by John Pelan
If I fail to make good my escape from the beast, I will no doubt end up in just such a cylinder. Perhaps the three of us…
It doesn't bear contemplating.
The worst part is not that Emily is dead. Nor that some loathsome creature beheaded her. Nor that her brain was removed and placed inside this bizarre cylinder. The worst part is that when I hold the cylinders containing the brains of Emily and her brother, I feel warmth. I feel subtle tingling vibrations and know without any doubts whatsoever that their brains continue to live.
THE STUFF OF THE STARS, LEAKING
Tim Lebbon
There was a clear dividing line between grass and sand, as if the beach advanced further inland night by night and, as yet, no breeze had come to blur the latest step. Shrubs held their baleful heads above the golden tide, and the shells of dead things surfed long, drawn-out waves.
Yet Brynn saw little of this. He passed across that sheer border between land and water with his mind elsewhere. His wife had died a thousand miles from here, but she was never far away, and as he imagined her car plunging into the sea, he smelled seaweed and brine and rotting things. Gulls screamed in the waning light, mourning further losses. The sea always made him maudlin. As death edged closer day by day, it was a state with which he felt content.
Sometimes he imagined her waiting for him, wherever she was now.
Brynn's legs ached from the walk down the cliff path, and he was already beginning to dread the climb back up. Glancing along the beach to the west, he could see the sun dip into darkening waters. It caught stray clouds as it fell, bleeding pink across their backs. He paused, looked back at the cliffs, wondered whether he should leave this until morning.
But the path seemed quite safe. And of course there was the dead thing on the beach, past the dunes, down near the sea.
From the clifftops it had been barely visible, little more than a smudge across the sands, a shape losing clarity to distance. Even through binoculars the image had been unresolved, though it had presented a disturbing insinuation of size. Brynn was awed but dissatisfied. He knew he would need a trip down to view it firsthand.
He mounted the last dune. In the soft light of the setting sun he could see the shape just above the waterline. He made a trail across virgin sands, each step a gentle hush against the soporific sigh of the sea. Sometimes he wondered whether, if he succumbed to the ocean's hypnotic charms, he would wake up even when the waters rushed into his mouth.
Approaching the thing, he realized it was far larger than he had thought. A whale, perhaps? The local newspaper had called it a monster, but of course it would. Good for tourism. Building sand bridges was their main concern.
He stopped fifty paces from the corpse, close enough to view it in some detail. It lay on the beach like a huge lump of wax melted and congealed many times over, picking up imperfections with each burn and set. Mottled and split though its surface was, however, there were no barnacles suckered to its leathery hide, no seaweed hanging from its appendages. It was as though all life had eschewed this creature.
Brynn knelt in the sand and took his camera from the backpack, imagining what Helen would have thought of this. She'd have created a million stories about this thing's final hours, drawing in all manner of inconceivable ideas and waterlogged fantasies to construct her own version of events.…
Perhaps she'd been daydreaming when she died. Living stories in her head, while death crept up from behind, pushed the car over a cliff, and drowned her.
As he began taking photos, changing position every couple of shots, the stench hit him. It must have been there before, but shock had obviously dulled his senses. It wasn't putrefaction, exactly, nor was it the tang of insides exposed to the elements. He held a handkerchief over his mouth with one hand as he snapped photos with the other.
The size of the thing stunned him. It was so big, he could not conceive what might have killed it. Could it really just die, something this magnificent, and wash up on this innocuous beach? As he circled the creature he saw tentacles buried in sand, surfacing a dozen feet further on, dipping in again, giving the classic sea monster silhouette.
He nudged one tentacle with his shoe.
There was a sudden shrill cry that startled him so much he dropped the camera, stumbled, and tripped over his own feet. Several seagulls descended as if to alight on the shape, but they only circled there, unable to land, repulsed by something, screeching in agitation until they flew away.
Brynn gasped and instantly wished he had not. The smell was even worse. He gagged, sought control of his stomach, then puked anyway.
Afterward he grabbed his camera and left, walking faster than he would have cared to admit. He did not look back.
In his caravan, waiting for his soup to warm, Brynn wondered why the prickly feeling on the back of his neck wouldn't go away.
Darkness tried to sneak through cracks in the windowpanes. Its pressure was almost discernible, pressing in like gas at a vacuum. He shivered and drew the curtains. It did nothing to hide the massive outside. He did not want to look out, in case he saw someone looking in, their face bathed in light borrowed from the moon. Their eyes unlit, even from without.
He sagged into his chair and sighed. He was acting like a kid. He'd always been cautious of the dark. That's what he told people: cautious. Never really afraid, even when he was young. Cautious. Like he was around electricity or acid. He treated them with respect lest they hurt him, and he respected the dark equally.
He thought it was the reaction most likely to be welcomed by whatever lived there.
As the soup plopped and blubbered in the saucepan he examined his camera. The damp sand had buffeted its fall, but grains had somehow worked their way into the mechanism. He removed the batteries and put the camera away, searching through piles of notebooks and scraps of paper for his cheap spare.
The smell of artificial tomatoes hung heavy in the air. Brynn had a fleeting, aromatic memory of eating with Helen in an Italian restaurant in Cardiff—
—and then he was on the floor.
Throughout it all he knew what was happening, but he had no control. His arms and legs buffeted the cheap carpet. His heels beat hard, shaking the whole caravan. His head lifted, fell, lifted and fell again, as if an invisible hand gripped his hair, its owner determined to shatter his skull. His fingers flicked at the floor as his arms rose and fell, and he heard his nails cracking. His back arched, then jerked straight. He tried to grit his teeth against the pain, but they crunched together, and he tasted blood and the gravel of chipped enamel.
He thrashed like a landed fish.
And he saw things. His eyes turned up in his head to view the terrible fantasies he had created, the images of what Helen suffered during her final few moments of life. Violent waters surged, snapping things flitted in and out of the waves, then there was a cool, dark deepness promising only a cold death… and something down there, waiting.
Shock held him and whipped him around, but one thought swept insanely around his head throughout the whole episode: I won't piss myself, I won't shit myself. Again and again. In that respect at least, his determination held out.
It was seconds or minutes before the fit subsided, instantly and without warning. As he lay still on the floor, panting and sweating and scared of the silence, Brynn's muscles continued to twitch and knot.
Something sighed against the outside of the caravan. Through a chink in the curtains, silhouetted by a tentative half moon, he saw a breath fading slowly from the cool pane, revealing the stars to him once more.
Eventually he made it to bed. He hid beneath the blankets and did not sleep.
In the morning, in the light, things seemed different. Brynn knew it was foolish, but the sun seemed to titillate the logical side of his mind. He'd had a fit for the first time in his life. He was scared, but thankful that he had not badly damaged himself. His fingers were sore, his head was bruised and thumping, but there were no broken bones. He would go to the doctor as
soon as he was back in Cardiff.
Everything was normal.
As he arrived again at the edge of the cliff and began his descent, a dreadful smell assailed him. It was worse than the stink of the day before, far richer, more gritty. It reminded him of the color brown and of white noise, as if he was smelling everything at once. He gagged, sure he was going to be sick again, but somehow he kept control of his guts. Leaning over, staring down at the rough path, he watched a string of saliva stretch from his mouth and darken the soil where it made contact. Stuff of me in there, he thought. Cells from my body, the stuff of stars, that's what we're made from. He wondered who else he was looking at in the muck around his feet.
He stood, shaded his eyes against the sun, and stared down at the beach. The tide was out and he could see the thing lying there, a great black hump on the smooth golden sands. Its tentacles seemed more abundant this morning—longer, more numerous—although it could simply have been that the sands had shifted in the night.
Brynn tied a handkerchief over his mouth and continued the descent. He tried to remember coming back up the cliff last night—it had been dusk, the shadows deceptive—but he could not recall the climb. He must have been on autopilot. He was surprised he hadn't fallen.
He followed his own footprints back to the thing on the beach. As he came to the dunes, he realized that he was following more than the single trail he had laid yesterday. There were other disturbances in the sand, strange whipped prints like those of a snake, and more resembling the footprints of birds, though a hundred times bigger. They might have been carved there by the breeze or left by seaweed that had been blown away. Perhaps they were caused by thousands of burrowing worms blowing bubbles through the damp sand.
None of these options explained why all the trails led to the dead thing.
Brynn approached, trying not to step on the other prints, afraid he would sense what had made them. As a child he avoided cracks in the pavement.… Step on a crack, break your mother's back. Perhaps old habits never died at all, but just lay in wait eternally. Seagulls still buzzed the corpse, and as they turned and spiralled away they still called out in distress. The distress was echoed in his head, a phantom throb like someone else's pain.
The sun was hidden today, but it wasn't cold. A warm breeze blew in off the sea, carrying with it hints of the deep and desert islands. As Brynn came to a standstill he kicked a bottle washed up the night before. He picked it up, expecting a message, but it was empty of hope.
He squatted on his haunches and wondered what the thing had seen, where it had been. Six miles down on the ocean bed perhaps its mate waited even now, moving through unimaginable pressures in a vain search for its companion. Or maybe there were more of them, a whole community. Searching. Rising from the bottom. Air sacs inflating, flesh billowing out as the pressures decreased.
He shook his head and stood again. The sand was soft beneath his feet, still wet, but drying now that the tide had left it for a while. He stepped forward, ready to touch the hide of the dead creature, run his hand along its tattered mass and look for signs by which he could identify it. Great clots of flesh hung from its torn skin, bulging, dried up in the sun.
He reached out. He was within one step of the thing. The sand became softer, as if hollowed out from below.
But something grabbed him and turned him around, an inherent sense of self-preservation, and before he knew it he was walking back along the beach. His spare camera banged against his leg, unused. His head pulsed with the headache that had been plaguing him since last night.
He'd had a fit. There had been a shadow at the window. Yet he felt more alone now than he ever had since Helen's death.
Brynn did not want to climb back up the cliff path—that would have felt too much like defeat—so he headed to the base of the cliffs instead. Sand gave way to rocks, which protruded like the petrified remains of unknown creatures. A seagull landed nearby, glanced at him, and then took flight again, cawing its way out to sea.
Nursed among the rocks were pools, darkened by the sea plants clogging their edges. There was an occasional pink flash of a sea anemone feeling at the water, and secret scamperings hinted at crabs and other creatures hidden in their own temporary ecosystem. Brynn wondered what it felt like to be trapped like that every day, and he squatted next to one of the pools, swishing the water and watching the reflection of the sky distort above his head.
He clambered over the rocks for a while until he found a spot out of sight of the beach. His jacket provided adequate protection from the damp sand, and he lay with his hands behind his head, eyes closed. He relished the cleansing warmth of the sun on his face. The steady beat of the sea was soporific, and he felt time drifting away from him, his senses withdrawing. Sound came to the fore, the sea singing different songs depending on where it struck the shore: from behind him, the soft hush of the salt waters shifting tons of sand; nearer, a roar as it stroked patiently at the receding land.
In ten million years, this would all have changed. The sea would have eaten this place. The sea ate everything in the end, wearing it down over massive expanses of time, which it alone could afford to expend waiting. Eventually, like a salmon to its birthing pool, everything went back to the sea. Somewhere in there was all of history, way beyond simple human understanding.
Helen had died in the sea. Her body was never found. Perhaps there were bits of her in the massive dead thing on the beach, atoms she had owned now given over to something else.
She died a long way from here, Brynn knew. But something that size could swim forever.
He had always hated himself for not hearing her final words, and the nightmares he had were guessed-at versions, guilt trying to fill in the blanks. The worst times were when she blamed him. However much he tried to convince himself that it could never have been his fault, the words followed him into waking and set terrible seeds of doubt in his mind.
Time passed, the sun moved, Brynn slid slowly into sleep.
When he stirred it was late in the afternoon, and the sun was already bedding down for the night. He stood stiffly, brushed himself down, shivered, and wondered why the cold had not awoken him. His head was still thumping, and his body had begun to ache even more from the battering it had received last night. His fingertips were bruised blue.
He picked up his backpack and noticed how far in the tide had come. Creeping up on him, patient, unhurried. One day, if he wasn't careful, it would have him. Just as it had taken Helen.
He made his way back along the beach until he came to the top of the dunes. The thing was still there. He was tempted to approach again, but something warned him off. He tried to convince himself that it was a simple matter of not wanting to invade its grave privacy.
He climbed the cliff path, panting, breathless, his knee joints burning and his sides stabbed with an ice-cold stitch. He had to stop three times on the way up, and for the last fifty feet—when the sun had truly set and he felt he was navigating by memory alone—he constantly expected to feel nothing beneath his next step, a wide, black nothing that ended with him broken on rocks a few frantic heartbeats below.
At the last, he was gripped by an incredibly clear urge to turn around and go back down. In the dark. Along a path that would certainly spill him to his death.
Sense and logic prevailed and he found his way back to his caravan, where something that had been working at the back of his mind for the entire climb came to the fore: the memory of what he had seen in the setting sun. The dead thing lying there with its tentacles—barely visible before— spread out across the sand like the spokes of a giant wheel.
Just lying there and waiting to turn.
Brynn tried to prepare something to eat, but his eyes were constantly drawn to the window. He kept imagining a face there, staring in at him, a face made of the same stuff as the dead thing on the beach… the stuff of unknown stars … so he closed the curtains.
It did not work. The outside was only hidden from view, allowing any
thing the opportunity to approach unseen. And seeing slivers of night through the threadbare curtain was worse than seeing a whole pane of glass: One eye, bloodshot and reflecting his own fear, would be more dreadful than a complete face.
Soup burned to the side of the saucepan, blackened, and coagulated into something barely resembling food. Brynn cursed and began to eat.
Later he took out his notebook and began to jot observations of the dead creature. He made rough sketches of the corpse, estimated its size and weight, and frightened himself in doing so. He was writing The Book of the Sea. He had been writing it ever since Helen died, but every chapter seemed to increase the distance between him and her memory. Still, he hoped a resolution would reveal itself soon, a twist in the forked tail of his grief—
He arched off the seat and hit the floor, pen and notebook sent flying. A groan of despair escaped him as he realized what was happening, then nothing else, because his neck was in tension as his head banged against the carpet once more.
This time the fit lasted longer and was more extreme. Light seemed to flee the caravan, scared by his thrashing, and the sounds of various parts of his body impacting the floor, doors, and cupboards faded to a whisper. Something stank, something worse than burned soup, more rancid than the chemical toilet he had not been tending properly. Faintness snowflaked his eyes. He vomited and felt the warmth across his face and neck. The thump of pumping blood filled his ears, sounding vaguely like the sea, and as coherent thought retreated he was sure he heard words in the rushes.
More ideas of Helen came in, but this time they were new visions of what she had suffered. So new, so detailed, so obviously heartfelt, that Brynn could not have possibly created them himself. They were put there for him to see. Helen in the car, shattered windscreen shards opening her to the seawater and spewing dark clouds as she sank, trapped, toward the ocean floor. A final breath held dearly, going stale inside of her, slipping murderous fingers through her lungs to clasp her heart as she saw… below, down past the car's hood … a total darkness. Not just a lack of light but something more.