The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  “What is it?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

  “We need to use your phone, please,” Yasmin said quickly. “We think we just witnessed a mugging.”

  “You think?” the guard replied. “What do you mean?”

  “We did just witness a mugging,” Yasmin said. “We need to call the police, and maybe even an ambulance.”

  The guard looked back toward his bulky, red-haired colleague, who shrugged uncomfortably, then shook his head. A strange sound could be heard inside the building, coming from upstairs. It was like the sound of a wave breaking, but held indefinitely and prolonged artificially.

  “Sorry,” the guard said.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Bony said, “come on! We heard somebody screaming out there past the railway tracks. We need a telephone or—”

  “Look,” the guard cut in, “if you know what’s good for you, you’ll both fuck right off right now. All right? Both of you. You, lass, and your lanky, skull-faced, bastard friend. OK? You don’t want to come in here. Mike here is a dab hand with his fists, if you know what I mean, right? And you’re trying our patience now.” As if for confirmation, he looked back toward Mike, who was still standing at the foot of the stairs. Mike nodded, and the gray-haired guard turned back to face Yasmin and Bony. “Push us any more and he will not go easy on—”

  The end of the cricket bat was in his face before he could finish his sentence. His words were choked off by his teeth being smashed inwards. He crumpled, mumbling.

  “Jesus Christ!” Yasmin said. “Fucking hell.”

  “I know,” Bony said. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t … I don’t know.” He put his free hand over his mouth and stood there in the doorway, still clutching the cricket bat in his right hand.

  Mike stared down at his floored colleague with suddenly saucer-like eyes, and his mouth open. Then he looked up at Bony and drew a fairly pathetic-looking night stick. He nervously licked his lips.

  Bony darted forward and plowed the bat into Mike’s stomach, and then, as he doubled over, brought it down on the back of the man’s head. There was an awful cracking sound and blood oozed from the point of impact. Mike hit the floor face-first.

  “Oh no,” Bony said, “I feel sick. I’m going to be sick. Oh no.”

  Yasmin was pale and shaking. “Bony,” she whispered. “Christ, Bony.”

  “I know,” Bony said. “I’m sorry.”

  Yasmin took his free hand. “You had to do it,” she said. “There’s something awful happening here.”

  Bony nodded.

  “Come on,” Yasmin said. “We need to get upstairs.”

  Yasmin led the way, and the two of them ascended the staircase, the fuzzy noise getting louder as they did so. At the top, they saw something black and sticky oozing out from underneath the door leading on to the call center floor. “I think we’ve done the right thing,” Yasmin murmured.

  “I hope so,” Bony said.

  Yasmin pushed open the door—letting a frantic, insectile noise escape—but it was difficult, as if there was something lying on the floor behind it. She jumped backward as a wedge of thick, wormy sludge squeezed its way out. She glanced back at Bony, her nose wrinkling. She then leaned forward to push the door open again, before putting her head through the gap and peering around. She shifted backward and let the door close.

  She shook her head. “I definitely think we’ve done the right thing,” she said. “I can’t tell you what’s happening in there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bony,” Yasmin’s eyes began filling up, “I think I’m really scared.”

  “If you’re scared, then I’m scared too,” Bony said, and nudged the door slightly open with the cricket bat. “What’s inside there?”

  “I don’t know what it is, but everything is covered in crap and worms.” She gestured at the few worms that made it through the open door. “I don’t know what’s happened, or where they’ve come from, but we’ve got to go in. This must be where it’s happening—whatever it is that’s causing that out there in the sea.”

  “OK,” Bony said. “OK.” He nodded. He swallowed. He looked at Yasmin. “Right, then,” he said, “let’s go.”

  Yasmin nodded in response. She pushed at the door again, putting all of her modest weight behind one shoulder, and, with a deep breath, stepped through on to the call center floor.

  The place was barely recognizable as a call center any more. It looked more like close-up, time-lapse footage of parasites feasting on the insides of some marine corpse. Brightly colored fleshy things were crawling through a bed of dead, rotten fluids. Human-sized tendrils and tubers and tubes undulated slowly from the backs of desks where telephones had been, and thin-limbed, starfish-type things crept around like giant spiders. Purple, sinuous, arm-thick creatures slid through the murk. Moisture was dripping from the ceiling now, but Yasmin did not look up to see what its source was. She looked back to make sure that Bony was with her, then slowly, unsteadily, started picking her way through the writhing tangle toward where she could hear a voice, a voice she recognized, raised above the static sound that seemed to be just hanging there in the air like a mist.

  Artemis.

  Yasmin could not work out what he was saying. It sounded almost as if he were speaking in some other language. She could see him now, kneeling on something white that looked supernaturally bright against the gloom filling the room. In the middle of the white space was a body in a chair.

  Bony was suddenly passing her by, cricket bat raised, as he jumped from one desk to the next to avoid the sucking muck on the floor. Yasmin found herself running too, suddenly desperate to reach that small, barren island of cleanliness on which Artemis knelt. She could feel things moving in her hair, in her shoes, inside her clothes. She ran and ran.

  “Artemis!” she heard Bony shout.

  Artemis looked up and around. In one hand he was holding a small white cup, the kind of thing you’d fetch a vending-machine coffee in. In that one moment, Artemis looked peculiarly pathetic, cup in hand, suit dirty and disheveled, a look of total incomprehension on his face, while he knelt at the feet of what … a corpse? Was that a dead body? Who was that?

  Harry?

  Bony swung the bat all the way around his body before it connected with the side of Artemis’s head. The cup dropped from the man’s hand and spilled blood all over the pristine surface in front of him. His head suddenly bent way too far over to one side, and there was a sound like a snail being trodden on, but amplified.

  Everything around them seemed to spasm and tighten and coil back in on itself, as if it suffered the same pain as Artemis. The sound of static quieted noticeably. Artemis began to crawl forward on his hands and knees, but Bony hit him again and his hands flew out from beneath him. Bony struck him once more on the head.

  Through the windows beyond, Yasmin could see the boiling sea. Her brain, her heart, her stomach went cold, then hot, then cold. No. No. What was that out there? What the fuck was that in the sea? She rushed forward, past Bony and Artemis, and pressed her face and hands to the glass. She stared for a long moment, then turned around and stared at the remains of the ritual that Artemis had been engaged in. She ran forward and tipped Harry’s chair out of the circle, pushed the chair over, and then threw herself on to the circle and used smears of the notyet-dried blood to obliterate the symbols that Artemis had been drawing. She was panting and desperate. Part of her was still at the window, looking out over the sea.

  Artemis lay motionless, face down in the creeping life, but Bony was still beating at him, his face now a mask, streaked with blood and the black stuff.

  “Yasmin,” said a voice. It sounded like whoever was speaking was speaking with their mouth full.

  She couldn’t see who had spoken. “Hello?” Yasmin said, standing up. She realized suddenly that tears were pouring from her eyes, and that she was shaking all over.

  “Here, Yasmin,” said the voice. “Here, on the desk.”

  After a mome
nt Yasmin saw. There was not much to see. Just a few pale inches of skin, and a vaguely human shape beneath a coat of filth and wriggling worms.

  “It’s Arthur,” the shape said, and a gobbet of wriggling creatures was spat out along with the words.

  “Oh no,” Yasmin gasped. “Oh my God, Arthur.” She started moving toward him, distractedly brushing things off her own body as she did so. But then she halted. “Arthur,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ll be back … Just wait a moment.”

  She looked back at the circle on the projector screen and saw, with satisfaction, that the organic substance that had taken over the rest of the space was now flowing into the circle as well. And, unless her senses were totally fucked, things now seemed to be moving a little less vigorously. Things were slowing down, maybe even somehow receding.

  Yasmin made her way back to the window and stared out of it for a moment before nodding briefly to herself and returning to Arthur. She started to scrape matted clumps from his body, starting with his head.

  “What was it?” Arthur asked. “Where did you go?”

  “Nothing,” Yasmin said, her voice subdued and faltering, even to her own ears. “I went nowhere.”

  “These things are letting go of me,” Arthur croaked. His voice, too, was weak, and his words seemed strangely formed, as if he were just remembering how to talk. “The … things … that were holding me are letting go. They’re relaxing a bit. I can move again. Thank you, Yasmin. I can move.”

  He pivoted around, swinging his legs down from the surface of the desk. He swayed on his feet, till Yasmin grabbed hold of his shoulders. “OK?” she inquired.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Thank you, Yasmin.”

  “We need to go now,” she said.

  “Bony!” Arthur shouted—or, rather, tried to shout. It was a strange sound but Bony appeared to hear it. He was just standing over Artemis’s body, staring down at it, but now looked up and seemed to stretch, almost as if he had just woken up. As he turned around, he looked lost and confused, and sick. He had dropped the cricket bat.

  “Come on, Bony,” Yasmin said.

  Bony merely nodded. It was difficult to differentiate him from the hellish backdrop against which he stood.

  ON AND OFF

  Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Arthur ducked behind the security desk.

  Bony, following, grasped the handle of the cricket bat and looked around warily. “Where are the guards?” he asked.

  “They’re not here,” Yasmin said. “They must have recovered and run off. They maybe weren’t even knocked out. People are tough.”

  “Recovered?” Bony mused, quietly. “You think?”

  Arthur pulled open the drawers of the security desk, one after the other, until he found the bottle of whisky that he had spotted previously. Unscrewing the cap, he sprinkled it liberally around the foyer, before hurling the bottle itself at the stacks of boxes containing printer paper stored beneath the stairs. Bony did the rest with his lighter.

  The flames spread quickly.

  *

  Yasmin and Bony watched the fire take hold, having unthinkingly put their arms around each other. Arthur looked blankly at the smoke. The black smoke. He could see, over to the south, the green eye of the lighthouse. It blinked on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on.

  Yasmin did not tell either of them what she had seen from the window. She did not tell them how the disturbance in the sea had spread, so that the ocean was jumping and spitting and boiling and had turned white from the harbor out to the horizon. She did not tell them about seeing a red cast to the thick, heavy clouds that had already gathered. Nor did she tell them that she had seen the torso of a massively tall figure rising up from the immense waves that broke against the harbor wall beside the lighthouse. A vivid humanoid silhouette, spindle thin, from which the red light gleamed as if its surface were reflective, its unpleasantly flexible arms terminating in clawlike hands with fingers that seemingly tapered into needles.

  It had wrapped one hand around the lighthouse, and with the other it had pointed at her.

  When she had returned to the window, after spoiling Artemis’s ritual, she had seen the huge thing staggering backward, a mass of writhing tentacles having erupted from its face, and then slipping back beneath the surface of the sea.

  *

  She looked over at the lighthouse again, following the direction of Arthur’s gaze. The green light shone regularly. On, and then off, and then on.

  THE THING ON THE SHORE

  Most species of whale will sink when they die. They are heavy creatures of great density. Some, though, contain enough blubber to remain afloat, so when dead, they stay near the surface of the ocean, moving with the currents of the water in which they are suspended.

  Like any other living creature, when a whale dies it starts to decompose and fill up with gas. Those whale carcasses that float thus become rotund, Zeppelin-like affairs, over time—balloons of skin and blubber inflated with gas and liquid matter, their skeletons lost and concealed somewhere deep within.

  Eventually the skin ruptures, so the skeleton and rotten internal organs drift away from the outer layers of the whale, sinking as they drift, to be eventually eaten by sharks and other sea-creatures. The skin, however, buoyed by the collagen of the blubber, bobs to the top of the ocean, and can stay there indefinitely. Normally the blubber floats there until, weathered and twisted and turned inside out by the ceaseless battering of the waves, it washes up on a lonely beach as something unidentifiable and mysterious. It usually causes excitement—whenever this happens, people assume they have discovered something fantastic, something unusual, something new. But it is just part of the process of death; just a physical product of the physical process of something dying—something beautiful dying in the depths of our world and briefly disturbing the surface.

  WORK

  Arthur rested his forehead on the desk. Seven more hours. Seven more fucking hours. Seven more frustratingly difficult, stressful, boring, confusing, draining, depressing, identical fucking hours. And then what? Bony and Yasmin would be out, but they would be together, and that whole relationship made Arthur feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was just jealousy, but he couldn’t shake the impression that Yasmin’s self-esteem was floundering, no, plummeting in the face of Bony’s bewildering attentions.

  Outside, it was raining. Inside, the air was busy with a thousand passive-aggressive responses, questions and excessively polite explanations. Like people constantly digging holes and filling them back in again. Trying to serve horrible customers using systems that didn’t work, following processes that didn’t make sense, based on policies the origins of which everybody had forgotten. When anybody asked for help, they found out that very few people really understood anything at all, but despite that, everybody kept on trying.

  Lack of conscientiousness was not the problem. People were so conscientious. People were so conscientious that they did not sleep at night; instead they squirmed around in their beds with battleship-colored numbers and screens flashing through their heads. They answered their home phones with their script. They wept in the mornings from thinking about that one particular customer who they knew they couldn’t help. Maybe everybody was just pathetic, right? Arthur didn’t know. He really didn’t know. What he did know was that everybody was gray-faced and heavy-lidded and, he imagined, thinking desperately about coffee or chocolate or TV.

  The fire had been treated as arson. Harry was widely held responsible; the general consensus was that he’d got drunk, then gone postal. The remains of two people—including Harry—had been recovered, according to the TV news. The guards had not been reported as missing, but nor had they reappeared.

  There were plenty of people on hand to say, “Yeah, always did think that Harry was a bit weird.”

  Nobody said anything about Artemis, though.

  Arthur knew that more had been found up there on the first floor of the call center than was ever reported afterward in the news
. But, yeah, Interext had been pretty thorough. Somehow they had ensured that nothing really changed. That was the real kick in the teeth. The refurb had taken all of two months. During that time all of the calls had simply been re-routed to another center somewhere slightly further inland—another Interext-owned building that simply sat empty in case of emergencies like this. A contingency plan.

  Bracket, the new site manager, had arranged for the staff to be bussed out daily, so, other than his compassionate leave, Arthur hadn’t even had any time off. Jesus Christ. Maybe this was how they were punishing him—they’d just stuck him back in this loop. Get up, go to work, go home, eat, sleep, wake up in the middle of the night, go to the lighthouse, watch the water, think about it, decide against it, go home, sleep, get up, go to work. Then repeat. It was unbearable.

  He felt physically sick at the thought of a fully operational, fully stocked call center just sitting there, just sitting somewhere else completely empty for more or less all the time—all the fucking time, just in case. A mirror image of this call center, but with everything switched off. Rows of empty desks, blank monitors, clean whiteboards, vacant chairs, dark meeting rooms, pristine carpets.

  Everything but the bodies.

  That was the place he thought about at night, while looking down into the sea. That empty building. Just waiting. Waiting for them all. He couldn’t bear it. If ever there was something, a symbol that said, “There is nothing you can do,” it was that empty building.

  That night, he decided, sitting there, cheek pressed to the veneer of the desk. He would do it that night. Out there, beneath the green eye of the lighthouse, maybe after just one last look back at the lit bedroom window of Yasmin’s flat. He would wind a rusted length of chain from Drigg beach around his legs, and then fall. It wasn’t like he’d be going somewhere that he’d never been before.