Lurker (6 page)

She didn’t only mean the prose, which had indeed become rather undisciplined, as if the author had grown either excited or fearful while documenting such outlandish events. The text was full of hysterical exclamation marks and misused ellipses, each deployed where calm explanation would have served the tale better. But how could any of
this
be described rationally? It was just nonsense, surely…Nevertheless, Meg gave the last few pages her most serious consideration; she
had
to. After all, it made so much sense of what she’d been experiencing lately.

In the 1860s, miners digging deepest for alum in the area had chanced upon an
entity
that defied all scientific intervention, back then as well as now.

Meg flipped briefly back to the title page of the book and discovered the account had been written in the 1980s; only the date was included under a repetition of the work’s title. But what difference did that make? If the story had been otherworldly twenty-five years ago, it was no less so today. Knowledge of such otherworldly matters had hardly developed in the intervening time.

The author alluded to an undying organic creature set free by the activities of prospectors. The drawing on one page was unsettling enough, but it was the text that tried to elucidate the thing that really shook Meg up. This read:

Like a centipede, but as big as a shark! … .. Flesh that is jellylike, like a squid’s, but crackling with something like electricity. White and pink and aqua blues, lanced with flashing lights.. .. . . It scuttled around on too many legs, each running with fretful haste. . . …But it did its worse with its tentacles! Nature had provided it with a skill unknown to man: its suckered ends had the capacity to adapt to recently severed parts of its victims—their hands¸ I mean!. . ... It could fuse itself to lopped-off parts of the miners it killed. It could even take their heads! These allowed it to do things only men can do: use opposable thumbs to grab tools . .. . and look around with human eyes! Its real head, a great blind orb of solid tissue covered in mouths and antennae, squirmed as it moved, making a sound like overcooked liquid burning with power! . …. It was quite hideous, and as it emerged from the pit, a few survivors who witnessed it said they’d never sleep again!!

Presumably these frightened people were the deluded souls from whose recorded accounts the booklet’s author had derived his or her implausible, ill-conveyed tale. The region had been rather primitive at the time, with low standards of education; it had also probably been host to a number of local myths. And might this bizarre story be simply another example of such uncritical hearsay?

The author went on to explain that approximately ten miners had been found dead in a mine at the time of this alleged rising of such an alien being. Most had been found without their hands, and at least a few headless. This part of the tale might be true, but the implication was that only one thing had caused the damage: the creature from the pit, its vast form—like a centipede, but as big as a shark, with jellylike flesh crackling with electricity—capable of adapting itself to recently severed human body parts. Its tentacles had fused with hands and heads, offering the thing an ability to fight with prosthetic devices and observe as well as its adversaries did…

This was all nonsense, of course, and as Meg raced on to the end of the book—the text offered nothing more of such grisly import—she felt dismissive in a way that felt almost aggressive. She pictured in her mind her husband’s face, and then the woman who’d visited the previous evening…Lord knew what either Harry or Amanda had to do with all she’d been imagining lately, but here the experience stood all the same. Meg rose from the chair, flinging aside the book, and now felt like fleeing, down the coastline, until all the terrors burdening her lately were distant specks on a horizon. Acting intuitively, she grabbed her coat from a peg near the door, and then let herself outside. Moments later, she was pacing along the cliff side, trying desperately to get her thoughts into less chaotic order.

She thought of severed hands and purple fingernails. She thought of her husband and his minor expenses fraud at work. She thought of unsolicited visitors in the dark watches of night, and palm prints pressed against an otherwise clean wall. She thought of Big Business and its relentless manner. She thought of the impish resourcefulness of Capitalism. She thought of the stress and strain her job had once put her under, and the reason she’d decided to leave paid employment. She thought—with the greatest sorrow of all—of her dead baby. She thought of redundancies, and the way large companies treated people as hired hands to be lopped off when no longer required. She thought of the use to which these appendages might consequently be put. She thought of unspeakable creatures unearthed during corporate enterprises. She thought of electrified jelly and centipedes, alien bodies as big as sharks, sounds like a moist thrumming, vicious decapitation and heads fused onto tentacles, and finally a beast prowling the planet with unforgiving sentience…

At that moment, as her mind processed this profusion of tangled reflections, Meg heard something scuttling on the far side of the cliff. By now, she’d reached that part of the Sandsend Trail occupied by the barren landscape, like the moon at peace with the cosmos. But whatever lurked nearby, creeping unseen along the inner lip of the coast, had little other than menace at heart. It moved stealthily, its progress resounding with a hissing glee that even overruled the sea crashing beyond the distant beach. Meg recalled the picture she’d seen on the local newspaper’s front page, that wriggly, insectlike creature clinging to stone behind the missing young woman. Then Meg remembered the goth’s plump face, her black garments, and her—

And that was when a hand emerged above the shale edge of the cliff, and Meg recognized it immediately. It was a female hand, tapered and smooth, and bore purple fingernails.

Oh God, this was the missing young woman police were looking for and her family was concerned about. Meg, unmindful of anything other than helping the tourist back onto the cliff from which she must have tumbled while walking, hurried forward, her hands reaching out for the one grapping over the lip like some dumb, disobedient animal.

And it was just as she touched the cold, lifeless appendage that its natural companion—another purple finger-nailed hand—appeared to the left…about
ten feet
farther along the coastline.

No, that was impossible. It could not be. It defied laws of biology…Nevertheless, now frozen to the spot despite an unseasonably warm afternoon sun blazing in the sky, Meg was unable to look away from the sight of two identical hands, separated by the length of four or five bodies, grappling with shale on the cliff’s edge.

Then a third object began rising midway between them—a woman’s head. But no, no, it wasn’t a head at all. Meg was mistaken. She snatched her gaze away, hoping to eliminate mental recollection of a soulless expression attached to a skull whose flesh had already begun to wither.

Seconds later, she was running, fast, away, along the grassy path to her new home, where only memories were around to torment her, and nothing like a monster from another time and world.

8

When her husband arrived home, she fell into his arms.

He’d got back early, surprising her, and although he’d worn a familiar fraught expression, as if the world and its meanest denizens were perched on his shoulders, she’d wasted no time in running to him, in the hope he’d support her in the way she’d craved since…since…well, for a long time now.

“Oh, Harry,
Harry
,” she cried, nuzzling her face into the junction formed by a shoulder and his neck. He smelled of strong aftershave, as if he’d added this during the day…but of course he had clients to see, folk to deceive with oily banter.

“Hey, hey, what’s the matter, Meg?” He pushed her away, but not unkindly. He’d never been the most affectionate person, except for when she’d consented to his advances in the dark. Nevertheless, he held her then, at arm’s length, his big hands gripping each of her biceps. “Slow down…take deep breaths…and…and tell me about it.”

If he sounded apprehensive, it was because of the distress his wife of fifteen years was clearly suffering. When she didn’t immediately respond, he gripped more firmly, shaking her a little, and this, overly forceful though it initially seemed, had the desired impact. Words were jerked out of her, like stones falling from the mouth of a mine.

“I’ve been having bad
dreams
,” she said, tears muffling her phrasing, as if she were buried underground. “Some were about you, Harry…and some about our…our…” She hesitated, drew breath, and then continued. “All those poor people…and their jobs…”

“Sorry,” he replied, his tone sharpening. “Is this about
me
and what I’m doing at work?”

“What…do you mean?”

“I’ve already explained. Redundancies
have
to be made. It’s all right for you, out of the business world now. But you seem to have forgotten that sometimes tough decisions have to be implemented.”

She looked at him, still sobbing. “Harry, how can you think that…that any of this is about
you
?”

“You just
said
it was.”

He sounded as paranoid as she’d once been, and that disturbed her. She tried reassuring him, because that was what she’d always done, ever since they’d met. “I was talking about…about…Oh, I don’t know. I’m confused. Help me, Harry.
Support
me.”

But he only pulled away. “That’s all I ever seem to do lately, isn’t it? I mean, I agreed to come and live out here, because I’d hope that would put an end to…to…well, to whatever’s bothering you.”

She felt as if something had just reached inside her with unforgiving tentacles, yanking out her guts to feed upon. “Whatever’s
bothering
me?” she repeated, unable to believe what her husband had just said. “You mean a little detail like…well, like
losing my baby
?” After stepping up close to shout, she added, “Losing
our
baby.”

Harry struggled to meet her gaze, simply paced aside and snatched up the newspaper from the coffee table beside the couch. “Yes, yes, I
know
,” he replied, as if his grief could be contained by trivial distraction. Indeed, moments later, he started reading the newspaper.

Everything Meg had been through the last few days seemed to merge in her mind, forming another version of that hideous creature she’d both read about and possibly brushed up against during her walk this afternoon. Since then, she’d been curled up in the armchair with the front door locked. She’d made neither an evening meal nor cleaned the house in advance of her husband’s return. Maybe that was why Harry was unsympathetic: after another long day in the office, delivering tough news to colleagues, he’d be hungry and have expected his wife to have fulfilled her half of the tacit deal they’d recently forged. If he was now earning their keep, he expected a few home comforts without complications.

That had struck Meg as fair, even though accepting it had meant sharing his monetary mind-set. That was simply the way Harry thought, investments leading to returns, while ensuring he acquired all he deserved. Meg assumed such reasoning lay at the heart of all successful marriages. Quid pro quo. Fundamentally a business arrangement. Romance built on firm foundations, like a fine house in a stable lot.

Nevertheless, she thought there was more to it than this. A relationship didn’t involve only practical support; it needed emotional nurturing, too. She and Harry had been through a terrible time, and the problem was that they’d never talked about it. The sad truth was that he hadn’t wanted to.

No wonder she’d been going quietly mad these last few months. And was that really the extent of her problem? Those handprints outside, her unsettling nightmares, the outlandish story from some anonymous local historian…Was this all suggestive nonsense, with no more basis in reality than the perverted imaginings of Hollywood screenwriters?

Harry had yet to switch on the TV (as was his wont most evenings), but was now fully engaged with the newspaper. That was when Meg remembered the missing woman and decided to mention her, as a way of reestablishing their connection without losing track of what they’d been discussing earlier.

She said, “Have you read the article about the missing woman?”

Meg pictured pale hands with purple fingernails reaching over the edge of an alum-scattered cliff. Then a flesh-bare head rose up to separate them, its eyes and the tongue lolling with hideous horror…But surely that had been a stress-induced hallucination. Meg wasn’t well at the moment; she needed sympathetic assistance.

That was when her husband replied. “She’s only a goth. Probably on welfare. Most of them are. She’s no loss.”

Just then, Meg remembered Harry filling in company expenses forms, adding sundries he hadn’t even partaken of, making easy money on top of the fortune he already earned. She pictured him jetting away on fieldwork trips and to conferences all around the world. Then she imagined Amanda’s face, Meg’s visitor last night. The lack of a wedding band on her third-left finger; her inquisitive scrutiny of the cottage and of Meg’s familial situation…Everything seemed to fall into place for Meg. A chain of notions triggered by her husband’s heartless comment a moment earlier had brought this truth home.