Two years later, the small seaside village of Frenchman’s Bay began to experience some strange phenomena. It began with a thick fog that drifted in from offshore, enveloping the hamlet in a ghostly mist. When it was still cloaking the village at midday many of the two hundred and twenty inhabitants were beginning to wonder what it all meant. Not even the fishermen, with decades of experience between them, risked taking their vessels out in such conditions, except Dan Johnson, who defied the warnings of his fellow seamen and headed out into a fate unknown. More unsettling, however, was the incredible number of gulls and terns that had fallen dead or dying from the sky, and the two sperm whales that had beached themselves.
In his house on a hill that looked out across a usually picturesque
