The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  Bracket thought about that.

  “You see?” Artemis said. “It’s the same for me also. It sounds too fantastic. I can’t sit at the end of a phone line and just imagine the place, and then be there. The plan was for Harry to believe in it, and for it to happen to him. It didn’t happen to him, though.” Artemis rubbed his eyes. “It happened to Arthur instead. The entity came for Arthur, somehow. Arthur was sitting at Harry’s desk on that day. The implication is that the awareness runs both ways, which is ultimately good, but it resulted in the entity trying to make contact through Harry’s phone, and reaching Arthur instead. We think.”

  “You think?”

  “We are not dealing with an exact science here, Bracket,” Artemis replied, “as I’m sure you appreciate. We are operating at the limits … no, we are operating beyond the limits of our understanding.”

  “I think I get that,” Bracket said. “I still don’t know what you need me to do, though.”

  “You need to know all this, just in case. If I for some reason have to go, Bracket, then you will be responsible for this shithole. You will get sent all of the briefing packs in that eventuality, of course, but by then … well, you might appreciate the little understanding I’ve just given you before things get to that stage, shall we say.”

  “I can’t believe what you’ve done,” Bracket said. “It’s horrible.”

  Artemis looked at Bracket and frowned. “Please,” he said, “let’s not get sentimental.”

  HARRY IN A STATE

  Pauline would always open the doors of the Vine to Harry. He was a good customer for a start, spending an obscene proportion of his wages—and maybe even his son’s wages—inside. But, more than that, he was a kind of friend. A friend purely out of familiarity, if that made any sense. So, however early he rolled in, Harry was welcome.

  This time he had turned up within official opening hours, arriving at about nine o’clock on Monday night. Now it was nine o’clock on Tuesday morning and he was still here. Pauline herself was asleep, her head resting on the bar. Harry was not actually asleep, but he was not really conscious either. Not in the true sense of the word. He swayed around on top of the bar stool like he was dancing slowly, even though there was no music playing.

  Apart from Pauline and Harry, the bar was empty. The room was dark, too, apart from the stripes of light that made it through the cracks in the blinds. They didn’t illuminate anything, though. They just hung there, in the dust-filled air, like solid things.

  LATE

  Arthur showed up for work at about eleven o’ clock. It wasn’t like him to be late, but then it wasn’t like him to have slept outdoors like a tramp. He was wearing yesterday’s clothes, as well.

  Bracket accosted him as he walked across the call center floor.

  “Hey!” Bracket shouted, “Arthur!”

  Arthur pretended not to hear him, but was forced to turn around when Bracket grabbed him by the shoulder.

  “What?” Arthur said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bracket said, jerking backward. “What happened to your eye?”

  “I was badly sick,” Arthur said. “Look, I know I’m late. I just want to get started, OK? I’ll make the time up at the end of my shift.”

  “Yeah, OK.” Bracket nodded. “God, are you alright?”

  “I barely know what I’m doing here,” Arthur said. “I haven’t really slept.”

  “Well,” Bracket said, “if you need to, go and have a sit-down in the break room.”

  Arthur looked down at the smaller man for a moment, and then nodded. “Thanks,” he said. He turned away and continued to his desk.

  Bracket watched him go. He had wanted to tell Arthur to go home and get some real, actual rest—to go home and not worry about this stupid, stupid job.

  Go home and stay safe.

  Bracket couldn’t stop thinking about Artemis losing his baby. Of course, the possibility of something going wrong with his and Isobel’s baby was a fear that never stopped throbbing away unpleasantly at the back of his head, but up until now he had, by and large, been able to dismiss it as some kind of natural paranoia. It was something that he assumed every prospective parent must feel. But this—what had happened to Artemis—made that eventuality seem much closer, much more likely, for some reason.

  Something else that Bracket hadn’t really considered before was what if the baby grew up to be a total bastard? What if the baby grew up to be like Artemis? What were Artemis’s parents like? Bracket didn’t think he’d ever met such an absolute wanker before, and so hadn’t worried unduly about his child growing up to become one. But now … now things were different.

  At night, when neither he nor Isobel were sleeping that well, he would be assailed by sweaty panics and dreadful fantasies in which their child grew up miserable and bitter and became the kind of man or woman who could only wear suits and spent all night at the office because they had nothing to go home for and ended up getting a prostitute habit and dying lonely or angry or both. He worried that, despite their best efforts and intentions, their child would become some kind of monster. For some reason, he envisaged the baby as something with green rotten eyes and skin slick with algae. Something that would grow up to feel just as at home slithering around in silt as it would all cleaned up and masked and slithering around some boardroom somewhere.

  It might help if Isobel would talk more about what she was feeling. But she didn’t really. They spoke less and less, as if ever-longer periods of their lives were being spent with some kind of “mute” button on. Isobel did not seem angry or unhappy; just completely content within a self-contained world. She and the baby. The bump. Bracket sometimes touched the bump—the sensation of movement within was thrilling—but he always felt like he was intruding on something private when he did so.

  After about half an hour of listening to calls, Arthur felt his eyelids increasingly difficult to control; they kept closing of their own accord, and not really opening again unless he really concentrated on them. Time for a coffee, maybe? Definitely.

  The coffee from the vending machine came in a small yellow plastic cup and smelled like stale cigarettes. Arthur really wanted one of the full-size proper coffees from the canteen—a cappuccino or something equally as exotic—but they were more expensive, and … well, how much money had he spent on cocktails last night? He felt sick just thinking about it.

  He stood by the vending machine and looked out of the window while waiting for his drink. Outside, the day was bright and hard-edged; the sea was sparkling and difficult to look at. Everything looked old and shabby in that unforgiving light. Seagulls made sounds that felt like scabs itching on his consciousness. He had another full day of total shit to look forward to, more or less. And his dad … where was his dad?

  Where was Yasmin, for that matter? It wasn’t her rest day today, Arthur was pretty sure. He took his actually quite manky-looking coffee from the vending machine and stuck his head through the break room door to double-check her desk. No, she wasn’t there. Then where was she? She never rang in sick. Yasmin wasn’t that kind of person.

  When Arthur returned to the vending machine for his change, which he’d forgotten, Diane was already standing there. She looked at him, quite expressionless, and extended her open hand, which held thirty pence.

  “This yours?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Arthur said. “Thank you.”

  “What happened to your eye? Burst a blood vessel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I did that once. Through being sick.”

  “Yeah,” Arthur said, “that’s how I did it, too.”

  Diane smiled faintly.

  “I’m sorry about the other day,” Arthur said. “I don’t normally get angry.”

  “Yeah, right.” Diane laughed briefly. She looked around, and then at Arthur. “I’m sorry for what I said about your dad,” she said.

  “That’s OK,” Arthur said.

  “I’ve been off work for a while,” she said.

&nb
sp; “Are you OK?”

  “I’ve just been ringing in sick.”

  “Oh, right,” Arthur said.

  Diane looked like she wanted to say something else; her eyes kept darting around and her mouth was sad. She didn’t, though. She just looked up—she had such big eyes, Arthur thought—and smiled briefly, then left him standing there.

  Arthur spent the whole of his shift half expecting to be pulled back into the Scape. He didn’t know how he felt when the time to log out rolled around and it still hadn’t happened. Last time he’d been there, though, he’d been scared for his life. What did it mean, then, that he now felt as disappointed as he was relieved?

  Probably nothing good; it probably meant that he was suicidal. Was that what it meant?

  Arthur slipped his biro in his coat pocket and left the building.

  BODY

  Artemis was alone in the call center. Well, alone apart from the security people manning the desk downstairs.

  Artemis felt like a god when he was in these places: flatpack, templated environments designed for function and little else. Supermarkets, offices, generic hotel rooms—bland places where you could be anybody. Out there on the harbor or in the dank little pubs, he felt uneasy and threatened, but here he felt that same power that he’d felt when Diane lay, passed out and naked, on his hotel-room bed. He could do anything here, too, and the anonymity of the location protected him. Not only that, but he felt like he could draw on some kind of power that was not accessible to him elsewhere. He was physically stronger and more agile when he was plugged into that sad network of vacant conferencing centers, business parks, industrial estates, motorway rest stops, etcetera. And call centers.

  Diane was one of many, many young women he’d taken off to hotel rooms. Even here, in Whitehaven, there had already been several. Most of them—four or five—were customer advisers at the call center. The youngest, prettiest, most insecure, least experienced in terms of employee rights or, indeed, in any of the ways of the world. Of course, there had been that checkout girl from Tesco’s, as well. Where were they now? At home probably, sleeping, or watching Dirty Dancing or some other crap girl film from the eighties. Feeling a deep sense of unease, most likely, and wondering what they’d done, or what they’d had done to them, and trying to work out whether or not it mattered.

  The bodies—Artemis liked to have his fun with those bodies.

  He checked his emails. Somebody called Sally—he couldn’t remember who that was—had sent him an email about some “mass confusion” that many of the managers were apparently feeling. She finished her message with a paragraph that sounded quite critical.

  I wouldn’t want to be responsible for calling a series of unnecessary meetings, thereby initiating a low-level radioactive hum of useless talk. But I do want to know what’s going on. I do want to instigate some kind of meaningful discussion.

  Artemis would have to have a word with her. Not only because of the unacceptably negative insinuation that there was a lot of meaningless talk going on, but also because of the overly extravagant language used. Where did she think she was? Some kind of university?

  There was a lot of meaningless talk going on, of course, but that was all part of it. Part of the boondoggle. Talking about talking about meetings about planning meetings about planning for projects about talking to people who talk to people about other people. It was a whole meta-economy. Meaningless talk was fine, especially given what would happen in the end.

  It was as Artemis was about to start replying that the phone rang. That is, a phone rang. Artemis stood up.

  Identifying a ringing telephone is normally quite easy, but not in a room full of hundreds of telephones. Especially when you realize that they all have different settings; they all ring at different volumes and tones. Stupid damn telephones, Artemis thought as he paced around, looking for the offender. Why can’t they all sound as uniform as they look? If the sound is quiet, how do you know whether it’s a quiet-sounding phone or just a phone that’s further away?

  He did find it, eventually.

  It was Harry’s telephone.

  He didn’t answer it. He just watched it for a while.

  Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the entity trying to communicate.

  The telephone didn’t stop ringing.

  Eventually he reached out his hand and picked up the receiver.

  He heard distant sounds: something scratching against a distant wall, the wind resonating through a faraway chimney. The sea. He frowned.

  The sounds grew louder and louder. Was there a voice in there, too? Somewhere in there, there was a voice.

  The sounds merged, dispersed, merged again. They were flattening out, somehow sketching and defining the boundaries of some kind of surface, some kind of plain. The static rose and fell like hills, like peaks and troughs, like waves, but he saw them as solid. He could envisage them as solid.

  He saw the writhing plain. He saw the dead sky. He turned around and he saw the walls of the City rearing up in front of him like some kind of solid, smooth, gray sludge. Between him and the walls there was a figure—a tall, spindly figure dressed in shiny black leather. Next to the tall figure there were two other creatures, possessing something like human torsos with no legs, but three or four arms too many, which they used like legs. They looked up at him with big protruding eyes, and hissed and groaned and spat.

  The tall figure moved awkwardly toward him, every step looking painful and uncoordinated. It was talking but Artemis couldn’t tell what it was saying. It was repeating itself—saying the same thing, or making the same sound, over and over again.

  “Ohdiee,” it was saying. “Ohdi. Ohdie. Ohhdee.”

  Artemis stepped backward. He knew what it wanted. Body, it was saying. Body. It wanted a body.

  Artemis wrenched the receiver away from his ear and clapped it back down into its cradle.

  He knew what he needed to do.

  COME AND MEET ME

  Arthur woke up to the sound of the telephone ringing. It was nighttime again. He felt like it was always nighttime, because all the time spent at work just didn’t count. The phone was ringing away like a bastard. Arthur swore into his pillow and punched the mattress, but the ringing wouldn’t stop.

  He heard Harry banging around in the next room.

  “Just coming,” Harry was saying. “Just coming.”

  Arthur lifted his head from the pillow and listened as Harry slipped and stumbled down the stairs. In Arthur’s mind he saw his father, hunched and muttering, descending through unlit space. Eventually he reached the telephone, or at least he must have reached the telephone, because the ringing stopped, and Harry said, “Hello?”

  Arthur waited.

  “Rebecca? Is that you?”

  He could only hear his father’s side of the conversation, of course, broken up by silences when whoever was on the other end—or, rather, whoever his father thought was on the other end—was speaking.

  “Rebecca? Are you OK? What’s wrong? … What? … What? … Really?”

  Silence.

  “I’ll come and meet you now. Just stay there. You’ll be OK. I’ll help you. I’ll bring you back. Oh my God, Rebecca, it’s been so long. It will be so good to see you. Stay there. See you soon. OK, bye.”

  Arthur was sitting up by now. He got out of bed and went to open his bedroom door and shout down to his father. But, even before he got there, he heard the front door slam. He ran out on to the landing and down the stairs to the front door, opened it and looked out.

  His father was running away, running along the street. He turned off between two houses, toward the steps that led down to the harbor, and disappeared.

  Arthur went back inside, took the stairs three at a time, and got himself dressed.

  A REQUEST FROM THE INTERSTICE

  Artemis stood at the windows at the southern end of the building and looked out over the harbor. You couldn’t make out individual figures when it was dark, but he knew that Harry would be
there, or on his way. Excited, hopeful, deluded. It felt strange to be here witnessing the culmination of a plan that had first been kicked off years and years ago. It felt strange to have shaped somebody’s life subtly, for once, rather than by using threats or violence or sex.

  Most of the lights in the huge room were now off, with just a couple still on, right in the middle above the command center. And, of course, the red LEDs that gleamed from monitors and computers all over the place.

  Artemis used his mobile to ring the security desk downstairs, advising the night-watchmen to let Harry in as soon as he arrived.

  *

  Artemis himself met Harry at the top of the stairs. He had arrived wearing bedroom slippers, a pair of boxers, and a horribly stained old dressing gown. Arthur was with him, his forehead creased, his hunched stance suggesting shame and embarrassment.

  “You smell of alcohol,” Artemis said to Harry.

  “Where is she?” Harry asked. He was looking around eagerly, like a dog expecting a biscuit. “Where’s Rebecca?”

  “Come this way,” Artemis said, steeling himself, then gingerly put a bulky arm around Harry’s shoulders. He maneuvered the smaller man through the double doors leading to the call center floor.

  Arthur followed.

  “Is she in here?” Harry asked.

  “Kind of,” Artemis said, pushing Harry forward now. “She is kind of in here, yes.” He turned and closed the door behind them. He made eye contact with Arthur then, and grinned.

  “Where is she?” Harry asked, turning around and staring up at Artemis. “I can’t see her.”

  Artemis looked down into Harry’s excited and bloodshot and yellowing eyes, huge and moist behind his thick spectacles. The man was a total mess. He shouldn’t even be employed. He wasn’t capable of work. Well, he was on the to-be-sacked list, although maybe that wouldn’t be necessary, in the end.

  “What were you going to do?” Artemis asked. “What would you actually have done if you’d found her here? How did you imagine it would happen?” He folded his arms. “What state would her body have been in?”