writhing, twisting thing wrapping itself around his throat. He woke up screaming and found his sheet twined around his neck. In the morning he decided to put an end to the awful fears he had of the dome and what he thought he saw there, high up in the eye. After dressing and downing a cup of coffee, he got into his truck and headed for that bloated sphere.
He parked his truck and noticed that though it was after nine a.m. there was no other vehicle in the lot. He climbed out and closed the door, being careful not to slam it. He quietly made his way to the doors of the building and walked inside. He had purposely worn his sneakers so that his footsteps wouldn't be heard. There appeared to be no one around, no customers, no old man. He went inside and looked upward toward the ceiling. The eye was closed. And then he heard some strange ululating sounds, as if from someone chanting in a strange language. Louder and louder the voice called, higher and higher in pitch. The language was some guttural tongue with impossible vowels and consonants. Along with the strident tones, the screeching that he had heard before began again — this time, ear-deafening in volume. He looked up to see the black and roiling sky above, the sky of his nightmares. And appearing through the inky darkness was something moving, something sinuous in motion, which seemed to come through the eye and snake downward toward the interior of the dome.
He could bear no more; he screamed and ran, stumbling through the masses of detritus, falling once, bloodying his face and then half running, half crawling to the doors. As he reached the safety of the threshold he turned around, just once, and that sight was enough to last him the rest of his days.
At last he reached his house, trembling and nauseous, and fell into bed. He dropped into a sort of stupor in which he had no dreams. He awakened at sunset and felt better and sat at his table pondering the events of the morning. Was what he saw real or did he imagine the whole thing? But why should he imagine something like this when he had never been a man of fancy, but a practical person who took each day as he found it? Then it must have been real, what he saw, and he shuddered as he recalled the vision. It was Tom's scream that alerted the old man in the domed building, that made him start the machinery in motion that caused the eye to close.
Tom's scream that stopped that monstrous thing from entering this world.
Winter had come and gone. Tom kept to his daily ritual of doing his chores and tending to the pecan trees. He had few dreams anymore, but at times during the day the whisper of a hated memory crept through and he felt afraid. Locals had told him that the dome was closed. The day after Tom's visit, the place had been boarded up, and in time the signs that announced its wares had fallen into disrepair. Whenever he would pass the place, he couldn't help looking its way and he would notice that it now looked only squat and benign and somehow ludicrous. Its silver dome was turning rusty and no one came to its doors. What had happened to the old man remained a mystery.
But the fleeting memories Tom still had were enough to convince him that what he had seen that day had been real — that blackness, those bloated wormlike arms writhing and groping, and that sound, like waves breaking upon an unlit and unknown shore. And most of all, the smell, a rank and rotten smell of a sea bottom upturned. The smell of things better left alone. Yes, there
Rotterdam
Nicholas Royle
Nicholas Royle is the author of the novels
As soon as Joe arrived in Rotterdam, he made for the river. He believed that a city without a river was like a computer without memory. A camera without film.
The river was wide and gray. A slice of the North Sea.
Joe was listening to 'Rotterdam,' a track on the Githead album,
He switched it off. It wasn't working. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. The chugging, wiry pop of Githead didn't fit this bleak riverscape. The breathy vocals were a distraction. Instrumentals worked better.
He didn't have long. A couple of days. The producer, Vos, wouldn't wait any longer. The American was a busy man and Joe knew he had already more than tried Vos's patience with repeated requests to have a shot at writing the screenplay, or have some input elsewhere on the movie. For now, at least, the script had John Mains's name on it and Joe knew he could count himself lucky to be scouting locations, albeit unpaid. He hoped that by showing his willingness and maybe coming up with some places that not only corresponded to what Vos wanted but also helped to back up his own vision of how the film could look, he might still get to gain some influence.
Joe turned back on himself and selected a cheap hotel with a river view. His room, when he got up to the fourth floor, managed to reveal very little of the Nieuwe Maas, but if you craned your neck you could just make out the distinctive outline of the Erasmus Bridge. They called it the Swan; to Joe it looked more like a wishbone, picked clean. Did swans have wishbones?
The room itself was basic, and while you wouldn't necessarily pick up dirt with a trailing finger, there was a suggestion of ingrained grime, a patina of grease. Joe quickly unpacked his shoulder bag, placing his tattered Panther paperback of
He walked toward the center. The kind of places he was looking for were not likely to be found there, but he wanted to get a feel for the city. He'd known not to expect a replica of Amsterdam, or even Antwerp. Rotterdam had been flattened in the war and had arisen anew in the twentieth century's favorite materials of glass and steel. But really the commercial center could have been plucked from the English Midlands or the depressed Francophone cities of Wallonia.
A figure on top of an anonymous block of chrome and smoked glass caught his eye. It was either hubris or a remarkable achievement on the artist's part that Antony Gormley's cast of his own body had, by stealth, become a sort of Everyman figure. A split second's glance was all you needed to identify the facsimile as that of the London- born sculptor.
Only absently wondering why there might be an Antony Gormley figure standing on top of an office block in Rotterdam, Joe walked on. He stopped outside a bookshop and surveyed the contents of the window as an inevitable prelude to going inside: Joe couldn't walk past bookshops. It was their unpredictability that drew him in. They might not have his book in stock, but then again they might.
This one had the recently published Dutch edition of Joe's crime novel,
Leaving the bookshop, Joe spotted another tall figure standing erect on the flat roof of a shiny anonymous building two hundred meters down the road.
When Vos had optioned the book, Joe had thought it was only a matter of time, but delay followed delay. Vos had a director attached, but couldn't find a writer the director would work with. Joe had asked his agent to show
