Max Gilbert

by Simon Clark

  They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. If so, these exposed souls were monstrously twisted and evil.

  Two-thirds of the way across the causeway, Wainwright saw the change in the things" faces. And he shuddered when he saw the eyes that looked as large and as shockingly bright as those of a starving man.

  Wainwright began to run, arms swinging, bandaged head jerking up and down.

  The villagers watched, struck silent, holding their breath, clenched fists resting on top of the walls.

  Wainwright had passed the seventh figure; only number eight to go. Then he would reach the road through the dunes which would lead him home.

  In his jerking run he approached the eighth and last figure. It still sat staring straight in front of it in the direction of the sea-fort, ignoring the running man.

  It knows; Christ, it knows ... Chris's stomach ached with tension.

  Then its head jerked up. It watched as Wainwright approached at a desperate run, arms windmilling, his white shirt now showing beneath his suit jacket.

  Then it moved.

  The figure on the beach leapt in one explosive movement, catching Wainwright in its red-black arms, sweeping him up, then backward, his feet whipping up higher than his head. Without releasing its grip, it swung the accountant down head-first onto the stone slabs that paved the causeway.

  Chris heard the crack of the skull against the stone even at that distance.

  Wainwright lay on the causeway stomach down, his head on its side. No movement.

  The creature moved a few paces away from the body, then sat down, cross-legged, staring with those bright white eyes at the sea-fort.

  The people in the sea-fort watched, stunned into silence, not moving. The scene wouldn't let them go.

  The other creatures hadn't moved. They just stared, eyes laser-bright. They made it possible to believe that they could burn holes through granite with a single look. No birds flew overhead; the mist seemed more dense. It grew colder, gloomier, as if the earth lay dying beneath their feet.

  Chris muttered that he was going to check on David.

  He returned to the caravan to find the boy asleep in the bedroom, his face poking above the duvet.

  He felt his son's forehead. It was moist with sweat. Gently he pulled the duvet down to his chest. Then, picking up the binoculars from the dressing table, he tiptoed out.

  As soon as he reached the steps he knew something had happened.

  He sprinted up to the walkway. The villagers were looking at the causeway, their heads craning forward.

  "Look!" cried one of the Hodgson boys. "He's shifted. The bugger's shifted!"

  Chris searched for what had caught their attention. The Saf Dar remained in their positions. Wainwright still lay ... Chris stiffened. But now he lay on his back, one knee raised in the air.

  He saw the man's arm move to wipe his face. Then, painfully, he pulled himself in to a sitting position. It was like watching someone wake with a monstrous hangover.

  After three false starts, Wainwright lumbered to his feet, head swinging from side to side.

  Chris jerked the binoculars to his eyes.

  Wainwright's head swung into view, uncomfortably large in the lenses. The bandage hung around his neck, now stained with fresh crimson. The balding head appeared; slashed across it, a gash in the shape of a smiling mouth, the open wound forming over-red lips with something white showing through. Chris lowered the binoculars and wiped his mouth.

  Lurching unsteadily, the accountant looked around him. He needed to stare long and hard at the Saf Dar to pull back the memory of a few minutes before. No nightmare, Mr. Wainwright, thought Chris grimly. This is stone-cold reality.

  Instead of trying to walk on, away from the sea-fort, away from the Saf Dar, including the one sitting on the causeway just five paces away, Wainwright began to stagger back to the sea-fort.

  "Idiot," whispered Ruth, "he should be going the other way. Not back. Idiot. ..."

  Mark Faust picked up the shotgun. "I'm going out there. Get the doors for me, Chris, please."

  "Mark, no." Tony snatched at Mark's arm.

  "We can't just stand by this time, Tony. That guy needs help."

  "No one goes out of those gates. It's suicide. No, it's worse than suicide. You of all people have seen what those things can do."

  "Shoot the cunts," grunted Farmer Hodgson, holding up his shotgun.

  "Look," stammered Tony, "get ready to open the gates, but only when he makes it back all the way."

  "Tony-"

  "Listen, Mark, listen. You saw what one of those things can do to a man. It split his head like a tomato."

  "Come on! Run!"

  "You can do it!"

  "Move it! Move yourself, man!"

  The villagers shouted encouragement.

  They were wasting their breath.

  One of the Saf Dar stepped up onto the causeway and walked toward the accountant. The creature's pace was unhurried. It reached out as the man staggered by and took hold of him. Then it pulled him down. With one red-black hand on the back of Wainwright's neck, it forced the man's bare throat down onto the corner of a stone block that edged the causeway; it dug deeply into his throat.

  Watching a man slowly choke was something no one wanted to see; but they couldn't turn away.

  Ten minutes later the accountant still struggled and clawed at the beast holding him down. He might as well have tried to scratch at solid iron. The thing merely sat cross-legged beside him and stared with its brothers at the sea-fort; only this one was pressing a man's throat to the edge of the causeway.

  Another ten minutes passed and the man still struggled, but now the movements were weaker.

  Useless.

  The movement had nearly stopped, apart from a few feeble twists of the torso, when Wainwright suddenly moved once more. He kicked frantically, his head jerked wildly.

  Then he lay still.

  Even though he did not move again the thing didn't release its grip. An hour later people began to drift away to sit huddled against the walls. Still the thing on the causeway didn't move.

  Chris could not take his eyes from the creature's muscular fingers rooted to the huge fists.

  By the time the tide rolled back in across the causeway, only a few people saw the creature release its grip on Wainwright. The body floated away to disappear in the rolling surf.

  Chris moved past those silent villagers who remained.

  With a last look at the water, now covering the heads of the Saf Dar, Chris, numb, walked slowly down to the caravan.

  The red hands. He couldn't stop himself picturing those brutal red hands.

  And David's fragile throat.

  Chapter Thirty

  Bored, David wandered around the sea-fort.

  Something had happened earlier in the day. Something that made everyone sad. He didn't know what it was but more than once he'd heard the name Wainwright mentioned. Wasn't he the man with the unfriendly face and all his head bandaged? Maybe he'd got angry about something and gone home. Anyway, he was nowhere about now.

  In the big room with lots of glass windows that looked out over the gundeck, people from the village sat on old chairs (some had even been pulled back out of the rubbish skip). Most stared into space. The old Vicar man (he had a miserable face too, and his breath smelled nasty), he walked around and round. He never said anything to anybody.

  David mooched on.

  Along one of the stone-flagged corridors was a smaller room with a few chairs and a little table. Through the crack in the door he could see his mum, dad, Tony and Mark talking.

  His mum said: "It's not going to last long. Not when we're feeding twenty-plus people, three times a day. You brought what you could carry; we stocked up because its a fifteen-mile around trip to the nearest supermarket, but it's going fast. There's no more fresh bread. We're down to the last carton of milk."

  "So we ration ourselves." That was Tony Gateman.

  "As important"-his d
ad's voice-"is the question: are we going to sit and wait or are we going to try and get help from outside?"

  Mark: "All the phones are down. There's no way of getting word out."

  His mum: "Have you thought what will happen if we don't? Come Monday morning the postman is going to try driving into the village. He's going to stop on the bridge where the road is blocked. Maybe he'll decide to reach the village on foot. You said there was one of those things waiting under the bridge?"

  "Ruth's right," said his dad. "By not doing anything we're going to let people die. You only have to look at what happened to that poor sod Wainwright to know what's going to happen to anyone trying to get into Out-Butterwick."

  His mum said, "How many people will die before the employers realize their staff aren't coming back from Out-Butterwick; and how many police will die before the authorities realize something is happening out here?"

  "I'm with these two, Tony." Mark's deep voice made the door vibrate against David's fingers. "If we sit back and do nothing, we'll have blood on our hands."

  Chapter Thirty-one

  This is Chris Stainforth's nightmare:

  Night-time.

  He had been walking around the sea-fort searching for an axe-head he could fix to the end of the axe-handle he'd chosen for a club. He wanted to upgrade his makeshift weapon. He knew he would need it soon.

  His dream search for the axe-head took him onto the sea-fort walls. The dream, unusually vivid, was richly detailed. He saw his surroundings clearly-the car in the courtyard, the timber and bricks piled behind the sea-fort gates to strengthen the barricade, the caravan in darkness. All the good villagers of Out-Butterwick soundly asleep.

  He reached the walkway that ran around the top of the walls and looked out. The night-time beach, a vast expanse of sand; the causeway ran ruler-straight toward the dunes.

  Tide out, the Saf Dar sat, sentinel-like, dark, brooding, staring at the sea-fort. As he leaned forward, his hands resting on the cold stones of the wall, he saw more things. These were awful.

  Lucky it was only a dream. If this were real he didn't know whether he could take it and stay sane.

  Approaching through the mist, more figures ... eleven, twelve, thirteen.

  As he watched the figures emerge from the mist, the dream became a nightmare.

  They formed a procession. Like the victims of some nightmare weapon that existed only in a diseased mind.

  He knew these were people lost to the sea.

  They were the recently dead, and the long dead.

  Almost straight away he recognized Fox. The beard, matted, hung down in rats'-tails. The wild-man hair had gone, along with the scalp, leaving nude bone gleaming whitely. Only one eye remained. The other socket, a raw split, looked as if it had been roughly packed with raw liver.

  One hand lacked fingernails. From the tips of the fingers grew pink cones. As if the force that had thrust its version of life through what had once been dead flesh had also crudely repaired the damaged body. Pink growths sprouted from any break in the skin. These men weren't dead. This was life-some form of life-at its most explosively dynamic.

  A larger figure followed Fox, its man-shape being lost beneath the volcanic pressure of growth beneath the skin. How little of the original man remained Chris did not know. But from the resemblance to Fox, Chris instinctively knew it was Fox's brother who had died ten years before. This figure was a bloated copy of his brother. Shellfish grew across its forehead, creating a heavy black crust; barnacles rashed in white speckles over its bloated chest which was bare of any clothing; sea anemones clustered in red and brown lumps around its distended genitals.

  A sick feeling bit into the pit of Chris's stomach.

  It followed his brother, its oversized feet slapping against the sand.

  Behind the Fox twins came more:

  A drowned pilot wrapped in a rotting parachute like a funeral shroud.

  Then a boy who'd swam too far out twenty summers before, now bulbous-headed with hands the size of footballs.

  Following him, a fisherman with a monstrous growth erupting from his throat; as big as a beachball, it was stretched so tight you thought it would burst with every step he took. Then came the accountant, Wainwright, walking a different kind of step now, the white bandage still hanging around his neck; from his smashed mouth a growth the size of a tennis ball and as red as a strawberry budded out.

  In the nightmare Chris's mind zoomed in on every detail.

  Then came more men, with heads that looked as if they had been formed out of beef-red-raw and moist-which shook and quivered with every step.

  Behind him, six men who had drowned in the same small boat. They had become welded together by the explosive growth of flesh to form a single creature with bent legs. It moved like a crab scraping a furrow in the beach.

  (Thank Christ it's only a dream.)

  They reached the causeway and crossed it.

  He sensed they had one purpose. One single craving.

  They all wanted to go home. Whatever remained of their minds must have mumbled the same word like an incantation:

  Home, home, home ...

  They moved like travelers nearing the end of an exhausting journey. Home, home, home ...

  Going home ...

  But then they suddenly stopped.

  He noticed that the Saf Dar were no longer watching the sea-fort but had turned to watch the figures crossing the beach. The figures turned; then, as if compelled by a will that defeated their own, they began to walk toward the sea-fort, their eyes fixed on it.

  And what eyes. He gripped the top of the stone wall. The eyes were like walnuts, convoluted shapes with ridges and bumps that protruded from their sockets.

  They approached.

  As he watched, the ones that possessed mouths opened them. They began to cry out, their faces distorting even more grotesquely. The cry, faint, vibrated with their agony. They were being forced to do something they desperately didn't want to do. And it was the Saf Dar who controlled them. He knew they had become their slaves.

  Only a dream, he told himself.

  Abruptly the force that drove them toward the sea-fort released them. Their old impulse reasserted itself...

  Home ... home ... home ...

  And they moved off once more down the beach and away into the darkness.

  The Saf Dar watched them go. Then, as one, their heads turned smoothly back and they stared at the seafort.

  A movement at his side startled him.

  It was Tony.

  Tony looked at him for a full moment. Then said: "No, Chris. You're not dreaming, you know. You're as wide awake as I am."

  Chris leaned forward over the wall, then vomited forcefully onto the sand more than twenty feet below.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  That morning Mrs Lamb stood on a packing case, tied one end of the washing line around her neck, the other end around an iron hook in the sea-fort store room ceiling, and stepped off.