Poe's Children (20 page)

“You mean the beach at Strand was like that?” I suggested, to encourage him.

“That’s right. Did you feel it too?”

His eagerness startled me. “I felt ill, that’s all. I still do.”

“Sure. Yes, of course. I mean, we were only supposing. But look at what he says.” He seemed glad to retreat into the notebook. “It started at Lewis where the old stones were, then it moved on up the coast to Strand. Doesn’t that prove that what he was talking about is unlike anything we know?”

His mouth hung open, awaiting my agreement; it looked empty, robbed of sense. I glanced away, distracted by the fluttering glow beyond him. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s because you haven’t read this properly.” His impatience had turned harsh. “Look here,” he demanded, poking his fingers at a group of words as if they were a Bible’s oracle.

WHEN THE PATTERNS READY IT CAN COME BACK. “So what is that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll tell you what I think it means—what he meant.” His low voice seemed to stumble among the rhythms of the beach. “You see how he keeps mentioning patterns. Suppose this other reality was once all there was? Then ours came into being and occupied some of its space. We didn’t destroy it—it can’t be destroyed. Maybe it withdrew a little, to bide its time. But it left a kind of imprint of itself, a kind of coded image of itself in our reality. And yet that image is itself in embryo, growing. You see, he says it’s alive but it’s only the image being put together. Things become part of its image, and that’s how it grows. I’m sure that’s what he meant.”

I felt mentally exhausted and dismayed by all this. How much in need of a doctor was he? I couldn’t help sounding a little derisive. “I don’t see how you could have put all that together from that book.”

“Who says I did?”

His vehemence was shocking. I had to break the tension, for the glare in his eyes looked as unnatural and nervous as the glow of the beach. I went to gaze from the front window, but there was no sign of the doctor.

“Don’t worry,” Neal said. “He’s coming.”

I stood staring out at the lightless road until he said fretfully, “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”

He waited until I sat down. His tension was oppressive as the hovering sky. He gazed at me for what seemed minutes; the noose dug into my skull. At last he said, “Does this beach feel like anywhere else to you?”

“It feels like a beach.”

He shrugged that aside. “You see, he worked out that whatever came from the old stones kept moving toward the inhabited areas. That’s how it added to itself. That’s why it moved on from Lewis and then Strand.”

“All nonsense, of course. Ravings.”

“No. It isn’t.” There was no mistaking the fury that lurked, barely restrained, beneath his low voice. That fury seemed loose in the roaring night, in the wind and violent sea and looming sky. The beach trembled wakefully. “The next place it would move to would be here,” he muttered. “It has to be.”

“If you accepted the idea in the first place.”

A hint of a grimace twitched his cheek; my comment might have been an annoying fly—certainly as trivial. “You can read the pattern out there if you try,” he mumbled. “It takes all day. You begin to get a sense of what might be there. It’s alive, though nothing like life as we recognize it.”

I could only say whatever came into my head, to detain him until the doctor arrived. “Then how do you?”

He avoided the question, but only to betray the depths of his obsession. “Would an insect recognize us as a kind of life?”

Suddenly I realized that he intoned “the beach” as a priest might name his god. We must get away from the beach. Never mind the doctor now. “Look, Neal, I think we’d better—”

He interrupted me, eyes glaring spasmodically. “It’s strongest at night. I think it soaks up energy during the day. Remember, he said that the quicksands only come out at night. They move, you know—they make you follow the pattern. And the sea is different at night. Things come out of it. They’re like symbols and yet they’re alive. I think the sea creates them. They help make the pattern live.”

Appalled, I could only return to the front window and search for the lights of the doctor’s car—for any lights at all.

“Yes, yes,” Neal said, sounding less impatient than soothing. “He’s coming.” But as he spoke I glimpsed, reflected in the window, his secret triumphant grin.

Eventually I managed to say to his reflection, “You didn’t call a doctor, did you?”

“No.” A smile made his lips tremble like quicksand. “But he’s coming.”

My stomach had begun to churn slowly; so had my head, and the room. Now I was afraid to stand with my back to Neal, but when I turned I was more afraid to ask the question. “Who?”

For a moment I thought he disdained to answer; he turned his back on me and gazed toward the beach—but I can’t write any longer as if I have doubts, as if I don’t know the end. The beach was his answer, its awesome transformation was, even if I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Was the beach swollen, puffed up as if by the irregular gasping of the sea? Was it swarming with indistinct shapes, parasites that scuttled dancing over it, sank into it, floated writhing to its surface? Did it quiver along the whole of its length like luminous gelatin? I tried to believe that all this was an effect of the brooding dark—but the dark had closed down so thickly that there might have been no light in the world outside except the fitful glow.

He craned his head back over his shoulder. The gleam in his eyes looked very like the glimmering outside. A web of saliva stretched between his bared teeth. He grinned with a frightful generosity; he’d decided to answer my question more directly. His lips moved as they had when he was reading. At last I heard what I’d tried not to suspect. He was making the sound that I’d tried not to hear in the shells.

Was it meant to be an invocation, or the name I’d asked for? I knew only that the sound, so liquid and inhuman that I could almost think it was shapeless, nauseated me, so much so that I couldn’t separate it from the huge loose voices of wind and sea. It seemed to fill the room. The pounding of my skull tried to imitate its rhythm, which I found impossible to grasp, unbearable. I began to sidle along the wall toward the front door.

His body turned jerkily, as if dangling from his neck. His head laughed, if a sound like struggles in mud is laughter. “You’re not going to try to get away?” he cried. “It was getting hold of you before I came, he was. You haven’t a chance now, not since we brought him into the house,” and he picked up a shell.

As he leveled the mouth of the shell at me my dizziness flooded my skull, hurling me forward. The walls seemed to glare and shake and break out in swarms; I thought that a dark bulk loomed at the window, filling it. Neal’s mouth was working, but the nauseating sound might have been roaring deep in a cavern, or a shell. It sounded distant and huge, but coming closer and growing more definite—the voice of something vast and liquid that was gradually taking shape. Perhaps that was because I was listening, but I had no choice.

All at once Neal’s free hand clamped his forehead. It looked like a pincer desperate to tear something out of his skull. “It’s growing,” he cried, somewhere between sobbing and ecstasy. As he spoke, the liquid chant seemed to abate not at all. Before I knew what he meant to do, he’d wrenched open the back door and was gone. In a nightmarish way, his nervous elaborate movements resembled dancing.

As the door crashed open, the roar of the night rushed in. Its leap in volume sounded eager, voracious. I stood paralyzed, listening, and couldn’t tell how like his chant it sounded. I heard his footsteps, soft and loose, running unevenly over the dunes. Minutes later I thought I heard a faint cry, which sounded immediately engulfed.

I slumped against a chair. I felt relieved, drained, uncaring. The sounds had returned to the beach, where they ought to be; the room looked stable now. Then I grew disgusted with myself. Suppose Neal was injured, or caught in quicksand? I’d allowed his hysteria to gain a temporary hold on my sick perceptions, I told myself—was I going to use that as an excuse not to try to save him?

At last I forced myself outside. All the bungalows were dark. The beach was glimmering, but not violently. I could see nothing wrong with the sky. Only my dizziness, and the throbbing of my head, threatened to distort my perceptions.

I made myself edge between the bushes, which hissed like snakes, mouths full of sand. The tangle of footprints made me stumble frequently. Sand rattled the spikes of marram grass. At the edge of the dunes, the path felt ready to slide me down to the beach.

The beach was crowded. I had to squint at many of the vague pieces of debris. My eyes grew used to the dimness, but I could see no sign of Neal. Then I peered closer. Was that a pair of sandals, half buried? Before my giddiness could hurl me to the beach, I slithered down.

Yes, they were Neal’s, and a path of bare footprints led away toward the crowd of debris. I poked gingerly at the sandals, and wished I had my stick to test for quicksand—but the sand in which they were partially engulfed was quite solid. Why had he tried to bury them?

I followed his prints, my eyes still adjusting. I refused to imitate his path, for it looped back on itself in intricate patterns which made me dizzy and wouldn’t fade from my mind. His paces were irregular, a cripple’s dance. He must be a puppet of his nerves, I thought. I was a little afraid to confront him, but I felt a duty to try.

His twistings led me among the debris. Low obscure shapes surrounded me: a jagged stump bristling with metal tendrils that groped in the air as I came near; half a car so rusty and misshapen that it looked like a child’s fuzzy sketch; the hood of a pram within which glimmered a bald lump of sand. I was glad to emerge from that maze, for the dim objects seemed to shift; I’d even thought the bald lump was opening a crumbling mouth.

But on the open beach there were other distractions. The ripples and patterns of sand were clearer, and appeared to vibrate restlessly. I kept glancing toward the sea, not because its chant was troubling me—though, with its insistent loose rhythm, it was—but because I had a persistent impression that the waves were slowing, sluggish as treacle.

I stumbled, and had to turn back to see what had tripped me. The glow of the beach showed me Neal’s shirt, the little of it that was left unburied. There was no mistaking it; I recognized its pattern. The glow made the nylon seem luminous, lit from within.

His prints danced back among the debris. Even then, God help me, I wondered if he was playing a sick joke—if he was waiting somewhere to leap out, to scare me into admitting I’d been impressed. I trudged angrily into the midst of the debris, and wished at once that I hadn’t. All the objects were luminous, without shadows.

There was no question now: the glow of the beach was increasing. It made Neal’s tracks look larger: their outlines shifted as I squinted at them. I stumbled hastily toward the deserted stretch of beach, and brushed against the half-engulfed car.

That was the moment at which the nightmare became real. I might have told myself that rust had eaten away the car until it was thin as a shell, but I was past deluding myself. All at once I knew that nothing on this beach was as it seemed, for as my hand collided with the car roof, which should have been painfully solid, I felt the roof crumble—and the entire structure flopped on the sand, from which it was at once indistinguishable.

I fled toward the open beach. But there was no relief, for the entire beach was glowing luridly, like mud struggling to suffocate a moon. Among the debris I glimpsed the rest of Neal’s clothes, half absorbed by the beach. As I staggered into the open, I saw his tracks ahead—saw how they appeared to grow, to alter until they became unrecognizable, and then to peter out at a large dark shapeless patch on the sand.

I glared about, terrified. I couldn’t see the bungalows. After minutes I succeeded in glimpsing the path, the mess of footprints cluttering the dune. I began to pace toward it, very slowly and quietly, so as not to be noticed by the beach and the looming sky.

But the dunes were receding. I think I began to scream then, scream almost in a whisper, for the faster I hurried, the further the dunes withdrew. The nightmare had overtaken perspective. Now I was running wildly, though I felt I was standing still. I’d run only a few steps when I had to recoil from sand that seized my feet so eagerly I almost heard it smack its lips. Minutes ago there had been no quicksand, for I could see my earlier prints embedded in that patch. I stood trapped, shivering uncontrollably, as the glow intensified and the lightless sky seemed to descend—and I felt the beach change.

Simultaneously I experienced something which, in a sense, was worse: I felt myself change. My dizziness whirled out of me. I felt light-headed but stable. At last I realized that I had never had sunstroke. Perhaps it had been my inner conflict—being forced to stay yet at the same time not daring to venture onto the beach, because of what my subconscious knew would happen.

And now it was happening. The beach had won. Perhaps Neal had given it the strength. Though I dared not look, I knew that the sea had stopped. Stranded objects, elaborate symbols composed of something like flesh, writhed on its paralyzed margin. The clamor which surrounded me, chanting and gurgling, was not that of the sea: it was far too articulate, however repetitive. It was underfoot too—the voice of the beach, a whisper pronounced by so many sources that it was deafening.

I felt ridges of sand squirm beneath me. They were firm enough to bear my weight, but they felt nothing like sand. They were forcing me to shift my balance. In a moment I would have to dance, to imitate the jerking shapes that had ceased to pretend they were only debris, to join in the ritual of the objects that swarmed up from the congealed sea. Everything glistened in the quivering glow. I thought my flesh had begun to glow too.

Then, with a lurch of vertigo worse than any I’d experienced, I found myself momentarily detached from the nightmare. I seemed to be observing myself, a figure tiny and trivial as an insect, making a timid hysterical attempt to join in the dance of the teeming beach. The moment was brief, yet felt like eternity. Then I was back in my clumsy flesh, struggling to prance on the beach.