Lurker

by Gary Fry

  Nevertheless, she quickly turned the key in the lock and then opened the door. Meg had always been willing to help out others in need; this was an ingrained characteristic established during her youth. She smiled broadly and peered outside.

  The woman was extremely attractive and maybe even younger than thirty. Her voice possessed a confident tone, as if she was used to addressing large venues full of people. Elegant clothes and a stylish haircut also suggested some important occupational role. Her eyes remained fixed on Meg for several seconds, but then the moment broke, leading her to hold out a hand to shake. Smiling, she averted her gaze as she spoke.

  “Thanks for this. It’s really appreciated. It’s cold and dark and I was getting worried.”

  Should Meg mention the missing goth girl, and by doing so, remind the woman that being cautious was sensible? But that could ruin the newcomer’s vacation or whatever other reason she’d traveled to the coast. Might a proud husband be lurking back in the car? Now Meg had an opportunity to look, she saw the roof of a red sports vehicle parked at the end of her driveway, behind a hedge. If the guy was anything like Harry, he’d be reluctant to admit to getting lost. Men were like that, of course: some genetic need to orient it was always foolish to challenge.

  Meg decided not to mention the missing woman, and then replied, “Don’t worry about it. I’m new to the area myself. When my husband and I first visited, it took us a while to find this place.”

  Once Meg stepped back, allowing her guest to pace over the threshold to evade the gathering chill, the woman said, “I’m Amanda, by the way. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Meg,” replied Meg, and finally took the hand she’d been offered. The two women shook, gazing at each other cautiously. Then they smiled in unison, as if bound by the same body and with the same fundamental purpose: to get along in life and find contentment. Once their hands had unclenched, Meg added, “Okay then, what’s the name of the place you’re looking for?”

  Amanda told her, and Meg soon accessed the Internet—her PC was located on a desk in a corner of the lounge—to identify the standalone vacation home. It was about a mile away. Meg printed off directions and then came across to her impromptu visitor, who was taking stock of the place, as if envious of…well, of what, Meg wondered? Its coziness, maybe? Its seclusion? Or…something else?

  In truth, Amanda didn’t look the type to retire into such seclusion. Her demeanor was too in-the-world, her dark eyes loaded with an appetite Meg thought she recognized from her own younger self and still regularly observed in Harry. It was ambition, the curse of the go-getter. The woman, Meg noticed, had nothing on her third-left finger. Late twenties or early thirties, she’d yet to be tied down by any suitor, and Meg imagined there’d be many.

  “Here you go,” said Meg, handing over the directions on a single sheet of paper. “Hope that helps.”

  “I’m sure it will. You’re very kind.”

  A pause followed, during which Amanda appeared to adjust to all she’d perceived since arriving and then sum up in a single devastating sentence.

  “Your husband and yourself,” she said, her face awash with unfeigned innocence, “do you live here alone…or do you also have children?”

  Meg had closed the front door after the woman had entered, but now sensed a chill suffuse her frame. She thought she also heard something shuffling outside, but then decided it was only the wind, sending autumn-dry leaves skittering across her stone path.

  Eventually, after swallowing awkwardly, she replied, “It’s…it’s just the two of us. We…like it that way. We’re peaceful people at heart.”

  And that was true—at least, part of it was. Meg loved solitude, the freedom to do as she pleased. If Harry had been coerced into such a life by caring for her well-being, he’d surely grow used to it. Besides, he still took weekly trips inland, didn’t he? That would satisfy his need for company and attention.

  Amanda was now looking at Meg in the same intense way she had upon arrival. But then she snatched away her gaze, smiling with inauthentic haste.

  “Hey, look, I was just curious,” she said, hoisting the sheet of directions and then pulling car keys from one pocket of her expensive jacket. “I’ll be on my way. It’s been a tiring drive.”

  Meg seized on the opportunity at once. “Where have you come from?” she asked, her mind refusing to consider what kind of subterranean material had prompted the question.

  And when Amanda replied—a little awkwardly, Meg believed—there was surely no tremble in the land, like a minor earthquake or explosives set off underground. This sense of movement was just Meg’s uneasy perceptions adjusting to the news.

  “Leeds,” the woman had said, her voice terse and evasive. “Leeds in West Yorkshire.”

  Once Amanda had departed, driving away in her pricey-looking coupe, Meg closed the door and locked it again. Something about the unsolicited visit, however briefly the woman had stayed, troubled Meg in a way she was unwilling to acknowledge. Maybe it was simply receiving a guest so late at night…or perhaps the awkward question she’d been asked, catching her unprepared and vulnerable…or maybe even the suggestive body language Amanda had displayed, which had surely been Meg’s residual paranoia again reading far too much into events…

  Whatever the truth was, the episode had exhausted her and she was now—at only nine p.m.—ready for bed. She tidied away the pamphlet she’d been preparing to read earlier, no longer eager to add to her nebulous concerns this evening. She simply craved the oblivion of sleep, but soon wondered whether even that was safe. She recalled her terrible dream a few nights ago in vivid detail, as if events today had revived it. And as the dark closed in around her—the security lamp outside had long since been extinguished, and she’d now switched out all the cottage’s lights—she wondered whether mysterious Amanda would be her only nocturnal visitor.

  7

  When she awoke the next day and went outside, she found the wall covered again in many more of those filthy handprints. Still in her dressing gown, she tried scrubbing them off with a brush, but that was when, despite sunshine blazing down upon her, the culprit returned. She heard it first, the heavy, crackling approach of something undoubtedly moist, scuttling her way on innumerable limbs. Then she turned and saw it in all its hideous glory: a queue of schoolchildren, many of them boys, clinging on to one another like carriages in a locomotive train. The hands of the one up front shared the same characteristics of all the others, but were free to enact more of the weird vandalism Meg had been seeking to eradicate. These were an adult’s hands attached to the wrists of a youngster; it looked as if the boy, eager to grow up quicker than nature allowed and enter a world of work and pain, had had his smaller appendages severed and replaced by larger ones. The fingers and palms were covered in clay and mud, like that extracted from a cliff-side mine, and moments later, the children were all over her, covering her gaze with oversize hands, all of whose fingernails, she now noticed, were painted a gaudy purple…

  Except of course that none of this happened; it had just been a typically savage dream. She jerked up from the bed, her arms flailing left and right. After glancing down, she expected to see herself bearing oversize fingers and palms, as well as stitching around her wrist where new appendages had been attached…but there was nothing other than her usual small hands. Then she was able to throw back the sheets and hurry to the bathroom, where she showered away the unclean residue of her latest gruesome imaginings.

  Her thoughts right now seemed connected to both children—perhaps understandably—and the mining area she’d visited several days earlier. The meaning of the second association was less transparent, and she ought to do everything possible to understand what it meant. After entering her lounge, where she’d briefly entertained Amanda the previous evening, Meg stooped to gather the errant book she’d located in the library, the one with no Dewy decimal details assigned to it.

  It had no imprint information either, which suggested—along with its photoco
pied appearance—it had been independently produced by some local maverick. There were twenty pages, ten A4 sheets folded and stapled. The text and drawings—roughly executed sketches in pen—constituted the narrative, with no chapter breaks or even a contents list. The booklet was amateurish, and for a reason Meg found uncomfortable, this made it feel untrustworthy as a source of information. But was that necessarily true? She’d worked in advertising for many years, and knew how glossy façades and official paraphernalia could lend authority to what was essentially bullshit. Just because the publication had been poorly produced, did that mean its material should be neglected? No, she found that conclusion illogical.

  And what did it have to offer? Meg boiled the kettle for a mug of strong coffee and then, not feeling like eating yet, returned to the lounge to sit in her favorite chair (the one away from the clutches of her lascivious husband), and finally began to read.

  The text was in a large font, and said very little with an awful lot of words. This only added to the document’s dubious nature, and Meg imagined if the author had a serious thesis to present, he or she would have endorsed it by adding a name and contact details. Alternatively, of course, lots of local history texts were presented as authorless, letting the facts speak for themselves. But was the information presented here grounded in truth…or simply the ravings of some deluded amateur historian?

  She decided to give the booklet the benefit of the doubt and read it straight through to the end.

  Most of the detail was humdrum, involving the working lives and conditions of miners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some parts were based on scraps of evidence, and others purely speculative, but after getting through the opening section, Meg felt more aware of what it must have been like to be employed in the Sandsend mines during days of yore.

  It was when the prose moved onto more significant events that her interest perked up a little. She’d wanted the miners’ stories to be dramatized by key episodes, and she certainly wasn’t disappointed by the second half of the book. She read accounts—crudely penned, it had to be admitted—of botched subterranean explosions and the occasional collapsing mineshaft. There was also material on criminal acts, such as an episode in the 1790s when a murder had been committed, with one miner stabbing another over access to a local woman. These were all tragic events, of course, but even so, Meg couldn’t help feeling how perspective achieved by the passage of time had rendered the violent quaint, the terrible nostalgic. She wondered whether her own dreadful experience would one day fade and become something she could accept with wistful reflection. It didn’t seem likely, somehow…But that was when the narrative took a turn for the worse.

  She didn’t only mean the prose, which had indeed become rather undisciplined, as if the author had grown either excited or fearful while documenting such outlandish events. The text was full of hysterical exclamation marks and misused ellipses, each deployed where calm explanation would have served the tale better. But how could any of this be described rationally? It was just nonsense, surely…Nevertheless, Meg gave the last few pages her most serious consideration; she had to. After all, it made so much sense of what she’d been experiencing lately.

  In the 1860s, miners digging deepest for alum in the area had chanced upon an entity that defied all scientific intervention, back then as well as now.

  Meg flipped briefly back to the title page of the book and discovered the account had been written in the 1980s; only the date was included under a repetition of the work’s title. But what difference did that make? If the story had been otherworldly twenty-five years ago, it was no less so today. Knowledge of such otherworldly matters had hardly developed in the intervening time.

  The author alluded to an undying organic creature set free by the activities of prospectors. The drawing on one page was unsettling enough, but it was the text that tried to elucidate the thing that really shook Meg up. This read:

  Like a centipede, but as big as a shark! … .. Flesh that is jellylike, like a squid’s, but crackling with something like electricity. White and pink and aqua blues, lanced with flashing lights.. .. . . It scuttled around on too many legs, each running with fretful haste. . . …But it did its worse with its tentacles! Nature had provided it with a skill unknown to man: its suckered ends had the capacity to adapt to recently severed parts of its victims—their hands¸ I mean!. . ... It could fuse itself to lopped-off parts of the miners it killed. It could even take their heads! These allowed it to do things only men can do: use opposable thumbs to grab tools . .. . and look around with human eyes! Its real head, a great blind orb of solid tissue covered in mouths and antennae, squirmed as it moved, making a sound like overcooked liquid burning with power! . …. It was quite hideous, and as it emerged from the pit, a few survivors who witnessed it said they’d never sleep again!!

  Presumably these frightened people were the deluded souls from whose recorded accounts the booklet’s author had derived his or her implausible, ill-conveyed tale. The region had been rather primitive at the time, with low standards of education; it had also probably been host to a number of local myths. And might this bizarre story be simply another example of such uncritical hearsay?

  The author went on to explain that approximately ten miners had been found dead in a mine at the time of this alleged rising of such an alien being. Most had been found without their hands, and at least a few headless. This part of the tale might be true, but the implication was that only one thing had caused the damage: the creature from the pit, its vast form—like a centipede, but as big as a shark, with jellylike flesh crackling with electricity—capable of adapting itself to recently severed human body parts. Its tentacles had fused with hands and heads, offering the thing an ability to fight with prosthetic devices and observe as well as its adversaries did…

  This was all nonsense, of course, and as Meg raced on to the end of the book—the text offered nothing more of such grisly import—she felt dismissive in a way that felt almost aggressive. She pictured in her mind her husband’s face, and then the woman who’d visited the previous evening…Lord knew what either Harry or Amanda had to do with all she’d been imagining lately, but here the experience stood all the same. Meg rose from the chair, flinging aside the book, and now felt like fleeing, down the coastline, until all the terrors burdening her lately were distant specks on a horizon. Acting intuitively, she grabbed her coat from a peg near the door, and then let herself outside. Moments later, she was pacing along the cliff side, trying desperately to get her thoughts into less chaotic order.

  She thought of severed hands and purple fingernails. She thought of her husband and his minor expenses fraud at work. She thought of unsolicited visitors in the dark watches of night, and palm prints pressed against an otherwise clean wall. She thought of Big Business and its relentless manner. She thought of the impish resourcefulness of Capitalism. She thought of the stress and strain her job had once put her under, and the reason she’d decided to leave paid employment. She thought—with the greatest sorrow of all—of her dead baby. She thought of redundancies, and the way large companies treated people as hired hands to be lopped off when no longer required. She thought of the use to which these appendages might consequently be put. She thought of unspeakable creatures unearthed during corporate enterprises. She thought of electrified jelly and centipedes, alien bodies as big as sharks, sounds like a moist thrumming, vicious decapitation and heads fused onto tentacles, and finally a beast prowling the planet with unforgiving sentience…

  At that moment, as her mind processed this profusion of tangled reflections, Meg heard something scuttling on the far side of the cliff. By now, she’d reached that part of the Sandsend Trail occupied by the barren landscape, like the moon at peace with the cosmos. But whatever lurked nearby, creeping unseen along the inner lip of the coast, had little other than menace at heart. It moved stealthily, its progress resounding with a hissing glee that even overruled the sea crashing beyond the distant beach. Meg recalled the p
icture she’d seen on the local newspaper’s front page, that wriggly, insectlike creature clinging to stone behind the missing young woman. Then Meg remembered the goth’s plump face, her black garments, and her—

  And that was when a hand emerged above the shale edge of the cliff, and Meg recognized it immediately. It was a female hand, tapered and smooth, and bore purple fingernails.

  Oh God, this was the missing young woman police were looking for and her family was concerned about. Meg, unmindful of anything other than helping the tourist back onto the cliff from which she must have tumbled while walking, hurried forward, her hands reaching out for the one grapping over the lip like some dumb, disobedient animal.

  And it was just as she touched the cold, lifeless appendage that its natural companion—another purple finger-nailed hand—appeared to the left…about ten feet farther along the coastline.

  No, that was impossible. It could not be. It defied laws of biology…Nevertheless, now frozen to the spot despite an unseasonably warm afternoon sun blazing in the sky, Meg was unable to look away from the sight of two identical hands, separated by the length of four or five bodies, grappling with shale on the cliff’s edge.

  Then a third object began rising midway between them—a woman’s head. But no, no, it wasn’t a head at all. Meg was mistaken. She snatched her gaze away, hoping to eliminate mental recollection of a soulless expression attached to a skull whose flesh had already begun to wither.

  Seconds later, she was running, fast, away, along the grassy path to her new home, where only memories were around to torment her, and nothing like a monster from another time and world.