“Well, why don’t we see what it’s like when we get there?” he asked, placatingly. “I could park somewhere different and we could try and go to some new places if you like?”
“No,” with the start of childish anger in the voice. “Not this Morecambe. A different one.”
“Lennie, there isn’t a different Morecambe, just the one we always go to. This is the only one, I promise.”
“It isn’t!” and with that, Lennie was shouting and thrashing in his seat, the straps preventing him from doing much more than writhing slightly from side to side. Huw risked turning away from the road for a moment, trying to catch Lennie’s eye. Lennie shrieked in a helpless toddler’s fury, his voice spiking and sending a jolt of pain into Huw’s head that dropped, becoming a wave of nausea as it fell through him. “Lennie,” he managed to say and then he had to turn back to the road, pull across the lane which was thankfully free of traffic, let the car mount the kerb and open his door in one clumsy movement and in one spasming rush he was vomiting. The sound of it swilled around his ears, his own retching and gagging merging with the sound of Lennie’s shrieking before collapsing in on itself like a dying star.
It only took a moment; there wasn’t much to come out except bile and jagged memories. Perhaps Ro and he needed to split up, he thought. Huw couldn’t keep going through this cycle of argument-friends-argument, with all of its attendant emotional and physical ups and downs. He sat back in the seat, took a deep and torn breath and turned again. Lennie was watching him with cool eyes, and Huw managed to think, So that’s how we distract him from his tantrums – just puke!
“I’m sorry, Lennie. Daddy’s not feeling very well,” he said.
“Why aren’t you feeling well?” Quiet and calm; the storm settled and gone.
Because your mum and I don’t seem to be able to go a week without arguing about something, and the arguments are getting worse and I’m not sure either of us can cope with much more. “I don’t know, son. Maybe I have a tummy bug, but it’s gone now. I feel better.” This was true; puking seemed to have cleared some of the bitterness from his stomach, and although the taste of vomit was harsh and unpleasant, it faded as he swilled saliva around and spat it onto the pavement.
“Thank you for bringing me to this different Morecambe, Daddy,” said Lennie from behind him.
Huw turned back to face his son. Lennie was placid now, sitting motionless in his seat. In his neat little dungarees and red jacket, with his legs stuck straight out in front of him, he looked curiously doll-like at that moment and Huw felt a wave of helpless, stifling love. How could he and Ro make such a beautiful thing, such a perfect little person, hold his future in their hands, make decisions for and about him, decisions affecting his entire life, and then not sort out their own differences? It made no sense. Huw smiled at Lennie. Lennie did not smile back.
“It’s all the same Morecambe, Lennie,” said Huw. “Look, it’s just like it is every time we visit.”
“No, it’s the different one,” said Lennie and there was a finality in his voice that Huw really didn’t have the strength to argue with. He twisted back, intending drive on but something brought him up short.
At first he couldn’t work out what it was. Through the windscreen, he saw the road and the side of the library and the carparks and the small train station platform and in the distance a grey sliver of the sea framed between the large supermarket and cinema. Morecambe, as ever.
Only, quieter.
There were no cars on the road or moving along the seafront, no people going to or from their vehicles in the carparks, nothing. Certainly, Huw wouldn’t have expected much activity this early on a Saturday morning, but even out of season, Morecambe tended to have visitors at most hours of the day.
“This is much better, Daddy,” said Lennie, his voice the self-satisfied sound of a child that had got its own way. Huw ignored him for a minute, instead looking more carefully around him at the town he had come to know so well over the past few years. It seemed the same at first glance, but the closer he looked the more he saw little things that jarred. The library’s square-edged shape was blurred with what looked like moss or hanging vines clinging tightly to the brickwork. The surface of the almost empty carpark was rippled as though the concrete had settled in some of the bays and was being pushed up from beneath in other. What cars there were appeared abandoned, covered in leaves and litter and streaks of dark, oily dirt. At least one sat on deflated tyres whose rubber puddled around metal rims that were dark with rust. Further away, the superstore and the cinema both looked overgrown, dark with the same kind of hanging or climbing plant that was smothering the library. Huw wondered if this was some new kind of hangover, an effect of alcohol poisoning that made him see things that were not there, or maybe just magnifying what was there to absurd levels. Certainly, Morecambe was run down, but this looked more than that, lost and abandoned.
Decaying.
Huw went to pull the door shut, seeing as he did so his pool of vomit on the floor. It had already dried and formed a skin over itself, had darkened so that it looked weeks-old rather than minutes. He stared at it carefully. No smell reached his nose from the pool. Beyond it, his saliva had also dried, leaving just a stain on the dusty pavement. He wondered briefly whether it was a result of dehydration then dismissed the thought as ridiculous. Dehydration caused his headache, it wouldn’t make his puke or spit dry any faster. This is stupid, he thought angrily. I’m spooking myself because I’ve got a self-inflicted injury, nothing more. I should learn to control my drinking when I’m arguing with Ro, and if I can’t then I should at least learn to take the consequences like a man! He put the car into gear and pulled out into the road, driving carefully and looking straight ahead until he had passed the carparks with their deserted cars and uneven surfaces and fat white questing roots gathering in the sunken bays and slithering out from gaps in the concrete.
Roots? No. He had seen nothing of the sort. It was just rubbish blowing across the concrete apron, or some odd effect of the sun making shadows or shapes that moved as he passed, made worse by his misfiring senses. I’m not safe to drive, probably, he thought. We need to stop and get out of the car before I crash. A walk will definitely do me some good.
Huw pulled into the carpark he and Lennie used on their trips out. It was past the library, nearer to the sea than the shops, but like the earlier ones it, too, was almost empty. There were a couple of cars huddled on its far side, close to the back of the Winter Gardens theatre, but he ignored them. There were no roots coming out of cracks in the concrete, and although its surface was uneven, it was no worse than normal.
Normal. Huw liked normal.
“Can we get out, Daddy?” said Lennie, startling Huw.
“Certainly can,” replied Huw with a cheerfulness he did not feel. He still could see no movement, no people walking about, no birds in the sky. Even the clouds that hung above their heads, dirty grey clusters that looked like sodden kapok, were still. When he got out of the car, his feet sent dull sounds across the open expanse of ground that returned from the theatre’s rear wall in flat, empty plosives. The noises of him opening the boot and getting out Lennie’s buggy, taking Lennie from the car and installing him in the buggy and finally locking the car settled into the air around them, reflected in toneless whispers by buildings that were themselves a flat monochrome not far removed from the colour of the sky above them.
“Do you want to put the money in the ticket machine?”
“No, thank you.”
Huw crouched by Lennie, peering at him. Usually, Lennie loved to put the money in the slot, laughing as each coin fell into the machine’s guts and then pressing the large green button that produced their ticket. Today, however, he simply sat in his pushchair and stared about him, a faint smile on his face.
“Hey,” said Huw gently, “are you okay? Does Daddy get a kiss? Are you sure you don’t want to help me get a ticket?”
“No,” replied Lennie, emphatic, peer
ing over Huw’s shoulder. “I’m looking.”
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; the ticket machine’s slot was rusted closed, the black strip clustered with an orange bloom that resembled ferrous moss. The digital display was dark and the pricing information sign next to the machine streaked with oil or some other heavy, dried liquid. Huw gave up trying to push his money into the slot, deciding that if the council expected him to pay his parking fees they ought to at least ensure that the machines were working. Besides, he didn’t like the way the coins were coming away from the slot streaked with rust, and he liked even less the way the rust transferred itself to his fingers and wouldn’t rub off, instead leaving pale orange patches on his skin that felt slimy and unpleasant. Walking away from the machine, pushing Lennie, Huw tried again to come up with some rational explanation for what he was seeing and experiencing. Perhaps there was some event happening that he had not heard about, and everyone was attending? No, not everyone would go. Besides, the superstore that he and Lennie were just passing as they moved towards the seafront would still be open, and it was not. Its illuminated sign was dark, and the great revolving doors shut and still. One had a cracked star across its glazed face, brittle fragments of glass hanging from the damaged section and littering the ground in front of it.
The cinema was no better. Its doors were shut and filthy with mud and dust that obscured the foyer beyond and reduced the large advertising stands to formless shapes that lurked just at the edge of Huw’s perception. When he leaned closer to the paneled door, trying to peer through the dirt and make some sense of what he could see, he glimpsed the food counters and ticket desks. The desks were hazy with dust, and the trays behind the clear counter of the food stall were black with some kind of fungus that spilled out around the Perspex and crawled down the counter and onto the carpet below. Had the cinema and the store closed and Huw missed the news about it? Morecambe was definitely moving, developing and growing, but things shutting, being abandoned? Had he and Ro really been so mixed up with each other that they had missed such major changes happening on their doorstep? Surely not.
“This is fun, Daddy,” said Lennie, unexpectedly. “I like this Morecambe more than the other one for now. I’m glad we came.”
Lennie’s voice sounded odd. Normally (ah, God, for something normal! thought Huw miserably), he was an excitable child, serious about things although never less than joyful, but the voice coming from the buggy in front of him was somehow flat and withdrawn. Emotionless. Huw leaned forward over the top of the buggy so that he was looking down on Lennie. Upside down, his son’s face stared back at him, his eyes pale against skin the colour of old parchment.
“I don’t think I like it,” replied Huw. “It’s very quiet, isn’t it? Perhaps we should go home and play a game?”
“No, Daddy,” said Lennie patiently, and Huw had the oddest feeling that their roles had been reversed and that he was the younger person there and Lennie the older one, “we’ll find people soon, or they’ll find us. You’ll see, this is a much better place than usual!” As he spoke, Lennie’s face grew animated for a moment, a great smile stretching his lips to reveal a mouthful of small, white teeth. Huw nodded carefully, aware of the pulsing, sick waves of the hangover still beating in his skull.
“Okay. We’ll go up around the corner and we’ll see what’s happening but if things don’t change, we’re going home. Deal?”
“Deal!” said Lennie but the excitement in his voice never seemed to reach his upside down, unblinking eyes.
Around the corner and they were on the seafront, Lennie silent and observant in his pushchair while Huw pushed. As they walked, he became more and more uneasy. Even here, where usually there were throngs of people, the roads and pavements were empty. The seafront kiosks and stores were closed, their windows covered by grills in whose slotted faces leaves and paper stuck and against whose bases more rubbish gathered. The beach beyond the sea wall was empty too, the sand unmarked by footprints. It was a strange colour, as though it had faded in bright sunlight or been too long in the water and had some of its vibrancy leached away. The sea itself was a dank grey, its surface untroubled by waves and lying smooth and glassy. Huw had never seen the ocean in Morecambe like that before; it looked unnatural, painted and artificial rather than the moving, energizing thing it usually was. The whole place looked false, somehow, as though they had stumbled into a film set made to scale but with all of its angles subtly wrong. Things at the corner of Huw’s eye looked just out of kilter, resting against each other in ways that they should not, as if the construction had been made by someone who had seen pictures of Morecambe, studied it but never been there and never seen how its buildings and streets and walls connected. Huw looked around, an impotent anger filling him. What the fuck was going on here?
They were coming to the Midland Hotel now. The grand white structure was encrusted with scaffolding, the metal struts crawling over its surface. At least that was normal, thought Huw. The work to refit the old hotel had been going on for months now, and was one of the town’s talking points; boards around the perimeter showed pictures of how the hotel would look when it was finished, but the actual work was hidden from view apart from the top few floors. It was supposed to look half-formed, yet even here, things seemed wrong. In recent weeks, the old hotel had been repainted or resurfaced, and the newly-white walls had gleamed behind the scaffolding cover like a tooth behind a brace. Now it was darker again, streaked with grey and green patches that looked unhealthily damp. The surrounding boards had warped and one or two had come loose from their neighbours, revealing at the front of the hotel an expanse of cracked concrete and flowerbeds choked with brambles and dead, twisted plants. He did not know why but Huw also had the distinct impression that the scaffolding had become brittle, would collapse if the least weight were placed upon it.
They left the Midland behind them without speaking, which was itself an oddity; when they had walked past the Midland on earlier trips, Lennie liked to tell Huw what he thought was behind the wooden barriers, coming up with wilder and wilder ideas that made Huw laugh. Today he passed it in silence. Huw, looking down surreptitiously at his child, saw that Lennie’s eyes were fixed firmly on the sea, ignoring everything that they walked past. There was a grin playing at his lips, but it was one Huw did not like; it looked hungry and hard and anticipatory. Lennie’s tongue poked out from between his lips and in the dull light it looked too dark, black where it should have been at worst a deep fleshy red. Then, as though becoming aware of Huw’s attention, Lennie looked up and smiled more broadly.
“I think we’ll see people soon,” he said.
“Do you? Who? What people?” asked Huw.
“People,” Lennie repeated as though that explained everything. “You said you wanted to see people. You will soon.”
“How do you know?”
“Can’t you hear them? They’re not far away now.”
Abruptly, Huw wheeled about, turning them back the way they had come. He began to walk fast, not letting himself run but coming close to it. This whole place was wrong; the look of it, the feel of it and the smell of it were all wrong. There was no sea scent, no salt or water odours, just a smell of rottenness and decay that had been building as they walked. They passed the Midland at a controlled dash, and Huw ignored that fact that the ‘after’ pictures on the hoardings showed a place that was corrupted and blighted and not their normal artist’s impressions of the intended gleaming edifice. Lennie began to giggle as his buggy bounced up and down, but it was not the giggle of a happy toddler. This sounded as though it came from some other place, from some other person, someone taut and humourless. “Son,” Huw gasped as he rushed, “please tell me what’s wrong. Please!”
“Nothing Daddy,” replied Lennie, only his voice was harsh and sharper than it should have been. “We came to the different Morecambe, just like I asked. Thank you Daddy!”
Huw tried to ignore the changing timbre of his son’s voice, just as he had ignor
ed the things he had seen and was trying to ignore other sounds he could hear. Try as he might, however, he could not help but hear them. There was a distant rustling and hissing, the sound of feet shuffling and stepping along, the murmur of voices. After his experiences of the previous minutes, Huw would have expected to be glad to hear the sound of other people but he was not. The rhythms of the noises were wrong, as though there were too many legs trying to walk and not enough space for them to walk in. The murmur of voices rose and fell, but in it were rumbles and cries that sounded like no recognisable words. Huw wanted to be gone from this Morecambe, back to the banal miseries of his life with Ro where their arguments were about money and sex and domestic chores, where Lennie was a cheerful child whose voice wasn’t rasping and raw and where Morecambe was a seaside resort finally beginning to win the battle to reinvent itself for a new kind of tourist. Huw fled back, heading for his car and for the life that he knew even if he didn’t like it.
“There are people coming Daddy,” said Lennie, his voice harder than it had any right to be. Huw let out a cry when he heard it, keeping his eye on his car and his mind on the thought of escape. If he could drive back, back to the place where this had started, he could get home, get Lennie back, get away. Something had happened when he puked, he had brought them somewhere, so reversing their trip would surely allow them back. Wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t it?
He fumbled his keys as he approached the car, dropping them in his haste to point them at the vehicle. Bending to pick them up, his face came level with Lennie’s. Huw let out a tiny, torn cry when he saw his son close to; his face was desperately pale and veins like worms rippled across his forehead. Like everything else around them, he was wrong, Lennie but not-Lennie, his son but not his son. He looked distorted, pushed out of shape from within, sweating and sickly but with eyes that glittered with a horrid, terrible alertness.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Page 8
