The gusty winds and high seas calmed by noon. A tepid sunlight pierced the ragged ceiling of cloud.

That afternoon the forward lookout reported what appeared to be wreckage, perhaps a capsized lifeboat, floating to the northeast. Davies slackened the engines and maneuvered closer. He was on the verge of ordering the boats prepared and cargo nets rigged when his Second Officer lowered his looking glass and said, “Sir, I don’t think it’s wreckage after all.”

They came alongside. It was not wreckage.

What troubled Captain Davies was that he couldn’t say what it was.

It bobbed in the swell, lazy with death, winter sunlight glistening on its long flanks. Some immense, bloated squid or octopus? Some part of some once-living thing, surely; but it resembled nothing Davies had seen in twenty-seven years at sea.

Rafe Buckley, his young First Officer, gazed at the thing as it bumped Oregon at the prow and slowly drifted aft, turning widdershins in the cold, still water. “Sir,” he said, “what do you make of it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what to make of it, Mr. Buckley.” He wished he hadn’t seen it ni the first place.

“It looks like — well, a sort of worm.”

It was segmented, annular, like a worm. But to call it a worm was to imagine a worm large enough to swallow one of the Oregon’s stacks. Surely no worm had ever sported the torn, lacy fronds — fins? a sort of gill? — that arose at intervals from the creature’s body. And there was its color, viscid pink and oily blue, like a drowned man’s thumb. And its head… if that vacuous, saw-toothed, eyeless maw could be called a head.

The worm rolled as it fell away aft, exposing a slick white belly that had been scavenged by sharks. Passengers mobbed the promenade deck, but the smell soon drove all but hardiest of them below.