Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

THE CHAIN

by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

THE FIRST DAYS were pleasant. Fun, even. Different from normal life. A break. A change—exactly what David needed, and what he’d come there for.

He slept well and rose early, carrying his first herbal tea of the day down to the beach. He took long walks and ate healthy meals, and sometimes when he felt like a cigarette he elected to not have one. He avoided alcohol. He thought about what he might paint, and in the evening sat on the small deck in front of the cottage and read non-taxing fiction or sat gazing calmly into space, nodding affably at people who walked by, as if he really lived here.

Everything flowed. One day led comfortably into the next.

It took a week before the chain began to break.

* * *

On Monday he’d arrived by car down from San Francisco and moved into the cottage. This didn’t take long. The tiny house was thoughtfully set up for vacation rentals, and provided everything he could possibly need except something to wear and something to do, both of which he’d brought with him in the back seat of his convertible Mini Cooper. Once a source of pride, the car was now battered and prone to malfunction (much like, David occasionally felt, himself).

He put his regular clothes in the drawers in the bedroom. He put his painting clothes in the small garage, along with easel, paints and a stack of canvases. He’d brought ten, a statement of intent. All were three feet square, purely because his supplier in the city happened to have them on sale. Tackling a fixed aspect ratio might be invigorating, and having no choice might also help focus the mind. So he hoped.

The garage had no windows except for a thin frosted strip along the top of the door, but the owner evidently used the space as an occasional workshop and it was artificially well lit via bulbs and fluorescent tubes. It seemed a shame, having driven five hours to such a beautiful part of the coast, to be planning to spend large portions of every day hidden from it—but that was the purpose of being here. To paint. To kick himself back into enjoying his vocation, even caring about it again.

If he really got his groove on, ten canvases wouldn’t be nearly enough for three weeks’ work—his process was to rough out initial masses quickly, returning at leisure to detail and finesse—but should additional ones be needed then he was confident he’d be able to obtain them. Carmel has a bewildering number of art galleries, and is home to people who fill them. They weren’t David’s kind of painter, but that was okay. David wasn’t sure if he was his kind of painter any more either—or any kind of painter at all.

That was what he was here to find out.

* * *

By Wednesday his temporary studio was laid out and ready to go. David was not. This wasn’t procrastination—he was wearily familiar with that pissy little demon, alert to its polymorphic disguises and insidious creep. The need to detox from the city and the last year’s inactivity, coupled with a desire to explore, seemed a reasonable excuse to postpone sequestering himself on such beautiful fall days.

Carmel is an extremely attractive place to stroll around. It’s the first (and rather small) town north of the wilderness of Big Sur, on a ruggedly stunning stretch of coast. There is a craggy cove with a beach, and a great many cypress and eucalyptus and pine trees up and down the narrow streets, at times giving the impression of a village built in a forest. What is most noticeable, however, is the houses.

There are few large dwellings in Carmel—the mansions start further north, on 17 Mile Drive and Pebble Beach and the outskirts of Pacific Grove. Carmel is a collection of cottages, as cute as can be—from perfect little Victorians to jewel-like Gothic and Mission and playful Storybook and Folk Tudor, all cheek-by-jowl, with nothing but narrow strips of intensely manicured garden in between. You wander the streets constantly struck by the dreamlike juxtaposition of styles, stopping to gaze upon one house before realising its neighbour is even more striking, and walking on a few yards to look at it, before having the same realisation about the next dwelling along.

And thus, for David, a few hours would happily pass, and whole mornings and afternoons.

It’s a small place—ten streets in one direction, twelve in the other, made cosy and intimate by all the trees, and whichever way you walk you’ll get to the centre before long. It’s here that (should you somehow have remained in doubt) it becomes clear that Carmel is a place for the wealthy. The centre is quiet and serene, dominated by the sound of birds, the purring of expensive automobiles, the polite chink of silverware. There’s an immaculate little bookstore. Patio restaurants, where waiters in white aprons deliver high-spec food and perfectly chilled glasses of local wines to sunglassed patrons in chinos or dresses in muted shades. A charming grocery market. A few coffee houses—mostly hidden down alleys, as if to make the point there are some people who truly live in this paradise, and everyone else is merely a tourist passing through. No Starbucks, God forbid.

And, of course, there are the galleries.

The art wasn’t all bad, either. Usually it’s axiomatic that the closer a gallery stands to the ocean, the worse its contents will be. The galleries of Carmel are not for enthusiastic amateurs hawking garish sunsets, however. From earliest days the village had been a Mecca for painters who could actually paint, along with poets, writers and free-thinkers of every stripe (though few such could dream of affording to live there now). There’s aesthetically lamentable work on sale, naturally—ominously perfect farmhouses in narcotically bucolic country scenes, anthropomorphised dogs, excessively winsome little girls in ballet outfits—but also plenty of serious stores specialising in admirable California painters of the last hundred years, and plenty of contemporary artists who know what they’re doing, too, and are capable of keeping on doing it.

Unlike, it might appear, David.

His intention had been to avoid the galleries, in order to avoid provoking the acid churning in the guts that comes from experiencing the work of others, while in the throes of personal non-productivity. This didn’t last, and he told himself it was to remind himself that canvases did get finished, and hung up, and bought.

As had David’s, though not recently. Five years ago he could expect to earn ten to fifteen thousand dollars for a painting, less a gallery’s draconian cut, naturally. Then two years ago he’d hit the wall. He’d start work, get as far as blocking out… but a week later realise that he’d never gone back to it. Soon this gap extended to a month, or two, and eventually it got to the point where he’d conceive of a painting and be able to imagine exactly how it might progress, and as a result feel disinclined to even start—knowing it’d be okay, but that there was no real need for it; believing that if he failed to create it, nothing of substance would be lost to the world.

Except, as his bank and other creditors eventually started to remind him, it paid for everything. This information did not help.

It broke the chain.

* * *

Finally, on the Friday afternoon, he went into his temporary studio. He put up a canvas. He lifted a 2B pencil from where he’d placed it in readiness, and quickly outlined some shapes. After ten minutes he pulled the iPhone out of his pocket and consulted a shot he’d taken that lunchtime, in the tiny courtyard of a coffee house hidden in the centre of the village. He put the phone back in his pocket—even when working from reference he needed to feel he worked from memory too—and made minor alterations.

He stood back, looked at what he’d done. It seemed okay. He put the pencil back in its place and walked into the house and had a shower.

* * *

On Saturday morning he found himself back at the same coffee shop. He sat at the same rickety metal table in the courtyard, watching the light on the opposite wall. The wall was more or less white, the kind of white you see on an exterior surface that was painted white a year or two ago, on top of a previous coat of white, and has since then experienced sun, shade, and only very occasional rain.

To the incurious eye, it looked… white. David’s was not an incurious eye, and the wall was what he was hoping to portray. His additions would be shadows. His last successful series of works had involved placing shadows of people on largely featureless walls. A woman sitting, a man standing. A couple together. A suggestion of content through absence. He’d stopped wanting to paint these things, but now he was finding that he did again.

He sat for two hours, drinking three coffees. Usually he’d have one in the course of a morning, two at the most. The brew at Bonnie’s was good, though. It had a nutty flavour, a little smoky. While he sat, he eavesdropped and observed a sequence of locals as they passed through, stopping to chat at the other tables. There was talk of planned or recent trips to Europe, the pleasures of a newly acquired boat, upcoming IPOs in Silicon Valley. This was not the kind of content he wished to suggest.

He left and went back to his temporary studio, where he worked all afternoon. It felt good, and as always when it felt good he was baffled why he didn’t do this all the time, springing out of bed in the mornings and getting straight to it. Each stroke of the brush seemed to flow from the previous and into the next, urging forward. So why did the chain fall apart so often? Why did it fragment into a series of dull, rusty links that seemed impossible to join together?

Rather than worry at the problem—David did not want to bring activity upon himself by thinking about it, however constructively—he kept working, for once going beyond outlining and starting to actually paint. This wasn’t his process, but maybe this was a good thing. Maybe the process itself was flawed. If there’s one thing he’d learned over the years it was that if something’s working, you keep doing it. Don’t question, don’t second-guess. If you decide later that you don’t like what you’ve done, you can fix it. But you’ve got to have done something first.

So he did.

* * *

That evening, to celebrate, he took himself out to dinner. He chose Max’s mainly on the basis that it had the most attractive patio, overlooking one of the central streets. He drank two glasses of a very crisp Sauvignon Blanc and ate a ribeye, medium rare. The steak was excellent, of course, accentuated before grilling by some kind of spice rub, smoky and a little sweet.

When the waiter came for his plate David asked what was in the spice mix. The man smiled and said it was a house secret. As usual, David found this irritating. He wasn’t going to run off and start his own restaurant on the back of a single recipe.

“Is there coffee in it?”

The waited inclined his head. “You have a good palate.”

“Tastes like the brew they have over at Bonnie’s,” David said.

The waiter smiled again, as if to say that he couldn’t possibly confirm or deny such a speculation, and took his plate away.

Back at the cottage, David found himself wishing he’d had one more glass of wine, or else thought to buy a bottle earlier in the day. To distract himself from this line of thinking he went into the studio, though he never normally worked in the evenings. He picked up his brush.

He stopped at midnight, a little confused at how much work he’d done, and the unusual colours in it.

* * *

On Sunday morning the work still looked good, but he wasn’t inclined to add anything just yet. Instead he went walking again. He remembered to take his proper camera this time, and spent a couple of hours taking pictures of particular houses he’d noticed on previous strolls.

After snapping a series of an especially perfect Storybook cottage, he turned to see a man watching him. Not merely a man, in fact, but a policeman, in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt. David felt instinctively defensive.

“Beautiful, huh,” the cop said, however. He was young, with short brown hair and a pair of dark glasses. “Always been one of my favourites.”

“I can see why,” David said, surprised. “Know anything about it?”

It turned out the cop did, from the name of the original builder to its current occupants. Then he seemed to realise there was probably something else he should be doing, and nodded, before starting to leave.

“Lucky place to live,” David said. He was speaking largely to himself, but the cop paused.

“Luck doesn’t have a lot to do with it,” he said, before walking away down the street.

* * *

Though he returned to the cottage late morning and spent a couple of hours in the company of his canvas, David did not make any progress. The momentum of the previous day had dissipated. He felt fine. He felt inclined to work. Yet… it wasn’t there.

Yesterday’s link in the chain was not connected to today’s. That happened sometimes. Just as it had once happened, six years ago, that a house he and his wife had wanted very much to purchase had fallen through because the chain of buyers had broken apart. One night it was all in place. By the following lunchtime it was gone. They lost the house.

Often David placed the beginning of the end of their relationship on that morning, that loss. The truth was probably that the chain of I-love-you-I-love-you-too had started to break long before. Even non-events throw shadows. Everything is contingent.

Knowing that the last thing you should do when the work isn’t happening is to stand banging your head against it—sometimes you can painfully bore your way through a blockage, but more often you end up tinkering, ruining the freedom of what you’ve done before—he went downtown for coffee.

He did not sit looking at the wall he was currently trying to portray. He knew enough about it already. What he needed was to clarify his ideas for the shadows he’d be casting upon it. Whose hidden presence did he want to evoke? None of the people he’d observed near it yesterday, that was for sure. Their gilded non-lives didn’t speak to him.

He watched the girl behind the counter inside, wondering if she would do. She was young, somewhat attractive, though carrying the extra pounds around the lower half that Californian women often seem to affect, presumably the result of some Scandinavian influence in the genes. She was very affable, dealing with locals and tourists much the same, and presumably had a real life of some kind. David found it hard to imagine what it would be.

He sat drinking another cup of the seductively complex coffee, and failed to come up with anything. He toyed with it being a couple of tourists’ shadows. A man and a woman, stopping for refreshment while driving up or down the coast. An air of tension, perhaps. Her wanting to enjoy the drive, him concerned with covering the miles to wherever they were booked for the night. Both of them, in their contradictory—and conflicting—ways, merely wanting the best for each other. Would David be able to evoke that through shadows alone?

It wasn’t difficulty that eventually made him go cold on the idea—when it comes to art, difficult is good. It was more the suspicion that no one, himself included, would give a crap when it was done. He needed something with a little more grit.

Finding grit in Carmel—now there was a challenge.

* * *

As he walked out of the alley onto the main street, he realised that in the six, nearly seven days he’d been in town, he hadn’t seen a single person who didn’t look as if they would have a perfect credit score. Also, that this was precisely what he’d been looking for. A Carmel wall, but with the imprint of someone who did not belong. That was the tension that would make the image worthwhile.

He wandered the central streets, on a mission now. After half an hour he still hadn’t seen anyone who stuck out. Everybody dressed the same, spoke the same, walked and shopped the same. It occurred to him that it would make as much sense to stay in one position and keep an eye out for someone passing, and so he did that instead, lighting a cigarette to keep him company.

“You can’t do that,” a voice said, immediately.

David turned to see a middle-aged woman smiling sternly at him. “Huh?”

“Smoking. On the streets. It’s not allowed.”

David looked around for a sign. He was used to this kind of restriction, though generally you had to be within twenty feet of an open doorway the public might use, which he currently was not. “Really?”

“Really. Town ordinance.”

She smiled again, more tightly, and strode up the street. David flicked the end off his cigarette, stowed the butt in the pack, and watched her go.

He spent the rest of the afternoon looking for grit. He walked a long way. He smoked a cigarette once in a while, careful to cup it in his hand, to hide it from passers-by. This, and the task he’d set himself, made him feel as if he was undercover.

When he gave up at five o’clock, he hadn’t seen anyone who looked mildly disadvantaged, never mind actively poor. He’d caught sight of a few Mexicans, engaged in yard-work or carrying sheets to or from vacation rentals, but it wasn’t the economic bracket that mattered. He’d seen no one who… he wasn’t even sure what the umbrella term would be. No one homeless. No one who looked like they’d ever been on medication stronger than some discrete Prozac, or Xanax to smooth out the bumps.

Living in San Francisco—or pretty much any modern town, he’d have thought—brought you into unavoidable occasional contact with someone who seemed to have been jammed into the world sideways. A corner-shouter. A crazy person. Even a simple down-and-out.

In Carmel, not so much. In fact, not at all.

Maybe there was a town ordinance for that, too.

* * *

On the way back to the cottage he stopped off at the grocery store. He brought a few snacks toward an evening meal at home. He also bought a bottle of wine.

After supper he sat out on the front deck and watched the world go by. It went by, smoothly, and without grit.

* * *

He went into the studio early the next morning, though his head did not feel great. He left again after ten minutes and went walking instead. He was more methodical than on the previous day, tracing the streets in a grid pattern. He saw houses he’d never noticed before, though none that looked cheap. He saw a somewhat run-down motor vehicle, but it was vintage rather than simply old.

He still saw no one to disturb the ineffable calm of the locals. No one who smelled. No one sitting with their hand held out, slumped beside a cardboard sign and a patient hound. No one with a battered acoustic guitar on their lap. No one with dreadlocks or dusty clothes.

At one point he thought he saw someone in a long black coat, some distance away, in shadows down a side street. Not just a coat, but wearing a dark and crooked hat, too.

This seemed sufficiently distinctive—and out of keeping with the locals’ usual pastel modes of dress—that he hurried down the street to get a better look, but either the person had moved on or had never been more than a trick of the light.

David considered himself no bleeding-heart liberal. He’d volunteered for neither soup kitchen nor shelter in his life. When confronted with such people on his home turf in the city, he experienced the same feelings of discomfort, fear and irritation as everyone else. Here, though… here, it niggled at him. He wasn’t sure why.

It wasn’t that the town was pissing him off. He liked it well enough, and still hoped to do good work in it. It simply seemed… strange. Could you really have a town in which there were no off-notes, nobody wonky, no misfits? Did such a policy have to be enforced, or was Carmel somehow self-regulating, a delightful painting in which no discordant elements had been incorporated, and for which there was simply no room—a work of living art rendered from a fixed palette in which there were no colors to evoke the discordant?

In the afternoon he went to Bonnie’s once more. He hadn’t intended to, had in fact grown bored of looking at the wall there, and believed he already knew what he needed to put in front of it. He seemed to have become mildly addicted to their coffee, however, and as he was about to pay, he realised something else might come of his visit.

“Do you live here?” he asked the barista girl.

“All my life.”

“Like it?”

“Well… sure.”

“There ever been any homeless people here? That you’ve seen?”

She stared at him for a moment, then laughed.

He went home, but he did not paint.

* * *

He’d told himself he put the second bottle in the basket just so he wouldn’t have to come by the market again the next day. By the time the first was finished, however, he was no longer that guy. He was the other guy. He knew there must be a link between these two men, some way one flowed into the next, but he’d never been able to spot the point where one ended and the other began.

It wasn’t like he had a drinking problem. Sometimes he simply drank too much. It tended to make him cheerful and mischievous rather than depressed or maudlin. The problem lay not with how he was when he was drunk, but how he felt the following day.

If there’s anything that breaks the chain of creation, it’s a hangover. Try telling that to The Other Guy, though. He won’t listen. It may well be from him that inspiration comes in the first place, but he’s not the guy who has to stand there making stroke follow stroke in the hours of daylight, and so he just doesn’t care.

About a third of the way through the second bottle, the idea dropped into David’s head. He could see right away that it was dangerously close to the kind of thing some of his long-ago art college buddies might have undertaken, far too seriously. It was unlike anything he’d ever done. Unlike painting at all, in fact.

This wouldn’t be art, though. This would be research. A step towards finishing the painting that was beginning to languish in the temporary studio. Sometimes the artist has to step into his work, after all. Perhaps it is that process that provides the solution in which events float.

He went indoors, colliding with the doorframe on the way, and made the remainder of the wine last as he worked.

* * *

As he walked up the street the next morning, David realised that he’d unintentionally added extra touches to his work in progress.

Doesn’t matter how long you brush your teeth, when you’ve consumed two bottles of wine you’re going to be exuding it the next morning one way or another. It seeps out of your pores. His head hurt, causing him to squint against the shafts of sunlight that made it down through the trees on his way toward the centre of the village. He’d slept terribly, too—it turned out the floor of the garage was just as uncomfortable as it looked—which conferred valuable extra detail. Often when you create something it’s the unintentional or unconscious touches that make all the difference—so long, of course, as the chain is operating.

He got his first sideways glance just as he made it onto the main street. A man wearing immaculate blue shorts, a blue shirt, and a blue cap looked at him, then away, and then back again. He seemed like he wanted to say something.

David looked back and grinned.

The man stayed silent, but walked quickly away.

Score, David thought.

He continued up the street, concentrating on shambling. It wasn’t hard, given how rough he felt. Just before he turned down the alley toward Bonnie’s, he coughed. It was supposed to be merely a throat-clearer, but the vast number of cigarettes he’d smoked the night before elevated it into a consumptive cacophony that lasted twenty seconds, and culminated in hawking a mouthful of beige phlegm into a flowerbed.

Looking up, head swirling, David saw that a middle-aged couple had stopped in their tracks and were staring at him with identical looks on their faces. It was hard to describe their expressions, though if you came home to find the dog had shat in the middle of your bed, you’d probably make something similar.

David waved, and lurched off up the alley.

The girl behind the counter watched his approach. He knew this was going to be an interesting test. She’d seen him the day before. They’d even had a conversation.

He stepped up to the counter, swaying slightly as he peered up at the board.

“Just a coffee,” he said. “Twelve ounce.”

She reached behind for a cup, not taking her eyes off him. He pulled out the motley handful of loose coins he’d put in his pocket in preparation. It took him quite a while to count out the correct amount. The girl watched, holding back on handing over the cup until he was done.

He filled the cup, added milk and a lot of sugar. Smiled crookedly at the girl as he left. She was still watching, and had not said a single word.

Out in the courtyard he sat at the table in front of the white wall. Had she really not recognised David? Hard to tell. Could be that she’d been left speechless by the transformation. He didn’t think so, though. He was pretty good at his job. He thought she had no idea who he was, and her reaction had been to what he appeared to be.

It’d taken him five hours. First thing he’d tackled were his clothes. At first he’d thought he might be able to get away with using some of his painting gear, but one glance told him that—to his eye—they were too obviously what they were: clothes someone had used to paint in. The balance and distribution of the colours weren’t right.

So he’d gone into the bedroom and found his second pair of jeans and an old-ish shirt. The jeans had always been kind of long in the leg and so the bottoms were ragged and a little dirty, a good start. The shirt was white and in good condition, but he’d worn it on the drive down from San Francisco and it had lain crumpled at the bottom of the linen basket ever since.

Working slowly and methodically—within the confines of the fact that he’d been well on the way to shit-faced drunk by then—he’d tested colours and textures, and then, when satisfied, got to work, layer by layer.

He was a firm believer in the maxim that you can always add but never take away, and so when he was almost done he set the clothes aside and got to work on his face and arms. After a while he hit on a combination of paint, water and dust from the garage floor that seemed to hit the mark. He ran his hands through his hair occasionally, ensuring some of all this got lodged there too.

He finally went back to the clothes and layered in over the creases, then bent and rubbed them against the wall for ten minutes, perfecting the shiny look that comes from dirt and filth that’s been lived in for so long it becomes ingrained, part of the garment itself.

He put the clothes on and lurched into the house. He checked the overall impression in the mirror in the bathroom, and went back to the studio for a couple of final touches, but by this point the wine was done and so was he. In a last-minute inspiration—aided by the fact he simply couldn’t be bothered to lurch back to the bedroom—he lay down on the garage floor.

Pretty quickly he got to sleep, via the intermediary of passing out.

* * *

There was a polite coughing sound, and he looked up to see someone standing over him. Not just someone, in fact, but a policeman—the young cop from yesterday.

“Hey,” David said.

“Like you to come with me, sir.”

“Why?”

The cop reached his hand out toward David’s arm. He didn’t actually touch it, but the implication was clear.

David looked around the little courtyard. Only one of the other tables was taken, a couple who were now studiously looking elsewhere. He raised his voice and directed it toward them. “You got a problem with me?”

Somehow, it turned out, it was possible for two people to look even less like they were there, while still remaining physically present.

David drained the last of his coffee and stood. By accident, his thigh banged against the edge of the little metal table, causing his stirring spoon to fall noisily to the flagstones. “Pah,” he muttered, with vague enmity, before starting to follow the cop up the alley.

As a final touch, he turned back to the couple. “Assholes,” he snarled.

The cop was waiting out on the sidewalk. David realised that rather than feeling nervous, or scared, he felt excited.

“What?” he said. “I wasn’t doing nothing wrong.”

The cop looked at him steadily. “Kind of a departure from photographing houses, isn’t it?”

David realised the policeman wasn’t dumb. He kept silent.

“So how come the drifter disguise? Which is pretty good, by the way.”

“Didn’t fool you.”

“It’s my job to keep my eyes open, keep track. It’s how I know who lives in which house, too. So—what’s up?”

“I’m just trying something.”

“You got a problem with the people who live here?”

“No. Just… I thought it would be interesting. To see how they would react.”

The cop nodded. He looked along the street. Most people were going about their business in the usual serene way. A few, mainly on the other side of the street, were watching. It was doubtless a while since they’d seen a cop talking to someone other than to cheerfully pass the time of day.

“I understand the joke, sir,” he said. “Some people won’t.”

“Don’t you think it would do them good? To be reminded?”

“I’m not talking about them, sir,” he said. “And anyway… no, I don’t think it would. If you’ve got some big thing about social equality, why not go back to the city and do something about it?”

David looked at him. Along the upper California coast, “the city” isn’t a catch-all term—it specifically means San Francisco. “How do you know I’m from there?”

“Happened to run into Ron Bleist, guy who owns the cottage you’re renting. Said you were a painter.”

“Happened to run into him?”

“My point is, nobody portrays Carmel as an equal-opportunity environment. It is what it is. If you can put up with that, you’re welcome here.”

“And if not?”

The man shrugged.

David found he was becoming genuinely angry. “You know the really crappy thing?”

“Tell me the really crappy thing.”

“Nobody here even knows the difference. You’ve got good eyes, presumably some experience of the real world. Everyone else I’ve encountered today… they can’t even tell I’m not a real drifter. I’m actually kind of well known for what I do. I’ve got a million-dollar condo up in the city. This crap all over me is paint and dust, not real dirt. And yet nobody here can even tell.”

“Maybe you’re a better artist than you realise.”

“Or maybe everyone here is dumber than they know.”

The cop shrugged once more.

“That’s it?”

“You want to string a sign round your neck, sir, declaring yourself a piece of performance art, be my guest. Otherwise, do yourself a big favour and go get cleaned up.”

“Is that some kind of warning?”

“Yes, it is.”

* * *

David did not go home, however. After fuming on the street for a few minutes, he stomped down to the beach. By the time he got there he was feeling hot and even more dreadful than before, so he continued down to the sea and walked straight into it. The water was very cold.

He trudged back up the beach, found some shade and sat down. When he awoke, several hours later, the hangover had abated a little. His irritation hadn’t, however.

A small group of people in their early twenties were now sitting some distance away. They wore shorts and T-shirts in various shades of pale. One of the guys glanced over at David, then turned back to the group.

David pushed himself laboriously to his feet. He went over. The dried sea-salt on his clothes had made them stiff, and caused interesting tidal patterns in the paint. Another unconscious finesse. He stood outside their circle. The same guy as before looked up at him. He was blandly good-looking, not overtly supercilious.

David croaked at him. “You got a problem with me?”

He’d noticed when talking to the cop that last night’s over-indulgences had coarsened his voice. Crashing out on the beach had turned the huskiness up another big notch.

“Nothing that needs resolving right now,” the boy said, mildly. He turned back to his friends, none of whom had appeared to pay David any attention at all, as if he wasn’t even visible.

Turning imperiously from them, David accidentally got his feet caught on a piece of driftwood, and fell over, full-length in the sand.

Nobody laughed, or jeered.

He got up and lurched away.

* * *

By now, if the truth be told, David was starting to tire of the game. He’d established that the residents and visitors of Carmel didn’t much care for down-and-outs. Big deal. He could have predicted that without the rigmarole. He wandered back into the centre, deciding to milk the effect one last time before going back to the cottage. A few people stared. Others crossed the street to avoid him. Nobody shouted, nobody called the cops.

Time to go home, have a bath. Reboot. Probably not work—with a hangover like this—but get an early night instead. Tomorrow’s always another day, potentially the start of a new chain. He still liked the idea of a drifter’s shadow in his painting. It worked. He could be up and at it bright and early. Have it blocked out by the afternoon, put the canvas to one side and start another. Have a civilised dinner at a restaurant in the evening, get back on course.

It might even have panned out like that, too, if his route hadn’t happened to take him past the grocery market, and if he hadn’t found a forgotten twenty in the back pocket of his jeans.

They may not like down-and-outs in nice stores, but they’ll always take their money for a big bottle of wine.

* * *

She came out of the alleyway just after eight o’clock, by which time it was the other side of twilight. David had been waiting across the street by the side of a gallery that had shut some time before. Galleries in Carmel didn’t have to work long hours.

He walked quickly across the street toward her. He nearly tripped on the curb—over half of the outsized bottle of wine was inside him now, and he was feeling much better for it. The barista girl from Bonnie’s looked up and saw him, and her face fell.

“Why’d you call him?”

His voice came out louder than he intended.

She took a step back. “What?”

“Why’d you call the cop? I was just sitting at a table. I’d paid for my coffee. I wasn’t getting in anyone’s face. So why’d you call the fucking cops?”

The girl started backing toward the alleyway that led to Bonnie’s, seeking safety in the work environment she’d just left. David followed.

He pressed her. “Can’t you see who I am? The guy who’s been coming in your place every day for a fucking week. I must have dropped fifty bucks in there. I asked you yesterday if you liked living in Carmel, remember? We had a conversation. Yet today, just because I look a little different, suddenly you’re all over 911.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, still backing up the alley.

“Big deal. The point is I’m the same guy. Actually, that’s not the point. Who even cares whether I’m the same guy? I’m a guy. A man. I had every right to sit there. I wasn’t causing trouble. So what the fuck?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll tell you. There’s a chain between everything you do, what you did last, what comes next. There’s a chain between people, too, him and me—and there should be one between you and me, too. Get it? There’s a duty of care. Person to person to person. If not care, just simple politeness. We’re all part of the hundred percent.”

She shook her head, looking miserable and scared, and kept backing up the alleyway, toward the courtyard.

David was aware this wasn’t coming out as clearly as he’d hoped, and his frustration started to run away with him. “If you break the chain nothing makes sense. You stop picking up the brush and doing something with it, anything’s better than nothing, then the paintings don’t get done. And if you stop respecting me just because I look like shit, society doesn’t work. We’re back to being animals. Do you get what I’m talking about now, you stupid bitch?”

She turned and ran the last yards into the dark courtyard. David, unsure of what he was doing, or why, strode enthusiastically after her. It struck him, in a corner of his soul he’d known was there but had always refused to visit, that breaking the chain might have interesting consequences.

He’d never been a violent man. Even his ex-wife would testify to that. But that was some other David. If the chain was broken… perhaps he didn’t have to remain consistent with that man’s behaviour. Maybe there were other ways of being that he could try. It struck him, like a bolt from the blue, that it might actually be interesting to punch a snivelling woman in the face. To knock her down and then stand over her and take his time over deciding what to do next—or what things, and in what order.

He realised with a shiver that these courses of action had always been there, running side-by-side with normal life, and it was only the restraining links to his previous ways that had stopped him trying them before.

As he lurched into the courtyard after her, he saw the girl reach the other side and go banging straight into the metal gate. During the day this gate yielded access to another alley, which let out onto the next street. Right now, however, it was padlocked.

“Huh,” he said, with a slow smile. “So now what?”

But she turned from the gate to face him, and he was confused to see she didn’t look scared of him any more.

He realised, too late, that they were not alone in the courtyard.

Sitting at the small tables, waiting, were the young man from the beach, the woman who’d told him off for smoking the day before, and the man in the blue cap, along with several others.

They didn’t look scared of David either.

* * *

Two hours later the body was delivered to the cop’s house. It was brought over by Bonnie—owner of the coffee store, also the lady who’d asked David not to smoke—and her husband, coincidentally an amateur watercolourist. The body’s legs had already been removed and were waiting in the cold store of Max’s restaurant. Bonnie would later prepare them for the long roasting procedure that would ultimately create the smoky-sweet powder that not just the restaurant and her coffee shop but every eatery in town deployed, in one way or another, according to the recipe and procedures laid down by the town’s long-ago founders.

The cop received the body without enthusiasm. He’d tried to warn the guy, and he knew for a fact the village had plenty of the powder in reserve and so this didn’t need to have happened. Nonetheless, he did his job.

He put the body in the trunk of his car and drove it an hour along the coast road. He took a turn off Highway 1 not far from the Big Sur River Inn, and drove a further ten miles down an old, forgotten road to the secluded cove where, once again according to protocol—this one dictated by the Watchers—he unwrapped the offering from the plastic sheeting and left it face down on the sandy beach.

An hour after he left, three figures emerged from the pounding surf. The Watchers were as always dressed in long black coats—or cloaks, no human had ever been close enough to establish the difference and survive—and tall, pointed hats. They consumed the parts of the body they had a taste for, primarily internal organs. The rest was left for the crabs.

The Watchers took care to savour the experience, as they knew its days were numbered. The Elders amongst them had started to indicate they were growing bored of the special relationship with Carmel, and that it might soon be time for the town and its inhabitants to meet their end. A date had not yet been set for the night when the Watchers would swarm en masse up from the sea and fall upon the village, but it would be soon.

Or so they thought.

Unbeknownst to them, the vast god which lives—and has always lived—in the frigid waters just off Big Sur was reaching the end of one of its own millennial cycles. Within a consciousness that moved slowly (and yet was capable of sudden and terrible decisions), was stirring the thought that it was almost time to rise up again and consume this portion of the coast—if not tonight, then the next day or the next. As usual, and by intention, the process would closely resemble an earthquake, one that would on this occasion not merely knock down a few houses, but leave the shape of the coastline permanently changed.

So much changed, in fact, that the new outline would displease the nameless being that spends most of its time in the shadows on the dark side of the moon. This dissatisfaction would eventually cause it to destroy the Earth entirely, erasing it in an instant to swirling dust, so it could start its creative work again on a fresh canvas.

* * *

There are always chains, in work and love, from birth to death.

What keeps us sane is not knowing our position along them.