little way and then claimed it again, only to roll it still farther with the next wave, until the sickly surf lost the strength to torment its plaything any further, and withdrew, leaving the ragged sack it had thrown up onto the black stones to remain where it was.
There, amid the fly-swarmed seaweed and the broken bottles and pieces of sea-worn wood (along with the occasional reminder that the Izabella had not returned empty-handed from the Hereafter: a very drowned chicken; a street sign bitten in half by one of the Izabella’s more aggressive occupants; a wooden crate containing several boxes of expensive whiskey; even—of all things—a laughing plaster pig, standing three feet tall and dressed in a chef’s regalia, while carrying a silver platter on which the pig was apparently quoted as saying: “Eat more pork!”) lay the body the waters had cast up on the Shore of the Departed.
It was the remains of a person, though the extensive damage that had been done to the body both from hungry fishes below and hungry birds above, did not at first make it easy to distinguish its gender.
But the signs were there, had there been anybody on that abandoned stretch of coast to see. It had the large hands of a male, and there was still an Adam’s apple in its much decomposed throat; its hips were narrow, and its shoulders broad. There were even a few signs of how this man might have looked in life. For some reason much of his face had been left untouched by the birds that had pecked at him as he floated, and it was still possible—if someone had cared to study his features closely—that at some time in his life somebody had sewn up his mouth.
The body had not gone unnoticed. Already some of the smaller scavengers that lived along the beach were appearing from under the stones they used as doors to their hideaways and cautiously venturing out to investigate the newcomer. The crabs that had been foraging in the rotting seaweed were now scuttling over the rocks toward this new meal. Most of them were small, their blue-gray shells barely as broad as the length of a thumb, but no sooner had they appeared than the bigger crabs, some of them twenty, thirty times larger than the foragers, appeared, pushing aside stones which then rolled or skipped down the shore and into the scummy water.
None of this sudden activity was missed by the bittamu birds that lazily circled the shore, huge scavengers that resembled the offspring of albatross and pterodactyl. They loosed full-throated shrieks of appetite and, making the subtlest of modifications in the angle of their wings, began a steady spiraling descent. But while they were still descending, a new claimant for the meat the Izabella had washed up came into view.
It had perhaps once been a crab, perhaps a crab of common dimensions. But it was much changed now, by something or someone who had corrupted it into this monstrous form with careless magic. It was albino, its shell marked with a symmetrical design of maddening complexity. It had no less than seventeen shiny black eyes, sitting atop twitching stalks, while its mouthparts worked in ceaseless finicky motion, as its massive claws rhythmically delivered the morsels it constantly picked up into the machine of its maw with a delicacy that their scale belied.
Scuttling sideways, like all of its clan, it approached the body. Several smaller birds, sharp-beaked mekaks who seldom took flight, preferring to dine, breed and die on the shore, were already dancing over the corpse in their delight at having so many treats to pick from. And in their squawking enthusiasm they failed to notice the approach of the albino. The creature, for all its size, was quick. It came at the frenzied mekaks at a rush, catching one in each of its scissor claws, and snapping each bird in half before they even had time to struggle.
The others, shrieking in panic, attempted to depart, flapping their ill-oiled wings in an attempt to get beyond the range of the crab’s claws. But no.
Now the albino had the feast to himself. Even the bittamu birds delayed their descent, and circled above the beach unwilling to take on the beast below, however tempting the meal.
The crab assessed the body with its pincers and eyes, seeking out the best place to begin. It elected the hand of the corpse, taking hold of the wrist in its left pincer and lifting it up in order to snip off its fingers. But as it did so a long thread of life, its length spilling a sickly light, slid from the entrails of the body, where it had been nesting.
It let out a high-pitched squeal as it appeared; the strongest sound that shore had heard in many an age. It climbed up the corpse’s arm so fast that the crab had no time to prepare for its attack. The creature coiled around the claw, which still held the dead man’s hand. Livid bursts of brightness, more intense by far than the light its body spilled, now burst from it. They caught the shell of the crab’s claw in a web of lightning, which instantly tightened. The claw cracked wide open, shards of shell and pieces of its meat flying in all directions.
The crab did not have a mouth with which to voice its pain. It simply scrambled wildly to be away from its mutilator, its pincer legs sliding on the rot-slickened stones. But it wasn’t given a chance to escape. A second lightning thread had appeared from the coils of the corpse’s gut, and gathering itself into a coil had launched itself at the monster striking its eyestalks then dropping to the stones in front of the immense beast.
It instantly zigzagged beneath the crab, and drove its lightning-wreathed length at the crab’s belly with such force that the unthinkable happened. The crab—which had ruled the shore for a decade, slaughtering indiscriminately, even when there were rich pickings among the dead—was thrown over onto its back. Its barbed legs struck out wildly in an attempt to right itself, but could only pedal the air, which was suddenly thick with flies. For the first time in its life the crab made a thin whine of complaint, tinged with fear.
It had reason. It had only been on its back for a few seconds when its enemies slid up over the rim of its shell and onto its underside. There they rose and fell, rose and fell, their motion perfectly matched, until some invisible signal turned their dance into death. Together they drove their lightning-bathed heads into the crab’s segmented belly.
The crab’s whine became a shriek. Not of pain—the crab knew little of that—but of profound terror. This was its nightmare, its
But it was not a crabmeat dinner the bright thread sought. It was the fear itself, which it fed on, fattening on its cream, rich and thick then bearing its bounty, returning to the body from which it had come.
In the brief time that had passed since the waters of the Izabella had relinquished the corpse, rain clouds had blown in from the northeast. They were the first sign of a storm that had formed in the wildly unstable air above the edge of reality itself, where the sea dropped away into oblivion. Within two or three minutes the rain shower had become a deluge, which drove all but those few caught in the life-and-death struggle on the shore back into their hiding holes beneath the stones.
The crab, of course, had no hope of retreat. Exhausted by its panic it lay inert as the rain roared down on it. The storm hadn’t slowed the threads that were feeding on its terror. The bright threads came and went, harvesting the fear that suffused every part of the animal’s anatomy. They didn’t need the nourishment for themselves. It was their deceased creator, whose body they had never deserted, that they sought to reclaim with these gleanings of fear.
Had they been rational creatures with an understanding of death’s implacable hold, they would never have attempted to resurrect their host. He was dead, beaten and broken by the waters of the Izabella as they returned from the Hereafter. They had borne a chaotic freight of detritus from the streets of Chickentown. Storefronts, lampposts, cars, parts of cars, people in cars (some alive), roofs, doors, windows all stripped from houses, and innumerable remnants of the lives lived inside those houses: chairs, fridges, magazines, rugs, people, toys, clothes, and on and on; junk and life all thrown together in a soup of things lost forever. The threads’ host had been dashed against so many sharp, heavy, twisted pieces of trash that he might have died half a hundred deaths if he’d had them to die.
But finally a calmer current—the one that delivered his body to the Shore of the Departed—had claimed him. And now, in contradiction to the Shore’s very name, and in defiance of all the laws pertaining to the dissolution of the flesh, the devoted labor of the threads, carrying the food that the crab’s terror provided back to their maker’s corpse over and over, bore fruit.
The dead man moved. The crab did not see the miracle its nightmares had made possible. At some point in the coming and going of its fears’ devourers, the crab let go of life. The sluggish motion of its legs ceased entirely, and its whine sank away into silence.
The albino didn’t see the corpse it had almost dined upon twitch on its bed of black stones, nor its eyelids flicker open as the rain danced down on its all but fleshless face. As one life ended another began.
Nor was it for the first time. Christopher Carrion had drawn his first breath many, many years before, as a baby prematurely born. Now he took that breath again: a second first. This time, however, it was not a frail
