Now when I see a sign that reads ‘Don’t Feed the Animals,’ I know to not feed the fucking animals.

It’s worse when you not only feed the thing without realising what it can do, but to defend its right to do whatever the fuck it wants or to join it. It makes you an animal too.

You could never see what lay underneath the surface of the water at the end of the jetty. Half of the reason was because you barely ever walked down the end of the ancient thing in the first place. But you could see things bobbing on the surface, perhaps they were dead molluscs or bongs or rubbish. I never stood there long enough to work it out.

And it took tourists to come to really confirm that the people that lived in my little town were batshit crazy. I never really doubted it but their perplexing ambivalence to whatever lurked underneath the black swamp was made even weirder when they saw picnics and sing-songs by strangers as more of a threat.

“They’re not like us,” they’d say to which I’d reply “We have picnics too.” My ‘smart-arse’ tone was apparently what was really wrong with the world. They never looked themselves in the mirror.

Finally, they all decided they had to do something about these ‘tourists.’ Soon they would take over the whole town, they thought but I’d never seen more than a dozen.

I was waiting for them to light their pitchforks and march down the local park but the mob marched right down that rickety jetty with a bag of bait.

My parents knew what was in that place, but never told me. It had never risen the whole time I was alive. And I thought they didn’t want it too.

I stood at the back of faces that had lost all vision except straight ahead. The mayor dangled his hand and plopped rotten prawn heads into the water.

I had to step back as the jetty rumbled and black sludge bubbled underneath. “Come on boy,” they cried below, “Show those tourists reason.”

My vision went slightly blurry as I kept tracking backward feeling the temperature rise. Even everyone else looked a little scared. Had they forgotten exactly what they’d summoned?

Dozens of narrow-minded eyes watched with terror as out of the swamp, a thick black tentacle rose and slapped onto the jetty, crumbling underneath the weight. Another slapped on top, the wood collapsing underneath. I could hear them all whimper a little as the bulbous head finally came up above everything with nothing but a pile of sticks under it.

Its red eye burned brightly. I dared myself to look at it and I swear it was really burning, like it was one black slimy lantern making its way down to the picnic ground following the trail of putrid bait.

The frightened faces dropped as it slurped past. They all laughed and smiled, pretending none of them had been scared.

The tourists were like statues gripping their song books and guitars tightly on the chequered cloth. They barely even looked at the thing. It floated a tentacle around, hovering over the food before coming right up close to a child’s face. She tried not to cry as she felt the suction cup underneath breathe her in.

“I knew it’d go for those song books first,” a guy who usually never left the pub said, “Can’t stand those things. How dare they play their music?”

It did as he expected and took the book from the shaking child’s hands. We all gasped as it teetered back to reveal its underbelly blanketed with teeth on every inch 0f its surface.

The paper flapped in the wind of its sucking mouth. There was a spark in that lantern eye for one second, pure madness exploding. Flames shot out from its teeth, engulfing everything around it, burning their music to nothing.

A frenzy of following tentacles took the rest until all of their possessions were ash at their feet. My ears rang with the drunken cheering around me. I felt sick – until I felt angry when I saw those crushed faces, kneeling on the ground.

Would it go for them now? It didn’t.

All of that joyous hypocritical laughter and singing stopped dead when that lantern glowed on them. That leading tentacle turned and drew near, still a little hungry.