Along the Darkening Coast Read online

3

  The House near Beachy Head was detailed in the note Landen gave me. It was the address listed for Mr. Inagi, and it was indeed marvellous. It wasn't so much at Beachy Head as it was located down coast from it, but the impressive white cliffs formed the backdrop of Mr. Inagi's secluded, cosy-looking living arrangement. Indeed, he had dogs too, and quite a lively livestock around his house. It was quite beautiful, like a modern version of an old English one-storey cottage (perhaps without the wild explosion of nature which would remind me of an English pensioner or other). I parked my car sheepishly and made towards the front door, minding not to break any of the trimmed skeletal remains of the hedgerows as I swung the gate forward. What a perfect front garden. Those little solar garden lights dancing along the cobblestones. Ponds either side where I glimpsed the occasional koi. More pleasantries - in the grass, in the roof tiles, in the planted front porch - in ways I can only remember the feeling from if not the particulars.

  I wrapped my knuckles and listened to the sound carry, feeling like the wood of the door would warp from the impact; the mahogany-painted boards were lightweight indeed. After not-so-short a time, I heard the lightest of footsteps approach - a kind of answer to my callous thuds. And the door drifted open in front of me. And there was a late middle-aged man, peering almost at eye level with me (his slippered state competing with my ignominious slouch). He had a ragged goatee, wisped with grey, perhaps the only thing about his entire perfected world not positively perfect, yet it suited his features.

  'Can I help you?'

  'Yes, actually.'

  'What can I do for you?'

  'Well,' I began. The words weren't flowing. 'It was a? friend, actually, who directed me here. Something happened to me on the beach recently. And he, sort of, seemed to think I could understand what was going on a bit better if I came to you.'

  He smiled as I stuttered through my introduction. 'I do see.' Mr. Inagi glanced once down the road from which I had come, and gave another glance across the lamb-littered field. A calculating glance, but the next words were warm. 'Well, I do not intend to keep you out here in the cold weather. Come in. Did you have a name?'

  'My name is Lyla.'

  My name is Lyla... what followed is my encounter with my first, and perhaps most interesting, contact. I was curious to see - in light of the splendid array I'd just witnessed - what the house inside had to offer. You'll have to forgive my whimsicalness; it really was an experience that seems now like some limited edition capture in the timeline of my life, like pulling the rare card out of some treat packet long-since discontinued.

  I can walk through it in my memory. Mind you leave your shoes, Lyla. A painted screen, but I don't recognise the scene depicted - a tree, no, it's painted to make you think that at first, it's actually a girl's form, I see it now, clutching into the wind a red paper umbrella (a character from A Dream of the Red Chamber, I've since found out). Ornamental plates with wisps of blue paintwork on platforms barely from the floor. The cream-white doors of little brown cupboards neatly dotted around. A non-painted screen, translucent. Another non-painted screen. The sound of my heartstrings being plucked.

  Eventually I had followed Mr. Inagi into the main living space, sitting and drinking tea, uncomfortably aware that to my side an array of eels were lined up on a chiselled cutting board that also lay tray to a set of stunning chefs knives - one of the apparently headless eels was curling itself around the nearest hilt.

  Mr. Inagi introduced himself. 'In England I am retired since my son passed away, and sell fish and crafts for a hobby. But that is for another time. Tell me about why you decided to come here, Lyla. My name is Takeshi, if you like.'

  But I still can't kick the habit of calling him by his surname. Then I was reciting what had happened to me that I had come here, and the all the best of the world I'd seen within the house couldn't blot out the dispirit it gave me.

  'Lyla, I tell you that I am familiar with the experience you went through.' Clatter of a teacup on its saucer. Clatter? Maybe mine. He only chinked his, a more delicate person than me.

  'You are? You found a rock, too?'

  'An artefact, of a kind.' He used the same word. And he gave a very warm smile at this point. I remember because it cheered me up a great deal. 'I have encountered something like what you speak. It took me down on to the beach, to watch the water sink into a whirlpool, and when the water washed away there was left behind a nightmarish relic. I'm a man who spends a lot of my time considering the details of things, and I knew right away that there was something wrong with that object - the markings felt alive on my fingers.'

  So I wasn't the only one. Landen's list had produced sharers of the horror I had found. I was eager to hear more.

  'I contacted the police,' he said. 'I was asked a few questions and given no answers - not out of indifference, I think, just that the policewoman did not know. It was a few weeks later that I too was visited by this man who you talk about - Landen.'

  'What did Landen want?'

  'Just to hear what had happened to me. He told me a similar thing had happened to three others. He said he was disturbed by the stories and just wanted to unravel the mystery. He was very stoic at first, but when I told him that I had woken on the same beach later with cut-up hands and no memory of how I got there, he became very interested, for sure.'

  This of everything I heard chilled me most. Everything I learned from Takeshi Inagi had matched my own experience, except for this part. Was I due this too?

  'You woke on a beach? That hasn't happened to me.'

  'As I said, I have no memory of how I got there. I went to sleep that night and dreamed that I was racing across the ocean surface in the darkness. It was very bizarre. Then I was just? somewhere, with my mind filled with roaring. I soon realised the roaring was the wind and the water, and that I was on a beach somewhere. I looked down, and my hands were bloody and scratched. Then I found a shovel nearby. It was all too strange for me to understand. After this episode, I never returned to where the artefact was.'

  'What happened next?' I asked sheepishly.

  Mr. Inagi blinked. 'Nothing. I returned home and bandaged my hands. I said this to Landen, and I've not had anything more out of the ordinary since.'

  'And the other three? Did Landen say if they had woken on a beach too?'

  'No. He didn't mention anything,' said Mr. Inagi. 'I didn't think to ask at the time.'

  I pressed Takeshi as to if he had any more information. Here I remember Takeshi looking graver than at any other point.

  'Finding the artefact was a horrible experience, but I didn't begin to look for answers until Landen visited. I have just something to share. I think that what we have both experienced here is related to a series of events around the world, all of which point to the work of something alive and foreboding, Lyla. An animal, or maybe many animals, whose trails have signs nobody has seen before, and which you'd find in no science book. I am sure that the artefacts we found are the most real sign of its existence.'

  The thought of those pulsating strands in the cold grey canvas, so much in my mind, had brought me to a sense of expectation that this was something beyond the realm of a reasonable explanation. His word that he had it on good knowledge and research was - perhaps naively at the time - enough for me.

  'I would warn you, Lyla. Be sure you are prepared to know any answers you might find. I have a bad feeling about this artefact, and everything associated with it.'

  I assured Mr. Inagi I'd let him know if I unearthed anything more, and shortly thereafter I was sat in my car, warming my hands and trying in vain to warm my spirits. Wondering. Digesting the indigestible. Could it be? Was there really a horror - a monster, perhaps - out there? I pondered Takeshi Inagi's mysterious episode. Probably the most uncomfortable development taken from the encounter; it came with a haunting feeling it was due for me too.

  One thing still hung over the entire engagement, though. The question of the child I'd seen, a ghost of a girl skirting a
cross the sand. I had come close to - but chose against - asking Takeshi if he had seen or felt anything like any such thing, because of all that had happened to me so far, it was the only part I felt wasn't real.

  Along the Darkening Coast | Jamie Campbell