Part I: That Day

When you look out from the garage doors of the corrugated steel warehouse where the Fort Springwell Community College soccer team made their heroic stand against the forces of darkness, the view at first seems . . . idyllic.

A rocky shoreline, uncommon for Florida. Periodically the beam of a lighthouse sweeps across our field of view. Everything looks normal, except on its course across the little cove, the beam lights up magical sigils that form a barrier from the lighthouse point to the other side of the cove. When they light up, the surface of the ocean beyond seems a little . . . wrong. Darker, more turbulent under a sky that isn’t quite the right color.

That’s the boundary of the Outer Darkness. There be monsters.

If you’re of a certain age, you probably knew of Schooner Key as a resort getaway, a spring break beach party, or maybe—if you’re really into sports—for the athletic facilities area colleges used for preseason team-building. There’s lots of old video. The cove, full of swimmers. Children splash in the shallows. Teenagers throw frisbees and check each other out. From the rocks and the seawall, fishermen try their luck. Sunburned dads grill burgers and dogs near the dive shop and the RV park.

But the resort had secrets, and on that August Sunday, they almost rose up to claim us all. That’s the Schooner Key you know if you’re under the age of forty. The scenes are burned indelibly into our collective memory:

The hordes surging up from the surf under a sky that seemed to be tearing itself apart between the stars.

The carnage on the beach, before the employees and visitors at Sunrise Resort could rally their defenses.

Fighter jets streaking overhead, dogfighting with monstrosities the mind can barely comprehend.

And nineteen-year-old Tuna Tooney, levitating above Urchin Cove on a column of occult energy. His arms are spread. In one is the codex. From the fingers of the other spill magical sigils, like letters forged in the workshop of a mad demon.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

• • • •

For this oral history, we talked to every survivor we could find and who would agree to an interview. We also spoke with a leading dimensional researcher, Dr. Constance Yoo of the New College of Florida, and members of the military. It’s surprising how many of them still live in the area—including Marge Delgado, a lifelong employee of the Sunrise Resort until her retirement just this past spring. We meet in her garden. Three decades on from the famous footage of her fighting off monsters with a lacrosse stick, Marge uses a cane now—carved, your correspondent noted, from the bones of one of the behemoths that lumbered up from the depths on that fateful day. “Just kind of a reminder,” she says, sitting in a wicker chair against a backdrop of her carefully kept peonies and clematis.

A reminder of what?

“That we’re still here, and they’re out there,” she says, pointing past her garden, past the nearby beach, out toward the barrier guarding the entrance to the cove. It’s a beautiful evening. The sigils almost seem color-coordinated with the sunset. “At night you can hear ’em out there sometimes,” she says. “Moaning and crying.”

That doesn’t bother her?

“No,” she says. “I remember what it was like that day, and I hope they sit out there crying until the end of the world.”

That day.

All of the survivors give those two words a particular inflection.

Part II: A Brief History of Sunrise Resort

Sunrise Resort wasn’t always a destination for vacationing families and preseason soccer teams. Until World War II, Schooner Key was largely undeveloped. The years immediately following the war saw the first permanent buildings on the island, built by ex-vaudeville performer and eccentric film financier Isidore Kovensky—better known in Hollywood as Izzy Kay. A series of personal tragedies gave Kay an interest in the afterlife, and from there he branched out into numerous areas of paranormal investigation. By the late 1940s, Sunrise Resort was almost fully built out, with a lodge, bungalows, and various outbuildings used for psychic and occult rituals. Aldous Huxley and Jack Parsons stopped by to spend time in the orgone shed with local beach bunnies. A parade of seekers and charlatans, actors and con artists—including a certain Gideon Ottmar Schrempf, about whom more shortly—gave it a lively if seedy vibrance. You know the kind of place. Full of pronouncements about Great Works and Ascended Beings, but you’d better keep one hand on your wallet.

Izzy Kay died in 1954, and the resort failed shortly thereafter. A speculator bought the property, spruced it up, and started attracting tourists. Most of Kay’s collection was thrown away. Some of it (luckily) remained boxed up in a large aluminum outbuilding known as the Shed.

Around the Shed, the rest of the resort gradually modernized. More things were piled into the storage areas. Snowbirds replaced occult seekers, and when the athletic facilities were built in the 1970s, the resort added a steady flow of soccer and baseball tournaments, along with training camps. Generations of young athletes sweated and ran drills on the fields, before running to dive into the gentle surf of Urchin Cove.

But hidden away behind the old lawnmowers and the gas cans and the stack of VCRs and the Asteroids machine that quit working in 1991 was a genuine miracle . . . and members of the Fort Springwell Sentries junior college soccer team just happened to be there to find it.

Schrempf: We were eclectic thinkers. Visionaries. The world scorned us, but in the end the world could not survive without our gifts.

Marge: Oh, there was all kinds of crap out there. When I started at the resort, people had mostly already forgotten about it. We just knew there were boxes in the back of the shed that were full of stuff the owner was meaning to sell someday. I think he never got around to it because he died, you know? And it was all still there. So I started putting the resort’s Christmas decorations out there too.

Schrempf: These are my possessions. My belongings. Even to this day they are kept from me. A monstrous injustice. With my power and the wisdom of those artifacts, I could achieve my destiny as the guardian this world requires.

Part III: “It Shouldn’t Have Been Possible”

If you had been looking out over the cove formed by the two hooked arms of Schooner Key about 1:45—Urchin Cove, they call it—in the afternoon of August 13, 1996, you might have noticed a slight disturbance. The water swirled counter to the outgoing tide, and what many observers later described as a strange shimmer rippled through the air over the water. “Then,” one of them said, “it kinda bounced back into itself, like there was some boundary nobody could see.”

Shortly after that, the first of the creatures appeared, accompanied by a sickly green radiance that seemed to be coming from underwater. Most witnesses agree that the first creatures were hybrids, transformed versions of ordinary marine life, perhaps affected by the initial opening of the portal (although even that word is contested; gateway, wormhole, irruption . . .). Then came the larger horrors, the genuine invaders from the Outer Darkness. Or perhaps another dimension. Or perhaps a pocket universe entirely contained within our own.

Every witness has their own story, their own particulars, their own variations. What matters is this: Monsters invaded Schooner Key, and the people there were suddenly fighting for their lives.

Professor Yoo: The boundary suggested by many witnesses was probably the perimeter of the initial disturbance. A hole or portal must be defined, must have edges. Whether this was interdimensional in nature or a product of Outer Darkness power that destabilized local space-time . . . well, that’s the question motivating my life’s work.

Liam “Raff” Raffensberger, Sentries co-captain: I had just hit the water between workouts and something weird crawled up onto this rock next to me. It was like a crab, but . . . also not. Then I saw the water moving and I got back up onto the beach toot sweet. That saved my life, I bet.

Patience Emuwa, Sentries graduate assistant coach: When the fish-men appeared, some of them were riding larger creatures. Much larger than one would think the water could hide.

Simeon Yamasingwa, Sentries midfielder: Slimy, stinking, part with shells and part, like exposed organs and shit. Too many eyes. Mouths in places where there shouldn’t be mouths.

Derek Flood, survivor: There was these crab things, you know, or like part crab and part maybe millipede, with these fangs that had little screens of tiny tentacles around them. Those things, shit. I ain’t like them one little bit.

Marge: I mean, it shouldn’t have been possible. The water right offshore there, out in the middle of the cove, is maybe twelve feet deep? Not even. That’s not deep enough for occult energy radiance and swarms of horrible monsters. No way.

Coach Emuwa: They got suckers on some of the tourists out in the shallow water first, and you could see the life force draining out of them and being replaced by . . . something else. Not alive, but aware. Evil.

Blake “Tuna” Tooney, Sentries backup goalkeeper: They turned some of the people they caught, but a lot of them they just killed. Tore to bits. You can’t—those people didn’t even look like people afterward. Didn’t look like they’d ever been people. Just strings of guts and strips of muscle. Bits of hair and skin floating around. I’ll never forget that.

Lauren Matuszak, Fort Springwell Community College athletic trainer: I took one look at those things and had two thoughts. First I thought: run. Then I thought: Wait a minute. I’m not running. Monsters are invading my world? My state? Like, my mom lived just across the bridge. Hell no.

Simeon: We were scared, but right away we decided to fight.

Lauren: There was a dive shop at the resort. Apparently a lot of people like to go spearfishing there.

Marge: Spearfishing is one of our big year-round revenue streams. We do group tours, that kind of thing. So there were a lot of spearguns and plenty of CO2 capsules. Oh, and of course spears.

Raff: Didn’t take long to rack up some spears and go after them.

Arturo de la Cruz, Sentries midfielder: At first there weren’t too many of them, but pretty soon they were everywhere.

Part IV: The Mighty Sentries

We remember the heroes of Schooner Key. The Fort Springwell Sentries, seemingly named for the occasion. The maintenance crew at the Sunrise Resort, whose only survivor was facilities manager Esperanza Iturralde. The Sentries’ coach, Patience Emuwa. Simeon and Arturo, the core of the Sentries’ dynamic midfield who also turned out to be pretty good shots with spearguns. Lauren Matuszak, the team’s trainer, who turned out to be even better. A few of the tourists, like Lucy and Derek Flood of Hillsdale, Michigan, whose Second Amendment enthusiasm came in handy on the day. The pilots of the United States Air Force, who fought an enemy way outside the scope of their training. (One of them even agreed to talk to me, anonymously of course because, as he put it, “A man in my position doesn’t get to tell the truth and keep his job.”)

And, of course, the undersized, bookish but scrappy Blake Tooney, better known to his teammates (as everyone reading this already knows) as Tuna.

Coach Emuwa puts it more simply. “If Tuna doesn’t run across that book, everyone on Schooner Key is done for. Maybe Florida. Maybe the world.”

Maybe the world. Yeah. The stakes were that high.

But none of them knew that when they got up that morning and headed to practice, or work, or down to the beach to fish or get a tan. It was August in Florida, a time when the tourists are gone, the heat and humidity are oppressive, and everyone just wants it to be October. Nothing happens in Florida in August. How would any of them have known that an ancient eldritch clock was ticking close to midnight? (Or, well, 1:45.)

Raff: I mean, it was preseason. We were supposed to be fighting for starting spots on the team, not our lives and the future of the world, you know?

Arturo: We got the spearguns and we were spearing these fucking things as they got up on the breakwater or came out onto the beach. One after the other.

Raff: Then we had to get the fuck out of there.

Derek Flood: I only had the one gun on me, but I put a few of them down before me and Lucy headed back to the RV for more ordnance.

Lucy Flood: I told him he should have brought a backup piece and extra magazines, you know, because we were in Florida and there’s crazy people everywhere. But that’s Derek for you, always believing the best about people.

Lauren: Not everybody made it off the beach. Not by a long shot.

Coach Emuwa: By the time we had the spearguns there was already a lot of blood on the sand. Some of the tourists had gotten away, some not. Resort employees, lifeguards . . . And the Fort Springwell Sentries lost a lot of people that day.

Arturo: I saw our keeper coach Phil go down. Those things tore him apart.

Simeon: While Phil was dying, he was also changing. I could see the horror on his face, that he knew it was happening. I wonder if he hoped he would die before the transformation was complete. I would have speared him myself, just to save him from that, but I was out of spears.

Coach Emuwa: You’ve seen it on TV, right? When somebody turns?

Esperanza Iturralde: The most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. There were people out by the lighthouse on the north point of the key, and we couldn’t do anything. They just . . . I’m sorry, I need a minute.

Lauren: There were too many of them. We had to run.

Esperanza: I had been working in the Shed, and I called to them. To everyone. It was closer than the main resort building.

Tuna: We saw the maintenance woman, Esperanza. She was yelling something at us, I couldn’t hear what, but we figured the Shed would be a good place to barricade ourselves until . . . I mean, I don’t know. Until help arrived or something.

Simeon: Once we were in the Shed, we’d be all right. I remember thinking that. And I was right. For a minute.

Lauren: I think it was about that time we heard the fighter jets.

Coach Emuwa: It had only been maybe fifteen minutes since the first creatures appeared. Was the government monitoring for that kind of . . . emanation? Energy? I suspect so.

Derek Flood: When I saw those F-16s go overhead, while me and Lucy was back at the RV, I just knew everything was going to be all right. The US military was going to rain holy hell on those abominations. It’s what we do.

Pilot: Tell you what, you think that shit looked weird from the beach, imagine what I was looking at from thirty thousand feet. One of the things . . . it was on the horizon. Miles and miles away, except the satellites all showed the disturbance only extended about to the shores of the cove. And I swear it could have reached out and pinched me right out of the sky. I think it did that to the other guys.

Major Duran: Casualty information from Schooner Key is classified.

Pilot: I hope those guys are dead. I hope they’re not like the kid who turned into that fish-man thing.

Tuna: Once we all started heading for the Shed from the beach, the monsters tried to cut us off.

Marge: I was up by the dive shop by then, trying to figure out a way to use oxygen tanks as a bomb. I never did get it, and it’s probably a good thing [laughs]. I might have blown us all up. But down between the beach and the Shed, all these things . . . crawling and hopping and running to cut everyone off.

Simeon: There was one that was like an ant lion. It got Jackie Wixom about a hundred yards from the shed. These pincers came up out of the dune grass and just punched right through him. He was still screaming when it pulled him down under the sand. I lied to his parents about that. Pretty sure we all did. But now they’re gone so I can tell the truth.

Derek Flood: Lucy and I came back from the RV loaded for bear, baby. Both had our ARs, I had a shotgun slung behind me, and twin Sig P365 nine-mils. We started lighting those fuckers up where they were chasing the soccer team toward that big warehouse.

Arturo: I was sure he was going to kill us right along with the monsters. I got their goop all over me from where he shot one of them that was between me and Simeon. Bet you everything I’ve ever owned he didn’t do it on purpose.

Lauren: Whatsisname the gun nut, Derek, he didn’t want to come inside. Said he could do more good in a target-rich environment.

Raff: I cannot believe that guy made it.

Arturo: If Derek’s wife wasn’t such a good shot, they’d have both been turned for sure.

Marge: I was never a big fan of guns, but I’m pretty sure that Lucy Flood saved my life that day. Before Tuna saved us all.

Tuna: Truth is, if Esperanza hadn’t been in there already and called to us, we probably would have made a run for the main resort building.

Arturo: We were headed for the main building before we saw Esperanza over in the shed. I almost kept going. If I had . . .

Esperanza: I was having second thoughts when I saw all the monsters chasing them. Like, should I shut the door? But I couldn’t, they were all looking at me and running, fighting on their way. A lot of them didn’t make it. Later we saw some of them, made into fish-men, trying to get in. You could tell because they were still wearing their swimsuits.

Tuna: We all got to the Shed and we got the doors closed. They weren’t that strong, though. Just sheet metal garage doors on tracks. There was no way we could stay in there for long.

Simeon: We were trapped. I felt it as soon as the door was shut, and I started looking for a way out. That’s how I found Benavides.

Part V: Who Put All the Fetishes on Rudolf?

You’ve seen the pictures. A large sheet-metal building with a concrete floor, maybe eighty feet by fifty feet. High ceiling. The site of the Sentries’ last stand against the forces of the Outer Darkness. In the popular imagination, this building has become the Alamo of Schooner Key—except the defenders won. It’s the place people want to go when they visit, even though it’s a bit touristy now, with a sushi truck called Tuna’s Last Stand. Inside the building, visitors can take in a gallery of photos taken in the immediate aftermath of the event.

One of them stands out among the carnage of human and monster bodies: A nine-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree. Instead of glass balls and tinsel, it is adorned with strange little figures. How did they get there?

(Turns out it was Toby Barnwell, whose tragic story we have not yet told.)

But to employees of the Sunrise Resort, the building was just known as the Shed.

Esperanza: The Shed. You could find anything out there. Old engines, parts, boat stuff, electronics, all the old stuff from the weird place that was here before Sunrise Resort. And Christmas decorations. Hanukkah, too. A whole box full of menorahs. Kwanzaa cloths. You name it.

Professor Yoo: We suspect that Toby had some kind of sensitivity that led him to intuit the significance of the fetishes.

Schrempf: Clearly the boy was a sensitive. I could feel a presence inside that building. I always know when someone—particularly a sensitive—is in close proximity to my unjustly seized possessions. It is another facet of my gift.

Raff: I saw him like an hour before it all went down. He was in that shed, way back in the corner, smoking a bowl. So he was good and baked when the monsters started coming. Maybe that made him more open to . . . whatever.

Tuna: I got into the warehouse, or shed or whatever, and the first thing I see is a Christmas tree with all this weird shit hanging all over it.

Marge: We called that tree Rudolf. I used to put Rudolf up every year in the main lobby, after Thanksgiving weekend. I always took it apart and stored it in the box it came in, but this year I guess I forgot.

Simeon: Then we saw the kid, Toby. He was tying another one of the little figure things. He had pipe cleaners and sticks he’d gotten from somewhere and he was hanging those things on the tree like his life depended on it.

Lauren: The whole inside of the building smelled like weed. And then it smelled like monsters.

Marge: When there are lots of kids at the resort, we do crafting sessions. I never figured to see crafting supplies used like that, though. Can you imagine?

Lauren: When the monsters started coming in, they shied away from the Christmas tree. So we tried to keep the tree between them and us. But it didn’t always work.

Arturo: And when Benavides came in? [Fear not, reader. You will meet Benavides soon enough.] Tell you what, he got close to Rudolf by accident and I swear to god his skin started to fuckin’ bubble. He screamed like a baby.

Esperanza: He was so corrupted, he was becoming one of them in spirit.

Lauren: Like Raiders of the Lost Ark. That’s what that moment with Benavides reminded me of. Unfortunately, he didn’t melt all the way.

Part VI: The Tunanomicon

The book known variously as the Grimoire, the Codex, the Tuna Testament, the Tunanomicon—you get the idea—was once the property of the aforementioned G. Ottmar Schrempf, a self-styled psychic savant, dimensional sensitive, clairvoyant, and paranormal researcher. He left it at the original Sunrise Resort when he was traveling to visit Jack Parsons out in Los Angeles in 1950, and by the time he got back to Florida, Sunrise Resort was shut down and the new owner had changed the locks. Schrempf tried to sue to get his things, but questions about his immigration status made it a hard argument. Plus he couldn’t exactly establish his ownership of a tome whose occult wisdom had baffled the uninitiated for centuries. He was deported in 1956 and has not set foot in the United States since.

Whatever its provenance, the Tunanomicon sat in the Shed at Sunrise Resort for almost forty years until the day of the invasion.

That’s why the monsters were there. Nobody in a position of authority has ever admitted this publicly, but it’s the common consensus of those who were there, including Tuna Tooney.

Tuna: What the fuck else would they want on Schooner Key? Conch fritters?

Schrempf: Clearly this incursion was an attempt to claim my Codex. The powers of the Dreaming World know its secrets, and wish to keep them from us. Even in my Bohemian exile, I could sense this.

Arturo: What happened was we were all trying to fight this thing that was coming up through the floor drain. It had barbed tentacles, and every time we cut it or punctured it—I was jabbing at it with this tree saw from the grounds crew—this dead fish-smelling black gunk came spurting out like it was shooting from a hose. We were all covered with it.

Simeon: Then something fell out of the sky through the garage roof.

Lauren: It was a dead monster. Some kind of awful flying thing, the size of a bear, with bat wings and tentacles and little sucker mouths all over its body. Horrible. One of the tourists shot it.

Lucy Flood: It was pretty big, but I figured a bullet through the head wouldn’t do it any good.

Derek Flood: She’s a hell of a shot, my wife. Better’n me, and I’m man enough to admit it.

Esperanza: That was right before the Air Force showed up and started killing the flying things.

Pilot: The flying things showed up right after we made our first pass to get visual on what we’d been told. After that, I didn’t think much. All I did was react.

Tuna: All kinds of stuff was smashed up and tossed around. So we’re hiding behind this pile of, like, debris. We could hear monsters climbing up the walls. I could swear I was hearing them in the floor drains.

Simeon: Once we were out of spears, we figured we were dead, but who knows. Maybe there was something back there we could at least throw at them, or hit them with, or something.

Arturo: We look around, and all of a sudden there’s Tuna rummaging around in this footlocker.

Simeon: He comes up with a book. The monsters are dismembering one of the resort employees in the corner, and Tuna’s locked in on this book.

Arturo: I’m thinking, Tuna, what the fuck are you going to do with a book?

Tuna: I don’t even know why I picked it up. I just had to.

Schrempf: I had sensed the incursion even at the great distance between my physical self and the event vortex. This is a gift I have. I sensed Blake Tooney close to the Codex.

Tuna: I opened the book. Like, one of the monsters was literally right next to me, and instead of running away, I opened this book. I couldn’t help myself. It was, like . . . calling to me.

Simeon: One of the fish-men would have ripped Tuna’s guts out but I laid it out with a shovel. He never even noticed.

Lauren: Everything going on around him, and he just kept reading.

Tuna: Simeon saved my life. Lauren too. All of them, really. I got a lot of credit, but none of it would have happened without them.

Schrempf: I owe Blake Tooney this much: Had he not bumbled his way into my cache of treasures, they would be lost to the powers of the Outer Dark. I suppose this shows that one need not be intelligent to be a hero.

Arturo: This weird hum came into the air. Made my ears feel funny. I might have puked except we were all trying to stay alive.

Lauren: God, that noise. And then this vibration like a voice, a giant voice so low you could barely hear it.

Esperanza: There was this sound like a voice, like the book was speaking. And these letters, or symbols, started coming out of it.

Simeon: The creatures fell back, they scrambled away. They really didn’t want to be close to those symbols.

Lauren: So we all did the exact opposite of what they were doing. We got as close to Tuna as we could.

Raff: I stuck right next to Rudolf. Gotta be honest, what I saw Tuna doing scared the shit out of me. Plus, there was still the tentacle thing in the drain to deal with.

Arturo: Then the giant thing that Benavides had let in reached for Tuna. We were all screaming at him.

Simeon: This thing spread out these huge claws, maybe eight fingers, big as my arms spread out. Like it was just going to engulf him and he’d be gone. Never seen again. But the color of the symbols started to shine through it, and a second later it was gone.

Lauren: The sigils just . . . they just like blew it way, like it was dust. The particles of it went swirling all around the shed.

Tuna: When it happened, I was . . . the only word I can think to use is possessed. Someone was guiding me, someone who knew what was in the book.

Schrempf: I directed him, gave him a sense of the power to be unlocked within the book.

Raff: Only guy in this whole saga I like less than Walter fuckin’ Benavides is Schrempf. Dude has not shut up about his Codex, his powers, his this, his that, in like thirty years. Makes me want to go to Prague just so I can punch him in the face.

Part VII: Fuckin’ Benavides

For the record, let Blake Tooney put to rest any notions you had about what it takes to master magic. Judging from his example, anyone can do it.

But not everyone will. That’s why—despite the way he squirms when the word comes up—he’s a hero.

And of course every story with a hero needs a villain. Not the monsters. They can’t be villains. They’re just monsters. A hero story needs a human villain, and in the Schooner Key story that man is Walter Benavides, part-owner of the resort and universally acknowledged greedy, overbearing creep. If a groundskeeper got cheated out of overtime, it was Benavides. Guest complains about inappropriate remarks toward her teenage daughter? Benavides. Resort got fined for illegal discharge of RV sewage into the canal? Benavides. Most importantly: When Tuna found the Grimoire in the storage closet and needed time to perform the incantation, who made sure the Dread Legion could find its way in? You guessed it. Benavides.

He’s been gone for a long time now, has Walter Benavides, so we can’t ask him why. Theories range from simple greed to some kind of soul-deep corruption that made him an advance agent, just waiting to let the forces of the Outer Darkness into our world. Fortunately for those of us who are dying to render an opinion, there exists one video of Walter Benavides, recorded about two years after the events at Schooner Key. It’s an interview conducted by a vlogger by the name of NyarlathoZep. Rock and roll plus non-Euclidean cosmic horror, all presented with macabre brio. Makes you wonder about an alternate timeline in which Robert Plant had read Lovecraft instead of Tolkien . . .

In this video, Benavides doesn’t shrink away from the role he played. He doesn’t try to justify it or minimize it. He accepts what people think of him, and he has a challenge: “Ninety-nine percent of them, these fuckers calling me a villain or a traitor or whatever”—he’s leaning into the camera, while on the other side of the split screen NyZep is riveted—“would have done the same fuckin’ thing in my shoes. They’re coming. If you didn’t see them then, you don’t know. They’re looking for a way in. They found it at Schooner Key, they’ll find it somewhere else, and again and again, and one of these days they’ll get a foothold and that’s gonna be fuckin’ that.” He leans back and spreads his hands. “When it does, you wanna be one of the ones they turn into meat? Or one of the ones they can look at and say, this guy, he saw where real strength was, real power, and he tried to carve out a space for himself and others like him. Because that’s what I was trying to do. Fuckin’ Tuna, that kid fucked it all up. He blew it for all of us. Because of him, we’re all gonna die, but all these simps go around acting like he’s a hero.”

Certainly a perspective, but not one shared by many others.

Walter Benavides has been dead for thirteen years now, the circumstances of his death odd enough to spawn conspiracy theories completely unrelated to the events of Schooner Key. But those who experienced the invasion remain unanimous in their appraisal of the departed. Even Constance Yoo, who as professor at the New School of Florida’s Department of Otherdimensional Studies might be expected to have a certain academic reserve, cannot remain wholly detached.

Professor Yoo: His actions on the day certainly profile him as the classic toady, looking to survive by attaching himself to a rising power and sacrificing others to prove his loyalty.

Marge: Walter is—was—well, Walter always looked out for himself.

Arturo de la Cruz: Walter, man, fuck him.

Tuna Tooney: I hated that guy. Only knew him for like twelve hours, but I’ve never hated anyone more in my life.

Lauren: When he came in, I wished I hadn’t run out of spears.

Simeon Yamasingwa: We’re in that warehouse with every monster in Hell trying to get in, and Walter fucking opens the bathroom window.

Arturo: He snuck into the bathroom and popped the window so one of the monsters could get in. He was talking to it, I heard them in there talking. Then—

Simeon: The door pops open, and this thing comes in.

Arturo: Like nine feet tall, tentacles, fangs.

Simeon: Smelled like low tide in high summer. Only worse.

Arturo: Spearguns didn’t even slow it down. First thing it did was wrap Drake up and just . . .

Simeon: He just kind of melted, man. And the thing like absorbed him while he was still screaming.

Arturo: And Walter’s watching the whole thing. I remember he looked at me and said, “Don’t resist. Let them show you.” Like, show me fucking what? I shot my last spear at him, that fucking traitor. But I missed, and then he locked himself in the bathroom again.

Simeon: The monster kind of like divided once it had absorbed Drake. Then there were two of them. We were okay as long as we kept that Christmas tree between the one monster and us, but with two?

Lauren: We were fucked.

Simeon: But then we didn’t know Tuna had found that book.

Raff: By the time Tuna was doing his thing with the Codex, I went looking for Benavides. I mean, I was gonna settle his fucking hash and I didn’t care if I went to jail. But I never found him.

Marge: After it was all over, he sold his stake in the resort and kind of laid low for a while. But I have a feeling he was kind of keeping lots of irons in the fire. I know a couple of times he tried to buy the rest of the old stuff from the previous resort, but the other owners wouldn’t sell it to him.

Yoo: It seems likely that Walter Benavides maintained some kind of contact with the Outer forces from the lantern chamber of the Schooner Key lighthouse. At least, that possibility is strongly suggested by the manner of his death.

Part VIII: The (Brief) Ballad of Toby Barnwell

The stories vary. Some of them say the turned people looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Others tell stranger tales, of creatures that wouldn’t quite come into focus no matter how intently you stared at them, or beings striated with colors that struck the viewer temporarily blind. Still others have stories of people acting strangely, as if they could hear and fall under the sway of commands from beneath the churning waters of Urchin Cove. Was Tobias Barnwell one of those? Does that account for the bizarre details of his story? Or is it all just the kind of haphazard omissions and embellishments typical of battlefield recollections?

As people keep telling their own versions, so do Tobias Barnwell’s parents Monica and Jerome. In this tale, an ordinary Florida kid is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and becomes entangled in the machinery of a secret state all too willing to sacrifice its own citizens in the name of its professed ideals.

No one seems to be able to decide what’s true.

Jerome: He’s been disappeared. My son. Like some kind of commie revolutionary in 1970s Argentina. Is that what this country has become?

Monica: He went to work one day, and all this happened, and he’s the only one who never came home? Or whose remains were never found? Doesn’t that strike anyone as suspicious? Where’s my son?

Marge: I knew Toby. He helped us out around the resort. Typical Florida kid, you know, liked his beach time, chased girls, always joked with me about would I sell him some weed. Which of course not. But he was a good kid.

Lauren: The kid freaked me out more than anything else, I’m not gonna lie.

Raff: The fuckin’ thing he turned into . . . I still have dreams about it.

Tuna: It happened right in front of me. I’m still not sure whether I did it.

Lauren: Tuna’s always blamed himself for the kid, but one of the other monsters touched him. I’m sure of it.

Tuna: All the other people the monsters touched, they either died or they were completely transformed. What made Toby different?

Monica Barnwell: He wasn’t any different than anybody else. He wasn’t some kind of psychic sensitive. He was just a kid. Just Toby. Someone is lying.

Raff: All the monsters and shit we saw that day, the kid—Toby—that was the worst thing, because he’d been human. You could still see it.

Tuna: He kept trying to talk, but his mouth parts didn’t work right anymore. Then Raff laid him out with a shovel.

Raff: I didn’t want to kill him or anything, but I just couldn’t stand the way he was looking at me. Plus, if they’d turned him, what was he going to do? Was he going to turn me? No fuckin’ way, man. No fuckin’ way.

Simeon: Raff started beating on him with a shovel, and I pulled him away.

Arturo: The kid wasn’t like the other people who turned. They just went straight into full-on like drooling fish-people fuckin’ madness, trying to kill everyone.

Raff: What was I supposed to do?

Tuna: He was still laying there when it was all over. He hadn’t changed all the way, I don’t think. Some Army guys got him and took him away.

Marge: I was trying to talk to Toby through the bars of the cage they had him in, before the helicopter took off. Even with those big fish eyes and the thing that happened to his jaw, he was trying to talk to me too. [Pause] All the people who died that day, and the one I still think of is Toby.

Tuna: I don’t think I did it. I mean with the Codex. I hope to God I didn’t. But I might have.

Major Durant: I have no information on the location of Tobias Barnwell.

Monica Barnwell: I’m suing them. I’ll sue them straight to the Supreme Court to find out what happened to my son.

Part IX: Turn the Page

The apotheosis of Tuna Tooney was witnessed in real time by only a few dozen people. There was no TikTok or FaceTime or Instagram. A single home video of the event has survived, to be scrutinized with Zapruder intensity, as well as grainy footage from news helicopters arriving after everything was pretty much over. That’s it.

Those few videos show what we all know, but here for the first time we add the voices of eyewitnesses who have never spoken of the event before. (And one, Ottmar Schrempf, who has basically never shut up about it even though he wasn’t there.)

Tuna: I felt like some kind of voice was speaking through me. Speaking each sigil into existence. It was a language.

Lauren: They started to form . . . not sentences, exactly, but. Well. Yeah. Sentences, I guess.

Raff: Long strings of them came out of the book, or out of Tuna, I’m not sure which.

Lauren: They wrapped around him, and kind of whipped out whenever one of the monsters got close.

Arturo: The thing in the drain, those symbols hit it and bam, it was just ash. Gone. A couple of little bones rattling around on the floor.

Simeon: Then Tuna started to, like float.

Schrempf: With my help, you see, Blake was able to survive the immense power channeling through him. The Exalted Beings that spoke would have destroyed him were it not for my psychic guardianship.

Arturo: I think I did puke at some point, just from the hum.

Marge: I was watching the fighter jets dogfighting with these giant bat-squid things, and then I heard this incredible noise. I looked over toward the Shed. The whole rest of its roof came off, and up he came through it, surrounded by this . . . energy, I guess?

Raff: Like, riding this column of magic power. Dude. It was amazing.

Tuna: I reached out one hand—my left, which is weird because I’m right-handed—and I started trying to draw some of the sigils. That voice in my head, it was still talking. Not English, not any language at all. I’m not even sure it was sounds. But even though I couldn’t understand it, I guess my hand did. Because every time I tried to draw one, it came to life in that sick pink color. They started to drift away from me.

Schrempf: The inscription of the sigils is not a work that should be undertaken by the uninitiated. The boy Blake was foolish to try. It was only through my assistance from afar that he was not completely annihilated by the power of the Codex.

Marge: He must have been, oh, three or four hundred feet in the air. The symbols started to spread out into the air all around him.

Esperanza: It was right about then the jets started to shoot at him.

Lauren: Then one of the Air Force jets made a pass by and started shooting at Tuna. Shooting at him! We were all like shit, what if he’s about to save the world and he gets lit up by an F-16? Nobody needs that kind of irony.

Major Duran: Air Force personnel made a heroic stand against a dangerous and powerful enemy. Our engagement was a critical part of the successful defense of Schooner Key.

Anonymous Pilot: Anything that looked magical or arcane, occult . . . it was a legit target. We didn’t know the kid had found a defense. Good thing it was a defense against us too, because honest to God, we lit him up.

Tuna: I don’t blame them. I mean, no hard feelings, you know? None of us knew what was going on, and there were a lot of monsters in the sky too. I mean, it’s pretty weird to look up and see an F-16 dropping a Sidewinder off its wing, headed your way. And then watching the missiles just kind of . . . blink out of existence when they hit the sigils. Man, I’ll never forget that. I was invincible for a minute.

Pilot: It was the worst mission I’ve ever flown.

Major Duran: At no time were any civilians, including Mr. Tooney, targeted by our pilots or any other Air Force personnel.

Tuna: I could feel the boundary of the hole in the world, and I could feel where each sigil was going to go as it left my fingers. They were attaching themselves to the boundary. Sealing it.

Simeon: All of the monsters in the warehouse were gone, so we ran back outside. The symbols coming from Tuna went streaking across the beach, and whenever they touched a monster, they just tore it apart.

Arturo: Eat it, monsters. We were all screaming and cheering.

Lauren: The sounds they made, the monsters . . . I’ll never forget it. So horrible, but so pathetic, too, like they were afraid in that last moment and crying out for someone to protect them.

Simeon: All the people who turned, including our teammates and coaches, they also fell when the symbols touched them. Some of them turned into a kind of slime that seeped into the sand. Others left bones behind. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it.

Raff: I missed a lot of it because I was trying to find Benavides.

Pilot: The distortions in what we were seeing contracted, hard and fast. The horizon went from some kind of off-kilter, nauseating nightmare to . . . the horizon again. The sky changed color again. The flying things blew apart into clouds of gooey droplets. When you flew through them, they corroded the fuselage. We would have had to scrap every jet that flew that day, but it worked out because the researchers from some deep-cover agency came and took them anyway.

Tuna: I felt like years were passing, like I was aging and would be a hundred years old before it was over. Literally. I could feel time. In my body. It’s impossible to explain.

Lauren: It was all over in just a few minutes.

Tuna: After I drew the last of the sigils, the voice got quiet. I was still holding the book while the energy faded, and it let me down on the sand. I sat down. There was blood and black stinking goo everywhere. Pieces of people and monsters. But all around, the sigils had formed a barrier. You could even see them under the water, out between the two points that, like, define the cove. I couldn’t hear anything. I wasn’t sure I was breathing. I just sat.

Esperanza: When the monsters started coming into the Shed, I almost gave up hope. And then when I saw what the symbols were doing, I felt that hope again in my heart. I wept for joy. Because we were going to live, you know?

Part X: The Official Version

Even if you were watching the invasion of Schooner Key live, courtesy of news helicopters from Tampa and Fort Myers, you still have to reckon with the official narrative, which is:

“The event at Schooner Key remains under investigation. There will be no further comment at this time.”

This has been the Department of Defense’s line on Schooner Key for thirty years.

The officer currently in charge of repeating this line, with minor variations, is Major Roberta Duran. She consented to an in-person interview exactly long enough for her to make clear that she was not going to add anything to the standard DoD brushoff. She also denied me permission to talk to, or observe, the creature that was once Tobias Barnwell. Schooner Key scholars and investigators have long suggested that he is being held at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

I did, however, get some time with Doctor Constance Yoo, Director of the Dimensional Studies Institute at the New College of Florida. The name, she suggests, is a bit of a misnomer. “We don’t really do physics here, and I’m not convinced that the phenomenon of Schooner Key was otherdimensional in origin,” she says. “There are ancient, definitely prehuman, powers existing here on Earth.” There’s a wry expression on her face as she says this, like she’s aware those words would have gotten her laughed out of any scientific conversation of the past hundred years.

The whereabouts of the Tunanomicon are unknown.

Pilot: Every pilot has seen some shit up in the sky. Weird lightning, UFOs, you name it. Guys have stories. But this . . . maybe it’s good there’s a cover story, because the real truth would drive a lot of people crazy.

Yoo: It’s safe to say there has never been an incursion like this before, whether the invaders are otherdimensional or just had some way to deform space-time locally.

Derek: What they should have done is gotten as many people out of there as they could, and nuked that whole island right out of existence. But probably some environmentalist wouldn’t let ’em because of an endangered crab or something.

Lauren: I heard there was consideration of nuking the island, but I think that would have just made the breach bigger, you know? Like, you can’t nuke a hole. And anyway, if they’d nuked that book, we’d have been one hundred percent fucked.

Major Duran: At no time was the use of nuclear weapons considered at Schooner Key.

Schrempf: I have endeavored for decades to secure the release of my property. The United States Government most certainly has the Codex. Fortunately, I will live for some decades yet, thanks to my learning from the Ascended Masters, so the long quest to regain the Codex and my other stolen goods has ample time to come to happy fruition.

Tuna: I feel like someone should be trying to learn from the book. Not me. I don’t ever want to touch it again. But someone. Probably not the government. Are there any scholars who study this stuff?

Yoo: The Department of Defense has stonewalled my every effort to get scholarly access to the Codex.

Schrempf: The world is at stake—and much, much more—if that Codex were to be studied by the wrong minds, with the wrong weaknesses.

Major Duran: I have no knowledge of the whereabouts of the so-called Codex or any other objects related to the event at Schooner Key.

Pilot: The post-mission debrief after Schooner Key was by far the weirdest day of my life.

Part XI: Where Are They Now?

Of the twenty-nine members of the Fort Springwell Sentries soccer team, only seven survived. All of their coaches died or were turned, with the exception of graduate assistant Patience Emuwa. He lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and still coaches soccer.

Simeon Yamasingwa is a financial advisor in Atlanta.

Liam Raffensberger teaches middle school math in Longmont, Colorado.

Arturo de la Cruz runs his own contracting business in Orlando.

Lauren Matuszak is head of the kinesiology department at Fort Springwell Community College.

The only survivors of the resort staff were Marge Delgado and Esperanza Iturralde, both now retired. Oh, and Walter Benavides, who in 1997 was found dead in the lantern room of the Schooner Key lighthouse, his body covered in black ichor and his internal organs missing.

Several tourists survived, including both Lucy and Derek Flood. Derek committed suicide shortly after our interview. Lucy Flood remains in their family home in Howell, Michigan.

Monica and Jerome Barnwell live in Bokeelia, Florida.

When Ottmar Schrempf says Bohemian exile, he means it. He lives in Prague, and at the advanced age of ninety-two still does psychic shows in the little courtyard outside Edward Kelley’s famous tower laboratory in the Lower Town.

The identities of any Air Force casualties are not known. Major Roberta Duran was reassigned to a classified position shortly after our interview.

• • • •

Tuna Tooney is forty-eight years old now, with a family that includes three daughters and a wife, Katie, who works in finance and really does not want him to relive his Schooner Key experiences. “It’s not good for him, and it’s not good for the family,” she says. “But it’s what he wants.” With that, she leaves us alone, and Tuna drives the short distance to the place that made him a hero and scarred him forever.

Imagine it, reader: You’re a nineteen-year-old kid, backup goalkeeper on a community college soccer team, indifferent student, devoted consumer of marijuana and pursuer of Florida women . . . and you find yourself in a warehouse building, besieged by monsters from another dimension. The tome, the codex, the grimoire before you holds pure terror in that it might drink your soul, but behind that, another more seductive—though terrifying in its own way—idea rings and rings in your head like a telemarketer who just won’t give up:

You might be able to save the world.

And then, when you put the book down, it’s over.

He hasn’t done any magic, touched anything occult, since that day on Schooner Key. “Not really what I wanted out of life,” he says now. “I saw . . .” He looks like he might be about to break down, and we’ve only been talking for ten minutes. I ask if we should call it off and he shakes his head. Katie shoots me a look as she crosses the kitchen doorway. I won’t be staying for dinner. “This is therapeutic for me,” he says. “If I can talk about it I can put it in some kind of context, you know?”

Some kind of context. What context is there for a legion of demonic monsters coming ashore on Schooner Key? For the screams of terror and the fiendish snarls of glee? For the sense that all humanity might be drawn into the hellish maw of monstrosities beyond the human imagination of evil?

Yeah. That’s an experience not many of us can relate to.

And then there are the years of tests and experiments, as government agencies new and old—DoD, NSA, other acronyms that show up in paperwork but no one will explain—tried to figure out if Blake Tooney had something they could use. Eventually they decided he had no magical aptitude whatsoever and let him come home to Cape Coral, Florida, only a few miles from Schooner Key.

The question, dear reader: He saved the world with a magic book, but he can’t do magic. Does that mean anyone can do it, or no one really can?

Tuna doesn’t care anymore. (Schrempf does. He has maintained, loudly, that it was his hand guiding Tuna that day, and he makes a good living pressing the point at lectures around the world. What’s the old saying, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good?) All that’s behind him now, or so he says, but as he says it the question lingers: Is any experience so prolonged, so devastating, so alien—is it ever really over?

I don’t ask him that. It seems too personal.

But it’s the question on everyone’s minds. Another event like Schooner Key hasn’t happened. Not yet. But when you’re on the beach in Ogunquit or La Jolla or South Padre, it feels a little different. You look out at the blue-on-blue line where the ocean meets the sky, and you wonder. Are there more places where the border between worlds is wearing a little thin? Will the sky here take on the same infected pallor as the sky just beyond Schooner Key? Will the waters churn even when the tide is slack? Will the sounds of monstrous legions echo up from the seafloor, presaging another invasion?

Are we safe?

Before we return to his house, where dinner will be waiting, Tuna looks out past the wall of sigils, into the lowering sky, and his eyes are seeing something mine will never comprehend. The sigils glimmer, just beyond the cove, at the end of vision.

Tuna: I mean . . . how do you ever really know?

Lucy Flood: Derek always thought they would come back. I think so too.

Marge Delgado: I’ll be right here waiting for them. About time I got a new cane.

Major Duran: There is no reason to suspect any ongoing interdimensional threat from the beings characterized as the Outer Darkness.

Professor Yoo: Very few things in nature happen only once.