In a diner/burger-combo off the A11.
Most of the water coming out of the base of the cold faucet, the hot one running of its own accord, broken plastic air vent covering exposing black dust. Sickened sky through a half-cracked window. Flushing the toilet swilled around a mash of yellow paper and shit mix under some guttering lights. No phone numbers or obscene comments written on the cubicle wall. Had seen some bad ones.
One last drop of soap in a Carex dispenser.
‘You know what we’re doing here,’ he said when I sat back down. The shadow of his soul and its oldness leaned out of him, seemed cast across the table in hazy grey from the windows.
‘I know.’
‘They told us we didn’t have to come.’
‘I know.’
‘You said you wanted to and so did I.’
‘Yes.’
I paid for the meal.
‘Thinking about going to college?’ the cashier asked a younger man working in the kitchen.
‘I was, but a bit old for that now.’
‘Ah. Eleven ninety please.’
How we were sacrilege to the place and its other months, to the manic grin of summertime holidays, the crazed pressing of the face into packets of pharmacy photographs, the packedup cars, the spooling out of a last line of one-sided adolescent nostalgia for the children.
Canned taurine and bacon breakfast.
We stayed where we were for an hour after eating. He slept in the passenger seat with his blanket round him and his hair a mess against the window. I leaned on the bonnet drinking green caffeine.
Then we rumbled the old Volvo on its way, a steady motorway churn the colour of mental affliction. He carried on dozing while I boiled in my own sweat, it tightened out of me by the furnace-death of the heater he wanted to keep on.
Different things. Wishing someone else in the car were dead instead of myself.
Not really. Exaggeration.
He knew what was what.
Had known.
Taurine and bacon breakfast. One of them would have made me sick. The two together made me reel nauseous.
Nameless stripes of trees beyond the barriers had plastic bags for leaves.
Night steadied up, the concrete turned black and the streetlights cast us in orange nothing. The bulbs scrolled us through. The change of light muffled the space. I remembered things.
‘Auto Business Centre’ ran a large, discoloured banner, hiding itself in a fold in the brown monochrome. One of too many anonymous, discredited buildings on the side. ‘Business.’ And cars flew past them every second, a second only to wonder and not conclude anything about their uses and disuses.
Flatter blocks next to this one were signposted metalworks. But no life.
I pulled in amongst ten cars and vans dropped in the spaces, a logoed lorry and a pickup truck, none presently manned. Killed the blast of the heater and woke him. Wiped the sweat off my face.
Cool beyond the chassis. It was refreshing. No movement in the parking space or around the buildings. Our footsteps echoed scratchy though the cars of course flooded above and behind us on the carriageway, where we could not see them. Seemed natural to straightaway head towards the Centre where a cutaway of iron doorframe and white fluorescence was frozen in place. The bricks of the fifteen-storey building were crumbling but would hold decades more of slow collapse. Only half of the windows had panes in them.
‘I always notice these places,’ I said.
The shredded clouds spat and the audible stream of vehicles and the audible rush of the world tore past this place sodden with neglect and sordid mystery.
He put a hand to my shoulder to steady himself.
We wandered in and down a coldest corridor, following natural, in a sense fearless, anticipatory, the lights that had been left on. Hoped for something.
We walked. Nothing to tell us where, or if, we needed to be.
Around a corner.
‘Ah!’ the man said when he found us, a gruff whisper that bounced off the surfaces and was flattened in dust. ‘Hello, boys. Both of you.’ He had a kind smile and the desolation of the place was sent scared by the niceness in his eyes which was amplified by the panes of his glasses, the panes which were not broken and were not missing and were not dirty like the lenses of the place we stood in, but were shining and expansive, and though he could have you believe it for a second, the nature of our business together meant that he could not have been as vivid and tender as the glass balls in his skull would have it, and this building knew not his heart.
‘How are you?’ the man asked, and shook hands with me, and, ‘How are you?’ and shook hands with him.
We said fine. Returned warmth in thanks.
‘Well,’ he said.
He led us up peeling stairs, through a flickering room lined with broken chairs to another large, white space, white but for the stains and cracks and brokenness. Night-time airport white. We sat around a plastic foldout table.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘There’s not much to say to you that isn’t better explained there.’
‘It’s not here?’ I asked. Though I would have felt it.
‘No, no, it’s not here. It is all far better removed.’ He rummaged in his pocket and unfolded his bits of paper. ‘This is the address, directions.’
‘Thank you.’
Even the particles, which were in the fallow air, which were ready for their mild and minuscule dreams to thrum at the wrong side of supposition, the place we had for years seen without eyes.
‘And this is… We didn’t know if this is the sort of thing that’s useful for you both. But we thought we’d give it to you anyway. It’s… It is something he wrote. Nothing really, it’s from a while back, long before it was as bad as it’s gotten. We just happened to keep it.’
‘Is it to do with the precariaste?’ I asked.
‘The note?’
‘No; generally.’
‘Oh no, we don’t think so. At all. That would be manageable. At least we managed before, once.’ He pulled the sleeve of his jacket. ‘That’s why we’ve called you.’
And then he called the Society to let them know we were on our way.
Before we left, I strolled to the back of the room, gazed out through jags of glass at the awful visible fields, brown and cramped and dissipating in the unholy light. Too much world without road. Left to seethe, fade.
Devoid. Gaping, gaping spaces.
In the car I glanced at the easy enough directions. Unfolded the other paper.
‘Could you turn the light on?’ he asked. I flicked the switch for the little overhead.
It was finely printed.
Ere
Should we not have
Had a single thought
We sat.
Not useful.
Not practically. Not a help.
But hair rising on my back and neck. A rush and fear and memory of those things.
We stayed the night in another travel hotel, occupied by worn vending machines out of time, and other midnight people who looked like the vending machines. In the room he took the main bed and I the camper, under the window from which a sliver of amber drew a line across the carpet, casing nothing and no remembrance in history.
Woke from standing in a rusty canal as pieces of pigeon carcass had floated towards and around me.
Falling asleep to falling awake. The room felt like someone had rotated it while we slept.
He was grey, awake, gazing around the ceiling, his palm and outspread digits laid across his belly. A knit of fingers that might bear symbolism in religious art.
Good morning.
Lukewarm water drank in tired thirst always tasted terrible, more so as my tongue associated it with headaches and mouldering stomach pains. I drank it and sat on the bed while he did his slow bathroom business, then I gave him the pills for his bones. He sat on the bed and asked me what was on the television.
‘It hasn’t been on. How would I know?’
After I checked out we sat in the car and chewed frosted wooden sandwiches from the petrol station. Soggy to sickening.
Chew. Chew. Chew.
At least we’d had our own bathroom.
‘I wonder,’ he said. Wrapped in his blanket.
His breathing.
‘You wonder. Well. We both do that.’ A salty string of lettuce. I pulled it out of my mouth and put it back in the box. Settled my stomach and antsed my brain with a sip of ‘energy.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ he went. I got so tired in the journeying of his sentences. Always. And as it always was in these old days, I saw his eyes and the sprouts of his beard and the curl of his palms and the way they looked like they held something grossly cherished to him, some semblance of somethingness, some piece of heart that he must press to his body to keep his weakened frame, and how empty those palms were, and I was so sorry for it that I could throw myself weeping into the fast lane. ‘If they need us,’ he finished.
The Society came about some decades before us.
But we had seen the most.
Drove over hours. Grim creased light through the clouds shrivelled, and another afternoon crawled into shadows. Then a wild lethargy overtook me as we went through the night. He slept. I went river-like over the thousand cat’s eyes and streetlights, the road pushing me out, letting me bump. Roiled over that heightened weariness. Jittery weariness. The seasick sensation bobbed about in my head and in my stomach. My brain bobbed about. Knocking against the sides of my skull.
We came to the place.
A nondescript turnoff from a country road. Shabby gate patching a wiry fence, wet track leading between black fields.
No trepidatious rush, as in days gone, days before the precariaste. For him neither, it seemed. Just the low thick feeling in my stomach, like someone had filled it with gravitational sludge.
I opened the gate. On the way back to the car I glimpsed him, behind a glare of headlight. Soft wrinkles and hard hairs in the frail flush of the dashboard. A dark, misdetailed glimmer of a man. In a way, after all this time, it was how he was meant to be seen. I think, how we were both meant to be seen.
Down the track, with the gate closed behind us. Jumpy fields and scrappy hedges that I did not stare longingly at. Bothered by the night, even after everything. Especially. Even. Still. The scrap became growth, and the trees began to rise up on either side of us. Shut all else off. The track became questionable. The car humped. He sat and looked straight out the windscreen, a change from his destitute nod against the window.
The track ended. By a small wooden shed, or a shack.
I halted the car and we sat, and I thumbed the headlights off, and we thought.
A man in his early twenties stood by the shack and was splatted with mud, his arms caked up to his shoulders. This dirt perhaps covering him as he had dug out the sky, which now I could see black and starred darkest blue, and not brown-churned above the cutout treetops. He stood and watched as we approached, not calling through the wood. The only light came from an old lamp that swung from his wet crusted grip; it brought me back down, the flame leaping up grooves in our clothes and his face and the young man’s face, sluicing unsure along creases in the bark of the trees, darting through the cracks of the shack we stood near.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re here.’
We were.
‘How much have they told you?’
‘Basically nothing.’
The ground was doing something beneath us. Reacting to the rumble in my heart though I could feel it in my feet. He looked not quite fearful but eager, concerned. His eyes were dim.
‘Best seen yourself, probably. I think you should come and see,’ the young man said.
‘I think that that’s so,’ he replied.
As we spoke a muscled woman creaked out of the shack door, gloved hands smearing sweat off her neck. ‘You’re here,’ she said, and she looked at us. She had a west-country voice. I think that I had seen her before, but I could not remember where. ‘They haven’t told you much? I guess they don’t really know. But they know you. You two’re old guard, aren’t you? Don’t think they’d keep it back on purpose.’
‘It’s not the precariaste.’
Gone. Years ago.
‘Oh, no. No, no.’ She wiped more sweat from her forehead, catching her hair and leaving finger tracks of dirt. ‘We were out here a couple of months ago, we didn’t know what we were gonna find. We knew something was here, but we really didn’t know. They were saying before they called you, something’s at the palisades, and it’s not like anything, it’s old. But everything’s old. There was the beginning of a tunnel already. But we dug deeper, and…’ She took a brief look at the young man just to see his face. It was shadowed. ‘They said this thing is not the precariaste. It’s not the ten thinnings. And we had to be quick, for a sentry. And it was too late for our man because he was caught by it, while the crew were digging. He was one of ours and it was too late.’
He’s down there still.
‘So we put him up,’ she said. ‘But it’s… He won’t last.’
How could we be the experts.
A question, perhaps, a doubt, that I would be called upon. A small one. Not a puzzle that he would be.
‘Better get to it,’ I said.
‘Here,’ the young man said, handing him the old lamp.
‘Thank you.’
I had a torch I’d brought with me. From a simple pack.
The young man and the woman led us into the shack. The sludge in my stomach gained weight. Had been feeding it cans and bottles all day. Wanted to get inside before the wind blew out the trees.
Watering can and trowel on slanted shelves. Web of shovels on the floor. A hole in the ground.
‘You won’t get lost,’ they said. ‘Be careful.’
I nodded, and helped him down, and then I went after him. One last look back at those workers stood in a dark small box.
And we. On our way to something.
Quiet rumbling blackness before us.
I did not turn on my torch to begin with. The tunnel was tall enough for us to stand comfortably, and he led the way with the lamp. Its light lent itself more naturally to the business. Had seen ghastly things in the harsh white of torchlight, though ghastly too things in the peripheries of candle glow, and the worst of all ghasts by the wavering black light of my mind, a light I had cast upon ancientness.
Just a fancy. Walls of earth should be walked upon by the tips and swathes of fire.
Every few feet we passed some tenuous beam acting as a rafter, held in place by wooden posts at the tunnel-sides. They had been as eager to get in as they had been to get out. We heard not the voices or sounds of them, minutes above and behind us. We heard the scraping of our shoes. I heard the blanket he still had round him, sweeping the walls. We heard the. The unheard rumbling.
‘I cannot even think what,’ he said.
We went deeper. We went darker.
Ten minutes.
‘It feels awful,’ he said.
It did.
And yet we drew closer.
Something scuttled at the bounds of the lamplight. ‘Mind,’ I told him.
Things were in the walls and on the ground. Spiders. Beetles. Millipedes, glistering and stringing into holes on filament legs. My skin would have shivered right off me were I a child. Something shifted and scuttled. In a corner we turned, I saw a crab black and back away behind a rock. Would have been held at the wonderment of the entomologist, all this, were he still with us.
He looked down but did not bother to lift his blanket.
We kept on. Moths began to dust around the lamp.
And the push inside my mind. Like drinking ten pounds of coffee and trying to sleep. Like the compulsions of the obsessed, ringing round them, being unable to shove them out because all else is too off-centre, too uncomfortable. But this here. In my brain. Whatever presence lay in the earth. Beyond it, nothing to do with the creeping crustacea, the threadbare wings. The tunnel throbbed with ill feeling. It filled the round vacuum. However many epochs the precariaste had been old, this was far more aged, so much so that it must have belonged to a time, an incalculable history different to our own.
He described just what I felt. ‘It fills me with worries. But inside all of them is an intense worry. That I do not know what these worries are.’
‘They’re not at odds.’
‘This is…’
He did not finish. Powerful.
And yet we drew closer. My heart beat around. Troubling, impossible, to discern my own anxiety inside the feeling dreamt into the space by something. A ball of paper, slowly unfurling, scratching the case of my cranium, deep and upsetting things written upon it.
What was the condition of time here? It was worn. The degeneracy of the dreamer had brought it to decomposition, and time always pictured as streaming rushing streaks was a silty blockage, hunks of it lumping off and crashing down. The tunnel did not move to our hands or eyes, but collapse felt imminent, teetering.
Nothing like this.
Had seen some bad ones. So recent as the twenties there had not been a group of people barely at the edge of knowing what they were doing. We knew some things, we accumulated what we could. We tried. There had not been, then, a group of people standing at the edges of flashbulb photographs, pitted about the room where lay the corpse of the man who had tried to gather those suffering night terrors. Iron beds and rubber tubes everywhere.
They had not shot him near the face, but his eyes had looked the most like bullet holes.
And that mighty thing years afterwards, its dream in ice that scraped our own.
Decades.
Decades.
Squared by the sides of space. And the infinite space we made.
He went on, purposeful. They could not have dug much deeper.
I watched his blanket skim the bugs, watched it gather dirt. Watched the outline of him behind his flame. The place was busy, my head crowded. The heavy arrhythmic fluttering of the crazed concern thumping through the passage as though through an amplifier.
For a moment he went on, purposeful, and I decided to pause. The tunnel was not cramped to our bodies, but it was full of titanic sentiment. I stood tall and almost cowered. The scuffing footsteps. The shuffling earwigs.
Despite the insects, in curiosity, I reached out. To touch the tunnel side.
Inside my head, the knowing impression. The space on the other side of the space, space turned inside out, space turned around, space dreamt of by the dreamer dreaming into us. The cavernous black inside and outside of the thick solid earth I was touching, the chasm, and the vision I had. The vision of standing in the chasms and the rocks and seeing away on the brown crumbling cliffs beyond that were somehow seen though there was no light, just made out, a demented boy who waved and was wild.
I pulled my hand away.
I saw him waving.
His features indistinguishable, but wholly terrible. I was sickened he should wave at me. At us.
I saw him wave and then turn away, back from the cusp of the cliff and then I saw him no longer.
But we felt him.
He walked in front. I heard his tight breath wheeze. He fell slower and propped himself up on me, his arm around my shoulder. I could smell his age.
‘We didn’t have to come,’ he said.
I know. I know, I know.
I don’t know where the temptation to animosity came from. He had not done anything to me. We’d barely spoken since long dusted times. And it was not that either. I don’t know. It was not that I was afraid to be as old as he was. It was not that I was jarred by his own closeness to me. I don’t know where the horror came from, why I should burn irritably in the fragmented milliseconds shooting through my face the moment he said something.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We wanted to.’
With the ridden walls to carry him along, he again went first. I turned the torch on. Worried about everything.
And the light of my torch touched him. It was us they’d called, but it was him. Journeys I could not count, sitting in cars and darkened rooms and trembling hard-faced in the crooks of silent houses as we stared up at night-time cornicing and down at skirting boards and willed whatever slept parallel to these lonesome places to be compelled and be sent away and be understood and be damned.
Still this bond I felt to him. How we could be so close without knowing.
Stained glass. What I’d always felt. Were a blaze of light to shine right on him he would take on the look of church windows; he would be sectioned into colours deep, colours radiating from inside of him without blaring, as behind his aged shadow leaned out of him.
I did not keep the torch on him, and in the end I switched it off.
Better the flickering leaping lamp.
‘You saw the boy?’ I asked him.
Under another rafter.
‘Yes.’
We came to it.
In a shack-like chamber walled with hasty planks, the man lay on the cot, if it was one, sweating up against the wood and his fevers. He jerked horribly in his state, trembling every part of him, his blankets rusted and crumbling as he did not grip them but the wholeness of his body clung to them and ruined them.
There were red boiling welts over all of him, where the dreams were ingrown.
‘That poor man,’ he said. The lamplight bored our eye sockets and threw us about.
‘He hasn’t really even lasted,’ I said. I did not know what we were to do. But we were to try. We were far from the full concentration of the thing. The man in the cot had tried to hold it back. Efforts ashamedly paltry. The crippling disquiet gushed back along the tunnel, and we were just at a stronger tide of it. I knew that had we been at the zenith, consciousness would have split into black spaces through which strangely soared untold logics, and my physical mouth would have been slavering, the boy’s face spinning far away in a place I did not want to see like a Catherine wheel at the bottom of a darkening garden when I was very young, beloved fathers running away after lighting it and my pulse flaring out my eyes that they might not make it away in time and might be lit screaming running to the shed where that other firework had almost caught and to the fences which would be shredded apart by the flames and the wet grass would smoke until a great latticework streak of suburbia was burning and screaming like a railway track.
His fingers curled around my arm.
We looked at the man in the cot.
‘Must be quick,’ he said.
I sighed and put my hand to the quivering man’s chest. Felt his sternum.
I took a knife left by the bed and put it firm into the man’s neck, drawing it toughly across, his slabbering automatic desperation to carry on living writhing against the blade and then what can only have been relief to be taken away, to be pulled finally back into death and wherever and away from whatever this growing presence was dreaming up against the earth and us all and grinning and waving far away on a crumbling cliffside somewhere on that wrong side of being.
I hauled him still slack and juddering from the bed, and with some final sick, some final vibrations, he went far from any of us.
The tunnel did not move. We knew that it did not. But the whole place lurched nonetheless. We were made to not know that it did not. I near vomited.
Impressed on me was the cliff shifting too. Those filth-coloured cliffs without bottoms in the dark, lurching like a dreadful ship. Without the Society worker, who had lain in the cot and been pitiful anchor.
We looked at the cot, and I was holding him as he was holding me.
We knew one thing.
And he said kindly to me. ‘I am old.’
It frightened me. ‘I will do it,’ I told him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It will be me.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked him, and all inside me toiled and fought. I felt the groan and creaking my bitterness, my unsureness made. Felt I would be toppled.
His eyes were scared and wondrous.
‘You know I am sure,’ he told me. ‘They said we didn’t have to come.’
‘I know,’ I said.
And he smiled and was brave and wondrous.
I helped him to lie down in the bed, pulled the damp crusted covers over him. I do not know how beyond he was, how beyond sensing the tight feeling in my throat.
‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.
It had been. Had been a long time since we’d spoken like true friends, true travellers. Had been a long time before that, that our closeness had been past knowing. Here, we spoke meaningful to each other one last time.
With my hand in his he closed his eyes, and shortly went to dream.
For a moment, in the mentally tangible distress filling time about me, I gazed at him. And took my own hand away, to wipe away my eyes.
Blank trodden sheafs of paper on the floor. Matches. A pen and gone-out candle on the table. Lit it before I left, he to hold his own vigil.
What would he be able to do.
Filled with the sense as I went that the shack and its planks were shaking, resounding with it all, would collapse directly under the burden of that colossal thing and what it dared to dream and its dream too close.
Did not turn on my way back through the tunnel. The throng of subdued panic was enough to keep me moving. Mine and the dreams’. In a braid. Didn’t much fancy turning. Didn’t much fancy seeing that boy and his waving.
The lamp swung in my hand. I remembered waving. Waving from doorsteps. Waving with laughing. Waving from behind coach windows.
By the time I reached the shack, these noiseless vistas were falling from me, leaving only that stale agony to line my being. The sensation of having a million sweating dragonflies inside my skull was fading. As was the print of the boy.
I exited into the black, where the woman stood smoking, and the young man was sitting on a cracked bough. I do not know what crossed their eyes when they saw me. But they did not question the lack of him.
‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t able to carry him out.’
‘Our man?’
‘Yes,’ I told her, broadening the substance of the darkness with the vagueness of my look.
‘That’s all right,’ she said, motioning to the young man.
‘Be fast.’
‘We will.’
‘And cave it all in behind you.’
She looked at me. She nodded. Of course. ‘Of course.’
‘Do you know what it is?’ the young man asked me. ‘In there?’
Stood for a while. We all. It was fiercely late, the thick dark not yet on us.
And he was gone.
He went so sagely into that chasm, into that indescribable pit that had echoed cavernous behind human and bacterial and geological knowing, for eons longer than we had known any other stalker of black reverie. The figure of the demented child, unformed as it would become, would dance upon the summit of my thoughts, atop my coffin-lid, around the crown of all unmeaning consciousness.
I drove home, night to night. Over the course of the hours I drank a lot of things and I saw a lot of road, and I felt as though I were shaking on top of time.
Originally published in Mandrake, Issue I.
dead lost beaches 