by Tom Fletcher
“What exactly is required of me?”
“That is as yet unclear,” said the voice.
“Thank you,” said Artemis. But, even as he was speaking, the line had gone dead. He downed the rest of his bright green drink, swept out of the bar, through the lobby, and out of the hotel. He turned immediately right and headed north up Tangier Street, involuntarily sneering at a bingo hall, and stopped in front of a pizza place with an ugly, incongruous yellow and black façade. He ordered himself a sixteen-inch Beast Feast, then waited outside in the slight drizzle until the Turkish proprietor called him back in once it was ready. Looking further north up Tangier Street he could see the yellow glow of the Tesco petrol station staining the darkening night. Damnable little town with its wind and rain and sandstone and its shrieking seagulls! He would wake up through the night, sweating, disturbed by the note of pain in their constant cries. He would wake up to the sound of the seagulls, and the sound of the sea, and he would feel like his lonely little box of a room was perched right on a cliff edge overhanging the ocean, and was poised to drop at any moment, the rock beneath him being eroded by the waves. He would get out of bed and look out of the window, just to reassure himself, and would see seagulls wheeling against a black sky, lit up like yellow sparks by the twenty-four-hour glow of the nearby supermarket.
FROM THE DEPTHS
It drifted up, as if propelled by the cloud of rotten filth and blood that it had suddenly released from the thin, white, bulging skin of its underside. The brown cloud billowed outward in murky waves. The scent of it—the stink—would inevitably draw sharks and other creatures, but the thing had nothing to fear from such scavengers. They would only be interested in the matter that it had left behind.
It was not floating at a particularly great depth, but the water beneath it was incredibly deep. It hovered there in a dark blue void. If it had possessed a human mind, it would no doubt have experienced fear at the blankness below, but it did not.
Above was a slightly paler, brighter expanse of water, the different shade indicative—the only indication—of the presence of the sun. That was the direction in which the thing moved. That was the beginning of the journey that would take it to Drigg.
Blind, pale, bulbous and hulking, the thing slowly rose up.
BAD THURSDAY
The shower sprayed water on to the tiles, washing little black worms out into the bath tub. Arthur kept having to lift his feet so that the worms could float on past them and into the plughole without touching him. He still made a point of killing any that were already visible before turning on the shower, but had resigned himself to the fact that there was an inexhaustible supply of the bastards lurking either in between or behind the tiles. It didn’t help that little flakes of grout fell out, leaving sinister black holes, every time he tried giving the tiles a clean. The water would get in there and rot the walls and cause damp, no doubt thus creating the perfect environment for these creatures to live and breed in. Not only that, but these holes provided the openings from which the worms crept once the shower was turned on. The more holes there were, the more worms there would be.
Arthur was even thinking about the possibility of retiling the wall completely when he felt something tickling his foot. He looked down and saw one of the bugs clinging on to the little toe of his right foot. He shivered slightly and bent down to flick it away, but the water streaming from his fingers dislodged it, and it slipped in between his toes.
The first ripple of revulsion caused Arthur’s body to quiver, but the second caused outright panic. He could feel the creature squirming against his skin, he was sure, and the shower seemed to be cooling down. He lifted his foot and shook it vigorously, but couldn’t tell whether the worm was still there. He tried to bring his foot up behind him, twisting his head around to examine the sole, but found himself hopping about ridiculously on his other foot, his right knee brushing the shower curtain, and realized just how slippery the surface of the bath was. Suddenly he lost his balance and fell, smacking his elbow on the rim of the tub and hauling down the curtain as he grabbed it for support. He gave a loud cry, the shooting pains in his elbow blanking out everything else, and then his entire arm went numb. The shower head had been knocked askew and was spraying cold water out across the bathroom floor. Arthur imagined he could feel the worms moving all around him and he scrambled to his feet. Clambering out of the bath, he expected his father might come to see if he was OK.
Harry didn’t come to see if he was OK.
“I was on the phone to your mum,” Harry explained, pleadingly. “She was upset. I heard all the noise, but I couldn’t just—”
“You were not on the phone to Mum!” Arthur shouted, slamming his mug down on the worktop. “You know you weren’t!”
“I … I was!” Harry said, and Arthur felt sickened to recognize that frail stammer from the numerous recorded calls he had listened to at work. Harry kept shaking and scratching the back of his hands. “And … and anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about, going on about these worms. What worms? I … I’ve never seen any!”
“The worms,” Arthur said, between gritted teeth. His eyes grew wet. “I’ve told you about them before, Dad.”
“Son,” Harry said, looking concerned, “I keep telling you, there are no worms in there.”
Arthur looked down. His wet hair flopped in front of his face. He was still leaning against the worktop. “You just can’t see them because you don’t wear your glasses when you’re in there,” he said.
“That’s not the case,” Harry protested. “I think you just imagine them.”
“No, I don’t,” said Arthur. “Go and look! Go and look at them!” He pointed upward, at the ceiling. “They’re still in there! Go and see!”
“I’ve been and looked,” Harry said. “I can’t see anything.”
“But with your fucking glasses on!” Arthur yelled.
Harry lowered his head at that, and started scratching more vigorously at the backs of his hands. Red blotches had appeared on his face. It was the first time he’d ever heard Arthur swear.
“No,” Harry breathed. “You imagine them.”
“I don’t imagine them. You imagine Mum, though.”
“That’s different. I’ve already explained. I talk to her over the telephone.”
“Put your glasses on,” Arthur insisted. “Put your glasses on.”
“No.” Harry was shaking his head. He backed away. “You’re going to be late for work,” he said, and then he turned and left the room.
Harry had suffered poor eyesight for a very long time. For as long as Arthur could remember, his father had worn very thick glasses. At work, Harry needed all onscreen text to be written in font size twenty. Similarly, he needed all of the computer programs to be displayed at twice their normal size. If anybody passing Arthur’s desk glanced over his shoulder as he checked his emails, it would be painfully obvious to them that all of the email messages were from Arthur’s father, all of them asking him for help.
Arthur got to work just on time. He nodded to the new security guard on the reception desk—one of several new Interext people working shifts to cover the desk twenty-four hours a day—and then he stopped dead.
The bottom drawer of the guard’s desk was open and a liter bottle of whisky was clearly visible.
Arthur looked briefly at the security guard, now deep in conversation with a courier, and continued up the stairs before the guard realized that Arthur had spotted the bottle. Arthur shook his head as he went, and grinned. It was the little things that made the days bearable.
He nodded in acknowledgment to several people as he walked past their desks, but couldn’t bring himself to talk. He was relieved, in a way, to notice that Tiffany—who sat opposite him—looked pretty miserable. When she was in a good mood she would babble on excitedly about anything and everything, and today he just wasn’t in the mood to feign any degree of interest.
It was only once he’d sat down that he sensed j
ust how miserable she really was. Her bloodshot eyes were surrounded by tired, purple-looking skin, and she kept muttering to herself.
“Are you OK, Tiffany?” Arthur asked finally.
She looked up, as if only just noticing his presence, and smiled faintly before she shook her head. “They’ve locked up my Ollie …” she explained, and for a moment her voice broke. “And the bastards have thrown us all on to the incoming, because there are so many calls queuing.” She started crying.
“You should go home,” Arthur said. “Go home and try to get some rest. You can’t be in the right frame of mind for work.”
“I can’t go home. There’s no availability for leave, and they say it’s not policy to give compassionate leave for this.”
Arthur didn’t say anything to that. Instead he looked at the telephone on his desk and steeled himself to lift the receiver and log in. He stared at it, and stared at it.
“Oh,” Tiffany said, “I’ve just remembered. I’m sorry, Arthur, but I can’t cover for your dad any more. They’re changing the call requirements now this Artemis feller’s arrived, and Harry, bless him, doesn’t do any of the things he’s meant to do according to this new script. It’s going to be too obvious. I reckon you’re going to have to have a word with him.”
Arthur stared blankly across at her and—after a moment or two during which Tiffany wasn’t sure he’d heard her—he nodded. Then he put his headset on.
Even though Arthur was busy dealing with customers himself, he was still aware of Tiffany becoming more and more panicked. She was too tired to think as quickly as the impatient customers expected of her, and too distracted to notice some of the important details of their accounts. Every customer who displayed anger or outright rudeness put her in an even worse state to deal with the next. She ended up aggravating people by saying things like, “I’m sorry, I got that wrong,” or, “Well, I’m buggered if I can understand this one myself.” As the day progressed, she started repeating, “I’m sorry, please bear with me,” while she stared at her screen trying to remember what it was the customer had originally asked for.
Inevitably, her callers became more and more pissed off, until they were regularly demanding to speak to her supervisor. Even this was proving difficult, as Tiffany kept pressing the wrong button—or the right button at the wrong time—and disconnecting them. Arthur could tell when it happened, because her teary eyes widened and her hand flew to her mouth. At one point he looked up and was startled to see Artemis Black standing behind Tiffany’s chair, looking down at her with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. She didn’t know he was there, and Arthur hadn’t noticed his arrival either. Arthur’s eyes returned to his screen, then looked back, and found that Artemis had gone again as silently as he had appeared.
Later, in the canteen, Arthur overheard a conversation between Diane and a relatively new employee called Oscar. Diane was sitting with her back to him and Oscar was sitting opposite her. Behind Oscar was a small poster Blu-Tacked to the glass.
Arthur looked at the poster, while listening to Diane and Oscar talk. It read:
Bums off Seats—Control, Alt, Delete
It was one of many carrying the same message, and they were supposed to help people to remember to lock their computers while they were not at their desks. The words had been burned into everybody’s brains just through this constant exposure. By the constant repetition.
“I was late on t’dinner because I had a proper fucked-up account just,” Diane announced. “Some right bitch screaming that she wanted to speak to Harry. He’s proper messed it up, he has.”
“Who’s Harry?” Oscar asked.
“He’s this weird old twat. You’ll soon recognize him: flaky skin, smells of meat.” Diane lowered her voice. “Everybody says he’s a pedophile. Got sacked from his last job because they found stuff on his computer. He’s a fucking freak.”
“He got sacked from his last job because he had a mental breakdown,” Arthur interrupted. “He’s never been accused of pedophilia.”
“Well,” said Diane, turning to face Arthur, “that’s what people say. And I heard that’s why he smells of meat. I’m just saying.”
Arthur put down his sandwich and swallowed. He stretched out his fingers and looked at them. “You know that what you’re saying is nowhere near true, but you’re saying it anyway,” he said.
Diane shrugged.
“You’re a spiteful, nasty little maggot,” Arthur continued. “You’re malicious and small-minded, and what you think and what you say count for nothing good. Don’t you dare reiterate such vile, destructive shit about my dad.” He stood up. “You’re a fucking disgrace,” he concluded, then picked up her cardboard mug of tea and poured it all over her plate of chips.
Diane stood up and jabbed a long, sharp fingernail at Arthur’s chest. She screwed up her mouth to speak just as Arthur felt a hand fall on his shoulder.
“Arthur! What the hell are you doing?”
Arthur turned to see Bracket’s pale, dark-eyed, stubbly face looking at him in confusion.
“Sorry,” Arthur said, quietly. “She was being very cruel.”
“Come with me,” Bracket said. “Now.”
Arthur left work that day with a warning. “One foot wrong and you’re gone,” Artemis had told him. Interext wouldn’t tolerate such deplorable behavior.
He hurried along by the harbor to the Vagabond, passing elderly couples sitting on benches while eating bags of chips from Crosby’s. It was a clear day, but breezy, and everybody seemed to be wearing heavy beige coats. He could tell that Old Man Easy was out and about, as he could hear music drifting across the marina. Just before he got to the pub he kicked out at a big metal sculpture of a knotted rope, one of several rising from the promenade at regular intervals. Yasmin finished half an hour after he did, and had told him she would meet him there. He was about to go inside and buy a drink when he saw Old Man Easy ambling toward him down the Sugar Tongue. He carried his knackered, fuzzy-sounding stereo in his right hand, as ever, while he murmured along to the Engelbert Humperdinck tape he was playing at full volume. He wore a pair of glasses that he’d covered in Sellotape to turn them into sunglasses. He nodded and smiled at Arthur as he passed. He gestured at his glasses with his left hand, and puffed out his already sizeable chest.
“Better than my own eyes, these are,” he declared. That was what he always said. Or, at least, that was all Arthur had ever heard him say.
Arthur nodded and entered the pub.
“It’s not a good time to be pissing them off,” Yasmin said, staring at her empty wine glass.
“I know,” Arthur said. “I know, but I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I shouted at Dad this morning.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Yasmin said, and she put her hand on Arthur’s arm. “I used to argue with my parents all the time when I lived with them.”
“I’m worried about him,” Arthur said. He shook his head. “He talks to Mum on the telephone. I shouted at him because he thinks I’m imagining things, and yet he talks to Mum on the telephone.”
“Maybe it’s just his way of coping.”
“Maybe,” Arthur said, “but I don’t think he’s coping at all.”
“How do you cope?”
“You know how I cope.” Arthur looked up at Yasmin and grinned. “I go out during storms and look for her.”
“Oh, yeah,” Yasmin snorted. “Well, maybe you shouldn’t go pointing the finger at your dad. You’re both pretty weird.”
“Thank you, Yasmin,” Arthur said.
“What is it you’re imagining, anyway?”
“I’m not imagining anything! There are little worms in the bathroom walls. They drive me mad, but Dad can’t see them, at least not without his glasses.”
Yasmin pulled a face.
“I know,” Arthur said. “It sounds disgusting.” He looked at his hands. “Jesus fucking Christ, I want to do something, Yasmin.”
“What?”
“I don’t know! Anything! I’ve read so many books about so many things, but they’re only books, and I feel like I’m only scratching the surface of things.”
“Why don’t you go to university?”
“But I don’t know what I’d want to study.”
“What are you interested in?” Yasmin asked.
“I’m interested in everything,” Arthur said. “Everything. But I could only study one thing at a time, really. And that would be after a few years of saving.”
“You could study one thing and then go on to another.”
“That would be very expensive,” Arthur replied. “And I also wouldn’t have time.”
“What do you mean, you wouldn’t have time?”
“To fit it all in before I die. I could live another hundred years and I wouldn’t understand half of what I want to understand.”
The two of them were sitting at a table by the window. Arthur looked out through the glass.
“You’ll just have to accept a certain lack of understanding, then,” Yasmin said.
“Really?” asked Arthur. “You think university is the only way?”
“Do I fuck think that. Anyway, maybe you could upload.”
“What do you mean, upload?”
“Save your consciousness to a computer and live forever. That way you could learn just as much as you want.”
“What are you on about?” Arthur asked, laughing.
“I don’t really understand it,” Yasmin confessed. “I read about it a while ago though, and it made sense at the time. My avatar would have pointed ears.”
“You do talk some bollocks.”
“Arthur,” Yasmin said, “is Bony coming through tonight?”
“I haven’t heard from him today.”
“I want to see him. Do you think he could be interested in me?”
Arthur looked at her, suddenly feeling very conscious of the expression on his face. “Why?” he asked. “Are you interested in him?”
