The Thing on the Shore (10 page)

Nobody said anything.

“C-sat,” Artemis said, “as you all know, is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction—or
C-sat
—is an essential measure of our performance. We can't forget about customer satisfaction.”

“So the advisers here are simultaneously pushing for payment, keeping their calls as short as possible, and trying
to ensure that all the customers are satisfied?” Bracket asked.

“Yes,” said Artemis. “Don't you think they're capable? Are you telling me that they don't have the right attitude? Actually, speaking of advisers, we need to lose a few—to save money.”

“We've always focused on the … on the C-sat,” said Bracket. “In the past, we've found that the shorter the call, the less likely the customer is to be satisfied, because the issue won't have been investigated thoroughly.”

“To me that implies that the advisers are not of a high enough caliber,” said Artemis, staring down at Bracket.

“They're of a
very
high caliber,” said Bracket, feeling flushed. “But it doesn't matter how high a caliber they are if they're to be set two contradictory objectives. It just won't work.”

Artemis stared at Bracket for a moment longer. “We'll take this offline,” he said abruptly. “We'll park it. I want to see you after the meeting, Bracket. Just drop it for now. OK?”

Bracket nodded. Suddenly ashamed of losing his temper, he couldn't bear to make eye contact with anybody, so dropped his gaze to the table.

“Did you say something about redundancies?” Kat asked Artemis.

“Yes,” Artemis said. “Yes, I did. There will have to be redundancies. This ship is simply carrying too much weight, and some of it is dead. We have to dump that dead weight or we will sink. It is very simple.”

“How will it be decided? And how many will have to go?”

“I will decide,” Artemis replied, “based upon performance metrics. In two months' time, the lowest-scoring twenty percent of the workforce will be dropped.”

“Twenty percent?” Sally repeated faintly.

“Yes,” Artemis confirmed.

Bracket didn't really want to hear any more. He found himself looking out of the window, his awareness of the meeting around him turned down to nothing. When, completely unexpectedly, the bright white sky started hurling raindrops like ball-bearings against the glass and Artemis jumped away from it and swore, Bracket reached a decision. He would just keep his mouth shut and do what he was told. He would stop caring about whether or not it worked. He would stop worrying. He would stop thinking altogether. These hours were not his, so why pretend otherwise?

Artemis waited at the call center for the rain to stop before making a break for it and heading back to the hotel. The night was cold and a sharp breeze blew in from the sea, causing the yachts in the marina to chatter and clack like loosely-boned skeletons.

The Waverley Hotel was a 300-year-old building with an impressive Georgian façade that had been painted an unfortunate shade of beige. Artemis stood on the opposite side of Tangier Street and looked up at all four stories, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his long black coat. Some of the large rectangular windows were lit up, and the place looked extraordinarily welcoming beneath the rolling waves of black cloud that broke across the dull silver of the sky above. He crossed the road and entered the lobby, barely glancing at the tall, sleek young woman on reception, and headed straight through to the bar.

The carpet in both lobby and bar was red, mostly, featuring a busy pattern of large, interlocking diamonds.
The chairs and bar stools were upholstered in red velvety stuff. The curtains were also red. The lower parts of the walls were paneled in some kind of dark wood, above which there was beige wallpaper. The bar was an almost perfectly square booth located right in the center of the square room. The gray-haired, smartly dressed man behind the bar nodded to Artemis.

“A Midori and lemonade,” said Artemis. “A double Midori, actually.”

The barman didn't say anything as he prepared the drink. Apart from the two of them, the room was empty. Artemis counted out his change and placed it on the bar while he waited. Once his drink was ready, he picked it up and went and sat in a corner, placing his mobile phone on the table in front of him. He drank up quickly, wishing he'd thought to ask for a stirrer. By the time his phone rang, he'd nearly finished it but the thick liqueur was still mostly lying in the bottom of the glass, not having had the chance to affect him in the slightest. They were ringing him earlier than he expected. He had planned to be secure in the privacy of his hotel room. He measured his breathing, cleared his throat, then picked up his phone and answered it.

“Artemis speaking,” he said.

“Artemis,” responded the voice at the other end of the line. The voice was distorted by faint clicks and beeps, which sounded like the noises dial-up modems make when connecting. It was an old, phlegmy voice—not just croaky but rough and animalistic. “We believe we are communicating with the Interstice. Expect contact.”

“What exactly is required of me?”

“That is as yet unclear,” said the voice.

“Thank you,” said Artemis. But, even as he was speaking, the line had gone dead. He downed the rest of his bright green drink, swept out of the bar, through the lobby, and out of the hotel. He turned immediately right and headed north up Tangier Street, involuntarily sneering at a bingo hall, and stopped in front of a pizza place with an ugly, incongruous yellow and black façade. He ordered himself a sixteen-inch Beast Feast, then waited outside in the slight drizzle until the Turkish proprietor called him back in once it was ready. Looking further north up Tangier Street he could see the yellow glow of the Tesco petrol station staining the darkening night. Damnable little town with its wind and rain and sandstone and its shrieking seagulls! He would wake up through the night, sweating, disturbed by the note of pain in their constant cries. He would wake up to the sound of the seagulls, and the sound of the sea, and he would feel like his lonely little box of a room was perched right on a cliff edge overhanging the ocean, and was poised to drop at any moment, the rock beneath him being eroded by the waves. He would get out of bed and look out of the window, just to reassure himself, and would see seagulls wheeling against a black sky, lit up like yellow sparks by the twenty-four-hour glow of the nearby supermarket.

It drifted up, as if propelled by the cloud of rotten filth and blood that it had suddenly released from the thin, white, bulging skin of its underside. The brown cloud billowed outward in murky waves. The scent of it—the stink—would inevitably draw sharks and other creatures, but the thing had nothing to fear from such scavengers. They would only be interested in the matter that it had left behind.

It was not floating at a particularly great depth, but the water beneath it was incredibly deep. It hovered there in a dark blue void. If it had possessed a human mind, it would no doubt have experienced fear at the blankness below, but it did not.

Above was a slightly paler, brighter expanse of water, the different shade indicative—the only indication—of the presence of the sun. That was the direction in which
the thing moved. That was the beginning of the journey that would take it to Drigg.

Blind, pale, bulbous and hulking, the thing slowly rose up.

The shower sprayed water on to the tiles, washing little black worms out into the bath tub. Arthur kept having to lift his feet so that the worms could float on past them and into the plughole without touching him. He still made a point of killing any that were already visible before turning on the shower, but had resigned himself to the fact that there was an inexhaustible supply of the bastards lurking either in between or behind the tiles. It didn't help that little flakes of grout fell out, leaving sinister black holes, every time he tried giving the tiles a clean. The water would get in there and rot the walls and cause damp, no doubt thus creating the perfect environment for these creatures to live and breed in. Not only that, but these holes provided the openings from which the worms crept once the shower was turned on. The more holes there were, the more worms there would be.

Arthur was even thinking about the possibility of retiling the wall completely when he felt something
tickling his foot. He looked down and saw one of the bugs clinging on to the little toe of his right foot. He shivered slightly and bent down to flick it away, but the water streaming from his fingers dislodged it, and it slipped in between his toes.

The first ripple of revulsion caused Arthur's body to quiver, but the second caused outright panic. He could feel the creature squirming against his skin, he was sure, and the shower seemed to be cooling down. He lifted his foot and shook it vigorously, but couldn't tell whether the worm was still there. He tried to bring his foot up behind him, twisting his head around to examine the sole, but found himself hopping about ridiculously on his other foot, his right knee brushing the shower curtain, and realized just how slippery the surface of the bath was. Suddenly he lost his balance and fell, smacking his elbow on the rim of the tub and hauling down the curtain as he grabbed it for support. He gave a loud cry, the shooting pains in his elbow blanking out everything else, and then his entire arm went numb. The shower head had been knocked askew and was spraying cold water out across the bathroom floor. Arthur imagined he could feel the worms moving all around him and he scrambled to his feet. Clambering out of the bath, he expected his father might come to see if he was OK.

Harry didn't come to see if he was OK.

“I was on the phone to your mum,” Harry explained, pleadingly. “She was upset. I heard all the noise, but I couldn't just—”

“You were
not
on the phone to Mum!” Arthur shouted, slamming his mug down on the worktop. “You know you weren't!”

“I … I
was
!” Harry said, and Arthur felt sickened to recognize that frail stammer from the numerous recorded calls he had listened to at work. Harry kept shaking and scratching the back of his hands. “And … and anyway, I don't know what you're talking about, going on about these worms. What worms? I … I've never seen any!”

“The
worms
,” Arthur said, between gritted teeth. His eyes grew wet. “I've told you about them before, Dad.”

“Son,” Harry said, looking concerned, “I keep telling you, there are no worms in there.”

Arthur looked down. His wet hair flopped in front of his face. He was still leaning against the worktop. “You just can't see them because you don't wear your glasses when you're in there,” he said.

“That's not the case,” Harry protested. “I think you just imagine them.”

“No, I don't,” said Arthur. “Go and look! Go and look at them!” He pointed upward, at the ceiling. “They're still in there! Go and see!”

“I've been and looked,” Harry said. “I can't see anything.”

“But with your fucking glasses on!” Arthur yelled.

Harry lowered his head at that, and started scratching more vigorously at the backs of his hands. Red blotches had appeared on his face. It was the first time he'd ever heard Arthur swear.

“No,” Harry breathed. “You imagine them.”

“I don't imagine them. You imagine Mum, though.”

“That's different. I've already explained. I talk to her over the telephone.”

“Put your glasses on,” Arthur insisted. “Put your glasses on.”

“No.” Harry was shaking his head. He backed away. “You're going to be late for work,” he said, and then he turned and left the room.

Harry had suffered poor eyesight for a very long time. For as long as Arthur could remember, his father had worn very thick glasses. At work, Harry needed all onscreen text to be written in font size twenty. Similarly, he needed all of the computer programs to be displayed at twice their normal size. If anybody passing Arthur's desk glanced over his shoulder as he checked his emails, it would be painfully obvious to them that all of the email messages were from Arthur's father, all of them asking him for help.

Arthur got to work just on time. He nodded to the new security guard on the reception desk—one of several new Interext people working shifts to cover the desk twenty-four hours a day—and then he stopped dead.

The bottom drawer of the guard's desk was open and a liter bottle of whisky was clearly visible.

Arthur looked briefly at the security guard, now deep in conversation with a courier, and continued up the stairs before the guard realized that Arthur had spotted the
bottle. Arthur shook his head as he went, and grinned. It was the little things that made the days bearable.

He nodded in acknowledgment to several people as he walked past their desks, but couldn't bring himself to talk. He was relieved, in a way, to notice that Tiffany—who sat opposite him—looked pretty miserable. When she was in a good mood she would babble on excitedly about anything and everything, and today he just wasn't in the mood to feign any degree of interest.

It was only once he'd sat down that he sensed just how miserable she really was. Her bloodshot eyes were surrounded by tired, purple-looking skin, and she kept muttering to herself.

“Are you OK, Tiffany?” Arthur asked finally.

She looked up, as if only just noticing his presence, and smiled faintly before she shook her head. “They've locked up my Ollie …” she explained, and for a moment her voice broke. “And the bastards have thrown us all on to the incoming, because there are so many calls queuing.” She started crying.