Beneath The Surface

by Simon Strantzas

  “Are you hurt?” Philip took a hesitant step forward.

  The man’s head turned, his one exposed eye bloodshot and filled with terror. The room became startlingly quiet. The entire left side of the man’s face was covered in an oily muck that clogged his orifices and disguised what lay underneath. It caked his greying beard and stained his clothes and skin. Philip retreated to the door as the man scrambled to his feet, leaving marks across the wall while sounds gurgled from his fouled lips. He pushed past Philip, leaving a long smudge across the counselor's chest, and Philip could do nothing but watch him escape. After he’d gone, Philip retreated to the office shaken, and sat quietly at his desk.

  He’d never seen anything so bizarre and upsetting before. His hands shook and he placed them upon the desk hoping to steady them. Underneath his fingers, Allan’s files stared up and the sight of them began to transform Philip’s fear back into anger. Where was Allan? Of all the days to skip work, he chose this day? Philip dialed Allan’s home number and at the sound of the answering machine hung up. Loathing filled him.

  He was relieved at the end of the day to find the train home nearly deserted as he wanted only solitude. He sat facing the front window, and watched the dark tunnel advancing upon him. Lights ran across the few passengers who sat like gargoyles, heads hung low, waiting for life to pour from their drooping mouths. Each door opening brought a glare that blinded them, and they squinted until their stop arrived. They then trudged with difficulty onto the cold platform, leaving Philip further alone.

  He looked back through the rear window along the line of cars behind him. They all seemed empty, passengers having departed them one by one until only Philip remained. As his train took the turn at Union Station, Philip realized he was wrong; near the other end of the train, he saw the briefest shape of someone sitting. Immediately the figure was gone, hidden behind so many empty cars.

  The distance between the penultimate stop and his own stretched for an eternity. When Philip stood to collect his things he noticed, upon his seat, a black gelatinous streak. He craned his head, looking for a stain upon his clothes and found it spread across his leg. Brushing only made it worse. He stepped from the car annoyed.

  The train hurried off, leaving him in his filthy clothes alone on the platform. The exit was bathed in its orange light, and as he walked towards it a strange sound followed. Like the suction of a foot leaving mud, it repeated, echoing off the walls. He looked around but the platform was empty. The noise continued and he wondered if he was really alone, or if someone else had left the subway train while he was too preoccupied to notice. He looked back again, and then moved faster towards the orange stairwell.

  Light spilled from it and flooded the blotched tiles, illuminating a dark stream of footprints that curved around the concrete walls and into the stairwell. From the first stair he could just barely see the surface level above and the dark night that already clogged the sky. He climbed the stairs, anxious to escape the shrinking walls and the awful sound behind him, and tried to ignore the feel of the railing, still slick with the sweat of an entire city’s hands.

  A pair of figures crested the top stair. They stood side-by-side, silhouetted by the pale light behind them. They filled the width of the stairwell and began to descend towards him. Unsettled by their approach, he stood to the side to let them pass.

  But when they were almost upon him, Philip recoiled in horror.

  They were six or seven feet tall, coated in some foul black crude like thickened oil; it slowly rippled over their bodies, obscuring their faces and mouths. It seemed to eat the light, and — like two black holes — reflected nothing under the orange glow.

  Philip found the first stair behind him, and then the next, and soon scrambled back down them to the platform. He needed to escape from those barren faces and find his way free.

  He turned the corner and there were more faceless shadows awaiting him. They grabbed his shoulders, black stuff swimming frantically over their hands, and touched his face. He felt numb instantly and his legs crumbled, dropping him to his knees. Philip’s stomach constricted, muscles convulsing, lungs filling, and he coughed up a thick, viscous fluid. With a shudder, his gut exploded, and a torrent of black grease poured from him like blood, covering the ground. Dark figures encircled him, their faces a swirling mass, black sputum pooling at their feet, as one by one Philip’s muscles failed. His whole body revolted, liquid spilling out, and he collapsed onto the drowned square tiles.

  Slowly, the world stopped moving, and for a brief moment threatened to never resume.

  Then, drop after drop, the congealed oil crept back towards Philip’s lifeless body. It crawled onto his chest, into his hair, through his clothes. More followed, faster, coating his body in a layer of sludge, of bile, of everything that had filled him for so long. It covered him, flowing thick like a river across the surface of his cooling skin. Eddies swirled in his eyes, finding banks in the angles of his bones. It was a torrent flooding over him, a tumultuous sea, as silent as the shadows that looked on.

  Eventually the waves subsided, and the liquid began to calmly move beneath the dull orange lights of the deserted subway platform, swirling in odd patterns.

  Then, something stood, and one more shadow joined the night.

  THE CONSTANT ENCROACHING OF A TUMULTUOUS SEA

  STRANGELY, THE WIND was far stronger in the city. It wrapped around tall skyscrapers, picking up speed as it gusted through the alleys of claustrophobic walls. There was a chill, far too unseasonable for the end of autumn, and the heavy coat I wore could not protect me from its bite.

  I had made my appointment to view the apartment weeks before, resigned to the idea that I could no longer live beyond the city’s walls, yet the agent I spoke with over the telephone seemed doubtful when I admitted the truth: I had never before set foot in the city. In any city.

  Her voice on the other end of the line became quiet, and I imagined I could hear her head shake as I spoke, trying to comprehend my very existence. By the time I had secured the directions to the vacant apartment, there was a small part of me that wondered if she had any real intention of meeting me there.

  But if those directions had once made sense, they no longer did. I wandered the streets aimlessly after my arrival, praying I might find a street name I recognized. Overhead, the sky was grey and thick with clouds that moved like dark molasses and, as they crept, the wind tossed litter down the gutters of the cracked pavement.

  The city was foreign to me; unlike the hearts of every love I had known, mine held no yearning for the cold concrete and steel, no desire to become lost in emptiness. Instead, I had spent all my days in the small towns that haloed it on the map. But to my horror I could not escape the city in the end. It was a beast to which I was tethered. One by one everyone I had known had disappeared; called into its grey waiting arms. I too heard its cry in the night, the wails flapping my tattered curtains as if they were the edges of a torn reality, and I resisted the summons as long as I could.

  I do not know how quickly the day passed while I was lost upon the cold concrete beneath the shadows of giants, searching for the agent and her vacant apartment. Beyond those towering offices the sun remained hidden by a veil of swirling clouds, and the color they assumed, though constantly shifting, did not lighten or darken dramatically over the hours. It was as though the world had stuck permanently just before dusk, and the few people I saw upon the streets ducking from the wind would not slow long enough to answer my questions. I felt invisible among their drained greying faces.

  My mother had warned me away from the city. She had gone there, long before I was born, and returned without the man who might have been my father. She told me it saddened her to think of him, yet she swore it was the city that had taken him and she could never forgive it. My time with her was spent watching her skin turn paler as she left my childhood home less and less. By the end, she was only a shell of the woman I had known, drained of life, and with her dying breath she bla
med the city for all that had happened to her.

  • • •

  I could not believe what I saw when I found myself stopped at a corner and chanced to gaze down the street that crossed my path. I rubbed my eyes, sure I was in a dream, but the image remained. Between a pair of buildings only a few hundred yards distant, a sliver of space remained uncluttered and I was standing miraculously at the precise angle to see through it to what lay beyond. Waves crested with white travelled across the surface of a great body of water, and suddenly in the cold air I could feel a trace of mist against my face. I inhaled deeply, but I could not smell anything on the wind.

  I altered my path immediately, forgetting my appointment and my worries. All that concerned me was getting closer to the sea that the city pressed itself up against as though it were a desperate lover.

  I descended the hill towards the water, passing over streets devoid of traffic. On the last, I saw a homeless man bundled against the biting wind, his hands stretched out before him and screaming into the gale “This is mine! You cannot have it. This is mine!” Yet, when I stopped to look closer, he was not holding anything. His hands were empty.

  He looked up at me at that moment and, as our eyes locked, there seemed to be something exchanged, some note of familiarity, a message I could not understand. He took a breath as if to speak, then held it and looked around as though seeing for the first time. He shook his head when I stepped closer, then scurried backward, clutching a hand close to his chest while desperately waving me away with the other. Confused and unsure, I backed away, and continued walking towards the water. When I passed over the last of the pavement and onto fine sand, I looked back but the homeless man had already disappeared.

  The turbulent sky crackled above me, threatening rain, but I did not care. I had felt buried beneath the miles of steel girders and concrete slabs, felt smothered by the giant tainted body that stood behind me at the periphery of the beach, and I needed a moment to look away from the city’s crumbling edifice and into the churning nature that rolled forward.

  But where I saw only bones behind me, I saw only dust ahead.

  Drab, empty, swirling eddies of sand travelling towards the water; the beach as dead as the city. Each step I took was swallowed by millions of the tiny grains, flowing around the shape of my boot, and when I lifted my foot sand rushed in to fill the void. I raised my face to the sky, looking for the sun behind the heavy clouds, yet that bright shining eye remained hidden and would not betray its presence to me.

  As I stood there watching, I noticed not far from me a lonely figure walking very close to the water. She held a bucket in her hands and moved awkwardly, but with purpose in her step. I watched as she slowly moved across the beach until she disappeared behind a hill of sand and then failed to reappear. I rushed forward, but when I reached the dune she was gone and the sand showed no trace of her passing.

  I scanned the beach for her, and thought I saw her a short distance away, her frail body carrying that bucket towards the dark foaming water. But again, she disappeared behind the dunes, and again failed to reappear from the other side.

  I checked my watch, unsure of how long it had been since I stepped onto the beach, yet the hands had not yet moved; everything stood still. The air was filled with a dull drone, interrupted only by the sound of wind gusting. My stomach writhed and twisted when I thought of the real estate agent who waited for me somewhere back within the claustrophobic streets of the cramped and littered city.

  I would have to go back, return to the bowels of that foul concrete and asphalt monstrosity. My mother was right to keep me from it, yet I no longer had a choice. But when I looked back from the sandy dunes to the streets that had borne me there, the way seemed to recede. The city was running from me, abandoning me. I turned back around and saw the waves washing up to the shore, a wide emptiness of rhythmic movement. The water called to me in a singsong voice, and for the moment it seemed wiser to listen to it than to the city’s monotone pleas.

  I had walked only a few yards, climbing a hill carved by the wind in the sand, when beneath me the ground disintegrated without warning. I barely kept from falling before the dune collapsed in on itself, and when I looked down at the valley it had once shielded, I saw at its nadir the thin woman I had watched upon the beach. Her bucket sat beside her, a wet rag in her hands, and she looked up at me with a glare so sour I had to turn away. Lying prone in front of her was the homeless man, his clothing in tatters, his face covered with grime and sand. He remained absolutely still as the old woman tended to him in the chilling wind. His hands were still empty.

  I did not know what had happened, but the woman seemed very upset. She mopped the man’s head with a dirty rag, periodically twisting brackish water from the cloth into her pail. All the while, her eyes never left me, even as I struggled to remain standing on ground that was so uneven.

  “Have you no shame?” the woman asked. “Are you so uncaring that you would disturb him?”

  I tried to utter sounds, but what emerged was cold and dry and inaudible over the howl of the wind.

  “Look what you have done,” she said, and pointed her long thin finger at the man lying before her. He said nothing, but sand had crawled into the cracks of his face, and I wondered how he could remain still when those silken granules were so close to his eyes and mouth that they might invade him at any moment.

  “I dug this for him,” she said, and I looked at the remnants of the sand hill and at the hole she had dug there; a hole my clumsy feet had collapsed. “It is too late now,” she said. “He has been here too long.”

  She put her hand on her knee and pushed herself to her feet. Then she looked down, and kicked further sand onto the homeless man. He did nothing to prevent it, and I realized then what she had dug, and what purpose it was intended to serve. “He was not enough,” she said, then lifted the bucket with her frail spotted arms and carried its heavy load towards the sea that continued rushing the shore.

  When the woman reached the rolling water, she set the bucket down on the wet sand and said something I could not hear over the sound of the wind and the waves. She then lifted the bucket, awkwardly as it seemed too big, too heavy for her, and tipped the contents into the curling sea. It seemed as though she poured for hours — it went on and on — and when I thought the bucket was finally empty, she shook it until more of that stained liquid flowed.

  The wind gusted around me then and sand stung my eyes. When I could see again I discovered the woman had gone, as though she were a spirit on the empty stretch of shore.

  I walked on, towards the water, leaving behind me the collapsed hill of sand and the man buried beneath it. I searched other hills on the beach — some full, others flattened or depressed — but behind none of them did I find that frail old woman or her dented metal pail. I thought, for a moment, I saw the briefest glimpse of her — a hand piercing the sand, a slight wave countered by the gusting wind — but when I turned my head, the mirage disappeared and all I saw were sweeping clouds painted in dark shades of grey as they passed violently over the churning sea.

  I did not realize until it was far too late that the ground beneath my feet had changed. I had just become accustomed to the feel of the soft frictionless sand, my treads sinking slightly more with each step, when my foot came down upon what looked like a large, reddish brown rock. But my foot did not land firmly upon its hard surface; instead, it went right through, the rock breaking as though it were unfired clay, revealing a hollow void. I sank suddenly, yet I was still moving forward, too fast to correct my misfortune. I held my arm out to stop myself as I fell, but the ground was covered in more of the dark rocks, and each one I touched broke just as easily beneath my weight. The high-pitch sound they made as I burst through inexplicably brought to mind the death of my mother.

  I lay there, my hands and feet trapped in the voids of those long brown rocks, my ribs aching from where they too had made contact yet failed to penetrate, and I realized then that I was unable to
move easily; I did not have the proper leverage to push myself up. When I tried to reposition my body, the pile of stones cracked further, and either pushed a sharp edge into my soft chest or slid me further into the ground’s tightening grip.

  It was then, with my face so close to those broken pieces, that I finally realized what had snared me. Those empty shells were not rocks as I had presumed, but the naked dead. There were hundreds of them, piled atop each other in a heap, lining the shore of the beach like a long wall. Each was dried out, mummified, and their discolored shells were all that remained after the softness within them had withered and gone.

  I felt on the verge of panic, but willed myself to remain calm for fear my struggling would only further inhibit my escape. I could hear the sea crashing only a few yards away from me — each landing wave inching closer to where I was — and when I turned to look at it, the water seemed to have taken on a darker aspect: deep blues and violets tainting it like a bruise. It was mesmerizing as the colors swirled, coursing between the grains of smooth sand that covered the beach as the sea retreated after each wave.

  I turned my head away and tried to focus.

  I twisted my body slowly, hoping for enough leverage to pull myself free. As I moved, I felt my bones slide against one another, and there was a sharp pain in my side that stabbed me so hard I nearly passed out. I stopped moving and panted as I waited for the stars to clear from my eyes and the throbbing to ebb away.

  From that vantage point, my head upon the ground, I could see the grey and black city towering at the edge of the beach, its thick lingering smoke scorching the air above it, and between the city and me there was a field of grey sand on which my footprints had already gone. There was no record of my passing, no one to count me should the empty vessels that held me so close take me.

  At first, I did not think I had seen anything. I had begun moving again — slow rocking motions to avoid aggravating my injured ribs — when, over the horizon, there was a flicker of life and I saw the old woman appear. The bucket still hung from her two emaciated arms, but it swung as though empty. There seemed to be a jog in her step, and I did not know if it was the wind trying to blow her over or her own anxiety. Either way, her eyes were set on mine.