Out of the ocean they came, rising from the surf: stealthy crabs, unfolding their giant legs like scaffolding poles. Silently, they stole into the villages, hamlets and farms, sweeping and surveying, scooping sleeping children from their beds, and when they could find no more, they scuttled seawards again, into the drowning depths. When the first fingers of dawn dragged over the faces of the fishermen and farmers and pulled them back into the waking world, all their pretty ones were gone.
Parents hurled curses at church altars, wept along high hedged lanes, screamed out their anguish into rockpools and poured their endless salt-grief into the waves that broke on the shore. In the public houses, barmaids pulled pints of foaming sorrow and old men supped them, as silent as the grave.
The late winter rains washed clean the children's hopscotch markings in the playground. The schoolroom echoed with the tick of the clock and the date on the blackboard remained unchanged. By the time the martins returned to their nests in the eaves of the school building, the master and mistress were gone.
A listlessness settled on the people then, like a smothering ash. Some died and were laid to rest. Some placed their belongings on the back of a cart and rode to the town, hoping that distance would help them heal. A few stayed for a while, hoping against hope. Farm gate hinges rusted. Cottage window frames rotted. Ivy crept into kitchens and parlours. A vixen raised her cubs in the milking shed and adders sunned themselves on the churchyard steps.
The Great House, once full of footmen, butlers and ladies' maids, shrank back up the driveway; its gardens over-grew with brambles, bindweed and blackthorn. Buzzards mewed high overhead on thermals and gulls made their nests in the clifftops of its roof and chimney stacks.
The moon was high and round on the night the stolen ones came back, out of the surf. Past the rockpools they came, up the high-hedged honey-suckle lanes, through the tousled churchyard and into the village streets. Some chattered, some sang, some were silent and shy. Some ran, some limped. Some were whole and some were not, and some were nothing more than pale, translucent whispers.
In the cottages, candles were lit by shaking hands, shawls thrown hastily around hunched shoulders, feet thrust into boots by the doors. Out into the night came the old ones who had waited, out into the embrace of those familiar strangers - searching the faces for their own lost ones.
Into the small hours they talked then, the old ones and the young, swapping stories. There was laughter and there were tears and there was joy and there was remembrance. When, finally, the stars finally winked out, and the sky grew pale, beds were made up and heads were laid down wherever they could find a place.
When they woke, they said, they would remake the world anew.
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