The name acted as a weapon.

  “The Crimson Thirst.” Frankie had repeated it to Ted and Dee Dee over the phone in the pre-dawn darkness, her voice still raspy from screaming herself awake. The nightmare had been a violation, a psychic assault that left her feeling bruised and raw, but it had given them something the real world couldn’t: a specific, concrete lead.

  It changed everything. Their frustrating, dead-end search had been too broad, like searching for a needle in a haystack. Now, they had the name of the needle.

  They met at the Norchester Public Library as soon as it opened, but they didn’t head for the familiar local history section.

  “General searches are useless,” Dee Dee declared, her voice low and full of a new, grim purpose. She looked as if she hadn’t slept, but her eyes were bright with a fierce, strategic light. “The internet is too wide. The town histories are too shallow. If this thing is real, its history has been buried. On purpose.”

  “So where do we look?” Ted asked, the useless kraken coin clutched in his fist like a worry stone.

  “We go deeper,” Dee Dee said. “We go to the place where they keep the things nobody wants to read. The uncatalogued stuff. The primary sources.” She nodded toward a heavy door in the library’s basement. “The maritime archives.”

  The archives offered little comfort. It comprised a dim, temperature-controlled room redolent of brittle paper, decaying leather, and the quiet rot of time itself. Metal shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, crammed with massive, leather-bound ledgers, rolled-up nautical charts, and cardboard boxes full of loose, yellowed documents. This, the library’s attic, its forgotten corner, where the real, unpolished history of Norchester crumbled into dust.

  For Frankie, the room offered immediate, low-grade torture. The cold, dry air made her throat feel raw. The absolute silence allowed her to hear the blood pulsing in her ears, a hungry, rhythmic beat. The smell of decay seemed to cling to the back of her tongue. This place resembled a tomb, and she seemed right at home in it, a fact that terrified her more than anything.

  The work progressed agonizingly slowly. The books were huge and heavy, their covers stiff with age. The pages, so fragile, threatened to disintegrate at the slightest touch. The script inside, a spidery, elegant scrawl from another century, the ink faded into brownish ghosts on the yellowed paper.

  “I can barely read this,” Ted muttered in frustration after an hour, squinting at a ship’s manifest from 1792. “It’s like they were writing with spiders dipped in tea.”

  They searched for any mention of “The Crimson Thirst.” They scanned shipping ledgers, captains’ logs, trade manifests, and naval reports. History's sheer volume overwhelmed.The mundane details of forgotten lives and forgotten voyages piled up around them. Cargo: twelve barrels of molasses, five crates of tobacco. Weather: fair, with a westerly wind. Crewman John Smith was treated for a mild fever.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  A sea of ink and paper drowned them.

  Hours passed. Frankie’s headache, a constant companion, flared up under the dim, flickering lights. Their initial hope of finding answers in the archives dwindled. What if the name was just a figment of the nightmare? A meaningless phrase her subconscious invented?

  “We’re never going to find him,” Dee Dee said, her voice barely a whisper. Her shoulders slumped, and she stared at the floor.

  Frankie slammed the book shut. “This is useless. We’ve been at it for hours.”

  Ted just stared blankly at a page, his eyes glazed over with defeat. “What’s the point?”

  “Wait,” Ted said.

  His voice sharply hissed in the dead-silent room.

  Frankie and Dee Dee looked up. Ted leaned over a massive logbook, one much older and more damaged than the others. Its leather cover cracked and peeled, and the edges of the pages stained dark with old water damage. He traced a line of script with a trembling finger.

  “What is it?” A familiar hungry beat pulsed in Frankie's chest as she asked.

  “I think… I think I found it,” he breathed.

  They scrambled to his side, huddling close to see the page. The entry, short, just a few lines scrawled in a frantic, messy hand, differed from the neat, looping script on other pages. A sense of urgency. Of panic.

  A British merchant captain's log from 1788 contained the entry. And this is what it said:

  Encountered the pirate vessel that plagues this coast. They fly no colors, but the men call her The Crimson Thirst. We outran her before nightfall, thank the Almighty. Her captain is said to be a demon, not a man.

  They stared at the words, their blood running cold. Printed in faded, 200-year-old ink. Proof.

  The Crimson Thirst.

  “Keep reading,” Dee Dee urged, her voice a tense whisper.

  Ted’s finger moved to the final, chilling sentence, scrawled at the bottom of the entry as a hasty addendum.

  Word from another vessel reports that The Thirst was last seen sailing directly into the great storm off Norchester Bay. It is presumed lost with all hands, vanished without a trace.

  The words appeared to float from the page, suspended in the frigid, lifeless air of the archives.

  Off Norchester Bay.

  The monster in Frankie’s veins wasn’t a random creature from some faraway, forgotten shipwreck.

  From here it came.

  The chest hadn’t washed ashore from across the world. It had washed ashore from just off the coast.

  It didn't just disappear at sea. It vanished right here.

  The truth settled over them, heavy and suffocating as a burial shroud. The creature that bit Frankie, the source of the curse now flowing through her blood, had a name. Blackmane. And his ship, his ghostly, monstrous vessel, hadn’t just vanished. It had vanished in their backyard.

  They looked at each other, their faces pale masks of horror in the dim, tomb-like light of the archives. The monster comprised no part of world history. It instead comprised a piece of their town’s history. A dark, bloody, secret chapter that had been waiting, sleeping, in the cold, dark water just beyond their sunny beaches.

  And they had been the ones who finally turned the page.