Adam Falcon sails away; his fiancée, Margeret Deveral, waits. A corpse in Adam’s clothes is washed ashore and mourned, but when Margeret kisses the body she screams — it is not Adam. John Gower, a rejected suitor, claims the corpse rose and killed Margeret in the night before fleeing. Horror spreads through Faring town: people die mysteriously and violent, sea-smeared attacks continue. The narrator, driven by a theory, confronts the thing at dawn on the beach: a sea-fiend wearing Adam’s garments. After a brutal struggle he kills it; the thing reverts to a moldering sea-mass and is left to be reclaimed by the tides. The implication is an ancient oceanic creature (mermen/sea-fiends) using a human likeness to terrorize the town.