Part Three - Seth

Seth was in the water, his hair swaying gently in the ebb and flow of the icy sea foam that pooled around his head then retreated rhythmically. When the water slipped away the roof of the car was covered in stars.

No, not stars. Tiny squares of broken glass. Safety glass. And blood.

It had all been so beautiful on the wharf, the city crouched behind him expectantly, the dark waves in front of him, a mass of cheerful people around him peering into the water. Faces had leapt out at him, their cheeks glowing with joy, their eyes sparkling. The detail and depth of the world had been achingly beautiful, richer than it had ever been before.

A piece of glass rolled towards his eye as the foam lapped a little higher and Seth coughed, choking slightly as a drop of seawater went up his nose. No time to remember, better get moving.

He turned his head as best he could, surveyed the car. It was upside down, that much was obvious. It was in the water but not under the water. He was propped up, his legs pinned under the driver’s seat and his shoulder against the door. His hands were cuffed. The guy next to him looked pretty dead, in that his neck was twisted at a weird angle and he was slumped face down in the bloody water. The metal grate that separated the back seat from the front had buckled, and Seth could see one of the cops who’d arrested him in the front. He looked even more dead than the guy in the back. His window was broken and the jagged rock which had apparently shattered it had also made a mess of the cop’s head. It wasn’t pretty.

Seth pulled his legs free of the seat and collapsed in a heap on the roof of the car, safety glass crunching under his weight. The more he came into contact with the water the greater his sense of dread and panic grew. Got to get out. Get free.

He swung himself round and began to kick the metal grate, forcing it loose enough to allow him to clamber into the front seat. He did his best to avoid the dead cop but couldn’t help brushing against his shoulder. He twitched at the contact, a shudder running up the length of his body. His hand closed on something cold and he dragged it with him past the driver’s seat and through the windscreen. With a final effort he pushed himself out through the shattered windscreen and into the space between the bonnet and the rocks. Sea foam swirled around his hands and legs as he knelt for a moment breathing heavily, relieved to be out of the car but still far from safe.

The cold thing in his hand was a gun. The cop’s gun. The one he’d tried to grab earlier.

The voice had been whispering to him, unintelligible but alluring. Then someone had grabbed him, spun him around, nearly thrown him into the water. The voice had become suddenly clear, insistent. “Gun. Get the gun.”

The crowd around Seth had faded into dull grey except for one figure, a police officer in a crisp blue uniform, leaning against his car at the edge of the wharf and watching the crowd. The gun at his hip had glowed and pulsed with a reassuring light and Seth had been drawn to it, had to have it.

It wasn’t long before he was being manhandled into the back of the car, in cuffs. He'd watched helplessly as people began to throw themselves off the wharf, into the water. People disappeared under the waves, between the shadows, then after an impossible time they surfaced, walked out of the water and back through the crowd, dripping and sloshing and smiling their way into the city. Then… then something had happened. The car had lurched and slid and flipped into the water, bodies flying around it, and the screaming had started.

There was no screaming now.

Seth lifted the gun and inspected it briefly. It was just like the ones he’d seen in movies, safety on the side, sliding action with the top bit to get a bullet into the chamber, cool as all hell. And reassuring. Definitely reassuring.

“Gonna be a writer… working on a script…”

The low voice wasn’t the whisper, wasn’t in Seth’s head. It was out on the rocks somewhere out of Seth’s line of sight, and worse it was familiar. They were his own words, words from the night before floating back at him on a watery girl’s voice.

“Spare a drink for a lost soul?”

A different voice, the same taunting repetition of his words from the previous night.

Seth inched forward, peered out from under the bonnet of the cop car. He was at the water’s edge, large rocks jagged beneath him, the water spilling over them insistently. Behind the car was carnage, broken wood, twisted floating bodies, and the city watching silently in the failing light. People were moving, sirens were wailing in the distance, but it all sounded far away, unimportant. Sounds heard from beneath the water.

“Let me guess, no ID?”

Seth turned slowly, cliché from a horror film in action, knowing that he didn’t want to see what was behind him, didn’t want to know, should run, but he had to look. Had to see.

Beyond the boot of the car, out in the water where the rocks fell away into swirling depths with deceptive speed, three girls in school uniform were watching him. They were standing knee deep in the water, their scarecrow bodies made up of odd angles. The water was far too deep for them to be that high up. Their heads hung limply and their eyes were overlarge, shiny, their skin pale. If they hadn’t been repeating his words Seth would not have recognized them as the sirens from Aro park. They were schoolgirls? Seth felt suddenly dirty, as though his sleazy old man routine was the worst of his problems.

“Come and join us,” one of the girls said, raising a stiff arm like a marionette. Her index finger curled and relaxed in a series of jerks, beckoning Seth toward her.

“Shouldn’t have taken the acid,” Seth mumbled, looking around and biting his tongue, trying to spot an inconsistency that would show this whole sorry mess to be a hallucination. Nothing changed.

“Joooiiinnnn usssssss….” The three girls chorused, rising another six inches out of the water. Their calf-high white socks were stained with mud and muck and blood, and their limbs dangled loosely.

Seth began to scramble backwards up the rocks, out of the water, stumbling and slipping as he fought for purchase against the handcuffs and the bulk of the pistol in his hands. As he did so he saw the three girls waver for a moment, then suddenly rear up out of the water and into the air. Running up the back of each girl’s legs and under her clothes was a tentacle, dark and pulsating and impossible to focus on. Seth found tears springing into his eyes as a dark shape in the water lurched forward, flinging the girls toward Seth like a child throwing rag dolls. He closed his eyes and screamed, his finger squeezing the trigger of the gun.

When nothing happened, Seth opened his eyes tentatively. He was warm, which was a pleasant change, and it was sunny. The creature in the water was frozen, still difficult to look at. Through a pulsating shimmer Seth could make out tentacles and eyes and fangs or horns or barbs of some sort. He blinked away his tears, tried to focus.

The water was still, waves half crashed but not moving. The three girls hung in mid air, their limbs askew, tiny drops of water halted in mid-air around them Behind him the distant bustle and activity had stopped. A break in the clouds above had let a single shaft of dying light through and Seth was bathed in its warmth. The world was silent.

“Don’t fight now. Just run,” the whisper in the back of his head instructed. It was close now, intimate, warm. Seth looked over his shoulder at the ruins of the wharf and saw with sudden clarity a path through the chaos, a twisted but ultimately safe way through.

He felt the tension in his finger returning, felt the trigger of the gun pull back. In a sudden rush the gun roared and bucked in his hand and the middle of one of the tentacles exploded in a cloud of green mist. The three girls crashed into the rocks around him as the severed tip fell into the sea. Seth scrambled up the rocks and into the remains of the wharf, leaping from broken support pole to pile of corpses to dangling support cable, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the things in the water.

Abruptly the terrifying sound of a city in chaos closed in on him, the sirens and cries and groans of torn steel and wood, and all around the sound of breaking glass, car alarms, heavy impacts and screaming.

The light was gone.