Sometimes if you sit on the beach when the sun is low in the sky, at the time when the upper half flirts with the wobbly Fresnel reflections and the lower half is going cold, at this time they will emerge.

They are green in the evenings if you spot one and the only time to spot one is in the evening, and so they will always be green. To you. To me, they are blue. And textured with the spattering of multicoloured nebula that glitters like speckled diamonds floating on the ocean.

Do not move. Vision to them is an experience of multilayered fields, each one a splay of vectors telling which molecule went what way. There is a layer for any item they wish to sense, a non-exhaustive list that includes the colour orange, air pressure distributions around the beat of a dragonfly’s wing, the molecular composition of sedimentary rocks, the molecular composition of obsidian, why the sky is blue on all planets with life, and fear. A layer for tracing the agitation a human gets when sitting in the sand for too long is most certainly in there.

Complex visual cortices.

Their eye sockets bulge to dominate ninety-five percent of their head, so much evolutionary effort was put into what those eyes can do. Eighteen, that’s the average number of eyes you would count on their head if you could get close enough to see them, which you cannot.

I once had the chance, or thought I had the chance, to count every eye on one. I’d found a tree branch that stretched out nicely from where the undergrowth stopped and the beach began. There I positioned myself for five nights, strapped in place by a taught hammock and some fish netting that I’d scavenged from the shoreline. A little after five o’clock, on the fifth night, four blue flippers revealed themselves as a lapping wave receded. It was like a magic trick, the wave was the cloth covering an empty hand, the flippers were the white bunny, somehow constructed from mere air particles.

Four more flippers emerged. Then another six, and soon all twelve were revealed and revealed together with the body that they all shared. This was my seventh sighting. It was about fifty feet away from me, or rather, my branch was fifty feet away from it.

They remind me of grazers in the farmer’s fields of Scotland, how not one will be seen too far from a herd of many, warmed by the company of friends. This night, as would have it, only one emerged where I would usually cast my eyes upon twenty if I were lucky to have found one. At first this one waddled around for food, as they do when an internal process in their body requests more resources that are no longer available. How their mouths move still disturbs me, leeching the dirt and sand like a biological vacuum cleaner built from tissue. A dust mite couldn’t breach the seal their lips make with the soil.

This one was leeching away at a particularly moist patch of sand, stopping its wander to invest additional suction into whatever juicy minerals are in the sand that these things eat. That – the diet of these beasts – is a question still unanswered.

And then it abruptly stopped. I had been so enamoured and disturbed by the performance I had been indulging in that I’d temporarily lost all whereabouts of who I was and what I was doing. The stopping of the leeching snapped me back, my subconscious body taking the sudden behaviour change as a warning. My nerves were being pumped with adrenaline and I was on high alert whether and I had no say in the matter. My breath came to me fast and heavy like a sea lion exhausted from hauling its weight around.

I thought maybe something in the forest behind me had frightened it, and that it would flit back into the sea. But instead it looked up from where it had had its face stuffed in the ground, and stared at the base of my tree.

I froze. But I reassured myself that it probably hadn’t noticed me from that distance, perhaps I’d shuffled the hammock without noticing, and the general direction of the stir is what it was casting its multidimensional photonic-processing units at.

Of all the stories I have heard of encounters with these animals, never have I heard of a story about one that was compelled with a sense of curiosity. Whoever had carved the evolutionary niche for these entities to nestle into, they had made do with a complex and messy geometrical nook, for every time I’m taken by surprise at what dispositions possess these animals.

This one picked up its leech mouths, turned, and began crawling directly towards the point on the beach below my branch hideout. I was simultaneously disturbed and stunned with the disbelief that I was about the be close to this creature, to be able to count every eye on that face. But I couldn’t put down the thought that this was not the happenstance interaction I’d imagined. There was intent in the motion of this one and out of all the positions along the treeline it could have chosen as targets for its venture, this single one had chosen the position where I lay tied to a tree branch by fishnets.

The rest of what happened, I don’t recall. After it made a few steps towards me, all I can dig from my mind is suddenly waking up on my back on the sand. The sky was dark and a dish pan of a moon was spraying light all over the beach, making it glow like the shoreline had died and returned as a ghostly apparition. Some persistent stars managed to break through the veil of light the moon was throwing over everything. My head was sore and I rubbed my hand over a lump like it was brail for a giant. The brail told me I’d hit it pretty hard. A branch hung above me with fishnets and a hammock torn down the middle, hanging like a downed mast. At the time I couldn’t remember having been up there, probably from having hit my head, and I thought the rubbish in the branch was from a sea storm.

After I’d settled myself back from my abrupt blackout, I realized a more subtle sensation gnawing at my hand, asking me to attend to it. It felt itchy. I turned my palm over and looked at the back side. There I discovered a perfect ring of hundreds of tiny little cuts, fresh blood still oozing from the wound.

I passed out.