Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026
On a gray, electric December beach, the narrator — a quietly isolated, self-described loner who visits the shore to manage dark moods — encounters a stranger walking toward him across the hard winter sand. In the moment their paths cross, something appears between them: a rope, hanging taut from the flat winter sky, its tapered end coiled limply on the beach, stretching upward into the overcast until it vanishes from sight. It is thick, cold, slightly slimy, with a rubbery texture and scattered raised nubs — more organic than manufactured, though neither man can quite name what it is. It wasn’t there, and then it was.
Before the rope appeared, the narrator had passed a severed tentacle washed up on the beach — gray, limp, curled, and suckered — and felt a strange, disproportionate grief at the sight of it. He recalls a documentary about cephalopods he’d watched alone in his apartment, and a researcher’s claim that these creatures represent the closest humanity may ever come to encountering an alien intelligence. The image clings to him. Meanwhile, a third figure is visible far down the beach, emerging from the cold ocean, moving with an uncanny, fluid urgency.
The narrator and the stranger — a warm, scarved, galosh-wearing man — attempt to pull the rope down and fail. During their efforts, their hands keep brushing together, prompting shared, inexplicable laughter. The stranger reveals he has seen the narrator on the beach before, and the narrator — shy, defensive, reflexively retreating — finds himself unexpectedly moved. When the stranger decides to climb the rope, fashioning a harness from his scarf and inching upward with boyish exuberance, the narrator watches with a complicated mix of longing, admiration, and self-protective inertia. The stranger calls down, inviting him to follow, calling it a potential date — even a lifeline. The narrator hesitates.
The figure down the beach is now close enough to resolve: its limbs are too long, too fluid, too prehensile. It is not human. Crabs are pouring from the ocean in their hundreds, fleeing. The stranger’s legs vanish into the gray sky. His scarf falls, a small offering or gift. With the creature closing fast and escape along the beach impossible, the narrator grabs the scarf and begins to climb — for the first time in a very long time.
From partway up, he sees the creature below: bulbous, tentacled, soft-bodied, possibly an octopus breathing air — and laughs wildly when its tentacles fail to grip the rope. He opens his eyes to discover ropes everywhere, dozens of them, hanging from the sky like dropped lines. Then the cloud cover breaks: matte-black, oblong ships hang in the sky, punched into the firmament like open doors, reeling out ropes from infinite dark interiors. A green galosh tumbles past him. The rope begins to bleed. Its nubs become pink, fleshy suckers. The cephalopods mass below — aware, intelligent, and no longer camouflaging themselves.
Suspended between the teeming beach and the unknown ships above, the narrator makes his choice: up. There is someone up there. Someone who said he would come back. Whether the blood on the rope signals doom or simply the cost of finally climbing, he decides — at last — to find out.
Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award-winning editor, and a four-time World Fantasy Award nominee. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and has been previously collected in Scratching the Surface, Undertow & Other Laments, and All the Things We Never See. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Undertow Publications, and editor of Weird Horror magazine.