Big like the ocean

From above the lagoon’s pale white band of beach sand, the village’s church-bell clanged the midnight hour.  The sound resonated peacefully over the water, registering only dimly on her abstracted senses.  It merged seamlessly with the steady rhythm that the waves were pounding out, in perfect harmony with the hissing accompaniment of the surf.
Seemingly from nowhere, a gravid, Cimmerian storm cloud drifted across the clear, star-studded sky and began to obscure the moon.  A muted peal of thunder issued from it, but that too was lost in the all-encompassing melody.  The golden yellow strip never faded, though… and then its symmetry was broken.

A dark shape humped slowly up from the water, straightening out as it cleared the surface.  Moonlight reflected off the cascade of brine that poured off it, giving it fleeting comeliness.
A rank, putrid smell wafted over to her.  The smell of rotting fish and barnacles she was so at home with from the endless times she had helped in scrubbing the fishing-boats’ undersides… the smell of ocean refuse.  The figure had emerged in profile to the now veiled moon, its features both indistinct and familiar.  Exhilaratingly familiar.
It turned to face her. Her naked skin bunched up momentarily in ridged of gooseflesh, and an anguished scream formed and died unvoiced in her throat.
The long months of immersion in the corroding sea had extracted their toll.  Yellowed bone gleamed softly where strong muscle and sinew had once been, and the endearingly crooked smile had been transformed into a macabre array of skewed teeth.  Seaweed hung like a tattered, clumped mantle from its hunched shoulders.  The eye-sockets were empty pits, and there was something squirming in there…a, yes, something…