The Thing on the Shore (26 page)

To be is to be perceived.

She was thinking about this, about to knock on the door of the adjacent pod and hand Artemis his (now password-protected) laptop, when she noticed—with an icy, gut-wrenching sensation in her stomach, before the onset of any cerebral reaction—the small, glassy eye of a webcam gazing at her from its mount within the plastic framing of the laptop screen. She felt horror slacken her face and, shaking, she slammed the lid of the stupid, stupid fucking computer shut and put it on the floor, then knocked on the pod door and ran back to her desk.

Bony sat in his little hut and thought about one day a long time ago, when he and Arthur were pretty young, really, and Harry had still been sober and had not yet sold the fishing boat. Harry had once been a big fisherman, though you wouldn't know it now, of course.

For Harry's last birthday before Rebecca had died, she had bought him a Fishfinder, a small box with a screen that sent signals down below and told you what was under the water. Harry, Arthur and Bony were taking it out for the first time. They had first got it all set up at one side of the boat, and then motored out, gazing back at the receding shoreline, where Harry's old four-wheel drive stood sentinel on the beach. The weather was not bad, but you couldn't have said it was good either. Good fishing weather probably, but Bony did not know an awful lot about fishing.

Bony remembered the three of them watching the Fishfinder in silence. Rebecca had been dead seven months,
maybe. For an hour and a half they sat still and watched it, and drifted, without a bite from the fish or a word between them. Except for the words that swam through Bony's head, at any rate; as to what swam through Harry's and Arthur's he didn't know. Every now and again, they would hear pairs of explosions from further down the coast, from Eskmeals way. Every now and again, a drop of rain would fall. Just one. Bony liked to think it was the same one, coming back round again and again to visit them. Something like a friend. Usually it would land on the skin of his right arm.

Eventually, it was Arthur who spoke. “If there's so many fish,” he said, looking at the Fishfinder, “why aren't they biting?”

“They're not fish on that thing,” said Harry.

“Then what's it picking up?” said Arthur.

“Weed,” said Harry.

“Then why aren't our lines getting tangled in it?” said Arthur.

“Well,” said Harry, “it's bubbles, then.”

“The sea isn't that full of bubbles,” argued Arthur. “It's got to be fish.”

“Then why aren't they biting?” said Harry.

“Maybe they're scared,” Bony said.

“Scared of what?” said Harry.

“The explosions,” Bony said. “The weapons-testing.”

“No,” Harry said, “they've been doing that for years. Makes no difference to the fish. If it made a difference, I'd know it made a difference.”

“The Fishfinder says that the depth is only two feet now, Dad,” said Arthur. “How can it be only two feet deep when we're this far out?”

“Because it's wrong,” said Harry. “Turn that shit off. We're moving.”

As their boat had moved through the water, the outboard motor sent short, hard tremors through the hull, the bench and Bony's body, and he thought about all those inland towns and the women in them wearing vibrating knickers or some such. And if he had looked at the shore at exactly that moment, and his line of sight were perfectly perpendicular to the shore, then the point on the shore that he was looking at was the point where that dead whale had washed up all bloated and sad when they were kids. Bony's mum had sent them all off to ride down through the dunes on their bikes, and they had all stood around it taking pictures of the patterns in the skin of the thing. Remember that? A minke whale, it was. Bony had learned that later from
National Geographic.

He ran his hand over his head. Today was a hot Monday, and his hi-vis jacket felt heavy. It had been a while since he had heard from his mother. His parents had moved to somewhere remote—even more remote—up in Scotland, to look after his father's sick brother. They were the kind of people who liked being in the middle of nowhere.

He was half thinking about giving them a ring, his hand almost on its way to the receiver, when the phone rang.

Bony thought about it for a moment, and then answered.

“Hello?” he said.

“Bony!” Yasmin replied. “It's happened again—to Arthur. I just thought I should let you know. I really think there's something wrong.”

“What's happened again?”

“He's collapsed. But … I don't know. There's more to it. I'm going to send you some emails now. I think we should meet up.”

“OK. OK, yeah, come down after work.”

“I'll be on the five-forty-whatever from Whitehaven. I'll be there just after six.”

“See you then,” Bony said.

“Thanks. Bye.” Yasmin hung up.

Bony put the phone down and sat back in his chair, running his hand over his head again. Outside his cabin, the sun beat down hard. He thought back to his night on the beach. The stars. He closed his eyes, tried not to think about what he'd done.

Arthur didn't know what to say. The creature was waiting for a response, that much was obvious, but Arthur could not imagine what.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

The creature moved its gleaming visage closer to Arthur's. Behind it, the sky was stained with purple light. Then he felt something tugging at his hair, at his head, and everything went white. He was dimly aware of being carried by somebody. His first thought was his father but, no, whatever was carrying him was far too strong to be Harry.

Full consciousness found Arthur slumped in a chair in one of the pods, with the blinds down. In another chair, Artemis Black sat, observing him intently, a hint of a smile on his face. This reality was barely less threatening than the last.

“What?” Arthur said. “What? I'm feeling really fucking …
really fucking tired.” He could feel something rise within him, getting close to the surface, something that would bring with it total fury.

“What did you see?” Artemis asked.

Arthur narrowed his eyes. “You know about it?” he said.

“Yes,” Artemis said quietly, “I know about it. I don't know what it's like, and I don't know what is there, but I know about it.”

“What is it?”

“It is the Interstice,” Artemis replied. “It is a place. A real place.”

“What? How?”

“Now then,” Artemis said, leaning forward and placing a hand on Arthur's knee, “you keep asking me questions, but you haven't answered mine yet. Just you answer my question, Arthur.” His fingers dug in around Arthur's kneecap. “You answer my question now.”

“OK.” Arthur nodded. He felt sweaty and nauseated. “I will, but let go of my leg, please.”

Artemis let go and sat back. “Go on,” he said.

Just then there was a knock at the door.

Artemis snapped his head around to look and lifted a finger as if to caution Arthur against speaking. He stood up slowly, silently, and covered the distance to the door in one long stride. He opened it a crack, looked around, looked down, bent to pick up his laptop, then closed the door and returned to his seat, looking slightly puzzled.

“Go on,” he urged again, after sitting back down.

Arthur then started to talk about the Scape—or the
Interstice, as Artemis called it. He was hesitant, uncertain. He stammered and kept putting his hand over his eyes.

They were cut off from the entire world inside that pod. The blinds inside the glass walls were dark gray, and Arthur kept forgetting where they were. More than anything, he felt like they were both trapped in a small glass cube that was suspended high up inside a gigantic, threatening cumulonimbus cloud above some violent ocean.

Arthur told Artemis about the ground. About the sky. The sounds. The City, and the light, and the thing—the patent-leather thing.

When Arthur mentioned the creature, Artemis widened his eyes and grinned like a skull. The expression alarmed Arthur, and something spinning and whirring in the back of his head told him not to elaborate, not to tell Artemis everything. Arthur's voice faltered and he cleared his throat.

“And then I found myself in here,” he said. “I felt something pulling at my head, and then I found myself in here.”

“Your headset?” Artemis said.

“What?”

“The thing pulling at your head. Could it have been your headset? Dean tried to pick you up and your headset came off. Or it might have been when he dropped you. Either way, do you think that was what you felt?”

“I don't know,” Arthur said. “I don't know why you
expect me to know anything. I think you know more than I do.”

“Probably,” Artemis said. He was still grinning. The sound of the call center was faint in the pod, but it was there, in the background: a palimpsest of sound that was all too familiar from the Scape. It was the sound of quiet voices. The sound of the sea.

“Artemis, please,” Arthur said, “tell me what you know.”

“I can't,” Artemis replied, still grinning. In the gloom of the pod—there was no overhead light—the large man looked terrifying. Even more terrifying than usual, because of the gloom and because of the grin.

“I want to go,” Arthur said.

Artemis didn't say anything.

Diane had rung in sick again. She was sitting, wrapped in a duvet, on the sofa of her parents' house—well, after all it was where she lived—and watching the
Saw
films boxed set. Mondays were the worst days, she reckoned. There was no desolation like Monday. It wasn't that it meant five whole days to go until the weekend—well, it wasn't just that—it was that the beginning of the working week was like a hammer slamming into your brain. Like a hammer that somehow communicated the awful message that all you were doing, really, was waiting now for those two days off at the end of it. You hated getting up early to go to work. You hated being at work. You hated having to go to bed in order to get up to go to work. You got through it all by looking forward to the weekend; that was the
only
way you got through it. Was that really worthwhile at all? Was that as good as life was going to get?

On a Friday you could forget about it, because Fridays were intensely joyful. That was just it, though: troughs
and peaks. Long troughs, short peaks. If Diane let herself think about it, the weekends seemed hysterical. Short and desperate and hysterical. It was the same for everybody else, she knew—it wasn't just her, but that made it worse. Was it right to emotionally yo-yo in that way, and not even acknowledge the swings? Was it good for your heart?

That night with Artemis had not been the first time she'd got drunk with a man and ended up regretting it. It was the first time, though, that she'd got drunk with a boss and woken up in the cold blue light of an early coastal morning, in his empty hotel room, with her face and breasts encrusted with his semen. She was assuming it was his. It was a fair assumption. He had left her and gone. To work, she thought.

She had showered to the tortured cries of a seagull echoing through the small extractor fan of the en-suite bathroom, dried herself, dressed herself, and then left the hotel room. Afterward, she had thought that maybe she should have searched his belongings; looked for something that she could somehow have used to take some kind of revenge on him for being such a horrible fucking bastard. But, at the time, such a thought had never entered her fuzzy, teary, pissed-off, hung-in-shame head. She just rushed down the red-carpeted stairs, past the reception desk, breaking into a slight run, and straight out of the front door.

She hadn't gone into work since, and had been off for nearly a week now. Another two days and she'd need a doctor's note.

Could she report him? She didn't actually know. It wasn't really illegal, what he'd done. Or was it? Was it some kind of rape? On the other hand, as much as she hated it, she didn't want to lose her job. It wasn't like they were thick on the ground hereabouts. She was checking the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority website for jobs at Sellafield daily, but she already knew that they had a massive waiting list. As if she'd ever get a job there anyway. You probably needed A levels or something. She'd take the risk and resign, but she knew her parents wanted her out of the house, and that would be even less feasible with no job.

Diane lived on the Orgill estate in Egremont. Egremont was a small town to the south of Whitehaven, built around an iron-ore mine, and Orgill was a housing estate much like any other. The houses were gray, though they'd once been white. There were children's playgrounds there, where Diane and her friends had frequently sat on the swings through the night with cider and cigarettes. Then they'd all left school and got jobs, and that, for some reason, had been the end of everything.

There was something else at the call center that scared Diane: not just the tedious passing of time, the waiting for the weekend, the wishing your life away, but something else. You had to have worked there for a period of time before you could see it, and it
was
related to the days, weeks, months, and years passing you by. But it was also something else, and Diane thought of it as “potatofication.”

Everybody who had started at the call center at the same time seemed to potatofy at the same rate. They would get gradually paler, gradually heavier, gradually less well-defined. Every group of new starters—fresh, fit, attractive, lively—would eventually all put on weight and slacken around the eyes and mouth, start to look bored, start to move more slowly. Yeah, it was probably to do with being stuck at a desk all day, but it was also to do with the mental fatigue from the conversational gymnastics you spent eight hours a day performing. It left you worn out, come the evening, left you craving takeaways and shitty films.