Many strange items wash up on beaches. Dead things no longer capable of controlling the paths of their bodies, blobs of gelatinous substance, secrets no longer secret, sea pickles and ice balls,corpses and fossils, shipwrecks and lonely messages in bottles, broken shells and crustaceans, the remains of millions of lives lived and lost, all naked and frail in their sudden and unexpected exposure. Most things on land expect that once they're done existing, the residue of their brief occupancy will be fittingly absorbed by the very thing that held them none-too-kindly on its rocky surface, but the untethered dwellers of the waters have no such guarantee. Instead, what is left of them continues onward—perhaps ingested by others whose ends aren't much further down the timeline of perpetuity, perhaps as artfully decomposing reminders of transience—and may as well be twinkling particles of flesh and carapace and scale drifting through the abyssal void of the upper cosmos as they are that of the lower. Eternity means something different in the deep than it does on land.

On occasion, something crawls from the water that isn't quite meant to do so. While this aberration occurs more often than it ought, to human memory (which is limited and fleeting at best and broken at worst) it is an occurrence unknown, and though such a fluke is usually the enigmatic result of a manifestation long in cosmic making, it is other times entwined with human will, as was the case that summer, the same summer a particular family happened to be staying at a particular house on a particular beach. For there are few accidents in the deep, and there are even fewer accidents when that deep elects to interact with the shallows.

A viscous moon wavered crystal white behind vaporous wisps of condensed air. An imperfect disc reflected far out over the dark waters like a bioluminescent pearl coughed out by some oyster tired of its irritating presence. The ocean was almost too calm, really, for a night of such consequence, and yet as one vast body it knew itself, spoke to its furthest reaches and fathoms, and maybe agreed upon stillness—who could say? Whether the Jenny waited for the moment or the moment occurred specifically for the Jenny was a sort of chicken-egg question not worth pondering. Whatever the truth of the matter, there were suddenly dark little indentations in the sand leading from out of the still waters where before there were none. The tracks were the size of, perhaps, shirt-buttons (if buttons were turned up on their sides), and they vanished once they reached dry sand, where few impressions remained. No observers stood on the beach that night, not even members of the Curry family, who'd spent the day divided between hospitals and rock caves and bedrooms, questions and shames and concerns clouding most of their minds. No one walked a dog or stole a romantic beach stroll, late-night jogged or observed stars (though the sky was remarkably clear). So the Jenny moved unimpeded.

The Jenny wasn't alive, not really. Not in the sense that alive things were alive. But it wasn't dead, either (not in that way). Not everything exists in those ways. The Jenny was difficult to explain, because the Jenny itself wasn't so much a sentient thing as it was a product of its maker, an illusion of sorts, and while it possessed some will of its own, it didn't have the capacity to make use of it. Didn't seem to have the desire to make use of it, or even the knowledge of what desire was.

In any case, the thing moved quickly, skittered and darted like a bone in the moonlight, blanched enough to make an impression yet too quick to entirely see, if one were around to try to see it. It sought the shelter of driftwood or clumps of dune grass as it left the open sands, seeming to seek out one particular deck, one particular building, for it was unsatisfied in several places and moved house to house until it at last decided to pause. With slower, more deliberate steps, the Jenny ascended the walkway from the sands to the back porch, climbing up onto the railing, and when it had reached the darkened house, it stopped and was still.

From an upper window, a yarn-haired doll watched the Jenny, though whether anything at all registered in the stuffing of Bloomy's cloth head was moot, and whether or not she'd pass on to her human friend whatever observances she took in was equally arguable. Still, she stared unblinkingly with her cracked painted eyes, smiled primly with her faded painted lips upon the delicate ossified star below as it, in turn, gazed with its empty and immoving holes up at her. Things clinked about in what qualified as the Jenny's head, bits of cartilage come loose, or sand lumps grown unstuck. These things rattled slightly in conjunction with whatever it did in place of thinking, and after several moments of airy silence during which even the ocean seemed to be pondering in quiet, the Jenny hopped off the deck and darted across the sand yards below, under the house.

On it went, away from the vacationers' homes and toward town, scurrying quite boldly right out in the open, along the paved roads and sidewalks where not a bird, not a cat, not a car nor a human moved. The hour was somewhere past midnight though not so far that the next day felt truly begun, late enough for all establishments to be long closed in a small town and not early enough for AM deliveries. This was Blackswallow Beach—might as well be off the map for all the traffic it got—and not even a gas station risked all-night hours, here. So the Jenny trotted along with no concern, its movements awkward due to its jointlessness. Only a slit right up its middle created the semblance of legs, and by stepping one in front of the other, the thing managed to totter at a surprising speed so long as there were no hindrances. Concrete was, as well, far easier to traverse than was sand. Besides those primordial legs and the holes which resembled eyes, the Jenny was in possession of two odd, small, flared appendages on its sides (something akin to short unbendable arms) and a triangular aperture beneath its eyes, a hole that could not close, and this gave the impression of a perpetually shocked mouth.

No one knew where the Jenny came from. The Jenny itself didn't know where she came from. She was called "she" merely because it was how her user referred to her. Perhaps that user had been the one to have something to do with her existence, but the Jenny was powerless to think of anything like existence or purpose, so she carried on, understanding her task merely because it was all she knew.

Moisture glistened on the black pavement from a light shower that had occurred about half an hour earlier; it'd lingered because of the humidity. Streetlamps shone in rings upon the ground, and the Jenny flickered through them. Though this was her first official tryst in Blackswallow Beach, she knew her way by heart, the strings of such convoluted delusions familiar to all beings like herself. It was as if, in fact, a fishing lure had been cast way out into the depths and caught her, pulled her out of the waters, and was now reeling her in through the winding streets of the town all the way to its edge, where a peculiar shop had lay dormant in layers of dust and memory and heavy curtains for an indefinite amount of time.

When the Jenny climbed a sidewalk and found herself at last across the street from the storefront of Quaxton's Manikins and Marionettes, she paused.

An eternity of delights awaited any who moved past that door, the one with the harlequin-head doorknob. It was what they'd been told, the Jenny recalled, what they'd heard: An eternity of delights. Of course, words like "eternity" and "delight" meant nothing to the Jenny. It knew only commands, like the Golem of legend, and the command, now, was wait.

The boy was first, appearing as a ghost out of the shadows, as mute and severe as was the Jenny. He drew right up beside her, though she rose only midway to his calf, and gave her a glance. She did not have the ability to turn and look up at him, nor would she have done so anyway. The boy wore a white collared shirt, buttoned and belted into khaki shorts. His hair and bare feet, however, indicated a wild nature, as filthy as they were, and even more overt were the multiple uneven antler-ish protrusions emerging from the sides and back of his head. He did not blink as he stood with clenched fists, some darkness frothing beyond his devilish dark irises, and the streaks of dirt across his face indicated that for as clean as his clothing remarkably was, he'd probably been recently subsisting in the wilderness. Surely, he was quite hungry for the sort of food the Jenny knew he craved.

A rustle of trees snapped the boy's attention upward, and he growled when he caught sight of a towering man behind them, lowering a hat toward him. "My apologies," the skeletal giant resonated. "It was not my intention to startle you. I assure you, we're old friends."

"Diablo has the memory of a sea cucumber." The words were spoken in a relatively feminine voice, but the tone quickly dipped as it added, "He's nobody's friend."

The giant and the boy regarded the new arrival, an odd person whose very self seemed divided down the middle into male and female halves. The half n'half strode unevenly in assertive and demure steps until they were next to the boy, at whom they nodded respectfully, and then all three arrivals glanced at the Jenny before focusing their undivided attention on the empty storefront across the street.

A noiseless few moments passed before the giant spoke from above, his voice a sonorous vibrato: "Ah, and now arrives our most excellent witch mistress, who's already met with success!"

The others could not see whom he meant, but within moments, a pair of women descended from the dark alley beyond the shop, one writhing in tentacles, the other crawling in scales, and the pair, rather than approach the assembly gathered across the street, chose to wait outside the empty windows of Quaxton's.

"Damned pretentious pair, as usual," muttered the half n'half's masculine side.

The boy and the man said nothing, though the former growled.

A shriek rent the air somewhere behind them, from the street leading toward the town. It was a man's cry, but it did not surprise any of those who'd gathered. In fact they hardly paid it heed beyond a perk of the shoulders, a slight eye roll, and when the sweating, half-nude pair of men at last hauled themselves raucously up the hill and into view, their unlit torches in their hands, they were arguing heatedly between themselves.

The half n'half narrowed their eyes not at the approaching men but at the women across the way, the siren and the lizard woman—they envied that pair, who even now had their forked tongues and feelers exploring one another in sensual display before that damned empty window as if no one else in the world existed but them.

"Have you brought your fire to light our way, Franek and Fergus?" inquired the giant, offering a wholesome chuckle.

"Fuck off!" insisted one of them before he turned back to his counterpart. "It's just the spider woman you pussy. Give it to the giant, why don't you? He likes all that fucking shit."

"Oh, yeah!" The other flamethrower, Franek or Fergus, whichever he was, turned his gaping face toward the Gaunt Gent's knee and looked up. "Here, eh?" He awkwardly lifted his shoulder, tilted his head as if afraid of his own body. "You want her?"

Lowering himself slowly, formidably, like a god from the clouds, the giant drew too near the flamethrower for the latter's comfort, and yet the flamethrower stayed put until the giant's enormous head was practically upon him.

"Ah, I see," the giant's cadaverous features hollowly nodded, and he uncurled an unnaturally long, bony finger until it just touched the flamethrower's upper arm.

As obscure as the late hour made their surroundings, anyone close enough to see would have noticed a tiny black arachnid scurry from the flamethrower's shoulder and onto the giant's gentle outstretched finger. The gaunt fellow proceeded to rise back up into the gloom, taking his spider acquaintance with him, happy to have someone with whom he could speak of matters that might interest them both.

"You think she'd do me like that?" one of the flamethrowers commented, Fergus, probably, speaking to no one in particular yet indicating the oblivious-to-the-world women with their tongues in each other's throats across the street.

The half n'half turned and eyed the flamethrower acrimoniously for reasons not even they really understood.

"Well we'd better get on with it, right? 'Afore they start fucking right there!" That one was Franek.

"The Jenny hasn't moved, yet," retorted the half n'half in its deeper tone, crossing its one bare, muscular arm over its other dainty, lace-shawled arm.

The flamethrowers drew nearer one another and muttered between themselves, argued about things in a language no one else understood while they gesticulated with their dead torches, and that lasted for a few tense moments while everyone watched the two sweltering women across the way in their awkward intercourse until at last a rather loud huffling, whurfling noise—like air being pressed from an exhausted malfunctioning whoopee cushion—came also from behind, up the hill.

Poor, poor Elmer. Even though he was assisted by a fabulously beautiful, buxom, luxuriously bearded woman, his heart was near bursting as he lumbered up that steep slope. An apple green Volkswagen beetle puttered along behind him, practically pushing him upward as he fell back against the bumper. Surely the elephantine man would have died right there on the pavement had the car and the woman been unavailable as reinforcement, for he was too large to fit in the vehicle, and he was far too heavy to carry in any other way. But at last the man made it up to the top, where he joined the others, and by then with all the noise and show he made upon arrival, even the siren witch and the lizard woman had stopped their slithering and sucking to watch what was going on around them.

Once he'd crested the hill, Elmer dropped upon his immense bottom, popping a few of the remaining buttons on his velvety slacks, and panted like a dog. The giant beside him bent at the waist and began to stroke his friend's head as if the fat man were a puppy while Elmer steadily wept thick tears in his strange silence.

Inattentive to what went on otherwise, to the variety of others who were continuing to arrive, the Jenny at last moved once again, scuttering toward the parked Volkswagen as its driver's door opened. She rounded the front of the car and met the unnatural dwarf in his clown suit as he stepped out.

With his rolling bloodshot eyes, the clown glared at the Jenny through the holes in his white-fleshed mask. He coughed for a moment; something pink and gelatinous splattered out of the open lining of the mask's neck and onto his bow tie and suit. With a reluctant hobble, the clown slammed his car door and made his way to the front door of Quaxton's shop. All those assembled watched in anxious expectancy, knowing what came next yet unsure they were ready for it, all the same. The clown fussed about in his pockets, swore profusely, coughed more, and all the while the Jenny waited patiently at his side. When at last he found what he sought, the clown withdrew the correct key and placed it within the waiting keyhole. The ceramic features on the door handle gaped, screamed, and grinned; the entire storefront quivered and shimmered with a pearlescent gleam; and the door gave way, pushing inward toward a black hole of plush, saccharine decay.

One by one, each of the assembled entered Quaxton's Manikins and Marionettes. The Jenny made sure they followed orders, and then she herself entered, assuring the door closed and locked solidly behind her.