He sprang away from the bed, bolted from the bedroom and ran out of the house without looking back.
She’s dead, she’s really dead. It hit him full force as he fled down the steps and into the garden. The stone path snaked out behind him, its tail eaten by the darkness gathering under the porch. Before him lay the remains of the back yard, a landscape that now seemed filled with skeletal trees and vines reaching impatiently toward the face of the rising moon. My mother’s dead. He tore down the path, a chill piercing his heart. Branches like bony fingers tried to snare his arms. He zigzagged and caromed off a tree trunk, dislodging the last of the dark, testicular fruit drooping and shriveling there. She’s dead and she’s never coming back not ever!
He hurried by the chicken coop, seeing the bobbing necks of the hens and roosters as they gawked with alarm at his passing. Their wings spread and beat out a flurry of feathers that were like snowflakes on the air. He could not escape their agate eyes. He paused long enough to open the pen and calm their squeaking. They assembled between his legs, covering his own ankles with their plumage.
“Shh,” he told them, “it’s all right, we’re all all right,” and did not believe it.
They observed him indifferently, the few remaining feathers on their scrawny bodies settling back into place.
His eyes filled with tears.
As he knelt one small chicken, his favorite, flew onto his knee. He stroked its piebald head and kissed its beak. The others tiptoed away to scratch at the hard dirt, and as the flock parted he saw a shape on the ground by the water trough.
It was the oldest and plumpest of the hens, lying on one side with her claws curled inward. Her feathers rippled and lifted.
He rose to a crouch and crept closer. He wondered how long she had been dead. It couldn’t have been very long, but already an army of ants had established a supply trail in and out of the open mouth, where the tongue protruded like a pink arrow.
He extended his arm to touch her, and immediately snatched his hand away as if she were hot. Damp feathers fell aside. The wrinkled skin was teeming with maggots, busily transforming the carcass into something he did not want to see.
He gagged and hid his face.
Who would take care of her chicks now? He reached behind the perch and found her nest. This time there were no peeps, no tiny pecks at his fingers. That was good. She had left no little ones behind. He felt the polished roundness of an egg. Gently he lifted it out.
The egg was smooth as porcelain but oddly soft. And cold. He cupped it gingerly in his hand and raised it to the dying light.
The shell was full-sized but not all of it had hardened properly. Part of the surface was nearly transparent, little more than a stretched membrane. He looked closer. Barely covered by the thin cellular wall was a distorted, malformed embryo. It was unlike any chick he had ever seen before, an error of nature mutated in vitro. Its congealed, elongated eye stared back at him through a delicate lace of veins.
William shuddered. Crying silently, he replaced the egg in the nest and covered it with straw. There, he thought, you won’t have anything to worry about now. Maybe it’s better this way, after all.
A cold wind blew through the trees. It whistled in from the front yard, catching and keening in the eaves of the house. Did something move there, just inside the screen porch? No, it couldn’t be. Grandma never got out of bed anymore. If anyone else were inside there would be a light showing somewhere.
Could it be—?
No. There was nothing, nothing. He told himself that. He dug his nails into his hands until his palms bled. What a baby you are. You’re afraid of—of—
There was a wailing sound. It blew in on the wind from the other side of the house.
He heard a commotion then, the dull clicking of heels on the sidewalk, and a scream. Somewhere a door slammed. The screaming did not stop.
He latched the chicken coop and hurried to the street.
At first nothing seemed out of place. The view from his gate was of the same houses, the roofs sagging under a dingy sky, the treetops jagged silhouettes against the horizon, their distended roots raising the pavement in uneven waves. There were the sunken boundary lines of cracked cement between the yards, only the reinforced security fence that began next door still tall and straight, porchlamps like the first stars of evening vibrating with oversized insects, Vern’s house across the street leaking spikes of yellow light.
But wait. There was movement in the bushes by Vern’s porch, a shaking out and a separating and then the stab of legs in the dimness.
Vern’s mother was already at the corner, huddled under a streetlamp with her face in her hands. The shape of her body blended with the shadows so that she might have stood there for hours before William noticed her. But now Vern’s older brother was running to bring her back to the house as the short bursts of screaming started again, tight and muffled by her knuckles.
William stepped off the curb.
The wailing at the end of the block became louder, rising and falling like a buzz saw, as a long car cut across the intersection and sped up the middle of the street. William jumped out of the way and saw that it was one of the dark military vehicles from the plant, like the one that had come to take his mother.
ECNALUBMA, it said across the front.
It dipped and braked and three men in uniforms hopped down and raced to Vern’s porch, a blur of equipment under their arms. The screen door flapped open. A moment later they reemerged carrying a litter, unfolded to support a bulky form. They were no longer in a hurry, and the sheet was drawn up all the way.
The screen door flapped again and Vern’s family followed, heads low, their feet scraping the rough cement. There was Vern’s sister Nan, two of the cousins from the next block, and Vern himself, so much shorter than the others. William looked for the stocky contour of Vern’s father, the broad shoulders and thick waist, but no one like that came out except for the chunky mound under the sheet.
William called out and waved until Vern spotted him. His friend didn’t wave back. His head was down between his shoulders and he was marching forward as though underwater.
Vern did not watch the men loading the gurney into the back of the van. The cousins waited solemnly a while longer, then went to help bring Vern’s mother back. She did not want to come. Her screams became a whimpering. When Vern did not move, William started across the street.
“Vern? Hey, Vern! What happened? Are you all right?”
One more figure came out of the house. William did not know who she could be. By some trick of light and shade the door did not appear to swing open for her, and yet there she was, following Vern like a tall shadow. She glided down the walkway behind him, a breeze filling her draped black veil.
William stopped.
Vern finally raised his eyes, saw William, and his face relaxed slightly. But he did not come forward.
The woman drifted ahead, her flowing garment enfolding Vern and then passing him as though he were not there. She floated away from them all and into the street, heading for the house where William now lived. The wispy black material covered her completely, almost wrapping her legs and feet as it trailed out behind her, and yet she did not hesitate at the broken curb. As the veil blew against her face William thought he saw something familiar in the shape of her features, but he could not be sure. He turned to watch her cross the humped blacktop and alight on the other sidewalk.
Vern said something at last, but his words were lost on the wind.
The woman approached Grandma’s house, only to bypass it in favor of the fenced-in area that began next door, not even slowing as she neared the high locked gate. Her face was still hidden by the veil, but William was sure that she was looking at him.
“No!”
Was Vern watching her, too? William looked back and saw his friend waving wildly, his arms raised in a railroader’s highsign.
“No, Willy! Don’t go in there ... stay here! Don’t ...!”
I
t was too late. He had to know.
When William turned again she was already through the gate. The edge of her veil slipped through the metal links and disappeared inside the compound.
Drawn by a feeling he could not name, William ignored the ambulance as it pulled slowly away, its siren now silenced, and followed the woman in black.
The entrance was heavily chained and padlocked, as if no one had gone in or out for a very long time. He could not slip through or under. He could scale the fence and the wall behind it if he used the links in the gate for toeholds, but the barbed wire at the top would be a problem. He disregarded the old warning signs posted around the perimeter, hooked his fingers into the ragged metal, and started climbing.
The barbs were sharp but he squeezed his eyes shut on the pain, rolled over the top as quickly as possible, and dropped down on the other side.
It wasn’t very far at all.
The sounds of life in the street, the tinkling wind that blew across the town, the lights going out in the rest of the world were all distractions cut off from him now. The deepening darkness was inviting, a cushion that broke his fall and called him to enter it at last.
Where had she gone?
There was no path for him to follow. As his eyes adjusted he made out the struts and crossbeams of an old support scaffolding, the flaking treads of an abandoned earthmoving tractor, the corroded shell of an amphibious tank, a hydraulic scoop, the segments of a conveyor belt, a teetering stack of old tires shot through with twiggy, hybrid weeds. Somewhere behind the tires a flickering like cold fire shone between collapsed sidewalls.
He got up from his hands and knees and made his way through the debris.
He passed a junked truck and came out into a small clearing. The moon was high above bowed tiers of rotting lumber, but it was a different light that beckoned him now.
He paused to get his bearings. The wall to his right might have been the fence along his grandmother’s yard, but how could he be sure? Serpentine foliage pressed up to the boards in an ever-expanding tide; soon the last property lines would disappear, swallowed by the unchecked growth. He padded on, placing one foot carefully in front of the other as unseen life forms scurried out of his way, large insects or small animals, rats, perhaps, or something like them.
He brushed a dented panel, releasing a shiver of rust and dirt that fell around him like heavy rain. It was the cab of an outsized reconnaissance vehicle, apparently designed to maneuver over rough terrain. The steel door creaked on its hinges and sent a reverberation through the rest of the machinery.
He covered his head. The driver’s seat was empty; the giant shift and brake levers were locked at odd angles, like the seized-up hands of a primitive timing device. He imagined that the vehicle might yet be capable of moving, inching forward to lead an assault under cover of darkness and establish a beachhead in occupied territory. That would explain the groaning he heard, loudest in the dead of night when everyone else was asleep, as though iron and steel were drawing relentlessly closer to the flimsy, unguarded barrier.
The rain of rust stopped. A last echo rang out. In the distant riverbed a population of bullfrogs resumed their Fitful chorus. He tried to set a course from their singing but it was no use. There were no landmarks in this place, no way to know that he would not end up where he started. Fear gripped him as a new sound began, a steady rhythm like the pounding of surf on a far shore. It was the beating of his own heart in his ears.
Help me, he thought, please! Somebody—
A shadow like the dark, gauzy hem of a long dress skipped over the blade of a forklift, backlighted for an instant by a soft flickering the color of static electricity, and vanished behind the gutted chassis.
Without hesitation he moved toward it.
There was a narrow passageway between piles of ancient brake drums and hubcaps. He pulled in his elbows and pushed through, and came out into the blue light.
At first it was like the pale glow of the phosphorescent stars he had pasted to his bedroom ceiling, only larger and brighter and spread out in a wide band like the Milky Way. Then he focused and saw a loose barricade of old canisters. They were taller and broader than oil drums and were marked with the same stenciled symbol he had seen on the signs outside, a circle divided into six wedges like a cut-up drawing of a pie. One of them had tumbled onto its side and probably leaked, because the lid was ajar and a heavy inner lining of chipped glass showed where the top had been. Directly in front of it the ground was bare and scorched, but behind the containers a tangle of skinny plants had taken root, and it was these that shimmered with a faint but unmistakable radiance.
On the ground before him, leading up to the cylinders and disappearing into the spray of shrubbery behind, was a series of elongated spots like ghostly footprints.
He placed his sneaker into one of them. The imprint was short and narrow but it fit him perfectly.
William started walking again.
His legs shook tall weeds, and a shower of pollenlike metallic dust settled on his skin. He looked at his hands, transfixed by their sparkling, and his toe thudded into one of the drums.
A few feet away, hidden only by the vegetation, there was an explosion of hysterical squealing and then a great thrashing, as if someone had taken a wrong step and plunged headlong into the darkness.
He swept the weeds aside.
There, sprawled on one side, was an enormous animal. It reminded him of the sows he had seen at the Fair in years past, and yet it was not one of their kind. It was much too large for any pen to hold, its snout thicker than his thigh, its huge underside rising and falling with peaceful regularity. It was black as coal from head to tail except for the immense belly, where now several smaller animals wriggled to regain position. Their fat shapes were stretched with translucent skin, their veins and capillaries aglow with a cold, unearthly light. Tiny silken hairs moved on their restless bodies, which were already pigmented in places with black spots that would soon toughen into a hide able to contain their new forms.
Does it talk? he wondered. Does it, really?
Awestruck, he stood and watched her suckling her hungry offspring. Then, stumbling desperately, he lunged forward into the glowing circle and flung himself at her teats, his hands feverishly pawing the air as he fought to gain a place there for himself.
... BESIDE THE SEASIDE, BESIDE THE SEA ... by Simon Clark
Simon Clark was born on April 20, 1958 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire—the alleged birthplace of Robin Hood—and currently lives with his wife and son in the South Yorkshire village of Adwick-le-street. A newcomer to this genre, Clark has had stories published in small-press magazines and has written an account of the life and work of the Welsh fantasist, Arthur Machen. In 1984-85 BBC Local Radio broadcast a series of Clark’s weird tales together with a radio play which he wrote, created the sound effects for, and acted all the parts. Recently he has completed a script for a half-hour pilot film entitled The Drowned Man for a small production company; shooting was on the east coast of England this past summer. Clark’s fascination with deep waters and whatever might inhabit them perhaps stems from his having almost drowned on three occasions. When he is not writing, and can muster enough courage, Clark likes to go skin-diving.
Note on Yorkshire dialect: “The” is usually silent in speech. In print it is usually represented as “t’ ” but this is unsatisfactory. The rhythm and many words of Yorkshire dialect come from the invading Vikings who settled in northern England.
Three-fifths of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean. From sand beach shallows to icy depths where a layer of salt water seven miles thick covers submerged mountain ranges, valleys, and the rusting hulks of sea-choked ships. The sea: The salt-water womb of life. Yet, an alien world of kelp jungles, silver-sided fish, stony-shelled mollusks and boiling, steam-winded whales.
Temperatures vary from a blood-warm surface in equatorial regions to the ice-thick waters of the arctic and antarctic. The two trade streams of water.
Invisible rivers of warm penetrate the cold. And icy fingers push deeply into the body of warmer seas. Along these currents drift the careless aquatic passengers of the oceans: Jellyfish, weed, kelp, seed pods, the flotsam and jetsam—the living and the dead.
In sweep the currents, with their bobbing free-riders, eventually reaching some coast to deliver their cargoes in the curling foam of surf.
The coastal town hung over the beach, almost lapping the water’s edge. It presented a facade of brightly colored lights, pulsing their lotus eater’s message into the evening. Crowds drifted along the promenade, occasionally caught in the eddies of smoke-filled bingo halls or drawn by the lure of an arcade, packed with whistling, banging, singing video games.
Pub doors rattled open. Yawning wide like thirsty mouths to admit a flood of bodies through dry throats; filling empty glass and disco-glittered bellies. The first record of the evening belched through the freshly beer-stained air and out into the dusk.
Where the land meets the sea, in the scummy wet divide of ocean and dry sand, the tide unloads its deep-sea cargo and retreats from the resort’s pleasure machine, sliding back in a rattle of pebbles. And by the sea-bitten wood breakwater, the pallbearer of the ocean collects and abandons its dead: Wet strands of brown leathery kelp, cracked shells, starfish, an oil-matted cormorant, the screw-shredded remains of a dolphin, the severed head of a conger eel and the scattered fragments of ten million corpses.
“I can’t,” said the girl, gazing out to where a darkening sky was fusing with a darkening sea. She sighed. “Not all night.”
The boy wrapped his arm about her waist. “Why not? You’re not back at school till next Monday.”
Her voice was soft. “I know ... But you know?”
He pulled her close. “There’s only me in the caravan till Thursday. Come on ... And we’ll go to the Cavern Disco by the harbor, tonight.”
The girl stretched; a decision made. “I don’t know. I’d like to.” And she began to walk toward the lifeboat slipway. Excited, he sensed her resolution. “Me dad left half a bottle of whisky in the caravan. We’ll ’ave that. He won’t mind ... Want a cig?”
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