The light-frosted sky told me nothing, until I heard some strange new sound, a howling not drawn from the wind scraping against the unsettled waves. Whatever storm battered Fall River, it did not make this cry—this unearthly, inhuman, unlikely, and unbelievable wail that came from . . . below or maybe beyond the water, I think. It came from the ocean, off in the distance—this high-pitched groan that carried on the storm the undercurrents of a creak, a squeal, like a great door opening or a lion’s mouth stretching into a yawn.

It was a living cry; that’s what I mean to say. Not the insensate noise of a ship leaning or a tree beginning to break; it was a sound made on purpose, by something that wished to be heard. Yet it must also be said that this sound was mechanical in nature—or its underpinnings seemed that way to me. I heard chains, unspooling. Metal on metal. Rusted cogs objecting to the thought of being turned, but turning nonetheless.

I did not have long to muse about the sound’s nature or origins, for I saw her again.

Only for a flicker, for the briefest shaved moment of a second.

On the rocks, to the left. On the tumbled boulders worn smooth and treacherous by the tide, moving across them as easily as Christ must have walked upon the sea. She moved steadily, but the motion of her limbs was not natural—her bare skin gleaming and wet; she looked like she had too many limbs, clinging and rattling, crablike, across the stones. (She had a center that did not move, only dangled between clicking, clattering, clawing appendages that gripped the uneven terrain and navigated it soundly, for all their strangeness.)

I tried her name again, but without any force this time. She wasn’t listening to me. She was listening to the cry that rose up out of the waves, and I wondered if this was the cry of Zollicoffer—of the monster who hounded us, and who must have surely arrived in Fall River by now.

Had he met us here? Now? Finally?

But no, that couldn’t be right. The mad professor would be coming by land. Whatever wet god summoned Nance from the Atlantic, this must be what called to him, too. The monster that calls to monster. The evil so great that it draws all other evil like a lodestone.

(Is this what we fled, when we left the ocean? Did we grow legs so we could run away?)

Somewhere in the back of my head, I wondered if Zollicoffer hadn’t already arrived at Maplecroft. He would stop there first, wouldn’t he? He might be there already.

But there was no turning around now. I’d picked my path, and this is where it led me—after Nance, down to the water. Onto the immense, uneven boulders that keep watch over the place where the water meets the shore.