Once, when I was a wee little kid, my father took me and my brother to Wildwood. Pleasant times were had on the beach.
For a time.
I found something hard half-buried in the sand, in a spot where I had water up to my waist. I bent over and felt around; it was long, thin, and felt firmly stuck in. My curiosity aroused, I dug it up. Triumphantly, I raised my prize out of the water to finally get a good look at it.
The next instant, I had this wriggling in my face:
.
I screamed, dropped it, ran out of that pit of alien horrors, and spent most of the rest of the vacation in the hotel pool.
I know now that I just happened to grab a
horseshoe crab by the tail, but for years and years I had become convinced that the whole incident was just a nightmare. No one believed my description connected to reality in any way. Even back then I often had violently disturbing dreams, so I figured it had been just one more.
In a way, it's strangely comforting to find out that something I thought was purely the stuff of nightmares is in fact as real as real can be.
