by Peter Straub
As we trudged back toward the lights the threat of a storm seemed to withdraw, and I blamed it on my tension. “Of course I’m all right,” he muttered irritably. “I fell and that made me shout, that’s all.” Once we were inside I saw the evidence of his fall; his trousers were covered with sand up to the knees.
IV
Next day he hardly spoke to me. He went down early to the beach, and stayed there. I didn’t know if he was obsessed or displaying pique. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to be near me; invalids can find each other unbearable.
Often I glimpsed him, wandering beyond the dunes. He walked as though in an elaborate maze and scrutinized the beach. Was he searching for the key to the notebook? Was he looking for pollution? By the time he found it, I thought sourly, it would have infected him.
I felt too enervated to intervene. As I watched, Neal appeared to vanish intermittently; if I looked away, I couldn’t locate him again for minutes. The beach blazed like bone, and was never still. I couldn’t blame the aberrations of my vision solely on heat and haze.
When Neal returned, late that afternoon, I asked him to phone for a doctor. He looked taken aback, but eventually said, “There’s a box by the station, isn’t there?”
“One of the neighbours would let you phone.”
“No, I’ll walk down. They’re probably all wondering why you’ve let some long-haired freak squat in your house, as it is.”
He went out, rubbing his forehead gingerly. He often did that now. That, and his preoccupation with the demented notebook, were additional reasons why I wanted a doctor: I felt Neal needed examining too.
By the time he returned, it was dusk. On the horizon, embers dulled in the sea. The glow of the beach was already stirring; it seemed to have intensified during the last few days. I told myself I had grown hypersensitive.
“Dr. Lewis. He’s coming tomorrow.” Neal hesitated, then went on, “I think I’ll just have a stroll on the beach. Want to come?”
“Good God no. I’m ill, can’t you see?”
“I know that.” His impatience was barely controlled. “A stroll might do you good. There isn’t any sunlight now.”
“I’ll stay in until I’ve seen the doctor.”
He looked disposed to argue, but his restlessness overcame him. As he left, his bearing seemed to curse me. Was his illness making him intolerant of mine, or did he feel that I’d rebuffed a gesture of reconciliation?
I felt too ill to watch him from the window. When I looked I could seldom distinguish him or make out which movements were his. He appeared to be walking slowly, poking at the beach with my stick. I wondered if he’d found quicksand. Again his path made me think of a maze.
I dozed, far longer than I’d intended. The doctor loomed over me. Peering into my eyes, he reached down. I began to struggle, as best I could: I’d glimpsed the depths of his eye-sockets, empty and dry as interstellar space. I didn’t need his treatment, I would be fine if he left me alone, just let me go. But he had reached deep into me. As though I was a bladder that had burst, I felt myself flood into him; I felt vast emptiness absorb my substance and my self. Dimly I understood that it was nothing like emptiness—that my mind refused to perceive what it was, so alien and frightful was its teeming.
It was dawn. The muffled light teemed. The beach glowed fitfully. I gasped: someone was down on the beach, so huddled that he looked shapeless. He rose, levering himself up with my stick, and began to pace haphazardly. I knew at once that he’d spent the night on the beach.
After that I stayed awake. I couldn’t imagine the state of his mind, and I was a little afraid of being asleep when he returned. But when, hours later, he came in to raid the kitchen for a piece of cheese, he seemed hardly to see me. He was muttering repetitively under his breath. His eyes looked dazzled by the beach, sunk in his obsession.
“When did the doctor say he was coming?”
“Later,” he mumbled, and hurried down to the beach.
I hoped he would stay there until the doctor came. Occasionally I glimpsed him at his intricate pacing. Ripples of heat deformed him; his blurred flesh looked unstable. Whenever I glanced at the beach it leapt forward, dauntingly vivid. Cracks of light appeared in the sea. Clumps of grass seemed to rise twitching, as though the dunes were craning to watch Neal. Five minutes’ vigil at the window was as much as I could bear.
The afternoon consumed time. It felt lethargic and enervating as four in the morning. There was no sign of the doctor. I kept gazing from the front door. Nothing moved on the crescent except wind-borne hints of the beach.
Eventually I tried to phone. Though I could feel the heat of the pavement through the soles of my shoes, the day seemed bearable; only threats of pain plucked at my skull. But nobody was at home. The bungalows stood smugly in the evening light. When I attempted to walk to the phone box, the noose closed on my skull at once.
In my hall I halted startled, for Neal had thrown open the living-room door as I entered the house. He looked flushed and angry. “Where were you?” he demanded.
“I’m not a hospital case yet, you know. I was trying to phone the doctor.”
Unfathomably, he looked relieved. “I’ll go down now and call him.”
While he was away I watched the beach sink into twilight. At the moment, this seemed to be the only time of day I could endure watching—the time at which shapes become obscure, most capable of metamorphosis. Perhaps this made the antics of the shore acceptable, more apparently natural. Now the beach resembled clouds in front of the moon; it drifted slowly and variously. If I gazed for long it looked nervous with lightning. The immense bulk of the night edged up from the horizon.
I didn’t hear Neal return; I must have been fascinated by the view. I turned to find him watching me. Again he looked relieved—because I was still here? “He’s coming soon,” he said.
“Tonight, do you mean?”
“Yes, tonight. Why not?”
I didn’t know many doctors who would come out at night to treat what was, however unpleasant for me, a relatively minor illness. Perhaps attitudes were different here in the country. Neal was heading for the back door, for the beach. “Do you think you could wait until he comes?” I said, groping for an excuse to detain him. “Just in case I feel worse.”
“Yes, you’re right.” His gaze was opaque. “I’d better stay with you.”
We waited. The dark mass closed over beach and bungalows. The nocturnal glow fluttered at the edge of my vision. When I glanced at the beach, the dim shapes were hectic. I seemed to be paying for my earlier fascination, for now the walls of the room looked active with faint patterns.
Where was the doctor? Neal seemed impatient too. The only sounds were the repetitive ticking of his footsteps and the irregular chant of the sea. He kept staring at me as if he wanted to speak; occasionally his mouth twitched. He resembled a child both eager to confess and afraid to do so.
Though he made me uneasy I tried to look encouraging, interested in whatever he might have to say. His pacing took him closer and closer to the beach door. Yes, I nodded, tell me, talk to me.
His eyes narrowed. Behind his eyelids he was pondering. Abruptly he sat opposite me. A kind of smile, tweaked awry, plucked at his lips. “I’ve got another story for you,” he said.
“Really?” I sounded as intrigued as I could.
He picked up the notebook. “I worked it out from this.”
So we’d returned to his obsession. As he twitched pages over, his feet shifted constantly. His lips moved as though whispering the text. I heard the vast mumbling of the sea.
“Suppose this,” he said all at once. “I only said suppose, mind you. This guy was living all alone in Strand. It must have affected his mind, you said that yourself—having to watch the beach every night. But just suppose it didn’t send him mad? Suppose it affected his mind so that he saw things more clearly?”
I hid my impatience. “What things?”
“The beach.” His tone reminded me of somethin
g—a particular kind of simplicity I couldn’t quite place. “Of course we’re only supposing. But from things you’ve read, don’t you feel there are places that are closer to another sort of reality, another plane or dimension or whatever?”
“You mean the beach at Strand was like that?” I suggested, to encourage him.
“That’s right. Did you feel it too?”
His eagerness startled me. “I felt ill, that’s all. I still do.”
“Sure. Yes, of course. I mean, we were only supposing. But look at what he says.” He seemed glad to retreat into the notebook. “It started at Lewis where the old stones were, then it moved on up the coast to Strand. Doesn’t that prove that what he was talking about is unlike anything we know?”
His mouth hung open, awaiting my agreement; it looked empty, robbed of sense. I glanced away, distracted by the fluttering glow beyond him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“That’s because you haven’t read this properly.” His impatience had turned harsh. “Look here,” he demanded, poking his fingers at a group of words as if they were a Bible’s oracle.
WHEN THE PATTERNS READY IT CAN COME BACK. “So what is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ll tell you what I think it means—what he meant.” His low voice seemed to stumble among the rhythms of the beach. “You see how he keeps mentioning patterns. Suppose this other reality was once all there was? Then ours came into being and occupied some of its space. We didn’t destroy it—it can’t be destroyed. Maybe it withdrew a little, to bide its time. But it left a kind of imprint of itself, a kind of coded image of itself in our reality. And yet that image is itself in embryo, growing. You see, he says it’s alive but it’s only the image being put together. Things become part of its image, and that’s how it grows. I’m sure that’s what he meant.”
I felt mentally exhausted and dismayed by all this. How much in need of a doctor was he? I couldn’t help sounding a little derisive. “I don’t see how you could have put all that together from that book.”
“Who says I did?”
His vehemence was shocking. I had to break the tension, for the glare in his eyes looked as unnatural and nervous as the glow of the beach. I went to gaze from the front window, but there was no sign of the doctor.
“Don’t worry,” Neal said. “He’s coming.”
I stood staring out at the lightless road until he said fretfully, “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”
He waited until I sat down. His tension was oppressive as the hovering sky. He gazed at me for what seemed minutes; the noose dug into my skull. At last he said, “Does this beach feel like anywhere else to you?”
“It feels like a beach.”
He shrugged that aside. “You see, he worked out that whatever came from the old stones kept moving toward the inhabited areas. That’s how it added to itself. That’s why it moved on from Lewis and then Strand.”
“All nonsense, of course. Ravings.”
“No. It isn’t.” There was no mistaking the fury that lurked, barely restrained, beneath his low voice. That fury seemed loose in the roaring night, in the wind and violent sea and looming sky. The beach trembled wakefully. “The next place it would move to would be here,” he muttered. “It has to be.”
“If you accepted the idea in the first place.”
A hint of a grimace twitched his cheek; my comment might have been an annoying fly—certainly as trivial. “You can read the pattern out there if you try,” he mumbled. “It takes all day. You begin to get a sense of what might be there. It’s alive, though nothing like life as we recognize it.”
I could only say whatever came into my head, to detain him until the doctor arrived. “Then how do you?”
He avoided the question, but only to betray the depths of his obsession. “Would an insect recognize us as a kind of life?”
Suddenly I realized that he intoned “the beach” as a priest might name his god. We must get away from the beach. Never mind the doctor now. “Look, Neal, I think we’d better—”
He interrupted me, eyes glaring spasmodically. “It’s strongest at night. I think it soaks up energy during the day. Remember, he said that the quicksands only come out at night. They move, you know—they make you follow the pattern. And the sea is different at night. Things come out of it. They’re like symbols and yet they’re alive. I think the sea creates them. They help make the pattern live.”
Appalled, I could only return to the front window and search for the lights of the doctor’s car—for any lights at all.
“Yes, yes,” Neal said, sounding less impatient than soothing. “He’s coming.” But as he spoke I glimpsed, reflected in the window, his secret triumphant grin.
Eventually I managed to say to his reflection, “You didn’t call a doctor, did you?”
“No.” A smile made his lips tremble like quicksand. “But he’s coming.”
My stomach had begun to churn slowly; so had my head, and the room. Now I was afraid to stand with my back to Neal, but when I turned I was more afraid to ask the question. “Who?”
For a moment I thought he disdained to answer; he turned his back on me and gazed toward the beach—but I can’t write any longer as if I have doubts, as if I don’t know the end. The beach was his answer, its awesome transformation was, even if I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Was the beach swollen, puffed up as if by the irregular gasping of the sea? Was it swarming with indistinct shapes, parasites that scuttled dancing over it, sank into it, floated writhing to its surface? Did it quiver along the whole of its length like luminous gelatin? I tried to believe that all this was an effect of the brooding dark—but the dark had closed down so thickly that there might have been no light in the world outside except the fitful glow.
He craned his head back over his shoulder. The gleam in his eyes looked very like the glimmering outside. A web of saliva stretched between his bared teeth. He grinned with a frightful generosity; he’d decided to answer my question more directly. His lips moved as they had when he was reading. At last I heard what I’d tried not to suspect. He was making the sound that I’d tried not to hear in the shells.
Was it meant to be an invocation, or the name I’d asked for? I knew only that the sound, so liquid and inhuman that I could almost think it was shapeless, nauseated me, so much so that I couldn’t separate it from the huge loose voices of wind and sea. It seemed to fill the room. The pounding of my skull tried to imitate its rhythm, which I found impossible to grasp, unbearable. I began to sidle along the wall toward the front door.
His body turned jerkily, as if dangling from his neck. His head laughed, if a sound like struggles in mud is laughter. “You’re not going to try to get away?” he cried. “It was getting hold of you before I came, he was. You haven’t a chance now, not since we brought him into the house,” and he picked up a shell.
As he leveled the mouth of the shell at me my dizziness flooded my skull, hurling me forward. The walls seemed to glare and shake and break out in swarms; I thought that a dark bulk loomed at the window, filling it. Neal’s mouth was working, but the nauseating sound might have been roaring deep in a cavern, or a shell. It sounded distant and huge, but coming closer and growing more definite—the voice of something vast and liquid that was gradually taking shape. Perhaps that was because I was listening, but I had no choice.
All at once Neal’s free hand clamped his forehead. It looked like a pincer desperate to tear something out of his skull. “It’s growing,” he cried, somewhere between sobbing and ecstasy. As he spoke, the liquid chant seemed to abate not at all. Before I knew what he meant to do, he’d wrenched open the back door and was gone. In a nightmarish way, his nervous elaborate movements resembled dancing.
As the door crashed open, the roar of the night rushed in. Its leap in volume sounded eager, voracious. I stood paralyzed, listening, and couldn’t tell how like his chant it sounded. I heard his footsteps, soft and loose, running unevenly over the dunes. Minutes later I thought I heard a faint
cry, which sounded immediately engulfed.
I slumped against a chair. I felt relieved, drained, uncaring. The sounds had returned to the beach, where they ought to be; the room looked stable now. Then I grew disgusted with myself. Suppose Neal was injured, or caught in quicksand? I’d allowed his hysteria to gain a temporary hold on my sick perceptions, I told myself—was I going to use that as an excuse not to try to save him?
At last I forced myself outside. All the bungalows were dark. The beach was glimmering, but not violently. I could see nothing wrong with the sky. Only my dizziness, and the throbbing of my head, threatened to distort my perceptions.
I made myself edge between the bushes, which hissed like snakes, mouths full of sand. The tangle of footprints made me stumble frequently. Sand rattled the spikes of marram grass. At the edge of the dunes, the path felt ready to slide me down to the beach.
The beach was crowded. I had to squint at many of the vague pieces of debris. My eyes grew used to the dimness, but I could see no sign of Neal. Then I peered closer. Was that a pair of sandals, half buried? Before my giddiness could hurl me to the beach, I slithered down.
Yes, they were Neal’s, and a path of bare footprints led away toward the crowd of debris. I poked gingerly at the sandals, and wished I had my stick to test for quicksand—but the sand in which they were partially engulfed was quite solid. Why had he tried to bury them?
I followed his prints, my eyes still adjusting. I refused to imitate his path, for it looped back on itself in intricate patterns which made me dizzy and wouldn’t fade from my mind. His paces were irregular, a cripple’s dance. He must be a puppet of his nerves, I thought. I was a little afraid to confront him, but I felt a duty to try.
His twistings led me among the debris. Low obscure shapes surrounded me: a jagged stump bristling with metal tendrils that groped in the air as I came near; half a car so rusty and misshapen that it looked like a child’s fuzzy sketch; the hood of a pram within which glimmered a bald lump of sand. I was glad to emerge from that maze, for the dim objects seemed to shift; I’d even thought the bald lump was opening a crumbling mouth.
