The Thing on the Shore
Page 19
Arthur raised his hands to remove his headset as soon as he heard it. That voice again. The voice he’d heard in the Scape.
“Arthur?” it said. It was now coming out of the headset, which meant that it was coming out of the phone. “Arthur? Are you there?”
And then it seemingly wasn’t coming out of the headset at all. It was in the air; it was being spoken and heard directly, as if the originator were there alongside him. Arthur took the headset off and stood up quickly and looked around.
He was alone. The call center was empty. Not just of people, but of everything. In fact it was not a call center at all. It was just an empty room of the same size and shape, with blank, smooth, gray walls that looked cold to the touch. The floor and the ceiling were gray, too. Everything was the same, uniform color, apart from the light that came in through the windows, which was purple.
Arthur knew where he was. He was in the city that he’d seen: the City. He knew that for sure. He moved to a window and looked out.
The streets and the exterior walls of the other buildings were made out of the same gunship-gray substance. They were untextured and featureless, apart from the regularly spaced windows, and even the windows were not windows so much as smoothly edged apertures opening into rooms that, Arthur assumed, were identical to the one in which he stood. All of the buildings were also identical, apart from their varying heights. They were the same width, the same shape, the same design. The colors and the lines were exactly the same as those of the computer system they used to manage customers’ billing accounts.
Arthur felt a strange hand crawling through his stomach.
The City was the billing system, wasn’t it? For a brief moment he was fully certain that each building corresponded to a record of a building in the database. Then the moment passed, and he was certain of nothing.
Arthur gripped the windowsill. The street in front was quite narrow and, when he looked down, he saw there the same pulsating organic matter that he’d witnessed on his first visit to the Scape. So he was definitely back there again. The street was illuminated by bright orbs emitting that same purple light. They seemed to be attached to the walls of the buildings, although Arthur couldn’t be sure. He looked up into the ill sky, and could see some kind of small dark speck moving far, far above.
Turning back to face the room, Arthur saw a door in the middle of the wall opposite the window. Going outside wasn’t an appealing prospect, though.
“Hello?” he said.
“Arthur,” said the voice.
“Whales!” Arthur blurted, without meaning to, and without thinking. “Last time I was here, I saw whales!” He ran his hands over his face. He did not feel either hot or cold but his skin was coated with a layer of oily sweat.
“This is the Interstice,” the voice said. “It is in between. It is in between various places. It is linked to the planes of your telephony systems. It is where all of the voices are when they are in between telephones. It is linked to deep waters—the place through which the Ancient Egyptians believed all waters were connected. It is linked to other places, too, Arthur, but the deep waters are where the whales come from. The whales exist both here and in their own waters. There are other things that can move from one place to the other but I, alas, cannot.”
Questions crowded Arthur’s brain. “Why whales?” he asked, panicking. He looked around the room, staring hard at every surface, trying to make sure that he was alone. For some reason, he had to keep talking. He had to keep that voice occupied.
“The great whales can do many things, Arthur.”
“What else can travel from the water?” Arthur asked. He started moving toward the door, slowly.
“There are spirits that can travel through the Interstice, from one place to another. From somewhere else into the waters.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Somewhere else. When they make it through to your world, they occupy other bodies. Bodies of things they find crawling across the bottom of the sea.”
“Who are these spirits?”
“They are the dead.”
The question Arthur had been about to ask—Where is “somewhere else”?—faltered on his lips. The dead? He found himself at the top of a staircase and, again, it was made out of the same gray matter. The same gunmetal gray color, exactly, as the screens he wandered amidst every day at work.
“Where do the dead come from?” he asked.
“The souls of the dead live beyond the borders,” the voice said. “Not every body has a soul, of course, because some people just rot and then are gone. The souls, though—some of them find their way here.”
“Are there any here right now?” he asked.
“With you? With me? No. But in the Interstice, yes. And there is nothing to stop the stronger ones—the most recently released—from journeying through the Interstice to other places. By the telephones. The water. There is nothing to stop them but they have little motivation. They are sluggish things.”
Arthur thought about his mother. How recent was recent? Her soul must be relatively recently released, if all the souls from all of history were out there. Maybe she was still strong. Maybe she was ringing his dad. But then, no. Why were the dead not always telephoning?
“The souls must find some kind of host body in your world,” the voice continued. “Some kind of shell to carry them. It is a difficult process.”
Arthur still hadn’t seen anybody who might have spoken. The voice sounded like it was getting closer. And like some kind of Impressionist painting, the closer it was, the less clearly defined its composite elements were. It sounded disparate and rough, and no longer reassuring. He started to run down the steps, following each flight round right-angled corners until, after a couple of levels, he saw before him an archway leading to the outside. He barreled through it, and stumbled to a halt on the spongy surface of the open ground.
The sky softly hissed above him: a ragged tissue of whispered static and distant, indistinct voices.
The purple light was cold, the steely color of the surrounding buildings was forbidding, and the weird, slithery rustle beneath his feet was nauseating. Arthur did not want to be here. If this was the afterlife—an idea that now seemed less plausible than it first had—then he did not want to die. Not ever.
He slapped himself across the cheek, but without effect.
He was about halfway between one end of the street and the other end, and he didn’t know which way to head. He didn’t know where he was going. He only wanted to get out of the City. He’d quite liked this place the first time he was here, and the only difference really was that then he’d been out in the middle of nowhere, out in the middle of some great, empty plain. The City, though … the City was threatening.
He chose to head left. No sooner had he taken a few steps when he saw a figure appear at the end of the road, about two hundred meters away.
“Arthur,” it said, “you’re back.”
The voice seemed louder than he’d heard it before, and harsher; like something being played too loudly for the speakers to transmit effectively. The figure was tall, dressed all in black. It moved in a stilted manner, as if it were from an old stop-motion B-movie.
Arthur started to feel light-headed and realized that he’d stopped breathing. When he started again, he inhaled greedily, not able to absorb enough air. Where was he? Where was his body? He bent over double and put his hands on his knees. He crouched down and coughed. He just could not breathe deeply enough. When he looked up again, the figure was moving slowly toward him. He could see that its legs were bizarrely long and its torso very small. Its head appeared to be almost perfectly triangular, but with the apex pointing downward. The purple light reflected off it cleanly, like it was dressed entirely in patent leather.
Arthur groaned and stood up. He turned around and, without fully recovering his breath, started running again. He started trying to slow his breathing: four seconds in, four seconds out. Four long, slow seconds in; four long
, slow seconds out. He picked up speed.
“Why are you running, Arthur?” came the voice.
Arthur shook his head but did not reply. He did not really know why. He knew that he was scared, but not why he was scared. There was no reason to believe that the thing meant him any harm.
At the end of the street he risked a backward glance. The thing was gaining on him, somehow, despite the fact that it moved jerkily, as if its legs were injured. Its arms were waving about like tentacles, but it was close enough for Arthur to see that they really were arms.
“Come back, Arthur,” it said.
Still, Arthur kept on running. He turned right into another street that looked exactly the same as the one he’d just left. It was longer, though, and actually had a slight curve to it. And who were all these buildings for, anyway? Was the thing behind him the only citizen of this whole place? It felt that way.
Without looking behind him, he darted left into a small alleyway. It was darker in there because there were none of those purple lights. He kept his speed up, the things coating the ground crunching slightly beneath his feet. He did not assume for a moment that he had not been seen entering the alley, so there was no point trying to move quietly just yet. He looked behind him again and saw the thing—the patent-leather thing—silhouetted at the end of the alley. Then he ran straight into the wall.
A dead end. Oh no. Oh no. Fuck. Oh fuck. Arthur started shaking, still lying there on the ground. He tried to stand up but his legs would not support him. He could feel his body trying to dump all the excess weight from his bowels in preparation for either fight or flight, but he kept his ass tightly clenched. Even now, even here, where there were no other people, he could not allow that. His teeth were gritted and his pale skin poured sweat. But where exactly were his bowels, his teeth and his skin? Were they all really here? It felt like they were all there with him, along with his mind, in this hell-hole.
He rolled on to his back and saw the thing was advancing. It did not have a triangular head, as he’d first thought, just a collar that rose up high behind the top of its head. Its head was actually the same shape as a human head, but, like the rest of its body, it seemed to be entirely coated—laminated almost—in patent leather. It was not actually patent leather, Arthur realized, just something that looked like it. The thing wore a cloak made of the same material, which flared down behind it almost to the ground.
Instead of a face, it had various slits and slots that looked randomly placed. Its spine, if it possessed a spine, seemed to move of its own accord, for the creature seemed to struggle to keep its torso steady. It flopped forward and backward constantly, as if something that should be holding it upright were broken.
Its legs were very long, but when Arthur looked carefully, that wasn’t quite all—they appeared to be longer than they were because, where its groin should have been, a square section of the creature had been cut away.
Arthur pushed himself backward until his back rested against the wall and his legs were stretched out in front of him. The creature’s torso flopped forward as it bent down toward him and started to speak.
The ensuing sound was so loud that Arthur screwed up his eyes and slammed his hands into his ears. That didn’t make much of a difference though, it didn’t really block out the sound. Any words were unintelligible, because the sound was now just a roaring wind of distortion, a total cacophony of howls and screams and shrieks. Then it stopped.
The creature tilted its head as if awaiting some kind of response.
THE PANOPTICON
During office hours, on a weekday, everybody more or less had their own desk. Yasmin’s usual one was in the group of desks between the command center and the bank of desks in where Arthur was, and she sat with her back to him. This meant that when Artemis suddenly stood up, wide-eyed, holding his still-open laptop in both hands like a tea tray, and started bounding across the call center floor, Yasmin at first assumed that he was heading for her. She had never before seen him move so quickly or with such urgency, and she froze up completely, terrified that she had unknowingly done something awful and was about to be punished accordingly.
It was only when Artemis sped past her that she turned around to see that Arthur had tipped sideways from his chair and landed, twitching, on the green-carpeted floor. Lots of people were standing up now, pointing and whispering and looking very concerned. Yasmin immediately made her phone “busy,” meaning that she wouldn’t receive any calls coming through, and she stood up too, suddenly cold.
“Back on the phones!” Artemis bellowed, as he weaved between the desks. “Back to your calls! It’s nothing! He’ll be fine!”
Upon reaching Arthur’s desk, Artemis put his laptop down and went to pick him up.
The laptop was left open.
Bums off seats, Yasmin thought automatically, despite herself. Control, Alt, Delete. You haven’t locked your laptop, Artemis.
But as soon as she’d thought it, Artemis himself seemed to remember the laptop.
“Dean!” he cried, standing up again from where Arthur lay, “Dean, pick Arthur up and get him into one of the pods!” He then turned back to his laptop and gathered it into his arms.
“Sh-should we be moving h-him?” Dean asked, moving forward.
“Yes!” Artemis shouted right in Dean’s face. “Of course we should be moving him!”
“Oh … OK,” Dean said, nodding, and then bent to pick Arthur up. He got one arm under Arthur’s knees and the other one under his shoulders, and then tried to stand up. But Arthur, thin as he was, must have been too heavy for Dean’s equally spindly frame, and they both tipped forward, Arthur’s head bouncing off the desk.
A collective gasp floated upward from the assembled audience.
Artemis nearly dropped the laptop then, but caught it in time. He turned and put it back on the desk. When he turned back, his face was bright red.
“Dean!” Artemis was roaring now. “You clumsy fucking spastic! Get the fuck out of the fucking way, you pale fucking bag of fucking shit!” He crouched down and hoisted Arthur up easily.
“S-sorry,” Dean said, in tears now, snot glistening around his spotty mouth.
Artemis didn’t reply. He just shouldered past him and marched off with his burden in the direction of the pods.
Yasmin looked around. There were no other managers on the command center. They all seemed to be gravitating toward the pods, from various locations all over the floor.
Yasmin quickly removed her headset and, while everybody’s attention was still held by the receding figure of Artemis, sneaked over and grabbed the man’s laptop. She waited until Artemis had rounded the corner, presumably to enter one of the pods, then took off after him, her fingers sweaty against the black plastic casing of the machine she held. She was banking on everybody assuming that she was taking the laptop back to Artemis—and, sure enough, nobody challenged her. She passed various managers already on their way back from the pods, who, she guessed, Artemis must have sent away.
Once she arrived amongst the glass partitions and blinds of the pods themselves, she ducked into the first unoccupied one she found and closed the door. She could hear Arthur murmuring deliriously in the adjacent pod, and Artemis’s low voice responding, but he was talking very quietly and she couldn’t make out a word.
She didn’t waste time trying to read the emails on his laptop. That would be too risky, she reasoned; he was bound to realize any moment that he’d left it unattended and come looking. Instead, she just forwarded to herself all the emails she could see that had come from an Interext email account and then swiftly, assuredly, deleted the same forwarded emails from the “Sent” mailbox and, finally, from the “Deleted” mailbox.
Artemis must have been watching Arthur, she thought. He had stood up so quickly. Of course, the command center was designed that way: a raised platform on which a varying selection of managers would sit, each facing a different direction, to be able to observe the whole extent of the floor.
To be is to be perceived.
She was thinking about this, about to knock on the door of the adjacent pod and hand Artemis his (now password-protected) laptop, when she noticed—with an icy, gut-wrenching sensation in her stomach, before the onset of any cerebral reaction—the small, glassy eye of a webcam gazing at her from its mount within the plastic framing of the laptop screen. She felt horror slacken her face and, shaking, she slammed the lid of the stupid, stupid fucking computer shut and put it on the floor, then knocked on the pod door and ran back to her desk.