by Gary Fry
Then there was only the encroaching dark, with the sea crashing against the wall in front of the concrete plateau at the foot of Jack’s garden.
He and Paul spent what remained of the evening trying to read again. His grandson had taken a new book from the luggage he’d brought along for the week, this one a shortish story about a disoriented man who discovered treasure in a remote location, but was unable to relocate it when he went traveling again. There were potentially millions of pounds at stake, but the sad truth was that without the goods, the adventurer had nothing. He spent all his savings trying to find the loot, but to no avail. The risk hadn’t paid off and the tale ended with him in poverty, dreaming of jewels.
Paul made a solid attempt at reading the text, and even though he stumbled a few times, Jack was more concerned about what would happen in the story than he was about difficulties of reading. He’d struggled to help his grandson interpret certain words, but again, this was of secondary concern to the plot’s conclusion, a bittersweet scene involving the hunter still wanting to hunt, which evoked sympathy because the guy knew he was rich but couldn’t produce the income, and pity because money was all he seemed to care about.
When it was time to go to bed that night, Jack hugged his grandson, hoping this elemental act would enliven his mind, which threatened to tumble into incoherence while sorting through all that had happened that day. One thing he’d failed to consider while exploring the sculpture outside was the taut atmosphere he’d experienced in the area more recently. Maybe, he thought, it had been so intense on this occasion that he’d been unable to perceive it, the way a serious illness grew dominant and made its sufferer forget what normal, predictable, take-for-granted health was like.
But then, thrusting aside all this material in his mind, he said to the boy, “Come along, then, Paul. Let’s get some sleep. I’m pretty sure we’re…in for no more surprises now.”
His grandson nodded, getting up from the chair on which he’d been sitting, watching more noisy shows on television (mercifully not The Squigglies). Before disappearing from the lounge, however, he came across to Jack, kissed him on one cheek, and said, “I’m scared, Granddad.”
“So…am I, Paul,” Jack replied, and with a paradoxical sense of relief, he realized he wasn’t referring to the ailment he believed was developing inside his poor, defenseless skull. But was the alternative prospect even worse? He knew he must remain strong for the boy, however. “I’ll be right beside you, in the next room. Try not to worry. If anything happens or you experience a bad dream, I’ll deal with it, okay? You can rely on your granddad. That’s what they’re for.”
Paul offered him a glance, as if to say: Well, in the absence of a father who cares, that will have to do. And the pity this look evoked in Jack made him think of Ruth, his hardworking daughter, who needed time alone to progress her job, without the complications of a spirited child. Jack also thought of Christine, his late wife, a woman who’d done almost everything for him, and since whose passing, he’d been forced to survive alone, making lunch and sewing up rips in clothing and Lord knew what other solitary tasks.
Once Paul had departed, Jack recalled pushing a needle through tough yet yielding material… Then he thought again about his existence and everything involved in that. All these matters are just parts of a full life, he reflected, the insight assaulting him without mercy: they’re components whose meaning is only established by binding them together.
Then, reflecting on language and the way it structured memory, like cocoons on a beach vulnerable to the inexorable tide, he retreated for bed…and feared what might visit overnight.
9
He dreamed of nothing tangible—no imagery, no unsettling intrusions; a dismaying void. In the blackness of his mind, he tried making shapes come to life, tiny strands composed of an elongated substance that waggled to and fro, bringing form to the frightening absence. But still there was nothing…just a howling emptiness whose sound was nothing more than subliminal.
He nonetheless contemplated abstract notions, the idea of a universe comprising more than the sum of its parts. There was no supernatural essence, no mind or spirit, controlling a multiplicity of wholes; just the wholes themselves, fighting for survival: brains struggling to remain coherent; families seeking unanimity; letters in search of an alphabet… Many of these thoughts struck Jack as surreal, but he also realized each was grounded in lived perception, in the moments of experience he and his grandson had shared. Jack wasn’t senile; he wasn’t even sick. Something had been attempting to invade his world, and he’d been the most proximate victim.
With these conclusions in mind, he sensed himself roused from sleep like a creature moving from one realm to another. His dream occupied a fragmented place, full of impossible events and nonsensical geometries; by contrast, the Earth, and Jack’s small part of it, was orderly and tamed, even carpentered in places. The things envied this, and sought to penetrate its truths by bringing many of its own: those mysterious cones; that amazing city in miniature; a fine display area in which it had dissected a creature, in an impromptu attempt to understand…
These notions accompanied Jack’s passage from slumber to wakefulness. Moments later, as often the case at such times, he struggled to retain the insights, and after sitting up in the surprisingly cloying dark, he recalled very little from his nocturnal imaginings.
It still was nighttime. Darkness lay around him like a premature burial. He reached out one arm, feeling blindly, hoping his hand wouldn’t snag on anything dangling from the ceiling, or worse, extended from the floor, its stringy form defying gravity… But again there was nothing, just chill air, which smelled like all the clean furniture filling the room and lacked the taut atmosphere Jack had grown used to recently.
He got out of bed and felt with his feet for the slippers he slotted underneath the mattress every night before retiring. He poked in his toes, tugging them over his heels by bending down and prising a fretful forefinger into each. That act reminded him of the great gouges he’d witnessed outside, before the sea had come along, as it had since time immemorial, to wipe out all evidence of the strange event Jack and his grandson had alone experienced.
With the thought of Paul passing through his mind, Jack wondered why he hadn’t turned over in bed and tried sleeping again? It was as if something had persuaded him to get up, tempting him to receive a treat or even thwart a disaster… This final thought did Jack no good at all, and brought back concerns he’d suppressed for days. His failing psyche struggling with the task, he hurried into the dark, hoping his speed wouldn’t lead to a foolish accident, like falling over and banging his head. Such an episode would surely result in a hospital visit, and perhaps medical tests and the intervention of social services… Jack didn’t want to compromise his new life out here, alone on the coast; he’d worked hard to achieve it, and although Christine was no longer around to share it, he could at least enjoy visits from Paul, the boy sleeping in the next room.
At any rate, Jack assumed his grandson was still where he’d retreated to last night. Where else could he be? Jack’s nocturnal vigil was surely nothing to do with Paul; Jack had just been feeling restless, and was that really a shock given everything he’d been through lately?
Nevertheless, he soon found the switch for his bedroom light and clicked it down with a relieved snap. The room was filled with nuclear light, like unexpectedly violent activities of the natural world. Jack briefly covered his eyes, flinching from this shock, but eventually looked again and saw only the door standing in front of him with its smart brass handle. He reached out, turned it, and stepped into the hallway.
A fan of pale illumination added shape to the passage, filling it to the edges, where no strandlike entities lurched and hunkered. That had all been a dream, of course, and although the recent spectacle on the scrubbed beach resisted dismissal in such a convenient manner, Jack could at least remind himself it hadn’t occurred inside his property. Every other tangible event had also
happened outside: the sketchy figure in his front garden, located on the Internet; the silent cones fashioned from sand; the mangled seagull, laid out for all onlookers to observe…
But he knew he shouldn’t entertain such unsettling recollections. He realized now what he was doing out of his room, creeping around the bungalow like a stealthy intruder: he wanted to make sure that his grandson was okay, that he was tucked up in the spare room as Jack had left him after kissing him good night no more than five hours ago.
Jack crossed to the spare room’s door, which was shut as tightly as his own had been. And then he eased it open with a taut fist.
Inside was darker than the hall passage, even though light continued to spill into there from his own bedroom entrance. Jack advanced, seeing only vague sketches of the boy’s bed in the cloying gloom ahead. Then Jack’s eyes adjusted and everything seemed to assume more definition—murky yet tangible, like a sea fret hanging over a port.
And that was when he saw what had befallen his grandson.
The multiple blackish strands had entered the room from the ground, mainly around the bed’s base. They were familiarly thin and as pliable as reinforced rubber, like metal softened with heat by some ingenious scientist. Each clacked against its companions with the sound of giant spider legs at work, slipping in and out of formation as if controlled by a blind, idiot force. There were about fifty of them, possibly more, all huddled over the mattress the way a human hand holds a solid object, but with far more digits, every one gripping for purchase. The way most had come together over the center of the bed suggested a joint approximately halfway up. Some had achieved this bend with a right angle, while others struggled with the shape, resorting to an awkward curve that strained their framework as the tip reached for its writhing peers. Conforming to a carpentered world was clearly still a challenge too many, and for some nebulous reason, this offered the on-looking, horrified Jack some hope.
After pacing forward with mounting panic, he saw his grandson trapped inside the impromptu rib cage of stringlike limbs. The boy was wide awake, his eyes bulging and his face pale, but fear had rendered him speechless. He had his hands clasped tightly together over his chest, as if this bodily posture could defend him against the worst of the things’ excesses.
But what did the entities want? Jack detected a vibrant humming sound coming from their insidious collective, as if the air around them had become charged with an intense version of that taut feeling he’d sensed outside. His mind immediately grew vague and distant, as if he’d struggle to interpret not only language on this occasion, but also visual imagery. But this was no illness, surely; he was simply being contaminated by invaders in his solitary home. They were seeking information, perhaps—knowledge about how people in this alternative world functioned.
Not just people, Jack reminded himself, his thoughts flinching away with horror. Then he recalled the seagull in the elaborate display amid that baroque sculpture on the beach. The things—surely after carving that amazing miniature city—must have demolished the bird, in the hope of seeing how its combined parts operated…and did they now plan to do the same with poor, restrained Paul?
Jack remembered thoughts about components and wholes, the way the first combined to make the second, but how the second couldn’t be reduced to a mere composite of the first. Something magical occurred when every element was in place, the way a fine book conjured stories into being, making readers temporarily forget it was composed solely of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters… By the same principle, a seagull was more than a skeleton, internal organs, wings and a beak. And a family was more than people connected by necessity.
Jack knew he had to combat the things…The Squigglies, his mind intervened; this was what they were, beings from another dimension, aspiring to become the rudimentary components of an alien method of communication; they might even be innocent in purpose… Nevertheless, Jack realized that to ensure his grandson’s safety, he must snap away these entities, freeing the boy from their prowling confines.
As Jack reached the bed, the multiple strands flinched and chattered with sentient unease, as if fearful or even paranoiac, like wild animals cornered by hunters. But was Jack the aggressor…or was that their role? He was unable to decide. He kept his gaze locked on Paul, who was looking back from his prison of half-formed shapes. For some reason, Jack imagined this multi-limbed trap as the boy’s dyslexia, holding him distant from the world at large, preventing him from fully escaping into a realm of meaning. Jack understood this feeling well, but he wasn’t ill, was he? His recent difficulties had just been these things leeching on him, the way a psychic force was reputed to drain the target of its scrutiny.
Anger animating his aging frame, Jack lashed out, grabbing hold of some of the strands, which felt both cold and hot to the touch. That made little sense, but nor did they in any conventional manner. They jerked away from his clutch, slipping in and out of his fists, until the space above the bed was little more than a sea of waving strings, like the constituent parts of an alphabet distorted by a diseased mind.
Then they began retreating. Either Jack had conveyed enough resistance or they’d never planned an attack in the first place. Might the dismembered seagull have been an exploratory mistake? Had this failure to understand the bird prevented them from trying anything similar again? Were the entities honorable scientists, arising from a different system of thought, yet sharing the same imperatives? They occupied an identical universe, a realm of time and space, and this surely dictated strategies they’d developed to achieve knowledge and control.
Jack was uncertain what alien presence had forced upon him such insight, but at present didn’t care. All that mattered was rescuing his grandson from the blackish, wavering objects. He grew so angry at one stage that he grabbed one of the strands so tightly its end broke off in his hand. He considered dropping the item, freeing himself up for more combat, but then noticed the things withdrawing, tugged back to their place of origin like needles pulled through tough fabric.
Moments later, as Jack grasped and groaned, stooping to hug Paul on the bed, the entities vanished, as if they’d never been there at all. And then darkness stole back into the bedroom, in all its reassuring normality.
10
Days passed, during which people came and went, many those Jack had recently contacted: police, journalists, representatives in charge of health and safety on the northeast beaches. Jack and a disarmingly enthusiastic Paul showed these authorities their photos of the cones made of sand, but could only describe what they’d seen the following day, the marvelous beach-wide sculpture with a thousand intricate features. They backed up their story with evidence from Google Maps, but one of the policemen—a dim-looking chap who looked all of eighteen years old—said, “That’s just a shadow of a wasted old tree, isn’t it?” Few others challenged the story, however, and it eventually made national headlines.
The only parts Jack and the boy had refused to elaborate upon were what had happened that night when grandfather had found grandson encaged by those weird beings. There’d been something…profound about this experience neither could articulate, as if it was beyond the reach of language, with its neat and orderly meanings. Whenever the issue arose, Jack would simply nod his head, and then the boy (before returning to his mother in West Yorkshire) would smile and nod in return. That was enough for both of them, and nothing else was said on the matter.
After all, Jack, alone again in his seaside bungalow, no longer suffered any difficulties with reading. He devoured novels and nonfiction alike, each with insatiable gusto. He read newspapers and journals, local history and scientific tomes. He even went online regularly to seek esoteric material, stuff perhaps best left in the realms of speculative fancy. And meanwhile, no words hampered him, or the letters that formed these words, like body parts constituting an animal or a person.
As for the things he and his grandson had encountered, Jack was still—weeks later now—no nearer the trut
h. Walking back and forth along the coastline, he realized the fretful atmosphere had diminished, replaced by a crisp coolness that stirred his frame into life. He wished Christine could have lived to experience this, the peace and communion with nature. Jack regularly stood on the beach, listening to the sea edging forward with its hissing fringe of froth. He was happy, with all the relative sorrow this rich feeling involved. He cooked and cleaned, exercised, watched television (even the occasional episode of his grandson’s inexplicably beloved The Squigglies), tended the garden, kept in regular touch with family (both virtually and in person, taking many coach trips inland), and generally enjoyed all aspects of life.
At the same time, however, like a worm hollowing out the heart of an apple, or a degenerative illness invading a brain, thoughts about his former visitors continued to burden him. He often found himself asking what they’d wanted here. Had they been friendly or otherwise? Jack remembered garish dreams involving Paul being probed and explored; he remembered the elaborate carvings, each unsettlingly arcane; he remembered that unfortunate seagull, divided into parts… Perhaps, he speculated, they’d wanted to understand inhabitants of this world, just as Jack wished to understand them. Had that huge sculpture been a model of their native cities, either life-sized or scaled to fit this modest beach? If Jack hadn’t attacked them that disturbing night, might they have done to his grandson what they’d done to the bird? And if that was true, had they realized what pain they’d cause…or had they been innocents, venturing into new territory, much like humans had while advancing into parts of the undiscovered world or jetting off into space?