Black Tide Read Online Free

basal tears, while adverse stimulation, the proverbial ‘sharp poke in the eye’, produces reflex tears. Psychic tears occur in response to emotional stimulation such as grief or fear. And then some of us are afflicted with a rare disorder that produces tears at inappropriate moments. I share the disorder with other men, most notably author George Plimpton, who pointed out in an essay that this type of crying is not the indication of weakness most people take it to be. Yet as I felt the tears beginning to well, I knew I must do something. The bastard would accept anything less than a punch in the snoot as either an admission of guilt or a concession to fear. But I didn’t know what to do. The department looked even less favourably on professors who assaulted young people than those who tried to romance them. Luckily, or maybe unluckily, Heather came to my rescue.
    â€˜What the hell is that?’ I heard her say.
    I didn’t look up. I turned away and tried to surreptitiously wipe my eyes and look busy. I fished a couple of specimen bottles from my pocket. I’d brought two sizes – the smaller bottles labelled ‘Karenia breve’ for the red tide samples, and a slightly larger bottle for the copepods I knew would be grazing on the algae. It wasn’t until I heard Scotty answer, ‘I don’t know,’ and his voice sounded strange, almost afraid, and he began moving for shore, that I stopped and glanced Heather’s way.
    She was standing and pointing to the east, toward Fort Walton Beach. I followed her finger. In the distance I saw … something. I’m not sure what it was. I was reminded of a moment I remember from my childhood. A local TV station would broadcast an afternoon movie called The Big Show – the movies were mostly science fiction films from the ’50s – big bugs, Godzilla, and Vincent Price horror films. I remember a scene from one of these movies in which people on a beach were fleeing a gigantic reptilian monster that had sprung from the ocean and was tromping shoreward, its giant steps raising huge splashes of seawater, and I remember feeling a shudder of sympathetic dread for those people. How awful it would be to have something huge and alien like that suddenly appear with no explanation and threaten your life. Now, for a moment, I felt a dim refrain of that horror as I looked to where Heather was pointing.
    A kind of haze, or a mist, was hanging above the sound. It was a deep, tobacco-brown colour that reminded me very much of the dome of smog you see covering Los Angeles when you’re about 10 minutes out of John Wayne Airport. It started at the surface, but about 300 metres into the air, thin, cancerous plumes were dispersing northward overland. It was almost opaque; behind it I could barely make out the bridge that connected Okaloosa Island to Fort Walton Beach. I’d heard about similar optical phenomena before. The local sand, for instance, features high concentrations of quartz crystals that give it a brilliant whitish hue. You’d swear an inch of snow was covering the real sand which lay below, brown and reeking. Most afternoons, with a humid breeze blowing off the Gulf, sunlight would strike the sand and be reflected back into the sky, where some of it was reflected yet again by water vapour, creating an eerie white penumbra over the beach.
    But the mist didn’t look like a trick of light. It had a soupy, unhealthy looking solidity to it. It might have been smoke. Maybe a boat was on fire, or one of the condominiums on the barrier island. I searched fruitlessly for a source but couldn’t find one.
    The mist seemed to be rising from the water itself.
    And whatever it was, it was coming toward us.
    Which was impossible. The air was so still you could barely breathe it. And not a single cloud dotted the horizon.
    Still, I could swear that between the moment I first looked and a few seconds later, the brown wall had moved a