The sea had always been a place of calm for Elena Ramirez. Since returning from the nightmare of the Isle of Teeth, she had taken a quiet post at the Halifax Maritime Museum, cataloguing relics and guiding the occasional tourist. The work was steady, unremarkable, and blessedly far from jungles that growled with hidden predators.But one morning, as gulls wheeled over the harbour and fog curled off the Atlantic, the old calm fractured.
“Miss Ramirez,” called a harbormaster, his face pale under the brim of his cap. “You’d best come down to Pier Nine. You need to see this.”
Elena followed him, boots clanging against the wet boards. A battered trawler drifted in the berth, its name stencilled in peeling letters: Marianne. The vessel looked as though it had been chewed by giants. Hull plating was peeled back, nets shredded into tatters, and the wheelhouse windows smashed.
A stink of brine and iron filled the air.
Two fishermen stood near the gangplank, their hands shaking as they lit cigarettes. They muttered in Acadian French, voices low and fearful. Elena caught only fragments: ombre énorme… des dents comme des lames… A vast shadow. Teeth like blades.
Inside the hold, she saw why.
Lying against the splintered boards was a tooth the size of her forearm. Yellowed, serrated, slick with salt. She froze. Memories surged unbidden—of the island, of monstrous jaws closing over screaming men, of blood staining the sand.
She reached out with trembling fingers, brushing the surface. The edges were sharp, unnaturally so. Whatever this tooth had belonged to, it was alive recently. And it was hunting.
“Elena?” the harbormaster whispered. “What kind of shark leaves a mark like that?”
She swallowed hard. “It’s not a shark.”
The fishermen crossed themselves. One spat into the sea.
That night, back in her apartment overlooking the harbour, Elena placed the tooth on her desk. The cracked compass lay beside it, the same one that had saved her life on the island. Its needle still twitched strangely, refusing to settle on north. She watched it spin, jitter, and lock toward the open ocean, as if drawn to something vast and unseen.
She told herself to throw both objects into the sea, to wash her hands of all of it. Yet she couldn’t. The tooth and compass seemed to pulse with the same unspoken truth: the Isle of Teeth had not finished with her.
Sleep eluded her. Each time she drifted, she heard echoes of roars across the surf. And in the small hours, when the fog pressed against the glass and the harbour groaned with the tide, Elena whispered the words she had sworn never to speak again.
“They followed us.”
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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