My feet clatter across the pier. He extends his hand wordlessly, and supports me back onto the boat.
I turn my face away from him and collapse and sit with my head in my hands.
Behind me, I hear the captain’s footsteps, the rumble of the engine starting. The boat begins to move.
I lift my head and see the shore receding, the island sinking slowly back into the sea, falling away on the horizon.
Around my neck, the camera hangs heavily.
Back in Tokyo, I disembark the night train and take a taxi. We drive through glittering streets and modern high-rises. The streets shine with fresh rain; puddles reflect the neon colours, the faces of people. I look out the window at the fluorescent monoliths rising high above.
The taxi driver wears white gloves and sits with a straight back. There’s a disciplined polish to his crisp, clean movements.
At the hotel, I sit on the narrow bed looking out at the view of Tokyo. It’s midnight. I fish the camera out of the suitcase and try to bring myself to turn it on.
But again that sense of resistance…Something stops me.
I put the camera down quickly as if it’s hot.
Instead I take out the tapes from my interviews and put on my headphones.
“On the day of the performance, the venue was packed. We had people standing all along the walls, crowding at the back, and kneeling on the floor before the stage.
“We plunged the room into darkness with only a faint grey light on the stage. There was a lot of chatter in the room when the lights went out, but once Morimura began dancing, everyone fell silent.
“He started off standing upright, elegant, and then gradually moved himself closer and closer to the earth, bent-backed and squatting, like so…All of his movements were slow but hyper-controlled.
“When he reached the floor, there was a strong flash of light that illuminated everyone’s faces.
“Then the smoke machines began billowing, and you could barely see Morimura through all of the smoke. But there he was, lifting his arms and legs and looking at himself as though surprised that he was naked.
“He picked invisible shards out of the palms of his hands. Then he raised his mouth skywards, opening and closing it as if to catch precious rain.
“We crawled in at this point, our whole group of dancers, surrounding Morimura with our ash-white bodies. Raising ourselves up, swaying with our arms held out. We turned up our heads to drink the invisible rain.”
I saw a photo of the performance. With their arms held out, they looked like zombies in an apocalypse.
I take off my headphones and pick up the camera again.
After that performance, Morimura disappeared. He resurfaced months later on the island.
I switch on the camera.
People tried to interview him. The performance had caused quite a stir. But he refused to talk to anyone. It didn’t seem like any kind of snobbery. He just wanted to vanish.
On the camera, the image comes up of the writing that was on the wall of his house. I flick through to the line of writing in his bedroom, and I realise that the two texts are the same.
Character by character I look them up on my phone.
The text reads: What is worse than a hibakusha? A zainichi hibakusha.
I write down the words and frown at them. My head begins to reel.
I move onto the photos of the documents, and decipher them. It takes hours of looking up words, checking the grammar and piecing the meanings together. But finally, after midnight, I am sitting with a messy translation in my hands, the paper filled with crossed out lines and rewordings.
It reads:
I was lying sprawled out on the floor of my room. I had just finished my night shift and was contemplating whether I had the energy to crawl into bed.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light…A strong, otherworldly light…I had never seen anything like it before. It was beautiful, but also frightening…
When I came to, I realised that I was in the middle of rubble. I had to scramble my way out of the building. I understood that a bomb had fallen, and as I made my way outside, I saw how lucky I was. The windows had blown straight in, and shards of glass punctured the walls opposite them. But I had only a splinter in the palm of my hand, and minor cuts and bruises.
The strange thing was that my clothes had vanished. I was naked! Where had my clothes gone?
By the entrance I found my friend Park Sun-il, who was badly injured and couldn’t walk. He was fourteen; two years younger than me, and he called me hyung, “older brother”. I felt ashamed that I was relatively unscathed.
I helped Sun-il out of the building, and then I felt a wave of nausea. I had to stop. Standing there, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The people on the street were burned from top to toe, and everyone was naked. Many people were holding their arms out, and I realised that it was because they didn’t want their burned skin to touch anything.
Buildings had collapsed and fires were everywhere. It was hot and difficult to breathe.
I carried Sun-il on my back. He was in a bad way, and he was desperate for water. I also felt an extreme thirst like I had never felt before. I decided that we should go to the river.
As we went through those streets, everyone was silent. No one made a sound.
Many of us were heading in the same direction, to the river.
I saw old women with peeling skin, young boys, mothers with their babies…
Schoolgirls with blisters on their faces…gathering around a police box, weak…
I heard sounds now…Young people, lying on the ground, calling for water…
In the distance I saw a tornado. It whipped through the streets, and everything that it touched was burned. Everyone tried to get away from it.
At the river, there were crowds of people. People were everywhere. Here there was a great commotion, and people crying out. More and more people were coming up behind us, crashing against us. The air was so hot that I felt my skin burning, and the water was a cool relief.
But as I dipped my head into the water, the water sucked me down, and I lost my grip of Sun-il. I tried to get out but the water was suddenly so strong. I thought for a moment that I would not be able to get out alive.
I heard Sun-il shouting my name, and I managed to grab hold of him, and drag us onto the other side of the river. I was so frightened that I hurried in taking us away from that scene before I stopped to think about what direction we should take.
I saw that many people were going in the same direction, and Sun-il said that it must be because they knew where a hospital was. So we joined them.
Soon it began to rain. The rain was black, and the raindrops were big. Everyone opened their mouths. They were all opening their mouths as wide as possible because they were so thirsty.
But the rain was sticking to everything. And it felt heavy, like oil. It hurt when it touched my skin. I begged Sun-il not to drink it, but he was so thirsty. He drank it.
I was beginning to shake from the effort of carrying Sun-il. Eventually we found a hospital, but it was overcrowded with people, and when they heard our accents, they knew that we were not one of them…
I didn’t know what to do. I seemed to be walking through Hell. On the streets, there were not just bodies of humans, but also of birds, cats and dogs, even horses…
I took Sun-il out of the city, and tried to help him myself. I tried to stop the bleeding, and to comfort him. I tried to keep him calm. He seemed to recover for a while, but then he grew weak, and spots appeared all over his skin, like mosquito bites…
I felt very alone. I buried Sun-il. He had wanted to grow up to become a botanist. But he’d been forced to come to Japan, to work in the factories.
After a few weeks, I also became ill. My hair fell out, and I became bald…I was very weak. I felt angry that I had no control over my own body.
I recovered, and when the war ended, I returned to my hometown. But back in my homeland, I was an outsider becaus
e my Korean was not good enough. Then the Korean War broke out.
Returning to Japan, I did all that I could to hide my identity. If they knew what I was, it would be difficult to work and find a place to belong in society.
Today, I try to find meaning in what happened. But I only find absurdity.
Yes. It is the essence of absurdity.
After I finish translating the document, I stand up and open the window. The room has suddenly become very stuffy. It feels suffocating and hard to breathe.
I gulp down the outside air.
Then I return to my bed, sit down, and pick up my camera again.
I hesitate for a long time before finally pressing the button, moving onto the final image.
Is this what frightened me so much?
There’s nothing in the frame except for Morimura’s documents, laid out on the floor, and the shadowy recesses under the bed.
I breathe out in relief. I realise that I’ve tensed up, and now I try to relax my shoulders, to slow my heart rate down, but my eyes are drawn back to the image.
There’s a strange and subtle sense of movement…At the back of the picture, in the shadows under the bed.
My chest tightens.
A miniature hand slowly creeps into sight, then another…Two ash-white hands, crawling cautiously forwards…
Hurriedly I switch off the camera. The screen goes black.
I don’t dare to breathe. I drop the camera.
But down, at my feet, a finger tickles.
I jump up, back away from the bed.
Slowly, two large hands inch into sight, the fingers waving and feeling ahead like the sensitive legs of a spider.
The hands are shy at first, tentatively becoming familiar with the floor, then they pounce forwards, and behind them the arms appear, stretching out.
The top of a bald head surfaces.
Morimura pulls himself out from under the bed and crouches opposite me. He looks down at the floor, hunching his shoulders, squatting.
Then he rises, straightening his shoulders, straightening his back, and his sad expression changes to one of calm.
I look into Morimura’s eyes and see that they are not eyes but holes torn through white flesh, opening out onto endless space; black as rain.
CONRAD WILLIAMS
THE OFFING
CONRAD WILLIAMS lives in Manchester with his wife and three sons. He is the author of nine novels: Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation, Dust and Desire, Sonata of the Dead and Hell is Empty, and his short fiction is collected in Use Once Then Destroy and Born with Teeth. He is currently working on a haunted house novel and an interactive video game.
Williams has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the Littlewood Arc Prize.
“‘The Offing’ was the result of a number of factors,” he recalls. “I’d not long before written a story for the anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth called ‘The Hag Stone’, which played upon similar ocean-based fears.
“It reminded me of various things: cutting open a squid to find a slowly-digesting fish within; watching swimmers while outflow pipes spewed God-knows-what into the waters on numerous beach visits around the UK as a child; James Cameron’s The Abyss, and that quote about our knowledge of the ocean compared to the moon; and what we’re doing to the sea and the great reckoning that is due us.
“The story crystallised not long after when I asked my youngest son, Zac, to draw me a picture of the ocean. He worked hard on it, and did a great job. I have it hanging on my bedroom wall: a sea filled with sharks and octopi and…other things, swimming in the deep. Things with curved teeth and spines and eyes the size of footballs. There’s a guy in a small boat on the surface with a speech bubble, and all it says is: ‘Help!’.”
FEARNE GATHERED HER treasures into the blue handkerchief and picked her way up the beach to where her mother was lying in the shingle. It was early evening—summer’s terminal breath—but even so Fearne could see the skin of her mother’s arms stippled with goosebumps; she had always been sensitive to a chill in the air. She didn’t seem to mind. By her side lay the remnants of their picnic tea: a few pastry crusts from the quiche, an empty packet of crisps, Pinot Grigot dregs gleaming in the base of a sand-blasted bottle.
“What did you find?” her mother asked. Her voice carried traces of sleep, although whether it was that already taken or yet to come, Fearne couldn’t be sure. The skin above the collar of her blouse was blotchy, a sure sign she had drunk too much. She always did when Dad wasn’t around, as if she was making up for lost time.
For a moment Fearne was reluctant to list her acquisitions. She felt the insecurities of childhood rise up even though she had turned thirteen last birthday; a fear that what was uttered would become desired by the other. Mum shouldn’t be interested in bits of sea-junk. She loved wine and shoes and hard rock. Fearne sometimes wondered why she had chosen to have children at all. The question alone was a surprise: Mum hardly ever showed any interest in what she was up to. The reluctance remained, however.
“I found some rusting chain. A blue stone. And a fossilised twig.”
“Nice,” her mother said, but her voice was as flat as the horizon. “That stone isn’t stone, it’s glass, polished by the sand. And that isn’t a fossilised twig, you ninny. It’s some kind of coral. White. Which means dead. And you’re not bringing that rusty old piece of rubbish home. If it scratches you: lockjaw. I don’t think you’ve had a tetanus shot since you were little.”
Fearne had found a shell too, a pretty one that reminded her of the ice cream that Mr. Nardini swirled on to the top of a sugar cone at the parlour near the guesthouse. She hadn’t intended to show it to her mum, convinced she would want it for herself, but she felt undermined; she had nothing of worth to show for her search and she didn’t want her mum thinking she was useless. She withdrew it from her pocket and held it out for inspection.
“Ooh, that’s gorge-o,” her mum said, holding the shell up to the hard, midday light. “It wasn’t a wasted trip after all. Lovely colour. Very unusual. Carmine, I’d say. Or a cochineal red. Very earthy. Very organic. I could make that up into a pretty necklace if you’d like.”
“Okay,” Fearne said, knowing full well that she’d not see the thing again. Her mother fancied herself as a craftswoman. Barb the Boho jeweller, she said. She had a little corner of the kitchen set up with various pieces of hardware: pots of glue, a little rotary power tool, a soldering kit, endless tubs of beads. Whenever she got to work on something, it would invariably be accompanied by a large goblet of wine. There’d be more wine than work, especially if one of her wine-by-day friends called for a chat. Jules, say, or Kat, or Loz. The shell was destined to end up as just so much calcium dust when Mum inevitably introduced the Dremel too enthusiastically.
“Although it’s a little weird, isn’t it, when you think about it? This shell…every shell was once home to something all wet and squidgy. Bit morb-o when you look at it like that.”
Fearne gazed out at the compressed edge of sea, like a beaded line of hot solder. It must have been five miles away. The sand was the colour of cooked cream. To the south, the power station sat fat and toad-like, steam rising from its cooling towers like the lazy pre-launch vapour of a sleeping rocket.
She too was tired. Originally she’d planned to march all the way out there to the water’s edge. The distance formed a layer on her own fatigue. She imagined striking out to try to meet it before nightfall, the effort it would take, and her posture slumped. She’d never been to the beach by herself or encountered the sea alone before. It was high time, she kept saying to her mum and dad, when they were driving out here. They teased her about that for hours afterwards.
Dad, unpacking his things in a room filled with sailor’s paraphernalia: coils of rope, a propeller on the wall, a dressmaker’s dummy in a Breton shirt. “It’s high time I put my jacket in this wardrobe.”
H
er mother, fingering the corkscrew already, though breakfast had been only a couple of hours before. “It’s high time we thought about lunch.”
Very funny. Very fucking funny.
She coloured now, as she thought of that prohibited word. She had never sworn in front of her parents; would not dream of it. But she had been angry, and what made it worse was that they registered that and did nothing to placate her.
“Shall we go back to the room?” her mother asked. “It’s getting a bit nipply.”
“Will Dad be there?”
“I don’t know, avocado pip. It’s likely. He’s been out longer than we have. It’ll be time for dinner soon. If he’s anything like me he’ll be starv-o.”
The thought of food made her feel even more tired. She wished they had come here during a proper holiday. Dad’s work—he was a wildlife photographer for a number of international travel and nature magazines—meant that they were forever slinking off during school term time. It would be nice to play with some other kids in the pool rather than sit with grown-ups all the time.
The wind began to swell as they trudged back along the seafront. Tiny twisters of sand stung their legs. By the time they got back to the pale blue guest house, Fearne’s long hair was matted with silica; it would take an age to wash it out.
Their room was empty. No note from Dad. No camera gear. “He must still be working,” her mum said. “I guess the light is better for him at this time of day. Less harsh.”
“What does he do at midday, then?” Fearne asked.
“Drink beer. Lech the local talent. I don’t know.”
“What about dinner?”
“If he misses it, he misses it. But I’m having a shower and a cocktail and then I’m eating seafood until it leaks out of every orifice.”
“Ew, Mum,” Fearne said, but she couldn’t keep the smile from her mouth.
They showered together, her mother helping to get the worst of the sand out of her hair. She seemed to grow a little wistful at the sight of her daughter’s coltish body, and she complimented her on her long, slender legs.
“Better legs than me,” her mother said. “But I’ve got the best bust, my little cherry stone.”
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