by Lee Murray
‘Hello?’ I reached out and put my left hand on his shoulder. Sylvia was tugging hard on the lead in my other hand. Only when I commanded her to heel did she stop pulling.
‘Sorry, Sylvia’s eager to get back home to her breakfast, little guts,’ I joked, dropping my hand from his shoulder as I stepped round to stand beside him.
At last he turned to face me, but his eyes were solid white without pupil or iris. Like he was staring through me. ‘I have heard our deaths shrieking in the waves,’ he whispered.
I staggered, tripping over Sylvia and tumbling backwards onto the cold wet sand.
He did not move his feet but his pupilless eyes tracked my fall and he loomed over me, a towering figure enhaloed with light from the bright blue sky behind. ‘From the depths, the worms devour us and enshroud the Earth with a hood of bone.’
Sylvia growled and snarled. I scrambled to my feet. Whether she sensed my fear or something worse, I couldn’t tell, but she stayed close as we fled the beach, not once daring to look back. We ran home. I was still panting after I had locked the front door, removed my jacket and headed for the kitchen.
‘You look knackered,’ Pete greeted me, glancing up from the coffee machine. ‘You haven’t taken up jogging again?’
One side of his pyjama collar stuck up awkwardly over his bathrobe, the bread bag lay open by the toaster. Sylvia padded to her water bowl and lapped noisily. I was irritated rather than reassured by the sight of such domestic normalcy.
‘There’s an old man on the beach,’ I started. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but his eyes … they were white, completely white.’
‘Cataracts,’ Pete explained matter-of-factly.
‘No, it wasn’t anything like that. Besides, it wasn’t just his eyes. He said all this creepy stuff about death in the waves and worms eating everyone.’
‘Cheery stuff. Although I suppose he has a point. We’ll all get eaten by the worms in the end.’ He crept towards me, wriggling his fingers towards my face and putting on a cheesy, rasping horror-film voice, ‘After we’re dead and buried. The worms are coming to get you, Barbara.’
‘Stop it.’ I whacked his fingers away. ‘I’m serious. It was threatening, somehow. It really scared me.’
Pete put his arms around me. ‘Don’t worry, hon. Maybe he was having you on, y’know. Trying to get a rise, or something.’
‘But it wasn’t just the guy,’ I said, pulling away. ‘Before that, Sylvia found this dead fish and it was riddled with these creepy worm things. I’ve never seen anything like them before. I could see their jaws, like huge teeth – fangs almost – hooking into the flesh. They were gnawing, scraping the meat off the bone.’ I shuddered.
Pete hesitated before speaking. ‘Do you think maybe that getting creeped out over a maggoty old fish might be part of it? You got unnerved and then some old guy happens to say some weird stuff and…’
‘You think I’m exaggerating?’
‘I didn’t say that, but it’s easy to see how getting squeamish over a rotting fish might make you a bit more susceptible to overreact to what actually…’
‘Overreacting? You think I freaked out over a bug or two and then imagine an old guy ranting about death for no reason?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Yes, you did. You literally said “overreact”. Just like that time when your mother didn’t mean to…’
‘My mother? Oh, so that’s what this is really about. You don’t want to have dinner with my parents.’
‘No, it’s not that. I just mean that you never believe me. It’s always me reading too much into what people say.’
He sighed and returned to the coffee machine. ‘Let’s not do this now. Let’s just have a nice breakfast and forget about it, okay.’ The espresso machine gurgled and rasped, drowning out the silence between us.
I waited, watching Pete watching the white cup slowly fill with dark, thick coffee.
‘We should go back,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Come with me to the beach. You can see for yourself.’
‘I was making scrambled eggs.’ He gestured at the stove top, but he hadn’t so much as broken an egg yet.
‘Make them when we get back,’ I insisted. ‘What if that old man needs help or something? We can’t just leave him.’
Pete gave a half-hearted objection but once he had swallowed the last of his coffee, he agreed to get dressed and walk back to the beach. Sylvia embarked on our second walk with less enthusiasm than the first. Both husband and dog dragged their heels but as only Sylvia could be hurried by means of a leash I had to plod along much slower than I wished.
The sight of the tussock-fringed dunes was enough to cool my impatience. A twinge of dread troubled me. What would be worse? To have Pete’s suspicions confirmed and see nothing more than a half-rotten fish and a harmless old man, or to discover that my fears were justified?
We followed the snaking path to the beach, the clay dirt bleeding into sand as we progressed towards the steep rise of the dunes, our feet treading deeper with each step.
‘Where was this guy?’ Pete asked, stopping to survey the beach from the peak of the dune.
The old man had gone.
‘He was at the edge of the ocean, just over there.’ I pointed to the lonely stretch of sand, still and lifeless but for the white-foamed remnants of broken waves stroking the shoreline. I swallowed hard. My throat was tight. ‘We may as well leave. It was silly of me, I guess.’
‘Come on, we’ll walk along for a bit. See him further up, eh?’ Pete took my hand and motioned onwards. Generosity came easy to him when he knew he was right.
We started along the beach. The tide had crept inwards, washing away any trace that he’d been standing there at all. We passed another couple and a lady walking her Labrador but nobody had seen an old man wandering the beach.
‘I guess he must have gone,’ Pete said, trying to not sound too pleased.
I nodded. I wasn’t annoyed or relieved; just suddenly, achingly weary. I felt disconnected from my earlier experience as though it had occurred long ago or in a dream. I spotted the two mounds of sand up ahead.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
I didn’t have the heart to exhume them.
*
It was just after midday when I loaded the car boot with corflute signs and headed out to set up for my one o’clock showing. I checked my teeth for lipstick in the car’s rear-vision mirror before reversing out of the garage. They were fine of course. I had checked my reflection scrupulously in my full-length mirror – polished shoes, crisp blouse, and pressed suit. Presentation was essential in an Open Home. Perfection produced confidence; confidence produced sales.
I drove down my street and turned onto Marine Parade. It was a faster, if less direct route to my first house than negotiating veins of suburban streets twisting around the centre of the town. Half a dozen or so people had gathered on the footpath beside a parked ambulance. I slowed down, pulled over and killed the engine. I glanced at my watch. I didn’t really have time to go rubbernecking, but this was too close to where I had walked on the beach this morning.
I paced over to the small crowd, my heels clacking on the concrete. The lady who works in the Four Square was one of the onlookers, her bright burgundy cropped hair identifying her more readily than the shop’s name badge. ‘Vera’. She raised her eyebrows in friendly recognition.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘A drowning. Apparently, that man found a body on the beach.’ She nodded towards the rear of the ambulance.
I turned. A young man was seated at the rear of the ambulance. A latex-gloved paramedic was swabbing the side of his mouth, but there were still traces of dried blood below his lips.
‘What happened to him?’
She shrugged. ‘Not sure, love.
Moana might know. She was here before I came over.’ She raised her voice and called to a pair of teenage girls who were simultaneously talking and typing into their phones at great speed. ‘Moana, love, come here a minute.’
The taller of the two girls obligingly trotted over, dragging her friend along.
‘Wassup?’ she said.
‘We were wondering what happened to him, the guy who found the body,’ Vera explained. ‘You were here weren’t you, when the ambulance arrived?’
Moana nodded emphatically, her brown eyes widening. ‘He was like totally freaking and yelling at the ambulance guys that he got bitten. For reals. Like when he went to give the old guy mouth-to-mouth, he got bitten. But here’s the real freaky bit…’ she paused dramatically. ‘The guy was already dead.’
Vera looked at me, her eyebrows raised. ‘Let’s not get too carried away now, love.’
‘Nah, it’s true,’ Moana’s friend insisted. ‘We were here when the ambulance arrived. The guy had been pacing up and down, waiting for them. His lips were bleeding loads, like blood running down his chin and everything. We could see it from across the road. We thought he’d just got the bash when we first saw him but then he started waving and yelling at the ambulance, “He’s drowned. He’s drowned and he bit me”.’
‘Look, I’ll show yous. They wouldn’t let us down on the beach but we got a photo from up on the dunes.’ Moana thrust her phone in front of our faces. A blurry image of a pale body lying flat on the stone-grey sand. The face was too small in the distant photo to make out any features. His clothes were wet, darkened with water and clinging to the lifeless body, but I recognised them.
‘Ohmygod,’ I whispered. ‘It is him.’
Vera’s eyes widened. ‘You know him? Oh, how awful. Put that away!’ She shoved Moana’s phone away.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know,’ Moana mumbled.
‘No, don’t worry,’ I started. ‘I don’t know him exactly. I’ve just seen him around before, walking on the beach. I saw him today…’
‘Are you okay, love? You look a bit faint.’ Vera put her hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ve had a bit of a shock.’
‘I have to go,’ I mumbled. The noise of the people around grew loud and indistinct. It was hard to focus on what Vera was saying. Something about sitting down?
I walked back to my car, trying to make sense of the conflicting explanations, trying to understand why the sight of a frail old man lying prone and lifeless had filled me with as much dread as sadness. I should have helped him. A man had died. I was probably the last person to speak to him and I ran from his disturbed ramblings.
And yet worse than the weight of guilt was the other sickening fear. Maybe I’d be dead if I hadn’t run. The man with the blood-smeared mouth, the girls’ story of how the drowned man bit him.
I fumbled my car open and got in, exhaling deeply once the door was shut. I looked in the rear-vision mirror. Calmness returned when I saw my grey-blue eyes staring back at me.
‘I don’t have time to think about this.’ I placed my fingertips at my temples and breathed. ‘It won’t do any good to lose my nerve. I have work to do.’
I grabbed my phone out of my handbag and sent a text to Pete: Off to Open Hm. Back @ 5. Will get wine for dinner.
*
Sylvia didn’t come to the door to meet us when we got back from Pete’s parents’ around eleven. I found her curled up in her bed near the fireplace, shivering.
‘Poor thing.’ I picked her up and cradled her in my arms. ‘Why didn’t you leave the heat pump on for her?’
Pete wandered over. ‘Get a bit cold, Sylvies?’ He tousled her head and shrugged. ‘She doesn’t feel that cold to me.’
‘You can sleep with us tonight, Sweetie. It’s too cold in here.’ Sylvia rested her chin on my elbow.
I carried Sylvia upstairs and lay her down on my side of the bed.
‘Keep her warm, Pete,’ I instructed when he entered and sat down. ‘I’m just going to take a quick shower.’
‘Sure thing.’ He kicked off his shoes and got on the bed, slipping one arm around the dog while the other reached for the TV remote.
I heard the background murmur of the late-night news as I turned the shower on in the en suite. It was warm by the time I’d undressed. I got in and buried my face in the cascading water. The day was over. I had held it together all afternoon and through dinner’s polite chit-chat.
Finally, I fell apart in a shaky flood of tears and didn’t fully understand why.
*
My dreams were not dreams that night. Memories crashed down on me like towering waves, knocking me over with their force, dragging me under, deeper into each distorted vision. I saw events, relived them, not as they had been, but as they were now: bloated, twisted, and monstrous. Childhood nightmares made flesh and spiteful. Faceless figures in the shadows watched and judged me for my sins. I stood in the sea, exhilarated, laughing with my friends as a young boy drowned before me, flailing and screaming beneath the waves.
I saw my dead uncle, a child of eight I knew only from old photos, rise up out of the ocean. His face and limbs were blue and swollen from the sea. He trudged through shattering waves towards me. I wanted to run but couldn’t. Something heavy and warm pressed my body down on the sand; the sharp edge of a blade pricked at the base of my throat, threatening to plunge deep if I moved.
The old man walked with my child-uncle now. Their white pupilless eyes stared ahead but they were coming for me.
Your death is shrieking in the waves, they rasped. The worms devour us. They’ll cover the world with a hood of bone.
*
I woke to the sound of Sylvia whimpering. She had pushed herself up close against me, her head on my clavicle, her paw stretched out, claws jabbing my neck. I slid her off me and she growled slightly but didn’t wake as I turned my head to look at the alarm clock. Three thirty-eight. My mouth was bone-dry and my throat stung. I rubbed my neck where Sylvia had been jabbing me. My fingers came away wet. I went into the en suite and switched on the light. I squinted at the brightness as I looked in the mirror. Blood trickled from the side of my throat to my nightgown. How had I not woken up with her scratching me like that? Had the Panadol I’d taken to relieve my headache before bed zonked me out completely? I ran the water and grabbed some cotton wool from the cabinet. Once the blood was wiped away, I saw two small punctures on my throat. They didn’t look like scratches. Had she bitten me?
I felt unsteady on my feet. In the mirror, streaks of grey slithered on the marbled tiles around me. I splashed cold water on my face and gulped two glasses of water. Feeling a bit better, I put a plaster over the wounds and crept back to bed. Sylvia twitched in her sleep, her jaws jerking and thrashing. I moved her to the foot of the bed and lay beneath the covers.
Forty minutes later I flicked on the TV, hoping the drone of infomercials would drown the grating in my head.
*
The dog was gone in the morning. Pete had vanished from the bedroom, too. My head felt heavy and my muscles ached. I dragged myself out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen. A note on the counter informed me that Pete had taken the dog for a walk to warm up.
I wasn’t hungry, but I turned on the stovetop and made porridge anyway. The spoon left trails in the viscous mix and my sleep-addled brain saw movement within. When I reached for the brown sugar a coughing fit overtook me, sudden and painful and just long enough to make me panic. What if I couldn’t catch my breath? What if coughing turned to choking? What if I drowned in my own phlegm?
When it subsided there was a red spray of blood and mucus across the kitchen bench and the pot. I leaned over the porridge, looking into its beige interior, and saw a thick gob of blood with wriggling trails descending into the mix. Unthinking, I stirred it with a wooden spoon, turning the pot pink. I took it off the heat, too, worried that it might somehow come to harm i
f left to cook further. I wiped the benches down, got out a bowl for Pete, and filled it with porridge. I eyed it suspiciously, wondering why it looked unappetising, then sprinkled a heavy-handed dose of brown sugar and cinnamon across the surface. I placed it on the dining table and drew the curtains closed. In the dim light the bowl looked normal, innocent. It was fine, I told myself.
I dressed without eating and returned to the kitchen. A whispering in the back of my head soothed my nerves, washed through me like waves lapping the shore. Pete would be back soon. I walked to the front door and opened it, breathed deep. The ocean was close enough to smell, close enough to fill my lungs with its promise of gentle rocking, of a salty embrace, of a huge, powerful presence deep beneath the waves waiting to pluck me from meaninglessness and place me, insignificant me, upon its ceaseless crown of waves. I smiled at the thought of my skeleton stripped bare by tiny razor jaws, bound in seaweed and coral and the black, terrible mucus hood of the thing below. My eyes would be pearls, my soul at one with the immortal ebb and flow of the tides.
There were other minds, other people nearby, feeling the same thing. It was comforting to sense them, to know that up and down the coast bodies like mine were waiting to be torn apart and dragged into the depths, to hang together on a hood of bone.
Pete was alone when he returned.
He cried, and shook his head, and told me that our Sylvia had died. She had snarled and snapped at other dogs on the walk, had sunk her teeth into a Doberman, then had charged into traffic on their way back. His palm was red and raw where the lead had been torn from his grip. I kissed and licked his broken flesh and guided him to the table.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, looking down at the cold porridge.
‘Breakfast,’ I replied. The thought of him eating it filled me with a warmth I hadn’t felt in years. ‘Eat.’
