The Thing on the Shore Read online

  THE THING ON THE SHORE

  Tom Fletcher was born in 1984. He is married, and currently lives in Manchester. He blogs at www.endistic.wordpress.com.

  Also by Tom Fletcher

  The Leaping

  THE THING ON THE SHORE

  Tom Fletcher

  New York • London

  © 2011 by Tom Fletcher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-62365-307-1

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  The Lighthouse Night

  Transition

  A Fantasy at the Lighthouse

  Arthur and Harry

  The Ominous Passenger

  Artemis Approaches

  At Home

  Swans

  Bathroom Dream

  Part Two

  Victorian Gothic

  Ears

  The Ghost Ship

  With The Animals

  At The Lighthouse

  The Vagabond

  Karaoke

  Before The Lighthouse Night

  Monday Morning At Arthur’s

  Where Are You?

  Dead Weight

  The Waverley

  From The Depths

  Bad Thursday

  Bony And The Thing

  Friday Night At Captain Bens

  Overtime

  The Landscape

  Objectification

  The Fishing Line

  Part Three

  The Suicide

  Arthur And The Thing

  A Request From Head Office

  Witness

  Young Eyes

  The Celebration

  The Whales

  Rebecca’s Last Day

  Blood on the Moon

  Bad Smell

  Realization

  Part Four

  Artemis at Work

  What It Is and Stuff

  Harry’s phone calls

  Patent Leather

  The Panopticon

  The Sea Near Drigg

  Escape

  Potatofication

  Distress

  The Emails

  The Worms

  At the Museum

  Part Five

  Yasmin Makes a Move

  The Streets of Whitehaven

  Bracket’s Development Opportunity

  Harry in a State

  Late

  Body

  Come and Meet Me

  A Request from the Interstice

  Face to Face

  Headset

  Choice

  The Mouthpiece

  Strange Weather

  Thin Places

  Security

  On and Off

  The Thing on the Shore

  Work

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  THE LIGHTHOUSE NIGHT

  Arthur had been what, twelve years old. So this was, what, fourteen years ago. He had woken up, not knowing why, and had lain there in bed and listened out for whatever it was that had disturbed him. He had not long to wait.

  Raised voices from downstairs: the words were unclear but the sentiments were not. Arthur’s room was dark but for the moonlight coming in through the thin blue curtains. He got out of bed and went to look out of the window. No point, really, in trying to sleep now.

  The moon hung fat and the stars also appeared extravagant; the sea was alive with the joyous shimmer of reflected light. Arthur looked at the sea and it looked like the perfect medium for life. It looked absolutely ideal. What if to be in the sea were to exist in a kind of luminous weightlessness? It sounded quite perfect. Of course you would not be surrounded by that light, not really, but what if?

  Arthur was almost ignoring the shouting from downstairs, but not really ignoring it well enough. He shifted his gaze from the sea to the lighthouse. The lighthouse had a green light. He dimly remembered the lighthouse once having a white light, as most lighthouses in films and TV programs and illustrations did, but at some point—he couldn’t remember exactly when—the light of Whitehaven lighthouse had gone green. Sometimes, at night, Arthur liked to look at the lighthouse and lose himself in the rhythm of that light. It was not a very bright light, and there was no rotating beam extending from it. It did not flash suddenly; it was just a slow blinking. The light would subtly appear at the top of the red-and-white tower, and then disappear. A gleaming thing: less like a light and more like something green and precious that was reflecting some other light. Arthur liked the fact that it was green and that it was understated. He narrated the status of the light in his head: on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off. The words were stretched out in his head because the light was either on or off for what felt like a long time. A good three or four seconds, at least.

  The front door slammed. Arthur tore his gaze away from the lighthouse and looked down at the floor. Some kind of continuous noise had suddenly stopped with that slamming. Then the front door opened again. He heard his dad calling from the doorway.

  “Rebecca!”

  But Rebecca, his mum, did not respond. She was running away. Why would she be running away? She was running across the grass toward the cliffs and the sea. Arthur could see her now, dressed all in white—thick white pajamas—hastening off. Harry, his dad, was out there too, although he was less prominent, wearing dark colors that did not stand out against the dark greens and browns of the scrubby ground. He wasn’t moving very quickly. He was shouting but he was not moving very quickly.

  He was not moving quickly enough.

  Arthur started trying to open the window but fumbled with the catch.

  What had they been fighting about, anyway?

  Arthur’s mum reached the cliffs and paused there. She turned back to look at Harry, who was now jerkily hopping and jumping toward her. He must not have had any shoes on. Arthur hammered on the window but neither parent looked up. He looked briefly at his mother standing there, luminous against the sea beyond; then, feeling some kind of desperate certainty about what was going to happen, he looked away. Looked at the lighthouse instead. From the corner of his eye he saw the shining figure of his mother slip away but, with some kind of world-shaking feat of mental strength, he concentrated on that flashing light instead. That on-off-on.

  TRANSITION

  The whale was young and injured. Something vicious and grasping and unseen had ensnared it from behind during its migration, squeezing it tightly in a tentacle grip. The young whale had only been released when its gi
ant mother had turned back and plowed into its attacker, mouth open wide, her pointed teeth tearing at squid flesh. Everything moved agonizingly slowly under water, though, and by the time the squid had let the young whale go, it already had several broken bones and ruptured internal organs. It spiraled downward, keening, crying, singing in a doleful voice, its eyes swiveling to and fro, looking for its mother. It could see her floating up above, quite far away now, struggling as if herself in some creature’s grip. But it could not see any sign of the squid.

  The young whale felt different now. The element in which it moved felt unfamiliar. This was not the ocean that it knew.

  It was no longer swimming through an ocean at all, but it could not know that.

  The whale was not aware of its mother any more. Still quite far below it, there stretched a seemingly endless plain of pink and yellow and white and red and green organic matter—tendrils and shells and matted, hair-like material. Above it there appeared to be some kind of strange, closed-in sky. It was a creamy color—not the familiar deep blue of hundreds of meters of brine—and it seemed to throb with some kind of energy. The whale did not think in such terms, but the sky was vibrating so violently and at such speed that it looked like there were two skies, one laid beneath the other and flickering in and out of existence.

  In the distance there was a cluster of purple lights.

  The whale stopped moaning as it drifted, and not long after that it died.

  A FANTASY AT THE LIGHTHOUSE

  Arthur had experienced one of his lighthouse days. Not a day spent at the lighthouse; rather a day spent longing to be at the lighthouse. It was getting dark by the time he finally got down there after work, and after tea.

  Increasingly, Arthur found himself alone. There were always traces of the fishermen, but the fishermen themselves tended to have left by the time he arrived. Of course it was not actually true that he was always alone at the lighthouse; it was just that he had started to become more and more aware of the solitude.

  He leaned across the wall from which the fishermen fished, avoiding the smear of fish guts. The sea was relatively smooth and still. Not still—it was never still—but relatively flat. Nearly still. Arthur looked all the way out to the horizon and thought it was a bit weird, actually, the way that there seemed none of the usual peaks and troughs.

  He pressed his cheek to the sandstone of the wall and closed his eyes.

  Arthur was woken by cold water falling on his face. He stood up and saw that it was now dark. It was not raining, as he had first thought, but sea water was spraying up from the other side of the wall. The surface of the ocean appeared to be more agitated than it had been earlier. It looked like there was a disturbance of some kind—like in a film when a submarine was surfacing. Arthur watched raptly, hoping that something huge and monstrous would emerge, something that just kept coming and kept coming, more and more of it, some kind of shiny black tentacle, or a mass of shiny black tentacles … Or some kind of huge, blind, bulbous whale-like creature, grotesque in its enormity, pale-skinned and moaning, mouth open wide, the whole creature straining against its skin, somehow rising from the water even still, more and more of its flesh being revealed as the brine ran slickly back down the body of the beast, whatever it was, back into the liquid mass of the sea itself. Some kind of saucer-eyed, seal-faced titan with a blank expression and a gigantic mouth hanging open, an endless flood of water streaming from between its teeth as it rose up over Whitehaven, taller than the lighthouse, taller than any lighthouse, bigger than any building. Like Godzilla but just standing there, no apparent desire to destroy, no apparent anger, just a fucking horrible blankness, a terrible apathy, like this thing had just woken up and just wished it was dead.

  Arthur looked out over the sea—now black under the night sky—and thought of a planet he had read about in the science bit of the newspaper. This was a planet that had been discovered outside our solar system, using a network of telescopes trained on a not-too-distant star. A water planet. One three times as large as the Earth and made almost entirely of water; a colossal spherical ocean wrapped around a ball of rock. That ocean was over fifteen thousand kilometers deep, which was a detail Arthur had not been able to forget. Fifteen thousand kilometers of water heading straight down. Fifteen meters seemed deep enough, to be honest. If you knew that the water beneath you was fifteen meters deep, that was enough to make you feel small; that was enough to make you feel like there was some serious depth below you. But fifteen thousand kilometers? That didn’t really bear thinking about. Arthur thought about it quite a lot, though.

  The same planet was believed to have a thick atmosphere that rendered it permanently dark. There was no visible light from the sun reaching that ocean. It was hot, being seventy-five times closer to its sun than the Earth was to our sun, and yet the ocean remained liquid because of the weight of the atmosphere. So the water could reach nearly three hundred degrees Celsius and still not evaporate.

  Theoretically there could be islands floating on this planet. Not made of rock or soil, but a kind of ice formed after it was subjected to phenomenal atmospheric pressures. Crystalline structures forced into existence through the compaction of water.

  When they got a chance, they would turn the Hubble Space Telescope on to this planet in order to analyze its atmosphere. They would look for oxygen: something that only exists on Earth because of the presence of life there. Oxygen in the atmosphere of the water world would indicate the presence of life there, too, which would not be as impossible as it might sound, given the way weird creatures thrived around volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea on Earth. And what kind of life might exist in an ocean fifteen thousand kilometers deep?

  Imagining this planet with its heaving, bottomless ocean, an impossibly hot ocean, an ocean totally enveloped in darkness, orbiting a red dwarf star—a dying star—felt very sad and eerie. It was an eerie sadness that Arthur could enjoy, though. He liked to imagine himself swimming through those black waters, somehow immune to—but not unaware of—the hideous temperatures. In these fantasies, the sky would flash red or white as unearthly storms tore open the heavy clouds, and barbed threads of lightning skittered across the peaks of the mountainous waves.

  He imagined the whales, or their equivalent, that might live in those depths. These creatures would be blind and they would also be gargantuan. They would be pale and they would have strange skin able to deal with the heat and the pressure. They might have some kind of rigid exoskeleton. Maybe those creatures would be more insect than mammal, or God knows what else. It probably wasn’t even possible, though. The planet probably didn’t even exist. How could anybody really know? Still, he often imagined himself swimming—flailing—across the surface of that orb, and waiting for something alive to brush against his feet.

  He now imagined something alive, one of those monsters from that planet, rising directly up out of the sea in front of him, somehow here with him, somehow in the water just by virtue of being from other water, as if all water were somehow connected; as if the oceanic depths of one planet were connected to the oceanic depths of another.

  The sea off the shore of Whitehaven would boil and the creature would thrash its way up above the surface and halfway on to the land and, without even knowing it, it would knock the lighthouse down.

  ARTHUR AND HARRY

  The next day, Arthur sat at the desk with his head in his hands, because it was somehow the most comfortable position. The chair he occupied was old and broken. His posture would be ruined forever. He should do something about it. He grimaced as one of the recorded voices rattling out of his earpiece grew louder and angrier. He felt like he wasn’t physically big enough to deal with the anger he was listening to. He wanted to expand and break and flow across his desk, until he was pressed into all the corners. He wanted to fill the small, perfectly square “pod” with himself, with just his body. Completely. He wanted to be bigger, and he wanted to be made out of water.

  The pod was not a real roo
m, but a space partitioned off by walls that were actually more like windows. Each wall was made out of two large sheets of very strong glass with a blind fitted between them. These blinds could be lowered so that whatever happened inside the pod remained hidden. The walls only went halfway up to the ceiling, though, so the pod was never entirely private. Conversations could be overheard. The pod was one of many lining one wall of the call center in which Arthur worked. He could hear the general murmur of hundreds of people talking on telephones on the other side of the glass, the insect buzz of typing, the hum of all those computers. He could smell dust and hot plastic.

  Arthur had lowered the blinds of the pod he occupied, so he could now feel alone. His back was hunched. His longish black hair flopped down in front of his face. He wore black trousers secured high about the waist by a belt in which he’d punched new holes with a corkscrew, and a white shirt with a red tie. The trousers were too big for him. His mum always used to say he was too thin.

  The angry voice that he was listening to had momentarily stopped shouting, and a second voice was now audible as it apologized. The second voice was weak, and its owner stammered.

  “I’m … I’m sorry, Mr. McCormick. I’m very, very sorry. Um … before I look into that, I just need to … um. Can … can I just ask, do you have a mobile number that, um, or any other … any other contact number that I could, um, take? Please?”

  Arthur squeezed his eyes shut. He heard a sharp intake of breath from Mr. McCormick.

  “No!” shouted Mr. McCormick. “No, you cannot! You … you bloody people, you’ll know more about me than I do myself!” His voice grew louder and Arthur could picture the spittle flying from his lips and sticking to the telephone receiver gripped in his fleshy hand. “I’ve got a heart condition! I’m not a well man! And you … you won’t even try to help me! It’s bloody disgusting! I’m ill, I am! And you just keep asking questions!”