The priest’s diary presented itself as a forbidden object.

  Small enough to fit in Dee Dee’s hand, its dark leather cover showed the smooth, featureless wear of time. A surprising weight pressed into her palm, a heft not of paper and ink, but of secrets locked in darkness for nearly two hundred years.

  They huddled together in the dusty, silent Town Hall basement. A single bare bulb overhead cast long, distorted shadows around them. The world outside—cars, cell phones, surf competitions—existed a million miles away. In this tomb of forgotten paper, time thinned. The past breathed down their necks.

  “Be careful,” Ted whispered, as if a loud noise might cause the ancient book to crumble to dust.

  Dee Dee opened the diary with the reverence of a bomb disposal expert. Mundane, daily records of a parish priest in the early 1800s filled the first few pages. Father Michael’s elegant, looping script detailed baptisms, weddings, and funerals. He wrote of leaky roofs, of squabbles between neighbors over property lines, of the price of lamp oil.

  “This is… normal,” Frankie said, a sliver of disappointment coloring her voice. For a moment, she had allowed a flicker of hope that this little book held all the answers.

  “Keep going,” Ted urged.

  Dee Dee turned the fragile, yellowed pages, her finger tracing the faded ink. And then she stopped.

  “Here,” she breathed. “Listen to this.”

  Her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper as she read from the page. “September 14th, 1805. Henry Rivera attended mass again today. The poor man is a ghost in my church. He sits in the back pew, his eyes fixed on the stained-glass window of St. Michael slaying the dragon, but I do not think he sees it. He looks at something else. Something only he can see.”

  A chill traced its way down Frankie’s spine. This subject had nothing to do with leaky roofs.

  Dee Dee continued to read, her voice giving life to the priest’s two-hundred-year-old concerns. Father Michael wrote about Henry Rivera several times over the next few months. He described a man not as a local hero who survived a pirate attack, but as a man deeply, profoundly haunted.

  “October 2nd, 1805. I visited with Mr. Rivera today at his small home by the sea. Horrific nightmares plague him. He speaks of the sea not with the love of a sailor, but with the fear of a man who has looked into the abyss and seen a pair of eyes looking back. The demons he faced at sea forever torment him.”

  “Demons,” Ted murmured, the word hanging in the air. “The priest meant it as a metaphor. For PTSD, or survivor’s guilt.”

  “But what if it wasn’t a metaphor?” Frankie countered, her voice barely audible.

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  Dee Dee’s eyes widened as she scanned the next entry. “Oh, you guys… You need to hear this.”

  “November 19th, 1805. Henry’s obsession deepens. His wife, Sarah, came to me in tears. He spends his days building strange markers along the coast—piles of stones, posts carved with symbols I do not recognize. He spends his nights performing personal, quasi-religious rituals at the water's edge, whispering prayers of his own invention into the wind. His consumption with what he calls ‘protecting the bay’ is absolute.”

  “December 5th, 1805. I confronted Henry today about his strange behavior. His potential fall into madness or paganism concerned me. His response chilled me to the bone. He looked at me with a terrifying clarity and said, ‘Father, you speak of caging the devil with prayer and faith. I have already done it.’ He believes he did not just escape a pirate. Conviction radiates from him: he ‘caged a great evil,’ and his family now carries the sacred duty to ensure it remains trapped forever.”

  The words hit them with the force of a physical blow.

  Henry Rivera did not just survive.

  He fought back.

  Not a victim who got lucky. A hunter. A jailer. The one who had trapped Blackmane. Frankie was not just the descendant of a survivor; she was the descendant of the man who won the first battle. He had not just run away. He had built the prison.

  The diary ceased to be a collection of historical entries. It became a witness statement. The priest failed to understand what he saw, what he heard. He chronicled one man’s descent into madness. But he actually recorded the testimony of the only man who knew the truth.

  Dee Dee turned to the last entry about Henry Rivera. Her breath hitched.

  “February 1st, 1806. I fear for Henry Rivera’s soul. He came to me today, looking gaunt and pale, his eyes burning with a fire I can only describe as fanatical. He spoke no more of his ‘duty.’ He spoke only of a shadow. ‘It sleeps, Father,’ he told me, his voice a raw whisper. ‘A thirsting shadow that sleeps beneath the waves. But it dreams. And it calls to me.’ I offered him a prayer, but he only shook his head. He says the only thing that keeps it caged is his vigilance. His bloodline. The cage will only hold as long as his family stands guard.”

  Dizziness washed over Frankie. His bloodline. The monster tied itself not just to a place. It tied itself to her family. Her blood acted as the key to the cage. And now… now her blood contained an infection of the very thing it contained.

  The diary seemed to run out of things to say about Henry after that. The entries returned to the mundane. But they had what they needed. The terrible, crushing weight of Henry’s secret duty. His legacy.

  His burden.

  As Dee Dee went to close the book, her thumb brushed against the inside of the back cover. She paused.

  “That’s weird,” she said, frowning.

  She ran her finger over the thick, yellowed paper of the inside back cover. The surface looked blank, but faint, almost invisible indentations pressed into the paper from the other side. “It feels like writing, but there’s nothing there.”

  Ted’s eyes lit up, his mind snapped back into analytical mode. “Don’t move,” he said. He rummaged in his backpack and pulled out a pencil. “Hold it flat.”

  Dee Dee held the diary open. Ted took the pencil and, holding it almost parallel to the page, rubbing the soft, grey lead lightly over the surface.

  And like a ghost emerging from the fog, an image appeared.

  A hidden drawing, a map, etched into the cover from the inside, its impression left on the final page. A crude, hand-drawn map of Norchester Bay.

  And on the map, a single, crudely drawn ‘X’.

  It marked a spot just off the coast.

  Directly in front of the hidden, malevolent silence of Black Rock Cove.