The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  Yasmin nodded.

  “Bony’s a bit odd when it comes to these things,” Arthur said. “He’s not really into women.”

  “What?” Yasmin laughed incredulously. “You’re not telling me that Bony’s gay?”

  “No,” Arthur said, “he just isn’t really attracted to anybody. Anybody real, I mean. He likes you as a friend, I know that much. He thinks you’re great. And don’t let me put you off making a move. He just … his most intense feelings are for things … and fictional characters. He likes fictional characters. Especially video-game characters.”

  “Wow,” Yasmin said.

  “Don’t tell him I told you,” Arthur said. “He gets paranoid that people might think he’s some sort of freak.”

  “No,” Yasmin shook her head. “I know people just like him online. I don’t think he’s a freak.”

  “He’s tried in the past,” Arthur continued, “but ultimately people are just objects to him, and eventually they get tired of just being that.”

  She bit her lip. “Excuse me.” She got up and headed off in the direction of the toilet.

  Arthur looked back out of the window. He wanted to get up and leave, right there and then.

  BONY AND THE THING

  Bony set off walking down the road from the level crossing in the direction of the beach. It was a narrow, unmarked road, and was longer than it looked. Bony wasn’t deceived by that, though, because he walked it frequently.

  In front of him there was the road, and to the right of the road there was a tall metal fence that marked the edge of the Nuclear Decommisioning Authority site that was the Drigg low-level waste repository. To the left of the road there were green fields dotted with white sheep. And at that point where the road disappeared there was a wavy line of sand-dunes. Above it all was a bright, mottled-white sky. Bony felt like the last human being alive.

  The road twisted a couple of times before ending in a small car park, usually occupied at that time of day, during the week, by the vehicles of people walking their dogs. There were no cars there at the moment, though.

  Next to the car park—which wasn’t really a car park, more of a lay-by—there was a huge black shed with no windows, boxed in by another high metal fence. The shed shared this enclosure with a moldy old caravan and a pile of wood, stacked up as if for a bonfire. Bony had never seen anybody actually inside that fence, although the padlock on the gate—which Bony examined regularly—always seemed to show signs of recent use.

  There was another gate, which barred the road, and it was this gate that Bony paid a visit to each day. Or, rather, it was the left-hand gatepost: a tall, wide metal pipe with a hole in it. Bony sat down with his back to the pipe, and positioned his head near the hole. The gatepost sang to him. Well, not just to him, he reflected, it could be to anybody, but he was the only one who sat and listened. The gate was located where the road and the fields terminated at a narrow stretch of sand dunes. Bony gazed along the dunes stretching to the north, the long grass on their spines rippling in the cold wind. The sky was huge. Just inland from the dunes, in that direction, the terrain was marshy—a Site of Special Scientific Interest due to the population of natterjack toads. The gatepost sang tunelessly but hauntingly; it had a deep, sad, fluting voice. Bony stood up and ran his hand over the top of it. He held himself close to it and felt the subtle resonance. He then walked through the gate, closed it behind him, and picked his way down the path toward the sand. The path also served as a run-off for water draining off the dunes, and as such it was often more of a stream than a path—a stream of water that was orangey-red, for reasons that Bony did not understand.

  *

  The beach was empty and the tide was out. The sky was even bigger now—a colossal wall of gray and white, rearing up beyond the sea and curving overhead. The sea itself was just a thick black line above the distant silvery expanse of flat sand. In places the level surface of the beach was interrupted by stretches of smooth stones or by large, jagged lumps of concrete. Nearer the water there rose a huge concrete cube, half buried, with a tall metal pole protruding from the top of it. This was Barnscar, and how such a small spot of land had earned its own name was a mystery to Bony, but the pole was a mark, a warning—the indicator of an area where it was easy to get caught out by the tide coming in fast. Somebody had drowned there once, hence the pole; that much he knew.

  To the right of the pole, several long, thin things protruded from the sand in some sort of regular formation. He understood these to be the metal ribs of something left over from World War II. They were surrounded by gnarled, rusted panels and plates. He couldn’t tell if it had once been a boat or a plane, or even a small submarine, but this was one of his favorite places to visit. Bony headed there first—the ribcage, as he thought of it—and let the desolate voices of the seagulls penetrate his awareness, take root in his consciousness.

  Once he reached his goal, he could barely make out the metal frame for the colony of mollusks that encrusted it. They weren’t anything new to him, however, their colonization of the wreck being part of its attraction. He ran his hand over the skin of shells and looked around, working out which way to walk from here. He decided to head south, in the direction of Ravenglass, because the last time he had been to the beach he had walked north toward Seascale and Sellafield. The previous time it had been past midnight, and the bright lights of the power station had turned the sky above it orange and purple, drawing Bony toward it almost as if he was searching for the source of some incredible music.

  After walking for about twenty minutes, occasionally stopping to investigate particularly interesting pieces of flotsam (two wooden chairs standing side by side; a red leather handbag; a giant, deflated balloon shaped like a bird), Bony approached something that he’d already noticed from a distance but had not been able to identify. Twenty or thirty gulls rose discordantly on his arrival. He had thought that maybe it was some item of bedding, or a ragged length of plastic sheeting. It wasn’t either of those, though. Upon reaching it, he dropped to his knees and placed both hands on top of his head. He was completely alone there, a skinny figure amongst the millions of pebbles. He didn’t cry or vomit, although he wondered if maybe he should be reacting in a more visceral fashion.

  The object he’d spotted was a soft-looking expanse of uneven white flesh, about forty feet long and in places three feet thick. It was ragged around the edge, and stank like the breath of a violent, snarling dog. Bony got to his feet and walked all around it, but could not see any discernible features. He wondered for a moment if it might be some giant kind of jellyfish, but its flesh was completely opaque. There was no central bulk to it, and nothing that he could think of as a head.

  He finally touched it. He stretched his hand out and touched it, wondering if it would respond in some way—if it would suck itself in like snails or slugs did. When the thing didn’t react at all, Bony squeezed it gently between his fingers. It felt quite tough, like raw meat that had been left out in the sun. If it was a creature at all, then obviously it was dead. He wasn’t even sure that it was a creature, but he couldn’t think what else it might be.

  Bony looked up at the white sky, where the seagulls were small, sharp-voiced sentries wheeling around. This lonely beach with its relics of humanity and its salt air and its weird flesh belonged to them. Bony knew that, and he also felt as if the seagulls knew that he respected them. He looked back down at this thing, whatever it was, and wondered if maybe something important was happening.

  It had survived the relentless, grasping fingers of the tides due to being trapped within the rusty half-cage formed by the bones of another dead ship or submarine or plane, or some other machine relic of some war. Over time, of course, the thing would be tugged against the prongs, and the edges of it would be swept seawards, and it would bulge out ever more between the metal struts containing it. But for now it just rested there, encased, like an internal organ being gently squeezed in the hand of a giant.

  Bony imagined
it under water, that fluid environment lifting it slightly, giving it the semblance of living motion, the illusion of life.

  Maybe things like this were washed up all the time, but normally swept away again by the outgoing tide. Maybe this one was only here still thanks to the fluke of it landing inside such a perfect trap. Bony could not quite believe that, though. He had spent a lot of time on this beach, so knew that things like this really did not wash up all the time. In fact, the placement of the thing felt intentional almost. Or maybe not intentional but meaningful. Like a message. Like it was supposed to be found.

  Bony normally slept on his back with his arms crossed over his chest. After seeing a picture of an Egyptian mummy during his childhood, he had tried to imitate its pose and had found it surprisingly comfortable. That night, though, he could not sleep at all, in any position.

  His room was a tangle of old games consoles and bookcases stuffed with small boxes, in which legions of tiny wargame figurines lay sandwiched between pieces of sponge. As well as the boxes of models, there were rule-books for role-playing games he didn’t play any more, or at least, he hadn’t played for a long time. He and Arthur and Yasmin still talked occasionally about getting another game going, but he knew—as did the others, he suspected—that it was never going to happen. They were adults now. Completely.

  It wasn’t normal for Bony to find sleeping difficult, and he wasn’t used to the pure physical discomfort of insomnia, the hyper-sensitivity to sounds. He had to get up early, very early, to be in the box at seven, which meant that—he checked his mobile phone—he would get, at best, four and half hours’ sleep. That thought did not help, of course, and a creeping panic squeezed at his heart until he had to get up and turn the light on. He then sat down on the bed, his vision blurred by the sudden brightness, and hugged himself. He might as well just not bother trying, he reflected. He yawned.

  There was a positive side to it, at least, for it was a long time since he’d walked along the beach at this time of night. Or day. Whichever it was at 2:30 a.m.

  The solitude was palpable. You could be on the beach throughout the day and not see anybody at all, but you knew that there were probably dog walkers strolling the paths between the dunes, just out of sight, or fishermen digging for lugworms down by the breakers, where the rocks, surf and bending light combined to make visibility difficult. Now, though, at night, with the beach lit only by stars, Bony knew without doubt that he was totally alone. It was something he could feel, in the same way that he could feel the cold coming in off the ocean. The gentle waves hissed and whispered and rustled. There was no other sound.

  Bony stood motionless on the sand, a half-smile on his face as he gazed westward out to sea. The sky above it was blue, a dark nighttime blue densely peppered with stars of varying size and distance. The depth of this starscape was unlike any he had ever seen.

  The Milky Way, above all, was clear and momentous, a luminous path traced through the middle of the sky that brought the spiral shape of the whole galaxy home to Bony in a more forceful manner than ever before.

  Bony could hear himself laughing. His chest felt tight with a kind of hope, and his mind felt unfettered by anything worldly or dull, like it was a helium balloon trapped inside his skull that had suddenly been let free. This was true love, he reckoned, at last. He now knew what people were always going on about. It must be nice to feel such a thing for another human being, though so completely ludicrous that Bony could barely imagine it. To have such strong desire for something so similar to yourself.

  He looked down from the sky and scanned the beach, before his gaze came to rest on the hulking shadow of the thing. The Thing. He now thought of it as having a capital T. Facing south-west, he set off toward it.

  The odor was more intense than previously, and Bony reckoned that by any normal person’s standards it was probably a lot more unpleasant. He didn’t usually let bad smells bother him though, for as long as he knew what was causing a smell, he could tolerate it. He didn’t understand those people who scowled and retched when they caught a whiff of some stench that was both explicable and harmless. Like when farmers were muck-spreading and some teenager standing on the platform at Drigg station would pull a face and mutter, “Fucking farmers.” You know what it is, and you know it won’t hurt, so shut the fuck up. All it required to tolerate just about any sensory input was a shift in perspective. That was all.

  Bony reached the Thing and looked down at its mass. He kneeled in the sand and rested both hands on its tough exterior. It felt harder than it had before, like it was gradually drying out. And that smell was definitely one of decomposition. Bony ran his hands over the gnarled surface, exerting pressure here and there in order to determine the structure of it. After a short while, he stood up and fished a small metal torch from his back pocket. He swiveled the torch on and began walking around the Thing.

  About halfway round, he stopped and frowned, then knelt down again. He held the torch between his thighs and felt with both hands for what he thought he’d seen. An opening? Not a tear, or anything violent, but a hooded tunnel, or something like it, edged with folded flesh.

  He found it again. With a grunt, he worked one hand inside, ignoring the sudden slime and softness, and then took the torch with the other and illuminated his discovery. Yes! Although there was no denying what it felt like—a giant vagina—more than anything else it looked like an eyehole. Not quite an eye socket, because there was no bone or anything else to form a socket in the true sense of the word. Granted, the eye itself would have to be about the size of Bony’s head, but that was what it looked like: an eyehole.

  Did jellyfish have eyeholes? He wasn’t sure. And yeah, there was always the possibility of this opening actually being what it felt like—a giant vagina—but he could nevertheless imagine it housing a large, glassy orb. And it would just look so right, so fitting, so much like an eye, that to entertain the idea of the aperture being anything else seemed stupid and delusional. He was not knowledgeable in marine physiology but he knew that much, at least.

  Bony finally pulled his hand free and the withdrawal resulted in a loud, bubbly, squelching sound. Strings of dark matter clung to his fingers no matter how hard he tried to shake them off, and if he’d thought the odor emanating from the outside of the Thing was strong, it was nothing to that of its internal gases.

  He grinned and turned the torch off, then looked back up at the stars. As he waited for his eyes to readjust, he saw ever more stars emerging as his pupils widened. Maybe the Thing wasn’t from the sea at all? Maybe it was from space? Wherever, whatever, it didn’t really matter. Bony loved the whole beach right then, the whole beach including the sky, if that made sense, and including the Thing too.

  It would, of course, be dangerous and disgusting to put his penis inside the Thing. Bony knew that, but he still felt the need to interact somehow—to plug in. He did, after all, have a condom in his wallet. Although the prospect of sex with another human being was not one that he actually entertained, he knew that it might always be a possibility. He did not, therefore, want to get caught unprepared and thus make some kind of stupid mistake. He thought about it further, still staring up at the Milky Way, at the thickening starscape, at those even brighter points that were planets. Everything moving quietly in accordance within its own system.

  Distant. Huge. Graceful. Terrifying.

  FRIDAY NIGHT AT CAPTAIN BENS

  Arthur was in the Vagabond alone. Yasmin didn’t really do Friday nights, and he hadn’t been able to get hold of Bony. And besides, after his conversation with Yasmin the previous evening, he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to see either of them.

  He kept on drinking pint after pint of Darkest Ennerdale until he felt like he needed some fresh air. Upon finally leaving the pub, he had walked out on to the Lime Tongue. Out there on the harbor he could hear shouts and shrieks emanating from the center of the little town: the wild, vicious and otherworldly sounds of hundreds of people moving erratically from on
e bar to another. Arthur stood there with his head down and felt the tug of those busier nightspots. The sky above the harbor and the town and the bars and the pubs, and the short-skirted good-time girls and the T-shirted skinheads and the stumbling drunks, was mostly a bulging black blanket with livid blue streaks. The sky was perpetually on the brink of breaking and raining.

  Arthur made his mind up after hearing a peal of high-pitched female laughter spiking up from some part of Whitehaven that was obviously livelier than the one in which he stood. He turned and walked away from the constant clacking of the moored yachts, back on to the promenade and then into the mouth of Marlborough Street, heading back past the Vagabond. He turned left on to Swingpump Lane, which was lined by the backs of shops and takeaways, and cluttered with massive wheelie bins.

  He continued up the road—which, imperceptibly, became Strand Street—and turned on to Duke Street, then left again on to Tangier Street. This end of the town was busier: small groups of people clattered up and down, shouting good-naturedly and pushing each other around. Arthur peered in through the windows of a bar called Blue, which was quite small but quite busy. Although he couldn’t see them from the window, Arthur knew there were small screens arranged on the bar itself which played music videos that you could watch while you waited to get served.

  He continued looking for a while, but he couldn’t see anybody he recognized; he could guess where most of the people he knew would be, actually. They would all be in Captain Bens, but it just wasn’t somewhere he particularly wanted to go. Still, he was tired of being on his own, so Captain Bens it was. He turned away from the windows of Blue, headed back to Duke Street, took a left, took another left, and walked up Benjamin Street toward the gaudy yellow sign that marked the entrance of the place he sought. He hesitated, wondering what he was doing, and at that moment his mobile rang.