The second thing you should know is: Oceanrest is haunted. I don’t mean “haunted by the ghost of the city it used to be,” either. I mean haunted. I mean it in the way people talk about deep Louisiana bayou and old derelict plantations and the dark woods of Romania and the unlit catacombs of Paris. I mean there are things here that ought not to be anywhere at all.

They adorn themselves in bone. They hood themselves in buck’s skulls, cow’s skulls, bull’s skulls, wolf’s skulls. They wear necklaces of teeth, phalanges, tarsals. Their fingers gleam in ivory rings, claw-tipped, leather-skinned. They might be human. They might not be human.