Mooncusser Cove

The moon had never been their ally. They cursed it. Condemned it. Loathed its reflection on the sea and hated its thieving light. In the years before the cathartic wrecking of the Sea Shadow, moonlit nights were simply restless nights without profit. After the wrecking, bright nights were hungry nights. Pervasive, bone-rattling nights of hunger with pangs so desperate and so deep that death and an eternity in Hell seemed less terrible.

The kin, the Mooncusser clan, scourge of the coast, land pirates and scallywags, had clung to the heels of the first wave of Puritans to settle the New World and had been long feared for their guile and cleverness. But, too, they were God-fearing early-American Christians. Though called "lazy" by the Puritans for their trickster's ways, they tithed, owned front pews in the sanctuary, and they lived strong, moral lives--as moral as could be for pirates, that is.

Marriage vows were held sacred within the clan. Children were baptized, and men of God were respected and left unmolested should they be brave enough, or daft enough, to wander the beach of the kin. Slavery was not tolerated. Most, though certainly not all, seafaring men drawn into Mooncusser Cove on dark nights by the clan's bright fire were given an opportunity to work and profit from their wrecking before being ushered from life at the point of a sword. The choice to live or the choice to die saw several good men change professions over the centuries the kin ruled the beach.

Theirs was a mixed lineage. As diverse as the melting pot America eventually came to be. Egyptian, Native American and Eastern European bloods married and added their flavors to the stew of the kin. Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Chinese flowering tendrils of rich heritage found their way onto the clan's family tree. From seafaring Frenchmen to Ivory Coast Africans destined for Southern plantations to Basque Jews escaping persecution by the Church, they all mixed their passion and seed with the kin. What man could say nay to a wild beachling woman wanting a new husband, be it for love or convenience?

The kin lit their bonfires to fool and wreck the lost, the storm-ravaged and the unwary. One dark night the Sea Shadow had been grounded by the lure of their fire. The captain of said vessel had been wrecked, but had not been a fool, nor had he been human. This became frighteningly apparent when the clan's leader slit the throat of the powdered-wigged buffoon wearing captain's brass. There'd been no spray of blood nor muffled death cry.

The captain did make a verbal response to the bite of the land-pirate's blade against his throat, however. And it was most certainly the last sound a Mooncusser should ever hear from a wrecked ship and dying crew. Laughter. The hearty laughter of a master of men and slave to none. It heralded an eerie stillness on the beach. It penetrated and pierced them. It was an unnatural harbinger of an evil yet to embrace the beach.

The clan's lead man died where he stood, a look of complete bewilderment on his face as he toppled over the railing of the shoaled ship. The other men held their blades aloft, unable to wield them, looking much like statues of heroic warriors. The captain of the Sea Shadow had a great and terrible power over them all.

He spoke to the clan with a thick accent. Spanish, perhaps. "Wreck me, will you, foul beachlings? Know you not with whom you tangle?"

When the unholy captain waded ashore, the second man of the clan greeted him with a pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other. "What manner of unclean monster are you that bleeds not in the wake of a blade's bite?"

"I am God to you!" the captain stormed.

The women crossed themselves at the blasphemy. The second man of the clan, Hezekiah Adaire, put more stock in his pistol than in his crucifix. "Only a man would boast so, and if a man, you can die!" he spat.

He fired. The shot struck the captain dead center.

The captain again laughed. It was a haunting, gut-wrenching, ear-shattering din. "You can't kill me. You may have wrecked my ship, but I can get another--nay--I am compelled to get another. You may have subdued my crew, but there are always men ready to set sail if offered enough coin, grog and belly warmers." He paused. "In fact, my comfort woman died mid-point in our voyage. We tossed her overboard, and now she's whore to the fishes. I'll take one of your women to replace her." He scanned the high ground where a dozen or so women and girls had gathered. "I'll take the young one holding my first mate's boot in her hand. She looks fresh enough to last a voyage or two."

Hezekiah Adaire postured aggressively. "By God, you will not."

The captain smiled. "I already told you, I am God. I'll take that girl the night of the next new moon. Have her ready for me."

It was Vesper he wanted. Vesper Highgate-Adaire. Daughter of the now-deceased leader of the clan. Thirteen and comely, with suitors aplenty but no mind to marry, she knew what the captain wanted of her. She was no stranger to the ways of men and women.

She dropped the sturdy leather boot she'd removed from a sailor's corpse onto the sand. "I'll take no part in your seafaring debauch, sir."

The captain chuckled. "Of course, you will."

"I'll go in her stead," Vesper's mother said, her voice barely wavering. "She is a child, and a child should not be subjected to the whims of a sailor."

"And yet this child has been subjected to murderous acts of piracy as a thieving beachling. She looks of age to me. She has the comely demeanor of a young woman about to come into full bloom. I see her little upturned buppies peeking out at me. What a time I'll have wagging my tail between those mounds of glory, I tell you! You needn't worry, mother. What we'll do with her is no worse than what will happen to her when she's married off to one of her own sotted kin."

"My daughter will not become bed warmer to the Beast."

"Beast? You flatter me." The captain laughed. "I was once human. I had a wife and a son and dined at the tables of Europe's royals and heads of state. I was a gambling man. I was a passionate man. I loved the company of women and the taste of wine from their lips. My passions condemned me when I lost a great wager. I cheated. And I was punished. I am a restless shade of what I once was--driven to sail the oceans of the world. I cannot die. Nor can I truly live. If I were the Beast, I am certain I'd have the power to end my suffering. Now, give me the girl on the new moon, and molest not the crew I send to make repairs. Return that which you have taken--all of it. The boots, the sailcloth, the brass fixtures down to the smallest nail. Do these things, and I shall not share my curse with your clan. Take anything from my ship, hinder her repairs or fail to bring the girl to me upon my return twenty-eight days hence, then you and yours shall suffer the Shadow's dark blessings for all time. Or at least until you've repaid your debt to me. This, I promise."

The Mooncusser clan didn't believe him. The man failed to bleed out after having his throat cut, and they didn't believe him.

Vesper had believed every word. She saw the curse smoldering in the captain's eyes barely hidden behind the fire he had stoked for her. The non-reaction of her kin, she realized later, must have been the curse already working its powers upon them. How could they ignore a command of the waking dead? How could they not mourn the loss of her father? It seemed all their souls died that night. To save the kin from a living Hell, she made up her young mind to sail when the captain returned.

Her world collapsed when Hezekiah defiantly torched the wreckage. Her father's body burnt with it, and the fire lit up the sky with frightening, twisted blue flames.

She wished more than once over the centuries that she could have taken a grand leap of faith and been consumed in that fire.

The burning opened the floodgate of the captain's curse upon the kin. She saw it in the flames. She tasted the clan's new needs upon her lips. The aroma of restless flesh and blood filled her lungs as the days passed. It was Eighteen Hundred Seventy-Seven, and the beginning of their great suffering. There was terrible anguish as the truth of their new unclean needs became overwhelmingly apparent. Nothing would fill their bellies. Dire, unending hunger led them like a cruel taskmaster. It was pervasive and horrible. It nearly did them all in. By broken heart, shame and suicide, the clan floundered in the darkness before coming to terms with their lot. Some starved to death rather than embrace the cannibalism forced upon them.

But, desperate hunger can move even the pious to act against their upbringing.

They embraced their new life as Shadow Lovers. Incubi. Succubae. Land pirates turned hungry demon-spirits.

By blood or seed,

We need to feed.

The women always fed first.

Wrecked sailors were men with men's needs. It was easy enough to coax a kiss or fondle from them as the kin came to their rescue with warm blankets and bottles of grog. Spiders inviting wounded flies to rest in their webs. Then, with those sailors reeling from the blood-poisoning of a Mooncusser woman's sting, the men folk of the clan would come to feed.

The clan, and each of them for all time, became accursed beasts, feeding on the souls of others by way of energies best left expended only in the marriage bed or upon the very life-blood of a sailor hoping to find a safe port at the tip of the flame, not a cutlass or pistol.

Fearful of eternal damnation and shunned from the Sacraments of the Church, others did what they needed to do to quell their hunger before retreating into feverish prayers, desperate to invoke God's forgiveness. But when the skies grew dark, and the moon failed to glow, prayer beads were set aside. Thus it was for hundreds of years.

The clan continued.

True it was that as wreckers and land pirates they needed to keep prying eyes away, but after the Sea Shadow stained their shore, the need for secrecy became dire.

The wealthy often employ bodyguards. It was no different for the Mooncussers.

Smart men, men with strong backs and quick minds, men who saw gold in the vision of the clan, pledged loyalty to the beachlings and became their protectors. Their Paladins. It was a blood oath, and duty passed from father to son, and sometimes even a manly girl-child with no suitors followed the call. So long as the kin were protected, it mattered not if their Paladin wore skirts or breeches.

When sails gave way to steam and their fires were dimmed by the glow of a lighthouse, their plundering land-pirate ways were abandoned. Their once exciting and romantic deeds of pirating wrecks along the shoreline became legends and bed-time stories. But legends die hard, and even then, they still need to eat.

For decades Vesper harbored the dream that the captain would return. She would then go with him willingly and beg him to remove the curse of the Shadow Lover from her kin. If only she had stepped forward the night of the wreck, her family would be in God's hands instead of wandering the earth to suckle at the teat of humanity like parasites.

Her sisters, Lauds, Terce, Sext, Nonne, Matins and Vigil, had moved away from the shore in Nineteen Forty-Two, choosing to live nomadic, gypsy lives rather than wait for the region to become so steeped with their venom that their secret would no longer be safe. With them, the last Paladin had fled.

Vesper scanned paranormal sites periodically, looking for men or women who claimed to have been accosted by an Incubus or a Succubus in the night. She read tabloids and newsstand rags--as sensationalized truth was still truth. She hoped, someday, to see her family again. She hoped they would return to their ancestral home--Mooncusser Cove. Though she did not know their whereabouts, she had a plan to make it safe for her kin to return. Once it was safe for them to return--the necessary conditions having been met--she'd find them all. Somehow.