Brian Lumley by The Pit-Yakker

Author:The Pit-Yakker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-08T22:17:50+00:00

DANGER! QUICKSAND!

Do Not Proceed Beyond This Point.

Quicksand? Quag, certainly, but not sand…

I don’t know how long I sat there. The sea was advancing and gray gulls wheeled on high, crying on a rising breeze that blew their plaintive voices inland.

Scummy waves broke in feathers of gray froth less than one hundred yards down the beach. Down what had been a beach before the invasion of the pit-yakkers. It was summer but down here there were no seasons. Steam curled up from the slag and misted a pitted, alien landscape.

I became lulled by the sound of the birds, the hissing throb of foamy waters, and, strangely, from some little distance away, the periodic clatter of an aerial dumper tilting its buckets and hurling more mineral debris down from on high, creating a mound which the advancing ocean would spread out in a new layer to coat and further contaminate the beach.

I sat there glumly, with my chin like lead in my hands and all of these sounds dull on the periphery of my consciousness, and thought nothing in particular and certainly nothing of any importance. From time to time a gull’s cry would sound like Moira’s voice, but too shrill, high, frightened, or desperate. She wasn’t coming, wouldn’t come, and I had lost her. We had lost each other.

I became aware of time trickling by, but again I state: I don’t know how long I sat there. An hour? Maybe.

Then something broke through to me. Something other than the voices of the gulls, the waves, the near-distant rain of stony rubble. A new sound? A presence? I looked up, turned my head to scan north along the dead and rotting beach. And I saw him — though as yet he had not seen me.

My eyes narrowed and I felt my brows come together in a frown. Raymond Maddison. The pit-yakker himself. And this probably as good a place as any, maybe better than most, to teach him a well-deserved lesson. I stood up, and keeping as low a profile as possible made my way round the back of the tarry dunes to where he was standing. In less than two minutes I was there, behind him, creeping up on where he stood wind-blown and almost forlorn-seeming, staring out to sea. And there I paused.

It seemed his large, rounded shoulders were heaving. Was he crying? Catching his breath? Gulping at the warm, reeking air? Had he been running? Searching for me? Following me as earlier he’d followed us? My feelings hardened against him. It was because he wasn’t entirely all there that people tolerated him. But I more than suspected he was all there. Not really a dummy, more a scummy.

And I had him trapped. In front of him the rocks receding into pits of black filth, where a second warning notice leaned like a scarecrow on a battlefield, and behind him… only myself behind him. Me and my tightly clenched fists.

Then, as I watched, he took something out of his pocket. His new knife, as I saw now.

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