Nocturnes

Webster gri

“I could give you something stronger than tea, if you like,” he said.

I declined his offer.

“Tea will be fine,” I said, and watched as he disappeared into the kitchen behind the bar in order to heat the water. He was gone for only a couple of minutes, but in that time I did all that I needed to do. From the pocket of his jacket, which always hung on a hook behind the bar, I removed a worn white handkerchief, praying to God to forgive me as I did so. Then, once Webster returned, I sat with him and drank my tea, maintaining a pretense of normality while fearing throughout that he might sniffle or sneeze, causing him to search for his handkerchief. When I was done, I offered him money for the tea, but he refused.

“On the house,” he said. “Just to show there are no hard feelings.”

“None whatsoever,” I said.

I left him, and took a walk upon the beach. Only when I was certain that I was unobserved did I get down upon my knees and commence digging a hole in the coarse, dark sand.

I did not sleep that night, so that when I heard my name being called I was almost expecting the summons.

“Mr. Benson, Mr. Benson! Wake up!”

Webster was below my window, a lamp in his hand. “You must come quickly,” he shouted. “There is a body on the seashore.”

I left my bed, pulled on my clothes and shoes, and descended to the door, but Webster was already ru

“Come on,” he cried. “Hurry!”

I paused and drew a stout birch stick from my umbrella stand. I liked to carry it when I walked, enjoying the feel of the bark on my hand, but now its weight and heft offered me a kind of reassurance. I followed Webster’s light until I stood at the edge of the dunes looking down on the beach. Where the waves were breaking, a black bundle lay. It looked like a child’s body. Perhaps I was wrong to doubt Webster, and there really was someone hurt or dead. Laying aside my fears, I stepped onto the strand. The sand felt soft and yielding, and my feet sank unpleasantly into it to the depth of about an inch. I began to walk. Ahead of me, Webster was beckoning, calling me closer, but the bundle at his feet remained unmoving, even when I knelt down beside it in the light and probed gently at it. Slowly, my hands shaking, I drew back the damp black cloth that covered it.

Beneath the cloth was hair, and a muzzle, and a long pink tongue. It was a dog: a dead dog. I looked up to find Webster’s light begi

“Mr. Webster?” I said. “What does this mean?”

I was about to stand when I was momentarily distracted by a stinging sensation against my face. I brushed at the spot, and my fingers came away with a coating of black sand. All around me, the grains were moving, shifting. Shapes rose and fell, forming columns that held their shape for an instant before disintegrating into dark clouds that fell back upon the beach below. They might almost have been human, except that they were strangely hunched, their features almost hidden beneath thick folds of hair. I thought I discerned horns emerging from their heads, warped and twisted growths that appeared to curl around their skulls, ending almost at their necks. The whispering began and I understood that it was not language that I had heard in the past, but the movement of the sands, the individual molecules brushing against one another, reconstituting themselves in strange configurations, briefly uniting to create, for a moment, ancient, lost forms.

Now Webster was ru

Ahead of me, Webster was tiring. I was closing on him, but I would not reach him before he gained the dunes. I waited, narrowing the gap between us by another five or six feet, then threw my stick with all the force I could muster. It struck him firmly on the back of the head and he fell awkwardly to the ground, the lamp tumbling away from him and the oil it contained igniting on the beach. In the sudden glare I saw his eyes grow wide and staring, yet he was looking not at me but at what lay behind. He tried to rise but I caught him a glancing blow with my foot as I leapt over his prone form. He fell again, and then I was approaching a steep rise, my feet sliding in the lighter sand of the dunes. I clutched at a patch of marram grass, drew myself up, and looked down on the black sands.

“You can’t escape,” he called. “These are the old gods, the true gods.”

He stood and rubbed the sand from his clothes. He appeared wary of the approaching forms, but not fearful.

“Embrace it,” Webster continued. “This is your death.”

“No,” I cried. “It is not my death, and these are not my gods.”

I removed from my pocket the bundled-up form of my stole and displayed it to him.

“Check your pockets, Mr. Webster. I think you’ll find you’re missing something.”

And as realization dawned, Webster was surrounded by what appeared to be five or six columns of swirling grains. I saw him try to break through, but the intensity of their movement increased, blinding him and forcing him back. And then, of a sudden, they disappeared and all was still. Webster’s thin form was left standing alone in the dying light from the burning oil. All movement had ceased on the beach. He raised his head uncertainly to me and reached out a hand. Instinctively, I stretched out my own hand to him in return. Whatever he had tried to do to me, I could not leave him in peril.

Our fingers were almost touching when a shape appeared close by Webster’s feet. I saw an oval of sand rise up with two holes about midway down its form, like the sunken sockets of eyes. The bridge of a ruined nose stretched between them, framed on either side by a pair of jagged cheekbones. And then, around Webster’s feet, a maw opened: I saw lips, and a brief glimpse of what might have been some kind of tongue, all carved from black sand. Webster looked down and started to scream, but the thing began to suck him down. He struck at the shape, his fingers clawing as he attempted to arrest his descent, but soon he was submerged to his chest, then his neck. His mouth opened wide once more, but any further sound he made was silenced by the grains that stilled his tongue as his head disappeared beneath the sand.

And then the face collapsed, leaving only a shallow depression where the hole had swallowed the life of a man.

There is no salvation without sacrifice. God Himself sent His only Son to prove the truth of that lesson, but there are others who have learned it in their own way. An archaeological dig at the site of the stone altar revealed a mass of bones, dating from before the time of Christ to the foundation of the village, an appeasement to whatever strange gods these people worshipped.

The chapel at Black Sands once more lies empty, and the village has a new leader. A German bomb landed on the beach in 1941, but it failed to explode. Instead, it sank into the sands, and attempts to recover it proved fruitless. If a bomb could sink into those sands, the argument went, then why not a person? So barbed wire has since been erected around the beach, and warning signs have been posted advising people to stay away.

Webster was wrong: the old gods will not so easily be forgotten. Sometimes the wind blows along this desolate stretch of coastline and causes shapes to rise up from the beach, phantasms of sand that hold their form for just an instant too long before falling in small heaps to the ground. It may take years, even decades, to complete the process, but they will succeed.