A Story from Shadows of the Coast: Book 2 in The Morro Bay Fog-Mythos Series
Most piers groan under the weight of the ocean. The Cayucos pier didn’t groan. It shuddered. It was a quarter-mile of weathered timber stretching straight out into the open Pacific, a wooden finger pointing accusingly at the horizon.
By day, it was a postcard of California nostalgia, tourists dropping ice cream cones through the slats, seagulls screaming for french fries, and children squealing as they reeled in surfperch. It had a loose, carefree energy, a remnant of the town’s history as a rowdy port for cowboys and rum-runners.
But by night, the pier shed its friendly veneer. The salt air turned heavy. The wood, soaked in a century of brine and fish blood, seemed to exhale a cold, damp breath. The darkness beyond the railing wasn’t just water; it was a void.
It was 2:00 AM, and the pier belonged to the die-hards. The midnight anglers.
Max Carter was one of them. He wasn’t out here for the sport, and he certainly wasn’t here for the fish. He was here because the house on D Street was too quiet. Since his wife, Tesa, had passed six months ago, the silence in their living room had developed a physical weight, pressing on his chest until he couldn’t breathe.
Out here, surrounded by the rhythmic thump-hiss of the surf slamming against the pilings, Max could think. Or, more accurately, he could stop thinking. He focused entirely on the tiny, chemical-green glow-stick taped to the tip of his fishing rod, bobbing in the dark.
Tonight, however, even the ocean seemed wrong.
A fog had rolled in around midnight. It wasn’t the usual high, wispy marine layer that drifted harmlessly over the coastal hills. This fog was low, heavy, and aggressive. It was a “bruise-fog,” a churning mass of charcoal-grey that tasted faintly of ozone and wet pennies. It had swallowed the streetlights of Ocean Avenue behind him, erasing the town, the shore, and the path back to land.
Max stood alone at the very end of the pier. The air was thick with static. The hair on his arms stood up beneath his jacket.
He checked his bait, a chunk of squid on a heavy sinker. He cast it out. The reel whined, a high-pitched zip in the silence, followed by a heavy plunk as the lead weight hit the water.
The ocean was unusually quiet. The swell had died down to nothing. The waves weren’t crashing; they were slapping the pilings with a wet, heavy lethargy, like a hand testing a doorframe.
Splash.
Max turned, his heart jumping. The sound had come from directly under the pier, near the pilings to his left. It sounded big. Not a splash of a fish jumping, but the heavy, displacement wallow of something large surfacing.
“Sea lion,” he muttered, trying to convince himself. “Just a big bull taking a breather.”
But there was no exhale. No chuffing breath. Just the water settling.
He turned back to his rod. The green glow-stick was perfectly still.
Then, it dipped.
It wasn’t a strike. It was a slow, heavy drag. The rod tip bent down, inch by inch, as if something had gently taken the bait and was swimming straight down to the bottom.
Max grabbed the rod. “Gotcha.”
He set the hook, jerking the rod tip up.
It hit a wall. The rod bent double, the fiberglass groaning under the strain. It felt like he had hooked the tectonic plate itself.
“Snagged,” he hissed. “Damn it.”
He tried to pump the rod, to free the hook from whatever rock or debris it had found. But then, the snag moved.
It didn’t run like a shark or thrash like a halibut. It just drifted. A heavy, swinging momentum that traveled up the line and vibrated in his hands.
He started to reel. Creeeeak. The mechanism protested, the gears grinding.
“What are you?” Max grunted, bracing his hip against the railing.
He hauled it up, foot by painful foot. The weight was dead, lifeless. It took him ten minutes to get the leader to the surface. He clicked on his headlamp, leaning over the rail to see his catch.
The beam cut a bright, swirling cone in the thick fog, illuminating the black water.
Breaking the surface was a tangled, glistening mass.
It wasn’t a fish. It looked like a ball of kelp, but it was the wrong color. It was a deep, oily grey, almost black. And it wasn’t leafy. The strands were thick, tubular, and rubbery, pulsing slightly in the current. It looked like a knot of severed intestines.
The smell hit him a second later. It wasn’t the brine of the sea. It was the smell of a stagnant estuary, sulfur, rot, and ancient mud.
“Ugh,” Max recoiled, gagging.
He reached for his knife to cut the line. He didn’t want that thing on his deck.
As he reached out, the mass shifted. The “kelp” uncoiled. It wasn’t a plant. It was a single, long, segmented limb. It thrashed once, a violent, muscular spasm, and slipped off the hook.
It slapped the water and vanished into the depths.
Max stood frozen, his knife hovering in the air. “Okay,” he whispered, his breath pluming in the cold air. “Okay. That’s… that’s enough fishing.”
He reeled in his empty hook. The line was coated in a thick, grey slime. He wiped it off with a rag, but the substance was sticky, like tar. It clung to his gloves.
He should pack up. He should go home to the quiet house.
But the obsession of the angler, the need to know what that was, held him. Just one more cast. Just to prove it was a fluke. Just to prove he wasn’t crazy.
He re-baited the hook. His hands were shaking.
He cast again. Plunk.
He waited. The fog thickened. He couldn’t see the water anymore, just the white void below the railing. The silence was intense. No cars on the highway. No birds. Just the distant, two-tone groan of the Morro Bay foghorn, four miles to the south.
Brummmm-Hoooooo.
Splash. Slap.
Another sound. To his right this time. Closer.
Max gripped the rod. The air temperature dropped ten degrees in a second. The moisture on the railing turned to frost.
His rod tip slammed down.
This wasn’t a slow drag. This was a violent, downward yank that nearly tore the rod from his grip. The butt of the pole slammed into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him.
“Whoa!” Max gasped.
He fought to keep the rod tip up. The reel screamed, line stripping off at a terrifying speed. ZZZZZZZZZZZT.
Whatever he had hooked was strong. Impossibly strong. It dove straight down and stopped.
The line went taut. It hummed in the wind like a guitar string.
Max tightened the drag. “I’m not losing this one.”
He pulled. The rod creaked.
Then, the line jerked. Three distinct, rhythmic pulls.
Yank. Yank. Yank.
Max frowned. That wasn’t a fish fighting. That was… signaling.
“Hello?” he called out, his voice cracking. “Is there a diver down there?”
It was an absurd thought. Who would be diving in this cold, in the dark, under the pier?
No answer. Just the foghorn.
And then, a voice.
It drifted up from the darkness under the pier. It wasn’t a shout. It wasn’t projected through the air. It was vibrating up the monofilament line, humming through the tension into the rod, and resonating in the cork handle against Max’s palms. It was a tin-can telephone from the abyss.
…Help… me…
Max’s blood turned to ice. It sounded like a child. A little girl, gurgling through a mouthful of water.
“Hey!” Max shouted, leaning over the rail. “I hear you! Are you in the water?”
…Help… the voice buzzed through the rod again.
Max looked at the line disappearing into the black water. The vibration was unmistakable.
“Hang on!” he yelled. “I’m pulling you in!”
He started to reel, pumping the rod with everything he had. The weight was heavy, but it was coming up. He was going to save her. He was going to pull this poor kid out of the dark.
He reeled faster. He could see the swivel coming out of the water.
“Almost there!”
The water beneath him erupted.
It wasn’t a splash of a surfacing swimmer. It was a surge. Something climbed the piling directly below him, moving with the speed of a striking snake.
In the beam of his headlamp, Max saw a hand.
It was pale, grey, and glistening. It had too many joints. It slapped onto the wooden crossbeam of the pier with a wet thwack. Then another hand.
A face pulled itself into the light.
It wasn’t a child.
It was a nightmare of adaptation. A “Trawler.” Its body was long and segmented, designed to coil around the pilings like a moray eel. Its skin was the color of a bruised storm cloud, slick with the same grey slime Max had wiped from his line. It had no eyes, just two swirling vortices of cold blue light in a featureless skull.
And in its mouth, a vertical slit of needle-teeth, it held Max’s hook. It hadn’t bitten the bait. It was holding the line in its teeth, grinning.
The Trawler looked up at him. The blue lights swirled, hypnotic and hungry.
…Got… cha…it mimicked, its voice a wet rasp that sounded exactly like Max’s own voice back at him.
Max screamed and let go of the rod.
Or he tried to.
His hands wouldn’t open.
The grey, oily residue, the slime from the “kelp”, had seeped from the cork handle onto his gloves. It wasn’t just slime. It was an adhesive. A biological cement.
His hands were fused to the rod.
“No,” he gasped, tearing at his own wrists. “No, no, no!”
The creature let go of the piling and dropped back into the water
It didn’t splash. It pierced the surface like a diver. And it took the line with it.
The force was irresistible. The rod became a lever. Max was slammed against the railing, the wood digging into his ribs, knocking the breath from him.
He planted his feet, fighting the pull. But the Trawler was heavy, and it was descending.
“Help!” Max screamed, the sound dying instantly in the heavy fog. The town was gone. The world was gone. There was only the pier and the thing below.
He was lifted off his feet. He was dragged over the rail.
He fell.
The rush of wind was short. He hit the water.
The cold was instantaneous, a shock that stopped his heart. It wasn’t water; it was liquid nitrogen. It burned his eyes, his skin, his lungs.
He sank. The heavy rod, still glued to his hands, acted as an anchor, dragging him down.
He looked up, eyes stinging in the salt. He saw the dim, yellow glow of the pier lights above, distorted by the surface, fading rapidly.
And he saw the silhouettes.
Dozens of them.
Long, serpentine shapes were uncoiling from the pilings all around him. The Trawlers. They had been waiting in the structure, hanging like bats in a cave, waiting for a line to drop. Waiting for a fisherman to think he was the one hunting.
The Trawler that had hooked him swam closer, its blue eyes pulsing in the dark water. It wrapped a long, many-jointed limb around Max’s waist.
It didn’t bite him. It leaned close, its featureless face inches from his.
…Release… the creature whispered, mocking the command fishermen used for small fish.
But it didn’t let go. It squeezed.
Max felt his ribs crack. The air left his lungs in a silver rush of bubbles.
As the darkness closed in, he saw the Trawler reach up toward the surface with a free hand. It was holding something. It was Max’s fishing rod.
The creature swam upward, thrusting the rod tip back through the surface.
Above the water, in the silent, foggy night, the green glow-stick began to bob and dance again. A gentle, rhythmic motion.
The trap was reset.
Max’s last sight was the green glow of the rod tip above the surface, bobbing gently in the mist, waiting for the next angler to see the light, step to the rail, and wonder what was biting in the dark.
By Pamela Beach ‘Beyond the Blog’
The fog holds more secrets…
“The Midnight Angler” is just one piece of the legend. Discover the other terrifying tales of the Watchers, the Takers, and the mist that consumes, in the Morro Bay Fog-Mythos Collection.
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Pamela Beach is a multi-genre author, poet, and lyricist who writes from her home on California’s foggy Central Coast. She is the creator of the “Morro Bay fog-mythos” and author of The Unstoppable You. You can read more of her work and explore her complete “fog-mythos” collection at her blog, Beyond the Blog with Pamela Beach
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