From Book 3 of The Echo-Mythos Trilogy
The Morro Bay Estuary is not land, and it is not sea. It’s the negotiation between the two.
For thousands of years, this vast, shallow network of channels and mudflats has served as the kidneys of the Central Coast. It filters the runoff from the Chorro and Los Osos creeks, trapping the toxins, the silt, and the secrets of the valley in a deep, sucking layer of anaerobic muck.
To the uninitiated, it looks like a wasteland of grey slime and pickleweed. To Dr. Isaac Weaver, it was a living lung.
Isaac was an estuarine ecologist. He spent his life in waders, measuring salinity levels and counting the ghost shrimp that lived in the black mud. He knew that the estuary was a place of absorption. It took everything you gave it, old tires, dead birds, lost tourists, and it swallowed them. It pulled them down into the soft, wet dark and kept them.
But tonight, the estuary wasn’t swallowing. It was choking.
It was 1:00 AM on a Wednesday. The “War of the Elements” had turned the bay into a cauldron.
Isaac sat in his research blind, a camouflaged wooden box on stilts located near the back channels of the Shark Inlet. Usually, the only sound here was the soft pop-hiss of mud bubbles and the cry of the Curlews.
Tonight, the sound was mechanical.
Hhhhsssss… Chuff. Hhhhsssss… Chuff.
It sounded like a fleet of steam locomotives idling in the reeds.
The air outside the blind was unbreathable. The ‘Steam’, that suffocating hybrid of the cold ocean fog and the hot valley wind, sat heavy on the water. It was a boiling grey wall, thick as cotton wool, raising the ambient temperature to a sweltering 105 degrees.
The water in the channels wasn’t cool. It was tepid. It smelled of boiled cabbage and sulfur.
Isaac wiped sweat from his eyes with a trembling hand. He peered through the slit in the blind’s wall.
“They’re coming,” he whispered into his voice recorder. “The invasive species.”
He saw the glow first. A dull, throbbing orange light moving through the Steam.
Then, the shapes emerged. They were walking on the mudflats.
That should have been impossible. The “Black Flats” of the estuary were notorious. At low tide, the mud was essentially quicksand. A man would sink to his waist in seconds. A deer would disappear without a trace.
But these things didn’t sink.
They were Steam-Walkers.
Isaac had seen the reports from the interior. He knew the morphology. A fusion of the wet, Taker-flesh and the dry, hollow-bones.
They were seven feet tall, lurching forward with a jerky, piston-like gait. Their skin was pale, boiled white, and pulled tight over jagged driftwood skeletons. They vented jets of black steam from valves in their chests and shoulders.
But it was their feet that terrified Isaac.
As the lead Walker stepped onto the soft, black mud, a sound echoed across the flats.
SSSSS-TINK.
It was the sound of a hot iron hitting a wet towel, followed instantly by the sound of cooling metal.
The Walker didn’t sink.
The immense heat radiating from its body, the internal furnace of burning souls, hit the wet clay of the estuary floor. It flashed-baked the mud.
In the split second that the creature’s foot made contact, the water in the silt evaporated explosively. The clay minerals fused. The soft, living mud turned instantly into a hard, red ceramic brick.
The Walker stepped forward. It left behind a footprint of fired terracotta, smoking in the mist.
It took another step. SSSSS-TINK. Another brick.
“They’re paving it,” Isaac breathed, the horror settling in his gut like a stone. “They aren’t just crossing the wetland. They’re killing it.”
There were dozens of them. A line of biological pavers marching out of the mist, heading from the land toward the water.
Wherever they walked, the estuary died. The pickleweed burst into flame and turned to ash. The ghost shrimp boiled in their burrows. The soft, absorbing sponge of the coast was being turned into a hard, kiln-fired floor.
They were building a road. A road for something bigger to follow. But the Estuary does not give up its territory easily. The mud began to bubble.
It wasn’t the small, methane pops of decay. It was a churning, violent roil. The ground shook, vibrating the stilts of Isaac’s blind.
GLORP… SCHLUCK.
The sound was massive. Wet. Deep.
Fifty yards out, directly in the path of the Steam-Walkers, the mudflat rose. It didn’t just bulge. It stood up.
A mound of black silt, dripping with eelgrass and old fishing nets, heaved itself out of the channel. It grew taller, piling mud upon mud, defying gravity.
It formed a shape. A humanoid shape, fifteen feet tall, massive and hulking.
It was the Estuary Man.
Isaac had heard the local legends. The “Mud-Dog” Miller story. He thought it was a myth, a personification of the danger of the tides.
It wasn’t a myth. It was an immune response.
The golem was composed of the detritus of the bay. Its ribs were the rotted hull of a skiff. Its fingers were tangles of rusted crab trap wire. Its eyes were two massive, dead geoduck clams, their shells glowing with a faint, bioluminescent green rot.
It roared.
GURGLE-ROAR.
A spray of black mud and water erupted from its mouth. It smelled of the grave.
The Steam-Walkers stopped. They hissed, venting clouds of black steam in agitation.
The Estuary Man lunged.
It moved with the slow, unstoppable momentum of a landslide. It swung a fist the size of an engine block, made of compacted clay and stone.
SPLAT.
It hit the lead Steam-Walker.
The Walker didn’t break. It squashed. The mud-fist slammed it into the soft ground, burying it deep in the muck.
The Estuary Man was trying to drown them. To pull them back into the anaerobic dark where the fire couldn’t burn.
It grabbed another Walker. It wrapped its massive, muddy arms around the boiling creature and squeezed.
Isaac watched, mesmerized. The wet vs. the dry. The cold vs. the heat.
“Crush it,” Isaac urged. “Put the fire out.”
But the Steam-Walkers were hot. Too hot.
HHHHHSSSSSSSSSSSS.
A massive cloud of white steam exploded from the embrace. The Estuary Man shrieked, a sound of wet clay tearing.
The mud touching the Steam-Walker didn’t extinguish the fire. The fire cooked the mud.
The chest of the Estuary Man, pressed against the boiling skin of the Walker, began to change color. It went from black to grey. Then to a dry, chalky white. Finally, to a dull, brick red.
It was hardening.
The Steam-Walker vented its internal pressure directly into the mud-golem’s body. The superheated gas shot through the pores of the silt.
Isaac saw the transformation spread like an infection.
The Estuary Man’s arm, the one holding the creature, stiffened. The flexibility of the wet mud vanished. It turned rigid.
CRACK.
The arm snapped. It didn’t splash. It broke like pottery.
A massive chunk of fired clay, shaped like a forearm, fell off the golem’s body and shattered on the hard-baked footprints below.
The Estuary Man staggered back, looking at its stump. It tried to reform. Usually, the mud would just flow back together. But you cannot reshape a brick. The damage was permanent. The clay was fired.
The Steam-Walker that had been buried in the mud climbed back out. It was covered in a shell of hardened terracotta, like a suit of crude armor. It glowed with heat.
It chattered a signal to the others.
Click-hiss-click.
The pack advanced.
They didn’t attack the Estuary Man with claws. They attacked it with proximity.
They swarmed it. Ten of them. They rushed the giant golem, throwing their boiling bodies against its legs, its torso, its back.
They hugged it.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
The sound of the steam was deafening. The blind shook.
The Estuary Man flailed. It tried to shake them off, but with every second of contact, more of its body died.
Its legs turned to stone, fusing to the ground. It could no longer move its feet. It was rooted. Its torso dried out, the black silt turning to grey dust, then baking into hard, red rock.
Isaac watched the green light in the golem’s clam-shell eyes flicker. It looked… panicked.
It opened its massive mud-mouth to scream, to call the tide, to summon the water.
One of the Steam-Walkers, a spindly horror with a skull of driftwood, climbed up the golem’s chest. It reached into the open mouth.
It vented.
A jet of 300-degree black steam shot down the throat of the Estuary Man.
The scream died instantly. The heat cooked the vocal cords of the bay. It baked the mud from the inside out.
Isaac saw the steam shooting out of the golem’s eyes, ears, and the seams of its body.
The Estuary Man went still.
The Steam-Walkers dropped off, landing on the hard, new floor they had created. They backed away, hissing in satisfaction.
The giant figure stood alone in the mist. It wasn’t a monster anymore. It was a monument.
A thirty-foot tall statue of rough, red ceramic. Its arm was raised in a defensive posture that would never fall. Its mouth was open in a silent, petrified roar.
It was a kiln-fired tombstone for the wetland.
Isaac sat back in the dark corner of the blind, his heart hammering against his ribs.
The Steam-Walkers turned their attention to the rest of the flats. They spread out. They began to march.
Step. SSSS-Tink. Step. SSSS-Tink.
They walked in grid patterns. They were methodical. They were tiling the floor.
Isaac watched as the soft, living mudflats were systematically converted into a hard, dead plaza.
The tide began to turn. The water tried to rush back in from the harbor mouth, but the water couldn’t penetrate the ceramic. It just lapped against the hard edge of the new shelf, sliding off the surface. The sponge was gone.
The estuary could no longer filter. It could no longer absorb. The water would have nowhere to go. It would flood the town.
CLOMP. CLOMP.
A heavy footstep shook the ladder of the blind.
Isaac stopped breathing.
The blind was on stilts, five feet above the mud. Or, what used to be mud.
He heard the sound of wood straining. The heat rising through the floorboards was intense. It smelled of creosote and burning pine.
A hand punched through the floor of the blind.
CRUNCH.
It wasn’t a hand. It was a fist of boiled flesh and petrified wood. Splinters exploded into the small room.
Isaac scrambled back, but there was nowhere to go.
The Steam-Walker tore the floor open. It pulled itself up into the small box.
It was cramped. The creature had to hunch over, its vertebrae cracking. Its face was inches from Isaac. The heat was blistering. Isaac felt his eyebrows singeing.
The creature’s face was a ruined cage of wire and bone, wrapped in white meat.
It looked at Isaac. It looked at the voice recorder in his hand.
It reached out.
It didn’t kill him. It touched the wall of the blind.
HSSSSSSS.
It vented steam into the wood. The damp, rotten plywood of the shelter dried out instantly. It turned grey. It warped. It hardened.
The creature was firing the blind. It was turning the wooden box into a ceramic cell.
It looked at Isaac again.
…YOU… ARE… THE… OBSERVER… the voice buzzed in the superheated air.
It reached out and grabbed Isaac’s ankle. The heat seared through his boot.
…STAY…
The creature vented again. A massive cloud of steam filled the small space. Isaac choked. He felt his clothes stiffening. He felt the moisture being sucked out of his skin.
He tried to kick, but his leg was heavy. Stiff. He looked down. His pants had fused to his skin. His skin had turned the color of terra cotta. He was being incorporated into the structure.
The Steam-Walker dropped back down through the hole in the floor.
It reached up and slammed the ceramic shards of the floor back into place, sealing the hole with a blast of heat that fused the edges.
Isaac was alone in the dark, hot box.
He tried to move to the door, but his legs were fused to the floor. He was a statue in a niche.
He leaned forward, pressing his face to the viewing slit. He could see the estuary. It was gone.
In its place was a vast, steaming plain of red brick. The statue of the Estuary Man stood in the center, a silent guardian of the new, hard world.
And marching across the plain, thousands of them now, the Steam-Walkers moved north, their footsteps ringing like hammers on stone, paving the way for the machine that was to come.
Isaac opened his mouth to scream, but his jaw was stiff. Clay.
He was part of the architecture now. A gargoyle watching over the end of the natural world.
Pamela Beach / IP Incubator / Creator of the Coastal Gothic Universe
P.S. Industry Note: For those tracking the IP: I retain 100% sole ownership of The Fog-Mythos and The Echo-Mythos franchise (including all literary, visual map, and gaming rights). This property has a Clean Chain of Title and is unencumbered by previous options or representations. It is currently available for acquisition/packaging.
If you’d like to talk about it email me at pam@beyondtheblog.org
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 ‘The Echo-Mythos’ and author of The Unstoppable You. You can read more of her work and explore her “fog-mythos” collection at her blog, Beyond the with Pamela Beach
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