He slowed when he spotted her, and removed a pair of white buds from his ears. When he smiled at her she was emboldened to ask him what music he was listening to.
“Not music,” he said. “It’s a recording. Of a lecture I went to in London last month.”
“What lecture?”
“Oh, just some stuff about environmental effects on communities. Behaviour. Health. That sort of thing. Linked to global warming. Or the possible dangers of nuclear power plants.”
“I don’t see any gills on you,” she said, meaning it as a joke. He laughed, a bitter little snort, but his fingers absently went to the side of his neck and plucked at the flesh.
Fearne checked behind her; her mother was lying back in the sand, having kicked off her shoes. To her mortification, she had also removed her blouse to reveal a black satin push-up bra that shimmered in the hazy light.
“Is anything wrong?” the waiter asked. Fearne remembered the previous night he had been wearing a shirt with his name on a badge, but the badge was grimy, or the light wouldn’t allow her to read what was upon it. She wanted to ask his name now, but also she wanted to know what things he had found in the sand, or whether he was tired all the time, and whether he believed that the nuclear power station was dangerous, or that there really was a tsunami poised to engulf the town.
Instead, she said: “I’m trying to find my dad. Did you see anyone, up on the road?”
“I saw nobody,” the waiter said. And then: “I only run for twenty minutes in the mornings, but by the time I get to work, my hair is stiff with salt, and it’s in the creases of my skin. It’s like being attacked.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“You should be scared. You know we understand more about the Moon than we do about our oceans?”
“What could we do if we knew everything?”
He stared at her. Sweat had dried to thin cakes on his skin. A muscle jumped in the shadowed flesh beneath his left eye.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “The sea comes back. The sea doesn’t come back. Either way makes me scared to the point of shitting myself.”
“I just want my dad,” she said. “Will you help me?”
“I can’t. I’m already late. Where’s your mum?”
“You’ll run straight past her if you go the way I came. So I’d run fast if I were you.”
He made a strange, stilted noise, a laugh, perhaps, though hobbled by mild guilt at finding her mother a figure of amusement.
“Okay,” he said. “Mind how you go. The rocks can be treacherous.”
Fearne watched him settle back into the rhythm of his run, and felt her skin tighten and flush as she caught herself admiring the jut of his buttocks against his close-fitting shorts, his slender, toffee-brown calves. She turned her back on him and marched towards the collapsed headland, angry with herself for becoming sidetracked. The watch in her fist was hot. Her father needed her and she had chosen instead to flirt with a guy who had not one iota of interest in her.
She reached the rocks ten minutes later. At some point there would have been pools here, little bowls of trapped seawater where kiddies would poke around with their nets, hoping to capture a stranded tiddler, or a crab. Now they were only tinder-dry crucibles littered with the translucent bones of sea creatures she could not identify. They reminded her of glass noodles; of thin, fractured patterns in puddles of ice. Some of the creatures seemed deformed, and she thought of what the waiter (Eric, was it? Eddie?) had said about the nuclear power plant. They used seawater as a cheap, readily available coolant, apparently. What came in was eventually discharged. She imagined water warmed by the reactor core going back into the ocean. She wondered if salt water meant that corrosion was a problem. She thought of all that water flushed with scintillas of uranium; irradiated fish spawning for generations. Imperfections upon imperfections. There might come a future where the fish returned to the land to avenge their crippled ancestors.
Maybe they were already in the process. She imagined a great piscine army jealously drawing back the waves. A power station without coolant could not survive for long, and she guessed uranium did not simply have an OFF switch.
Too many prawns before bed, she thought. How shellfish of me.
She picked a way through the potholes, looking out for any striking counterpoint to the dun landscape. She found a shoe as she was making her way down the side of a rock scarred with what looked like a million tiny ash-white limpets. Was it her dad’s shoe? She couldn’t be sure. It was big enough, but it was badly damaged: leather hung like a flap of torn skin from the vamp. Dried blood ringed the collar. She called out for him again but her voice was as dry and cracked as the scenery.
On the other side of the fallen shoulder of land, a bay stretched away to what looked like marshlands, and a narrow, stunted fringe of trees with weather-beaten canopies like back-combed hair. Salt made Christmas of everything. No figures here, though Fearne could see the marks Eric (Ernie? Is the name Ernest still going?) had made in the sand with his prissy gait before angling up on to the bluff.
There were no buildings here either, save a small wooden hut that might have served as a coastguard’s retreat but was now dilapidated, its door wailing grittily in the breeze. She approached it anyway. Inside she found a chair with its vinyl seat torn, sunburned foam frothing from it like fat from an opened gut. A newspaper had been whitened to illegibility. Ink from a pen had oozed across a page creating a thought bubble of furious black. The sound of something tapping or flapping against the wood at the back of the hut made her think of restless sails knocking against masts in deserted harbours. The beat matched that of her heart, and, she imagined, of the tide creaming against a shore many miles away. She remembered wiggling her toes in the crashing waves at anonymous beaches all over the world. Her father with a Nikon in his hand. She remembered a holiday—an assignment—when she was constantly worrying about her parents. It was around the time she began to understand what mortality was. After the reassurances, after the cuddles, her father—never one for sentimentality—had taken her for a walk along the beach.
“The waves are like us, Fearne,” he told her. “They move through their short lives placidly, unnoticed, but at the end, near death, they gather pace; they struggle and roar. Never think that death is easy, sugar lump. The body might be tired and old, but it fights like fury. It does not go gentle.”
The hasp of the padlock that had kept this hut closed was shattered; anything of value was long gone. She closed her eyes. The smell of the vinyl from hot days gone by had remained in the air. There was a smell too of burnt dust, and of skin that has been touched by the sunshine.
When the tapping became more of an irritation than she could cope with, she stepped outside and walked around to the rear. The rocks had reached this far in their collapse from the promontory. They formed a loose circle. She found her father within it, like a fragment trapped in a ring of teeth. Something had been at him in the night; most of his face was missing. She stared at the pale skin where his watch had been. The wind blew the fastener on his camera bag against the shed’s rim joist. She watched that for a few minutes, until the numbness inside her felt too much like the frost creeping across her bedroom windowpanes. Sand was shifting over her feet, and she struggled to free them. She moved away and the horizon was suddenly closer, as if viewed through binoculars. The sea was returning.
Fearne hurried back the way she had come, and only when she hit the shield of the headland did she realise that she was crying. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and wiped her nose. The surf was alive. It did not move in the way those waves from her childhood had moved. There was no rhythm or poetry to it. It was a shambling collapse, filled with angles and shadows: were they fins? Tentacles? Teeth? She thought she saw a serrated hook on the end of what looked like pistoning white muscle unsheathed from a tube of blood-red chitin. She thought she saw something globular turn in on itself, revealing a skirt of nacreous tissue, like oy
ster flesh hanging off a bed of shells. The water billowed and foamed with the exuviae of a billion things either dead, or grown too big for what had housed them. The sound of the sea was nothing that she recalled. No ozone crash and hiss; no skitter and chuckle of surf on pebbles. This was a sickly slithering, a jumble of keratin and collagen, a slick of ink and membrane and cartilage. She thought she saw remnants of ancient meals on the barbs and claws of what thrashed beneath the surface. But she could not concentrate on them. They looked too much like fingers. Too much like the things that she’d found in the base of her father’s suitcase. Her eyes would not fasten on the eyes that fastened all too readily upon her: they were too soulless, too intent. There were too many of them.
Her mother was half-asleep, singing snatches of a song half-remembered from the radio. Sand had claimed her to the groin. It played in the pleats and crevices and wrinkles of her flesh. Her lips made a ring of dry white elastic; her tongue was a forgotten bivalve on a half-shell, desiccating in the sun.
The perils of the cockle harvest. The collapse of a tunnel bored through a dune with cheap red plastic and tiny hands. Quicksand. A man was dragged from the pier. Tsunami. Riptide. The shark attack occurred in just three feet of water. Bodies still missing. You’d be forgiven to believe that such things as accidents did not occur.
She moved toward the water and her pace increased. She felt herself turning brittle under the cold stare of what shivered just beyond that frothing black tide.
The beach was no place for a child.
KURT FAWVER
MARROWVALE
KURT FAWVER is a writer of horror, weird fiction and dark fantasy. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Aeons, the Lovecraft eZine, Weird Tales and Nightscript. He has also released one collection of short stories, Forever, in Pieces (Villipede Publications, 2013), and his nonfiction has been published in periodicals such as Thinking Horror and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
Fawver holds a Ph.D. in literature and teaches at a large state university where, every semester, he tries to impart to his students the necessity of horror.
“The primary inspiration for my story was my hometown,” he explains, “which, like the eponymous ‘Marrowvale’, is an unassuming, slowly eroding backwater village nestled in central Pennsylvania. The people there are largely xenophobic and highly protective of their customs and culture—a culture that, above all else, revels in tromping about the wilderness (whether to hunt game, go camping, ride all-terrain vehicles, or hold alcohol-fuelled bonfire parties).
“Growing up, I always suspected that the people of my hometown were belligerent to outsiders because they were hiding some sort of deep, dark secret—maybe about themselves, maybe about their town. This secret would most naturally manifest itself in the wilderness and be latently (if not openly) hostile toward anything from the ‘outside’ world.
“‘Marrowvale’ provided an opportunity to glimpse such secrets, and to explore the uneasy insularity that binds together small, rural towns like the one I grew up in.”
From the unpublished manuscript of The Candle-Lit World: A Travelogue of Unusual Halloween Traditions by Charlotte Halloran
Entry: Marrowvale, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
DEEP IN THE forgotten foothills of central Pennsylvania lies the impoverished, weather-beaten town of Marrowvale. It’s a speck on the map—little more than one nameless bar and a dozen enfeebled, paint-stripped houses wheezing toward demolition. Barely what you could even call a “town”. Surrounded by dark, rolling forests and tattooed with fallow cornfields, Marrowvale impresses passers-through—if it impresses them at all—only as a fleeting image of exploded dreams and withered hopes. It’s the sort of place where America has worn itself to a nub, the sort of place where “living” and “dying” are the same word, the sort of place that the future has stopped visiting.
Within this decrepit hamlet reside thirty-three men, women, and children—each and every one a crumbling watchtower standing sentinel over the remains of a savaged kingdom, each and every one refusing to accept that the battle for their tiny hometown was lost decades before they were even born. These are people the outside world might call “rustics”, “yokels”, or “sons and daughters of the soil”. They wear wrinkled, sweat-stained flannel shirts with crusted jeans and speak in a slow, distant manner. Many struggle with the bottle. Even more struggle with obesity. They are people who hunt deer and squirrels and even groundhogs for food and work themselves into early graves. Their industries are the industries of sawdust and grease and heavy lifting. They express little concern for the world beyond their valley because the world certainly expresses no concern for them.
On its surface, Marrowvale doesn’t seem the sort of place that I would have visited for this book. As small and relatively remote as it is, it doesn’t seem like the sort of place anyone would visit for any reason. But Marrowvale conceals an inexplicable and, if I’m being honest, terrifying Halloween tradition that few outsiders ever witness.
In my last book, Burying Ourselves: Funeral Practices Across the World, I’d mentioned in my epilogue that I was thinking about writing a future volume on the topic of Halloween. As it so happened, a fifteen year-old girl who lived in Marrowvale—one Kristina Taylor Pittlebach—had read that book and decided to e-mail me about her hometown, a tiny nowhereville with what she claimed was a super weird and freaky thing that we all do at Halloween. She said that I absolutely had to come and see it; she said no one but the people of Marrowvale knew it happened.
Of course my curiosity was piqued. I responded to Kristina and asked if she could provide any more details, stressing that if the tradition really was out of the ordinary, I’d be happy to swing by her town and check it out. To my query, she sent a grainy black and white photo of two dozen people posed in graduated rows, as though they were taking a class picture. Everyone in the photo wore strange cylindrical helmets that entirely engulfed their heads. A chaos of jagged lines lay engraved about the circumference of each helmet. Where one would have expected eyeholes, a pair of spiked, elongated pyramids protruded from every face. I wasn’t sure how anyone could see out of the things. Considering that there were no visible nose or mouth apertures, I wasn’t sure how anyone could breathe in them, either.
To accompany her photo, Kristina wrote only one cryptic line: We all have to wear them to the meeting place every year.
As I stared at the picture and imagined an entire town wearing headgear that resembled 1950s sci-fi robots by way of a medieval torture device, a deep sense of unease washed over me. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was about the helmets or masks or whatever they were that set my nerves on edge; I could only say that they didn’t feel right. They didn’t give the impression of objects any sane human would ever design, let alone want to wear. It was exactly the kind of weirdness I was in search of, and it convinced me to include Marrowvale in my Halloween itinerary.
To reach Marrowvale, I had to fly into Harrisburg and then drive a rental car northwest from the city for almost two hours. Along my route, I encountered a profusion of nameless villages without so much as a single working stoplight or chain convenience store. I passed farmhouses and barns that, while still clearly operational, were flaking and splintering into nothingness. I drove over surprisingly steep hills cowering in the shadow of even more surprisingly steep mountains. And everywhere, everywhere I was met with autumnal foliage not bright and inflamed like the leaves in more northerly climes, but the same withered brown as rotting fruit and ancient parchment.
When I finally rolled into Marrowvale the day before Halloween, I was greeted by two sights: one, the town bar—a sagging two-storey Gable Front house which was only distinguishable as a bar because of the neon Coors and Budweiser signs that hung in its dusty windows—and two, a shirtless old man riding a lawn mower on the berm of the road.
As I neared him, the old man pulled his mower into the gravel parking lot that fronted th
e bar to let me pass. But I had no interest in passing. I, too, needed to visit the bar. I swerved in behind him and collected my thoughts. Curious as to the people of the town, I sat in the car and stared at the man. He turned in his seat and stared back. His right eye was entirely missing and he made no attempt to cover over the injury with a patch or a glittering prosthetic. His gaze split my attention in equal halves. On one side, a hollow gaped wide and deep and beckoned its viewer to crawl inside and explore a vacancy that might easily extend far beyond the reaches of the old man’s skull. On the other, an electric blue eye shot forth concentrated, penetrating scrutiny that felt as though it could carve through any length of time and space. I wasn’t sure which side I should meet.
As I stared in fascination, the old man’s cracked, blistered lips tightened and quivered. It seemed he was about to break into either tears or a murderous rage. He shook his head once, slowly, then swivelled forward, threw open the mower’s throttle, and motored away.
Clearly, Marrowvale wasn’t in the business of tourism. I jumped from the car and hurried into the bar.
In Kristina’s first email, she mentioned that the bar’s owner—a Mr. Dale Schwartz—kept a collection of what she termed “Halloween Meeting Treats” in one of the bar’s upstairs rooms. I wanted to check out this collection before I visited the Pittlebachs, so that I wouldn’t arrive on their doorstep entirely ignorant of their traditions. So the bar was my first stop.
Most likely due to the fact that it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, the rustic watering hole sat empty. The hardwood floor of the place was scuffed and cracked and its boards groaned under my every step. I counted eight tables set up around the main bar area, but I doubted they were ever all filled at the same time. Behind the bar slouched a doughy man with a shaggy walrus moustache and heavy circles draped beneath his eyes. He glanced up from the magazine in his hands—a yellowed Reader’s Digest—and asked, slowly, as if uncertain how to approach someone who wasn’t a regular, “What can I getcha?”
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