Crescent's Bloodcurdle

From Samuel F. Dawson comes a tide-lashed horror about lineage, lunar pull, and the appetites that never quite die. Under a sickle of moon, a song crawls up from the water and into the throat. They call it the Bloodcurdle. It shivers glass. It knots nets. It names a debt.

1. Crescent's Reach, a black scimitar of rock thirty miles off Whitby. Mairi Black grows up in the lee of a stone lighthouse, her palms salted by work and her future portioned out to a fisherman twice her age. She learns the names of currents and of knives; she keeps a whalebone comb and a pewter bowl that always smells faintly of iron. One fog-bound night a bell tolls though no hand pulls its rope, and an outsider in a tar-stained coat comes ashore on a skiff without oars. He speaks of a path off the island, a passage bought with a voice sung into the tide and a cut made by a crescent-bladed knife. Mairi bargains for open water and unowned breath. She pays in blood and brine and the nameless hunger that wakes behind her teeth. For those who strike the bargain keep the tune, and the tune keeps them.

2. New Orleans, the Crescent City. Delphine Roche lives above a milliner on St. Claude, hand-stitching veils while the streetcars spark and hiss. A widow with a silver-tipped cane—Calanthe Vasseur—collects Delphine's grief with a tenderness that tastes like anise and ash. There are invitations to dinners lit by gaslight and jars of greened absinthe; there are phonograph cylinders labeled only with moons and cuts; there is a brass key filed into a crescent notch that opens a cabinet of wax-coated bones. Delphine's soft heart falters at the tombs in St. Louis No. 1, at the names swallowed by water and fever. Love is offered with a price she only dimly hears beneath the parlor music: a lullaby that curdles blood when the moon thins, a promise that her dead will never leave if she will sing them home. Freedom, it turns out, is a room with every mirror turned to face the wall.

3. Crescent, Oregon. June Park takes the graveyard shift at the shuttered cannery and day classes at the community college, hoping the coast will sand down what she did—and what was done to her—back in Spokane. The night a sealed tin washes up at Lighthouse Beach, stenciled with the word BLOODCURDLE over a crescent, she opens it and finds black salt, an iron key, and a ledger page signed by Mairi Black, 1697. Soon June hears it: under gulls and breakers, a hum that syncs to her pulse, turns her mouth to metal, and teaches her a song only the sleepless can stand. She starts digging: Coast Guard logs in Newport, parish records in Plaquemines, message boards full of moon-sick strangers with matching scars. A woman named Edda Vale—the last lightkeeper's granddaughter—presses a silvered bell into June's palm and says, Don't ring it unless you mean to feed it. When a tattooed man with a half-moon scar on his wrist follows June through the tide pools, when her own reflection begins to lag half a second behind, June stops running from the thing that hunts her and starts hunting back.

This is a tale of appetite—the sea's and our own—and of the ways a song can be a knife, a promise, a trap. It is about islands and cities that share a name, and the debts we carry from shore to shore: bones ledgered in ink, kisses written in salt. It is about a moon that wants, a bell that remembers, and a note so cold it curdles. It is about how hunger travels through blood, how grief finds its voice, and how something starts again in the dark once the last light goes out.