Greentide

  This article was on my doorstep this morning, which is the morning of the fifteenth of February 2020. An unpublished article from The Weaver’s Hill Tribune. 

Crescent Beach Massacre Culprit Identified in Weaver’s Hill; Arrested

By Michelle Cross

February 17th, 2020

After five years of investigation, Detective Howell of St. Johns County has identified and arrested the suspected person responsible for the Crescent Beach Massacre of 2015. The perpetrator was identified as Timothy Davidson of our very own Weaver’s Hill, Florida. Local police arrested and transported Davidson to St. Johns County for his trial, the date of which is still to be decided as of writing this piece.  

On Friday, he was released after posting a hefty bail (the amount of which has not been disclosed to the public).

Young and old alike remember the grisly details of this story. Its specifics have confounded conventional meteorologists and psychologists for half a decade. As such, many have turned to conspiracy theories, religion, and even the supernatural to articulate the events clearly.

Before hearing the public’s interpretations, we reached out to Davidson for his personal account of that day…

       The article ends there. Attached to this stub was a sticky note written in excessively loopy cursive. It had four words: Tell us your side. Signed Michelle Cross. I feel like I’ve told this story one thousand times; to the police, to what’s left of my family, and now, I suppose, it’s the press’ turn. As much as I think everything that there is to say has already been said, I suppose one last go-around wouldn’t kill anybody, would it? You can cut some of this for your article, Michelle, but the following account will be my story in its whole context, down to every last detail.

  This country is full of people who know better than I do about the ways of the world. No matter how many of those people I talk to, though, none of them can understand what happened on Crescent Beach all those years ago. I myself don’t know too well what happened. I can only tell what I saw and let the others who know better to interpret. After all this, the last thing my mind wants to do is think.

       People now know what happened that day as the Crescent Beach Massacre. For me, that day never started with anything like that at all. In reality, it started with one of the best things in the world.  

       Summer Sunday, sometime in the middle of June 2015. I never cared to remember the exact day, though I’m sure you could find it in the papers. My family was Christian, but not quite that Christian. We skipped out on morning mass and went out for a day on the beach. Some people claim that our lack of faith that day is what led to the slaughter. No other explanations have proved fruitful, so perhaps that is the best one we can come across. For now.  

       It was on the ride there that I felt ethereal premonitions of something astir, something deeply unsettling. As our car sped along highways crisscrossing Florida from East to West, I sat watching the monotonous landscape pass by while Haylee played on her phone and my parents chatted in hushed tones. Half an hour into the drive, we reached the outskirts of the city and entered a scene of flat farmland.

       Soon after, dim thunderheads rolled in the distance, despite the Weather Channel saying that not a cloud dotted the horizon. As they neared, they took on an odd hue that I had never seen clouds take on before. They were green, an iridescent green that danced with variegated tones in the scorching heat.

       I poked my sister on the shoulder and whispered:

       “Haylee. Do you see those clouds?”

       She stopped messing with her phone and looked.

       “Yeah. What’s with that?” She asked.

       “I dunno, I was going to ask you that. What do you think about them?”

       She stared out for a second, then pointed and said, “I think we’re going to drive into them.”

       I followed her finger. The clouds sprinted across the sky, descending all the while. Within seconds they had formed clustered humps on the road some mile or so away. They rested there, flattening and expanding as we barreled towards them.

       “Can’t dad see the clouds?” I whispered, but it went unheard.

       The clouds lurched towards us and in an instant, we were engulfed in emerald fumes. The car became dark, but my parents continued as if nothing were wrong.

       The clouds were much bigger than I expected; from a distance, they looked to be no larger than a house, but now they felt much larger. As soon as we entered, I fumbled for my phone and began a stopwatch. Seconds ticked by, and I kept my thumb poised above the stop button for the second that we reached the other side.

       Meanwhile, my eyes wandered about. There was not much to see. Outside every window was the same vaporous green mist plastered on every window. It roiled across in a lustrous churning mass.

       I stared deeply into the cloud and I saw things floating by. Odd, terrifying things that still haunt my dreams. Faces floated past, grotesque faces with gnarled features and misty bodies that were lost in the general murk. They splayed themselves on the window for a split second before gliding back into obscurity. I noticed that none of them had hands, just vaporous stubs, and at the time I didn’t know what to make of it.

       I looked away from the windows, stared down at my lap, and looked for the end of the clouds from the corners of my eyes. My sister, assumedly having seen what I saw, copied me.

       The car sped up. My dad might not have seen the clouds, but they must have obscured his vision in some capacity. If they didn’t, well, I don’t understand why the car’s engine roared ever louder when the speed limit hadn’t changed.

       At length, we reached a partition in the clouds, which lasted only a few seconds, but it was just enough for me to catch a glimpse of the speedometer. By then, the needle on the dash settled on ninety. A second later we were immersed in the mist once more and did not find another partition until we flew out the other side. I stopped my timer then. Five minutes and some seconds in change. I rounded it down to five and multiplied it by the speed limit over sixty and got an estimate of about five miles. Five miles! All pure cloud and murk and strangeness. But that was a conservative guess. If you remember as surely as I do, when we entered that partition in the clouds, we were going closer to ninety miles an hour. With some extra estimates, the longest it could have been is seven and a half miles.

       Now, a cloud of that size is no grand thing. Still, it makes it even odder that, when we shot out the back end of that cloud, I immediately turned around and saw that it was gone. No five to seven-and-a-half miles of cloud; just a scene of solid road and flat farmland.

       The thought crossed my mind that perhaps the cloud was much longer than what I had measured. Maybe we did not reach its end but its end reached us, that it sank into the ground and we had jumped out its top end. That would absolutely explain why it disappeared behind us. What it did not explain was why, and I’m sure we now all know the answer to that question is still up in the air.

       In the few seconds after we escaped, our car kept going at ninety. My dad noticed this then lowered it. I could see the vaguest cracks of confused wrinkles sprouting between his eyebrows. They disappeared as quickly as the clouds, and that was that. Nothing else strange occurred on that drive that I can tell (I napped the rest of the trip, and I remember little of any dreams I), though that one aberration gave me dreadful indications to the horrors that fate had spun. 

       When I awoke, the scenery had changed. Flat as Florida is, not many things change from center to coast, not immediately. Lakes skimmed by the windows. Wooden fences and farmhouses and animals gave way to sidewalks and condos and parked cars. We had just passed by the bridge to St. Augustine but turned right on the A1-A to Crescent beach. We followed the road for a distance until my dad pulled an abrupt left turn followed by a right. We found ourselves in a small parking lot, about four rows of spaces that were filled up. To our south was a church. I remember that specifically since we had bailed on our church to come to the beach. It was just about one o’clock when we got there, a few groups of people were filing out the church’s doors to their cars, donned in their Sunday best. One woman walked hurriedly to her car near the boardwalk and peeled out onto the highway. My dad seized the opportunity and stole the spot just as she left.

       We prepared ourselves quickly, stripped and exchanged our clothes for bathing suits we wore beneath. I popped open the trunk and pulled out three chairs, my sister grabbed the bags of towels and food, my dad the tent poles and canvas awning, while my mother went ahead of us to secure a spot on the beach. Not a cloud dotted the pristine cerulean sky, though that would soon change.

       One thing does strike out of my memory now that I’m writing this down. To the East, where the beach was, there were two small buildings with sloped roofs and signs plastered all about and around them. Between sprouted the wooden boardwalk that branched over the dunes and spilled into the beach. Normally I don’t pay them any mind to the signs there, they were the same warnings every time, but two caught my eye. One of them was posted right before the boardwalk:

WARNING

Rip Currents

Watch Out!

You could be swept out to sea and drown. If in doubt, don’t go out!

       To the side of this was a diagram of a rip-current. Two curved arrows formed a funnel from shore out into the open ocean.

       The second was a color-coding key for the beach flags, the one’s the lifeguards used. All the different colors indicated how safe the beach was, or if it was closed off. Across the boardwalk, I could see the faint outline of the Green low-hazard flag flapping in the breeze from the yellow lifeguard tower.

       We passed the signs, crossed the scorching boardwalk, and walked onto the beach.

       There weren’t many people, which was good. About thirty groups of people littered the beach in either direction, each doing various activities you would do at the beach: tanning skin, playing volleyball, building sandcastles. The lifeguard sat in his raised tower, gazing through sandglass across the entire beach as if it were his.

       My mom had picked us a good place, as always; a plot right at the edge of a sand shelf which sloped down about three feet. My sister and I helped my dad set up the tent, after which I unfolded our beach chairs while my mom slathered cold sunscreen on Haylee’s back, much to her discontent. I smeared some sunscreen on my face, chest, arms, and back, then walked out towards the shoreline. 

       The hot sand seared the bottoms of my feet. Sand filtered between my toes with each step, crushed seashells rasping against my skin. I stepped onto cool, wet sand now. A strong wave swept across it all, sending cold rushes up my calves and thighs, droplets spraying in all directions. The wave receded, and the whole cycle started anew.

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       I walked until the water was at mid-thigh, plastering my bathing suit to my skin. After years of unplanned beach visits, I found that mid-thigh was the sweet spot for standing and staring at the wide expanse of the ocean. Just enough water to keep your waist cool, but not enough so that the waves would send you sprawling. That was my favorite thing to do at the beach—stand in the water and think, watching as waves licked and swallowed swathes of the beach.

       That day I distinctly remember what I was thinking about. I was remembering the last time we came to Crescent beach, maybe six months prior. After visiting the beach, which was cut short by a spontaneous closing, we went to St. Augustine. We walked down St. George Street with all those ancient Spanish Colonial houses and storefronts. We went into this one shop, a jewelry store. We weren’t looking for anything in particular, just meandering about.

       I remember looking at this one bracelet there. It was a single piece of gold in a horseshoe-like shape. It was flattened on top, space for a custom engraving they did in-store. I called Haylee over and asked her what she thought. It was nice, she said, but that she had enough jewelry without it. Before we left the store, I talked with my parents, told them to get Haylee out of the store so I could buy her something. As soon as they walked her out, I bought the bracelet and engraved her name into it.

       I don’t think I’ve seen her go a day without it, since.

       As if on cue, I heard a faint splashing behind me. I turned and saw my sister wading awkwardly through the water, her wrist flashing gold with her bracelet. A beige bucket hat too big for her rested on her head. Where the water had been mid-thigh for me, it reached a little bit above her waist. After a few seconds of her struggling, I offered her my hand, which she swatted away. She struggled for a moment before finding a level spot to stand about arms distance from me. The water leveled out near her belly button.

       “Whatcha doing? You’ve been out here for like twenty minutes.”

       My brow furrowed, and I looked back out at the shore. “Lord. That long?”

       “Mhm. Mom wanted me to check in on you, make sure you weren’t dead or somethin’. I dunno.”

       We stood like that for a while, speechless, the sun beating harsh on our necks, staring at the water. As we cast our gaze like fishing lines out to sea, my gaze drifted to the right, towards a particularly odd patch of water. All across the beach waves roiled, thrust their bodies upon land, and regressed and left seafoam. But this spot—some twenty feet away—had no waves. The area behind it had waves, every spot around it had too, but as they entered this spot they sputtered out and morphed into a peculiar flatness that the ocean should never have. The spot stretched from shore to about thirty feet out into open water.

       I lifted my feet and found them difficult to move. Standing so long had allowed the soft wet sand to ensnare my feet. I struggled to pull them out, succeeded, then fell face-first into the water. Below, my head was filled with otherworldly sounds; high pitched screams erupted like consecutive gunshots. Barely audible behind the screams were raspy whispers that tunneled into my ears like the eternal wailings inside a Conch Shell. When I lifted my head out my face was fixed in an expression of utter revulsion.  I still heard screaming out of the water, until I realized it was Haylee doubling over in laughter. But in that instant, I stopped and looked at her with that mortified expression.

       “I heard something in the water.”

       Her laughter turned nervous then petered out.

       “Like what?”

       “Screams. Like that roaring sound when you put your ear to a Conch Shell.”

       “What kind of Conch shells are you listening to?” She said a slight grin on her face.

       “Just put your head under.”

       She frowned but relented. One hand on her hat, she thrust her head under. After a few seconds she surfaced, her brow furrowed, her lips pressed into a hard line.

       “I hear them. I think they’re coming from over there.”

       She pointed to her right, where the patch of flat water was. We both trudged through the surf towards it. As we got closer, I noticed more refined features. Worst of all was its color. Whereas the water surrounding this area was of a deep ocean blue, the interior was a shimmering sickly green.  The surface was inert; flat as paper. I was tempted to wade my hand through it to see if it would move at all, but something else unnerved me. Beneath the surface, awful things spun about. A constant churning mass of gas and cloud swirled underneath but left the surface undisturbed. It reminded me of the clouds from the drive over.

       The edge between the flat green water and the roiling blue sea was clear cut—a near-perfect straight edge set them apart. I made sure to stand a good few feet from the edge. Haylee wasn’t so careful. Inch by inch, she waded closer.

       “Don’t get too close to that,” I warned. My voice quivered a bit.

       She paused just half a foot from the edge. It might’ve been my imagination, but the water beneath the surface looked to be churning faster. Two distinctly large swirls formed on each side of the space, finally breaking the flat surface and infecting the ocean blue with green. The water clouded and darkened. Haylee’s hand glided closer, enraptured with the dimming verdant water.

       Suddenly I heard a whistle pierce the air. I looked back up at the beach and saw calamity invade the beach. Sometime after I got in the water, dark clouds coated the horizon. Gusts of wind shot across the beach, lifting swathes of sand and rocketing them into the side of tents, umbrellas, towels, and people. Whole tents lifted and tumbled down the beach. The whistle I heard was of the lifeguard’s frenzy to get everyone out of the water. He scrambled in his tower, replacing the violently flapping green flag with a red one. The man then struggled down the ladder, fell, landed on his back in the sand. He stopped moving. Sand piled against his face and chest immediately.

       Behind the tower, the clouds, now aided by the ferocious wind, encroached faster. As they loomed above us, they assumed the water’s ghastly green shade.

       The quickly encroaching chaos forced my attention back to Haylee, whose hand was within inches of the roiling water.

       “Haylee! Get away from there! Haylee get away now!” I screamed, lunging to grab her hand. As I did, she looked at me, her hand grazing the water. A wave punched into her side and she tumbled into the current, which grabbed her and sucked her inside. Without a thought to spare, I lunged into the current. The last thing I saw was the bright green surf staring into me.

       Immediately, the current shot me into the open ocean. A stray flow slammed my body into the ground chest first, forcing my mouth open. Water and silt overran my lungs, rasping my throat and leaving a burning sensation throughout. My eyes were forced open by the rushing water, which burned along with my lungs and throat.

       I had no time to react; I was a ragdoll to the whims of a tyrannical ocean. It yanked me up again, then back into the ground, this time sliding me along the sharp pebbles and shell fragments of the seafloor. I felt my skin tearing off layer by layer until I was again lifted into open water. At this point, I had stopped feeling pain altogether from the pure adrenaline seeping through my veins. The water became deeper still until the current couldn’t slam me into the bottom because there was no bottom anymore. I was pushed out further, groping through the water for anything solid to hold onto. Adrenaline flowed into my muscles, dulling the pain, but I was still in the hands of the current.

       My hand came upon something in the water, something solid. It was slick, but I grabbed hold of it, my hand wrapped tightly around its base. In spite of the freezing water, the object had a touch of warmth in it. I pulled it closer and held onto it for dear life as the sea tossed me about every which way.

       It felt like years passed by, but the ocean relented. I drifted to the surface, surprised I still had breath, my eyes still squeezed tightly shut to stop saltwater from getting in. I splashed there for a minute, gulping great gasps of air, careful not to let any water in. After a while, my breathing slowed, and I laid back, unable to see. I floated, calm, unfeeling. Waves pushed on me gently now, ever closer to some unknown destination.

Meanwhile, the adrenaline wore down, and the pain came back with the waves. They washed over my wounds, each recession bringing with it new torture.  First my skin, then my eyes, my chest, my lungs. They burned, but in my weakened state, there was little else to do than float.

       All the while, I held on to that object I had grasped earlier. While I couldn’t move, I inspected the object in my hand by slowly inching my fingers over its surface. I groped along the side of it until my fingers connected with other fingers. It was my sister’s hand, I was sure of it. Tears escaped the tight slits of my eyes, tears of joy. I smiled. My eyes closed and I squeezed her hand tightly in mine.

       At least we were together.

       I think we floated for about thirty minutes when I felt something brush past my foot. It felt gritty, like sandpaper. The first thing to cross my mind was that it was a shark. I broke out in hysterics. But I brushed against the thing again, and a piece of it crumbled off and stuck to my skin. Not sandpaper, but sand.

       My eyes bolted open despite the stinging saltwater. I saw that it was dusk, barely light out. Still, I could just barely see the ghosts of condo windows shining over the beach. Newfound energy surged into my muscles and dulled all the pain again. I began paddling with one arm, keeping the other holding onto my sister in the water. My legs kicked and propelled me forward, and I slowly made way to land.

       Within seconds, I felt my feet sink into the seashell-coated sand. Ragged sighs of relief mixed with whispered prayers escaped my sea-slicked lips. I collected myself, lifted my body out of the water with wobbling knees. I wiped the water out of my eyes and could see clearly.

I’m afraid that seeing clearly was the worst decision I could have made then.

       I struggled forward with the surf. The sea was calm now, the jagged waterline having receded twenty feet or so. My feet had just trudged out of the water when my foot stumbled on something soft. I almost tripped but was able to catch myself before sprawling on the sand. I looked back and saw an amorphous silhouette. I thought it was a jellyfish

       As I looked closer, I saw the surface of the thing wasn’t anything like the bloblike texture of a jellyfish. The closer I looked at it, the less amorphous it looked. It was a severed hand, it’s skin pallid and lifeless.

       Horrified, I staggered back, my arms pinwheeling. At that moment I felt the hand holding my sisters was practically weightless out of water. I looked at the thing and dropped it after a sharp yelp.

       Another hand. I stared at it, shaking. It was definitely not my sisters. It was smooth but much too large. A gold ring was nestled tightly at the base of one finger. The bottom below the wrist was cleanly cut off. No blood stained it, as if it had been cauterized.

       I recoiled from the hands, only to have my foot connect with something else. Another hand, this one holding a frisbee. My eyes darted about the dark beach. Most of the tents and towels and umbrellas were firmly planted in the sand, still. Others had been blown away by the storm. In between all these structures, I noticed a few dozen amputated hands tossed about the beach. Some of them had objects in their grasp; books, magazines, phones, sandwiches. There were small pairs, too, holding buckets and trowels. There were no clothes, no bodies; nothing to suggest that these hands had belonged to anyone. But they did. Of course, they did.

       I began walking towards our tent when something glinted on the beach, maybe five yards away. It was a hand, half-buried, a gold bracelet wrapped firmly around a truncated wrist. I didn’t need to pick it up to know that it said HAYLEE DAVIDSON.

       My lips quivered as I picked it up. It was deeply wrinkled and cut in a few places but was unmistakably hers. I pressed it against my chest and walked towards our tent.  In it, I found two pairs of hands. I gathered one hand from each and kneeled in the soft sand, cradling the three hands in my chest.

       I think I was kneeling there for hours. By the time the sun sent its first rays spilling over the beach, the first beachgoers arrived and saw the horror before them and called the police. I was the only person alive among a sea of hands that were not my one. Not a good look, so naturally, I was guilty from the start.

       It took a long time for people to find enough evidence to convict me, but they did it, nonetheless. I don’t know how, I just know that they did. I’ve lived under too much speculation and conspiracy, and multiple times I’ve tried to set the record straight. Hopefully, this final time will do just that.

       Maybe prison won’t be that bad, in a way. I’ll never go to a beach again, and I’ll never have to relive that painful experience again. Still, sometimes I do see the emerald clouds that brought the tide from time to time on the highway, or outside my apartment window, swirling dangerously near. Though now I can see new faces drifting in them, the lovable ones of my lost family. Those days I am forced to remember the Crescent Beach Massacre and the day that I lost everything.