To whom it may concern

The Angler Fish was mottled white and pink, and it's smooth flesh had a greasy rubberized sheen to it. Melanie Monroe walked slowly around the fluted pedestal on which it sat, moving first clockwise, then anticlockwise. She sniffed, then wrinkled her noise.

"Jan?" she asked. "What did you say this thing was made from?"

Janet Donner glanced up from where she was folding napkins into an diorama showing the sunken city of R'lyeh rising from the deep.

"Spam," she said. "It was what Radford had on hand at short notice."

Melanie considered this.

"Hamgler fish," she said. "I like it."

The lighthouse hung down from the ceiling, a vast man-made stalactite gleaming pale against the dark rock of the far-distant cavern roof. Janet Donner pushed wet hair out of her eyes, spat out a mouthful of briny water and several mouthfuls of curses, and froze.

Dark against the yellow glow of the lamp, the silhouette of something not quite human was moving along the outer railing, it's gait smooth and assured despite hanging upside down deep in the muck below Lake Eerie.

Her fingers scrabbled in the thick and cloying mud as she struggled to her feet, swallowing her screams.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Lake Eerie versus Wolf Mountain

Meet Capricorn!

The bell above the Baitshop door jangled as something from Outside pushed it open. Janet glanced up, saw the curved and glistening edge of a single malevolent bubble, and closed her eyes.

"Hey, Boss," she said, reaching beneath the counter for a folded sheet of white linen, smelling of lavender and edged in silver thread, and tying it across the upper half of her face. "What brings you here?"

Thoughts that were not her own crawled at the edges of her mind, cold and slimy as a kimchi appetizer. She nodded, reached for her order pad and pen.

"Coming up."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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The blue glass buoy dangled from the Baitshop ceiling, suspended in a net woven from the fine silvery hair of the lake's oldest fishwives. It was full of images, and they flickered and writhed at the edges of Janet's vision as they tried to get her attention.

She paused in the act of putting the coffee machine back together, her gaze caught by the tiny blue-tinted figures dancing just under the curved surface of the pretty glass ball.

"Okay," she said. "I'll take a look. But if you pull some Enchanted Zoltar-level bullshit on me, you're going straight into storage."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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When they returned to the Baitshop, Janet removed the Specials board from it's place above the condiments table and hid it under the counter.

Fred (or whoever he had decided to be that day) vanished into the kitchen, returning a couple of minutes later with two small earthenware cups and a bottle of plum sake that was already filling the air with it's scent as it warmed.

He placed his cargo gently on a small table nearest the door and poured them both a drink, gesturing for Janet to join him.

"A turkraken," he said wistfully. "I'd never even imagined..."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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The foghorn was already sounding by the time Janet arrived at work. Through the gloom she could see the tall shadow of the lighthouse, a shadowed patch against the already dark sky that the dirty yellow sweep of it's light failed to illuminate.

The nigiri stirred uneasily in their tanks, brains of wine-soaked rice and pickled vegetables sensing that something was wrong in the world beyond the protective walls of glass. She murmured reassurances to them as she unlocked the great iron door that was the staff entrance and slipped inside.

Last night's warding sigils were still intact, at least.


Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Weather

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"Oh," says the Harvest King, speaking through her ex-boyfriend's face, and if she needed proof that this isn't really Marshall - at least, not right now, and she tries not to think that it might not be ever again - it's in the smooth, even tone of his voice.

Marshall, who tensed up if he thought Melanie was playing pinfinger a little too fast, wouldn't be this calm after almost maiming her.

Although, given what the things in the lake have done in service of their "repairs", maybe it still counts as a maiming.

She flexes her hand, whole but still damaged.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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The Harvest King was waiting for her beneath the spreading canopy of an old oak tree. His crown of green was bright with gold leaves of almost-ripened corn and in the places where it's twisting vines grew straight out of his head, blood-bright berries clotted and clustered.

"You came," he said, and it's almost the voice that Janet remembers, undercut with the howl of a hunting wolf and the wind up on the mountain.

He holds out his hand, which is pale and pink and human, and when she reaches for it she touches the whirring blades of a thresher.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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It's not quite a Viking funeral - for all his muscle and mass, he's still a triple-folded sheet of A4 in the end and that means his body would burn up too quickly to suit the solemnity of the occasion - but it's not a bad approximation, either.

Sara Sue sketches a shallow-bottomed row boat, the benches missing, and after she's signed it into reality the three of them line it with moss gathered from the scrubland that surrounds the lake. She unfolds the rumpled sketch of the Nanny and smoothes the brittle paper over the soft, damp green.

Dash hadn't known Harley before the disappearances at the lake and his own long, dark years trapped in the cell beneath City Hall, and the quiet, slightly lost shadow left behind in Simon's absence doesn't bear much resemblance to the stories he'd heard back then. Still, he thinks he sees a glimmer of it when Harley shows up twenty minutes before Arnold's send-off with a crate of illegal fireworks and an honour guard courtesy of the Unkind Ones.

They slide the paper-light boat out onto the dark blue water, and when the gentle swell has carried it a little distance from the shore, the three of them shoot rockets at it until it catches fire, orange-white flames curling up to mingle with multi-coloured explosions that light up the night sky and reflect in the waves below.

The Unkind Ones stand with heads bowed and hands clasped, and Billy Millions doesn't answer when Dash presses him on exactly how Eerie's most notorious biker gang came to know the Haversock's mail-order nanny. Harley shrieks with laughter at some of the bigger explosions, and again Dash wonders about that six year old who could bite through reality, and how hard reality must have bitten back once Simon was gone.

Sara Sue selects a roman candle that's thicker around than she is, lining it up with the drifting, half-melted boat with the same carefully calculated precision that he's seen her apply to everything, from drawings designed to leave municipal buildings in screaming heaps of meat and rubble to the exact amount of whipped cream required to make a perfect sundae.

It bursts with a thousand cascading explosions of green and pink and blue, and the shrill whistle as it goes off is magnified tenfold by the empty space around them. As the last traces of Nanny Arnold are obliterated in alternating flashes of light and dark, Sara Sue's eyes are wide and wet, and she drinks in the final death of her oldest creation.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Her second cigarette was almost gone.

Janet checked the double set of watches adorning each wrist - the Old Gods that owned the Sushi Bar may have long ago outgrown such concepts as time and space, but they allowed their employees to use it in order to make doing the rota easier - and sighed.

"I need to get back and set up for the King Tide," she said. "You can pay my consulting fee in American dollars or sunken treasure. I don't take Sea Witch wishes anymore."

The smallest corpse gurgled a phlegmy inquiry. Janet scowled.

"I don't do free samples."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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The swollen and awful things gazed at her with milky, unseeing eyes, slack faces pulled into rictus-like mockeries of reproach.

One of them had evidently lain too long at the bottom of the lake to withstand such rough treatment, and it's jaw fell off, hitting the water a dozen feet below it with a slap that echoed across the little inlet where the Sushi Bar lay.

There followed a long and awkward pause, where the monster animating the dead summer people tried to pretend that hadn't happened, and Janet tried not to laugh.

"Maybe you could workshop it?" she suggested.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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If Fred was around, he didn't answer. Janet put one hand against the listing and salt-stained timbers of the Baitshop, the other pressed over her hammering heart, and breathed deep.

"It doesn't mean anything," she told herself. Fred often lost himself in the depths of his most recent impersonation, refusing to answer to any name other than the one he'd currently adopted, even when he'd neglected to inform his coworkers just what that name might be.

She made her way to the rear of the little shack, fumbling in her bag for the heavy ring of keys as she went.


Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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The waves snapped hungrily at her feet, and the wet sand sucked at her dirty pink converse with a hunger she could almost feel.

In the surf near the shore, the little mackerel soldiers were darting back and forth, their bodies flashing silver against the white and foaming crests. Further out, the human heads and torsos of mermaids bobbed amidst the gentle swells, long wet hair bright and gleaming against their bare shoulders and barely-there seashell bras.

Beside her, Melanie's black sneakers left imprints that were quickly wiped away, and the incoming tide split and flowed around her.

"They don't like me as much as they like you," she said, and her voice was full of sympathy.

Janet didn't seem to hear her, and when Melanie reached for her best friend's hand, for a moment it was cold and slick and rasped like scales against her fingers.

Then Janet blinked and her eyes were brown again, not the aching and hungry blue-grey of the lake.

"Sorry," she said, shaking her head. "I missed that bit."

One of the mermaids made a rude gesture at Melanie, which she returned with both hands.

"Never mind," she said. "It wasn't so important, anyway."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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It was summer, and the late evening sky was a deep, dark blue. Thin wisps of clouds, black against the lesser darkness, scudded across the endless Indiana sky and laughed at their reflections in the lake.

Janet selected a lump of something raw and dripping from the chum bucket, squeezed it gently yet firmly as she painted over the wards on the door, now dry and faded after a busy day's trade. The air was full of the smell of fried food, cigarette smoke, and the tinny scent of old blood.

Things moved beneath the water.

"We're closed," she said.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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"Most likely," said Melanie, nodding with some difficulty due to being upside down. "Though the horrible were-chicken thing and the whole reveal about the Chicken Palace serving something that at least used to be human flesh must have given him some bad associations as well."

Janet made a face.

"He eats at the sushi bar," she said. "Anything that comes up out of that lake has been feeding on people it's whole life. Long pig's practically part of the food pyramid in this town."

"Yeah," said Janet, "But the nigiri don't generally wear clip-on ties, so he's good with that."

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Marshall set a handful of coins down next to the sugar bowl that contained tiny crystalized kraken spawn, enough to cover his coffee and a tip, though probably not enough to make up for the dig about the labcoat.

"No thanks," he said. "I'm good. I need to get back anyway. Thanks for the chat, and the note."

Fred Suggs, ordinary waiter who had never in his life encountered forged missives from a dying Mackerel Solider, looked blank.

"What note?" he asked.

Marshall shook his head, smiling wryly.

"Never mind," he said. "I must have you confused with someone else."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Marshall somehow stopped himself from sighing aloud, and took the letter over to the long bay window that ran the length of the Sushi Bar, looking out over the lake.

It was a strange mixture of handwriting - a wide and untidy sprawl of thick black lines - and words cut from magazines and pasted onto the artificially aged paper. Even if the Mackerel Soldiers could speak English, Marshall doubted they know how use scissors and a glue-stick.

He held it up to the light, but no hidden message revealed itself. He even tried the Commander Cody decoder ring, to no avail.

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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"Fine," said Fred. "Whatever. It's a Hollywood trope and therefore inherently obsessed with youth in a way that has no baring on my actual, real age. I forgive you for working in a fundamentally ageist paradigm."

"...thanks," said Marshall, wishing more than ever that Janet had been on shift that morning instead. He needed to have a normal conversation with a normal person who could help him out with a normal problem like ghost-pirates infesting the communal areas of his apartment, not spend the day navigating the murky waters of Fred Suggs' personal identity.

"You are welcome," said Fred, graciously.

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Marshall was silent for a moment, his mind full of the poor, dying Mackerel Soldier who had used the last of his strength to scribble a no-

"Wait a minute," he said. "Mackerel Soldiers refuse to read or write any of the Dry Languages. And even if they did, the water would make the paper all soggy and the letter would have fallen apart when you touched it."

Fred blinked.

"Oh," he said. "Yes. A professor of marine cryptobiology would know that, wouldn't he?"

"That's what you're supposed to be?" said Marshall, so surprised that he'd forgotten to be polite.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Marshall leaned forward, his elbows resting on the polished countertop.

"Not enough?" he prompted. "A letter from the King Crab himself?"

Fred - or whoever he was today - shook his head.

"The King Crab is overthrown!" he hissed. "One of his Mackerel Soldiers sent word to me at my home, many thousands of miles from here-"

(at this, Marshall, who had delivered Fred Sugg's newspaper to his front door at 52 Festive Road every day from the ages of twelve to fifteen, did not quite manage to suppress an eye-roll)

"-warning me of great upheaval in the World Beneath the Waves!"

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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The wind turbines were visible today, standing tall and white off a shore that existed someplace far outside of Eerie. The great metal blades rotated slowly, turned by a sea-salt breeze that blew from that other place.

Marshall pushed through the beaded curtain that hung in the door of the Baitshop, hearing sea-glass chime against puka shells and drowned men's bones as he did so.

"I see the phantom ocean's back again," he commented to the man in a crisp white apron who stood behind the counter.

"I wouldn't know," said Fred Suggs. "I've never been to this town before."

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ghostly hooks and spectral cutlasses littered the kitchen counter, pulsing with a faint blue other-light that resembled nothing so much as a migraine aura. Marshall winced. Ghost-pirates it was.

"Hey," said Simon, who was wearing a pair of sunglasses indoors to ward off the glare and trying to read an ancient tome on seagoing exorcisms at the same time.

"Hey," said Marshall, reaching through a tangle of discarded and incorporeal peg-legs in order to grab the cereal. "Problems at the lake?"

"Looks that way," Simon agreed. "I think Janet worked the closing shift last night, so I haven't called yet."

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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