Ella Simon was not the kind of person who saw things that weren't there. So when it happened for the second time on her drive south, she hit the brakes and pulled off the road. She'd seen something out there in the dark waters of the sound, on top of one of the submerged houses. Was that a person up there?

She'd been driving all day, hoping to get free from the ghosts she'd left behind in Boston. Her father. Steven. Her cold, empty apartment. Her stalled career. She needed to leave all those bad feelings and haunting memories back in the city, far from the strip of two-lane highway bordered by wind-blown sand that she was traveling on now.

Traveling, and seeing things that weren't really there.

The sun had come out again, and she was on her way past the black-and-white Hatteras lighthouse that still lit up the North Carolina coast. She'd just driven onto the rebuilt section of the highway that had been washed out in the hurricane when she saw the movement on top of one of the flooded houses in the sound.

I'm letting my imagination get away from me, she thought, and that's not like me. My nerves are shot from driving all day, and it's making me see things that aren't there.

The first time it had happened, she'd been crossing over the Oregon Inlet Bridge. The cold March wind had slammed into her car as she reached the highest section of the bridge. For an awful moment—a moment that seemed to last forever—she thought she was going to go over the side.

The dark waters of the Croatan Sound were on her right, far below her, and the whitecaps of the Atlantic Ocean were marching off in the distance on her left. The sun came out of the clouds just in time to nearly blind her with its brilliance.

The sudden blasts of wind against her car windows made her think of broken glass. When she regained control of her car a second later, she risked another look down at the water off to her left.

Flashing just under the surface of the choppy waves were faint lights, flickering orange and white. They looked like emergency beacons, or tiny explosions.

Impossible, she'd decided. It's just the sun, reflecting off the water. Playing tricks on my fatigued eyes.

And now, half an hour later, it was happening again.

Feeling like a tightrope walker on this narrow slip of land surrounded by water, Ella left her car. Tall and slender, she wore a faded pair of jeans and a Boston University sweatshirt that hid her figure in a way that she always liked. Holding her breath, she stepped onto the sandy shoulder of the new patch of highway.

She kept her gaze locked on the drowned house surrounded by driftwood and tree limbs, and then she saw the movement again. It looked just like a shadowy figure.

The figure—if that's what it was—moved in a strange, irregular fashion, like a beat-up flag or a tree limb blowing in the wind. But the wind had died, and none of the trees in the area were left standing.

Still squinting across the dark blue waters of the sound, she reached into the back seat and felt around for her binoculars. She found them after a few seconds of searching around her suitcases, computers, scuba gear, and other equipment. She didn't dare take her eyes off the battered roof three hundred yards out in the sound.

There's got to be a reasonable, logical explanation for this, she told herself. But that didn't stop her heart from pounding out of control. She still held her breath, as if she were afraid to let the air out of her lungs.

She brought the binoculars up to her eyes in one quick movement. Even when she focused the binoculars, she still couldn't see the figure clearly.

But it was a person, without a doubt. Whoever it was, the person was big, and covered in shadows like a robe.

The figure seemed to almost float through the air as it leapt and spun to some silent melody. Ella could barely keep up with its movements as the dark figure danced to the edge of the roof, and then danced back.

He was dancing on the roof of the drowned house. The blurry man—she was pretty sure it was a man, not a woman—looked deformed somehow, but she couldn't focus on him long enough to figure out what was wrong with him.

And then she realized that the person out there was missing his head.

Continued...