Jensen frowned at the makeshift fences and pylons, with handwritten warning signs, set about thirty yards back from the sea wall, marring the views of the picturesque fishing village. Tolbert, who owned the boarding house, had said nothing about this.

Tolbert greeted him at the bus stop and escorted him uphill to the clapboard house where he would spend the summer. The landlord wore opaque dark glasses and his expression was inscrutable. Jensen was so disturbed by this that he forgot his manners.

“Why is the shore blocked off?”

“It’s not safe. Even this side of the barrier might not be safe. It’s best to keep well clear.”

Jensen sighed. The whole purpose of the trip was to be in the water, boating among the various tiny islands dotting the expansive bay. He glared at Tolbert. “Can you see?”

Tolbert had a strange smile. “Well, yes. It was taken away but given back. I was too close to the water. The house should be safe.”

“Let’s see the room, then.”

Tolbert on the telephone, weeks ago, had seemed normal. But now… The next bus wouldn’t come through for another 24 hours.

The room was clean and offered a view of the harbor. Jensen took his meal inside and locked the door. No reason to stay more than a night. After reading for a while by the light of the moon, he fell asleep.

In the depth of the night, a tingling dull pain woke him, with a darkness as oppressive as the inside of a coffin. I can’t see IcantseeIcantsee, his mind screamed, and he raised his fingers to his eyes to find empty sockets. He heard a knock on the door. “It’s here already,” Tolbert said. “You don’t need to let me in.”

Jensen found he could still see — but not inside the room. Instead, his view was of the street, but a mouse’s view, just above the pavement. Crawling.

“Maybe in the end there’s not a limit to its reach,” Tolbert said.

It took hours for Jensen’s new sight to crawl along the street to the worn stone seawall, and fall into the salty water. Suddenly he could also see in the room again, not in the same way, more a knowledge of where everything was than the image itself.

“I see both,” Jensen cried.

“It taxes the mind,” Tolbert said.

The sun was rising. Underwater, there were other eyes, moving sinuously, trailing nerves and bits of flesh. Swimming toward something dim but large, with legs or trunks. The size of a building. His eyes, and all the others, joined it. Became a part of it. Hours or days later, it started to move.

As it broke the surface of the water, Jensen’s second vision, of the room around him, went dark again. He saw only a compound view of the city, as an alien nightmare, through the thousands of the eyes of the giant thing that was now lumbering out of the sea.