The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  Beneath the streetlights the tarmac shone a wet yellow color, still slick with the rain from earlier in the day. The sandstone terraces lining the street contained large, comfortable townhouses that implied a certain understated wealth. They spoke of a more prosperous era, having been built when Whitehaven was an important trading port. Nowadays they were mostly bought and paid for by Sellafield wages. Cozy light shone from the gaps around or between heavy, expensive-looking curtains. Bracket could hear the constant traffic traveling along the nearby A595, and the ever-present seagulls yammering on. He headed down the road toward the Tesco supermarket, which he passed at least twice a day on his way to work and back. There he bought some cigarettes at the petrol station, and made his way on to the harbor. He stroked Yorkie’s head, let him off the lead, and watched as the dog ambled off to piss against the railings which prevented unwary people from falling into the oily water. He didn’t often talk to his dog, like some people did, but he was concerned about the decrepit little creature dying on him. He liked having a non-verbal relationship and could spend hours with the dog, just thinking. He worried that after the dog died he wouldn’t be able to think at all.

  The clouds were being torn into blue-edged tatters by some high-up wind, and between them the crescent moon was visible. Bracket walked a little way along the harbor and sat down on one of the big wooden benches, where he lit his first cigarette in six years. He narrowed his eyes against the smoke and scratched his nose with his thumbnail. His parka was closely bunched around him, as the cold always headed in from the sea at night. He gazed at the masts and rigging of the old fishing boats and yachts moored in the marina, and then beyond them toward a row of tiny lights far out to sea. Only visible sometimes, they were the lights of a town or village on the Isle of Man.

  He finished his cigarette. A baby! Good God. He laughed a little and then stood up—then saw Yorkie and grimaced. Yorkie was crouching, further along the side of the harbor, and unloading what looked like about half his body weight in loose feces. Bracket fished a carrier bag from his parka pocket.

  Just beyond where Yorkie was defecating was “The Wave.” It was a sculpture installed as part of the harbor’s Millennium regeneration, and took the form of a long, curvy, white metal bar supported on white metal legs. It ran the entire length of the Lime Tongue, the jetty on to which ships had once unloaded their cargoes of limes. The Wave had neon lights embedded along its structure, so that blue neon shone on one side and green neon on the other. At least half of the time one of the neon bulbs had blown so the whole thing was switched off, but tonight it was fully operational.

  Bracket studied it as he waited for Yorkie to finish his massive job and, as he admired the bright blue and green ripples in the water on either side of it, he suddenly became aware of somebody else standing on the harbor, near the far end of The Wave. Not just another dog-walker, which would not have been unusual, but a strikingly large man dressed in a black suit. He kept scraping one foot backward across the ground, like a cartoon bull about to charge. A sizeable black suitcase rested beside him. The blue neon gleamed off his bald head and it took Bracket a few seconds to work out why he looked familiar, but then it clicked. Artemis Black. The man was Artemis Black.

  Bracket’s heart scuttled out of its shell and right down through his body, to seek refuge in his shoe. He turned away and was all set to scuttle off himself, but then realized that Yorkie, incredibly, still hadn’t finished shitting. What the fuck was wrong with that dog? Internally it must have been just a pea-sized brain packed in amongst a maze of intestines. Nothing but stomach and guts. Stupid fucking meatball.

  And then Artemis was walking toward him. Not walking but striding—marching, almost—bearing down like one of those minotaur things from the old Doom games that Bracket still played sometimes when alone in the house. He didn’t look happy. As he got close Bracket saw that he looked distinctly unhappy, in fact.

  “I’ve got dog shit on my shoe,” declared Artemis. “It’s disgusting. This is the first time I’ve ever set foot in this town, if you can even call it that, and on my way to the hotel, on the very first journey I make, I tread in a pile of dog shit.”

  “It wasn’t me,” said Bracket.

  “No,” replied Artemis. “Glad to hear it. But was it your dog?” He was speaking through gritted teeth, and slowly, like he was trying to tell off a three-year-old child while suffering from a terrible headache.

  “No,” said Bracket. He raised his right hand, which was holding an orange carrier bag already inside out. “I pick his up. I mean, when he’s finished. He hasn’t even finished yet.”

  Artemis gazed down at Yorkie with such a sneer of disgust that Bracket flinched. Yorkie looked up, made a last explosive moist sound, and wagged his tail. “He stinks,” said Artemis.

  “He’s an old dog,” said Bracket.

  “What’s this thing, anyway?” Artemis pointed over his shoulder with his thumb toward The Wave.

  “It’s a sculpture,” said Bracket.

  “It’s fucking bollocks, is what it is,” said Artemis. There was a silence as if he expected a response. Bracket just let his eyes slide from Artemis’s face toward the neon lights, and didn’t say anything. Beyond The Wave, the harbor continued on down to the burned-out hotel, and the hill with that rough residential estate at the top of it.

  “Have you been crying?” asked Artemis, after it became evident that Bracket wasn’t about to agree with him.

  “No,” said Bracket.

  “You have,” said Artemis, leaning forward and peering into Bracket’s face. “You’ve been crying.”

  “Look,” said Bracket. “It’s been a heavy night. I just—I just need to pick up this crap and then go home. Please. I don’t really want to have to pick it up in front of my new boss.”

  “What?”

  “I saw you on the organogram,” said Bracket. “I work at the call center. I’m a team manager there.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bracket.”

  “What the fuck kind of name is that?”

  “Oh … Oh, sorry. I mean that’s just a nickname. Hackett is my real name. Not really any better than Bracket, is it?”

  “No, not at all.” Artemis sighed deeply and looked past Bracket, over his head, in the direction of the call center. “So why were you crying, then? You can tell me all about it, you know. I think you’ll find me quite approachable. And if it’s something major, then I should probably know anyway. If it might affect your work.”

  “My wife is pregnant,” said Bracket. “I just found out tonight.”

  Artemis’s eyes suddenly focused back on Bracket’s. “Then you’re crying because you’re happy?” he asked. His expression was severe.

  “Oh,” said Bracket. “Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

  “Good,” said Artemis. He clapped a heavy hand on Bracket’s shoulder. “I guess you’ll be wanting some overtime, then, eh?”

  Bracket bit his lip and looked down at Yorkie. Yorkie gazed back at him with an expression that said nothing at all.

  “Yeah,” he said, eventually. “I guess I will.”

  “Ha!” barked Artemis. “Excellent! I have a couple of projects that I want to kick off, so you can be my right-hand man.”

  “Sounds good,” said Bracket.

  “I’ll talk to you some more on Monday.”

  “Great,” said Bracket. He was still looking at Yorkie.

  “I’m going to go and find my hotel now,” said Artemis. “You go home.”

  “Yeah,” said Bracket. “I was just about to, anyway, actually. Which hotel is it?”

  “The Waverley.”

  “Down there,” said Bracket, pointing along a pedestrianized street that ran from the harbor straight into the town. “Down there and to the left.”

  “See you on Monday, then,” said Artemis, and strode away again, back toward his suitcase.

  Bracket just looked at Yorkie for a while, who sat there looking back up. Then he bent do
wn and picked up the still-warm feces. He could feel the heat and the wetness of it through the thin plastic of the carrier bag. Once he’d gathered most of it he reversed the bag the right way round again and tied it closed.

  “Come on, then,” he said to the dog. “Come on, old man.”

  SWANS

  Artemis walked on past his suitcase toward what looked like a ramp for getting boats into or out of the water, just beyond the piece-of-crap “sculpture” that was The Wave. Behind him, he could hear Bracket scraping up the dog shit and he shook his head. How could anybody lower themselves to that? He then sat down on the ramp, just above the water level, and took off the shoe that was smeared with muck. He dipped the sole of it into the water. The liquid was an inky black, except where the ripples caught the moonlight or the neon, shining their reflections silver and bright blue respectively. He paused momentarily as he thought he saw a ghost emerging, head first, from the water, but then realized that it was just a sleeping swan tinged with a blue luminescence from The Wave. It was one of many bobbing gently on the surface, their heads tucked beneath their wings so that they appeared almost spherical.

  Once his shoe was clean, Artemis put it back on and just sat there with his head in his hands.

  He’d loved his wife. They’d first met in the zoo; he’d gone to look at the big cats and she’d been on her way to the aquarium. Artemis had loved her dearly.

  BATHROOM DREAM

  In the early hours of Saturday morning, Arthur dreamed that he stood looking at the toilet. Small black worms were overflowing from beneath the lid of the cistern, which shifted slightly due to the tumultuous mass heaving beneath it. He knew the cistern was full of them. He knew they were hidden inside all of the walls, all of the pipes. Even as he watched, more and more of them tumbled down the bright white sides of the cistern. He could hear the wind outside, just the wind and nothing else, and he imagined that there was nothing else, just a flat, empty landscape, as flat as a still sea.

  PART TWO

  VICTORIAN GOTHIC

  Bony had a very impressive 32-inch flatscreen monitor, together with a brand-new, cutting-edge graphics card, and Arthur kept getting so absorbed in watching the mist drift across the screen that he neglected to play the game itself. Bony was sitting next to him, slurping from a fresh cup of tea, but that didn’t really detract from the atmosphere created by the surround-sound set-up and the dim lighting in the room.

  “I am blown away by the mist all over again,” said Arthur.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” said Bony. “It makes the game seem almost worthwhile.”

  “Don’t mock that which you don’t understand.”

  “You’ll start playing it for yourself next.”

  “I do play it for myself, really,” said Arthur. “I mean, I don’t know how playing it for myself would be any different.”

  “I don’t understand it. I mean, I understand why you do it but I don’t understand Tiffany’s motivation.”

  Arthur paused the game and sipped from his own mug meditatively. The curtains were closed and the only light came from numerous candles spaced around the small room. The squawking of seagulls came from outside, but apart from that the only thing to be heard was the game’s soundtrack—vaguely spooky piano music evocative of its nineteenth-century setting.

  “I can’t say I really understand it either,” said Arthur, tipping back on the two rear legs of his chair, “but people earn a living doing this full time, you know. You have, like, offices full of people doing it in Japan.”

  “What? Playing multi-player online games for other people?”

  “Yeah. So, like, you have some rich businessman who wants a super-high-powered character, but he can’t be bothered playing as a low-powered character in order to gain the experience points he needs. Like, he can’t be bothered trotting around the sewers killing giant rats, or whatever. So he pays somebody else to play all the early stages of the game for him. Then, once the character is powerful enough—say the businessman has specified that he wants a level-thirty character or whatever—the person who’s been playing it so far just tells the businessman that the character’s ready whenever he wants to log in, and that’s it.”

  “And people do that for a living?”

  “Yeah, but it’s illegal. So if you’re doing it for that businessman, you have to pretend to be that businessman. Like, you have to pretend you’re that same businessman playing the game as his allotted character.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing for Tiffany?”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Playing the game as her because she wants to play it but can’t be bothered playing it?”

  “You finally understand,” said Arthur. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.” He unpaused the game and gestured at the screen. “Currently, my character—I mean, Tiffany’s character—and her delightful companion, Miss Lynch, are exploring the backstreets of Whitechapel, looking for a drunk who may have some information regarding Jack the Ripper.”

  “I prefer proper games,” said Bony, “like Fallout 3 or Command and Conquer. Games with nuclear weapons.”

  “You would,” replied Arthur. “Anyway, I think that will have to do for now.” He opened a dialogue box on screen and typed a short message addressed to Miss Lynch.

  I have to go now, Yasmin, he wrote. Be in the Vagabond tonight. You out?

  Will be if you lot are, replied Yasmin. See you later!

  He logged out and closed down the game, and the misty world of Victorian Gothic Online dissolved from the screen. He realized that Bony was eyeing him and frowning.

  “What?” said Arthur.

  “She knows who you are,” said Bony.

  “Yeah,” said Arthur, “but that’s OK, because I know who she is, too. Yasmin won’t go to the game police.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Can I blow these stupid candles out now?” asked Bony.

  “You can stick them up your ass. What time’s the train?”

  “It’s in ten minutes. We’d better get ready.” Bony started opening all the curtains.

  He lived in a tiny bungalow in Drigg, a couple of minutes’ walk from the level crossing at which he worked. If you didn’t know him properly you would be surprised at how pretty his house and garden were, given his cadaverous appearance and his devotion to all things technological.

  Arthur opened the front door and squinted up at the gray clouds. It was Saturday afternoon, not late at all, but the sky was dark with the approaching storm. “I hope we don’t miss the best of it,” he said.

  “We won’t,” said Bony. “It’s going to be another big one, I think.”

  EARS

  Yasmin wanted elf ears. She spent hours looking at photo galleries on the internet, studying photos of people with elf ears, people who’d had cosmetic surgery to make their ears look like the ears of elves. Or those of Vulcans, sometimes, but mostly elves. The surgery was expensive but she reckoned she could afford it if she started doing some overtime at the call center. She tucked her long blond hair behind her current ears and inhaled deeply on her gentle spliff. As she exhaled, the smoke curled beautifully in the draft from the open window. The windows on either side of her desk looked directly out over the harbor and the marina and the sea.

  Yasmin lived in a first-floor flat in a harborside building that had once been a warehouse for storing sugar and limes and rum, and possibly—probably—slaves. Tonight, black clouds were gathering on the horizon and turning the sea slate-colored. She preferred the view as the sun was melting into the sea, when it looked like the whole world was swaddled in the yolk of a bloody, broken egg.

  Ultimately she would like to live on a riverboat somewhere. With friends, though. On an impossibly huge river-boat big enough for her and all of her friends and all of her books and CDs and video games. She finished the spliff and turned her PC off, then lit an incense stick and put Fleetwood Mac on and started getting ready to go out. Spectral fingers, reachi
ng down out of the sky, approached from across the sea. They were composed of rain.

  THE GHOST SHIP

  Artemis stood on the raised platform in the middle of the call center floor and looked out over the rows of deserted desks. Six o’ clock on a Saturday evening and the place had closed at five. No fucker around. The windows looked out over the darkening sea, and a rising wind was starting to make the roof creak. The telephones were still and silent, though they were never turned off, only ever sleeping. Artemis stroked the black receiver of the unit on his own desk. If he deliberately listened for it he could hear the insistent hum of electricity. He smiled to himself. This building felt like a ship, and he was the captain. It felt like an empty ship. A beached ship. A ghost ship.

  He sat down and turned on his computer. Then he stood up again and paced his way from one end of the huge, empty room to the other, keeping to the west-facing side and looking out of the window. Next he walked down the southern wall, until he found himself inside the glass labyrinth of the pods. He opened all of the shutters and raised them till he was surrounded just by sheets of glass that reflected each other and reflected his bulk between them, although his reflections seemed ethereal and lost amongst the shining panes. He left the shutters up, and weaved his way through semi-circular huddles of desks back to the raised platform, the command center. He was a giant stalking through streets at night and the desks were houses. He was the Beast of Bodmin and the desks were just little lambs. When he got back to his desk the computer was fully awake and waiting for him. He logged on using his employee number and password—L1SA—and pursed his lips when the Outsourcing Unlimited logo appeared as his desktop wallpaper. That would have to be changed. In fact, the whole site would require complete re-branding, starting with the logo displayed on the outside wall. He’d get on to the Comms team about it on Monday—and Facilities Management too. Still, at least he’d been able to bring in his own night-watchmen. They’d worked with him in the past, at previous sites, and they had developed certain understandings.