Cecil was about to run. A hulking beast on two legs stepped into the door of his cell. The beast was dark, almost absent, like Death in his blackest hooded cloak. From the dark, claws jutted out like razors. Fangs glinted white and red, as if a fire flickered on them. In them. Maybe whiskers above the fangs. Cecil was certain the beast was Edmond, playing a prank or dressing up for a Halloween party. But Cecil tasted of blood. He smelled rotting flesh. He heard the grinding gnash of fangs and claws.
“This was Leb’s second or third monster now. This little boat. He thought he’d mastered the thing six months ago. He hadn’t.
‘You want me to do it?’ Luther started to stand from the rear seat of the rowboat.
‘Have you ever rowed a boat?’
‘Of course I’ve rowed a boat.’
‘When?’
Luther sat back down. ‘Plenty of times…. What, you think I’ve lived twelve years underneath Oldham’s Fish and Crab, on an island surrounded by fish and crawling with fishermen, and I’ve never rowed a boat?’”
In the sequel to At a Wall on an Island, we pick up with the inhabitants of La Mirada island six months after the infamous “ghost treasure mystery” that put the little island on the map. As we move from winter into summer, just as things begin to seem right with the world again (despite the island’s new notoriety) people start getting attacked and killed by a mysterious fiend described by the few witnesses as a hulking someone wearing a werewolf or cat mask.
When the graveyard finally gets a commemorative plaque for General Cornwallis, Leb leads a ceremony at the spot where they buried the cat on Castle Island. The attendees of the ceremony include Leb, Elspeth, Luther, Cecil, Caper, Henry, the La Mirada Witch and her “warlock” brother. (They invited others, including Mrs. Prattle, Elspeth’s grandmother, and Chief Murphree, who bowed out, and Durry who refused to get in Cecil’s crate, still.) Somehow, the ceremony unleashes a relentless, wrathful beast that takes retributive action against anyone who threatens any of the ceremony participants. Did the La Mirada Witch conjure something? The Warlock, angry and disturbed by the recent violence in their home? Bertram? Some other power?
Whatever happened, it's on them to stop it.
