Little Beastie

A Frankenstein(beck) story set in Cannery Row, California

By Marshall Comstock

Dad thought the music was medicine. John thought it was. I think it is. – Nancy Ricketts

The Creature did not see the steam engine collide with the 1936 Buick, did not hear the cowcatcher grind into the driver’s side door pinning the man between the car and the train for two hundred feet down the tracks. It knew nothing of the crowd that gathered, silent and in shock, as the man was extracted from the wreckage and lay broken beside the tracks. The Creature did not stand vigil with the onlookers as an ambulance arrived and bore the man off to the hospital—did not linger, unable to leave, until at last the great steam locomotive gasped, choked, and lurched slumped shouldered toward its terminus at Pacific Grove station.

The Creature did not know any of this. Instead, it slept in the quiet darkness of the basement at Pacific Biological Laboratories and dreamed (if creatures of that sort do dream) of the day it would shake off its five-gallon shell for something bigger, something brighter.

In the days that followed, the Creature remained oblivious to the nervous anxiety that gripped Cannery Row as the man that everyone called “Ed” slipped in and out of consciousness in his hospital bed, his eyes glazed and his speech mumbled. It did not indulge in the false hope that circulated among friends, family, and well-wishers as the doctors offered platitudes in the hospital waiting room. And the Creature did not mourn with the town when finally on May 11, 1948, the man’s body surrendered to the severity of his injuries, and the natural process of cellular atrophy began.

Instead, the Creature grew hungry and restless in its tank. It listened closely for the return of the soft rhythms and vibrations that so often hummed down from the upstairs apartment just before a feeding—Monteverdi, Bach, Ravel—unaware that the delicate setae of its exoskeleton would likely never again know such gentle music.

It was not unusual for human body parts to be found along the Monterey Peninsula. There is, of course, the famous case of Josh Billings. And during the Tong Wars bodies were regularly found among the pilings near Fisherman’s Wharf or even further up the coast near Point Pinos. But what washed ashore at Del Monte in August of 1948 caused a panic that spread as far north as San Jose. The farm workers picking artichokes near Castroville discussed it every day for a week, and down the valley in King City small boys retold the story over and over in mock jest to hide their terror.

A fisherman found them at 6 am: two legs, a perfect pair, ripped off just below the hip joint. Each leg wore a matching rough leather boot—Red Wing, men’s size 12—with high woolen stockings dyed bright blue. Besides the shoes and socks, the legs were naked and very white.

By 7 am the police had arrived, then the newspapers, and finally by 9 am a crowd of no less than two hundred had gathered in the fog to get a look for themselves at what the papers would later describe as “an act of vile dismemberment.” This characterization came mostly from the fact that the legs had been twisted off with immense force. Not cut or sawed or hacked off—twisted off. The top of the femur, that great ball of bone that makes up one half of the hip joint, protruded out from the raw block of thigh flesh in a way that made it seem as though someone (or something) had popped the legs off the torso like grapes from a vine.

That night, the Monterey Citizens Action Group (MCAG) held an emergency meeting. All the most important people in the town were in attendance: the mayor, the planning commissioners, all the clerics of the five leading churches in the Christian Fellowship League (CFL). The Masons were there, along with the Knights of Columbus, the Knights Templar, the heads of the Moose Lodge, the Elks, the Odd Fellows and Rebekahs, the Lions Club, and the Rotary Club.

They were generally a miserable bunch. It was this crowd who had personally seen to it that Flora Woods, Cannery Row’s most famous madam, died penniless after being blackballed from civic engagement. The city official who signed the order to strip her of her businesses felt terrible to have to do it (having been a regular customer for years) but said his hands were tied as it was an election year, and he could ill afford to lose the Christian vote.

At first the shouting and carrying on was not atypical. But after the initial banality, the shouting became more focused, more specific. The group had something concrete to work with in those two severed legs, and they began to build up a head of steam.

George Pickett, Deputy Vice Chair of the Planning Commission, led the charge.

“What we witnessed on the beach in Del Monte this morning was not just an act of homicide. It was an affront to nature itself. That anyone, or should I say anything, believes they can simply rip the legs off a man, leave said legs in the sand as a kind of taunt, and then go back to their everyday lives, slithering among us as a snake in the skin of a man, is a slander against our divine nature as Americans.” 
The crowd had gone mostly silent, but at the word “slander” many began to murmur. 
“I will not stand idly by and be made to look a fool by a murderer.” 
More murmurs of approval emerged from the crowd. 
“I propose we organize a committee of certainty tonight, which shall be fully endorsed by both the sheriff and mayor to root out this evil within our community.” 
A dozen members of the crowd proclaimed “AYE!” 
“I call for a full inquiry as well, so that the MCAG might monitor the police department’s investigation concurrently with our own efforts. Mr. Mayor, I expect a decree first thing in the morning. I will not allow a second pair of legs to wash ashore next week.” 
No one bothered to look around for the mayor, who had slipped out fifteen minutes earlier once he saw Pickett arise and head toward the front. 
“We are by rights the divine stewards of this land, conquered and tamed by our great grandfathers. We will not allow predators to roam free and prey on our citizenry.” 
The crowd stood.  
  “Ladies and gentlemen. A White Man has been butchered in our town. I call for the blood of whatever savage dared defile our home with this act. Let us not rest until we have repaid in kind this monster who spat in our faces.” 
And with that, the room erupted in a chorus of pitchforks and torches, and the transformation was complete.  

The Creature did not know yet that it was hunted, nor did the hunters truly understand at this point what they were hunting. The Creature only knew that in those first few weeks since escaping the Lab, it had harbored an overwhelming sense of biological longing. At first it had mistaken this longing for hunger, which is what drove it to tear through the screen covering of its tank, topple out onto the wet concrete floor, and scramble, nearly suffocating, through the basement door of the Lab and out to the sea.

The Creature stayed close, taking up residence below the old Del Mar Cannery, but still something felt wrong. The five-gallon fishmeal bucket it had dragged out from the Lab was rusty, cold, and ill-fitting. Inside it, there was a profound sense of loneliness.

Two months it lived like this, until one day in August it came across a human body stuck in the rocks. The body had not been there long, hours maybe—its feet wedged in a granite fissure. Using its immense claws, the Creature pulled at the body until the torso came free of the legs. And then it began to eat. It found the flesh of the chest cavity and the lower abdomen to be soft and sweet. It tore away at the stomach and vital organs, hollowing out the ribcage. And then, in an act as natural as slipping on a shoe, the Creature abandoned its five-gallon fishmeal bucket and, using its lower pleopods, guided itself deep inside the torso of the dead man, holding the flesh tight to its own.

Instantly, the longing it had felt since before escaping the Lab vanished. This action, this biological fact, felt correct and true. The Creature moved away from the rocks, down into the sandy sea bottom among the root stems of the kelp forest, and again dreamed of quiet rhythms and vibrations.

Lily Chong—lifetime resident of Cannery Row, librarian at Hopkins Marine Station, niece to the venerable Yock “Jack” Hing Lee of Wing Chong Grocery—did not attend the funeral of her good friend Ed. No one blamed her. Each resident on The Row came to grips with the death in a different way. Jack closed the Wing Chong Grocery for a week and painted a ten-foot mural of a wolf in one of his upstairs apartments. Pelón Aguilar, manager at the Monterey Boat Works and Ed’s longtime collecting partner, climbed the Point Pinos lighthouse and stared into the wind and fog for 48 hours without speaking. Gabe Bicknell, the fill-in bartender at Kalisa’s La Ida Café, openly drank up the bar’s stock of single malt whiskey during his shift, and no one had the heart to fire him.

Lily passed those first bleak days attempting to walk off the pain. From her apartment at Hopkins Marine Station, she walked five, ten, even fifteen miles. She walked from Sand City to Cypress Point and then back to Point Pinos. She breathed in the cool, salt air and listened to the gulls call across the calm, summer water of the bay. She sat on the granite boulders at the western edge of the peninsula and let the dull roar of the waves drown out the noise inside her head.

Lily had grown up just across the street from the Lab, raised in the upstairs apartments of the Wing Chong Grocery. It was Ed who had given her a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses and then later The Bible of the World. She first heard Bach’s Art of the Fugue at a birthday party at the Lab when she was twelve. And when she was fourteen, she helped Ed open the stomach of a Humboldt squid and saw the world unfold before her.

Exactly three months after Ed’s death, she woke on a Tuesday before 4am and walked down Oceanview Avenue to the little beach near Prescott Ave. The tide was out, and in the dark and fog Lily climbed beneath the pilings of the Del Mar Cannery, picking her way among the dripping rocks until finally she hit the dead end just below the Lab. She had not visited since Ed’s death—had not thought she could bear to be in that space without him there.

She slid down against the concrete retaining wall and tried to listen for the sound of the tide coming in. Her mind drifted to the Lab just feet above her, and there in the wet darkness for the first time since the accident, she wept. For nearly an hour she cried, her sobs echoing among the rocks and pylons as the tide ebbed its way back in.

When she couldn’t cry any more, she sat in silence and let the rhythm of the water fill her mind. It was simple at first, a slow rolling drumbeat of wave on rock. But then came the long, low note of a cello. And later flutes, horns, a full chorus of strings. She remembered Holst’s Planets and Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia playing on the phonograph upstairs in the Lab. That music and more merged with the sound of the sea and drove out the usual noise.

Lily hummed the melodies, softly at first, and then louder against the rising tide. She lost herself in the music, casting her voice out amongst the dark pilings. And then she realized she was not alone. She noticed it first as a scraping on the rocks that cut through her symphony. And then she saw it—a rippling that was independent of the tide’s natural flow. Something immense moving just below the water’s edge. In the dark of the pre-dawn, she could make out only vague shapes, but she knew that this was something large, something agile. It did not move like a fish. It was something with legs and… arms?

She stood and peered into the dark water. For a moment she thought she saw the silhouette of a man floating face up, arms waving and ghostly white. She stepped forward to see more closely, placing her feet with care on the slippery rocks. She moved forward three steps and realized that whatever it was had evaporated into the black and hissing surf.

As the sky lightened, Lily emerged from under the pilings and walked in the fog back to her apartment at the Marine Station where, for the first time in months, she slept a deep, dreamless sleep.  

The next morning, Lily sat before a mountain of ledgers, logbooks, spiral-bound journals, and multi-colored filing cards. As head librarian for the Hopkins Marine Station, she had been tasked with organizing the files brought over from Pacific Biological Laboratories after Ed’s death. Lily hadn’t been able to face the chaotic pile until now.

Lily searched among the mess of papers and found a journal dated 1948 and opened it to read entries from the last month of Ed’s life.

April 2, 1948 – Have brought in another group of dogfish with the help of Pelón. Used the small dragnet off Lover’s Point. Should be enough to fill the order for the Lowell High School science program. Will inject the veins this evening and preserve the lot for shipment next week.

 April 3, 1948 – Dogfish order finalized. Forgot to note in last entry a curious little beast that Pelón pulled up with the dogfish. A decapod, or possibly pereiopod, red in color with an elongated body. Seems to move about on four long, articulating legs with two dactyl arms near the head (other legs possibly hidden). At times resembles a spider in its movement due to those long legs. Slightly curved abdomen like a hermit crab but carries no gastropod shell. It is also much larger than any local hermit crab, roughly the size of a football. Have dropped it in the tanks outside and will cover with screen.

Lily skimmed over a few short entries detailing some rattlesnake breeding patterns and again found notes about the creature from the dogfish catch.

April 9, 1948 – Have had to move the little beastie (which continues to grow) into my large indoor tank as it has destroyed three of the screen covers for the outdoor tanks in an effort to escape. Though, had it succeeded in escaping, it likely would have perished as it seems to be a marine crab. Without a shell to hold its water, it would have suffocated. Appears much happier in the larger indoor tank and has not attempted escape. Left a gallon coffee can in there with it, but it has repeatedly climbed in and out as if it does not find the can comfortable. Will continue to feed it fish meal I bought from the Del Mar Cannery.

April 10, 1948 – Have spent all morning researching to identify the creature in the basement. The abdomen fits the Anomura classification, but cannot make a conclusive identification based on the books in my library. Will borrow a book from Lily at Hopkins this week. The creature continues to be restless with regard to the coffee can “shell.” Have thrown in a large conch shell, but seems even less interested in that.

Lily remembered Ed coming by to borrow a book but couldn’t remember the name. His notes for the rest of the month focused on his preparations for an upcoming collection trip to Alaska. Once or twice he wrote about feeding the “little beastie” fish meal, but he did not write again about it in detail until early May, a week before he died.

May 6, 1948 – “Little” Beastie has nearly tripled in size. Have had to refit a 300-gallon tank to hold the creature and threw in an empty five-gallon fishmeal bucket to replace the coffee tin.  Will cease to feed it the fishmeal, however, which seems to have been spiked with some sort of growth hormone—a failed attempt by the Del Mar company to chum the water and boost the declining sardine population. Have made little progress in identification but will read more in the book borrowed from Hopkins.

And there the entries ended. It was two days later that Ed’s car stalled out on the railroad crossing at Drake Avenue and Wave Street.

The initial fervor that had animated the mob at the MCAG meeting might have faded and died had a human head not washed ashore at San Carlos beach. Found by an off-duty seaman apprentice just below the Coast Guard pier, the head had no eyes, and most of the nose, lips, and ears had been eaten away. Unlike the pair of legs, it was clear that this head had been in the water for quite some time. What flesh did remain was bloated and sagging off the skull.

The seaman apprentice had called his commanding officer first, who in turn informed the police. Because the chief of police was a political man, George Pickett and the rest of MCAG found out shortly. The article that ran in the Monterey Herald the next day quoted Pickett heavily.

Members of Monterey’s civic organizations have called for increased police action after the defaced head of a thirty to forty-year-old male was discovered washed ashore at San Carlos Beach yesterday morning. George Pickett, insurance salesman and Deputy Vice Chair of the Planning Commission, has called for martial law to be implemented until the origin of the head is discovered.

The attending officer at the scene did not give comment when asked if this incident was related to the pair of legs that washed ashore two weeks ago. In both cases, the police department spokesman said they were working to identify the remains but so far have no leads.

Pickett, speaking on behalf of the Monterey Citizens Action Group (MCAG) and the Christian Fellowship League (CFL), emphasized his belief that the head was evidence of a second homicide. “I’ve examined the body parts myself and can say with certainty that the legs do not match the head. These are separate incidents, but connected by a common theme. Someone is attempting to strike fear into the heart of our community. As long as this killer remains on the loose and bodies continue to wash ashore, we cannot live peacefully.”

Pickett went on to declare his suspicions that the culprit likely had arrived amidst a recent wave of immigrant farmworkers and called for all true citizens of Monterey to gather nightly to patrol the shores and catch the killer in the act.  

“Our police, noble as they are, do not have the numbers to stand watch over our shores at all hours of the day and night. I call for the sheriff to order a mass deputization, or for the mayor to declare martial law, so that we might use the full force of our citizenry to bring this foreign agent of fear into custody.”

The MCAG and CFL plan to meet this evening to organize community watch groups who can work in shifts over the next several weeks. All interested parties may volunteer their services.

Just before dusk three days after the discovery of the head, Lily walked from the Marine Station down Oceanview Avenue toward her uncle’s grocery and saw a group of six men carrying spotlights and baseball bats. She had read the newspapers and seen other armed groups patrolling the shore. She knew one of the patrols had already cornered two of her cousins and interrogated them about what “strange Eastern medicines” might use human body parts.

She knew she would be a target—Chinese, female, alone. So, as they approached, Lily ducked up the stairs of what had been Pacific Biological Laboratories and tried the front door. Ed famously never kept it locked, though now Lily found it shut up tight.

She looked up the street toward the approaching voices of the mob and then remembered that Ed had given her a key nine years before when he was away in Mexico and needed someone to feed the rattlesnakes. She fished out her ring and after a few misfires found the polished brass key, its teeth still sharp.

The main room of the Lab, once a hub of music, poetry, and libation, sat quiet and desolate in the dying evening light. Lily stepped through and stood away from the front windows until she heard the MCAG patrol move into the Vacant Lot and up toward the railroad tracks. Then she walked from room to room; a few cans of peeled tomatoes, some broken records, and a pile of tattered rags was all that remained. Of course, the great built-in speaker was still there next to the front door, but the phonograph was gone.

Lily returned to the front room and sat against the wall. She remembered the clear voices of the Sistine Choir spelling out “Pater Noster” as she and Ed and others sat cradling quarts of beers while the evening fog moved in over The Row. The grief that had paralyzed her just weeks ago was not gone, but it seemed to have now transformed, hardened within the pit of her stomach, and turned to a kind of lonely knowledge—a sad secret only she understood, but that she was also grateful for.

Lily rose and headed for the back door. She had been curious to visit Ed’s workroom ever since reading in his journal about the “Little Beastie.” None of the family had reported finding a giant crab in a basement tank, and she wondered what had happened to it.

Downstairs she found the door ripped off its hinges. She entered the basement and surveyed the mess before her. In the workroom the 300-gallon tank was tipped on its side, the floor covered in broken glass and a fine white layer of dried sea water covering most of the cracked concrete floor.

Had someone broken in? No, that didn’t seem right. As best she could tell, this chaos was months old. There were footprints in the crust of dried seawater, probably from members of the family when they’d cleared out the bulk of Ed’s specimen collection from the main garage. It seemed to her like they had surveyed this mess and made the choice to leave it.

It looked more like someone had broken out. Lily stepped over the broken glass, searching for anything. She found a large conch shell, a gallon coffee tin, and a book: Anomuran Crustaceans of the Central and Western Pacific. She picked it up and recognized it as the book Ed had borrowed from her in the week before his death.

The book was dusty but otherwise unharmed. It had been protected from the saltwater mess by the overturned tank. She cracked the spine, and the book fell open to a page about two-thirds of the way through. A small slip of paper had been inserted next to a section titled “Deepwater Hermit Crab.” On the slip, in Ed’s fine, looping scrawl, were the words “Little Beastie.” Lily took the paper and put it in her pocket. Then she read the entry.

The deepwater hermit crab (family Parapaguridae) possesses the soft, curved abdomen typical of its order. It is, however, atypical in its method of self-defense. While most common hermit crabs collect gastropod shells into which they fit their vulnerable posteriors, the deepwater hermit crab has developed a symbiotic relationship with sea anemones (zoanthids). The crab will move into a gastropod shell at a young age, after which an anemone will attach itself to the shell. As the crab matures, the anemone will envelop the gastropod shell and slowly dissolve it. The anemone then grows in a way that creates a coiled cavity to accommodate the hermit crab’s abdomen, taking the place of the original shell after it has dissolved completely. The relationship is mutually beneficial, as the stinging cells (nematocysts) of the anemone discourage the hermit crab’s natural predators. Meanwhile, the anemone becomes mobile, increasing its access to plankton and small fish.

Lily looked from the broken screen atop the 300-gallon tank to the white crust of salt leading out the back door of the basement. She walked outside, past the concrete holding tanks, to the high overhang that looked down on the tide pools just below pylons of the canneries.

She remembered the early morning weeks before when she had sat among the pilings and wept at low tide. She remembered the presence of something in the water, and in her mind she saw again the white silhouette of a man floating face-up in the water.
Hormone-spiked fish meal.
A giant, ravenous hermit crab desperate for symbiosis.
Two legs and a rotting head.
She looked down into the darkening water, beginning to understand. It was then that she heard the shouting and saw the lights.

George Pickett had been rehearsing. He’d arranged for the police dispatcher to phone him immediately when the call came in so that he could be first on the scene. That was essential. He would arrive before the mayor, before any other senior member of the MCAG or the CFL. He would  position himself to be in the photo that would appear in the paper the next morning, and he would make a statement that would be a not-so-thinly-veiled announcement of his intention to run for mayor in the upcoming election cycle. It was all arranged.

So, when the call came, he did not bother to listen to what the dispatcher was trying to tell him.
“I know you wanted me to call you, sir, should there be any development with the legs and
“Yes. What have they found?”
“They’ve found a torso with arms, but I’m not sure exactly how to explain—”
“Just give me the address.”
“I can do that, sir. You’ll want to head to 700 Oceanview Avenue, below the old Del Mar Cannery.”
“Did you say below?”
“Yes, sir. Below. Under the pilings.”
“Very good.”
“But sir. I think you should know what else they said.”
“I’m leaving now.”
Pickett had already hung up and did not hear the dispatcher say, “It’s a crab, sir. They said it’s a
homicidal crab.”

Lily needed to find Pelón. She knew what the lights and shouting meant, knew what they had found among the pilings under the cannery, and she felt something close to righteous indignation coursing through her. She knew what the mob would do, and she knew that she had limited time. From her apartment she gathered a small phonograph, a pair of pliers, and a roll of speaker wire. She rushed to the Monterey Boat Works and found Pelón closing up for the night.
“I need a boat. A proper fishing boat with a horn and a light,” Lily demanded.
Pelon smiled. “¿Por fin te llevo conmigo, corazón?”
“Cállate, cabrón. I don’t have time to joke with you. I need you to put me on the water outside the Del Mar Cannery, and I’m going to have to rewire the horn on the boat.”
Pelón, who had openly loved Lily since he was fourteen, did not ask any more questions. He turned and led Lily outside to the docks.  

 George Pickett was not prepared for what lay before him. Beneath the Del Mar Cannery, illuminated by the flashlights of a dozen men, a ten-foot red crab with four horrible articulating legs sat motionless in a large tide pool. In its two powerful claws, little bits of white flesh floated like ribbons. And on its back, stretched over its curved abdomen, was the naked and headless torso of a rotting, tattered corpse.

The men all shouted at each other over the sound of the shore break. The tide was coming in, and they knew that once it did the Creature would be free to rise with the water and attack them, or worse, escape. The men continued to shout, and it took Pickett several minutes to realize that they were shouting at him.

“The police wouldn’t shoot it and left to get animal control.”
“What should we do, Pickett?”
“We need a spear or harpoon.”
“Who should we call?”
Pickett stared at the Creature and then looked back to the mob. He opened his mouth, but did not speak. He looked back at the Creature and the moldering corpse on its back and felt the cold twinge of death crawl into his lower back and creep up his spine. But then he envisioned himself standing before a newspaper photographer holding one of those long, powerful legs, and he found his resolve.

Deep within his black soul, he knew that this abomination had to die.
He gathered every ounce of courage, malice, and guile that he possessed.
“MEN. YOU WILL WADE INTO THE POOL AND BEAT IT TO DEATH.”
The men did not move.
“USE YOUR BATS. BREAK THE LEGS AND BLUDGEON THE BODY. BY GOD,
KILL THE FOUL BEAST DEAD.”
A wave moved in through the pilings and eased over the edge of the tide pool. The Creature stirred slightly, and the men recoiled.
Pickett was incensed. “COWARDS! IT CANNOT KILL ALL OF YOU. ADVANCE!
ADVANCE!”
The Creature flitted its legs again, and just as it seemed that the men would turn and run, another group arrived, this one armed with whaling harpoons

The Creature knew it was trapped, just as it had been trapped in the Lab for days without food. Only it was not hunger that drove its need to escape now, but fear. Fear of the lights flashing in the water and the muffled shouts coming from the many dark shapes moving just above the water line. It also knew that the body it had placed on its abdomen would offer it no protection. For several days now, everything about the partner organism had felt wrong—cold, clammy, and inanimate.

The rising tide offered a way out, but amid the confusion and chaos of the lights and shouting, the Creature panicked. Death lurked above the water in every direction and would soon enter the tide pool. It sensed that the shadows and voices had been hesitant, but now more had arrived: predators.

 Lily chose Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom specifically because she knew that Ed had once prescribed it to a close friend to cure his depression. She believed that the Creature would respond to it, if only she could get close enough to play it clearly.

Pelón steered the purse seiner as close to the Del Mar Cannery as he dared, and Lily switched on the phonograph that she had hastily wired into the ship’s fog horn just fifteen minutes before. She said a short prayer to whatever god might be listening and laid the needle down on the first track: “Аминь. Господи помилуй.” She heard the music crackle to life through the horn and hurried outside.

The Creature heard it, very faintly at first, but growing stronger—those same clear, high voices it had known during those early days in the quiet of the indoor tank. The sound moved in on the tide and penetrated the tide pool, stimulating the Creature’s carapace from its rostrum down to the back of its dorsal shield. Driven by necessity, the Creature drew in its four immense legs, tucked its chela in tight against its mouth, and sprang forward toward the sound of salvation.

She feared she was too late. From the deck of the boat Lily watched the mob encircle the tide pool amidst a swirl of flashlights and waving arms. The men, ignorant of the music emanating from the boat, moved like a gangling octopus descending on its prey. She shouted, hoping to draw away their focus, but the mob could not, or would not, hear her.

A wave from the rising tide surged high up the shore and through the pilings. As the water rose Lily saw the Creature emerge from the dark water, immense and red, hoping to launch itself seaward past the waiting arms of the mob. Unprepared for the sheer size of the beast out of water, several of the men slipped on the rocks and fell into the tide. But one man kept his feet, and with a murderous steadiness hurled a whaling harpoon straight into the fleeing Creature’s abdomen.
Lily cried out.
She heard the mob cheer.
Together they pulled on the harpoon’s rope and dragged something heavy back out of the surf. Lily could see Pickett among the flashlights, wading forward toward his prize. But soon the cheers turned back to yells and Lily saw that the mob had only succeeded in spearing the rotting corpse. A new wave broke under the pilings, knocking over Pickett and the rest of the mob and crashing the rotting corpse against the rocks.
Lily yelled to Pelón. “The light! The light!”
Pelón switched on the spotlight and scanned the dark water beyond the pilings. About fifty feet out from the cannery, Lily saw something big moving toward them through the kelp.
“It’s working,” she yelled to Pelón. “North-north-west at trolling speed.”
Lily went into the cabin to ensure the phonograph did not skip as the boat moved out into the rising swell of the open bay.

In the deep waters of Monterey Bay Canyon, the Creature settled into the comfort of the dark water. It had followed the clear, echoing voices down the sloping sea floor until at last it was immersed in quiet. Already anemones had begun to attach themselves to the Creature’s soft, fleshy abdomen, surrounding it with the gentle movement of their stinging fingers.

In the dark of his office on Alvarado Street, George Pickett sat in silence, his suit still damp and salt-stained from the night before. He had not gone home, and instead brooded with the blinds pulled low and the door locked. The police had identified the body, matching it to the legs and head. He couldn’t remember the name—didn’t care to since the authorities had ruled the death accidental, deeming the mutilation of the corpse as post-mortem and an act of nature rather than a crime. Pickett was out of ammunition, but still rank with the weight of his own fear mongering. He wanted to weep but could not gather enough spirit to do so.

In the Hopkins Marine Station library, Lily pulled a book of poetry from the pile of Ed’s belongings. She had no patience for long, dense verses this morning and instead thumbed through looking for short stanzas in terse, simple prose. At last she found a page, and read through the poem several times.

In the desert
I saw a creature naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter
“And because it is my heart.” (“In The Desert” by Stephen Crane )

Lily’s fingers felt at a small slip of paper in her pocket. She fished it out and read “Little Beastie” written in Ed’s looping hand. Taking a pen from off her desk she wrote “Pickett” just underneath, and then placed the paper in the crease of the book of poetry before closing the cover.

In the months to come, the Creature scavenged freely across the ridges and valleys of Monterey Bay Canyon. The anemones on its back grew larger as the Creature ferried them from meal to meal.

Over time they jockeyed for position, pushing each other out until finally there was only one—a single enormous anemone to cover the Creature’s fleshy back end. In the dark quiet, the anemone slowly transformed its soft, sucking underbelly to match the spiral curve of the Creature’s abdomen, insulating the Creature forever from the prying mandibles of hateful predators.