The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  One thing—just one more awful thing—about this awful place was how the seasons seemed different. It could be cold in summer or hot in winter, which was confusing. The bizarre weather just kept happening. Like hailstones. What month was it, anyway? Artemis scowled and turned away.

  Besides, these things didn’t really matter any more.

  Back at his desk, Artemis fiddled with a stack of paper and then fell idle. He had a phone call to make, and he knew it. He started breathing deeply in order not to panic. After a couple of minutes of this he picked up the phone and dialed.

  His call was answered almost immediately, as expected.

  “Artemis,” said the voice.

  “Good afternoon,” Artemis said. “Is all well?”

  “What do you want?”

  “A potential body has been identified.”

  “Good. When will you start communicating with the interstitial entity directly?”

  “As soon as I’ve worked out how.”

  “Work it out, Artemis,” the voice said. It sounded like the sound of somebody whispering into his ear, but overlaid across an old vinyl recording of the same words. “You don’t get paid just to have your fun with the bodies. We have now made contact with the Interstice, but you need to open that line of communication with the entity. And keep it open.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’ll be communicating as soon as I can.”

  “We know what you’ve been doing. You can do what you want with the bodies, but don’t get neglectful of the whole.”

  “I won’t,” Artemis said. Sweat cooled and then ran down his face. The knuckles of his right hand, which gripped the telephone receiver, shone white.

  “When necessary, the operation can be moved elsewhere. An alternative location has been established.”

  “What? Where?”

  “No where, Artemis. You know better than that.”

  “You’re talking about the AI,” Artemis said.

  “Yes.”

  “The calls will be dealt with by the AI.”

  “Yes.”

  “By my wife.”

  “By the voice of your wife. Yes.” The voice paused, and there was a sound like it was clearing some kind of throat or other. “In short, the entire business of that site can be redirected at a moment’s notice. Everything is ready.”

  “Redirected to what? The recordings?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know we were ready for this.”

  “We are ready.”

  “Where is the AI based?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where are the computers? Where is the server?”

  “There are multiple servers, and back-up servers. The AI exists on those. More accurately, it exists between them. This is how we made contact with the Interstice itself.”

  “And the customers won’t know?”

  “Of course not.”

  Artemis nodded. He thought back to the years—no exaggeration—his wife had spent recording her voice. Going through dictionaries, recording a word at a time. Over and over again to ensure variety. To ensure it sounded authentic. Real.

  The last few years of her life. Alone in that small room at Head Office. Jesus Christ.

  “I’m still not entirely sure why this contingency plan is required,” Artemis said.

  “There is one other thing,” the voice said. “The increase in interstitial activity may be producing some effect elsewhere.”

  “What?”

  “We believe there may be something in the sea.”

  “What?!” Artemis said, standing up and putting his left hand to his forehead.

  But there was no answer. The line had gone dead.

  Outside the hailstones grew fatter and fatter, and then just stopped.

  WHAT IT IS AND STUFF

  The sound was a shock. Yasmin’s first thought was of an insect, and she jumped in surprise and fell out of the armchair. A gigantic fucking insect trapped inside an envelope, and vibrating fit to shake all of its chitin off. But it was just somebody at the door, pressing the buzzer.

  The air was thick with joss-stick smoke. Yasmin realized that she had been drowsing. That Sunday-evening crash. She was wearing a jumper way too big for her—it came down almost to her knees—and leggings, and she felt like she was sprawling and shapeless. The buzzer was still buzzing, violently. It was, to be honest, an unfamiliar sound.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, hang on.” Even though there was no way the person at the front door of her building would be able to hear her, seeing as it was two flights of stairs down. She considered going to the window to look out and see who it was, but that would only mean that whoever it was would be kept waiting for even longer. She dithered and then darted across the room to pick up the telephone-receiver-like thing mounted on the wall.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi, Yasmin? It’s Arthur.”

  “Arthur? Come on up.”

  “Is it open?”

  “Yeah,” Yasmin said, pressing the button that unlocked the front door. “It’s open. Come on up.”

  Yasmin glanced at the clock on the wall. This was the first time Arthur had visited her flat on his own. She clicked the kettle on and then went to put out the original joss-stick, while brushing some floaty hair away from her tired eyes.

  “I wanted to talk to you about what I saw,” Arthur said. The two of them sat on the floor, as Yasmin only had one armchair, and each cradled a mug of tea. Something calming and ambient was playing on the stereo, but Yasmin didn’t know what it was. It was a compilation CD that some ex-boyfriend had made for her, to which she had long ago lost the track listing. “I saw another world, Yasmin.”

  “What about your father?” Yasmin asked. She could not let go of the image of Harry distraught in the bath along with the worms. “Are you sure he’ll be OK?”

  “He’ll be all right.” Arthur nodded. “He just needs some rest. He’s been in bed since Saturday. I think he’s had a cold or something, as well.”

  “It sounds like he needs help.”

  Arthur shifted his weight from one buttock to the other, and bobbed his head around like a little bird. “He’ll be OK,” he said.

  If Arthur thought he was being subtle in his evasiveness then he was wrong, but Yasmin decided against pushing the topic.

  “I wanted to talk to you about what I saw,” Arthur said again.

  “The landscape?” Yasmin asked.

  “Yeah,” Arthur said. He bit his lip and looked around wide-eyed, not seeing but thinking. “I call it the Scape,” he said.

  “Full of goats?” Yasmin joked, smiling.

  “What?” Arthur asked, smiling back, but uncomprehendingly.

  “Never mind. It was a joke, kind of.”

  “Oh! Scapegoats!”

  “That’s it,” Yasmin said.

  “Jesus, Yasmin, I’m sorry. Being friends with me must sometimes be like being friends with a child.”

  “Not really,” Yasmin said.

  “No goats,” Arthur continued, “but creatures, almost. Like being under water. I once saw this thing on TV: this footage of a dead seal on the ocean floor. The footage was all speeded up, but basically it showed how the whole body, and all of the ground around it, got covered in small animals and … organisms that came to feed on it. I mean covered, like the whole scene was thick with tiny starfish and weird eels and long-legged crabs, all crawling all over each other and burrowing in and out of the seal and … It was really scary, Yasmin. It was really horrible, and, uh … um …”

  Yasmin knew that when Arthur’s mother’s body had finally been recovered, the corpse had been picked almost entirely clean. She guessed that this was in the back of Arthur’s mind as he spoke. She guessed that this was why he’d stopped, and was now wiping his eyes.

  “The ground, Yasmin, it was like that. It was like the sea floor in that TV footage—moving, and alive. You know, like some of the walls in the old Doom games? Once you get to Hell, and the
walls are supposed to be fleshy or something, and they’re moving? The ground was like that.”

  “Arthur,” Yasmin said, “it sounds really pretty fucking awful.”

  “It wasn’t as awful as I’m making it sound,” Arthur said. “The thing is, I want to go back.”

  “What do you mean?” Yasmin said.

  “Yasmin,” Arthur said, “this is a real place I’m talking about! It’s a place you can go to. I want to talk to you about it because you’re clever, so I thought maybe we could think about what it is and stuff.”

  “OK,” Yasmin said. She put her now-empty mug down and stood up. “I’m going to put the kettle back on. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize … I haven’t been sure all this time whether or not you’ve been talking literally or figuratively.”

  “Literally,” said Arthur. He waved his hands around. “It’s all literal.”

  “Do you want tea or coffee?”

  “Tea, please.”

  “I’m going to have coffee,” Yasmin said. “I need to wake myself up a bit.”

  Yasmin had a laptop with a broadband connection. This was not unusual in itself, but it was something Arthur and Harry did not have, and so far Arthur had not been able to look online for anything in the way of explanation. He’d tried to get on the internet at work, but the firewalls had blocked him. And anyway, he felt like he wanted some company for it. Somebody to help him sort the helpful from the nonsense.

  “It’s difficult to know what to search for,” Yasmin said, fingers hovering over the keyboard, the search-engine field sitting empty in the middle of the screen. She typed “world inside telephony system” and the search returned lots of telephony-system consultancy companies and technical websites. She searched for “telephone limbo,” and the results were equally useless. She tried “interstitial world” which brought back dictionary websites and medical pages about interstitial cystitis, whatever that was.

  They spent ages trying to find something useful. Yasmin was well aware that real research involved more than trawling the internet, but the public library wouldn’t be open. Arthur paced around behind her, suggesting things to try, swinging around a cricket bat that Yasmin usually kept by the bed in case of intruders. “Informational systems world,” he would suggest, or “data landscape” or “hidden reality.”

  After a while, Yasmin was trying things like “new world hidden information structures alternative reality,” but still to no avail.

  “I know we’re not finding anything useful,” Arthur said, “but I feel like by doing this we’ve kind of worked out what it is I’m trying to describe.”

  “I know what you mean,” Yasmin said. “Fucking hell, though, some of this stuff is a bit heavy for a school night.”

  “Sometimes I wonder what I’d be capable of, if that place—work—didn’t drain me,” Arthur said. “Sometimes, when I’m not there, I feel almost intelligent.”

  “Work guts you,” Yasmin said. “We’re all capable of great things, but work uses that capability up.”

  “True,” Arthur said. By this point, he was looking out of the window at the sea.

  “Speaking of work,” Yasmin said, “we should do a bit more digging there. See what we can find out.”

  HARRY’S PHONE CALLS

  Harry never stopped to reflect on it, but it was strange, really, that Rebecca only rang when Arthur was out at work. If only Arthur were at home when she rang, then his son would be able to answer the phone and hear for himself that Harry was absolutely not imagining the voice. He’d passed the phone over, of course, in the past, on those occasions when Arthur came home and Harry was on the phone to Rebecca, but Arthur refused to listen. He had taken the receiver once, and spoken into it, but Rebecca had not replied; in fact, when Arthur had passed it back to Harry, the line was dead.

  “It’s no wonder he doesn’t believe me,” Harry complained.

  “Don’t think I believe you,” Pauline said.

  “Ooh, I believe you,” Tiffany said, “but then I’m a medium.”

  The Vine was never that full on a Sunday night. Harry, Tiffany and—unusually—Bracket sat at the bar. Yorkie, too, had a bar stool to himself, which—unbeknownst to anybody, he was urinating on. The worn green cushion just soaked up the liquid. Pauline stood behind the bar, leaning on it with her elbows, her mass of curly brown hair flopping forward over her red, worn face.

  “You’re a what?” Harry asked.

  “A medium.”

  “Look like a small to me,” Harry said.

  “Ooh!” Tiffany said, and she started giggling. “You awful man!”

  Harry gave a watery smile, as if his flirting had been accidental. Actually, it had been accidental. Sometimes when drunk, and especially in the company of women, he just said things. Really stupid things. What a stupid fucking cretin he was.

  Pauline gave an over-dramatic roll of the eyes and shook her head.

  “A medium?” Bracket said. “Really?”

  “Call yourself a manager?” Tiffany said. “Don’t know the first thing about me, eh?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bracket said.

  Bracket was drunk. Bracket was really very drunk. He had left the house after Isobel had fallen asleep on the sofa at about six o’ clock. He wondered if maybe she was depressed. Or maybe she was just perfectly content to not communicate. Maybe she was very happy. Who knew? Anyway, he’d gone out to walk the dog, and somehow ended up here, at the Vine. The haunt of real drinkers. And what’s more, he was enjoying it.

  “Shame that I can’t just talk to any old body up there in the afterlife,” Tiffany said, “otherwise I’d ask your Rebecca why she won’t talk to young Arthur. He’s a great lad, your Arthur, Harry.”

  “I know,” Harry said. “He’s the greatest.”

  “Good at his job, too,” Bracket said.

  “I’m very proud of him,” Harry said.

  “Maybe she gets too upset to talk to him,” Tiffany said.

  Bracket wasn’t sure what was going on. It sounded like Harry was claiming that he talked to his dead wife on the phone, and Tiffany was saying that this was OK, this was possible. He wanted to tell them that this was not possible. Maybe ghosts did exist, but not like this. Surely not like this. Other people were sitting at tables elsewhere in the pub, and were probably having conversations that actually meant something.

  “What do you talk about,” Bracket asked, “when Rebecca rings you up? What do you talk about?”

  “All sorts.” Harry shrugged. “Can be anything. She starts by asking how I am, and what I’ve been up to—she always asks me those things. And I always tell her I’m fine. And then I tell her about my day. And it just kind of goes on from there.”

  PATENT LEATHER

  The weekly communication was issued every Monday. Arthur looked forward to it in a perverse kind of way, because it was always so badly written and so full of errors that it was almost funny. This week’s was no disappointment, as he found himself reading and re-reading one sentence:

  This is primarily as a result of failure against service levels and abandonment rates where performance on both overloaded and other causes is poor.

  He couldn’t work out if it made sense or not; it either didn’t make sense at all, or he was being very, very stupid. Probably the former. Yasmin was convinced that half of the communications, directives, initiatives, training, briefings, etcetera—anything that came from higher management—were deliberately nonsensical to confuse the front-line staff so much that blame for every conceivable failure could then be loaded on to them.

  Not that this was really necessary, for senior managers seemed to face no long-term consequences for their actions. Anyway their career progression seemed to work differently. They just floated from one role to another, one company to another, like massive self-aware Zeppelins built for the higher reaches of the atmosphere. The upper echelons. It appeared to be an entirely different world up there. Of course, maybe Arthur and Yasmin and all of the other customer advisers were
wrong in their perception of the way these things worked, but as yet nobody had noticed anything to suggest so.

  So the communication was usually almost funny. But only ever almost. It was, rather, on the boundary between “funny” and “pathetic.”

  After reading this latest communication, Arthur searched for another call to listen to and assess. The assessments were done by quota: every customer adviser had to have a certain number of their calls assessed per month. Arthur chose one by Victor. Victor was the call center’s only member of staff with a discernible foreign accent—Indian, in his case.

  The call was good. Victor was good. Things only started to go a bit off-script when the customer was put on hold. Of course, what a lot of customers didn’t realize was that sometimes when they thought they were on hold, the customer adviser had merely muted their mic and could hear everything the customer was saying. As could anybody listening to a recording of the call.

  “Bloody call center’s in India, innit?” the customer was saying to somebody in the background. “I mean he’s tryin’ his best, but they don’t understand over there, do they? I’m not being racist, but they don’t understand our culture or owt.”

  Arthur wasn’t sure what culture the customer was talking about, or how exactly it was relevant. These things were often said, though, and race cropped up as a topic of conversation pretty frequently in telephone calls across the site. “Oh, it’s nice to get somebody English for a change,” was the usual line—the usual starting point.

  On the call Arthur was now listening to, the customer was wittering on about outsourcing and cheap labor and strong accents when Victor un-muted the mic and spoke.

  “We’re actually based in the UK, sir,” he said. “I am English.”

  There was a silence.

  “Oh right,” the customer said. Then, after a long pause, “They tell you to say that, do they? Think we can’t tell?”

  Victor hung up then. Justifiably too, Arthur thought, but of course you weren’t supposed to terminate a call without warning the customer, and so Victor should be marked down for that.

  And of course, for all the customer knew, the call center could indeed be based in India. Could be based in fucking Siberia, the bottom of the sea, or a network of caves in South America. Didn’t make him right about any of the other stuff he spouted, but the truth was that there was no way of knowing the whereabouts of the people that you were speaking to. They could be anywhere and the scary thing was that it didn’t make the slightest difference. Their only location, in any meaningful sense of the word, was inside the networks—just rafts of signals, of ones and zeroes, drifting down the wires and emerging from the telephones of all of the customers.