The following is the opening to “Stormwalker,” a story I wrote in 1990 about the legendary Gray Man of Pawley’s Island, SC. It’s currently scheduled for a collection of supernatural stories I’m putting together following the final installment of The Saga of the Dead Silencer. Happy Hauntings!
He shimmers into being beneath leaden skies, alone on this very beach we’d walked together so long ago. After so many years asleep, he awakens to this gray sameness. This same island, this same fury approaching from beyond the horizon. Time and direction are all that change in his dreary, twilit hell.
Attuning, he takes his bearings from the occluded sun and foaming distemper of the ocean. He notes the skeletal black outline of the pier to his right, as vague and insubstantial as he amidst the billowing curtains of spume and sand.
He faces southeast. It will be very bad this time.
Shimmering, now solid as shadow, the dark apparition on the sandbar turns to stride across the washboard ripples of the swollen tidal pool. The sharp, hissing sands, the mad bluster of the winds rage vainly through his straight, military bearing as he approaches the houses beyond the dunes.
His manner is not one of a weary, self-pitying spirit. Not like myself, not like the rest who are free to depart this Earth and, having done, may only watch. No matter how onerous his burdens, he has always borne them so bravely and so well.
“Stormwalker” Copyright © 1990, 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.
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