plot

on the surface, sidrón island is a paradise. plainly so, with no asterisk attached. it’s a lush, volcanic country with one great peak cresting the mainland, where the land, sea, and sky run for miles higher than one can fathom. the deep greens, crystal blues, and glowing yellows are pictorial garlands, strung from one horizon to the next — look long enough, and it’s as though the island promises something everlasting.

underneath the grandeur, sidrón lives slow. coiled landlines, pastel refrigerators built like safes, and television sets so heavily convex you’d swear you’d bought a glass orb in a box with antennae bolted to the top. some roads are paved, some are dirt — the islanders stopped minding the difference a long time ago. they know that all the trails wind everywhere a person could want to go, and they’ve been walked smooth over, and all that’s left is to put up official signs — eventually, when whoever’s in charge gets around to it.

the wealthy (and arrogant) have their boxy muscle cars and their hardtail motorcycles; everyone else walks, or bicycles inland when the shore feels far, while the tin-can trucks and horses split the hauling of the town’s goods between them. if one is lucky enough to get their own horse — purchased from the barns — more power to them. no one much likes the sound of an engine, anyway.

there are no corporations. no chains, no enterprise with a board of shareholders, no establishment with the letters “ltd” anywhere near its name. air conditioning is about as far ahead as sidrón cares to get, and even then, it’s reserved for the lucky. in place of future-forward sensibilities, there are ice-cold soda floats, a vaudeville bill that changes every fortnight, and the privilege of having sun-kissed skin.

the islanders are happy. well… content. on an island this old, the latter is more impressive.

but sidrón didn’t use to be like this. or it did, and always has, and the two thousand years since anyone first set foot on it have done nothing but teach the island how to bend to their will. really, who likes the feeling of being conquered?

history has it the island rose out of the water already glorious: the great peak, the fertile soil, the impossible colour. all of it in place from the start, ringed by a scatter of islets. it’s as if the island were destiny made manifest — but what it is is still up for discussion.

and the question of who arrived first is the oldest, most contended argument on sidrón, and the one least likely to ever be settled, because everyone tells it differently.

historians (native to the island, of course) will tell you that sidrón was found as a refuge, come upon by a people whose old land had been destroyed, then made liveable by hand across generations. the vampires will tell you — though only ever to one another — that they were here first and have always been here, with the caves near the sea their first homes. the werewolves say the same, and with the same privacy. the witches can take the argument or leave it; of everyone on sidrón with a stake in who came first, they’ve decided it doesn’t much matter who was standing on the sand when it was new.

and so the humble seaside town grew from nothing into a place where a person could be born, live a whole (and relatively happy) life, and die without ever needing to leave. slowly, sidrón became a “somewhere,” even as the rest of the world tore on ahead of it. the islanders made their peace with running a bit behind. it suits them. they consider it part of the charm.

there’s always truth in fiction, as the islanders like to say — and the truth buried in sidrón’s fiction is this: for a long stretch of those early centuries, anywhere past the edges of the little seaside town wasn’t safe to be after dark, and for a good while, it wasn’t safe at all.

then, somewhere around sidrón’s first thousandth year, the islanders began to notice something. the world across their water was raising palaces, and lining its streets with commerce, and building up great religious and political capitals — while sidrón seemed to be going the other way. people were disappearing. and the ones who turned up again turned up… wrong. mangled past recognition, their bodies left without the honour a person is owed on their way out of the earth. (it was, obviously, the work of something inhuman. everyone knew that much, even though they wouldn’t let themselves believe it.)

it was one man who decided to do something. shibata no akitsune came to sidrón already a warrior, having made his name spilling a fair amount of blood in some war back in the country he sailed from, and he arrived to find an island where every other soul knew how to hunt an animal for the pot and not for the things that were killing them.

but akitsune did. he turned his skills on the dark and dediated his life to it, beginning a bloodline of the island’s saviour-exterminators — running clean and unbroken.

the beginning of the extermination turned the different factions on one another, each blaming the rest for the attention they drew, and what followed was the better part of a civil war fought entirely in the dark. and what the islanders would awaken to (unimaginable, irrevocable loss) was the soil that legends grew out of.

at first, the stories were a way to make sense of what people had no other way to explain. then, they became a way to frighten children into doing as they were told. then, in time, they hardened into folklore. the stories became a wall — deliberately constructed to be impenetrable — separating the ordinary lives of ordinary people from the inhuman lives being led just a few miles up the dark road.

it was somewhere in here that the word arrived: nightcrawlers.

the islanders believed in them, or they didn’t — either way, what ultimately united them was this: they were a people who prized their own safety over the truth. and then the tales kept stacking, one on top of the next, until they stopped being tales and became what they’d come to call the complete mythology of sidrón.

by the 1890s, the nightcrawler hunger-state (essentially, the complete opposite of a commonwealth) had nearly eaten itself alive. the islanders had left it to its own devices, and in the absence of restraint, “it” had grown into a sizeable portion of the island’s population living lawlessly. unfortunately, this coincided with an island that, by then, possessed all the mechanisms of a proper, functioning nation. and a population without limits is a population that dies, because limitlessness has only ever pointed in one direction: extinction.

it all came to a head in 1922. the details of the story have been worn smooth by half a century of retelling, but the moral survived. the story goes: a girl of eight or so went missing one night, and over the hours that followed, nearly every party on the island became involved — the vampire who supposedly took her, the werewolf who caught the scent and gave chase, the shibata who was hunting them both, and one of the cunning folk (what they were known as back then) who’d been sent for the moment the girl’s mother realised her daughter’s bed was empty, and who arrived in time to be of use to no one.

the girl was dead. and her death finally did what a thousand years of discarded bodies failed to do — not one of the four could stand over her and lay the blame on the other three. there was no one left to point at. there was only the girl.

so they stopped. all of them, at once, for the first time. the heads of every faction on sidrón — the council of vampires, the leadership of the werewolf pack, the senior cunning folk, and the hunters’ then-leader tomonari shibata — finally came together to sit in a room to talk.

what came of it was a treaty. one that pored through every imperfection (both real and perceived) they had a species, then flattened in the name of peace. it was a signed decree that stated in plain terms: no one kills as they please. there are places on the island where killing is off the table. every faction would put in the effort to fold itself into human society, because if they kept hunting one another down to the last twitching eye, everyone would go hungry.

it was here that the notion first emerged that vampires might make do with animal blood as opposed to human (a sugar pill, later vampires would muse). the werewolves took to the new arrangement faster than most, as it gave them a way to become protectors of the island — a worthy, noble cause. the cunning folk were charged with keeping their hands off anything that might warp the world beyond what people could comprehend. the shibatas had the hardest turn to make, having spent a thousand years priding themselves on a philosophy of exterminating vermin. and naturally, the young of every faction have their own opinions about the treaty their elders signed.

in the years that followed, the pieces came together, as it were.

the vampires took the nights — the island’s after-dark life, with its dance halls, and midnight vaudeville, and rooms where people can gamble until sunrise. the werewolves held their posts. the witches became quiet hands. the shibatas, as they’ve always maintained, are the kings of livestock distribution on the island.

the disappearances thinned to nothing worth noticing, and the island got on with the business of being an island. sidrón’s government, realising they’d been sitting on a paradise with a long shelf of ghost stories in its library, did the sensible thing. it sold both. the island leaned into its own myths — the very legends built from pain — dusted them off, prettied them up, and turned them to face tourists with disposable income.

and so people started coming. and they kept coming. again and again. the island runs on them now, in the plainest sense: the boats bring the money, the money keeps the lights on, and a quiet season is a frightening thing for anyone holding the books.

the crown jewel of it all is the season, once a year, when sidrón opens its doors for the most audacious celebration of all: la concordia. for a week, sometimes two, the slow seaside island becomes the loudest, most crowded place for a thousand miles of open water in any direction.

the official story (the one on the posters and in the mouths of the tour guides) is that la concordia honours the day the island’s old “factions” laid down their long quarrel and agreed to share the land — a quarrel the tourism board has spun into something safe, grand, and wholly made to move merchandise.

(whether any rumour of the real treaty ever trickled down to the islanders is a question the islanders themselves couldn’t answer for you, and never will, since no one on sidrón will ever know for certain whether the creatures in the costumes were ever anything other than costumes.)

and speaking of costumes — they’re the heart of la concordia. elaborate masks, hairpieces, and costumes of the nightcrawlers, worn through the streets in the thousands, brandished as a tradition that started back in the dark years as a way of appeasing them.

it makes noise loud enough to shake the windows, with lacquer-bright masquerades bobbing above the crowds, and long processions snaking through the streets until the whole island seems to move as one body. it has heat, smoke, and the half-serious reverence of people gathering around bonfires as if they’re only pretending not to believe in them. it has flowers, candles guttering in doorways, sugar, salt, and the odd sensitivity of a nation that remembers its ghosts. it has open bottles, music spilling from every corner, and the best food they can put out.

it is, by a wide margin, the most chaos sidrón can conjure for profit.

and it’s in this year — 1972 — with the festival nearly upon them, and the island as unsuspecting as it has ever been, that something arrives on sidrón which the treaty never accounted for.

they came ashore quietly, about a year ago, on one of the small, outer islets where almost no one looks, and they’ve been working ever since. they’re not from sidrón, and they have no use for its long, exhausted peace, because they came for a single reason. they believe — truly believe — that something is sleeping beneath the island. that it’s been sleeping there since before sidrón had a name. that the thing under the island is theirs, and so the island is theirs, and the two thousand years of people who built their lives on top of it are squatters who simply haven’t been told yet.

and sidrón, fattened on fifty years of so-called peace, has dressed itself for the slaughter.