The Thing on the Shore (36 page)

With a grunt and a jerk, Harry's body started shaking. Arthur's heart beat faster as he watched his dad's arms and head tremble. The bones and tendons of Harry's hands shone white due to the intensity with which he was gripping the chair arms, but every other part of his body
seemed to be in spasm. There seemed to be some kind of life left, something that was expressing itself through inarticulate gasps and sobs and gurgles, and random, sporadic movement.

The sound from the Scape was now roaring in Arthur's ears. And there was something else: undercutting the sickly smell of the dark liquid still bubbling from the headsets, there was the sharp new scent of the sea. Arthur crawled forward on his elbows, trying to hold his head above the now sodden carpet tiles, heading for his dad. Artemis had turned back to the window and was staring out with his hands pressed against the glass. His mouth was wide open. Whatever he was looking at, it wasn't Harry.

Something landed on the floor in front of Arthur with a heavy, wet squelch, stopping his progress. At first it looked just like a clot of some sort, a congealed lump of matter, but then Arthur saw that it was moving, and it was pulsating slightly. He shouted out in disgust and recoiled, only to see and hear and feel more of the same stuff raining down from the desks ranged above him.

There were ropes and knots and clusters of thin worms, all of different lengths, writhing frantically as if trying to untie themselves from each other. There were hair-thin, eel-long things, and tiny ones, like staples, that Arthur was sure had somehow got there from his bathroom, and all kinds of worms in between. He splayed his fingers and saw that his skin was dotted with the little ones, as if they'd been there in the rank liquid all along,
and he screamed out loud. He felt those living dollops landing on his back, on his legs, on his head. Without even consciously trying to stand, he suddenly found himself on his feet, clawing at his clothes and hair. He could not keep his eyes open for long, but when he did so, he saw that every desk was now thick with wriggling creatures, all of them slopping around in some kind of blind frenzy.

At the rear of the desks, through the same holes that the computer cables came through, familiar pink and red and white and yellow tentacle-type things protruded, some of them thicker than the worms, some of them similarly slender, and waving around like seaweed under water. There were other things too: chitinous, clawed things, poking and snapping but seemingly—given an apparent inability to escape their neighboring organisms—bound to the same root flesh, whatever that might be. In that brief moment of seeing, Arthur got the impression that these things were extending, curling around each other, creeping along any surface they found.

He also noticed Harry's body shuddering violently in his seat on top of the projector screen. And beyond that, heavy rain hammering into the windows. And beyond that … that was when Arthur closed his eyes.

The sea had been white with a turbulence just beyond the outer harbor wall. That was what had Artemis's attention, even despite Arthur's screams. What was it? What was causing that? But things had started dropping from Arthur's fringe on to his face, and his eyes had snapped
shut before he could get the fuller picture.

Harry was screaming through the slit in his throat, or trying to.

When Arthur opened his eyes again, Artemis was standing directly in front of him, bending forward to look directly into his face. Their faces were just a few centimeters apart, and Artemis was not smiling.

“I don't know what you are trying to do,” Artemis said.

“Trying to stop you,” Arthur said. “Trying to help my dad.”

Things were crawling around their feet, and they could barely hear each other above the static, which was now loud enough for distant voices to be heard in it.

Artemis pushed Arthur back against a desk, and then further back, forcing him down on to it so that he was lying across it. Arthur tried to struggle free but found that he could do nothing—Artemis was too strong. Things moved beneath him. He could feel them squirming vigorously. Artemis punched him in the head, and lights flashed inside his skull. His mouth and his eyes hung open and Artemis grabbed a handful of the worms and ground them into his face. They dropped on to his tongue, and then into the back of his throat. Arthur felt them under his eyelids. He coughed and gagged. He felt things wrapping themselves around his arms and legs and throat. The things felt like cords of hair. He managed to turn his head to the side before he threw up.

He realized that Artemis was no longer holding him, but he still could not move.

Matter slimed wetly between his cheek and the surface of the desk. With his head on its side, though, he could see Artemis moving back toward Harry's body. He forced himself to keep his eyes open and watch.

Artemis bent down over Harry and peered into his face. He thumbed open his eyelids. Harry's body had stopped its shaking and it looked like he really was dead. Artemis turned back to the cups of blood and lifted one of them. He knelt down toward the circle that he'd drawn, which, Arthur noticed, had remained free of the filth that was still slowly deepening across the whole of the rest of the call center floor. The room had become thick with the static hiss and the sound of lively slithering. The air smelled both sulfurous and salty.

Artemis dipped his fingers in the blood and started to mark the circle precisely, delicately, carefully.

The hissing intensified.

Light shone from the revolving door at the front of the building. As Bony and Yasmin approached it, they could see that the two security men were standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, looking worried.

“What do you reckon?” Bony asked. “Shall we just walk in like we're visitors?”

“You can't do that,” Yasmin said. “This time of night, the doors'll be electronically locked.”

“Right then,” Bony said. He hefted the bat nervously. “Right, then, we'll knock, shall we?”

“We could try knocking.”

“Can we knock, really?”

“I don't know.” Yasmin grimaced.

“I'm going to try knocking before anything else,” Bony said.

“OK,” Yasmin nodded. “OK, yeah, let's knock.”

The two of them walked up to the door, conscious that they would now be visible to the security guards if the
guards turned away from whatever was drawing their attention toward the stairs. Bony propped the cricket bat against the wall just to the right of the door, well out of sight, and tapped sharply on the glass. The security guards instantly turned around, saw Yasmin and Bony, and looked at each other uneasily. They both wore black trousers and jumpers. One of them—tall with thinning gray hair, and a neat gray beard—came up to the door, pressed a button on the inside, and hauled the door open.

“What is it?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

“We need to use your phone, please,” Yasmin said quickly. “We think we just witnessed a mugging.”

“You think?” the guard replied. “What do you mean?”

“We
did
just witness a mugging,” Yasmin said. “We need to call the police, and maybe even an ambulance.”

The guard looked back toward his bulky, red-haired colleague, who shrugged uncomfortably, then shook his head. A strange sound could be heard inside the building, coming from upstairs. It was like the sound of a wave breaking, but held indefinitely and prolonged artificially.

“Sorry,” the guard said.

“For fuck's sake,” Bony said, “come on! We heard somebody screaming out there past the railway tracks. We need a telephone or—”

“Look,” the guard cut in, “if you know what's good for you, you'll both fuck right off right now. All right? Both of you. You, lass, and your lanky, skull-faced, bastard friend. OK? You don't want to come in here. Mike here is a dab hand with his fists, if you know what I mean, right? And
you're trying our patience now.” As if for confirmation, he looked back toward Mike, who was still standing at the foot of the stairs. Mike nodded, and the gray-haired guard turned back to face Yasmin and Bony. “Push us any more and he will not go easy on—”

The end of the cricket bat was in his face before he could finish his sentence. His words were choked off by his teeth being smashed inwards. He crumpled, mumbling.

“Jesus Christ!” Yasmin said. “Fucking hell.”

“I know,” Bony said. “Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't … I don't know.” He put his free hand over his mouth and stood there in the doorway, still clutching the cricket bat in his right hand.

Mike stared down at his floored colleague with suddenly saucer-like eyes, and his mouth open. Then he looked up at Bony and drew a fairly pathetic-looking night stick. He nervously licked his lips.

Bony darted forward and plowed the bat into Mike's stomach, and then, as he doubled over, brought it down on the back of the man's head. There was an awful cracking sound and blood oozed from the point of impact. Mike hit the floor face-first.

“Oh no,” Bony said, “I feel sick. I'm going to be sick. Oh no.”

Yasmin was pale and shaking. “Bony,” she whispered. “Christ, Bony.”

“I know,” Bony said. “I'm sorry.”

Yasmin took his free hand. “You had to do it,” she said. “There's something awful happening here.”

Bony nodded.

“Come on,” Yasmin said. “We need to get upstairs.”

Yasmin led the way, and the two of them ascended the staircase, the fuzzy noise getting louder as they did so. At the top, they saw something black and sticky oozing out from underneath the door leading on to the call center floor. “I think we've done the right thing,” Yasmin murmured.

“I hope so,” Bony said.

Yasmin pushed open the door—letting a frantic, insectile noise escape—but it was difficult, as if there was something lying on the floor behind it. She jumped backward as a wedge of thick, wormy sludge squeezed its way out. She glanced back at Bony, her nose wrinkling. She then leaned forward to push the door open again, before putting her head through the gap and peering around. She shifted backward and let the door close.

She shook her head. “I definitely think we've done the right thing,” she said. “I can't tell you what's happening in there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bony,” Yasmin's eyes began filling up, “I think I'm really scared.”

“If you're scared, then I'm scared too,” Bony said, and nudged the door slightly open with the cricket bat. “What's inside there?”

“I don't know what it is, but everything is covered in crap and worms.” She gestured at the few worms that made it through the open door. “I don't know what's
happened, or where they've come from, but we've got to go in. This must be where it's happening—whatever it is that's causing that out there in the sea.”

“OK,” Bony said. “OK.” He nodded. He swallowed. He looked at Yasmin. “Right, then,” he said, “let's go.”

Yasmin nodded in response. She pushed at the door again, putting all of her modest weight behind one shoulder, and, with a deep breath, stepped through on to the call center floor.

The place was barely recognizable as a call center any more. It looked more like close-up, time-lapse footage of parasites feasting on the insides of some marine corpse. Brightly colored fleshy things were crawling through a bed of dead, rotten fluids. Human-sized tendrils and tubers and tubes undulated slowly from the backs of desks where telephones had been, and thin-limbed, starfish-type things crept around like giant spiders. Purple, sinuous, arm-thick creatures slid through the murk. Moisture was dripping from the ceiling now, but Yasmin did not look up to see what its source was. She looked back to make sure that Bony was with her, then slowly, unsteadily, started picking her way through the writhing tangle toward where she could hear a voice, a voice she recognized, raised above the static sound that seemed to be just hanging there in the air like a mist.

Artemis.

Yasmin could not work out what he was saying. It sounded almost as if he were speaking in some other language. She could see him now, kneeling on something
white that looked supernaturally bright against the gloom filling the room. In the middle of the white space was a body in a chair.

Bony was suddenly passing her by, cricket bat raised, as he jumped from one desk to the next to avoid the sucking muck on the floor. Yasmin found herself running too, suddenly desperate to reach that small, barren island of cleanliness on which Artemis knelt. She could feel things moving in her hair, in her shoes, inside her clothes. She ran and ran.

“Artemis!” she heard Bony shout.

Artemis looked up and around. In one hand he was holding a small white cup, the kind of thing you'd fetch a vending-machine coffee in. In that one moment, Artemis looked peculiarly pathetic, cup in hand, suit dirty and disheveled, a look of total incomprehension on his face, while he knelt at the feet of what … a corpse? Was that a dead body? Who was that?

Harry?

Bony swung the bat all the way around his body before it connected with the side of Artemis's head. The cup dropped from the man's hand and spilled blood all over the pristine surface in front of him. His head suddenly bent way too far over to one side, and there was a sound like a snail being trodden on, but amplified.

Everything around them seemed to spasm and tighten and coil back in on itself, as if it suffered the same pain as Artemis. The sound of static quieted noticeably. Artemis began to crawl forward on his hands and knees,
but Bony hit him again and his hands flew out from beneath him. Bony struck him once more on the head.

Through the windows beyond, Yasmin could see the boiling sea. Her brain, her heart, her stomach went cold, then hot, then cold. No.
No.
What was that out there? What the fuck was that in the sea? She rushed forward, past Bony and Artemis, and pressed her face and hands to the glass. She stared for a long moment, then turned around and stared at the remains of the ritual that Artemis had been engaged in. She ran forward and tipped Harry's chair out of the circle, pushed the chair over, and then threw herself on to the circle and used smears of the notyet-dried blood to obliterate the symbols that Artemis had been drawing. She was panting and desperate. Part of her was still at the window, looking out over the sea.