Part II, Chapterlet 4.2

4.2
Once, a demon came to the island. At first, the demon tried to talk to the people who lived their. But they were frightened. The demon thought to himself that it was reasonable for them to be frightened of strangers. He was sure that he would be afraid of them, too, if they were not so small. He decided to wait. He thought that eventually, they would stop being so afraid.
He waited in a cave in the rocks on the leeward side of the island. The wind came each day from the south and carried its insubstantial body over the entrances to the grottoes that moved through the belly of the island toward deep darknesses under the water and sand. When the tide was high, the caves sang as the moved down over the faces of rock and over and through their openings. The caves sounded like a pipe being played slowly when the wind blew fast. Their song was sad.
The demon hunted for tiny crabs among the rocks when the tide went out. Sometimes, he opened mussels and felt their small lives slowing on his tongue with some regret. The crabs, at least, fought fiercely and died fiercely, their little claws gripping and tearing at the demon’s lips and tongue. The demon felt something like love for the crabs.
From time to time, he tried gathering eggs from the seagulls nests that dotted the high blank faces of rock above the cave mouths, but the birds swarmed around him, pulling at his hair and horns and pecking at his eyes. They did not wait and watch with cold black eyes like the mountain birds of his home. They came furiously, and he often held himself back from destroying them completely. Eventually, he stopped trying to pillage their nests. He preferred the single combat of the crabs to the dangerous swirling clouds of birds stooping out of the sun without warning.
The demon waited and watched the villagers go about their business, making nets and building little reed boats from which to cast them into the darkling sea. The villages fished at night, with orange lanterns that bobbed and floated like watery stars inelegantly slopping against the sides of their boats. The fish they brought in were small, and they flashed silver as they poured from the nets into shallow pools dug along the windward shore.
Days came and went. The demon would sometimes walk to the edge of the village, but the people would stop and stare. Some would come and try to shoo him away. He sometimes talked to them and sometimes he stayed silent, gesturing, encouraging. But every time, the children shrieked in fright. Eventually, the sound would push him back to the caves.
One particular day, the wind shifted. The waves visible from his bed grew large and terrible. The sand built up around the mouth of the caves and came pelting at the demon, needling his skin and blinding his eyes. Yelling in pain, the demon scrambled up over the rocks and toward the village, hoping to find some shelter. As he ran, the wind and the stinging salt and sand drove him faster and faster.
As he reached the edge of the village, he stopped. He could feel the wind pushing and pounding into his back with a thousand malevolent hands. He watched as the invisible hands of the wind tore the roof from one of the huts and threw it up into the sky. As suddenly as it had risen, the wind died. The roof of the hut came down hard on a young boy who was just staggering to his feet, having fallen when the wind’s sudden cease had caught him leaning into it, halfway between the tide pools and the open space of beaten earth around which the village huddled. The nearby adults all ran to the boy, but he was dead. The whole village began to make a keening noise as they lifted the roof off of his body. The wind rose again, coming from its normal direction. The demon turned and walked back to his cave, the sound of the villagers mingling with the sound of the still-violent surf and the mournful pipes of his underground spaces. That night, the storm came in truth, bringing awful lights in the sky.