Three nights after the mannequins vanished, the estuary gave something back.
The tide was running hard under moonlight when Danny Vale saw it drifting beyond the moorings.
At first he thought it was driftwood.
But Blackwater had taught Danny long ago that anything floating at night was worth checking before someone else checked first.
Just professionally unlucky in ways that occasionally produced opportunity.
He stole diesel from unattended machinery, lifted wallets during festival weekends, and once made nearly four hundred pounds selling stolen copper piping back to the man it had been stolen from.
The village called him a thief.
Danny preferred resourceful.
Only the soft creak of wet rope and tide beneath him.
The bale was wrapped in black tarpaulin and lashed tight with marine cord.
Something about it made the water around it seem darker.
Danny hooked it and dragged it toward the old slipway near the abandoned smokehouse.
Thin silver needles across the estuary.
By the time he cut the ropes open, his hands were black with tar.
Bundles upon bundles of old notes wrapped in oilskin.
For one impossible second he simply stared.
The kind of laugh a desperate man makes when fortune finally loses concentration.
A tarry smell rising from them, sweet and rotten together.
Dense black resin packed into waxed cloth.
Danny suddenly stopped smiling.
Only fog gathering low again.
By dawn, rumours had already begun.
A vessel missing offshore.
Just fragments of timber washing near Crow Point and whispers from fishermen that someone had “scuppered her proper.”
Blackwater preferred silence until silence became impossible.
Danny hid the bale beneath floorboards in his late uncle’s empty boathouse.
He kept only two bundles of notes upstairs.
Just enough to feel rich.
Just enough to feel doomed.
Dietrich Sloane first saw him outside Miriam’s café that afternoon.
There was river mud still dried on one boot.
And fear sat on him badly.
“You found something,” Sloane said quietly.
Danny nearly dropped his tea.
“Don’t know what you mean.”
Sloane looked toward the estuary.
“No,” said Sloane. “I think you were lucky.”
The foghorn sounded once across the water.
Sloane finished his cigarette.
“Luck,” he said, “is usually just the first part.”
That night, the first man arrived.
He walked into Blackwater as though following directions only he could hear.
People noticed him because he asked no questions.
He stood at the harbour wall for nearly an hour staring at the tide.
Then another arrived the following morning.
Like the mannequins had found skin.
Danny saw one outside the boathouse at dusk.
Danny remained hidden upstairs clutching a rusted flare gun while sweat rolled down his neck.
The suited man eventually walked away.
As if he already knew where everything was.
On the fourth night, Danny ran.
He stuffed what money he could into a canvas bag and headed inland through the old alleys behind the chapel.
Rain hammered the rooftops.
Danny cut through Miller’s Lane.
Past the mannequin hatch outside the Inn—
Someone stood beneath the archway ahead.
Then another emerged silently from the fog near the quay steps.
“Take it!” he yelled. “Take the bloody thing!”
One of them tilted his head slightly.
Exactly like the mannequin had.
Danny suddenly realised something horrifying.
He had never actually seen any of these men arrive in the village.
As if Blackwater itself was placing them.
The Blackwater Inn door stood open.
Sloane seated alone near the fire.
Danny burst in soaked and shaking.
Sloane looked at him calmly.
“Did you open all of it?”
A silence settled heavily between them.
Outside, footsteps stopped.
Sloane stared into the fire.
“Years ago,” he said quietly, “boats used to move certain cargo along this coast. Things that never officially arrived anywhere.”
Danny’s breathing trembled.
“The bale wasn’t lost,” Sloane continued. “It was hidden.”
Sloane finally looked at him.
“The kind of people who sink their own vessel before letting something be found.”
three slow knocks against the Inn door.
Sloane’s expression darkened slightly.
“The money back,” he said.
“Or the part inside you now.”
Sloane nodded toward Danny’s hands.
Black tar still sat beneath his fingernails.
The opium resin had soaked through the cuts in his skin.
Outside, the knocking came again.
As if whoever stood beyond the door knew they no longer needed to hurry.
And out on the estuary, beneath the tide-black water—
something large moved silently past the drowned wreck.
