Grady eased his motorbike down the plunging road while the sea revealed itself below. The cleft containing the road, quarried out of the rocky shoreline, offered no shade. The sun blazed from the strip of sky overhead and doused him in heat and ultraviolet rays. But the pain in his foot tormented him more. Yesterday, riding, he’d stupidly worn flip-flops and burned his shin against the motorbike’s exhaust casing.
The road ended at a small parking lot. He secured the bike, then headed for a shack containing a bar, which was perched beside some steps descending the final yards to the beach. By now, he craved a pint of Bintang.
Inside, he clambered onto a stool at the scuffed, heavily graffitied counter. A mirror hung on the wall behind it and showed him his face in unflattering detail. It was red, wrinkled, and littered with broken capillaries. For decades that’d been his appearance—even during his thirties when he’d worked as a roughneck in the Libyan and Nigerian oilfields. The African sun, the backbreaking labor, and the booze had marked him long ago.
He ordered a Bintang.
“Holiday?” inquired the barman, curiosity piqued by Grady’s age.
“No,” he replied. “Business.” This seemed an appropriate moment to conduct business, so he removed Elizabeth’s photo from his shirt-pocket.
No joy. The barman couldn’t remember seeing her. Dutifully, he took the photo around the bar’s other customers. He was inured to the responses—bemusement, indifference, irritation, looks that silently asked: Who are you, creepy old man, and how dare you interrupt me while I’m on my smartphone? Often, because of language barriers, he got incomprehension. This was particularly true of the Russian youths, who, since their country’s invasion of Ukraine, had left home and holed up in Bali to escape being drafted. Occasionally, someone was interested enough to question him and nodded politely when he explained about his daughter who’d been missing for the last half-year.
A young Englishman was talking at an upright smartphone. He reviewed a plate of nasi goreng he’d been served as pub-grub, his voice so solemn he could have been reviewing something from the Arts de la Table Menu at London’s Ritz. Patiently, Grady waited until he finished filming, then asked him too.
Again, no joy. He returned to the counter. Trying to lift his mood, he twisted on his stool and gazed westwards, between the timber columns supporting the bar’s roof, out across the sea to the line where the water’s dark turquoise gave way to the sky’s bleached blue. His spirits didn’t revive. Damn you, girl. I know you’re here somewhere. You can’t stay hidden forever. He stared at the horizon more intently, as if Elizabeth was floating there, waiting to be discovered.
He saw something, but not Elizabeth.
It was a straggling chaos—like a gigantic spider whose body constantly pulsated, outwards, inwards. Whose many limbs constantly stretched, broke off, fell into nothing, and were replaced by more limbs sprouting at ever wilder angles. He closed his eyes, but the hideous, sprawling image remained, seared on his retinas.
Then it wasn’t there. Grady dared to open his eyes. It wasn’t anywhere.
Shakily, he drained his Bintang, left the bar, and went down the steps to the sand. A pod of surfers bobbed on the sea, waiting their turn as, one by one, they rode in on each large wave. Along the beach’s landward edge lay a row of lithe, nearly naked bodies, like surplus shop mannequins dumped in an alley behind a department store. Most had an arm bent upwards at the elbow and a hand grasping a smartphone above them.
Once he’d composed himself again, Grady worked his way along the sunbathers, showing the photo, asking. From under sunglasses, eyes squinted up at him resentfully. The girls probably thought this was a ruse whereby he could ogle them at close quarters. Also, he sensed his physical condition offended them. Yes, he mused. I’m an affront to your youthfulness. A reminder that no matter how many yoga sessions and beauty treatments you do here, you’ll still look as shit as me one day.
Then he limped southwards. The beach gradually narrowed and ceased altogether at a muddle of boulders. Beyond the boulders, he couldn’t see anything more of the shore. It curved inwards, forming a bay. But a cliff to his left, crags bearded with precariously growing trees, blocked it from view.
He listened as the waves struck the boulders and slathered them with foam. Then he saw the apparition again in the air ahead. It was too riotous now to resemble a spider. It was more like a vast splatter of ink, tendrils of it wriggling off in all directions.
What, he wondered, is happening to me?
This vision finally passed too. He’d seen many versions of it in recent days, not just in the air but superimposed on things around him. As a multicolored splodge of oil on a puddle outside a garage. Or a strangely tentacled swirl of dust approaching on a highway. Or an amorphous, squirming combination of street light and curtain-shadow on the ceiling of his hotel room. What was it? Something conjured by a physical malfunction in his brain—a tumor, a blood-clot? Or by a psychological one—madness? Or could it possibly have an external origin?
Whatever caused it, it was manifesting itself more often. And if it was an external phenomenon, perhaps he was getting closer to its source.
He headed back. Above one section of the beach, a grassy shelf extended to the base of the cliff. On this, he noticed a local man operating a film camera on a tripod, so he scrambled up to him. Grady saw on the camera’s LCD that the man was filming the surfers. Each would get footage of their exploits on the waves today that they could upload to their social-media accounts.
This local man said he hadn’t seen Elizabeth either. Then Grady asked him what lay beyond the boulders, inside the hidden bay. Was there more beach?
“No beach,” he replied, slightly too brusquely.
Grady looked back at the way he’d come. Something caught his eye, not at the level of the beach but up on the ridge of the precipice beside it.
He retrieved his motorbike and ascended the road. While the cleft’s rock walls crept by him, he felt like a bug climbing the inside of a drainpipe. At the top, he found a track that followed the cliff-edge, though it was difficult to know where that edge was exactly because a dense screen of stunted trees and thorny bushes grew along it.
Finally, he located what he’d seen from below—a trawler catamaran. Concrete pillars had been set against its hull to hold it upright. Vegetation pressed against it too, branches growing at skewed angles across it, showing it’d been there a long time. Perhaps the locals had planned once to turn this shoreline into a thriving tourist area. Perhaps an entrepreneur had parked the boat on the clifftop intending to create an eccentric shipboard restaurant, not one that floated, but one with a spectacular view. But the plan had come to naught. This stretch of coast remained an outpost visited by only the most adventurous backpackers and influencers. Abandoned, the boat had become an oddball landmark.
On his phone, Grady studied the last picture Elizabeth had posted of herself. He zoomed in on the cliff behind her. Yes, at one point, distantly, a boat was perched on top of it. He couldn’t inspect the sea-facing side of this boat because the wall of snarled undergrowth made it inaccessible. But it had to be the same craft. In the picture, the sea was on Elizabeth’s right, meaning it’d been taken on a beach south of here, not north. And south implied the hidden bay, the place where the cameraman claimed there was no beach.
Grady followed the track further. He calculated he’d drawn level with the bay when he spotted amid the tangle of trees and bushes a gap that opened onto a narrow path. He chained his bike to a tree-trunk and ventured through the vegetation. After a few yards, the path reached the edge, dropped away, and transformed into a flight of stairs. The stairs had been hewn out of the cliff-face, though sometimes stone slabs and now-rotted planks had been laid to make them firmer.
Because of their unevenness, Grady’s injured foot, and the intrusion of clawing, scratching branches—misshapen trees cloaked the cliff-face too—going down those stairs was an ordeal. And a few times, the thing tortured him again. No longer did it materialize in the sky. Now, it appeared as angry, writhing conformations of shadows cast by the sun as it poked between the trees. Terrified the sight of it would cause him to lose his footing and fall, he halted each time and waited for the manifestation to fade.
He drew on all his willpower to keep going. He couldn’t give up now, not when it was possible Elizabeth was below.
At last, wheezing, drenched in sweat, foot so sore it could have been jammed against the exhaust pipe again, Grady cleared the bottom stairs and emerged from the lowest trees. He hobbled across another shelf of grass and arrived on a band of smooth, pale sand that arced off to his left and right. For a time, he stood listening to the rumble of incoming waves and the rustle and hiss that accompanied their disintegration into breakers. He savored the feeling of solitude, of not having other people around to remark on his agedness and decrepitude.
So, this was the hidden bay. With an apparently empty beach.
He turned and started northwards. He fixed his gaze on the boat on the clifftop, hoping he’d come to a spot where his view of it exactly matched the background of Elizabeth’s picture—the spot she’d stood on six months earlier. His foot ached more than ever and walking on the shifting, sliding sand was laborious. Soon he was panting again.
Then he trod on something solid. The sand had given way to an expanse of rock. It was a huge slab about twenty yards long, though he couldn’t tell how wide it was because on one side it disappeared beneath the swarming breakers. From above, it must resemble a tumor that’d burst through the beach’s soft skin. Grady crouched. The rock looked almost metallic, its gray color imbued with a faint silveriness. He touched it. The surface wasn’t hot, despite the sun beating on it all day, but after a few moments, he detected a subtle warmth. It seemed not to come off the rock’s topmost layer, but from inside it. He felt like he was holding his hand against the casing of a tumble-dryer and feeling the heat from its drum.
Another thing. The surface wasn’t flat, but mildly lumpen and carbuncled, and was imprinted with runnels that were a few inches across and deep. He raised his head to see how far those runnels extended.
But then he forgot about the rock. Ahead, past where it ended and the sand resumed, he’d spotted a one-story building standing on the grassy shelf behind the beach. Two wooden shafts sprouted crookedly from the sand in front of it, maybe the poles of a long-disappeared volleyball net.
Grady limped towards the building. By the time he’d passed from the rock onto the sand again, he could tell it was a shell. The windows in its concrete walls lacked glass and it had no roof. Not that it was a ruin. It’d never been finished. Someone had started building it—a hotel, probably, from its size—but then, during construction, abandoned it.
He came close enough to see half-a-dozen concrete steps rise from the beach to a doorless opening in its seaward wall. He also observed figures on the sand between the entrance and the two poles. One was sitting, the others lay on their backs. The seated figure he identified as a young woman. She was meditating, legs folded under her in the lotus position. A selfie stick was planted upright in the sand before her, the smartphone on it filming her.
He asked excitedly, “Elizabeth?”
Approaching the figures, though, Grady realized the girl wasn’t his daughter. He came closer still, saw what was wrong, and thought, Thank God that’s not Elizabeth. He also experienced a rush of nausea that made him spew up the beer he’d drunk in the bar.
The girl wore a bikini. The sun had turned her bare skin hideously red and baked it so dry it was corrugated and fissured. Peeling strands of it formed a gruesome beard under her jaw. Her parched hair poked out of her scalp like stalks of straw. Momentarily, Grady thought her torso exuded extra breasts, then recognized these as huge, globular sun-blisters. She was wildly emaciated too, her face sunken and skull-like.
The figures reposing beside the girl were even worse. There was a boy with spindly limbs and a ribcage that jutted high above his wasted stomach. His skin was so sun-ravaged it’d metamorphosized into a hard, scaly crust, making him look almost reptilian. Next to him lay the mummified remains of a woman. Her flesh had dried and shrunk and taken on the color and texture of hard toffee. On her face, while the tissue contracted, her mouth had expanded into a great, gaping maw of teeth. Tendons as straight and sharp as piano wire protruded from her shriveled throat. At her side, a smartphone was half-buried in the sand between the splayed, root-like fingers of her hand.
Meanwhile, the phone on the selfie-stick wasn’t filming the girl at all. It was cracked and begrimed and surely couldn’t be functioning.
Grady wiped threads of regurgitated beer from his chin. “Fuck,” he exclaimed. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Then, assuming the girl was alive, since a corpse couldn’t maintain the pose she was in, he spluttered, “I’ll get you out of this sun.”
She didn’t respond, so he grasped her under the armpits, hoisted her, and wrestled her up the steps. They passed through the opening into a large, square space intended to serve as a hotel lobby. It was roofless and the walls cast only narrow strips of shade. He dragged the girl into one of the strips and lowered her. When she lay on the ground, he realized shreds of her skin were hanging from his fingers and suppurations from her sun-blisters had wet his shirt and shorts.
Grady needed time to get his head around this. Some kids had arrived here and set up camp and…yes, afflicted by sunstroke, or drugs, or both, they’d gone crazy. They’d burned themselves in the sun, and starved, and the beach was so isolated nobody had witnessed their craziness and summoned help. It occurred to him he should do that now. His heart sank when he took out his phone and looked at the indicator icons at the screen’s top—no signal bars, no Wi-Fi. The phone on the selfie stick outside had been incommunicado even before it stopped working.
He had another thought. Others might be here—including Elizabeth.
He left the girl in the shade and approached an opening in the lobby’s far side. Things crackled between his feet and the sandy floor and, looking down, he found himself tramping on desiccated fish-skins, eggshells, feathers, little animal-bones. Is this, he wondered, all they’ve been eating? He avoided some dried lumps he knew were pieces of excrement.
He entered a passageway with empty doorways lining its sides. The absence of a roof and doors made him feel he was in an outdoor maze, one whose sides weren’t formed by hedges or shrubbery but by concrete-block walls. These walls, closer together, created more shade and the heat felt a little less fierce. In the slightly cooler temperature, he noticed a smell—a musk of putrefaction. From nearby came a whirr of busy flies.
Grady steeled himself and entered the first of the unfinished hotel rooms. The sun fell on half of its floor and showed the same litter of food-debris and lapidified turds. Whereas in the shaded half, he made out an ominously human-shaped mound. He knelt and placed his hands against one end of it and started brushing sand away. His shaking fingers exposed the hard dome of a forehead and the sharpened ridge of a nose. For a vile moment, one of his fingertips blundered into a socket and, at its bottom, touched something round and soft. Then his fingers crossed cellophane-like skin, binding the remaining scraps of flesh against the skull. He uncovered teeth. Like the dead woman outside, the teeth took up far too much of the face.
He checked the quills of hair sticking from the edges of this death-mask and groaned with relief. The hair was blonde. So, this wasn’t Elizabeth either.
Grady heard a cough. “Fuck!” he shouted and sprang back, lost his balance, and landed on his backside. The cough sounded again, and he realized it hadn’t come from the corpse. Rather, it came from a far corner, obscured by the shade, which seemed to contain a pile of rags and dirt. The pile shifted. It extended two limbs across the ground towards him, and he suddenly understood a person was huddled in the corner. A living person who was now stirring.
Slowly, on all fours, another woman came at him. She was skeletally thin, her face burned by unrelenting exposure to the sun, strings of rancid hair trailing around her shoulders. As she crawled over the sand-covered contours of the corpse, she raised her head, and he saw the cloud of a cataract filling one of her eyes.
Her other eye goggled at him in horror. Instead of another cough, she released several hoarse screams.
Somehow, those screams were the worst experience yet for Grady. Numbed, he sat on his backside while the woman shrieked into his face. Then his numbness gave way to a desperate urge. I need to get out of here! He scrambled to his feet and lurched into the passageway, where immediately he crashed into someone else.
The figure staggered back from him. It was a man—a young one, presumably, though it was impossible to tell his age from the condition he was in. Skin was flaking off his face and pieces of it formed oversized dandruff on a matted beard hanging down his chest. Grady looked deeper into the hotel’s interior. More figures were shambling out of the doorways along the passageway, as emaciated and as disfigured by extreme sunburn as the others. Tottering towards him, summoned by the girl’s screams, they resembled ambulatory scarecrows.
Grady tried running the other way, back through the lobby, but the bearded man had fastened a claw-like hand on his arm. Also, he held forward a smartphone, the sun glinting on its shattered screen. “Fuck, man, you’re ugly.” An Australian accent was vaguely discernible in his parched voice. “So fucking old. It must be hell for you, skin all cracked and wrinkled like that.”
“Seen yourselves lately?” Grady roared, almost hysterically, and swung a punch. It caught the man’s jaw, and he dropped like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Grady’s years in the oil fields had made him handy with his fists, but this man looked so flimsy a child could have felled him.
He glanced back. The passageway was filled with them now, a shuffling, nightmarish parade of apparitions, stick-thin, rank with filth, faces blackened and blistered. The nearest ones were almost within arm’s reach of him. He ran through the lobby and careened down the steps outside. There, he saw the boy with the crusted skin had revived and was crawling blindly on his hands and knees, more reptilian, more lizard-like than ever. Then Grady raced back along the beach, oblivious to the pain flaring in his foot each time it struck the sand.
As he dashed onto the expanse of rock, a major wave crashed over its edge and sent breakers fizzing across it. Something made him stop running. He stood watching the water’s progress. It poured into the rock’s runnels, filled them, coursed through them. Only now did he see how the runnels covered the entire rock in a giant, labyrinthine pattern, simultaneously intricate and chaotic. While the white foam followed the countless straggling grooves, it took on familiar forms. He knelt, mesmerized by the ever-changing configurations of the sea-foam as it drizzled through the rock. Configurations he’d likened earlier to spiders, ink blots, oil spillages, dust swirls, dancing shadows.
He stayed there a long time. Several times more, a large wave doused the rock in water, filled its runnels, created the patterns that’d haunted him during the past weeks.
He became convinced he could commune with it.
Gradually, he was enlightened. He understood how an entity resided within this rock. For eons it’d been buried, until some natural cataclysm, a tsunami perhaps, had uncovered it. He also understood how it’d lured the youngsters here and how it existed with them parasitically, draining of them of their life-energy whilst feeding them comforting delusions that they remained young and beautiful, that they were still uploading photos and videos to eager social-media audiences on their smartphones, which in reality had ceased working long ago.
One, two, then several shadows fell across him and a familiar, Australian-accented voice croaked, “That skin of yours, man. So wrinkled, so fucking ugly!”
A crowd had followed him from the hotel, clambered onto the rock, and formed a circle around him. Among them was the youth he’d punched, his beard now splattered with blood as well as befouled with flakes of skin. He extended his broken phone, believing he was filming.
Grady couldn’t move or speak. The force in the rock had made him its captive. Another big wave hit and again, in the surrounding rock, foaming water created the tumultuous shape that’d obsessed him.
The one-eyed woman who screamed at him was present, too. “Don’t worry,” she rasped. “We’ll help you. We’ll free you of it.”
But why had it brought him here? Was it because it needed something to keep its livestock content for a while? Was he meant to be a distraction, an entertainment for them? An object they could vent their bloodlust on because, while draining these young people, the entity had also made them insane?
He knew he should get up and flee, but the entity kept him paralyzed. He continued to kneel while the noose of ravaged bodies tightened around him. As they closed in, they lunged down at him, scratching, clawing, gouging.
One pair of hands sank long, sharp fingernails into the sides of his face. Before pain fogged his vision, he peered up at the person the fingers belonged to and recognized her gaunt, scorched features.
Grady cried, “Elizabeth!”
***
He regained consciousness and found himself spreadeagled on the beach, his wrists and ankles bound to pegs that were driven deep into the sand. He was beside one of the poles and from its top something fluttered in the sea-breeze. Watching it, he admired its ragged tentacles as they wove this way and that. They made riotous shapes that, to him, were somehow familiar and reassuring.
But then he became conscious of an excruciating, burning sensation across his naked body while the sun blazed on it. Realizing the thing fluttering above was a substantial area of his skin, removed with non-surgical haste and eagerness, Grady screamed.
