notice her distress and takes her hand in his, accompanied with his usual tight lipped smile. He doesn’t think it was her fault, Dane believed her when no one else did.
Her boss had sweated and paced, foam collecting on his forehead and palms as black ink marked report after report, unable to listen to her story in his nervous frenzy.
“A great thing was in the water,” Millie had tried to tell him. Nearly seven feet long, with craggy skin, grasping fingers, spines down its back, and a mouth and fangs so dark they could have stopped her heart from the sight.
Stopped her heart… like the man it dragged under. Millie turns into Dane’s arms with a whimper, comforted by the reassurance of his rough skin, calloused from hard work and harsh conditions, a life that has made him fight for his meals and his freedom.
Millie’s boss had mopped his forehead as she told him what she saw, and he waved her away, because that doesn’t describe any creature in these waters. It could have been a shark, if we lived a few hundred miles south, but we don’t and there are no sharks, and no such thing as a Dardanos.
The Dardanos, a creature created to freeze children in their seats around the fire, so tired mummies and daddies do not have to chase them down by the Oceanside at night. The more he can weave the story to paint Millie as a silly girl, the more relieved he becomes. Surely her testimony cannot be trusted if she thinks she saw the Dardanos! A humanoid ocean monster, with reflexes like a lizard struck like black lightening and scaly skin like a corpse. Such a thing could never exist except in an imagination gone wild, and the Dardanos will not, under any circumstances, appear in the police report.
It would not have been the first time, Millie had protested. People have claimed to have been attacked, felt the rough skin brush against them, hearing the salty, rasping breath, and remember nothing but the freezing of adrenaline in their veins as the Dardanos snaked its way to their throat with its long, nimble fingers--!
Millie jumps, unable to help the way her skin crawls with terror when she feels Dane’s fingers encircle her wrist. Although she feels bad, she is still angry that he made her come back here to the beach tonight. She had wanted to go out for dinner, but Dane had said he was not hungry. Dane is always hungry, so Millie can only figure that he thinks walking back along the scene will be therapeutic for her.
Except it isn’t. She feels the scaly skin under her fingertips again, the same as when she tried to beat the creature away, she smells the same sharp, tearing scent that pervaded the ocean salt.
Millie tucks her head against Dane’s chest, quietly asking if he really believes her about what she saw. Would he call her crazy if she said she believed in the Dardanos? Will he make excuses like her boss, lathered in a nervous sweat because he knows the unthinkable? Perhaps he will tell her that she simply saw a large fish, and the patron she saw dragged away had… some sort of heart attack before being pulled away by a current. Is he even listening?
Dane rubs his palm across Millie’s back, the scratching comforting her as he speaks in his gravely voice.
Of course he is listening. Dane smiles as he looks out over the ocean, lips curling back over long teeth. Her Dardanos could have been anything.