by Gary Fry
In the absence of further engagement from Harry, Meg turned to watch the film, which appeared to be concerned with an ancient creature roused from a pit during a moon-based mining operation. This feature was science fiction, the special effects convincing, but the beast was far less disturbing than what Meg felt she might entertain if she allowed herself to. All she needed was to push her mind a little further. She pictured hands at the ends of squirming tentacles, too many heads elevated high above a tenuous barrier…But then she put an end to such nonsense by declaring herself ready for sleep…or any rate, bed.
“I’ll come with you,” Harry replied, in the way he always had when eager for the kind of favors delivered in the late, unlit hours.
Once they were in bed together, Meg listened to the night at work beyond the curtained window. She wanted to discuss what had happened between them—maybe, in his own way, Harry was also grieving—but didn’t know how to begin. The move here had been planned as a fresh start, but she knew from experience that people carried more than possessions from one place to another. They took memories, too, each packed and placed in storage, in the hope none would escape to burden them further. But of course they always did; trying to have it any other way was destined for failure and possibly even corrosive horror.
She said, “Do you want to talk about it yet, Harry? About our…about our child?”
By this time, her husband had already shuffled onto her side, his breath stinking of whiskey. “No, not yet. I just need…physical attention. It’s the only thing that helps. Words are just words.”
Contrary to cliché-mongers and so many trite self-help guides, they’d made love more often since the tragic episode than before it. In their mid- to late-thirties, their sexual encounters had gone from once a week to once a fortnight and then to once a month maybe. But after that horrifying trip to the hospital one cruel spring night, their loving acts had, following a brief period of chastity on her part, returned to the frequency of their twenties, when they’d both been strong and—yes, it was true—very different people.
On this occasion, however, Meg felt less enamored of his obvious advances. She remained rigid in his arms, as if the scent of him, and not just the booze he’d consumed, was now distasteful to her. He smelled like earth, she thought—like the stuff she’d scraped from the side of the cottage and had yet to tell him about.
As he slid up her nightgown, she asked, “Are you still glad we moved out here, Harry?”
“It’s only been a few months.”
“Do you mean you might one day change your mind?”
“I doubt it. But who can say? At the moment I feel fine about it. The traveling’s hard, but it’s not as if I’m not used to that, is it?”
“No,” she replied, looking at him, seeking signs of untrustworthiness in his unblinking expression. “It isn’t.”
He was a competent liar; his line of business had taught him the necessity of that. But why should she think he was being dishonest now? He worked away, spent long hours at the office, earned enough to support the pair of them. She had a comfortable life and appealing prospects. Wouldn’t millions of other women exchange their relatively disadvantaged positions for all Meg had: free time, a home on the coast, plenty of stimulating interests? Of course they would, and to think otherwise was selfish…Nevertheless, a distinct part of her remained aloof from what followed.
Something definitely stirred outside the property, wriggling cautiously toward it. Their bedroom gave on to the rear of the building, and there was no security light situated there. The moist, hissing sound that accompanied the arrival might be rain falling at a distance…or might be something else entirely.
And while Harry continued pumping in an act Meg could no longer associate with anything other than baby-making, the cottage gave a sequence of flat, wet sounds, which might be objects pressed firmly against its clean exterior.
5
A few days later, when Harry was back in West Yorkshire, Meg decided to visit the local library, at the heart of nearby Whitby.
There’d been no further disturbances around her home, which had led her to assume that all the strange thoughts burdening her this week had been just a consequence of her psychology, adjusting to the house move and her husband’s more frequent absence.
She’d decided to take an interest in her new environment by seeing what she could learn about it. She’d start by exploring her native Sandsend, before moving on to other parts of the region, which she knew had lots of fascinating history associated with them.
The bus dropped her off near a bridge over a river, where countless tourists loitered, many eating fish-and-chips. Above the town, on a cliff overlooking the North Sea, stood the famous abbey, and nearer by were countless independent businesses, uncorrupted by high-street-store dominance. This appealed greatly to Meg, despite having once worked for an advertising company, many of whose clients had been the corporations she now decried.
If this was a hypocritical standpoint—she’d been paid a high salary over the years—she shouldn’t feel guilty; she’d at least known when to put an end to it all. Her hostility to the industry went deeper, however, and involved a suspicion about what overwork and stress had done to her body. She’d quit paid employment only months after becoming pregnant, but could residual exhaustion and anxiety continue to have a corrosive effect? She didn’t know, and wasn’t sure she wished to. Indeed, after entering the library in a quieter part of town, she pushed aside the thoughts and tried to remain positive about her newfound research interests.
The main part of the building was on the first floor, up a single flight of steps. Then she found herself in a large room bearing copious shelving filled with books. Smiling casually at a librarian standing at a check-out desk, she strolled to her right, following signs for key categories, such as biography, politics, science, art, and then—the reason she’d come—local history. The aisle in question was a well-stocked unit with many tomes on display. She began at the beginning—the letter A—and slowly worked her way through the offerings.
After reaching Z, she’d extracted two books that might suit her purposes, one a comprehensive guide to Whitby and its surrounding areas, and the other a history of mining in the northeast of England. She took both to a table nearby and sat in a chair to peruse them.
The first, an unambiguously titled tome called Whitby, contained several chapters on a range of local issues, including religion, shipping, fishing, cultural life and folklore. Meg scanned the index for reference to Sandsend and found just three entries, two of which proved negligible, and the third only marginally less so. A section was dedicated to various materials acquired from the tiny village, including jet, alum, roman cement, ironstone and building stone. There was little about the human aspects of this mining activity, however—the main reason Meg was interested in the issue—and so she quickly moved on to the second book.
This one moved closer to her chosen subject matter, but was similarly sparse and frustrating. She’d wanted to know what it had been like for miners in those bygone days, where they’d lived and what their jobs had involved. But the best the book could offer was a handful of evocative quotations from noted commentators of the day.
In 1858, someone called Walter White had written about the Sandsend alum works in the following way:
…a low, darksome shed, where from one end to the other you see nothing but leaden evaporating pans and cisterns, some steaming, and all containing liquor in different states of preparation…In going about the works it was impossible not to be struck by the contrast between the sooty aspect of the roofs, beams and gangways, and the whiteness of the crystal fringes in the pans and the snowy patches here and there where the vapor had condensed.
This was certainly interesting, but got her no closer to the people who’d worked in the mines for such pitiable wage packets. She read on, hoping the narrative would become a little less reliant on dry facts. And that was when she chanced upon a section that brought life
to all the people who’d once grafted in conditions hardly conducive to physical or mental well-being.
Someone called Sir George Head had described the work of jet miners in 1835 thus:
A man very often not only works alone all day in such a gloomy state of confinement, but reaches his solitary dungeon without assistance, merely by the perilous expedient of a rope rove round a stake fixed on the summit of the cliff: by the rope he lets himself down, and at the end of the day’s work pulls himself up again.
Compared to this experience, the health and safety regulations that hampered and enhanced modern institutions seemed laughable fey. Meg even laughed briefly, drawing a few disapproving glances from people around her, including several elderly people who might be familiar with working conditions before welfare campaigners had set their merciful hands upon them. But then she returned her attention to the book.
She paged through several more chapters, but found little to excite her. In the Sandsend area, unmarried men working in the mines had occupied communal hostels situated on the site, while guys with family had walked from their homes in nearby villages. All were paid by the day or by piecework, while more skilled staff would be contracted on an annual basis and paid every six months, in June and December.
That was as much as she’d been able to discover about the people she was interested in. Perhaps she’d have better luck with the local newspaper’s archives, which, she’d been led to believe, dated back to the 1850s and might present a more human side to all the dramas enacted in the region.
She got up to return the books to the shelves, and was about to leave when her hand fell upon an extra publication she hadn’t noticed earlier. She knew this was true because the book – in fact, it was little more than a stapled pamphlet, around twenty pages long—had no Dewey decimal details on it. She checked the back cover as well as the imprint page, but found nothing informative. It was ostensibly an authorless text bearing a few amateurish illustrations.
If the booklet couldn’t be checked out, there was no reason she should reveal she was borrowing it. If it had been placed on the shelf by mistake, nobody would miss it, and after reading and extracting any information she required, she could return it without saying anything to the various librarians patrolling the building, like seagulls hunting for prey on the unforgiving coast.
This publication was called The Undermined: the untold stories of Sandsend’s mineral excavations. This title was provocative, as if something had been deliberately deleted from official accounts of her new home’s past. Alternatively, the book might have been written by a local crank and, unknown to anyone other than the culprit, slotted into the formally arranged row of tomes, to give voice to interpretations best left in the realms of unhealthy fantasy…Meg would find out for certain by using her own judgment. She tucked the booklet inside her handbag and then made her way swiftly out of the building.
She’d never stolen anything in her life, but didn’t consider this latest act illegal. Even while pacing back into town for the bus stop, she refused to interpret the multiple sounds of footsteps scuttling in her wake as anything other than tourists fleeing for transport, hoping to make it back over the North York Moors before too many of their fellow day-trippers had the same idea.
Meg had time to kill before her ride would arrive, and so stole into a nearby newsagent’s to buy a copy of the local newspaper. When the bus finally showed up, five minutes late, it was four p.m. and the sky above the sea along the craggy coastline was a cerulean blue tilting toward dark. With slow reluctance, Meg glanced away and consulted the front page of the Whitby Gazette.
The headline reported on a young woman, a tourist who’d recently been vacationing in the area, having gone missing. The article was accompanied by a photograph, a beach shot showing the woman dressed in the all-black garments of a goth, standing on the beach at low tide, with chinking cliffs behind her.
Something about this image troubled Meg, but she was unable to figure out what it was. Her gazing eventually straying from the picture, she read the text and learned that this twenty-five-year-old had been visiting the region alone and hadn’t been seen or heard from since Tuesday, two days ago. Her West Yorkshire family were frantic, apparently, as Meg imagined parents would be. The fact that the woman—whose name was Melissa: a sweet name for such a robust-looking girl—hailed from the same region in which Harry worked was of course just coincidence, nothing more than fuel for pernicious speculation. Meg should know better. Then she switched her gaze back to the young goth’s photo, noticing her fingernails were painted dark purple, and her lips likewise, as if she had some fatal heart condition.
That was the diagnosis doctors had ascribed to Meg’s dead child: a congenital defect even modern science could do nothing about. The knowledge had been heartbreaking, leaving Meg—and her husband, of course—in a cold stew of horror. They’d drifted around for weeks afterward, hardly able to accept it; Harry had buried himself in work, staying away for days. The hospital had been in constant touch, recommending counseling, and Meg, less cynical than her bullish husband, had agreed to a meet a college-taught youngster. The advice the guy had offered had been useful, and Meg had made swifter progress than she’d imagined possible. Harry remained as Harry always was: stoic, preoccupied, ambitious. Meg had left him to his own devices, while she’d focused on her own period of adaptation. After all, what right had she to tell him how to behave?
As these thoughts flitted along the cramped tunnel of her mind, she noticed something unusual about the picture on the front page of the newspaper. It was the same thing she’d spotted earlier, though this time perceived with more focused scrutiny.
Something was clinging to the cliff way beyond the missing woman.
Meg knew this stretch of coastline well, having walked it several times since moving into the area. The cliffs there, at least fifty yards high, were dark and red, made of the same boulder clay and sandstone with which she was now familiar from the Sandsend Trail.
In the picture, stretched across this from almost top to bottom, was a moist-looking, wriggly shape, all angular limbs and a jerking spine. The photo had clearly been taken in the evening, and the light wasn’t good. Nevertheless, the entity skittering around in the missing woman’s background, perhaps undetected by the photographer and possibly every reader since publication—in truth, it could be easily mistaken for a pattern in the cliff’s ancient material—resembled a refugee from Meg’s recent bad dream, a multi-segmented beast out to cause only insidious unrest.
6
That evening, after Harry had called with his usual tales of occupational woe, Meg found herself watching a TV documentary about the role of prosthetic devices in human evolution.
The narrator suggested, with video footage to support the claims, that mankind had developed the way it had not simply through natural selection, which characterized the animal kingdom, but also through the use of objects. People naturally adept at manipulating all kinds of tools had boasted an evolutionary advantage, passing onto offspring the same biological inscribed abilities. Such individuals had flourished, surpassing those less able, until the world had become populated only by skillful tool users. The opposable thumb had been a great boon in this process; the ability to grip objects had conferred upon individuals a physical prowess that transcended the more primitive body. In this way, cultural factors in the form of inventions had transformed the genetic basis of humanity.
Meg found this kind of material fascinating, but was nonetheless eager to review the book she’d taken from the library. Once the documentary had ended, she switched off the TV, brewed a mug of strong coffee, and then settled down in the armchair in one corner of the lounge. And that was when she—
—heard a knock at her front entrance.
She panicked, imagining that large insectlike creature she’d spotted on the front page of the newspaper had come to visit, using what passed for its hands—no more than the ends of jelly-esque tentacles—to punch at her door
. But then after getting up from the chair, Meg noticed what she hadn’t moments earlier: the curtains were lit up from the outside; the cottage’s security light had been triggered.
This implied a tangible visitor, someone much realer than her stupid, involuntary imaginings. Nevertheless, while heading for the door, Meg remained anxious, her heart running beneath her ribs as if with multiple limbs. She’d locked the front door earlier, a matter of habit after living in a city for so long and certainly not because she was fearful of anything out here, on the trouble-free coast.
But a woman has gone missing recently, a soft voice spoke up in her mind, and the recollection made her hands shake as she reached for the key in the lock.
“Who…who is it?” she called, attempting to steady her voice, but an involuntary stammer betrayed her unease. She hoped whoever was outside—perhaps the police, come to question her about the missing woman—had failed to detect her discomfort. A wind howled, cutting across the coastline like a cry of seabirds. Meg thought maybe this had masked the sound of an approaching vehicle—a police car, she hoped, bringing a man in reassuring uniform.
Moments later, however, it was a woman who replied.
“Oh, hi there. Sorry to bother so late in the evening. But I was wondering if you could help. I’ve booked accommodation in this area, but am struggling to find it. I’ve been looking for about an hour, with no luck. And I just wondered, what with you being a local, you might be able to help out.”
The voice belonged to someone younger than Meg, maybe in her early thirties. She sounded pleasant, and her reason for calling seemed plausible. Meg was even amused to think that of all the properties at which the woman might have sought guidance, hers was least likely to provide it. Meg had been in the area only a few months, after all, and had yet to learn where everything was.
