The Thing on the Shore Read Online Free Page B

his father’s week. Second only to karaoke night in the Vine, maybe.
    It was a shame, Arthur thought, that his father was not as good at his job as he was at
University Challenge
.
    Arthur eventually went into the bathroom. There wasno window there, so he couldn’t see anything much at first, but he couldn’t really bear that so he tugged the light-switch cord. He urinated into the toilet bowl, fixing his eyes on the cistern. As he washed his hands, he noticed something move, out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look at it but couldn’t see straight away what it was.
    The walls above and around the bath were covered with small white tiles. The bath itself, despite Arthur’s best efforts, was a little stained. He leaned over it to look more closely at the wall. Something had definitely moved. A lot of the grout was rotten or missing, and it was into one of the black holes left by some missing grout that Arthur now peered. There was something in there.
    He wasn’t sure that it was what he had originally seen, but he could certainly see it now. It looked as if a small part of the remaining grout was somehow alive and wriggling. He shuddered involuntarily as he watched the soft, tiny piece of darkness squirm its way out from between the tiles and drop, silently, into the heavy glass soap dish that had once been his mother’s. He saw then that it was a short black worm, maybe no more than a centimeter long. There was one already in the soap dish. That must have been what he’d spotted from the corner of his eye—the first worm falling. Together they made up an “=” symbol in the soap sludge.
    Arthur’s face twisted as he examined them. Then he tore off some toilet paper and rolled it into a ball, before using it to squash the two worms. Gathering them up with it, he flushed the toilet paper away. Arthurshuddered again as he washed his hands, and then he left the bathroom, turning off the light as he went.
    The soap dish that had been his mother’s was heavy because it was so thick. It was made out of blue glass, with a shallow cavity at the top to hold the soap in place. Inside the glass itself were lots of tiny mirrored squares that caught the light and reflected each other, or whatever else was there.

T HE O MINOUS P ASSENGER
    Bony turned off his Walkman—he had been listening to whalesong—and put on his hi-vis jacket before jogging down the steps to close the level-crossing gates. He could smell cow muck and hear the cows themselves in the distance. Maybe, if he stood completely still, he could also hear the sea. And he could just about hear the train if he put his mind to it.
    He closed one of the gates—the one on the far side of the line from his signalman’s hut—and then stood between the rails and looked southwards, which was the direction from which the train approached. The level crossing was at about the halfway point of a particularly long stretch of straight track, and Bony stared all the way to the vanishing point of the rails. Beyond that rose the humped blue shadow of middle-distance mountains. If he were to turn around, he would be able to see the rails passing beneath a bridge and then disappearing toward the horizon that way too. The sky was growing dark, turningpurple. The sky was big here in Drigg. There was nothing getting in the way of it.
    The sound of the train was now definitely audible—a low, rhythmic rumble that sounded warm to Bony, warm and reassuring—although the train itself was not yet in sight. There were no cars or people around. There never were at this time of day.
    Bony lay on his side across the tracks, facing south, with his ear to one of the rails. It was vibrating and he held his head up slightly, so that the vibrations didn’t rattle his skull. He longed to lie face down along one of the tracks, and let the humming metal bring him to orgasm. The only reason he didn’t was that somebody might