Chapter Two
October
chilled into November, and wild winds danced around the lighthouse
at Hagerawl Point. They rocked Jem Priddy in his bunk room below
the control deck, and carried weird voices up from the grey-glass
sea. The voices didn’t wake him. Seals sang. Waves surged into
serpentine caves and forced air up through blow-holes in the
cliffs. No true-bred Rosewarne Cove lad would break his sleep for a
song from the sea.
Priddy
dreamed on.
Sometimes they didn’t feel like dreams at all. They were just
recall, detailed and playing on an endless loop. The nightclub was
crowded, faces fading in and out of focus over the top of Priddy’s
tenth margarita. The place was pretty damn funky by Penzance
standards, Eric Prydz thudding out of high-end speakers, an
alchemist’s toybox of neon-glow shots lined up behind the bar.
Priddy had already tried most of them, and circled back to the
margaritas out of boredom.
He knew
he was being a twat. About the drink, about the kaleidoscope of
substances, legal and illegal, that came swirling out of the summer
visitors’ vans or got dealt by hard-eyed locals in alleyways behind
the pubs. It was just that he and Kit had been hammered down so
hard in their classrooms at Penwith College for the past few
months, cramming for the A levels that might springboard them out
of the Cove and into a bigger world. It was easier for Kit, who had
parents who gave some kind of shit about his future. When Priddy
had gone home with a rucksack full of textbooks, his dad had
snorted in derision, then shoved his only son straight back out the
door to one of the boat-mending gigs that brought the family some
sort of living. It had been too easy, once he’d turned eighteen, to
cut some of the moorings and float on the tide of visitors who
transformed the southwest into a rough Riviera, a carefree hippie
playground, for a few brief summer months. They were fun. They
appreciated Priddy’s knowledge of the sea and lifelong acquaintance
with surfing lore, and they usually had drugs.
Marijuana mostly, but occasionally something harder. Harder or
weirder—bright little packets marked with peace symbols and
shimmering colours, to appeal to adult children who’d missed the
wave of rave and were struggling to cobble together a dream-world
of their own. The bulk of it was harmless, tea leaves with a bit of
dope mixed in, aspirin dyed pink. Priddy enjoyed his experiments in
the same way he’d once enjoyed chemistry, mixing stuff up in the
test-tube of his body to see what would happen. The margaritas
would have to do it for him tonight. He was cleaned out, only
enjoying this last drink courtesy of the handsome surf-bunny he’d
idly been flirting with for the last half or so. It was all fine.
The music morphed into Opus
Fourtet’s weird, floating drum-and-bass,
and the club’s single cellar room began to heave with
dancers.
Beautiful people, beautiful times. Priddy beamed at Kit,
who’d just appeared beside his table. “Hey, dude. Paul, this is my
best, best mate, Kit. Kit, this is...”
But the
bunny was gone. His seat had the air of having been vacant for a
while. Priddy should have got round to the kissing and the
thigh-caressing sooner. He never seemed to time these things right.
“Never mind that,” Kit said, thumping down on the sofa next to him.
“I’ve scored some bloody lovely crack.”
Even Priddy drew the line somewhere. “Actual
crack, Kit?
Heroin?”
“Jesus, no. Just something herbal. But Billy and Dave said it’s
fantastic, like being off your face and really, really clear at the
same time. Dave said he saw weird lights in the sky.”
“Dave lives beside Land’s End airport, Kit.”
“All the same. You look bored. Wanna give it a try?”
Priddy
did. Lights in the sky sounded good, even if all the drug did was
make you forget they were probably the Scilly Isle Skybus. He
wanted to be off his face, out of his skin. He could cram away at
his studies, stride about the beaches on his life-guard shifts
looking like he knew what the fuck he was doing in the world, but
never for one minute—unless stoned—could he forget that he was a
Priddy of Rosewarne Cove, latest in a shuffling, trailing line of
men and women distinguished for doing absolutely nothing. He’d
screwed up his exams, he knew. Kit said he’d done the same, but
Priddy wasn’t so sure. Kit had far horizons in his eyes, the look
of a man on his way. “Thanks,” Priddy said, knocking back the
bright purple pills with a gulp of margarita. He tipped the glass
in a vague toast, then drained it. “Not gonna see any lights in
here, are we? Let’s go for a walk on the prom.”
“It’s three in the morning, mate.”
How was
that possible? Priddy had got here just after eight o’clock. His
whole affair with the bunny—mutual glances, drinks offered and
consumed, the mistimed flirtation—couldn’t have taken more than a
couple of hours. Surely he hadn’t been sitting here knocking back
cocktails ever since.
He was
suddenly ashamed of himself. “I’ve got to pull it together,
Kit.”
“Pull what?”
“Me. I’m pissing everything away, and I don’t even know why.
Let’s go down Long Rock sands and have a run or a swim or
something, then we’ll hit the truckers’ caff and get a pint or two
of coffee. I’m gonna email the college tomorrow and see about doing
another year, re-sits, whatever it takes.”
“Why, you daft bugger? The results won’t be out until
August.”
“I know. But I still...” He faded out, losing the thread. There
must be some kind of fancy-dress party going on in the club
tonight. He hadn’t seen anyone putting on masks, though.
Christ, they’d put on different heads. Priddy stared in horror as the
plump, pretty girl whose uninhibited dance he’d been admiring
turned to grin at him. Her ringlets had transformed into writhing
ragworms. Her face was armoured with scales, her lower jaw
thrusting out, lips receding. A single antenna sprang out from her
brow, a sickly green light bobbing at the end of it. “Shit,” Priddy
whispered, pressing back in his seat. “She’s a fucking
anglerfish.”
“What?”
“That girl, the one in the red vest. She’s a... Oh,
God.”
“What’s the matter with you? That’s Julie, Bill’s sister.
Pretty hot, if you ask me.”
A demon would think that. Priddy recoiled to avoid the claw Kit had put out
to help him up. “Fuck, mate. Where did you get the head from? I
don’t mind—I just want to know, and then I won’t be so
scared.”
“Jesus Christ.”
The
demon got to its feet and came round to Priddy’s side of the table,
leaning over him in concern. The claw closed on his wrist. Priddy
gave a yowl of fear and tried to scramble away, overturning the
table in a shower of ice cubes and shattering glass. The monsters
on the dance floor began to stare. There was a definite aquatic
theme going on. The anglerfish was part of a shoal, hemmed round by
lampreys and hammerhead sharks.
Priddy
loved the creatures of the deep—had been sincere in his desire to
study marine biology—but this was fucking ridiculous. He scraped at
his eyes. “Don’t touch me,” he pleaded with Kit. “Not with those
things, anyway. Where have your hands gone?”
“Julie,” demon-Kit yelled, and the anglerfish came swimming
over, a mobile phone incongruously clutched in her fin. “Call an
ambulance. Priddy’s sick. He’s freaking out.”
“I can see that.” Her sweet Falmouth accent was bizarre,
emerging from that horror-movie mouth. “What’s he had?”
“I don’t know. I... Oh, shit. Yeah, I do. Priddy, man! I’m so
sorry. Come to the bathroom and we’ll try and make you
puke.”
It was
too late for that. Priddy knew this, as surely as he knew that his
blood was turning to molten lead, his brains catching fire. He
clutched at his skull, doubled up and vomited anyway, all over
demon-Kit’s nice new sandals, which looked weird with great
red-clawed feet in them. Kit was holding on to him, like the friend
and gentleman he’d always been before his transformation. “Kit,”
Priddy choked out. “Don’t take those pills. Not the purple ones,
mate. Don’t take those...”
The
shoal of devils closed in. Their faces gawped and floated, jaws and
tentacles and razor teeth, and Priddy began to sink, a vortex of
glowing eyes rotating around him. Down he went into the sea of
nightmare, down and round and down...
***
He woke up in cloud-scudded moonlight. One good thing about
solo watch in a lighthouse—he could scream until his lungs burst,
and not bother anyone at all. He sat up in his bunk, bunching sheet
and blanket against his chest. Had he been yelling? His throat was
sore, and weird displaced echoes like the deadly sound-machine in
the Kate Bush Experiment IV
track were careening off the walls. That might be
the wind, though, or the various rasps of the great rotating lamp
on the floor above him. Or mermaids, God knew—as likely as anything
else to Priddy’s fried circuits, and Hagerawl Point was infested by
them, to judge by the legends. The round walls could warp even
ordinary sounds. The flush of the toilet sent whale-song spiralling
through the Victorian pipes. Shakily Priddy got out of bed and
pulled a dressing gown on over his T-shirt and boxers.
He
didn’t normally dream that vividly unless he’d forgotten his meds.
Fastening the dressing gown, he went looking. His living space
consisted of one big circular room, and was easily searched. Kit’s
grandfather had grumpily offered him the keeper’s cottage, huddled
like a frightened animal at the foot of the tower, but he’d
preferred the storm-watch accommodation up top. He had no official
role of guardianship—would never have got a gig with
responsibilities like that—but on very wild nights, he liked to
sweep the bay with binoculars from time to time. His predecessor
had left behind a radio set, and a few times now he’d been able to
patch through a warning to vessels straying close to Hell’s Teeth,
the savage line of pointed rocks whose tips barely broke the