I have had to change a name in this strange story for legal reasons.
On the night of October 15, 1987, at around 11pm, a heartbroken 15-year-old named Barry left his home off Twickenham Drive in Leasowe and wandered aimlessly through the howling autumn winds.
A girl named Shannon, whom he had loved from afar for months, had passed him an hour earlier as she walked hand in hand with a boy named Luke – a lad who attended the same school as Barry. Feeling as though he had nothing left to live for, Barry headed west.
By midnight it was clear that something was wrong with the weather. A gale-force wind seemed determined to prevent him from running into the icy sea at the Wallasey Embankment.
Barry did not know it then – nor did the Met Office – but this was the most powerful storm to strike English shores since 1703.
It would go down in history as the Great Storm of 1987. Within hours, eighteen people would be killed by the hurricane-force gales, fifteen million trees would be uprooted by winds of up to 120 miles per hour, and hundreds of thousands of homes would be left without power.
A cross-Channel ferry was driven ashore at Folkestone, while many other vessels capsized or were wrecked by the demonic winds that night.
Although the storm first struck at the tip of Cornwall, then scythed across the Midlands before leaving the land via the Wash, the spirals of destructive wind wrought structural damage for hundreds of miles, and the North West was not spared.
On Moreton Common, Barry was knocked down by this King of the Gales. He rolled over and over, suddenly realising he did not want to die.
He could hardly breathe in the cyclone from Hell, and at one point his cheek was slit by a fragment of seashell, propelled at terrific speed by the storm.
Then, as he lay flat in the grass and sand with his ears ringing and the waters of Liverpool Bay moaning and crashing against the embankment, he prayed. He thought of Shannon, of never seeing her again, and suddenly the winds dropped.
Barry looked up. There was not a soul in sight. To the east he saw the horned crescent of the waning moon on the rise, and, knowing a little about astronomy, he recognised the ancient bloodshot eye of Betelgeuse winking above the Liverpool skyline across the storm-tossed Mersey.
And then he noticed it.
About fifty yards away, a vast grey sheet, like a net curtain, lay stretched out on Moreton Common and something within it was twinkling.
Barry rose to his feet and wiped the tears from his left eye with the back of his hand.
His knuckles came away smeared with blood. Remembering the injury from the flying seashell, he dabbed his cheek with his coat sleeve as he walked towards the sheet.
The material was not fabric at all but gelatinous, wet to the touch. It reminded him of a jellyfish’s body, and a horrible thought crossed his mind – that this thing was alive, and had come from the sea.
Walking around it to gauge its size, he realised it was star-shaped and at least sixty feet across.
By the faint glow of a distant lamppost, Barry saw a hundred or more elliptical shapes embedded in the mass, all resembling the “eyes” on a peacock’s tail.
In the centre of the star-shaped sheet of jelly rose a dome, and as Barry stared at it, he saw it quiver. The movement froze him in place.
Then every single one of the eyes in the vast starfish-like mass opened, each pupil burning with a dull bluish light.
Barry staggered backwards, the dreadful truth dawning on him: this creature was alive, and the storm had blown it ashore. The entire, semi-transparent body quivered and Barry thought he heard a wet, squelching noise emanating from it.
The thing suddenly shifted towards him in a rippling motion. Barry turned and ran, and at that moment the storm began to stir again.
By the time he reached Leasowe Road, he was being driven towards the sea, as if some weather god had changed its mind and decided he should die after all.
At one point, he was leaning into the tempest at a forty-five-degree angle, the gale peeling back his eyelids and rippling his cheeks. Barry swore at the storm, but his words were hurled back down his throat.
He leaned further forward, almost parallel with the ground, levitating on the jet of roaring air as he fought to leave the common.
Then the wind dropped slightly, sending him sprawling face-first onto the hard ground, nearly breaking his nose.
Clutching the grass, he thought he heard a screech and turned his head, bracing himself lest the wind demon rip him from the earth.
Through watering eyes smarting with grit and sand, Barry glimpsed the creature, blown like a vast sheet of canvas across Moreton Common towards the sea.
After each gust, it tried to crawl back with its five flapping limbs, only for the next blast to hurl it northwards again.
A crushed soft-drink can struck Barry on the head, and then the gale renewed its fury, driving him towards the sea-born monstrosity.
Yet even as he was forced closer, he saw with relief how the storm finally lifted the thing into the air and hurled it into the semi-darkness of the embankment, where the waves boiled into heaps of foam.
Minutes later the winds eased, and Barry seized his chance, sprinting non-stop down Leasowe Road towards home.
Around a third of this planet is covered by sea, and who can say what ancient creatures still lurk within its depths?
Fish once thought long extinct have been rediscovered alive in our oceans. One such creature is the coelacanth, which swam in the seas 300 million years ago and was believed to have died out 70 million years ago. Yet in 1938 it was found alive in the Indian Ocean, described by marine biologists as a “living fossil”.
Scientists once confidently claimed that fish could not exist below 26,000 feet, where darkness and unimaginable pressure reign.
Yet far deeper, strange species have been discovered – eyeless, with reinforced bones and skin, like nightmares made flesh.
What else might lie waiting, thousands of fathoms down?
* All of Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are available from Amazon.