Sleepy English Villages

The village of Ravenscar sat at the edge of England’s northern coast, where the cliffs rose high and sheer, battered by relentless waves. It was a place forgotten by time, too small for maps, too strange for tourists. The air was heavy with the scent of salt and decay, and the streets were silent, save for the rhythmic creaking of empty boats bobbing in the harbour.

Zemo stepped out of their car, straightening his coat against the biting wind. Bucky followed, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“You ever notice we never get sent to places like Paris or Rome?” Bucky grumbled. “Always the foggy, cursed corners of the world.”

Zemo shot him a dry look. “The day eldritch horrors start sunbathing in the French Riviera, I’ll let you pick the assignment.”

They had come in response to a letter, one scrawled in uneven, shaking script by a Father Obediah Wilkes, the village priest. The sea is not right. The people are not right. They are feeding it.

That was it. Just those 3 lines. Then, nothing. 

Well, they just had to investigate.

Now, Ravenscar stood before them, silent and expectant, and they were beginning to regret their life choices.

The church was an old, crumbling structure at the cliff’s edge, its stained glass windows dulled by time. 

“Why do they build these things on the edge of a cliff?” asked Bucky, getting out of the car.

“To make the penitent suffer,” said Zemo, loosening his coat, and walking round to Bucky’s side.

“They must also get a hell of a work out walking all the way up here for mass.”

Zemo smirked, then quipped “Did you remember to pack the silverware, James?”

“Funny,” said Bucky, striding to the door.

Inside, the air was thick with damp, the wooden pews empty. The altar, however, was not.

Bucky stopped short. “Well, that’s not supposed to be there.”

A body lay sprawled across the altar, its skin pallid and slick, as if drowned. The lips were parted, revealing teeth that had grown unnaturally long and sharp. The fingers were curled into claws. It looked unfinished.

They approached cautiously. Zemo knelt, noting the faint imprints on the stone. A trail of something wet and inhuman led toward the back of the church. He turned to Bucky. “Looks like Father Wilkes found out what they were feeding.”

“Is that the food,” Bucky said, pointing at the body, “or the thing being fed?”

Zemo rose to his feet. He looked at Bucky, tilted his head. “Shall we go and find out?”

“Must we?”

“It’s what we are purposed to do, James.”

Bucky sighed. “I hate when you’re right.”

Then they heard it.

A whisper, low and insidious, curling through the air like sea mist.

It came from beneath them.

A trapdoor at the back of the church led to a narrow, spiralling tunnel, carved deep into the cliffside. The deeper they descended, the colder the air became, thick with the scent of brine and something foul.

“Any last bets on whether this ends well?” Bucky murmured.

Zemo glanced at him. “Not unless you want to jinx it.”

At the tunnel’s end, they emerged into a cavern, a monstrous, yawning space where the rock walls pulsed as if alive. The sea lapped hungrily at the far end, its waters unnaturally black. And in the centre of it all stood the villagers. All the villagers.

They were kneeling in a circle, their heads bowed in prayer, their bodies swaying in unnatural unison. The whispers grew louder.

Zemo grabbed Bucky’s arm and pulled him back. He whispered low. “We need to go. Now.”

Too late.

The villagers turned as one. Their eyes were gone, their mouths open in silent, gaping grins. Then they rose, moving toward them. Not walking, but shifting, their bones bending in ways that defied nature.

Bucky shrugged off Zemo and yanked his revolver free. “Alright, I vote we start shooting.”

Zemo raised his own weapon. “Agreed.”

The first shot rang out, striking one of the villagers square in the chest. It barely flinched. Instead, its flesh rippled, like something beneath the skin was shifting, rearranging.

Then, the water at the far end of the cavern began to move.

A shape rose from the black depths, vast, writhing, wrong. Its form was impossible to comprehend, morphing between glimpses of jagged fins, slick tentacles, and eyes that should not have existed. It did not emerge from the water. The water itself became it.

A voice, not a voice, a presence, filled their heads.

It is awake.

Zemo grabbed Bucky by the coat. “Run, James.”

For once, Bucky didn’t argue.

They stumbled back through the tunnel, the whispers chasing them, thick as the mist curling at their heels. The walls trembled, cracks forming in the stone.

Bucky fired blindly behind them. “Tell me we have a plan.”

“Survive now, plan later!” Zemo panted.

They burst out of the church just as the ground beneath them shuddered. The villagers, or what remained of them, started to claw their way out of the trapdoor, their elongated fingers grasping for flesh.

Zemo grabbed a lantern from the wall and stepped back inside to hurl it down the aisle. The oil ignited instantly. Bucky followed his lead and smashed another. The wooden pews burst into flame, toppling like dominoes, sending the fire further into the church.

The flames spread to the altar and the trapdoor behind it, and the screams that followed were not human.

Bucky dragged Zemo back toward the car, breathing hard. “Did we just set fire to an entire town?”

Zemo threw himself into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “We set fire to whatever they were. And they were not human.”

As they sped away, the church collapsed in on itself, swallowed by the earth.

Behind them, the sea roiled. Angry. Denied.

They didn’t stop driving until the village was miles behind them. Only then did Bucky break the silence.

“I am never eating seafood again.”

Zemo exhaled sharply, staring at the road ahead. “I don’t think that will help.”

The night stretched before them, dark and endless.

And in the distance, the sea whispered still.

***