Seaspawn

He’d never explored this far down shore before. Away from the butterfly-bright colours of the tourists in their raincoats, the bay showed its ugly side, with the debris of the town piled in rusting banks of plastic and metal, fringed with long, pink tendrils and the greenish flowers of bladderwrack. White foam sloshed through the flotsam like the breath of some vast, dying creature, or one just wakening to life.

Kedji scrambled across rocks and rusting oil drums frilled with thick seaweed, its purple membranes blooming like spilt viscera. Petrol trickled from abandoned engine parts, leaking filthy rainbows across the coarse, grainy sand. For a while he amused himself by poking about in the rocks, startling tiny crabs from their hiding places and listening to the water whisper secrets to the dark shingle.

When he looked up he found he had wandered around the base of the bluff, so that the main bay had vanished altogether, and he was alone in a strange gallery of sea-creatures and corroding metal. He ran a cautious finger along the bubbled surface of an old bike frame, down the pitted metal of its triangle to where the chain rings sprouted a spongey green lichen.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?”

Kedji jumped as if the lurid moss had bitten him. Above him on the rocks stood a creature in a tattered raincoat and trousers that flapped in the wind.

“People toss ‘em away, like they’re useless. Like they’re nothing at all.”

The stranger turned and swayed, gesturing toward the rusting junk like a proud curator. His fingers splayed, feather-like, and Kedji tried not to notice how some of them were stumps, some missing altogether.

“They don’t see how they’re just waiting to turn into something else. Like a caterpillar. Like frogspawn.”

“Did you make them?” Kedji asked, staring at the strange museum of seaspawn: rusting hubcabs pearled with whelks; violet starfish wreathed around the spiked, warped ribs of wrecked supermarket trolleys; a lawnmower engine stripped down by the waves to mere discs and cogs, ribboned with the translucent skirts of a jellyfish.

“Make them!” the man cawed, as if it were a great joke. “As much as I made that seagull!” He fumbled in a tatty black pocket and pulled out a hunk of stale bread, flicked it into the centre of the lawnmower’s interlocking metal spiral. The morsel teetered for a moment, then stilled. Beneath it the machine seemed to tremble slightly, as if in anticipation. One short finger held aloft like a mad prophet, the man nodded sagely to Kedji, then gazed at the sky.

A seagull wheeled overhead, its attention caught by the spark of white against the dark wetness of sea and rusted metal. It hesitated a moment, as if judging what risk the two humans posed. Then it plummeted like a stone, down to the centre of the machine, to claim its prize.

“They run on oil. That’s their fuel, see. But to grow, they need something a little more – heh – organic.”

There was a whirr of moving metal, a screech of cogs and alarm, and the machine sprang to life, crushing the seagull into a mess of white feathers and blood.

Kedji shrieked and sprang backwards.

“Why’d you do that? That’s horrible!”

“I told you,” said the man. “They need it, to grow.”

Kedji gaped at him, his arms flung wide in protest as he backed further up the beach. “You’re crazy,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of rusting old junk!”

“That’s a rude thing to say!” the old man frowned. “And stupid too.” He motioned to the still-whirring spiral of metal, the discs spinning more softly now, like the purr of a contented cat. “They’ve got feelings, you know!”

Suddenly the beach seemed very empty, apart from this crazy old man and the sharp, rusting edges of his machines. Kedji took a few more cautious steps up the beach, then stopped.

Something was happening to the lawnmower.

The thick ooze of blood the seagull had left in its metal maw was shrinking, as if being absorbed by the spinning discs. But that wasn’t what prised Kedji’s mouth open in disbelief. The thick, jelly-like creature wrapped around the machine was pulsing, throbbing like a heartbeat, and while Kedji watched, it began to swell as if it were growing, just like the old man had said.

His black beady eyes followed Kedji’s gaze and he nodded, gleeful. “See? I told you.” He swept a maimed hand wide, taking in the junkyard of his creation. “All of ‘em’s the same. Oil to run, flesh and blood to grow.”

With a chill, it dawned on Kedji why the man had stumps for fingers, why the skin of the forearm that peeped out from the ratty old wind-cheater was thick with scars. Around them, the membranous machines seemed to take in breath, all at once, like they were scenting him. As if they could smell the warm blood as it rose to his chest in panic.

He stumbled further from the man, his feet slipping on the slime-covered rocks at the waterline. Then, he turned and ran.

Behind him there was a whirring and scraping, as if a great hive of metal bees were awakening. Ahead, too far away, a scrub of sand-dunes rose up like sanctuary. Kedji risked a look over his shoulder and felt his stomach clamp tight.

The whole beach behind him was undulating, sand falling down gaps between the spindled limbs of machines and the cling of jellied creatures that bound them like musculature. They were a nest of strange scorpions, writhing in the unaccustomed daylight. Flesh and blood to grow. Kedji whimpered, scenting their hunger. Behind him, the crazy old man cackled and cawed.

His feet pounded faster on the sucking silt. A long, riveted tentacle rasped out of the sand with a dry hiss like the rattle of an old bicycle chain. It rippled, and Kedji saw the pink suckers on its underside, moist and open like mouths along the rusted metal. He screamed and bolted, the long, jointed spine of metal flicking out after him hungrily.

The clasp of it around his ankle was metal and cartilage, cold and oozing and elastic. Kedji’s scream was lost in the sand that filled his mouth as the tentacle contracted, whipping him back down the beach to a great, rusting engine of broken teeth already beginning to grind.

There was a screaming of gears, a scraping of membrane and steel, and thick, dark blood seeped across the sand like an oil slick.