Clickers

by J. F. Gonzalez

  A family of tourists back from an outing that had obviously been interrupted by the rain were surrounded by the creatures. Their main attention was diverted to the boy—he was in the middle of a tug-of-war by the creatures who had grabbed onto each arm with their large pincers, pulling him. His parents were screaming in fright. More of the creatures came running up the beach to join in the fracas; one approached the boy, stinger raised high, and nailed the boy in the stomach. The boy howled in pain.

  Rick felt numb with shock, rooted to the spot as the fracas went on. For an instant the scene below took him back to two hours before when he and Janice had run down the pier to the sound of similar screams of pain coming from Bobby. The sound of the boy’s screams intermingled with the clicking of the creature’s claws created an eddy of mad cacophony in Rick’s ears. Clickers, he thought. What else can we call them?

  The man rushed forward to save his son only to be stung by in the stomach by a clicker. The force of the blow sent him reeling on his butt. The man sat on the sand for a moment, eyes wide open. His hands clutched at his full belly as he moaned in pain. The creature advanced on him and popped him again, this time stinging his neck. The man shrieked as the venom inflated his neck like an inner tube and simultaneously dissolved the flesh. His stomach expanded and finally burst like a ripe melon. It looked like a balloon filled with sausages soaked in barbecue sauce exploding.

  Rick watched the action as it went down in slow motion before him.

  The boy’s chest began expanding, the flesh bubbling as he fell to his knees. The clickers swarmed around him, stuffing pieces of his flesh in their mandibles.

  The woman remained standing in the sand screaming as more clickers surrounded her and took her down. Stingered tails rose and fell and the audible clicking of pincers snapping at flesh rose in Rick’s ear.

  The man sat on the sand, his inner organs spilling out of his split belly, covering the creatures in a sticky, red mess. The man continued screaming and kicking out at the feasting crustaceans even as he was being eaten alive before his very eyes.

  Jack bent over and vomited into the wet asphalt of the parking lot. Rick stared at him as if in a fog. This was far worse than he could have imagined. There were dozens of the things scurrying up out of the water now to get their piece of the late tourist family. There were God knew how many more farther along the coast, scurrying farther inland. He didn’t want to think about what was happening to other unfortunate people the creatures came across. The clicking sounds hurt Rick’s eardrums.

  He grabbed Jack by the shoulder, pulling him to his feet. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here and warn everybody!”

  Jack focused on Rick with fear in his eyes. He looked like he was going to be sick again. The nausea seemed to pass over his face again and watching it made Rick want to throw up.

  Finally Jack gained his composure. “How? The phones are out…”

  Rick thought for a moment. “We’ll have to go door to door…there aren’t that many people in this town—”

  “Not many people?” Jack panted. “There’s close to a thousand…”

  “Compared to Philly that’s nothing,” Rick said. But he knew what Ripper meant. “If we could get some help—” The clicking cut him off as it intensified. They looked toward the beach as dozens and dozens of the things came bubbling out of the surf. It looked like the entire beach was alive with the red things. It looked like there were thousands of them making their way onto the shore.

  Rick grabbed Jack by the coat and pulled him along down the pier, leaving Janice’s car forgotten. They headed back to town, toward the mall.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Glen Jorgensen was sitting in the rear examining room, the one where the freezer was kept, examining the remains of the two creatures that Rick Sychek had his run-ins with.

  He sighed and sat back from the desk he was working at. The severed claw and tail segment were resting on carefully placed trays, which, in turn, rested on two towels. He had stowed both samples in the freezer the moment they’d come into his possession, both to preserve them for better study later, but also because they fascinated him. And with good reason.

  Glen had been born and raised in this town. Had walked its beaches at night, swam in the ocean, fished off the pier. And he’d never seen, nor heard of, anything remotely resembling the monstrosities that emerged from the ocean that caused so much fear and bodily damage. When Rick brought the claw to his office yesterday he’d racked his brain trying to come up with a plausible explanation. He’d searched through all his textbooks on crustaceans, arachnids, Atlantic sea life, Maine wildlife, everything he could find. And he’d found nothing.

  And then today—the scene at the beach, Bobby’s hand…

  Glen Jorgensen shuddered at the thought that was skittering in his mind.

  He stood up and walked out of the room toward the receptionist area. The waiting room and reception area were brightly lit against the darkness that was raging outside thanks to two battery-powered lanterns placed on the reception counter. The rain was coming down in hard torrents, the wind howling, ravaging the trees outside, making the big oak tree outside the house scratch its branches against the north side of the building. The screeching sound the branches and leaves made against the wet glass of the windows was enough to give anybody the willies. Couple that with what lay in the metallic trays in the rear office, and—

  But no. To think about that now would be to go mad.

  After dropping Rick off at the pier, Glen had trudged back to the office. Janice was already coming out of sleep and Barbara was tending to her when he arrived. Glen told her that Rick had gone to fetch her car and he would be dropping it off at the house. Janice had nodded groggily and asked if he would take her and Bobby home. Glen had given her a quick look-over, pronounced her fit yet exhausted due to stress and prescribed a night in bed. Bobby was still passed out. With Glen’s help, Janice got out of bed and hobbled to the bathroom while Barbara helped him bundle Bobby up for the trip.

  With Barbara’s help he got Janice and Bobby into his car and drove them home. He carried Bobby upstairs to his room and helped Janice set things up; his favorite blanket, his X-Men comics at his bedside should he feel the urge to delve into comic book world when he awoke.

  Glen had left a bottle of tranquilizers with Janice with explicit instructions not to exceed two every six hours. Janice nodded, saying she understood, she’d get some rest, she was going to take care of her little boy and thank you. Glen smiled, told her to call him at home if she needed him—she had the number—and then he and Barbara left.

  After dropping Barbara off at her modest little cottage on the outskirts of town, he’d driven back to the house. He’d double locked the front and back doors of the house and shut himself up in the office where he proceeded to study the segmented tail and severed claw again.

  The comparison to the claw and the tail fit. Both pieces looked to have come from an animal roughly the size of a badger; something approximately three feet long, a foot and a half to two feet wide. The stinger at the end of the tail was a good three inches long and needle-sharp with no barbs. Smooth. Like the stinger of a wasp. It could sting again and again and again.

  But was it venomous?

  In his opinion, it was. Every critter he had ever run across with a stinger had been venomous in one form or another. During his initial examination of Rick Sychek’s right thigh, he’d looked for tell-tale signs of a venomous sting; redness around the wound, swelling, nausea, blurred vision, sweating, shortness of breath. The only symptoms present were the redness and swelling around the wound and those could have been caused by the wound itself—after all, nearly three inches of a sharp, protruding objected had been jabbed into Rick’s thigh. But the other signs of a venomous sting—the nausea, dizziness, abdominal cramps, stiffness of the joints, corrosion of the flesh—never showed up. After his cursory examination of Rick, he had immobilized the leg and let him rest up in examination room numb
er one while he turned his attention to Bobby. He waited for something to show up, but Rick had been fine.

  Once Bobby was bandaged up, he asked Barbara to draw a blood sample from Rick. He would examine a sample in his lab at the office and send a smidgen of the blood to Bangor General for further analysis. After he sutured Bobby’s fingers, he’d given Rick’s blood sample a look under a microscope. In short, a healthy sample, with no trace of a foreign substance.

  He’d mentioned this to Rick on the ride to the pier. He’d brought up the dry sting theory and Rick agreed. If the creatures were poisonous in some way, he was damned lucky. No telling what they would be up against if it had injected its venom.

  Glen stood for a moment, letting these thoughts run past him. If he could only get these samples to somebody in Bangor, they might—

  Something rose in Glen’s mind, eclipsing all thought. He turned and made a mad dash up the stairs to his private living quarters, all thoughts to the specimens downstairs in the metal trays forgotten. He ran to his study and began searching for a book, all the while his mind racing, putting together pieces of a long forgotten puzzle.

  He remembered reading something about a fisherman pulling up a giant lobster like the one Rick had come across back in the 1930s. The story had made the local paper, as well as a book on local superstitions. The fisherman had been casting for trout when he and the men he was with hauled a net to the ship with a giant lobster trapped in the mesh. The captain of the ship stated it had been the most gigantic lobster he’d ever seen—well over three feet long—but also unlike anything he had ever come across. It wasn’t really a lobster—he didn’t know what it was. His men had been dumbfounded and watched in shock as the thing clipped through the sturdy mesh and splashed into sea. They’d tried casting for the creature again, but it failed to turn up in their nets.

  There hadn’t been a sign of anything remotely resembling it since then.

  Until now.

  Glen found the volume on local folklore he was looking for and turned to the story. He scanned it quickly, confirming the events. Late fall, 1935. Ten miles off the coast of Phillipsport.

  And then there was another story—

  He flipped through the book, excitement spurring him on.

  He found it in back of the book. An artist’s sketch of the creature that had attacked Bobby, Janice, and Rick.

  Homarus Tyrannous had been a prehistoric crustacean that lived in the Northern Atlantic Ocean in the latter part of the Paleozoic period, but there was evidence that they survived till at least the middle of the Mesozoic Period. Not much was known about them save for the few fossilized remains that were found embedded in stone and ice in Greenland in the early 1920s when they were discovered. From what scientists had been able to surmise, they bore a strong likeness to modern day crabs and lobsters, and were most likely the linkage between those species’ primitive beginnings.

  They’d been extinct for over two hundred million years.

  This was what sent Glen’s heart racing, what sent him racing toward the shelf in search for another volume as another thought exploded in his mind. Sent his hands shaking as he found the book, a slim chapbook published by a local tourist curator shop, and began thumbing through it.

  It told the story of the Lost Village…

  He’d happened across this little doodad in a tourist shop on the outskirts of town. Amid trinkets of hand-carved figures carved by the local Indians, arrowheads, taxidermied animals, jewelry, postcards and T-shirts bearing the Phillipsport banner, travel brochures and local history books, Glen Jorgensen had found this booklet.

  It was written by Paul Hackett, a member of the local Micmac Tribe. Hackett held a Ph.D. in American Literature and Urban Folklore from the University of Maine at Orono and was well versed in the stories handed down to him from his family elders. He was also the owner of the curio shop Glen had bought the booklet from. Glen remembered being interested enough in the booklet to inquire as to where Dr. Hackett was so he might speak to him, but the author was out of town on business. Perhaps if Dr. Jorgensen stopped in again another time? Glen had paid for the booklet anyway, making a mental note to stop in and speak to Paul Hackett himself at some point, but he never got around to it.

  Now he flipped through the little booklet, scanning it rapidly.

  In 1605, late in the month of October, the entire village of an early English settlement vanished without a trace. The settlers had landed in the area now known as Phillipsport that summer and settled in the area, befriending the Micmac Tribe. While they settled, the ship that had brought them set sail for England for supplies and more of their brethren.

  When the ship arrived the following spring they found the village deserted and in ruins. Weather hadn’t been the cause of the destruction; the village had been torn apart by something malicious. There hadn’t been a trace of the settlers anywhere. Only a few scraps of clothing and the ramshackled structures of their modest settlement remained.

  The local Indians denied any involvement or knowledge of the whereabouts of the settlers. Despite some intense interrogations, the Indians held fast to their denial. They had seen nothing, heard nothing.

  The one tell-tale sign that the settlers met with a fate other than hostile Indians was a hastily scrawled message on a piece of stone. What seemed to start off as the simple lines to mark off the days spent in settlement ended as squiggles culminating in a fragmented sentence…

  …demons from the s—

  And a rough sketch…

  The sketch was reproduced in the booklet in pencil for the reader alongside a grainy black-and-white photograph of the original stone etching. Glen stared at it for a long time.

  The first, a rough sketch of the thing Rick found. It looked like a cross between a giant crab and a scorpion. The severed tail and claw resting in his downstairs freezer would match a beast like this perfectly.

  The second…a hint of a message, preserved in time in the grainy black and white photograph, the message cut off suddenly when the unknown artist met with a sudden, unknown fate.

  Glen Jorgensen read through the rest of the booklet with amazement. Phillipsport County remained largely uncolonized until the early 1700s. The crew that landed in the area one hundred years before had taken their tale back to the mother country and the tale became a legend, handed down from generation to generation.

  And it had remained as such. Until Paul Hackett dug up the story and published it for the local tourist trade.

  Glen had heard a rough version of the story when he was growing up in Phillipsport. It was told around a Boy Scout campfire when he was eleven or twelve. An older kid told it in all the spooky tones and gestures of campfire story telling. “And legend says that the Wendigo came down from the sky and ransacked the village, destroying all its inhabitants and pulling them back with him into the air, never to be seen again. And even now, four hundred years later, the Wendigo waits for the right moment…when an unwary boy might stray alone into the forest…like…us!”

  The story had always ended on a melodramatic note, designed to shock. And it had spooked him back then; it held all the reverence of those urban legends that are handed down from generation to generation, from older brother to little brother and his friends, in turn handed down to smaller kids in the neighborhood where it grows, mutates into a story with horrifying proportions. They were the kind of stories that the teller proclaims was steeped in the truth, and he or she believed it; it had happened to his cousin’s sister’s boyfriend’s best friend. There were similar tales of woe. Bloody Mary, who appeared in the mirror—after you gazed into it in a dark room and chanted her name three times—to rake your face with her long fingernails. The Hook, who hung around lover’s lanes and decapitated young fornicating couples. It bore similarities to such a legend, with the possibility of more. The Wendigo was more than just an icon in this tale; it was also an Indian legend, centering in New England, the northeast coast of Canada. Indian legend described it as a monster—
a god, if you will—that roamed the woods of greater Canada and Maine, devouring human flesh and ravaging everything that crossed its path.

  Glen chalked the Wendigo legend up with that of the

  Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot—unproven, undocumented fairy tales. At least there were photos of Nessie and Bigfoot. He had always regarded the Wendigo legend as a pile of shit in comparison to the former two.

  Glen closed the slim volume, his brow creased in reflection. The lost village story and the creatures they were dealing with now had a common thread—Paul Hackett reported in his book that shortly before the settlers vanished, there’d been an invasion of giant crabs from the ocean. The villagers had scampered inland, horrified at the sight. This had been documented by a tribe member who’d been near the campsite when it happened. The Indian darted back to his tribe to spread the word. Legend had it the tribe retreated farther inland en masse, as if escaping the wrath of a rival tribe on the warpath.

  They’d waited until the following rise of the next full moon. Just as their forefathers had done, many times before the white men had ever come to this land to build their villages. Then they returned.

  This time the white man’s village was ransacked. Not a soul had been spared.

  Glen Jorgensen pursed his lips in thought, his mind running on auto-pilot.

  A mass exodus of giant crabs. The excited shock of the villagers.

  And then the town is ransacked, the villagers vanished.

  The hastily scrawled message in stone…demons from the s—

  Demons from the sea? That would be the most plausible deciphering of the message. The settlers had obviously seen the giant crabs come up from the beach. In those times of religious persecution, when possession by devils was taken seriously and a mole on a pretty girl’s cheek meant she was a witch, they very well could have thought the overgrown crabs were demons from the sea. They could have very well been scared out of their wits when the crustaceans had washed ashore. Panic had probably ensued at a greater level than was happening now. Somebody could have scrawled the message and then been interrupted to join the fray to beat the creatures back to the ocean. But why would the creatures have come up in the first place, just as they were doing now?