The Thing on the Shore (33 page)

After about half an hour of listening to calls, Arthur felt his eyelids increasingly difficult to control; they kept closing of their own accord, and not really opening again unless he really concentrated on them. Time for a coffee, maybe? Definitely.

The coffee from the vending machine came in a small yellow plastic cup and smelled like stale cigarettes. Arthur really wanted one of the full-size proper coffees from the canteen—a cappuccino or something equally as exotic—but
they were more expensive, and … well, how much money had he spent on cocktails last night? He felt sick just thinking about it.

He stood by the vending machine and looked out of the window while waiting for his drink. Outside, the day was bright and hard-edged; the sea was sparkling and difficult to look at. Everything looked old and shabby in that unforgiving light. Seagulls made sounds that felt like scabs itching on his consciousness. He had another full day of total shit to look forward to, more or less. And his dad … where was his dad?

Where was Yasmin, for that matter? It wasn't her rest day today, Arthur was pretty sure. He took his actually quite manky-looking coffee from the vending machine and stuck his head through the break room door to double-check her desk. No, she wasn't there. Then where was she? She never rang in sick. Yasmin wasn't that kind of person.

When Arthur returned to the vending machine for his change, which he'd forgotten, Diane was already standing there. She looked at him, quite expressionless, and extended her open hand, which held thirty pence.

“This yours?” she asked.

“Yes,” Arthur said. “Thank you.”

“What happened to your eye? Burst a blood vessel?”

“Yeah.”

“I did that once. Through being sick.”

“Yeah,” Arthur said, “that's how I did it, too.”

Diane smiled faintly.

“I'm sorry about the other day,” Arthur said. “I don't normally get angry.”

“Yeah, right.” Diane laughed briefly. She looked around, and then at Arthur. “I'm sorry for what I said about your dad,” she said.

“That's OK,” Arthur said.

“I've been off work for a while,” she said.

“Are you OK?”

“I've just been ringing in sick.”

“Oh, right,” Arthur said.

Diane looked like she wanted to say something else; her eyes kept darting around and her mouth was sad. She didn't, though. She just looked up—she had such big eyes, Arthur thought—and smiled briefly, then left him standing there.

Arthur spent the whole of his shift half expecting to be pulled back into the Scape. He didn't know how he felt when the time to log out rolled around and it still hadn't happened. Last time he'd been there, though, he'd been scared for his life. What did it mean, then, that he now felt as disappointed as he was relieved?

Probably nothing good; it probably meant that he was suicidal. Was that what it meant?

Arthur slipped his biro in his coat pocket and left the building.

Artemis was alone in the call center. Well, alone apart from the security people manning the desk downstairs.

Artemis felt like a god when he was in these places: flatpack, templated environments designed for function and little else. Supermarkets, offices, generic hotel rooms—bland places where you could be anybody. Out there on the harbor or in the dank little pubs, he felt uneasy and threatened, but
here
he felt that same power that he'd felt when Diane lay, passed out and naked, on his hotel-room bed. He could do anything here, too, and the anonymity of the location protected him. Not only that, but he felt like he could draw on some kind of power that was not accessible to him elsewhere. He was physically stronger and more agile when he was plugged into that sad network of vacant conferencing centers, business parks, industrial estates, motorway rest stops, etcetera. And call centers.

Diane was one of many, many young women he'd taken off to hotel rooms. Even here, in Whitehaven, there had already been several. Most of them—four or five—were customer advisers at the call center. The youngest, prettiest, most insecure, least experienced in terms of employee rights or, indeed, in any of the ways of the world. Of course, there had been that checkout girl from Tesco's, as well. Where were they now? At home probably, sleeping, or watching
Dirty Dancing
or some other crap girl film from the eighties. Feeling a deep sense of unease, most likely, and wondering what they'd done, or what they'd had done to them, and trying to work out whether or not it mattered.

The bodies—Artemis liked to have his fun with those bodies.

He checked his emails. Somebody called Sally—he couldn't remember who that was—had sent him an email about some “mass confusion” that many of the managers were apparently feeling. She finished her message with a paragraph that sounded quite critical.

I wouldn't want to be responsible for calling a series of unnecessary meetings, thereby initiating a low-level radioactive hum of useless talk. But I do want to know what's going on. I do want to instigate some kind of meaningful discussion.

Artemis would have to have a word with her. Not only because of the unacceptably negative insinuation that
there was a lot of meaningless talk going on, but also because of the overly extravagant language used. Where did she think she was? Some kind of university?

There
was
a lot of meaningless talk going on, of course, but that was all part of it. Part of the boondoggle. Talking about talking about meetings about planning meetings about planning for projects about talking to people who talk to people about other people. It was a whole meta-economy. Meaningless talk was fine, especially given what would happen in the end.

It was as Artemis was about to start replying that the phone rang. That is,
a
phone rang. Artemis stood up.

Identifying a ringing telephone is normally quite easy, but not in a room full of hundreds of telephones. Especially when you realize that they all have different settings; they all ring at different volumes and tones.
Stupid damn telephones
, Artemis thought as he paced around, looking for the offender. Why can't they all sound as uniform as they look? If the sound is quiet, how do you know whether it's a quiet-sounding phone or just a phone that's further away?

He did find it, eventually.

It was Harry's telephone.

He didn't answer it. He just watched it for a while.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the entity trying to communicate.

The telephone didn't stop ringing.

Eventually he reached out his hand and picked up the receiver.

He heard distant sounds: something scratching against a distant wall, the wind resonating through a faraway chimney. The sea. He frowned.

The sounds grew louder and louder. Was there a voice in there, too? Somewhere in there, there
was
a voice.

The sounds merged, dispersed, merged again. They were flattening out, somehow sketching and defining the boundaries of some kind of surface, some kind of plain. The static rose and fell like hills, like peaks and troughs, like waves, but he saw them as solid. He could envisage them as solid.

He saw the writhing plain. He saw the dead sky. He turned around and he saw the walls of the City rearing up in front of him like some kind of solid, smooth, gray sludge. Between him and the walls there was a figure—a tall, spindly figure dressed in shiny black leather. Next to the tall figure there were two other creatures, possessing something like human torsos with no legs, but three or four arms too many, which they used like legs. They looked up at him with big protruding eyes, and hissed and groaned and spat.

The tall figure moved awkwardly toward him, every step looking painful and uncoordinated. It was talking but Artemis couldn't tell what it was saying. It was repeating itself—saying the same thing, or making the same sound, over and over again.

“Ohdiee,” it was saying. “Ohdi. Ohdie. Ohhdee.”

Artemis stepped backward. He knew what it wanted. Body, it was saying.
Body
. It wanted a body.

Artemis wrenched the receiver away from his ear and clapped it back down into its cradle.

He knew what he needed to do.

Arthur woke up to the sound of the telephone ringing. It was nighttime again. He felt like it was always nighttime, because all the time spent at work just didn't count. The phone was ringing away like a bastard. Arthur swore into his pillow and punched the mattress, but the ringing wouldn't stop.

He heard Harry banging around in the next room.

“Just coming,” Harry was saying. “Just coming.”

Arthur lifted his head from the pillow and listened as Harry slipped and stumbled down the stairs. In Arthur's mind he saw his father, hunched and muttering, descending through unlit space. Eventually he reached the telephone, or at least he must have reached the telephone, because the ringing stopped, and Harry said, “Hello?”

Arthur waited.

“Rebecca? Is that you?”

He could only hear his father's side of the conversation,
of course, broken up by silences when whoever was on the other end—or, rather, whoever his father thought was on the other end—was speaking.

“Rebecca? Are you OK? What's wrong? … What? … What? … Really?”

Silence.

“I'll come and meet you now. Just stay there. You'll be OK. I'll help you. I'll bring you back. Oh my God, Rebecca, it's been so long. It will be so good to see you. Stay there. See you soon. OK, bye.”

Arthur was sitting up by now. He got out of bed and went to open his bedroom door and shout down to his father. But, even before he got there, he heard the front door slam. He ran out on to the landing and down the stairs to the front door, opened it and looked out.

His father was running away, running along the street. He turned off between two houses, toward the steps that led down to the harbor, and disappeared.

Arthur went back inside, took the stairs three at a time, and got himself dressed.

Artemis stood at the windows at the southern end of the building and looked out over the harbor. You couldn't make out individual figures when it was dark, but he knew that Harry would be there, or on his way. Excited, hopeful, deluded. It felt strange to be here witnessing the culmination of a plan that had first been kicked off years and years ago. It felt strange to have shaped somebody's life subtly, for once, rather than by using threats or violence or sex.

Most of the lights in the huge room were now off, with just a couple still on, right in the middle above the command center. And, of course, the red LEDs that gleamed from monitors and computers all over the place.

Artemis used his mobile to ring the security desk downstairs, advising the night-watchmen to let Harry in as soon as he arrived.

*

Artemis himself met Harry at the top of the stairs. He had arrived wearing bedroom slippers, a pair of boxers, and a horribly stained old dressing gown. Arthur was with him, his forehead creased, his hunched stance suggesting shame and embarrassment.

“You smell of alcohol,” Artemis said to Harry.

“Where is she?” Harry asked. He was looking around eagerly, like a dog expecting a biscuit. “Where's Rebecca?”

“Come this way,” Artemis said, steeling himself, then gingerly put a bulky arm around Harry's shoulders. He maneuvered the smaller man through the double doors leading to the call center floor.

Arthur followed.

“Is she in here?” Harry asked.

“Kind of,” Artemis said, pushing Harry forward now. “She is kind of in here, yes.” He turned and closed the door behind them. He made eye contact with Arthur then, and grinned.

“Where is she?” Harry asked, turning around and staring up at Artemis. “I can't see her.”

Artemis looked down into Harry's excited and bloodshot and yellowing eyes, huge and moist behind his thick spectacles. The man was a total mess. He shouldn't even be employed. He wasn't capable of work. Well, he
was
on the to-be-sacked list, although maybe that wouldn't be necessary, in the end.

“What were you going to do?” Artemis asked. “What would you actually have done if you'd found her here?
How did you imagine it would happen?” He folded his arms. “What state would her body have been in?”

Harry looked at him for a moment, not comprehending. Then he blew up.

“
Where is she?
” he screamed, fists clenched and arms held rigid down by his sides, the dressing gown flapping open, spit flying from his chapped lips and brown teeth. “
Where the fuck is she?
”

Artemis frowned slightly, and then back-handed Harry across the face in a movement too quick for Harry or Arthur to see it coming, let alone have time to react to it. Harry's glasses flew off and smashed against the wall, and he went down straight away. He himself would have said that he hit the floor “like a sack of spuds.” He crawled forward and tried to stand up, using a desk as support, but just then his legs failed him.

“Oh my God,” he was saying, quietly. Blood flecked from his mouth. His eyes were half closed.

Artemis looked at Arthur, who had clapped one hand over his mouth and was staring at the scene with one white eye and one red one.

“Nothing to say?” Artemis asked him.

Arthur took his hand away from his mouth. “Dad?” he ventured.

Harry didn't reply.

Arthur looked up at Artemis, while Artemis looked back and waited for Arthur to do something. But it looked like Arthur did not know what to do.

Artemis grinned again. “What are you going to do, Arthur?”

After another long moment, Arthur hesitantly stepped forward and aimed a slow kick at Artemis. But it was nothing—just a pathetic, ineffectual gesture. Artemis sidestepped it easily and, with one long arm, grabbed Arthur's shoulder. With the other he punched him hard in the face. Arthur's head snapped backward, blood spraying from his nose. He would have fallen if it were not for the grip Artemis maintained on his shoulder. Arthur swayed, eyelids fluttering.