The Thing on the Shore (34 page)

Artemis punched him again, in the stomach this time, and let him drop. He then hauled Harry to his feet and dragged him, at speed, across the call center floor. Harry had to half-run not to be pulled off his feet again. His legs felt weak. Artemis dragged him over to Harry's own desk, where he just stood, looking dazed.

“What do you want?” Harry asked.

Artemis pushed him down into the chair. “Put your headset on,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Put your fucking headset on,” Artemis snarled.

“What for?”

Artemis slammed both hands down on the desk and spoke very calmly right into Harry's face. “So that they don't find you floating in the fucking harbor with your bowels turned inside out,” he said. “Just do it. Do it for me. Do it for your boss. Come on, Harry. Just fucking do it.”

Harry picked up the headset and put it on. Artemis grabbed his head and forced it into the desk, knocking
him out. Then he turned back to Arthur.

Arthur was getting to his feet a few desks back, one hand covering his face. Even in that dim light, and at that distance, Artemis could see that the boy was losing copious amounts of blood. Arthur staggered toward him. What exactly was he now planning to do? Was he going to attack again? Artemis almost laughed at the prospect. The boy must not really know what he was doing.

Once Arthur was within range Artemis drove his fist into his face again, his knuckles cracking the bridge of Arthur's nose and one cheekbone. This time Arthur did fall to the floor, but Artemis pulled him up by the hair and, in much the same way as he had done with Harry, smashed his head into the nearest desk. Arthur went completely limp in his grip. Fearing he had used too much force, Artemis held Arthur's mouth to his ear and could detect breathing. So that was OK. He would be no use dead, after all. Artemis placed Arthur into a seat next to Harry's, and slipped a headset on to his head, too.

Artemis strode over to the command center and gave his keyboard a few quick taps. He then took Harry's and Arthur's employee IDs from the database and used them to log both their phones into the network remotely. He next set the two phones up to receive calls. Of course, there were never very many calls coming through at this time of night, but there were always a few. Nocturnal call volumes would surprise most people, and Artemis liked to wonder who they were. Wrong numbers? Lonely insomniacs? Psychopaths? People from other time zones?
Sometimes he listened in to these calls from some airy distance, and marveled at the almost alien voices of those confused human beings at night.

The plan was not for Harry or Arthur to receive these calls, though—especially now that they were unconscious. They were here for their own unique connections to the Interstice. Well, Arthur was, at least; Harry had been a pretty effective way of luring him here. And Harry would come in useful, anyway. Artemis was pretty sure of that.

Arthur heard the beep. It carried the impact of a hammer blow. He knew what he would see when he opened his eyes, so he didn't want to open them at all. But eventually he had to, because he was lying on his back, and he could feel unpleasant things moving beneath him. And, sure enough, there it was—that sky above him the color and texture of rotten milk, and hung so
low
, like it was always hovering just out of reach. It swirled and fizzed with long-gone conversations and with those sounds he recognized from being constantly on the phone at work, waiting for incoming calls. Those distant murmurings, like the wind sighing through tall grass a very long way off. He had always known, deep down, that he was listening to the sounds of an actual place.

He heard something behind him crunch loudly, and he turned around. The shiny man-thing stood over him. Whatever it was, it loomed up, silhouetted against the weird sky, looking tall and willowy and strong. It hissed
and burbled like a cat with a cut throat. It bent over and reached down with a hand encased in the same smooth, gleaming black material as the rest of it. The hand was long and thin, with five pointed fingers—although whether the fingers themselves were pointed, or just the veneer covering them, Arthur didn't know. Or maybe the veneer was part of the thing itself. But none of that mattered now.

What mattered now were the sharp fingers at his throat, feeling tacky like rubber; the asymmetrical face suddenly just inches away from his own; the whirring sounds coming from within it and the glinting of something like metal through the slots. Those were the things that mattered. The inexorable movement; the drawing together; the inevitable meeting of their faces; the digging and pulling and kneading of the cold hands on his throat; the quickening chatter and grinding and clicking and flashing from within the darkness of the head of the thing that faced him.

Things started to emerge from that head. Whether organic or mechanical, Arthur couldn't be sure. They were penetrating his face before he could tell.

As Arthur's body nearly spasmed right out of the chair, Artemis clapped his hands together. Harry jerked his head up from the desk and looked around blearily.

“Excellent!” Artemis cried. “Looks like we have contact.”

Arthur was clearly having a seizure. Black fluid started running down the sides of his head from both earpieces of the headset—black fluid with an oily sheen.

Harry sat up, shook his head.

“Harry,” Artemis warned, “don't you fucking dare touch anything. Harry … no!”

But he did not get down from the command center quickly enough. Harry's fingers had curled tightly around the headset and, although it felt unnaturally reluctant to be detached from Arthur's head, he finally succeeded in yanking the thing away, resulting in a sudden and eerie stillness falling over Arthur's body. Harry looked at the headset there in his own hand and grinned triumphantly.

But Artemis was upon him. He plucked the headset
from Harry's grasp easily, and since Arthur was no longer exhibiting any obvious signs of life, he fastened it to Harry's head instead, knocking off the one that had already been there. The transition had started, but it had not yet finished. There was still a chance that the process could be completed with a different person connected to the Interstice. Artemis hoped so, anyway, as he didn't really want to have to report any kind of failure back to management.

Now it was Harry who was suffering the seizure. It was Harry whose face was contorted, whose ears were being filled with that otherworldly substance, whose eyes were rolling, whose teeth were clashing. He screamed and the sound was ragged and high-pitched. His body jerked and twisted, and he screamed again. Artemis was grateful that the call center was surrounded by nothing but empty car parks.

Arthur was not dead. He was not even unconscious. He felt violated, though, to such an extent that his mind had diminished into nothing but a tiny, lost spark of sentience struggling to illuminate the cavernous body in which it found itself. The thought of opening his eyes or mouth, or reacting in any way to any of the things he could dimly hear, just did not occur to him. His ears felt wet and leaky, and so he wasn't sure that he could hear properly anyway. He felt like something had physically been trying to creep into his ear canals.

As he noticed or felt one thing, he found himself noticing and feeling other, related things. He felt like an office block in which the lights in a series of adjacent rooms were being turned on, one after the other.

He could hear his dad screaming and he knew he should do something about it. He knew he should help in some way. But he knew, as well, that he would fail. In the same way that his dad had failed to save his mum. His dad had
let her die, right? His dad knew how it was to be powerless to help. He would understand.

Arthur attempted to move some part of his body, any part, and wasn't sure if he succeeded or not. He didn't reckon he was thinking straight; all of his frames of reference seemed shot. What was it he had just been thinking about his dad? He couldn't remember. It was as if he'd just forgotten a dream he'd been having. Maybe that was what had happened. Maybe he was just waking up.

But who was that screaming?

Arthur's eyelids fluttered and then stilled, and then fluttered again.

After a few more tortured seconds, Harry's body slumped into the seat, all the tension gone out of it. He had unintentionally shrugged his dressing gown off and sprawled there nearly naked.

“I am here,” he said, although his voice was not his own reedy voice; it was something diffuse and unearthly, made intelligible by the human vocal cords thrumming within Harry's throat. “I have this body now, and I am here.”

“Welcome,” Artemis said, grinning. “Welcome to our world.”

Without prior warning, Harry's body jerked up out of the seat, so that he was standing. The wire to the headset was stretched out to its full length. He looked around and then took a couple of steps toward Artemis, who remained completely motionless, still grinning.

The headset fell off, Harry's body having taken one step too many away from the telephone to which it was connected. He fell.

“Lesson learned, I think,” Artemis said. “You won't be trying that again.”

He picked Harry up as if he were nothing, and dumped him back into the seat. He then picked up the headset, now dripping and trailing something lank and black, like slimy wet seaweed. He stood behind Harry and, once more, clamped it to his head.

“I need a body,” said the voice emanating immediately from Harry's mouth.

“You have a body,” Artemis said.

“Why can't I then move?”

“You are connected to the telephone,” Artemis said, “by a wire.”

“This is not enough.”

“You are not here for your own reasons,” Artemis said. “You are here because we want you here.”

“I am not here at all.”

If it weren't for the very slight motion of his chest as he breathed, Harry would have appeared dead.

After a long silence, Artemis spoke again. “We want you to help us,” he said.

“I do not just help you people.”

“You have been asked before?”

“Many times.”

Artemis nodded, his forehead creasing. “Well,” he said, “no matter. If you do not just help us people, what does it take?”

Silence. Then, “A body.”

“We have given you a body.”

“You have given me a mouthpiece,” the voice replied, with a rasping sneer. “I require a sacrifice.”

“I didn't think a sacrifice was expected,” Artemis said. “I am quite sure this is only a Priority 2 negotiation.”

“You and your organization are pitifully ignorant about me, Artemis,” the voice said. “You have no understanding of what I require or what I desire. You only have a rudimentary understanding of what I can offer you or of what I am capable. Do not attempt to bully me.”

“Well, then,” Artemis said, “if you really need a sacrifice, you can kill him.” He gestured impatiently at Harry's prone form. “Take what we've given you. And then what? You will … you will accept the offering and, in return, help us?”

“Yes. But I cannot kill it—not from here.
You
must kill it.”

“OK,” Artemis said, “no problem.” He stood up.

“But what is it that you want in return? What is the assistance that you require?”

“Disruption,” Artemis said. “We want you to disrupt and disturb all the telephony networks of other centers, other outsourcers, other corporations.”

“That is all?”

“Yes,” Artemis said, “for now.”

“That is nothing. That is pathetic.”

“Then … wait.” Artemis pointed at Harry's body, which he felt was watching him. The eyes now had a cold, remote gleam to them that didn't seem right, and Artemis couldn't work out which light source they were reflecting. “If we can communicate like this, and what we are asking
you to do is so trivial, why do you need a sacrifice?”

Silence, or almost silence. There was a kind of breathing sound—waves, or maybe static.

The moment stretched out.

“Oh, Artemis,” Harry's mouth said. There was a strange, new tone to the voice—a wistfulness. “I have not set foot in your world for such an age,” the voice continued. “Not since Crowley came to the pyramids and called me through. And only then for mere minutes of your time.”

“You want … you want to be summoned?” Artemis asked. He laughed. “Well, then, that would require a sacrifice, yes. Although I myself am not authorized, you understand, for any Priority 1 negotiations. And even if I was … what do you take me for?” Artemis laughed again, more loudly this time. “You must think I'm a fucking idiot!”

“I know what you want, Artemis.”

“I've got everything I want,” Artemis said. “Or I can soon get it.”

“You can't get Eleanor back, can you?”

Artemis felt his head jerk back as if he'd been slapped. He stared into Harry's black, shining eyes. He took a breath, as if he were about to speak, but then released it. He took another breath, a deeper one.

“What the fuck did you just say?” he asked. “What the fuck are you talking about, you slippery fucking bastard?”

“Or what about Lisa? Yes, maybe Lisa. Maybe that is a more persuasive prospect.”

“What are you talking about?” Artemis gritted his teeth. “What do you mean?”

“I can bring one of them here,” the voice said. “I can bring one of them through for you, if you'll bring
me
. Or even both of them, if you do enough.”

“I don't believe you,” Artemis said. “Why should I believe you?”