TRUE TALES OF TERROR
Conch Shell, Conch Hell!
Reggie paced the docks anxiously as the fog rolled in like thick pea soup except that it was in the air instead of in a bowl, and it was cold, and it wasn’t soup. The stabbing beam of the lighthouse cut through the night, but couldn’t cut through the uncertainty in Reggie’s bones.
He girded his courage, his loins, and his lunch box, and stepped gingerly down the rotting timbers that composed the rickety stairs, descending into the sand-encrusted bowels beneath the abandoned wooden pier. His dark silhouette quickly merged with the shadows under the boardwalk, coalescing into an inky, endless sea of darkness.
He’d been warned to stay away from this part of town once the sun had set. He’d been warned not to venture into the dark sandy depths beneath the docks. But most of all, he’d been warned not to touch the conch that lay there before him in the gloom and the sand and the salt spray and the long stringy seaweed that stank of the depths.
Yes, the conch shell. Formerly the home of a tropical marine mollusk, now a spiral shell bearing long projections, high spires, a flared lip, and a noticeable siphonal canala. Or so he had been told.
It seemed to be waiting… waiting for someone who could not resist its shellish allure.
Reggie had felt drawn to conch shells ever since he’d read “The Lord of the Flies,” the seminal 1954 novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding, concerning a group of marooned young boys who form their own violent self-government, and whose first rule is the incontrovertible right of whoever holds “the conch shell” to speak and be heard by the others. He who holds the conch holds the power. BMOC equals Big Man on Conch.
And now, here he was, standing over the legendary conch shell of Cutthroat Cove, only a tantalizing few inches away from its captivating luminescence. So coy. So alluring. Surely it wouldn’t hurt him just to touch it?
It was cold to the touch, and he wasn’t sure why that surprised him. Did he truly expect it to pulse with the heat of a warm-blooded creature? No. It was just a shell. An empty shell. So surely it wouldn’t hurt to pick it up?
The heft of the conch felt good in his hands. It was solid. It was weighty. It had substance. It was clearly an object of consequence. Surely it wouldn’t hurt for him to blow it once? Right?
Now it should be noted that Reggie was more than familiar with the stories. Legend had it that anyone foolhardy enough to venture beneath the barnacle-encrusted docks on a fog-enshrouded night and blew the godforsaken conch shell of Cutthroat Cove would awaken the most bloodthirsty creature of the deep, the deadly demon of the sea, the hideous, remorseless, killing machine that folk tales branded as… “The Merman.”
A foolish old wives’ tale, certainly. An urban legend. A cautionary tale of longshoremen and unemployed baristas. Nothing more.
Reggie lifted the conch to his puckered lips and blew.
A low, baleful moan echoed out from the curving recesses of the spiral shell, a cross between a lonely foghorn blast and the grief-stricken cry of a maiden who has lost her betrothed to the sea. The unearthly sound, bouncing between the pier posts and pylons, sent a shiver up Reggie’s spine, and before it had a chance to die away, it was joined by another haunting sound: the soft crunch of sand shifting under the weight of an approaching creature.
Surely, this was a coincidence, the rhythmic crush of flesh on sand that grew nearer, ever nearer, louder, ever louder, overlayed with a deep, primal rumbling, simultaneously suggestive of the seductive purr of a jungle cat and the bloodcurdling snarl of an apex predator. Something was coming. Something was coming and Reggie was doomed.
And the worst part was, he knew he had brought this upon himself. He had disobeyed the warnings. He had taken up the conch. He had blown two hot lungs full of life-affirming breath into the fated shell and called forth the denizen of the deep that was even now closing the distance between them. Already, he could see a distorted shape lurching inexorably toward him, a dark shadow in the impenetrable fog that grew larger and more ominous with each passing second.
Reggie closed his eyes to say a silent prayer to a God he never believed in and when he opened them again, he instantly recoiled as the horrifying beast stood before him in all its terrifying glory. Ten feet tall. Thirty feet long. Scales and gills and webbed appendages too numerous to count. Few who glimpse the Merman live to tell the tale and as the prehistoric behemoth opened its maw and bared its multiple rows of needle-sharp teeth, Reggie knew he was staring down Death itself.
The Merman leapt for his prey.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Reggie chided, waving one finger at the menacing marine monster as if scolding a child. The creature froze, taken aback as the oh-so-vulnerable man raised the mystical conch shell over his head with his other hand. “Whoever holds the conch shell is allowed to talk. That’s the rule.”
The snarling, drooling, blood-encrusted jaws of the creature hung open in mid-air, confused at this unexpected and frankly asinine interruption, but obeying nonetheless.
“Yes, as long as I hold this conch, I have the floor,” Reggie continued. “And everyone has to stop what you’re doing and listen up. And that includes Mer-people. Mer-men. Mer-women. Little Mer-children. Mer-in-laws. The whole bleeding Mer family.”
The merman let out a long, disgusted blast of air and slumped to the sand, compelled to listen by the power of the mighty conch.
“And I just want to say, first of all, mea culpa. I admit that I was the one who blew the conch that summoned you -- my bad -- and I can appreciate that you’ve walked a long way to answer that call. Well, technically, I guess it would be more accurate to say you waddled here seeing as you have no legs. You’re really not built for land travel, are you? Guess you haven’t evolved that far yet. So in the scary column: one. Practical column: Not so much. Anyhoo…”
And as the aquatic leviathan waited with an agitated impatience bordering on mania, Reggie continued to talk. And talk. And talk. He opined on the beauties of the ocean and the mysteries of the deep. He made every sea, ocean, and water-based pun he could formulate. He referenced every aquatic story and character he knew from Flipper and Aquaman to the Loch Ness Monster, saying anything and everything just to keep talking.
“You remember that movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Have you seen it? Oh, you have to see it! I mean, I never saw it, but I heard it was good. With Captain Nemo, right? That was Ellen DeGeneres as Nemo, right? Or was she Dory? I always forget. And so does she. The point is, it’s the underwater stuff that’s the cool part. That’s what the fans are jonesing for, am I right? If you ask me, they should have started that movie Titanic with the boat sinking. Boom! Get Leonardo and those rich jerks in the water already, you know what I mean?”
And as the minutes turned to hours and hours turned to more hours, the morning sun crested the horizon. The day warmed and, bit by bit, the Merman began to dry out. His gills cracked. His flesh dehydrated. And ultimately, like a fish out of water, he collapsed, a parched husk on the shifting sands of doom.
Years later, when learned historians and basic cable pundits looked back on this momentous encounter and the death of the very last Mer-creature, many of their lot felt that it proved the old adage, “The mouth is mightier than the Merman.”
But for those of us who were there, those who lived through it, we knew the truth.
‘Twas tedium killed the beast.
He girded his courage, his loins, and his lunch box, and stepped gingerly down the rotting timbers that composed the rickety stairs, descending into the sand-encrusted bowels beneath the abandoned wooden pier. His dark silhouette quickly merged with the shadows under the boardwalk, coalescing into an inky, endless sea of darkness.
He’d been warned to stay away from this part of town once the sun had set. He’d been warned not to venture into the dark sandy depths beneath the docks. But most of all, he’d been warned not to touch the conch that lay there before him in the gloom and the sand and the salt spray and the long stringy seaweed that stank of the depths.
Yes, the conch shell. Formerly the home of a tropical marine mollusk, now a spiral shell bearing long projections, high spires, a flared lip, and a noticeable siphonal canala. Or so he had been told.
It seemed to be waiting… waiting for someone who could not resist its shellish allure.
Reggie had felt drawn to conch shells ever since he’d read “The Lord of the Flies,” the seminal 1954 novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding, concerning a group of marooned young boys who form their own violent self-government, and whose first rule is the incontrovertible right of whoever holds “the conch shell” to speak and be heard by the others. He who holds the conch holds the power. BMOC equals Big Man on Conch.
And now, here he was, standing over the legendary conch shell of Cutthroat Cove, only a tantalizing few inches away from its captivating luminescence. So coy. So alluring. Surely it wouldn’t hurt him just to touch it?
It was cold to the touch, and he wasn’t sure why that surprised him. Did he truly expect it to pulse with the heat of a warm-blooded creature? No. It was just a shell. An empty shell. So surely it wouldn’t hurt to pick it up?
The heft of the conch felt good in his hands. It was solid. It was weighty. It had substance. It was clearly an object of consequence. Surely it wouldn’t hurt for him to blow it once? Right?
Now it should be noted that Reggie was more than familiar with the stories. Legend had it that anyone foolhardy enough to venture beneath the barnacle-encrusted docks on a fog-enshrouded night and blew the godforsaken conch shell of Cutthroat Cove would awaken the most bloodthirsty creature of the deep, the deadly demon of the sea, the hideous, remorseless, killing machine that folk tales branded as… “The Merman.”
A foolish old wives’ tale, certainly. An urban legend. A cautionary tale of longshoremen and unemployed baristas. Nothing more.
Reggie lifted the conch to his puckered lips and blew.
A low, baleful moan echoed out from the curving recesses of the spiral shell, a cross between a lonely foghorn blast and the grief-stricken cry of a maiden who has lost her betrothed to the sea. The unearthly sound, bouncing between the pier posts and pylons, sent a shiver up Reggie’s spine, and before it had a chance to die away, it was joined by another haunting sound: the soft crunch of sand shifting under the weight of an approaching creature.
Surely, this was a coincidence, the rhythmic crush of flesh on sand that grew nearer, ever nearer, louder, ever louder, overlayed with a deep, primal rumbling, simultaneously suggestive of the seductive purr of a jungle cat and the bloodcurdling snarl of an apex predator. Something was coming. Something was coming and Reggie was doomed.
And the worst part was, he knew he had brought this upon himself. He had disobeyed the warnings. He had taken up the conch. He had blown two hot lungs full of life-affirming breath into the fated shell and called forth the denizen of the deep that was even now closing the distance between them. Already, he could see a distorted shape lurching inexorably toward him, a dark shadow in the impenetrable fog that grew larger and more ominous with each passing second.
Reggie closed his eyes to say a silent prayer to a God he never believed in and when he opened them again, he instantly recoiled as the horrifying beast stood before him in all its terrifying glory. Ten feet tall. Thirty feet long. Scales and gills and webbed appendages too numerous to count. Few who glimpse the Merman live to tell the tale and as the prehistoric behemoth opened its maw and bared its multiple rows of needle-sharp teeth, Reggie knew he was staring down Death itself.
The Merman leapt for his prey.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Reggie chided, waving one finger at the menacing marine monster as if scolding a child. The creature froze, taken aback as the oh-so-vulnerable man raised the mystical conch shell over his head with his other hand. “Whoever holds the conch shell is allowed to talk. That’s the rule.”
The snarling, drooling, blood-encrusted jaws of the creature hung open in mid-air, confused at this unexpected and frankly asinine interruption, but obeying nonetheless.
“Yes, as long as I hold this conch, I have the floor,” Reggie continued. “And everyone has to stop what you’re doing and listen up. And that includes Mer-people. Mer-men. Mer-women. Little Mer-children. Mer-in-laws. The whole bleeding Mer family.”
The merman let out a long, disgusted blast of air and slumped to the sand, compelled to listen by the power of the mighty conch.
“And I just want to say, first of all, mea culpa. I admit that I was the one who blew the conch that summoned you -- my bad -- and I can appreciate that you’ve walked a long way to answer that call. Well, technically, I guess it would be more accurate to say you waddled here seeing as you have no legs. You’re really not built for land travel, are you? Guess you haven’t evolved that far yet. So in the scary column: one. Practical column: Not so much. Anyhoo…”
And as the aquatic leviathan waited with an agitated impatience bordering on mania, Reggie continued to talk. And talk. And talk. He opined on the beauties of the ocean and the mysteries of the deep. He made every sea, ocean, and water-based pun he could formulate. He referenced every aquatic story and character he knew from Flipper and Aquaman to the Loch Ness Monster, saying anything and everything just to keep talking.
“You remember that movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Have you seen it? Oh, you have to see it! I mean, I never saw it, but I heard it was good. With Captain Nemo, right? That was Ellen DeGeneres as Nemo, right? Or was she Dory? I always forget. And so does she. The point is, it’s the underwater stuff that’s the cool part. That’s what the fans are jonesing for, am I right? If you ask me, they should have started that movie Titanic with the boat sinking. Boom! Get Leonardo and those rich jerks in the water already, you know what I mean?”
And as the minutes turned to hours and hours turned to more hours, the morning sun crested the horizon. The day warmed and, bit by bit, the Merman began to dry out. His gills cracked. His flesh dehydrated. And ultimately, like a fish out of water, he collapsed, a parched husk on the shifting sands of doom.
Years later, when learned historians and basic cable pundits looked back on this momentous encounter and the death of the very last Mer-creature, many of their lot felt that it proved the old adage, “The mouth is mightier than the Merman.”
But for those of us who were there, those who lived through it, we knew the truth.
‘Twas tedium killed the beast.