2698 words

Day One

It is the stream that leads Gethin to the cove. At night it burbles in his dreams, foaming at the mouth and demanding he follow it. And so he obliges.

Seven miles he walks, with the stream as his guide. Seven miles in pitch dark, through field and forest, until he arrives at the coast at the cusp of dawn. Poised on the clifftop, Gethin peers down on a mercury-tinted bay while the stream cascades over the cliff, spewing its guts into the sea.

A deep breath to summon his courage before he scrambles down the cliff face, camera bag strapped to his back and the legs of the tripod digging into his kidneys.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he sees. Nothing. For here on the pebbled beach stands a stone circle. This is no modern structure, but an ancient gathering place. A ceremonial circle where stars align. But how did it get here?

Gethin shakes the incredulity of its location from his brain and focusses the camera lens. The sun hovers below the horizon, reluctant to rise at such an ungodly hour, while the tide hisses and spits as it breaks on the pebbled beach, a spiteful child retrieving the gifts it had bestowed hours earlier and leaving those it is bored with in its wake. A hypnotic rhythm, an anaesthetist's spell.

As the sky blushes magenta and violet, he prepares to shoot.

Facing east, Gethin watches as the golden orb, armed with silver daggers, splits the tallest megalith in three yet deals no damage. Instead, the stone wears the sun as a crown before passing it to its adjacent sibling. Shadows lengthen, turning the stones into slender gods with pebbled offerings at their feet, but all too soon the show is over, leaving Gethin somewhat bereft.

He sits in front of the tallest megalith and settles against its sun-warmed torso.

It is the whispers that wake him. Words indecipherable, and yet he is certain they carry meaning. Eyelids flicker open, and the whispering ceases. A dream. Nothing more than a dream, but when he closes his eyes the whispering resumes. Wave forms. A primal ululation, distant and nonsensical. His heartbeat is a hummingbird, and as he rises to his feet the lichen that clings to the stone's face tugs at his hair, reluctant to let him leave.

The evening is spent in front of the PC, working on the photographs. The softness of the light, the magic captured during the golden hour. A few he is pleased with, and yet there is more to be done. Tomorrow, in time for sunrise, he will return.

At night he dreams of coral weed, tendrils of pink-splayed fingers reaching out to stroke his face, and wakes to find a strand of seaweed draped on his pillow, the salty tang of brine on parched lips.

Day Two, 04:00

Gethin steps out of the shower, leaving in his wake a trail of sand that refuses to rinse away despite the power of the jet. He wipes the steam from the mirror, and his sightless eye stares back blankly. Eleven years old when a stone from a slingshot blinded him, and the eye has not judged his actions since.

This morning, the walk to the cove seems to take longer, and he wonders if he has taken a wrong turn, but soon the sweet scent of gorse taints the early morning mist, and the grating breath of waves breaking on pebbles grows louder with each step. He pauses atop the cliff, his gaze fixed on the megalithic structure on the beach below. The stones are dark, brooding giants, purple faced and misshapen.

Black-eyed gulls strut the clifftop as he descends, whooping with joy each time he stumbles. This is their domain, not his. He rests on a ledge, some fifteen feet from the bottom, surprised to discover the tide is far out to sea. Since he neglected to check the tide times he will need to foreshorten the image to ensure both sea and structure are included in the scene. Legs dangling, he counts the stones. Fourteen in total, each one ranging in height and girth. Evenly spaced, except for the two closest to the shore. Here the space is wider, like a missing tooth in a gaping mouth. The megaliths are statues, pitted and gnarled against an indigo backdrop, and the sound of the sea as it laps at their feet reminds him of the whispering.

Was this once an ancient place of worship and ritual? A place where bards and druids gathered to eulogize. Perhaps the whispers are the voices of bardic ghosts. He gathers his breath, and completes the descent.

Gethin's good eye surveys his surroundings while instinct and experience assist. Setting up the tripod and camera is a mechanical act, one he has performed countless times. His mind knows this and weaves its own path, one strewn with stones and the gap-toothed grin of the boy who stole the sight of an eye. A trauma long past, but not forgotten.

This morning the golden hour is a quantum leap, each wave a time-lapsed sequence, each colour shift, through violet to red, over in a heartbeat. He sits at the foot of the tallest megalith, digs his heels in firm among the pebbles, and leans back, spent. The tide rolls in ever closer, until it licks at the stones, causing those at the water's edge to decrease in height with each surge. An act of slow drowning. He watches...and waits.

Discomfort ebbs into his subconscious, a prodding pain in his spine, so he turns and rests on his haunches, studying the face of the rock. The conical tip of a limpet stands proud, but there's more on offer here. The rock face is a world in miniature, and an ideal subject for some macro work.

A carpet of algae makes a suitable starting point. It's not a species his phone app recognizes but an interesting type nonetheless—the colour of aubergine, baked in the sun. No hint of chlorophyll, instead it mimics the surface of the rock. Filamentous. Invasive, too. Even the limpets are garbed in it.

He squints towards the sky, grateful to see that the clouds have rolled in and reduced the contrast. Switching to a macro lens, and attaching a polarising filter, he squats low. F-stop 4, his sighted eye focusses.

A few clicks is all he manages before his vision pixelates, each filament of algae becoming a throbbing strobe that waves in his vision as though calling to him. Then a frothing garble of murmured vibrations that he hears rather than sees. A shooting pain at the back of the retina, and a bout of nausea so acute he retches.

The world turns black.

He wakes to the scream of gulls and the sharp tang of iodine, but the tide has encroached no further, so he could not have been unconscious for long. Throbbing pain in his cheekbone; his fingers come away bloody. Gradually the world stabilizes, and he stands on legs that belong to a newborn deer.

The journey home is fraught with fear, but Doctor Google assures him that what occurred was nothing more than an ocular migraine, with tiredness the likely cause. Makes sense, since he's never been a morning person and has been up and out long before sunrise the last two days. He buries the incident in the occipital lobe and warns it against recurrence.

To distract himself from negative thoughts he copies the photos from the SD card and begins the process of deleting those he deems unworthy and filing those that show potential. The sunrise shots are awesome, some of his best work to date. Gethin takes a deep breath before opening the first of the macro shots, of which there are only three. It was all he managed before the faint. He imports the first into Photoshop, and the screen displays a maroon carpet of algae. Nothing more. No waving arms or strange sounds. And the knot at the back of his neck loosens its grip.

Day Three, 10:40

Gethin wakes to the distant wail of a siren and the realization that he has overslept. A muzzy head and a sore back punish his tardiness. Even the shower fails to rouse him, so he turns down the dial, delivering a blast of cool water to his aching body. It is as he dries his feet that he notices the bloom. At first he mistakes it for sand, but the grainy matter that has adhered to the soles of his feet refuses to shift despite a vigorous rub with the towel. It itches, too. A deep, penetrating tingle, made worse by the rubbing. He checks the rest of his skin, relieved to find the rash has not spread. Fungi, he assumes, something he picked up while barefoot. But he would have noticed sooner, wouldn't he? He dabs the soles of his feet with calamine, wincing at the ensuing sting, then heel walks to the kitchen while the lotion dries.

After yesterday's incident he knows he should rest, but the call of the cove is a magnet. By midday he is dressed and heading for the beach. Today he will capture the macro shots that yesterday's episode stole from him.

Heavy-legged and sore-footed, he makes it to the cove just as the rain starts. A persistent drizzle; a photographer's nightmare. An invisible horizon, cloud so low it is impossible to tell where sea ends and sky begins. The whole landscape washed grey as far as the eye can see. It is not the light that concerns him but the thought of getting water inside the camera. Still, he's here now, and after such an arduous walk he intends to make the most of it. The focus will do him good, help take his mind off things.

He begins with an easy subject—a pile of pebbles at the edge of the cliff. Zoomed in, the pebbles resemble a nest of speckled birds' eggs, one ringed with concentric ovals, another pale and wan. The ugly duckling among the brood.

The tide has turned, leaving in its wake rock pools teaming with life. Seaweed slick as oil, a rib of kelp, shaped like a tree, its warty anchor like an old man's testicles, but it is the funnel-shaped peacock's tail that captures his attention. A silvery fan of concentric circles, the ear of Cliodan, goddess of the sea and granter of wishes. Eyes closed, he makes a wish, the same one he has wished for fifteen years, though it has never been granted.

Gethin removes his boots and socks, rolls his jeans to his knees, and scavenges among the rock pools. A skulking crab-like creature beneath a clump of seaweed, stalk-eyed, but instead of pincers it has spiralling tusks, like those of a narwhal. He tries to get a shot, but it burrows beneath the sand in the time it takes to blink.

Waving at him from another pool is a clump of dead man's fingers, the colour of maggots. Each digit is tipped with a gelatinous black-slanted pupil that follows his movements. He shudders, and the mass emulates his response with a quiver of its own. Gethin imagines the corpse to whom they belong buried beneath the rock, a hand reaching out in a last desperate attempt to survive, but logically he knows it's only fungus. He considers himself genned-up when it comes to marine biology, but between this and the crab-like creature something feels off here, there's something eerily peculiar about the whole thing. He shivers, and heads back to the beach.

The salt water has soothed his itching feet; the incessant drizzle has ceased, so he turns his attention back to the megaliths, visiting each stone in turn and noting its features.

One of the stones wears a wig of crusted guano, sun-dried and white as snow. On another, a colony of tiny barnacles have clumped together to form a beard. We are all parasites, he thinks. Nothing but a bunch of hopeless leeches. A wave of despair accompanies the thought, and the whispering returns to haunt him.

It comes from all around now. From the breath of the wind to the lisp of the sea. The hollowed rock-pools and even the tiny holes of the barnacles. A plethora of voices, some low and guttural, others a high-pitched whine. Hands pressed to ears, he curls in a ball and rocks like a frightened child.

The journey home seems never ending. His legs are a pair of skittles, weighted with sand; his torso a punchbag, filled with dread. Tomorrow he will stay at home, tie himself down if necessary.

Day Four, 16:00

All day long day he resists the call of the cove. The grainy rash has crept as far as his knees and his elbows are capped with limpets. The absurdity of his situation strikes as he tries to prise one off with a screwdriver, for what he assumes must be the creature's muscular foot produces a sound like the twang from an elastic band—the sturdy type, used as event lanyards. At that precise moment, his blind eye pulsates, the intensity and length of the vibration exactly matching the twang. Other than the odd itch or pulse of pain, the eye has ceased to exist for fifteen years, at least in any useful sense. He takes another stab at the limpet, this time with the good eye closed, and the same thing happens. It is for all the world as though the creature is trying to communicate with his useless organ.

Worst of all though is the cluster of barnacles, tangled among his chest hair. Each the size of an acorn and empty as a beggar's purse. It is the tiny void that sickens him most, each shell sucked dry by a predator so that an empty hole stares back at him like a sightless eye, multiplied again and again in the colony. He recalls a strange fact about the acorn barnacle: Proportionally, it has the longest penis in the animal kingdom, eight or nine times the length of its owner. A neat solution for a creature glued to the spot and needing to mate. He's grateful the shells are empty because the thought of all those penises tangled in his chest hair makes him retch. Each attempt he makes to remove the barnacles is thwarted, no matter how deep he digs. The skin on his chest red-raw from scrubbing; a bleeding nipple where blade pierced flesh.

He launches the screwdriver across the bathroom floor and slumps on the edge of the bathtub, deflated.

Day Five, 00:00

The head torch is the only reason Gethin makes it to the beach without breaking every bone in his body. Stiff-limbed and sick to the stomach, his good eye sweeps the cove while the other buzzes and hums to its own tune. This is how it has been since the limpet incident, and it has gradually worsened over the last few hours.

Low tide, and the gap in the stones grins wide in welcome. Fourteen megaliths stand erect, like guards surrounding an invisible palace. His sightless eye fixes on the gap, a circular pattern of wave forms oscillating in his vision, like the ripple of water when a stone strikes the surface. No colour or form, but it's real nonetheless. A small part of him, the last scrap of logic, wonders whether he should abandon the mission he is about to embark on and visit the eye doctor instead. Could it be that after all these years the eye is reawakening? No sooner does the thought enter his head than the whispering starts again. He's entered the circle now, and the stones urge him onward, toward the gap. The crescendo rises as he spans the diameter, a chant from the gods, a trisyllabic mantra of encouragement. As he reaches the gap in the stones, the moon peeps from behind the clouds to witness the sight, turning the sea to a shimmering carpet of silver.

Gethin's last thought is what a wonderful photograph the scene would make.

© 2025 Catherine McCarthy