The Thing on the Shore (23 page)

“Dad?” Arthur shouted, moving out on to the green-carpeted landing. “Are you OK? Have you come home sick?”

“Yeah,” Harry shouted back. At least, that's what it sounded like through the door. “Fine.”

“I'm going out,” Arthur said.

“Fine,” Harry said. “Fine. Fine. Fine.”

Arthur stretched out his arms and flattened himself against the slick, streaming exterior curve of the lighthouse, his cheek cold against the wetness, the water running down his neck and under the collar of his jacket.

The rain splashed down heavily, roughening the surface of the sea and dancing across the pitted stonework of the
pier. The sky was a whitish-gray, not the dark sultry gray of storm clouds, just the color of frosted grass maybe, or the color of bone. The sea itself was the color of bruises, a less vibrant version of the palette that had been evident in that other landscape—or, as Arthur had been thinking of it, “the Scape.”

The Scape was not under water. Arthur realized that much now. He thought about it again, as the violent precipitation plastered him against the bright white and red of the lighthouse. He closed his eyes. He had needed to move slowly, when he was there, but that wasn't due to any resistance from water. It almost wasn't physical movement as such at all, but it was as if his mind had been floating over the green and purple surface of spidery starfish and pulsing tentacles. There had been a sky, of sorts, and the City in the distance and—despite the creatures crawling over the ground, so numerous and densely packed as to have maybe even
formed
the ground—his impression had been of a dry place. He had not been aware of having to breathe. And yet there had been a solidity to it all: a tangibility.

Arthur turned and walked to the edge of the pier and looked down at the water splashing up in the rain. The Scape was not the sea, but there was still some kind of connection; some kind of echo or reflection of one in the other.

When Arthur got home the shower was running, and he could hear the voice of his father from the bathroom. As
he went upstairs, Arthur could see that the bathroom door was actually open. Steam billowed out, floating down the top few steps, and leaving moisture on the landing walls.

Harry was singing weakly. He was singing something excruciating by some terrible rock band from the eighties, but Arthur didn't know what.

“You OK, Dad?” he called, from just outside the bathroom door.

“Son?” Harry replied and the shower was suddenly turned off. “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” Arthur said, placing his hand nervously on the door. He was aware of his pulse speeding up.

“Oh, son,” Harry said, “it's been an awful day. Put the kettle on, eh? Must be time for … for Paxman.”

“It's only half past three,” Arthur said, “and it's Saturday.”

“Well,” Harry said, “it's still been bloody awful.”

“What's happened?”

Harry didn't reply.

“Dad,” Arthur persisted, “I'm going to open the door. I don't think you're well.”

He waited a moment and then entered the room.

Harry was sitting in the bath, his shoulders shaking, his skin blotchy. He evidently hadn't pulled the shower curtain across, and water was everywhere. It was all over the bathroom floor, the hand-towel they used as a bathmat almost floating, the whole room sodden and miserable.

The plughole was partly blocked with loose plaster that the shower had washed away from the now exposed section
of the wall, which meant that the bath itself was nearly half-full with grit and soapy water. The wall, where the tiles had been, was now black and disgusting.

The worms were there, too, of course. When he approached the bath, Arthur balked on seeing them all wriggling in the water and clinging to his father's skin. He didn't dare look too closely at the wall itself, for fear of spotting some as-yet unseen writhing knot, evidence of some kind of habitat cluster.

After what felt like an age of hesitation, he grabbed his father under the armpits and hauled him up.

Artemis worked best when there was nobody else there. He tended to haunt the call center through the night and on Sundays. This was a Sunday. This was the Sunday after the Saturday on which that flaky fuckwit Harry had thrown a pissy-fit and run screaming from the office. Well, he needn't think of coming back.

Artemis was going through the head count with a red pen, comparing names against call-quality scores and then cross-referencing with average handling times. He ticked people off as he went.

“Dozy cunt,” he would mutter as he did so. “Uppity fucker. Daydreamy bastard. Egotistical twit. Intolerable bitch.”

Anybody observing might have found it curious that Artemis had such vehement personal feelings toward each and every employee who was, by his draconian standards, underperforming. The fact was that Artemis had vehement personal feelings about everybody, underperforming or not.

The vacant floor stretched away from him in all directions. Empty chairs, desktop terminals with blank screens. The place was quiet. The only sound was the terrible, interminable precipitation outside. It never seemed to end here. Of course, obviously, sometimes there would be nothing falling from the sky; it was just that Artemis always seemed to miss those rare moments.

After a time spent slashing the head count, he stood up and went for a walk around the center: the working floor, the pods, the training rooms, the meeting rooms. In one meeting room he stared out of the east-facing windows and watched waves of white hailstones billowing across the railway platforms and the small scrappy skate park beyond them.

One thing—just one more awful thing—about this awful place was how the seasons seemed different. It could be cold in summer or hot in winter, which was confusing. The bizarre weather just kept happening. Like hailstones. What month was it, anyway? Artemis scowled and turned away.

Besides, these things didn't really matter any more.

Back at his desk, Artemis fiddled with a stack of paper and then fell idle. He had a phone call to make, and he knew it. He started breathing deeply in order not to panic. After a couple of minutes of this he picked up the phone and dialed.

His call was answered almost immediately, as expected.

“Artemis,” said the voice.

“Good afternoon,” Artemis said. “Is all well?”

“What do you want?”

“A potential body has been identified.”

“Good. When will you start communicating with the interstitial entity directly?”

“As soon as I've worked out how.”

“Work it out, Artemis,” the voice said. It sounded like the sound of somebody whispering into his ear, but overlaid across an old vinyl recording of the same words. “You don't get paid just to have your fun with the bodies. We have now made contact with the Interstice, but you need to open that line of communication with the entity. And keep it open.”

“No, I'm sorry. I'll be communicating as soon as I can.”

“We know what you've been doing. You can do what you want with the bodies, but don't get neglectful of the whole.”

“I won't,” Artemis said. Sweat cooled and then ran down his face. The knuckles of his right hand, which gripped the telephone receiver, shone white.

“When necessary, the operation can be moved elsewhere. An alternative location has been established.”

“What? Where?”

“No
where
, Artemis. You know better than that.”

“You're talking about the AI,” Artemis said.

“Yes.”

“The calls will be dealt with by the AI.”

“Yes.”

“By my wife.”

“By the voice of your wife. Yes.” The voice paused, and there was a sound like it was clearing some kind of throat or other. “In short, the entire business of that site can be redirected at a moment's notice. Everything is ready.”

“Redirected to what? The recordings?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't know we were ready for this.”

“We are ready.”

“Where is the AI based?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where are the computers? Where is the server?”

“There are multiple servers, and back-up servers. The AI exists on those. More accurately, it exists between them. This is how we made contact with the Interstice itself.”

“And the customers won't know?”

“Of course not.”

Artemis nodded. He thought back to the years—no exaggeration—his wife had spent recording her voice. Going through dictionaries, recording a word at a time. Over and over again to ensure variety. To ensure it sounded authentic. Real.

The last few years of her life. Alone in that small room at Head Office. Jesus Christ.

“I'm still not entirely sure why this contingency plan is required,” Artemis said.

“There is one other thing,” the voice said. “The increase in interstitial activity may be producing some effect elsewhere.”

“What?”

“We believe there may be something in the sea.”

“What?!” Artemis said, standing up and putting his left hand to his forehead.

But there was no answer. The line had gone dead.

Outside the hailstones grew fatter and fatter, and then just stopped.

The sound was a shock. Yasmin's first thought was of an insect, and she jumped in surprise and fell out of the armchair. A gigantic fucking insect trapped inside an envelope, and vibrating fit to shake all of its chitin off. But it was just somebody at the door, pressing the buzzer.

The air was thick with joss-stick smoke. Yasmin realized that she had been drowsing. That Sunday-evening crash. She was wearing a jumper way too big for her—it came down almost to her knees—and leggings, and she felt like she was sprawling and shapeless. The buzzer was still buzzing, violently. It was, to be honest, an unfamiliar sound.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, hang on.” Even though there was no way the person at the front door of her building would be able to hear her, seeing as it was two flights of stairs down. She considered going to the window to look out and see who it was, but that would only mean that whoever it was would be kept waiting for even longer. She dithered
and then darted across the room to pick up the telephone-receiver-like thing mounted on the wall.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi, Yasmin? It's Arthur.”

“Arthur? Come on up.”

“Is it open?”

“Yeah,” Yasmin said, pressing the button that unlocked the front door. “It's open. Come on up.”

Yasmin glanced at the clock on the wall. This was the first time Arthur had visited her flat on his own. She clicked the kettle on and then went to put out the original joss-stick, while brushing some floaty hair away from her tired eyes.

“I wanted to talk to you about what I saw,” Arthur said. The two of them sat on the floor, as Yasmin only had one armchair, and each cradled a mug of tea. Something calming and ambient was playing on the stereo, but Yasmin didn't know what it was. It was a compilation CD that some ex-boyfriend had made for her, to which she had long ago lost the track listing. “I saw another world, Yasmin.”

“What about your father?” Yasmin asked. She could not let go of the image of Harry distraught in the bath along with the worms. “Are you sure he'll be OK?”

“He'll be all right.” Arthur nodded. “He just needs some rest. He's been in bed since Saturday. I think he's had a cold or something, as well.”

“It sounds like he needs help.”

Arthur shifted his weight from one buttock to the other, and bobbed his head around like a little bird. “He'll be OK,” he said.

If Arthur thought he was being subtle in his evasiveness then he was wrong, but Yasmin decided against pushing the topic.

“I wanted to talk to you about what I saw,” Arthur said again.

“The landscape?” Yasmin asked.

“Yeah,” Arthur said. He bit his lip and looked around wide-eyed, not seeing but thinking. “I call it the Scape,” he said.

“Full of goats?” Yasmin joked, smiling.

“What?” Arthur asked, smiling back, but uncomprehendingly.

“Never mind. It was a joke, kind of.”

“Oh! Scapegoats!”

“That's it,” Yasmin said.

“Jesus, Yasmin, I'm sorry. Being friends with me must sometimes be like being friends with a child.”

“Not really,” Yasmin said.

“No goats,” Arthur continued, “but creatures, almost. Like being under water. I once saw this thing on TV: this footage of a dead seal on the ocean floor. The footage was all speeded up, but basically it showed how the whole body, and all of the ground around it, got covered in small animals and …
organisms
that came to feed on it. I mean
covered
, like the whole scene was thick with tiny starfish and weird eels and long-legged crabs, all crawling all over
each other and burrowing in and out of the seal and … It was really scary, Yasmin. It was really horrible, and, uh … um …”

Yasmin knew that when Arthur's mother's body had finally been recovered, the corpse had been picked almost entirely clean. She guessed that this was in the back of Arthur's mind as he spoke. She guessed that this was why he'd stopped, and was now wiping his eyes.

“The ground, Yasmin, it was like that. It was like the sea floor in that TV footage—moving, and alive. You know, like some of the walls in the old
Doom
games? Once you get to Hell, and the walls are supposed to be fleshy or something, and they're moving? The ground was like that.”

“Arthur,” Yasmin said, “it sounds really pretty fucking awful.”