The Thing on the Shore

by Tom Fletcher

  Arthur didn’t say anything.

  “Y’is alreet, lad?” Johnny asked, moving closer.

  “Yep,” Arthur said, nodding. “Yes, thanks. Just … think I’m going to go home. Feel a bit sick.”

  “Gone pale as a fish,” Johnny said. “Git yersel away.”

  “Yeah,” Arthur said, “I will. Thanks, Johnny.”

  “Nae bother, lad,” Johnny said. He disappeared into a cubicle. They were the kind of cubicles composed of just panels of wood in a metal frame, not really self-contained or at all private. Johnny evidently didn’t mind, though. The moment the sound of his defecation started, Arthur knew he had to leave or he was going to be sick again.

  Sometimes dehumanization was so normal, so commonplace, that you didn’t really notice it.

  The feel of the cool breeze on Arthur’s face was immediately pleasurable. It seemed to blow the sweat and the clamminess away, drying him out and bringing him round from what had been—although he hadn’t really realized it—a less than fully conscious state. He stumbled, head down, along North Shore Road, away from the hulking white shed of the call center. Then, as he passed the Tesco’s car park, the harbor opened out before him. There was only one place he could go to really get his head back, and it wasn’t home—it wasn’t home to his father, who was having a rest day and was probably already drunk, or trying to heat up some baked beans and burning them, or shivering and crying in his bed, or deluding himself that he was talking on the phone to …

  To his wife, Arthur’s mother. That was the one place Arthur could go. To the end of the pier. Jesus Christ, why wasn’t it his mother there in the Scape? Why, instead, was it that fucking horrible thing?

  Arthur stopped walking. How could he accuse his dad of deluding himself, now that Arthur had seen what he’d seen and been where he’d been? Surely there was a possibility that his dad wasn’t as deluded as Arthur had always thought. Still though, he didn’t feel up to having that conversation just yet. He fixed his gaze on the lighthouse, gleaming white out there above the navy blue water, and narrowed his eyes. He looked out over the sea. Clouds reared up over the horizon. They were so big that they looked much closer than they actually were. The sun was behind them, so that their edges were shining yellow, but their mass was an intensely dark, matte gray. Out there, below the clouds, the surface of the sea looked black. How was the lighthouse so bright when those clouds were in the way of the sun? Arthur had long ago stopped trying to work out the passage of light near the sea, though. It never really did what you would expect it to.

  The pier was relatively busy with people fishing, from young teenagers through to very old-looking men who seemed incredibly fit for their age. Or maybe they weren’t that old. Maybe they just looked old because they sat out in every kind of weather all the time. Anyway, on his way out to the lighthouse, Arthur passed numerous people and groups of people who sat dangling their legs off the edge of the pier. It wasn’t very warm but it wasn’t wet either, and the wind wasn’t powerful enough to pose any kind of risk—not unless you were a child or a waif and risked standing too close to the drop—so it was a pretty good day for fishing. Yeah, once upon a time Harry would have been out here, too, but not any more.

  People were smoking and drinking and eating. Arthur knew that after they were all gone, a fair amount of their rubbish would be left behind. The seagulls loved it, especially the gory remnants left by those who had killed and gutted their catches on the spot. The scavenging birds peppered the sky.

  God it was beautiful if you let yourself feel it.

  Arthur kept his head bowed because he didn’t want anybody to see his blood-red eye. He had been thinking about it, the eye, and had calmed down a little bit. He had seen something like it before on Facebook at Bony’s house. Somebody had posted a picture of herself with a red eye like his, adding a comment about how she’d got so drunk that she’d been sick—violently enough to burst a blood vessel in one eye. That was it, then—a burst blood vessel. That was all it was. Like a nosebleed, but inside the eyeball. Nothing to worry about.

  A wave of nausea rolled over him, and he stood still until it passed.

  It discolored your eye, but then eventually it went away. That’s what had happened to the girl on Facebook, anyway. No permanent damage.

  Arthur hadn’t ventured out here since that night with the crab. He found himself thinking about it and the way it had moaned.

  Reaching the lighthouse, he extended the palms of both hands against it and stretched himself. He was aware of probably looking like some sort of freak; he would probably always look like some kind of freak. He didn’t have the energy right then to worry too much about how other people must perceive him. He wondered if he would ever have that kind of energy again. This was probably how people became strange and lonely and troubled. Through preoccupation.

  Well of course it fucking was. That went without saying, didn’t it? Arthur shook his head. He couldn’t tell whether such thoughts were blatantly obvious or totally nonsensical. Somewhere in between had to be insight; he doubted very much that he was achieving insight, though.

  The wind was bringing those clouds closer, quite quickly.

  He needed to stop thinking for a while. He just needed to be somewhere and not think. He turned away from the lighthouse and went to sit on the edge of the pier, away from the west-facing wall over which the fishermen leaned. He sat at the very tip of the pier, where there was no wall, facing north. In fact, he was almost facing the call center, which was still all too visible, even at this remove. Maybe that was because it was white: a great, big, white, barnlike structure against a slope of brown and yellow grass.

  Arthur looked away from the call center and down toward the water lapping at the stone beneath him. The movement of the liquid was hypnotic. The way something natural could possess such a regular rhythm was fascinating. Incredible. Arthur watched it, and watched it. If he let it, it would draw him in; physically draw his body forward. The lure of the sea. He had always acknowledged that as something real, something dangerous. Well, since his mum had thrown herself into it, anyway.

  Something moved beneath him. Not the water, but something else, something not part of the rhythm of the water. It was this dissonance that made it visible. Because, when he looked for it, looked for the thing that was moving but was not the water, he couldn’t see it. It was the movement he had seen, not the thing itself. He frowned and maintained his focus. He was peering through the surface of the water now, since whatever had moved must have been beneath it.

  Minutes passed. A few of the fishermen pointed at the approaching clouds and started reeling in, disassembling their rods. The seagulls above wheeled and laughed.

  There! There it was again! Arthur opened his mouth slightly and leaned forward a little more. Whatever it was, it was clinging to the stonework of the pier, moving along it, or maybe … maybe even up the wall itself. Its color was barely distinguishable from the color of the depths in which it crept.

  It reached up and broke the surface.

  The crab! It was that fucking crab again. Or … no, it was a similar crab but it was different. It was bigger. Or was it even a crab?

  Had that other thing, the other night, been a crab?

  This thing was bigger than the kind of crab you found in British waters, and it didn’t look like it had enough legs to be a crab, anyway. And it moved in the wrong way. It maybe moved more like an octopus or something, as if its limbs were arms instead of legs—as if it were pulling itself along with arms, not walking with legs—but these limbs, these arms, were jointed and hard-looking, not like the tentacles of a cephalopod. And how many limbs were there? Four? No, five. With those massive crab-like claws, which it was using to climb steadily, dextrously, intelligently. Five limbs? What the fuck kind of number was that? Maybe it had lost one. Jesus Christ. It was only moving slowly but it was fucking disgusting. Its head was more prominent than that of a crab. It protruded, rounded and bulbous, from the center, whereas th
e head or face of a crab was, of course, a small, well-protected thing tucked away on the side of the body. Could this be the same creature he’d seen previously? That had looked more like a crab, whereas this … it was about the size of a child, for a start, a three- or four-year-old child.

  It was dark green and slimy-looking. Its body appeared to be mostly a kind of hub for the limbs and a … a socket, almost, for the face. The face itself seemed to be looking directly up at Arthur. He was still sitting on the edge, legs dangling, bent over at the waist, looking straight down at the crab thing, and it seemed to be looking right back up, as if it were conscious of him. It moved in a horribly deliberate way.

  It moaned—with the same weary, almost bored sound that Arthur remembered from that moonlit night when he’d last been out here. It was the deep sigh of a depressive. The throaty gasp of a heavy smoker suddenly shocked or winded. Then it made a sound like coughing, but it wasn’t coughing. It was a sharp, regular, hacking sound.

  Arthur’s head was swimming. It was all he could do to prevent himself from pitching forward face-first into the creature, and into the sea. It was only when its front claw, the largest, tentatively nudged his foot that Arthur wailed. He scrambled backward, his heels kicking against the stone, and rose to his feet.

  He looked around him. All of the fishermen had gone. Those oppressive clouds were now more or less overhead. Even as he looked up, the first few drops of rain hit his skin like they’d been spat. These were raindrops falling from a great height. A phenomenal height.

  When he looked back, the horrendous being was now perched just on the edge of the pier. Its eyes were visible. They were far too large. It was not a natural thing. It was too much. It was too wrong.

  Arthur turned around, and as he did so, he saw that there was another one. Another of the massive bastards. Not directly behind him, but just to his left, as he stood with his back to the first. As if it had climbed up the side of the pier that had been to his right when he was sitting down. It was easily distinguishable from the first, having only one claw, but it was slightly larger. It didn’t look injured, though. Just … different. It was as if, whatever species of thing these were, every specimen of it could be different. As if they hadn’t all evolved to turn out the same.

  Arthur ran toward the second one and booted it square in its horribly over-active mouth. It rattled backward, squealing, and over the side, splashing into the water beneath. From behind him the first of the monsters made that sickening coughing sound, and Arthur could hear it running toward him. He ran in the same direction, and found, thankfully, that he was faster.

  Why was there nobody else around?

  Once he’d put some distance between him and his nightmarish pursuer, Arthur turned. He thought about it and then went back—started running back toward it. Because it had been visible for longer, and he had longer to think about it, he felt much more squeamish than he did with the other one. He’d had longer to let the revulsion in his body build up until he almost felt like he was going to stop running completely. But no, he reached the thing and kicked it hard, the sharp toe of his work shoe crunching into the space between its two—panicked?!—eyes. The crab, or whatever it was, flipped over, and … and, God, that mind-fucking sound, the voice, that hellish fucking voice. It babbled, the thing babbled. It was like … it wasn’t like the sound any animal makes. It was like it was talking, like a human, but in another language. Arthur didn’t attempt to understand, though. He just closed his eyes and stamped. He held his arms up high for some reason, and he kept his eyes closed and his mouth tightly shut as well, just in case some kind of fluid escaped and splattered on to his face. All the while, the thing spoke. Arthur carried on stamping, though. He could feel its legs clawing, twitching and spasming against his own.

  Once he thought it had stopped moving, he opened his eyes and looked up at the sky. The rain was torrential, but he hadn’t noticed it develop from those first few drops. It was the kind of rain that’s so heavy you can’t hear much else. Arthur had previously been able to hear the creature, but that was it. Now the only sound was the rain. He looked down at what he’d done.

  Really, the underside of the thing was not remarkable. It did look like the underbelly of a crab, albeit a very large one. Pale green with lots of chitin connecting and interlocking. The size of it made Arthur shudder and look away again for a while. It was like a huge dead hand lying there, palm facing upward.

  Arthur knew that he should turn it over and try to establish what the creature was. Try to establish that it was, in fact, just a large crab. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to prove that there was nothing wrong, just in case there was something wrong.

  What the fuck was wrong with him? The Scape, then his red eye, and now—now this. And what was he doing out here, anyway—trying to somehow find some peace with his mum? She was dead.

  He was as bad as his dad. He was turning into his dad.

  The rain was roaring now. The sound was aggressive and muscular.

  Arthur used his foot to push the now dead thing toward the edge of the pier, its ugly limbs snagging in the pitted stone surface. His shirt and lightweight coat stuck to his skinny frame. Finally, eventually, he gave the monster one last shove, and it slumped over the edge.

  There was one person he now needed to talk to before anybody else: his father.

  It was only when he was nearly home, walking along the road where he lived, in fact, that he started to wonder if any of those creatures had emerged from the sea while he wasn’t around. If so, where had they gone?

  Or … were they only drawn to him?

  THE EMAILS

  Yasmin got on the train at Whitehaven in a metallic, cloud-warped sunlight. The train plunged into the Bransty Tunnel immediately after the Whitehaven station platform, and by the time it shot out the other end the rain was torrential.

  As usual, when it stopped at Sellafield, the train filled up with noisy commuters chatting and laughing. Maybe I could get a job at Sellafield, Yasmin thought. I really don’t know what else to do.

  She was the only person to get off the train at Drigg. As soon as she did so she was soaked. The sky above was black. She ran from the platform out on to the small road, and then continued down the middle of it—there were no cars—and away from the railway, away from the level crossing, heading toward Bony’s house. Trust her to be wearing such a flimsy dress on a day like this. It was dark blue, mind, with a pattern of tiny red and yellow flowers, so she didn’t look indecent, but still. The long, lightweight white cardigan she wore above it was as protective as tissue paper now. She hammered on Bony’s door until he answered, which he didn’t do nearly quickly enough.

  “Yasmin?” he said, frowning at her. “You OK? Something wrong?”

  “It’s raining!”

  Bony looked up at the sky, and then all around. “So it is,” he said, and stepped back to let her in. “Hope you didn’t get too wet.”

  They sat in Bony’s living room, which—compared to other rooms in his house—was quite sparse. There was a sofa, a small coffee table, a big TV on a stand crammed with various consoles, and some shelves full of video-game boxes, DVDs and books. The floor was bare wood, without carpet or rugs. The walls were white. The windows were huge, with French doors leading on to a small patio at the rear, but there was so little light outside now that the blinds were drawn and the lights turned on. Yasmin knew that Bony was weirdly anal about keeping this room tidy; whenever they visited him, he would pick up any rubbish or empty mugs and take them through to the kitchen immediately, rather than wait to clear everything up later, in one go.

  They each soon had a steaming mug sitting on the coffee table, and the room felt warm and safe. Yasmin felt she could just rest here, if she let herself—just sit back and rest. It was a restful place.

  “These emails,” Bony began.

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t read them yet, but how did you send them to me?”

  “I sent
them from Artemis’s own laptop to my personal email address. Then I used my phone to forward them to you.”

  “Oh, right.” Bony nodded. “And Arthur’s OK?”

  “I don’t know,” Yasmin said. “I don’t even know where he is.”

  “They’ll have made sure he’s OK, though, if they took him away?”

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you?” Yasmin said. She looked at Bony with eyes wide.

  “Well, I would think so, yeah.”

  “I tried to ring his mobile, but couldn’t get through,” Yasmin said. “Otherwise I’d have told him where we are.”

  “Let’s ring his home number now, before anything else,” Bony said. “We can speak to him or leave a message.”

  Bony reached for his mobile, which lay on the coffee table, and dialed one of the only two numbers he knew by heart. He put the phone on loudspeaker and then held it to his ear. It rang for about half a minute, before there was a click and somebody answered.

  “Rebecca?” said a small, fearful voice. “Is that you?”

  Bony and Yasmin looked at each other and winced.

  “Harry,” Bony said. “Hi, it’s—”

  But Harry had already hung up.

  “Harry’s phone calls are something to do with all of this,” Yasmin said, “but I can’t work it out.”

  “With all of what?” Bony asked. “Arthur passing out?”

  “Yeah.” Yasmin bit her lip. “Bony, Arthur came round the other night … God, it was only last night. Anyway, he came round to talk about that vision he’d had.”

  “Oh, right,” Bony said. He nodded. “Did he tell you he fancies you?”

  “What?” Yasmin exclaimed.

  “What?” Bony said, jumping at her sudden sharp tone and looking behind him. “You mean he didn’t?”

  “No! And I’m sure he doesn’t.”