He experienced a jactating sleep that night, a restive palimpsest where the spectres of then and now and never passed through one another one moment and lost each other the next. Memories danced with hopes and forgotten dreams hazily, as if lost and intoxicated at an indistinct masked ball. One imagined recollection where he and Estella, firm and gay in their twenties before they’d ever met, attempted impressions of Hollywood stars along Blackpool pier, was interlaced by another where he and his wife Rosalind had travelled to London in a rickety bus and pulled funny faces in front of the British museum’s suggestively-shaped exhibits. In this hinterland of loss, transience refused to depart. Sometimes, because of this very obstinate recalcitrance, Rosalind and Estella would meet in impossibility. They would laugh together, whispering the private jokes they shared about him into each other’s ears. It heartened Bob to see this; those two would have got on like a house on fire, were they ever to have met.
He was on a beach with Estella, now, walking side by side along an ivory strip eternally beaten by the inchoate churning that we have decided to call the sea. They were in their late thirties here. It was spring; a limpid balm suffused the night, galvanising the skin on their faces into one last youthful hurrah. They were barefoot, with the sand was smoother than they had ever felt it; the waters had done their job well. Sometimes her features slipped and slid into those of Rosalind’s, but on this fresh night the majority of his companion was Estella, and on this night he was glad for it.
The good friend stopped in her tracks suddenly, and looked downwards. She had stepped on something. Bob’s gaze followed hers, and their eyes rested on a dark obdurate mass. It was circular, solid, and half-buried in the sand. It then began to move. It shifted from side to side compulsively, an antsy miniature mountain jostling at their feet. Estella began to laugh then, a glittering song backed by the surf; it was a turtle. Bob could now make out its head as it swayed from side to side and its fins dug deep into the sand for purchase before it realised its grip and began the shuffle all over again from a slightly readjusted position. Bob laughed too; in its repetitive gyration, the intent testudine cut a comic figure.
Bob laughed, and opined to Estella how humorous it appeared, noting that it appeared to be dancing to a broken record. Estella looked to him, then, a calm smile in her eyes. She thought it was wondrous, she said; so wondrous that nature danced.
Upon this, the ground began to tremble with a low roar. The grains of sand which had clung to the creature’s cartilaginous husk were displaced so that it emerged from the sand entirely. Still it kept moving forward and back, forward and back, its shielded belly scratching against the grains with a dull, ominous drawl. Bob noticed, then, that the thrum - which had up until now been confined to the Sisyphean bauble beneath their feet - now surrounded them. He looked about to observe the beach covered with emerging shells, all of them dancing to the same repetitive beat. Estella laughed, louder than the all-pervading hum, and began to dance herself, attempting a clumsy approximation of their staccato rhythms. Bob, with humour in his heart, looked up to her staggering form.
Estella was not laughing anymore. Her eyes were filled with fear, and the veins along her neck and in her forehead had snapped rigid, as if lined with solder. She could not stop the dancing. She could not stop the dancing. The turtles’ shells rose up above her like leaping walls, ascending until they towered over them and revealed a lurid underside of viscid limbs and bony tentacles. What had been curious examples of nature’s wonder was revealed to be something large, alien, and perverse. Malignant water wraiths with shells of barbed stone waltzed across the moonlit sand in what seemed to be a grotesque caricature of Estella’s recent attempt at mimicking one of their submerged brethren. Their dread ballet was timed to the tides of solitude and oblivion, with swaying suckers smothering the hope that had filled the night air so recently with a pitched despair. Estella’s dancing became an necessity dictated by a force within herself that she could not control, her body taking on a curious mix of manic frenzy and rigor mortis. She tried to scream, but the sound which emerged from her agonised throat was closer in tone and pitch to hideous whalesong than the appeals of a lost human soul, and her eyes widened further in terror at herself. Bob watched on helplessly, statued himself by similarly cosmic influence. He could feel the malign force within attempting to compel his limbs into like movement, and it took all the remaining exertion his creaking form possessed to refuse. The cephalopodinous colossi began to move their syncopated ball towards the churning surf, which bowed before them in tragic obeisance. Estella found herself moving along with the horrendous forms, and Bob was powerless to prevent her flailing form from passing into that black, yawning grave. Compulsively gyrating with tears filling dulling eyes, Estella quietly withdrew beneath the waves, locked in an endless dance of hopelessness and of time.
He woke then, the dream still knotted within. There was a knocking at the door. He lifted his legs onto the floor and ambled on over. He was, wonderfully, confronted with Estella, smiling a smile that no turtle ghoul could dispel.
“Why are you grinning like a loon?” he asked, wanting to understand the happiness of her morning, so removed from his own, and to bathe in it.
“I know what happened to George.” She was antsy with excitement and pride, as if she had discovered that George had not passed away, but had actually located the Seven Cities of Gold, and sent her the forwarding address.
Bob motioned her in and she shuffled over to the bed. She sat down and up-ended her knitted satchel, littering the duvet with a deluge of cheap paperback books, notepads and crumpled tissues of indeterminate lineage. Estella rifled through the rubble and pulled out two clippings stapled together by the top-right corner. She scanned her eyes over them hurriedly, implying that she had many such coupled apocrypha and she needed to ensure that this was the right one for the moment, and held it towards him. He walked over, sat down beside her, and read the first clipping. It was from a periodical entitled Anomalist Times.
UNEXPLAINED LIGHTS OVER SOUTHPORT TO BLAME FOR INCREASING NUMBER OF MISSING PERSONS?
A number of unexplained lights have been spotted over the Southport coast over the last few months. Witnesses report erratic movement and fait headaches upon seeing the –
Bob didn’t need to read any of this. The joy that Estella took in it – and not the thing itself - was what pleased him. He’d rather see it through her eyes and understand it through her words than through this dubiously scribbled-upon toilet paper.
“You think George was abducted by aliens?”
“Aye, I do.”
Bob had never liked George, whom he felt was apathetic to the point of mental suicide, but this conversation, and the joy Estella was taking in it, left a bad taste in his mouth. He felt a duty to the hopeless deceased, and in doing so reprimanded the person whose enthusiasm stood so much for the exact opposite of that which he loathed.
“People die here every day, Estella. Part and parcel.”
Her face sank against its hinges. It looked older. He rushed to salve his morning by reorienting hers.
“Why do you think it’s was aliens?”
Her cheeks climbed a little at this, though Bob worried he had caused the upper rung of the ladder irreparable damage. This did not stop her from releasing her hypothetical torrent with reckless abandon:
“There are a few telltale signs when it comes to close encounters of the third kind, and I think George’s case fits the criteria. One, he went missing. He didn’t die shite-ing himself like the overwhelming majority, he actually left the building.”
“George never left the building.”
“If he did I never saw him do it. Two, his sleeping patterns had become more erratic over the past two weeks. Kept on telling people he couldn’t get a good night’s sleep, no matter what he did. In recorded cases of extraterrestrial phenomena, abductees often complain of unconventional sleeping patterns. He even complained of losing an hour Tuesday last week at four p.m. Witnesses often report missing periods of time which they cannot account for by any rational means other than a time warp or something inter-cosmologically altered – a wormhole, like.”
“I saw him last Tuesday. He’d fallen asleep in front of Heartbeat.”
She frowned. “No, that can’t be it.”
“I couldn’t believe he’d conked out either. Claude had fallen down a well. It were riveting.”
She punched his arm at this, more in frustration than in jest, before carrying on.
“There are too many strange coincidences. Plus of course, there were his shoes.”
Bob’s interest piqued at this apparently mundane detail. “What about them?”
“They found them. The coppers. Couldn’t explain it. Found ‘em down on the shore.”
“On the shore?”
“Aye. Past the dunes.”
Bob thought about this; about this and about his dream.
“That’s strange,” he said.
She smiled at that.
