by Peter Straub
What did we do, Ann and Lucas and I, in the fields of June, such a long time ago?
“It is easy to misinterpret the Great God,” writes de Vries. “If He represents the long slow panic in us which never quite surfaces, if He signifies our perception of the animal, the uncontrollable in us, He must also stand for that direct sensual perception of the world that we have lost by ageing—perhaps even by becoming human in the first place.”
Shortly after Ann’s death, I experienced a sudden, inexplicable resurgence of my sense of smell. Common smells became so distinct and detailed, I felt like a child again, every new impression astonishing and clear, my conscious self not yet the sore lump encysted in my own skull, as clenched and useless as a fist, impossible to modify or evict, as it was later to become. This was not quite what you should call memory; all I recollected in the smell of orange peel or ground coffee or rowan blossom was that I once had been able to experience things so powerfully. It was as if, before I could recover one particular impression, I had to rediscover the language of all impressions. But nothing further happened. I was left with an embarrassment, a ghost, a hyperesthesia of middle age. It was cruel and undependable; it made me feel like a fool. I was troubled by it for a year or two, and then it went away.
The Voice of the Beach
Ramsey Campbell
I
I met Neal at the station.
Of course I can describe it, I have only to go up the road and look, but there is no need. That isn’t what I have to get out of me. It isn’t me, it’s out there, it can be described. I need all my energy for that, all my concentration, but perhaps it will help if I can remember before that, when everything looked manageable, expressible, familiar enough—when I could bear to look out of the window.
Neal was standing alone on the small platform, and now I see that I dare not go up the road after all, or out of the house. It doesn’t matter, my memories are clear, they will help me hold on. Neal must have rebuffed the station-master, who was happy to chat to anyone. He was gazing at the bare tracks, sharpened by June light, as they cut their way through the forest—gazing at them as a suicide might gaze at a razor. He saw me and swept his hair back from his face, over his shoulders. Suffering had pared his face down, stretched the skin tighter and paler over the skull. I can remember exactly how he looked before. “I thought I’d missed the station,” he said, though surely the station’s name was visible enough, despite the flowers that scaled the board. If only he had! “I had to make so many changes. Never mind. Christ, it’s good to see you. You look marvellous. I expect you can thank the sea for that.” His eyes had brightened, and he sounded so full of life that it was spilling out of him in a tumble of words, but his handshake felt like cold bone. I hurried him along the road that led home and to the He was beginning to screw up his eyes at the sunlight, and I thought I should get him inside; presumably headaches were among his symptoms. At first the road is gravel, fragments of which always succeed in working their way into your shoes. Where the trees fade out as though stifled by sand, a concrete path turns aside. Sand sifts over the gravel; you can hear the gritty conflict underfoot, and the musing of the sea. Beyond the path stands this crescent of bungalows. Surely all this is still true. But I remember now that the bungalows looked unreal against the burning blue sky and the dunes like embryo hills; they looked like a dream set down in the piercing light of June.
“You must be doing well to afford this.” Neal sounded listless, envious only because he felt it was expected. If only he had stayed that way! But once inside the bungalow he seemed pleased by everything—the view, my books on show in the living-room bookcase, my typewriter displaying a token page that bore a token phrase, the Breughel prints that used to remind me of humanity. Abruptly, with a moody eagerness that I hardly remarked at the time, he said, “Shall we have a look at the beach?”
There, I’ve written the word. I can describe the beach, I must describe it, it is all that’s in my head. I have my notebook which I took with me that day. Neal led the way along the gravel path. Beyond the concrete turn-off to the bungalows the gravel was engulfed almost at once by sand, despite the thick ranks of low bushes that had been planted to keep back the sand. We squeezed between the bushes, which were determined to close their ranks across the gravel.
Once through, we felt the breeze, whose waves passed through the marram grass that spiked the dunes. Neal’s hair streamed back, pale as the grass. The trudged dunes were slowing him down, eager as he was. We slithered down to the beach, and the sound of the unfurling sea leapt closer, as though we’d awakened it from dreaming. The wind fluttered, trapped in my ears, leafed through my notebook as I scribbled the image of wakening and thought with an appalling innocence: perhaps I can use that image. Now we were walled off from the rest of the world by the dunes, faceless mounds with unkempt green wigs, mounds almost as white as the sun.
Even then I felt that the beach was somehow separate from its surroundings: introverted, I remember thinking. I put it down to the shifting haze which hovered above the sea, the haze which I could never focus, whose distance I could never quite judge. From the self-contained stage of the beach the bungalows looked absurdly intrusive, anachronisms rejected by the geo-morphological time of sand and sea. Even the skeletal car and the other debris, half engulfed by the beach near the coast road, looked less alien. These are my memories, the most stable things left to me, and I must go on. I found today that I cannot go back any further.
Neal was staring, eyes narrowed against the glare, along the waste of beach that stretched in the opposite direction from the coast road and curved out of sight. “Doesn’t anyone come down here? There’s no pollution, is there?”
“It depends on who you believe.” Often the beach seemed to give me a headache, even when there was no glare—and then there was the way the beach looked at night. “Still, I think most folk go up the coast to the resorts. That’s the only reason I can think of.”
We were walking. Beside us the edge of the glittering sea moved in several directions simultaneously. Moist sand, sleek as satin, displayed shells which appeared to flash patterns, faster than my mind could grasp. Pinpoint mirrors of sand gleamed, rapid as Morse. My notes say this is how it seemed.
“Don’t your neighbors ever come down?”
Neal’s voice made me start. I had been engrossed in the designs of shell and sand. Momentarily I was unable to judge the width of the beach: a few paces, or miles? I grasped my sense of perspective, but a headache was starting, a dull impalpable grip that encircled my cranium. Now I know what all this meant, but I want to remember how I felt before I knew.
“Very seldom,” I said. “Some of them think there’s quicksand.” One old lady, sitting in her garden to glare at the dunes like Canute versus sand, had told me that warning notices kept sinking. I’d never encountered quicksand, but I always brought my stick to help me trudge.
“So I’ll have the beach to myself.”
I took that to be a hint. At least he would leave me alone if I wanted to work. “The bungalow people are mostly retired,” I said. “Those who aren’t in wheelchairs go driving. I imagine they’ve had enough of sand, even if they aren’t past walking on it.” Once, further up the beach, I’d encountered nudists censoring themselves with towels or straw hats as they ventured down to the sea, but Neal could find out about them for himself. I wonder now if I ever saw them at all, or simply felt that I should.
Was he listening? His head was cocked, but not toward me. He’d slowed, and was staring at the ridges and furrows of the beach, at which the sea was lapping. All at once the ridges reminded me of convolutions of the brain, and I took out my notebook as the grip on my skull tightened. The beach as a subconscious, my notes say: the horizon as the imagination—sunlight set a ship ablaze on the edge of the world, an image that impressed me as vividly yet indefinably symbolic—the debris as memories, half-buried, half-comprehensible. But then what were the bungalows, perched above the dunes like b
oxes carved of dazzling bone?
I glanced up. A cloud had leaned toward me. No, it had been more as though the cloud were rushing at the beach from the horizon, dauntingly fast. Had it been a cloud? It had seemed more massive than a ship. The sky was empty now, and I told myself that it had been an effect of the haze—the magnified shadow of a gull, perhaps.
My start had enlivened Neal, who began to chatter like a television wakened by a kick. “It’ll be good for me to be alone here, to get used to being alone. Mary and the children found themselves another home, you see. He earns more money than I’ll ever see, if that’s what they want. He’s the head of the house type, if that’s what they want. I couldn’t be that now if I tried, not with the way my nerves are now.” I can still hear everything he said, and I suppose that I knew what had been wrong with him. Now they are just words.
“That’s why I’m talking so much,” he said, and picked up a spiral shell, I thought to quiet himself.
“That’s much too small. You’ll never hear anything in that.”
Minutes passed before he took it away from his ear and handed it to me. “No?” he said.
I put it to my ear and wasn’t sure what I was hearing. No, I didn’t throw the shell away, I didn’t crush it underfoot; in any case, how could I have done that to the rest of the beach? I was straining to hear, straining to make out how the sound differed from the usual whisper of a shell. Was that it seemed to have a rhythm that I couldn’t define, or that it sounded shrunken by distance rather than cramped by the shell? I felt expectant, entranced—precisely the feeling I’d tried so often to communicate in my fiction, I believe. Something stooped toward me from the horizon. I jerked, and dropped the shell.
There was nothing but the dazzle of sunlight that leapt at me from the waves. The haze above the sea had darkened, staining the light, and I told myself that was what I’d seen. But when Neal picked up another shell I felt uneasy. The grip on my skull was very tight now. As I regarded the vistas of empty sea and sky and beach my expectancy grew oppressive, too imminent, no longer enjoyable.
“I think I’ll head back now. Maybe you should as well,” I said, rummaging for an uncontrived reason, “just in case there is quicksand.”
“All right. It’s in all of them,” he said, displaying an even smaller shell to which he’d just listened. I remember thinking that his observation was so self-evident as to be meaningless.
As I turned toward the bungalows the glitter of the sea clung to my eyes. After-images crowded among the debris. They were moving; I strained to make out their shape. What did they resemble? Symbols—hieroglyphs? Limbs writhing rapidly, as if in a ritual dance? They made the debris appear to shift, to crumble. The herd of faceless dunes seemed to edge forward; an image leaned toward me out of the sky. I closed my eyes, to calm their antics, and wondered if I should take the warnings of pollution more seriously.
We walked toward the confusion of footprints that climbed the dunes. Neal glanced about at the sparkling of sand. Never before had the beach so impressed me as a complex of patterns, and perhaps that means it was already too late. Spotlighted by the sun, it looked so artificial that I came close to doubting how it felt underfoot.
The bungalows looked unconvincing too. Still, when we’d slumped in our chairs for a while, letting the relative dimness soothe our eyes while our bodies guzzled every hint of coolness, I forgot about the beach. We shared two liters of wine and talked about my work, about his lack of any since graduating.
Later I prepared melon, salads, water ices. Neal watched, obviously embarrassed that he couldn’t help. He seemed lost without Mary. One more reason not to marry, I thought, congratulating myself.
As we ate he kept staring out at the beach. A ship was caught in the amber sunset: a dream of escape. I felt the image less deeply than I’d experienced the metaphors of the beach; it was less oppressive. The band around my head had faded.
When it grew dark Neal pressed close to the pane. “What’s that?” he demanded.
I switched out the light so that he could see. Beyond the dim humps of the dunes the beach was glowing, a dull pallor like moonlight stifled by fog. Do all beaches glow at night? “That’s what makes people say there’s pollution,” I said.
“Not the light,” he said impatiently. “The other things. What’s moving?”
I squinted through the pane. For minutes I could see nothing but the muffled glow. At last, when my eyes were smarting, I began to see forms thin and stiff as scarecrows, jerking into various contorted poses. Gazing for so long was bound to produce something of the kind, and I took them to be after-images of the tangle, barely visible, of bushes.
“I think I’ll go and see.”
“I shouldn’t go down there at night,” I said, having realized that I’d never gone to the beach at night and that I felt a definite, though irrational, aversion to doing so.
Eventually he went to bed. Despite all his travelling, he’d needed to drink to make himself sleepy. I heard him open his bedroom window, which overlooked the beach. There is so much still to write, so much to struggle through, and what good can it do me now?
II
I had taken the bungalow, one of the few entries in my diary says, to give myself the chance to write without being distracted by city life—the cries of the telephone, the tolling of the doorbell, the omnipresent clamor—only to discover, once I’d left it behind, that city life was my theme. But I was a compulsive writer: if I failed to write for more than a few days I became depressed. Writing was the way I overcame the depression of not writing. Now writing seems to be my only way of hanging on to what remains of myself, of delaying the end.
The day after Neal arrived, I typed a few lines of a sample chapter. It wasn’t a technique I enjoyed—tearing a chapter out of the context of a novel that didn’t yet exist. In any case, I was distracted by the beach, compelled to scribble notes about it, trying to define the images it suggested. I hoped these notes might build into a story. I was picking at the notes in search of their story when Neal said, “Maybe I can lose myself for a bit in the countryside.”
“Mm,” I said curtly, not looking up.
“Didn’t you say there was a deserted village?”
By the time I directed him I would have lost the thread of my thoughts. The thread had been frayed and tangled, anyway. As long as I was compelled to think about the beach I might just as well be down there. I can still write as if I don’t know the end, it helps me not to think of “I’ll come with you,” I said.
The weather was nervous. Archipelagos of cloud floated low on the hazy sky, above the sea; great Rorschach blots rose from behind the slate hills, like dissolved stone. As we squeezed through the bushes, a shadow came hunching over the dunes to meet us. When my foot touched the beach a moist, shadowy chill seized me, as though the sand disguised a lurking marsh. Then sunlight spilled over the beach, which leapt into clarity.
I strode, though Neal appeared to want to dawdle. I wasn’t anxious to linger; after all, I told myself, it might rain. Glinting mosaics of grains of sand changed restlessly around me, never quite achieving a pattern. Patches of sand, flat shapeless elongated ghosts, glided over the beach and faltered, waiting for another breeze. Neal kept peering at them as though to make out their shapes.
Half a mile along the beach the dunes began to sag, to level out. The slate hills were closing in. Were they the source of the insidious chill? Perhaps I was feeling the damp; a penumbra of moisture welled up around each of my footprints. The large wet shapes seemed quite unrelated to my prints, an effect which I found unnerving. When I glanced back, it looked as though something enormous was imitating my walk.
The humidity was almost suffocating. My head felt clamped by tension. Wind blundered booming in my ears, even when I could feel no breeze. Its jerky rhythm was distracting because indefinable. Gray cloud had flooded the sky; together with the hills and the thickening haze above the sea, it caged the beach. At the edge of my eye the convolutions of th
e beach seemed to writhe, to struggle to form patterns. The insistent sparkling nagged at my mind.
I’d begun to wonder whether I had been blaming imagined pollution for the effects of heat and humidity—I was debating whether to turn back before I grew dizzy or nauseous—when Neal said, “Is that it?”
I peered ahead, trying to squint the dazzle of waves from my eyes. A quarter of a mile away the hills ousted the dunes completely. Beneath the spiky slate a few uprights of rock protruded from the beach like standing stones. They glowed sullenly as copper through the haze; they were encrusted with sand. Surely that wasn’t the village.
“Yes, that’s it,” Neal said, and strode forward.
I followed him, because the village must be further on. The veil of haze drew back, the vertical rocks gleamed unobscured, and I halted bewildered. The rocks weren’t encrusted at all; they were slate, gray as the table of rock on which they stood above the beach. Though the slate was jagged, some of its gaps were regular: windows, doorways. Here and there walls still formed corners. How could the haze have distorted my view so spectacularly?
Neal was climbing rough steps carved out of the slate table. Without warning, as I stood confused by my misperception, I felt utterly alone. A bowl of dull haze trapped me on the bare sand. Slate, or something more massive and vague, loomed over me. The kaleidoscope of shells was about to shift; the beach was ready to squirm, to reveal its pattern, shake off its artificiality. The massive looming would reach down, and
My start felt like a convulsive awakening. The table was deserted except for the fragments of buildings. I could hear only the wind, baying as though its mouth was vast and uncontrollable. “Neal,” I called. Dismayed by the smallness of my voice, I shouted, “Neal.”
I heard what sounded like scales of armor chafing together—slate, of course. The gray walls shone lifelessly, cavitied as skulls; gaping windows displayed an absence of faces, of rooms. Then Neal’s head poked out of half a wall. “Yes, come on,” he said. “It’s strange.”