The Thousand Year Beach

by TOBI Hirotaka

  Anne had not taken her eyes off her daughter’s face. Her beautiful girl. Anne would never see her again. How could she look away? This was what saved Anne’s life.

  Two round holes opened in her daughter’s face: Pop, pop. Clean holes, as if someone had taken a hole punch to a photograph.

  Abandoning the harpoon, she dove away.

  The hunger had opened fire.

  The Spider lost its balance, falling over forward.

  Anne raced around to its rear.

  Skidding to a halt, she drew two sturdy knives from her belt, one in each hand. She always had them hanging there in their leather sheaths. It was a habit she had picked up in her younger days as a brawler.

  The Spider’s back had been pierced through from within by the point of the harpoon. The hide around it was cracked. It looked like a machine’s exterior paneling opening at the seams as the machine’s frame warped. Anne sunk both blades into the gap.

  The Spider struggled so violently a nearby storage shed went flying. But Anne held grimly on. Her thighs bulged. Her rubber soles stayed rooted in place. Her upper body flushed bright red as the children watched. The more the Spider struggled, the wider the joins in its skin opened, and because Anne kept working the knives farther in, not weakening even for a moment, the Spider’s struggles only served to create further damage. Eventually its external paneling flapped open and a dirty white liquid began to ooze from the cracks. Probably the fluid it made its silk from.

  The Spider began to make a noise like a broken machine. Its ability to maintain the imitation of life in its outward appearance was faltering, revealing its true nature as a simple tool for work in the Realm.

  The noise weakened, slowed. Anne knew that the spider was on the verge of death, but she did not let up; if anything, she pushed harder. Her ability to sustain the onslaught was unbelievable.

  Suddenly releasing the knives, which stayed stuck where they were, she reached into what was now a yawning gap between two of its exterior panels and tore the Spider open with her bare hands, as if it were a boiled crab.

  And then her tension dropped away.

  She fell backward onto her seat.

  Her entire body was drenched in sweat, and she was covered in the spider’s secretions and her own blood.

  Her emotions had not yet revived within her.

  “Mommy,” the twins said, running from both sides to take their adoptive mother’s hands.

  Anne accepted their help getting to her feet. “Thanks,” she said. Powerful as her crane-like legs were, she felt as heavy as lead. Her mind felt far away. What she had just done was the equivalent of dismantling a car barehanded.

  “Ah …”

  Spiders were sailing down from the darkened sky. Tens, hundreds, thousands of them. As big as oxen, as houses, even as big as ships.

  The west bay was surrounded. She could already see the town being eaten away, starting with the mountains.

  Not just the trees. The contours of the land were sinking fast. The mountains were vanishing.

  Anne did not recognize this as hunger yet, but she knew that it was the same as whatever had riddled her daughter’s head with holes, only larger. With the overwhelming force of the flowing tide, it was beginning to erase the town—the whole Realm.

  The Town Hall clock tower was visible from where she was. It was the tallest building in the west bay. As she watched, it lazily toppled behind the houses in their rows.

  Anne looked over her adopted children.

  Was there a way to run without them getting in the way?

  One minute later, the engine in a nearby fishing boat began to turn.

  They were off to the east bay.

  The boat began to glide over the waves, headed toward the jewel that was the eastern side of town, where the Mineral Springs Hotel and the elegant summer houses stood.

  Anne finally let out her first sob.

  There were fewer than twenty telephones in the whole Realm of Summer. One of these valuable specimens began to ring in the local station chief’s office in the east bay. Town Hall was on the line. The station chief listened, turning pale, then handed the receiver to the deputy mayor, Bastin, who happened to be there for a meeting. He then sent another officer who was in the room with them to gather together the local station’s core personnel.

  Bastin had not realized the severity of the situation before putting the receiver to his ear. The skies over the east bay were their usual healthy blue. He glanced at Bernier, a retired Town Hall employee, as a terrified voice that sounded on the verge of screaming reported on the bizarre events transpiring around Town Hall in the west bay.

  As Bastin struggled to listen and understand, the local station’s officers assembled in the room. “I don’t have all the details,” the chief said to them, “but according to Town Hall, police headquarters is just gone. They say it was eaten by monsters.”

  The officers had no idea what to make of this. The local station chief could hardly blame them. He felt the same way. It was all beyond him.

  Bastin pulled the receiver away from his ear.

  “I think Town Hall’s also, uh …” He offered the receiver, which had fallen silent, to the police chief. “I can’t get through anymore.”

  The local station chief and the deputy mayor shared what they had heard over the phone, piecing together the information they had. The west bay, the heart of the Realm, had been attacked by a vast horde of monsters that looked like spiders. The monsters had obliterated police headquarters, slaughtered the townspeople, and eaten the mountains from the peaks down.

  Someone looking out the window of the second-story room let out a noise like a groan.

  The sky was coldly beginning to rot.

  “All right,” the local station chief said, pulling in his chin stiffly as he gathered his thoughts. “A lot of people are going to come running from the west bay. We’re going to protect them. Get in touch with the local fire station, too. After that, we go find out what happened over there.”

  “Hey, where’s the mayor?” asked Bernier, who was standing beside Bastin. Bernier was friends with the mayor as well as his deputy. All three had started working at Town Hall in the same year. Already retired, Bernier had come to help Bastin with the tournament scheduled to be held in the hotel today. “Where’s Roger?”

  Bastin shook his head. “Good question,” he said. He explained that the call had come from the mayor himself, but decided it was not yet time to reveal that the call had ended in a cacophony of screams and collapsing buildings.

  “You can set up a field base of operations here,” said the local station chief.

  “It’s a bit cramped, I think.” Bastin made a quick mental list of townspeople from the east bay who would probably be good to have around. “We need more room.”

  “True enough.” Only the bare minimum of officers was assigned to the local station, which had no room for more in any case. It was a virtual holiday resort, after all. “We’ll have to find somewhere else.”

  “Let’s use the hotel. Plenty of rooms there we could use for meetings.”

  “Good thinking. Yes, I see—the hotel has other advantages, too.”

  Bastin nodded. He was short, but he had a barrel chest, and he thrust it out now. He had to keep things together. He could not falter, he told himself.

  “Bernier,” he said, “looks like we’ve got work to do, if your old bones can handle it.”

  “Glad to hear it. A thousand years of this is enough to drive a man crazy.”

  Bastin looked at the sky. The spiders had yet to fall. He felt both restless and terrified.

  Thus was it decided that the battle soon to unfold in the east bay would do so at the Mineral Springs Hotel.

  And yet—could this truly be called Bastin’s will?

  The shack stood where the breeze was refresh
ing. José val Dormael had chosen the site partly to ensure that the home he built would be cool enough to sleep in even during the day after the fishing was done. From the outside it looked like a dump, but its single room was as cozy as a first-class cabin.

  Today, José had washed his youthful, sensitive face, lain on the bed, stretched out his long, strong limbs, and begun to doze. Normally this would lead to a deeper sleep, but for some reason he found himself awake again. He gazed absently at the wall.

  Once, long ago, there had been a shelf on the wall with a collection of Glass Eyes on it, but that was gone now. Now there was a bookshelf instead. He had assembled his library volume by small, slim volume. Here and there were gaps where he had lent a book out, but because those books always came back swollen with salt and moisture, he never seemed to fill the gaps again. Just buy me a new copy, he would say, but still …

  Those gaps would never be filled now, not because the books had vanished but because the shelf itself soon would: the irrational idea floated to the surface of his half-dozing mind.

  Suddenly, José sat up. He realized why he had woken: that unfamiliar noise. Rising from bed like a panther, he crossed the room to the window in a single stride. Noting what had happened to the sky, he pulled a shirt over his bare chest and stepped outside. Houses were few out here on the outskirts of town, and the dirt trail that ran by his shack looked quite different under the darkened sky. He ran down the trail toward the road connecting the west and east bays.

  He didn’t know what was happening. He had no idea what those things falling from the sky were. But he knew what he had to do.

  A Spider flew overhead with a menacing roar like a squad of bomber planes. José felt a presence at his back that gave him goosebumps, and looked back over his shoulder as he ran.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes. The ground was opening as if unzipped. A long, black fissure stretched through the rural landscape toward him. It spread without the violence of an earthquake. Inside the fissure there was only black. No cross-section of geographical layers on the walls, nothing. Just pure darkness, without even depth. The edges were as sharp and fresh as if they had been cut by blades. But José understood what he was seeing. At the edges of the chasm, white pixels flickered and danced like noise. The fissure was reducing the roads and fields to pixels, the smallest elements that made up the Realm.

  The tip of the fissure followed the shadow of the Spider that had flown overhead. It was tracking the Spider’s flight path. Put another way, the Spider was guiding it.

  José watched the Spider’s movements closely, then slipped off the road to run in a direction that would keep him out of the fissure’s path. There was more than one Spider in the sky now, and their numbers were growing. Glancing behind him, he saw the fissure widening. He imagined the view from above: a landscape of green being eaten away by long, snaking black threads that widened gradually. A vivid image of his own cabin leaning and finally falling into one of those chasms came to him, but there was no more time to look back. Ahead he saw the sea, and Spiders above drawing black threads across it.

  He splashed through a brook and saw the main road ahead.

  A smattering of refugees from town were on it. José felt as if he had swallowed a ball of lead. Their numbers were so small. It made no sense for so few people to be on the move. Just how bad were things in town?

  “José!” someone called. Several other people, hearing the name, began to cast around for him.

  “José!”

  “José!”

  The voices multiplied. Girls, wives and children of fishermen, elderly men. The ragged crowd had a desperate, hunted look in their eyes. They were too terrified to think straight. Soon José was surrounded, standing at the center of a ring of people. Most of them were a full head shorter than the lanky young fisherman.

  They all spoke at once, telling him what had happened in the west bay. They were desperate to tell José their stories. More than anyone else, José was who they wanted to tell. For twenty full seconds, José only listened, saying nothing. When he spoke, he kept it simple.

  “Move quickly, but don’t panic. Head east.”

  There was a brief silence, like the moment after diving into the water. José saw a youth he knew standing beyond the circle, and called, “Camille, go and get four or five more men.”

  Camille’s head jerked up as if he’d been shot.

  “I’m going to stay here a while longer,” José continued. “I know it’s a big ask, but I want you to stay with me. Someone needs to direct traffic.”

  “Yes, sir! I think some guys I knew were at old Rene’s shipyard.”

  “Ah, the old man’s around? Does he have anything seaworthy?”

  “I’ll ask him,” said Camille, and ran off.

  José issued orders to the remaining crowd. Move in small groups. Older men to stick with women and children. People who knew the Catwalk to take the lead there. Did anyone know how to use an Eye? How many boats were there? Take the weaker groups by sea. As many trips as you need.

  Order was deftly brought to the flow of AIs escaping from the west side of the town, with danger dispersed as they headed east.

  José stayed at the crossroads until it was almost too late. The black threads ate away at the land until there seemed nowhere left to run.

  Fortunately, when José and the others finally fled, the Spiders left them alone.

  Spiders poured out of the shattered skies.

  Perfect …

  A boy with an unfamiliar face strolled past Jules’s house along the road that led into town.

  The toylike house was half-destroyed. Black smoke billowed from a raging fire in the kitchen. The boy saw an AI’s corpse inside, charred black. A mold-green Spider passed in front of him making a tinny scraping sound, long and thin as a piece of cord.

  So innocent … so utterly simple …

  On his way through the orchard, the boy stopped in his tracks.

  The hole about the size of an LP record that he had opened that morning when arriving in this Realm had been covered up. He was sure he had locked the Spiders to prevent them repairing it.

  An AI must have fixed them. There was no other explanation. Which meant that that was the sort of thing the AIs of this Realm could do.

  I see … They must have used a Glass Eye.

  The boy smiled for the first time.

  No challenge at all …

  Everything was moving forward as expected.

  I bet they’re all waiting for me at the Mineral Springs …

  In no particular hurry, the boy began to walk again. No, there was no need to hurry at all.

  At least twice as much space as a normal office desk. A stained-glass lampshade. A fine leather desk mat. And beyond it all, the warm face of Denis Prejean.

  Bastin and Bernier were shown into the manager’s office behind the front counter at the Mineral Springs. As soon as he saw them, Denis’s look turned suspicious.

  Bernier realized how utterly desperate the two of them must seem. Denis had to have been wondering what could have made the cool, calm, and professional Bastin in particular look that way.

  Denis ran a hand smoothly back over his head, as was his habit. Except for a small band around his ears, he was quite bald. His silhouette looked exactly like an incandescent light bulb. Whenever he ran his hand over his head like that, it made everyone smile, easing suspicion and anxiety just a little.

  But Bastin and Bernier just sat silently on the sofa. They were leaning forward, as if about to start gnawing at the glass ashtrays in front of them. Denis came out from behind his desk and sat himself down across from them.

  “It’s very bad?”

  Bastin paused, then said, “Probably.” Succinctly, calmly, distinguishing carefully between what they knew and what they did not, he explained the situation. And then he said that he wa
nted to requisition the hotel.

  “May I ask what you intend to use it for?”

  Bastin explained that he hoped to use the Mineral Springs Hotel as a makeshift Town Hall and a command center for the battle that seemed about to begin.

  “In that case,” Denis said with a smile, “there is no need to ‘requisition’ anything. The Mineral Springs Hotel’s full resources are at your disposal whenever you need them. We are here for everyone’s sake.”

  Officially it was the Hôtel de Clément, named after its founding family, but nobody ever called it that. Everyone preferred the unaffected and unpretentious “Mineral Springs Hotel.”

  The hotel stood on an enormous property that had originally belonged to the Cléments. It was built on a miraculously natural plateau right where the mountains plunged precipitously into the sea, which was why it was right next door to both mountain and sea, forest and beach. The front of the hotel faced the mountain; the sea was at its rear.

  The main building was four stories high, with two wings enclosing an exquisite courtyard. Before it lay a smoothly rolling expanse of densely grown lawn. The beautiful forest which grew right up to the hotel on one side was also on its property, and on the other side was a marina whose row of elegant yachts was for the exclusive use of hotel guests. There was also a broad wooden terrace built above the ocean where new arrivals could enjoy their welcome drink, feel the sea breeze, and soak up the sights: the summer houses and gardens scattered up and down the steep, overwhelming slopes; the little art gallery; and the beauty of the greenery.

  Denis and the two men from town hall walked through the lobby. It was not yet noon. The lobby was hushed and still. That said, no real guests had arrived at the hotel since the day of the Grand Down a thousand years ago. Only AIs visited now. A club for the AIs abandoned by their customers (or had they been? even that was unclear), who now gathered to talk to each other.

  But the manager still missed nothing, even in the hotel’s farthest corners. There was not a speck of dust, and everything that was supposed to shine had been polished to perfection. The weighty hues of wood and brass filled the rooms, and everything was classic, unshakable, reliable.