8

  Finding Emily's corpse connected me to the artefact in a way I don't think I'll ever escape, as it brought to me the real threat of danger, of which I will have to be ever vigilant. When I arrived back in England, I was frantic in my desire to find Mr. Inagi and warn him. Emily had been killed by a monster, and there was no doubt in my mind that it was linked to the artefacts we all had been inflicted by. I would warn Mr. Inagi, and then Laurie, and then I would search for Landen - I needed help too.

  I drove my car once more through the winding country roads, through a torrential rain which never seemed to stop, back to where Mr. Inagi was. Eventually I arrived at his front gate and, paying no mind to the perfections of the front garden this time, I dashed across the cobbled steps in the grass to the front porch. I knocked, and waited, but no soft footsteps came to soften my soul. I was not prepared to wait, not after what I had seen in Hong Kong, and once again I was breaking and entering, this time through brute force on the fragile door.

  The house inside appeared perfectly pleasant, but the crisp cosy atmosphere inside had melted away. Maybe it was my mind, but the faintest layer of dust had settled in what was once a dustless world. The lady from A Dream looked to have lost her vibrancy - the colours to my mind were duller than before.

  From the void of the beach to the dwelling in Hong Kong, to here, a heavy air pressed on me, and here the air felt thicker still. I walked through the house, all but the knives seeming to have lost its shine, but soon I found a set of stairs behind a latch in the flooring so perfectly a part of the tatami mats and floorboards that I wouldn't have noticed - though now in my mind it seems unmissable.

  Mr. Inagi had mentioned briefly that he sold fish - I was a little amused at that bizarre statement before. Now I knew what he was getting at. The basement was filled with fish tanks - massive great things all over, and they cast the basement in floating shades of dark blues and greens. There were dozens of them, large and small, the small ones crammed into corners and shelves and platforms high up, the large ones lined up like room partitions, forming passages through the basement and occasionally being broken by surface spaces donned with tubes, filters and other equipment.

  Everything that lived within moved slowly. In the nearest large tank which flanked me from the left, a giant swam past, scaled and gold, fixed on me permanently with a glare, and with a flat upper head, accompanied by a few medium-sized fish it paid no mind to. Next to me slowly pulsed a vibrant coral with colourful blues and yellows. Even in the lesser tanks dotted with small coral fish, they drifted with lethargy and appeared to watch me all the time. The tanks went on throughout the room, that I might have been in an aquarium, that I certainly was a stranger here. And most pronounced of all was the air, which smelled like waters with none of the freshness or breeze of an ocean.

  But the weight of the unnerving pressed down on me, and I dashed between the passages of tanks, past silent shoals of every kind of fish imaginable. I came to a clearing, surrounded on all other sides by still more shimmering blue and white tanks. But this was at least lit by something other than these tank glows - the light from a small lamp, which sat upon a desk blanketed with papers. Much more prominent than the desk, though, was the pin board that sat above it. This really was blanketed, bits of newspaper cuttings and handwritten notes stuck there so that I couldn't see any part of the board, or even the frame around it, and it was on this I finally saw the extent of Mr. Inagi's research. I had stopped at the sight of all this, and now I moved closer in curiosity, and then I noticed what the cuttings were about. Many had been handwritten in Japanese script, the little Hiragana characters meaning nothing to me at the time, but others were newspaper columns from around the world, and from what I could gather, as I eyeballed the unfamiliar titles, all pertained to trouble at sea. I could make out photos under Japanese script of strips of coastline from Japan, and others that looked more tropical, and still more that looked more desolate. Then I fixated on the principle piece: 'Sighting Sparks Jellyfish Warning', from an Australian newspaper. And the contents of the column once again brought in me a feeling that the pieces were finally falling together, for Jack McCormack was commented on in the last sentence as a recent disappearance, and now the cause of his death - the same fate as Emily, something I had supposed for a while now - seemed plain to me.

  I took a sweeping glance around the space, spinning on the balls of my feet. There must have been a wealth of knowledge there, knowledge that might have given me the truth I sorely sought. But, no, a good ninety-nine percent was unreadable, and I had other things to worry about just now. I dashed on past the clearing, into a basement that must have extended beyond the construction of the house. I ran until I no longer was amongst the largest of the tanks - now there was only tables, and the occasional small tank, these ones bare of fish and looking quite unkempt. I remember a bucket on the floor, a bucket filled with dead exotic species, their colours having taken on a black hue. But amongst the tables was a greater horror still.

  Mr. Inagi was dead exactly like Emily Lau. I had spoken to Mr. Inagi, learnt from him, enjoyed his company, even so far as to say been inspired by his careful attention to his world. Now the tentacles - exploding from drains and water pipes which served the fish tanks - had suffocated the life from him, and it looked like he had been dead at least a few days, taken by the will of a monster.

  I was in a full-flung panic when I sprang from the house, and was momentarily subjected to the downpour until I dashed back in to the drivers' seat of my car. I had watched in series the people who shared my misfortune die, and now a little girl's life was next in line.

  I drove ferociously without a thought for anything else. The trees were being buffeted so much now that branches that would otherwise have been far beyond reach were whipping the screen of my car. When I took that drive along the country lanes to the beach where I first found the artefact, I was savouring every sensation; perhaps I was feeling particularly relaxed that day. Here I bypassed in my mind all but what I could not avoid? and a man standing on the edge of the road, stoic in the face of the storm, was amongst what I could not ignore. A man I recognised. The road had burst from the fields and now stretched along a course parallel to a beach - the beach it all began on. And there, watching over the ocean as the gargantuan of the storm rose above it, was Landen.

  Oddly enough I wasn't taken aback; I treated the sight of him like spotting a destination I knew I was heading for. I sped on towards him, because I knew I could sorely use his help in saving Laurie, the girl with the pigtails who even then might be in immediate danger.

  I ran from my car (left strewn on the roadside), ran through the rain towards Landen, who stood there in a brown trench coat as the rain soaked his hair, who looked around at me with a puzzled expression, and said with a tone of almost expectation of my arrival through fate, 'Lyla?'

  'Landen!'

  I panted through my speech, through my proclamation that the sister of the man whose name Landen had left on the list of contacts was in mortal danger, in every way I tried to impress upon him the urgency. But Landen remained calm.

  'Lyla, look.' And with a firm hand he pointed my attention towards the sea.

  I certainly feel that I will never have the power of word or speech craft to bring that moment to life again. Landen pointed me across the beach, and there I could see a tree, all dead but for the satanically purple leaves which floated stiff in the wind and never fell. But, watching, and seeing the base of the tree in my field of vision, I found the answer to all my worst dreams. Two serpents of a terrible green-black hue were burrowing their way silently from the silken gust-swept sands, that they appeared in full on the beach before me, and without hesitation, without recognition of the worst of the elements or wailing of the waters, they slithered with unnerving beauty to the sea.

  And to greet them in their path, the greatest horror of my life rose. Even from the distance where it stationed, out in the deep waters beyond the intertidal realm, it rose far above us to blot out the sky. A terrible serpent, dark green like the vilest shade of tangled seaweed, covered faintly in the lines and glyphs that had been burned into my mind by the artefacts, many times greater than its tiny offspring, with eyes that glowed fiery orange like the sunset. It glared at us as if for all the world it would lunge, but then its children reached the water, and any resolve it may have had to deal destruction faltered and broke. I watched with Landen beside me as its arching body caved and twisted sideways in a protective usher, and with little protest from the cursive currents its body hit the surface of the water, ready to drift back under the waves. And slowly it did disappear, leaving behind it the imprint of its body on the storm in the sky.

  All along the artefacts had in fact been eggs - that's how I understand it now. They were eggs that I and all my fellow victims had fed to the machinery of gestation that the tree, so innocently a part of the natural order of things, had been all along; I didn't even need Landen's explanation of this later; it was another 'clunk into place' if you will. Even as I watched the gargantuan thing disappear, and even as the rain lashed me in heavy drops, I felt a lightening of a kind, as if the air grew thinner, as if I wasn't haunted anymore. It pacified me and put a damper on my urgency, so that, even as I insisted to Landen we must get going to protect the girl with the pigtails, I drove with an absent-mindedness, until we slowed to a halt outside Jayson's house.

  Laurie was safe, it transpired, playing in the garden as the very last time I'd seen her, and while Landen talked to Jayson she was even keen to play with me, interrogate me on my favourite animals, even ask how I 'prettied' my hair the way I kept it. I was still in the clasp of worry, until Landen took me aside afterwards.

  'I believe you are safe, Lyla, and Laurie too. There's nothing more to worry about.'

  'How do you know?' I protested.

  'Because you destroyed your egg, and rendered Laurie's useless, and in doing so you stopped the pursuit of you two by the monster.'

  'Wait a moment, how do you know I destroyed my egg?'

  'Because I watched you do it. I've been watching the sight where you found your artefact very closely.'

  Landen took me to the corner of the garden, and there he told me how he too had been conducting his own research since our last meeting. How he had dug up more, more that I wasn't expecting at all, and which I would soon see for myself. And then how he'd found Mr. Inagi shortly before I had, and knew it was probably a good time to return to the sea front.

  'But why does this make me safe?'

  'You'll see for yourself, with this.' And he handed me a leather box, maroon, and with a handle that fit comfortably into my hand. 'There was another man you never discovered, who I never told you about, in this whole event. A man I've come to greatly admire, whose revelations have greatly worried me. Lyla, use the contents of this box only if you feel you have the spirit.'

  'Wait a moment,' I insisted. 'I hardly know anything about you. Tell me a bit about yourself, at least.'

  'I really have to go, but we'll get more chances to talk, I think. If you choose to immerse yourself in the contents of this box, I think we'll be in contact again in the future.'

  'But why me? Why did you even choose to get me involve in this in the first place?'

  'Why you?? I guess because you were interested. I didn't think you'd be that interested, or even believed what I might say, mind you, given the limited interest Jayson seemed to show, but I thought I'd give you the chance to look into it a bit yourself if you changed your mind.'

  I wasn't impressed, having travelled to the other side of the world on account of a lack of information (though this did mean I solemnly could break the news to Landen of Emily's death, something he had only guessed at). Still, my disgruntle didn't go far. Landen, the man I hardly knew, had given me the chance to see for myself what curse I'd fallen in to, and for that I must be grateful. I guess I'll leave it to my readers to decide for themselves the extent to which I should have been indignant.

  Along the Darkening Coast | Jamie Campbell

 

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