This thing in the water, in the dark, was not an octopus, though. What did I know? But it worked away at me and after some time settled, curled around my feet, and stayed there. If it was to kill me, so be it. My legs were constrained, wrapped in coils of unrelenting strength up to my hips. I could not fight it, nor kick at it, and I had used all of my breath in shrieking at it. I fainted or surrendered, or was constricted until I choked, I don’t know, but when I was conscious again, the tide was out and I was alone in my chamber.

When thirst moved me to try to arrange my chains to channel water down my arm, my hand landed on something alive and I shrieked. (Yes, I do a lot of shrieking here in the dark. There is little else to do between the terror and the suffering—perhaps the disembodied tosser voice is right. Perhaps I have gone mad? Oh, well, how can you tell in the dark?) But it wasn’t alive, what was on the ledge—recently alive, perhaps. I ran my hand over it gently, feeling the spines, the fins, the eyes—a fish. Dead, but recently so—as long as my forearm and as big around. And the flesh had been scored, I could feel the cuts through the scales. I assumed the posture of prayer, where both of my hands could meet, and I ate the fish’s flesh, willing myself to slow down, not to swallow the scales or bones. It was the finest food I had ever eaten, and I felt my very being envelop it, making it part of me as if I were absorbing nourishment from the very dark itself.

The creature in the dark had left the fish for me, scored it for me, saved me from hunger if not delirium. What rough beast knows charity? What shark’s cold eye shines with kindness? None! These are human things, but even as a man can act a beast, can a monster show the character of a man? A woman?

She came to me on the next high tide and I yipped when roused from my reverie, but I did not kick at her as she brushed by me, again and again, rubbing against me as she passed, the way a cat will. Then, again, the creature wrapped around my legs, and I waited, again, for the bite that might take my leg, as the great slick coils of muscle constricted me. The claws came again, piercing my haunches. I shrieked, but these were not the tearing slashes that had scored the fish, but only just broke the skin, then the pleasant drift and I felt her soft parts begin to assail my manhood.