The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

It Washed Up by Joe R. Lansdale

In the moonlight, in the starlight, the churning waves seemed white with laundry soap. They crashed against the shore and the dark rocks there, and when they rolled back they left wads of seaweed and driftwood and all the tossed garbage and chunks of sewage that man had given the sea.

All the early night and into the midnight hour, the junk washed up, and then, a minute past one, when the sea rolled out and took its laundry soap waves with it, a wad of seaweed from which clinging water dripped like shiny pearls, moved. It moved and it stood up and the shiny pearls of water rolled over the seaweed, and the sewage clung tight and the thing took shape, and the shape was that of a man, featureless and dark and loose as the wind.

The seaweed and sewage man, gone shiny from the pearl drops of sea foam, walked toward town, and in the town it heard the clang and clatter of automobiles out on the brightly lit street, and it saw the street from its position in a dark alley, watched the cars zoom by and heard the people shout, and it chose to stick to the dark.

It went along the dark alley and turned down an even more narrow and darker alley, and walked squishing along that path until it came to the back of a theater where an old man with a harmonica and a worn-out hat sat on a flattened cardboard box and played a bluesy tune until he saw the thing from the ocean shuffle up.

The thing twisted its head when the music stopped, stood over the man, reached out and took the hat from the man's head and put it on its own. Startled, the man stood, and when he did, the thing from the ocean snatched his harmonica. The man broke and ran.

The thing put the harmonica in its mouth and blew, and out came a toneless sound, and then it blew again, and it was a better sound this time; it was the crash of the sea and the howl of the wind. It started walking away, blowing a tune, moving its body to a boogie-woogie rhythm and a two-step slide, the moves belying the sound coming from the instrument, but soon sound and body fell in line, swaying to the music, blowing harder, blowing wilder. The notes swept through the city like bats in flight.

And out into the light went the thing from the ocean, and it played and it played, and the sound was so loud cars slammed together and people quit yelling, and pretty soon they were lining up behind the thing from the ocean, and the thing played even louder, and those that fell in line behind it moved as it moved, with a boogie-woogie rhythm and a two-step slide.

Those who could not walk pushed the wheels of their wheel chairs, or gave their electric throttles all the juice, and there were even cripples in alleyways who but minutes before had been begging for money, who bounced along on crutches, and there were some without crutches, and they began to crawl, and the dogs and the cats in the town followed suit, and soon all that was left in the town were those who could not move at all, the infants in their cribs, the terminally sick, and the deaf who couldn't hear the tune, and the thing from the ocean went on along and all of the townspeople managed after.

It went out of the town and down to the shore, and over the rocks and into the sea, and with its head above water, it rode the waves out, still playing its tune, and the people and animals from the town went in after, and it took hours for them to enter the ocean and go under and drown, but still the head of the thing from the sea bobbed above the waves and the strange music wailed, and soon all that had come from the town were drowned. They washed up on the beach and on the rocks, water swollen, or rock cut, and lay there in the same way that the garbage from the sea had lain.

And finally the thing from the sea was way out now and there was just the faint sound of the music it played, and in the houses the infants who had been left could hear it, and they didn't cry as the music played, and even those who could not move, and those in comas, heard or felt the music and were stirred internally. Only the deaf were immune. And then the music ceased.

The thing from the sea had come apart from the blast of the waves and had been spread throughout the great, deep waters, and some of the thing would wash up on the beach, and some of it would be carried far out to sea, and the harmonica sunk toward the bottom and was swallowed by a large fish thinking it was prey.

And in the town the infants died of starvation, and so did the sick ones who could not move, and the deaf, confused, ran away, and the lights of the town blared on through day and night and in some stores canned music played and TVs in houses talked, and so it would be for a very long time.