Inside, the smell was lying in wait for him. He held the door open with his foot, though that admitted not only the infrequent wind but also more of the light that made his hand appear as pale as the receiver in it was black. His clumsy swollen fingers found the number in his pocket and held the scrap of paper against the inside of a frame that had once contained a mirror above the phone. Having managed to dial, he returned the paper to its niche against his unreasonably flabby thigh and clutched the receiver to his face with both hands. The fourth twosome of rings was parted by a clatter that let sounds of revelry at him, and belatedly a voice. “Who’s this?”
For longer than a breath Grant felt as if he was being forced to stand up in class for a question he couldn’t answer, and had to turn it back on the questioner. “It’s Ian, isn’t it?”
“Bill,” Ian said, and shouted it to their friends. “Where have you got to?” he eventually thought to ask.
“I’ve broken down on the coast. I’m getting the car fixed tomorrow.”
“When are we seeing you?”
“I told you, tomorrow,” Grant said, though the notion felt remote in more ways than he could name.
“Have a drink for us, then, and we will for you. Won’t we, you crew?”
The enthusiasm this aroused fell short of Grant, not least because he’d been reminded of the water accompanying dinner, a memory that revived the taste of the meal. “Don’t get too pissed to drive tomorrow,” Ian advised and made way for a chorus of drunken encouragement followed by the hungry buzz of the receiver.
Grant planted the receiver on its hook and shoved himself out of the box. Even if Baiting had boasted a pub, he would have made straight for his room; just now, supine was the only position that appealed to him. As the phone box shut with a muted thud that emphasised the desertion of the seafront, he set out along the top of the submerged wall.
It was broad enough for him to feel safe even if he wobbled— luckily for his career, however distant that seemed, teachers didn’t have to be able to swim. He wouldn’t have minded being able to progress at more than a shuffle towards the landmark of his car blackened by the moonlight, but the unsynchronised restlessness flanking him made him feel less than stable, as if he was advancing through some unfamiliar medium. The luminous reflection of the arc of cottages hung beneath them, a lower jaw whose unrest suggested it was eager to become a knowing grin. The shape of the bay must be causing ripples to resemble large slow bubbles above the huddle of round whitish shapes along the middle of the sea wall. He still couldn’t make them out, nor how many images of the moon were tracking him on or just beneath the surface of the inlet. The closer he came to the halfway mark, the larger the bubbles appeared to grow. He was within a few yards of them, and feeling mesmerised by his own pace and by the whispers of the sea, when he heard a protracted stealthy wallowing behind him. He turned to find he had company on the far end of the wall.
It must be a swimmer, he told himself. Its glistening suggested it was wearing a wet suit rendered pallid by the moon; surely it couldn’t be naked. Was the crouched figure making a joke of his progress? As it began to drag its feet, which struck him as unnecessarily large, along the wall, it looked no more at home on the path than he felt. Its head was bent low, and yet he had the disconcerting impression that it was presenting its face to him. It had shuffled several paces before he was able to grasp that he would rather outdistance it than see it in greater detail. He swung around and faltered just one step in the direction of his car. While his attention had been snared, another figure as squat and pale and dripping had set out for him from the opposite end of the wall.
He was paralysed by the spectacle of the pair converging effortfully but inexorably on him, the faces on their lowered heads indisputably towards him, until a movement let him peer in desperation at the farthest cottage. The front door had opened, and over the car roof he saw Tom. “Can you come and help me?” Grant shouted, stumbling towards him along the wall.
The cottages flattened and shrank his voice and sent him Tom’s across the bay. “No need for that.”
“There is,” Grant pleaded. “That’s in my way.”
“Rude bugger.”
Grant had to struggle to understand this meant him. It added itself to the sight of the advancing figure pallid as the underside of a dead fish. The closer it shuffled, the less it appeared to have for a face. “What are they?” he cried.
“They’re all the moon brings us these days,” Tom said, audibly holding Grant or people like him responsible, and stepped out of the cottage. He was naked, like the figures on the wall. The revelation arrested Grant while Tom plodded to the car. Indeed, he watched Tom unlock it and climb in before this sent him forward. “Stop that,” he yelled. “What do you think you’re doing? Get out of my car.”
The Cavalier was no more likely to start first time for a naked driver than it ever did for him, he promised himself. Then it spluttered out a mass of fumes and performed a screeching U-turn. “Come back,” Grant screamed. “You can’t do that. You’re polluting your environment.”
No doubt his protests went unheard over the roaring of the engine. The sound took its time over dwindling once the coastline hid the car. The squat whitish shapes had halted once Grant had begun shouting. He strode at the figure crouched between him and the cottage and, since it didn’t retreat, with as little effect at the other. He was repeating the manoeuvre, feeling like a puppet of his mounting panic, when that was aggravated by a burst of mirth. Fiona had appeared in the cottage doorway and was laughing at him. “Just jump in,” she called across the water.
He didn’t care how childish his answer sounded if she was capable of saving him. “I can’t swim.”
“What, a big strong lad like you?” Her heartiness increased as she declared “You can now. You can float, at any rate. Give it a try. We’ll have to feed you up.”
Beyond the spur of the coastline the sound of the car rose to a harsh note that was terminated by a massive splash. “That’s the end of that,” Fiona called. “You can be one of my big babies instead.”
Grant’s mind was refusing to encompass the implications of this when Tom came weltering like a half-submerged lump of the moon around the bay. Grant dashed along the sea wall, away from Fiona and Tom. He was almost at the middle section when he saw far too much in the water: not just the way that section could be opened as a gate, but the pallid roundish upturned faces that were clustered alongside. They must be holding their breath to have grown clear at last, their small flat unblinking eyes and, beneath the noseless nostrils, perfectly round mouths gaping in hunger that looked like surprise. As he wavered, terrified to pass above them, he had a final insight that he could have passed on to a classroom of pupils: the creatures must be waiting to open the gate and let in the tide and any fish it carried. “Don’t mind them,” Fiona shouted. “They don’t mind we eat their dead. They even bring them now.”
An upsurge of the fishy taste worse than nausea made Grant stagger along the wall. The waiting shape crouched forward, displaying the round-mouthed emotionless face altogether too high on its plump skull. Hands as whitish and as fat jerked up from the bay, snatching at Grant’s feet. “That’s the way, show him he’s one of us,” Fiona urged, casting off her clothes as she hurried to the water’s edge.