by Mark Morris
Mike had barely registered this before the creature twisted, rose in one fluid motion and smashed the lamp from her hands. It flew across the room, shattering against the corner of the dressing table. Before Charlotte had time to react, the thing was upon her, hands clamping around her neck, bearing her effortlessly to the ground.
Horrified, Mike leapt to his feet, reaching for the gun in its holster beneath his jacket. ‘Leave her alone or I’ll fire,’ he yelled - or tried to; pain sawed through his vocal cords like a rusty blade and his voice emerged as a croak. The creature that had been Tony Maybury either didn’t hear him or chose not to. Hissing like an enraged snake, it bore down savagely on Charlotte’s throat, as if he was trying to crush the fine bones in her neck.
Mike aimed at one of its outstretched legs and fired. As the bullet struck, bone and flesh parted in an eruption of evil-smelling blood so dark it was almost black. The creature threw back its head and howled in rage and agony, then its head whipped round with a look of pure hatred. Mike braced himself for the attack, but after glaring at him for a second or two - marking him - the creature turned back to Charlotte.
Charlotte had neither made a sound nor moved. She lay pinioned, arms and legs splayed and limp. Either she was dead, or unconscious, or simply too traumatised to fight back.
‘Let her go!’ Mike croaked again, but the creature ignored him.
Calmly Mike raised his gun for the second time and shot Tony Maybury through the back of the head.
Black lumpy stuff flew in all directions, spattering the bed, the carpet, the wall, the mirror of the dressing table. The corpse toppled forward on to Charlotte’s prone body with the floppy gracelessness of a tailor’s dummy.
Immediately Charlotte began to make breathy little screaming sounds, her arms and legs pistoning frantically as she tried to push her father’s corpse off her body. Black ichor-like fluid from its shattered cranium drooled on to her white skin and stained her pink top like melted liquorice.
Mike crouched down and shoved the corpse to one side. It rolled slowly over on to its back, quills rattling and rustling.
Charlotte scrambled out from beneath it, eyes bulging, her mouth a quivering moue of panic. She looked like an animal, terrified almost to the point of insensibility.
Mike grabbed her and held her tightly. ‘Everything’s all right now,’ he whispered over and over, and gradually he felt her shaking subside. Cautiously he relaxed his grip a little and was about to say, Let’s get out of here, when all at once she doubled over in pain as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mike asked in astonishment.
Charlotte looked at him with frightened eyes, her face suddenly deathly pale, almost grey. ‘My baby,’ she whispered.
‘Help me please...’
Then she passed out in Mike’s arms.
It was nice to get a break from the kids, but ever since arriving here on Friday June Goldsmith had felt nervous.
There was a funny atmosphere in the town; everywhere she looked people seemed unaccountably aggressive. It was the way they stood, the way they stared at you - as if you’d done something to offend them. And it wasn’t just her imagination either - she had witnessed a fight between two men in a restaurant, had watched people (both male and female) squaring up to each other on the beach. There’d been some sort of incident on a fishing boat out in the bay as well; no details had been released, but the rumour was that everyone on board had died in mysterious circumstances. And last night there had apparently been a riot in a town-centre pub in which one man had been stabbed to death.
The kids - Freddie, who was nearly five, and Dana, two and a half - ran her ragged, but secretly June would be pleased when the weekend was over and she and Terry were in the car, heading back to Sheffield. Terry had done his best to reassure her, to convince her that whatever weird thing was going on in the town had nothing to do with them, but June could tell the tension was getting to him, too; he’d become more irritable as the weekend had progressed, and had developed a rash on his upper arms which he kept scratching, much to her own irritation.
They were walking hand in hand along the beach now. A last stroll along the sand, Terry had suggested, before heading back to the hotel to pack. June had wanted to pack straight after lunch and reach her mother’s in time to give the kids their tea and put them to bed, but she didn’t want to get Terry’s back up again this weekend so she had smiled and said, yes, that would be lovely.
Only it wasn’t lovely, was it? It was every bit the ordeal she had been expecting. She gripped Terry’s hand tightly, avoided eye contact with each person staring at her as she walked past, and concentrated on putting one foot firmly in front of the other.
Making a conscious effort to appear casual, June looked at Terry, who was walking closest to the water’s edge, gazing out to sea. They had met ten years ago when they were both twenty-six, in a disco in Sheffield. It had been her best friend Millicent’s hen night, and June had been very drunk. The following morning she had not been able to remember much about Terry, even though it had been the start of a relationship leading eventually to marriage, to their own house, to two beautiful children.
Ten years on, and looking at Terry now, June realised that she had never once regretted writing her phone number on a beer mat and thrusting it into his hand at the end of that riotous evening. Too many business lunches had thickened his girth and doubled his chin, and the thick dark hair that had once grown on his head now seemed to have chosen to sprout from his nose and ears instead, but none of that altered the fact that she loved him as much now - if not more
- as she ever had.
She squeezed his hand, and when he didn’t respond she murmured her pet name for him: ‘Terribubble.’
He looked round, face slack.
‘Hmm,’ he said, managing to sound like the village idiot on a go-slow.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said playfully, ‘was I keeping you up?’
‘I was just... just... just thinking,’ he slurred. Then a slight frown crinkled his forehead. ‘What do you want?’
Part of her wanted to snap, ‘Oh, never mind!’, but it would be a shame to end the weekend on a sour note. I just wanted to tell you I love you,’ she said.
There was a pause as if he was waiting for more. Then he said, ‘Thanks. I love you too.’
She sighed, though not loud enough for him to hear, and they walked on. A couple of minutes later she said, ‘Do you know what’s strange?’
Again that slow reaction: ‘Hmm? What?’
‘It’s a boiling hot day and yet most of the people on this beach are covering themselves up. I wonder why.’
He shrugged as if he couldn’t see what she was getting at.
A few moments later he answered, ‘Maybe they don’t want to get sunburned.’
‘No, I don’t think it’s that.’ She frowned for a moment, lips pursed, then raised her eyebrows in a facial shrug. ‘Oh, what does it really matter? We’ll be home soon. This is just a peculiar place, that’s all.’
They were near the end of the beach now, most of the holidaymakers behind them. June began to relax a little, even though they would have to run the gauntlet again on their way back. A little further along the sand gave way to jutting rocks, seaweed-slimy rock pools and the silently howling mouths of cliff caves. There were few people around here. The whispering of the tide sounded like a secret that the sea would reveal only to them.
June stopped and looked out at the water, fascinated and soothed by the shifting mosaic of green, blue and grey, coins of golden sunlight bobbing and sparkling on the waves. Terry let his hand slip from hers and moved on slowly. He clambered up over the first of the rocks, stepped carefully around a few pools with his flip-flopped feet, and ambled aimlessly towards the nearest cave, a dark, vertical gash in the sun-drenched cliff.
June watched him go, then turned back to the sea, enjoying her moment of communion with it. If she hadn’t felt so nervous of her fe
llow human beings, she could have sat on a rock and gazed at it for hours, intermittently dozing, allowing the rhythmic liquid breath of the tide to transport her to another place.
Despite her state, the sea managed to weave its mesmerising magic. June was certain she had remained conscious as the sea’s never-ending patterns kaleidoscoped in front of her eyes, yet suddenly she was jerking not so much awake as aware, with no idea how long she had been standing there. She looked around, hoping to catch sight of Terry pottering among the rock-pools, but there was no sign of him. She almost called out but didn’t want to attract attention to herself.
He couldn’t be too far away. If she didn’t see him when she climbed up on to the rocks, she’d no doubt find him poking about in one of the caves, looking for interesting stuff that had been washed ashore by the tide. She sidestepped a great swathe of clear jelly at the base of the rocks and headed towards the caves.
The rocks were relatively dry, though the mossy seaweed that provided them with a furry green coat was still damp and slippery underfoot. As she stepped down from a jagged crest of rocks on to a relatively flat area, the nearby entrance to the first of the cliff caves gushed with light.
It was sunlight, of course. She must have looked at the cave at the exact moment that the sun inched far enough across the sky to flood the entrance and drown the shadows inside.
Not that the shadows had been hiding anything interesting.
The sand in the cave, still damp from the lack of sunlight to bake it dry, was strewn with bladderwrack, an old blue fishing net, pop bottles, driftwood and more blobs of the jelly-like stuff that the sea seemed to have coughed up like phlegm.
She walked past the cave and stopped outside the next one.
The entrance was four feet high at its apex and she had to crouch down to peer inside. There was nothing to see. The interior was no bigger than a tepee. On to the next one, and still no sign of Terry. She glanced back the way she had come. Surely she was now for enough away from the people on the beach to be out of earshot? She walked towards the next entrance, calling her husband’s name - and was rewarded almost immediately by what sounded like a rustle of movement.
She smiled and all but skipped the last few steps to the mouth of the cave. She was immediately struck by an unpleasant smell - like dead fish and rotten vegetables - but she took a step inside. Instantly the stench wrapped itself around her like a winding sheet, making her gag. She clamped her hands over her mouth and nose and took a hasty step backwards. The stench was pungent as ammonia; her eyes began to water, her surroundings dissolving into a blur of watery shadows. Something must have died in here, she thought. There was no way that Terry would have lingered here.
Without any warning a figure stepped into view from behind a shelf of rock in front of her, making her jump. In the dim light its head was a bleached skull, its hands held out before it, palms up. As it moved towards her June’s heart skipped a beat and then she gasped as she realised that it was indeed Terry, after all. His sunglasses and her blurred vision had made his eyes look like nothing more than dark, empty sockets. She blinked to clear her vision, and was only partially successful. Terry’s outstretched hands looked dirty, but as he stepped forward into the sunlight she saw that they were not black, but red.
‘Blood,’ he said before she could speak.
There was a beat of silence as she took this in, then, ‘My God, what have you done to yourself?’
He frowned as if he didn’t understand the question, and shook his head. ‘Not mine. It’s all over the wall.’
She glanced behind him, fighting off the smell. ‘My God,’
she breathed. ‘Terry, we’ve got to tell someone.’
Then the interior of the cave erupted.
June’s first thought was that a bomb had gone off. All at once sand was geysering up and out of the cave in a great plume, covering them both. June felt it blasting through her hair, stinging her eyes, crunching grittily between her teeth.
She was thrown backwards, on to her knees, swiping at her face as if she was being attacked by bees. She coughed, sneezed and spluttered, her eyes streaming.
She straightened bolt upright, however, when she heard Terry begin to scream.
The first, a terrible, wrenching scream of mortal agony, was rapidly followed by a succession of others. June felt every muscle clench at the sound, felt a bolt of coldness tear through her stomach. Despite the stinging pinpricks of sand in her eyes she forced herself to open them. When she saw why Terry was screaming, she forgot her own discomfort in an instant. Her eyes widened in terror and disbelief.
The thing that had erupted from beneath the sand was an impossibility. Part bull, part spider, part scorpion, it was massive, its jointed, spiny legs at least eight feet long. Even its bristling, multi-eyed head, which looked tiny in relation to its muscle-packed abdomen, was substantially bigger than June’s. It was tearing apart the figure pinned to the ground between its two front legs. Blood was gushing out over the sand as it feasted, trickling down the rocks, swirling around June’s feet like a sticky incoming tide.
Within seconds Terry had stopped screaming. His body jerked spasmodically. His mouth was open and full of blood.
His sunglasses had fallen off and his eyes had rolled up into his head.
The scene was so appalling, so unbelievable, that June was numbed almost to the point of inertia. But acting with an odd, distant composure, she stepped out of her flip-flops, turned from the scene and walked away. She moved carefully as she picked her way across the rocks, taking pains not to slip. It was only when she reached the edge of the formation and she had jumped over the blobs of jelly nestled in the crook between rocks and sand that she began to run, heading back the way she had come.
She had progressed no more than a dozen yards when she heard a scuffle-clatter of movement behind her. Breathing hard, she glanced back over her shoulder. The creature had evidently finished with Terry and was now scurrying unevenly across the rocks towards her.
In an instant the fragile veneer that had shielded June from her emotions shattered. Gut-wrenching terror surged through her like an electric shock. Her legs took up the challenge, doubling their pace, and as she ran she let out a piercing scream that seemed to tear her throat, releasing the taste of blood into her mouth.
Now she didn’t care that the people on the beach were looking at her. Rather, it urged her to cry out for help, her voice raw and ragged. However, no one came to her aid. The people either stood transfixed - some of them with gleaming, hungry eyes - or screamed and turned tail.
Seconds later the stink of dead things overwhelmed her and she fell, struck from behind. It was only when she saw her own blood spilling on to the sand that she realised she’d been sliced open. She tried to roll over, to get back to her feet, but it was no use. She tried to crawl but her limbs wouldn’t let her.
Then it was upon her and there was only the scuttling, stinking blackness of its body. Her last thought was of her children, miles away in Sheffield, excitedly awaiting their parents’ return.
The Brigadier took off his cap and leaned forward in his chair until his forehead was touching the desk. The hard surface was cool, comforting. Not for the first time that day he closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift.
It was proving increasingly difficult to hold on to his thoughts. He remembered speaking to Yates on the RT and arranging a UNIT clean-up team to deal with... with some sort of incident at the guesthouse where Yates was staying.
And more recently he had spoken to the Doctor, hadn’t he?
But not his Doctor. The younger chap he’d met earlier, the one in the cream coat. What was it this new Doctor had told him? It was something about the threat that was facing them. He’d said a word - Xaranti - that, even though the Brigadier was sure he’d never heard it before, nevertheless seemed to resound in his head like some newly-roused memory.
He was not too far gone to realise that whatever was wrong with him was something rather m
ore serious than mere stress-fatigue or overwork. Perhaps he ought to relinquish his post, declare himself unfit for duty, hand over the mantle of command to Mike Yates. To do so, to admit to any kind of weakness, was anathema to him, but he was nothing if not a realist. He knew he couldn’t go on like this. For the first time in his military career he simply had no idea what to do next.
And if he couldn’t make proper, informed decisions then he might very well end up endangering the lives of his men - not to mention putting the country, or even the entire planet, at risk.
He raised his head wearily from the desk and was reaching for the RT - first of all pausing to scratch the infernal itching that had started on his shoulder and was now spreading down his arm and across his chest - when the door opened and Benton blundered breathlessly in.
The Brigadier jerked upright as if he had been caught napping and for a moment his mind cleared. ‘Benton,’ he snapped, ‘don’t you know to knock before entering a superior officer’s... er... office?’
If Benton noticed the Brigadier’s moment of confusion he didn’t let on. In fact, he looked a little confused himself.
‘Sorry, sir. It’s just that... well, there’s a monster on the beach, sir.’
‘A monster?’ repeated the Brigadier scathingly. ‘Can’t you be a little more precise, Benton?’
‘Sorry, sir.’ Benton looked as if he was concentrating hard.
‘The local police have just rung in. They say there’s a large, insect-like creature running amok on Tayborough Sands beach. Quite a few fatalities already it seems, sir.’
‘Right, Benton,’ said the Brigadier, not quite with relish, but certainly galvanised - however temporarily - by the prospect of action. ‘Get the men ready to move out in force.
And try to get hold of the Doctor, let him know what’s going on.’
‘He probably knows already, sir. His hotel is right on the seafront.’
‘Is it, by George?’ said the Brigadier, wondering whether he already knew this. ‘Well, try and get hold of him anyway. Tell him not to go near this dratted creature until we get there.’
