The Thing on the Shore (37 page)

Artemis lay motionless, face down in the creeping life, but Bony was still beating at him, his face now a mask, streaked with blood and the black stuff.

“Yasmin,” said a voice. It sounded like whoever was speaking was speaking with their mouth full.

She couldn't see who had spoken. “Hello?” Yasmin said, standing up. She realized suddenly that tears were pouring from her eyes, and that she was shaking all over.

“Here, Yasmin,” said the voice. “Here, on the desk.”

After a moment Yasmin saw. There was not much to see. Just a few pale inches of skin, and a vaguely human shape beneath a coat of filth and wriggling worms.

“It's Arthur,” the shape said, and a gobbet of wriggling creatures was spat out along with the words.

“Oh no,” Yasmin gasped. “Oh my God, Arthur.” She started moving toward him, distractedly brushing things off her own body as she did so. But then she halted. “Arthur,” she said. “I'm sorry. I'll be back … Just wait a moment.”

She looked back at the circle on the projector screen and saw, with satisfaction, that the organic substance that had taken over the rest of the space was now flowing into the circle as well. And, unless her senses were totally fucked, things now seemed to be moving a little less vigorously. Things were slowing down, maybe even somehow receding.

Yasmin made her way back to the window and stared out of it for a moment before nodding briefly to herself and returning to Arthur. She started to scrape matted clumps from his body, starting with his head.

“What was it?” Arthur asked. “Where did you go?”

“Nothing,” Yasmin said, her voice subdued and faltering, even to her own ears. “I went nowhere.”

“These things are letting go of me,” Arthur croaked. His voice, too, was weak, and his words seemed strangely formed, as if he were just remembering how to talk. “The … things … that were holding me are letting go. They're relaxing a bit. I can move again. Thank you, Yasmin. I can move.”

He pivoted around, swinging his legs down from the surface of the desk. He swayed on his feet, till Yasmin grabbed hold of his shoulders. “OK?” she inquired.

“Yeah,” he said. “Thank you, Yasmin.”

“We need to go now,” she said.

“Bony!” Arthur shouted—or, rather, tried to shout. It was a strange sound but Bony appeared to hear it. He was just standing over Artemis's body, staring down at it, but now looked up and seemed to stretch, almost as if he had just woken up. As he turned around, he looked lost and confused, and sick. He had dropped the cricket bat.

“Come on, Bony,” Yasmin said.

Bony merely nodded. It was difficult to differentiate him from the hellish backdrop against which he stood.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Arthur ducked behind the security desk.

Bony, following, grasped the handle of the cricket bat and looked around warily. “Where are the guards?” he asked.

“They're not here,” Yasmin said. “They must have recovered and run off. They maybe weren't even knocked out. People are tough.”

“Recovered?” Bony mused, quietly. “You think?”

Arthur pulled open the drawers of the security desk, one after the other, until he found the bottle of whisky that he had spotted previously. Unscrewing the cap, he sprinkled it liberally around the foyer, before hurling the bottle itself at the stacks of boxes containing printer paper stored beneath the stairs. Bony did the rest with his lighter.

The flames spread quickly.

*

Yasmin and Bony watched the fire take hold, having unthinkingly put their arms around each other. Arthur looked blankly at the smoke. The black smoke. He could see, over to the south, the green eye of the lighthouse. It blinked on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off, and on.

Yasmin did not tell either of them what she had seen from the window. She did not tell them how the disturbance in the sea had spread, so that the ocean was jumping and spitting and boiling and had turned white from the harbor out to the horizon. She did not tell them about seeing a red cast to the thick, heavy clouds that had already gathered. Nor did she tell them that she had seen the torso of a massively tall figure rising up from the immense waves that broke against the harbor wall beside the lighthouse. A vivid humanoid silhouette, spindle thin, from which the red light gleamed as if its surface were reflective, its unpleasantly flexible arms terminating in clawlike hands with fingers that seemingly tapered into needles.

It had wrapped one hand around the lighthouse, and with the other it had pointed at her.

When she had returned to the window, after spoiling Artemis's ritual, she had seen the huge thing staggering backward, a mass of writhing tentacles having erupted from its face, and then slipping back beneath the surface of the sea.

*

She looked over at the lighthouse again, following the direction of Arthur's gaze. The green light shone regularly.
On
, and then
off
, and then
on
.

Most species of whale will sink when they die. They are heavy creatures of great density. Some, though, contain enough blubber to remain afloat, so when dead, they stay near the surface of the ocean, moving with the currents of the water in which they are suspended.

Like any other living creature, when a whale dies it starts to decompose and fill up with gas. Those whale carcasses that float thus become rotund, Zeppelin-like affairs, over time—balloons of skin and blubber inflated with gas and liquid matter, their skeletons lost and concealed somewhere deep within.

Eventually the skin ruptures, so the skeleton and rotten internal organs drift away from the outer layers of the whale, sinking as they drift, to be eventually eaten by sharks and other sea-creatures. The skin, however, buoyed by the collagen of the blubber, bobs to the top of the ocean, and can stay there indefinitely. Normally the blubber floats there until, weathered and twisted and
turned inside out by the ceaseless battering of the waves, it washes up on a lonely beach as something unidentifiable and mysterious. It usually causes excitement—whenever this happens, people assume they have discovered something fantastic, something unusual, something new. But it is just part of the process of death; just a physical product of the physical process of something dying—something beautiful dying in the depths of our world and briefly disturbing the surface.

Arthur rested his forehead on the desk. Seven more hours. Seven more fucking hours. Seven more frustratingly difficult, stressful, boring, confusing, draining, depressing,
identical
fucking hours. And then what? Bony and Yasmin would be out, but they would be together, and that whole relationship made Arthur feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was just jealousy, but he couldn't shake the impression that Yasmin's self-esteem was floundering, no,
plummeting
in the face of Bony's bewildering attentions.

Outside, it was raining. Inside, the air was busy with a thousand passive-aggressive responses, questions and excessively polite explanations. Like people constantly digging holes and filling them back in again. Trying to serve horrible customers using systems that didn't work, following processes that didn't make sense, based on policies the origins of which everybody had forgotten. When anybody asked for help, they found out that very few people
really understood anything at all, but despite that, everybody kept on trying.

Lack of conscientiousness was not the problem. People were so conscientious. People were so conscientious that they did not sleep at night; instead they squirmed around in their beds with battleship-colored numbers and screens flashing through their heads. They answered their home phones with their script. They wept in the mornings from thinking about that one particular customer who they knew they couldn't help. Maybe everybody was just pathetic, right? Arthur didn't know. He really didn't know. What he did know was that everybody was gray-faced and heavy-lidded and, he imagined, thinking desperately about coffee or chocolate or TV.

The fire had been treated as arson. Harry was widely held responsible; the general consensus was that he'd got drunk, then gone postal. The remains of two people—including Harry—had been recovered, according to the TV news. The guards had not been reported as missing, but nor had they reappeared.

There were plenty of people on hand to say, “Yeah, always did think that Harry was a bit weird.”

Nobody said anything about Artemis, though.

Arthur knew that more had been found up there on the first floor of the call center than was ever reported afterward in the news. But, yeah, Interext had been pretty thorough. Somehow they had ensured that nothing really changed. That was the real kick in the teeth. The refurb had taken all of two months. During that time all of the
calls had simply been re-routed to another center somewhere slightly further inland—another Interext-owned building that simply sat empty in case of emergencies like this. A contingency plan.

Bracket, the new site manager, had arranged for the staff to be bussed out daily, so, other than his compassionate leave, Arthur hadn't even had any time off. Jesus Christ. Maybe this was how they were punishing him—they'd just stuck him back in this loop. Get up, go to work, go home, eat, sleep, wake up in the middle of the night, go to the lighthouse, watch the water, think about it, decide against it, go home, sleep, get up, go to work. Then repeat. It was unbearable.

He felt physically sick at the thought of a fully operational, fully stocked call center just sitting there, just sitting somewhere else completely empty for more or less all the time—
all the fucking time, just in case.
A mirror image of this call center, but with everything switched off. Rows of empty desks, blank monitors, clean whiteboards, vacant chairs, dark meeting rooms, pristine carpets.

Everything but the bodies.

That was the place he thought about at night, while looking down into the sea. That empty building. Just waiting. Waiting for them all. He couldn't bear it. If ever there was something, a symbol that said, “There is nothing you can do,” it was that empty building.

That night, he decided, sitting there, cheek pressed to the veneer of the desk. He would do it that night. Out
there, beneath the green eye of the lighthouse, maybe after just one last look back at the lit bedroom window of Yasmin's flat. He would wind a rusted length of chain from Drigg beach around his legs, and then fall. It wasn't like he'd be going somewhere that he'd never been before.

As ever, limitless thanks to Beth. And also to my family. Thank you to Nick Royle for being such a good friend and agent. Thanks to Charlotte and Richard at Quercus, and of course Peter Lavery, for all of the advice. Thanks to everybody else who has helped.