In the distance, not too far, there's a rushing sound — the sound of the tide coming in on a beach that wasn't there before. There's a lighthouse too, a black structure built on the furthest point of the cape. The snow comes all the way up to the rocky beach.

More urgently, in the trees above, a rustling. Very close. There's no immediate cause, but something is clearly moving through the branches. Whatever it is, it's clearly coming this way —

— then drops, just as abruptly, the coiled, gnarled flesh of some living thing, its extremities stretched to an impossible length to make ropey appendages that were probably once arms, once legs. Its flesh is pulled around itself to make spiraling grooves. Boneless, it flops around on the ground and then starts to roll, pulling itself forward with the same kind of momentum as a headless octopus, or some impossible starfish. The sound it is making — hrk, hrk, hrk — sounds almost like human speech filtered through warped vocal chords.

Another tentacle-like appendages worms its way out from underneath the snow, reaching for Benji, making that same hrk hrk hrk, nearly a keening. Then another, and another — they're coming in from holes in the ground.