The crab did not have a mouth with which to voice its pain. It simply scrambled wildly to be away from its mutilator, its pincer legs sliding on the rot-slickened stones. But it wasn’t given a chance to escape. A second lightning thread had appeared from the coils of the corpse’s gut, and gathering itself into a coil had launched itself at the monster striking its eyestalks then dropping to the stones in front of the immense beast.

It instantly zigzagged beneath the crab, and drove its lightning-wreathed length at the crab’s belly with such force that the unthinkable happened. The crab—which had ruled the shore for a decade, slaughtering indiscriminately, even when there were rich pickings among the dead—was thrown over onto its back. Its barbed legs struck out wildly in an attempt to right itself, but could only pedal the air, which was suddenly thick with flies. For the first time in its life the crab made a thin whine of complaint, tinged with fear.

It had reason. It had only been on its back for a few seconds when its enemies slid up over the rim of its shell and onto its underside. There they rose and fell, rose and fell, their motion perfectly matched, until some invisible signal turned their dance into death. Together they drove their lightning-bathed heads into the crab’s segmented belly.

The crab’s whine became a shriek. Not of pain—the crab knew little of that—but of profound terror. This was its nightmare, its only nightmare: to be lying helplessly on its back while something that it had intended to make a meal of, devoured it.

But it was not a crabmeat dinner the bright thread sought. It was the fear itself, which it fed on, fattening on its cream, rich and thick then bearing its bounty, returning to the body from which it had come.

In the brief time that had passed since the waters of the Izabella had relinquished the corpse, rain clouds had blown in from the northeast. They were the first sign of a storm that had formed in the wildly unstable air above the edge of reality itself, where the sea dropped away into oblivion. Within two or three minutes the rain shower had become a deluge, which drove all but those few caught in the life-and-death struggle on the shore back into their hiding holes beneath the stones.

The crab, of course, had no hope of retreat. Exhausted by its panic it lay inert as the rain roared down on it. The storm hadn’t slowed the threads that were feeding on its terror. The bright threads came and went, harvesting the fear that suffused every part of the animal’s anatomy. They didn’t need the nourishment for themselves. It was their deceased creator, whose body they had never deserted, that they sought to reclaim with these gleanings of fear.

Had they been rational creatures with an understanding of death’s implacable hold, they would never have attempted to resurrect their host. He was dead, beaten and broken by the waters of the Izabella as they returned from the Hereafter. They had borne a chaotic freight of detritus from the streets of Chickentown. Storefronts, lampposts, cars, parts of cars, people in cars (some alive), roofs, doors, windows all stripped from houses, and innumerable remnants of the lives lived inside those houses: chairs, fridges, magazines, rugs, people, toys, clothes, and on and on; junk and life all thrown together in a soup of things lost forever. The threads’ host had been dashed against so many sharp, heavy, twisted pieces of trash that he might have died half a hundred deaths if he’d had them to die.

But finally a calmer current—the one that delivered his body to the Shore of the Departed—had claimed him. And now, in contradiction to the Shore’s very name, and in defiance of all the laws pertaining to the dissolution of the flesh, the devoted labor of the threads, carrying the food that the crab’s terror provided back to their maker’s corpse over and over, bore fruit.

The dead man moved. The crab did not see the miracle its nightmares had made possible. At some point in the coming and going of its fears’ devourers, the crab let go of life. The sluggish motion of its legs ceased entirely, and its whine sank away into silence.

The albino didn’t see the corpse it had almost dined upon twitch on its bed of black stones, nor its eyelids flicker open as the rain danced down on its all but fleshless face. As one life ended another began.

Nor was it for the first time. Christopher Carrion had drawn his first breath many, many years before, as a baby prematurely born. Now he took that breath again: a second first. This time, however, it was not a frail inhalation. This time, though the rain was still beating a tattoo on the stones as loudly as ever, the sound of the dead man drawing breath reverberated all along the shore, its resonance causing the stones beneath the stones, and those layered still deeper, to rattle against one another, the sum of their percussions so loud that the din of the deluge seemed inconsequential.

And as if driven off by that greater thundering, the storm clouds rolled inland, to pour their waters upon a place they had some hope of cleansing: someplace where the laws of life (and death) still held sway. The shore lay silent, except for the breathing of the dead man, and the sound of the Izabella as it threw its waves upon the stones.

The drumming of the stones finally ceased, its task complete. Carrion lived. His body was no longer the wretched, colorless thing it had been. Myriad forms of light were spilling into the air around it, memories of a life he almost lost. They seethed around him blazing with a living light this shore had not witnessed in many an age. In the flux of memories, Carrion began to whisper ancient incantations, designed to heal his broken body. In the time it took for the tide to turn, retreat, and turn again to once more climb the shore, the healing was complete. Healthy tissue spread over his wounds, sealing them and causing the rotted flesh to fall in strands and scraps onto the hard bed where he still lay.

The smaller crabs, the tiny, green sea lizards that had taken refuge beneath the stones, and the mekaks that had seen several of their kind killed by the Albino, returned now to the proximity of the man so as to feed on the putrid meat that the healed body had sloughed off. They had no fear of this man or his bright agents. He didn’t even see them as they scuttled over the stones around him, cleansing the shores of every last scrap of the death he had taken off in order to dress in life again.

After a time, he got to his feet. His memories still played in the darkness around him, their meaning—having been put to the purpose of Carrion’s rebirth—eaten away, leaving the darkness surrounding him swarming with the remnants of a life he’d lived once, died too. It was well lost. He would not make the same mistakes again.

The screech of metal on stone stirred him from his ruminations. He looked toward the water, and found there the source of the raw sound. The incoming tide had brought another souvenir of Chickentown to the Shore of the Departed. An entire truck, missing three of its wheels but still containing the slumped body of its driver, securely held in his seat by his seat belt, was being delivered to the shore.

Carrion’s face had betrayed no trace of feeling until now, when the subtlest of smiles appeared on a mouth still marked, even after his revival with the scars of his grandmother’s handiwork: the lines where she’d sewn his lips together for speaking the word love. He raised his hand to his mouth and ran his fingers over the scars. The smile died, not because Mater Motley had done him harm, but because she’d been right. Love was sickness. Love was self-slaughter. Love was poison and pain and humiliation.

He was reborn to be love’s enemy. To destroy it, utterly.

The thought gave him strength. He felt the power in his body surge, and with it a sudden desire to celebrate his return into the living, tender, fearful world.