Synopsis:  

After the death of his mother Dolores, and on the brink of fatherhood, Morgan Pool returns to the coastal community of his childhood, The Headland. The Headland is bleak and atmospheric, inhabited by free-spirited artists and thriving wildlife.  Whilst there, Morgan stays in his mother’s summer studio, Watchbell House, and meets her old friends, reviving hazy memories from his youth. Amongst his mother’s paintings and possessions is a journal written the year before Morgan’s birth, and in its pages a dark secret she has never told him.   

The journal begins in October 1987, after the Great Storm, when Dolores discovers a strange being she names Violet, washed up on The Headland’s beach. Violet seems neither human nor animal, and her origins are unclear. This creature, both beguiling and terrifying, gradually transforms the life of Dolores, a lonely but gifted artist who has become estranged from those around her.   

In this scene, Dolores has brought some driftwood she discovered on the beach into her house, and has learnt the trick of ‘seeing’ Violet who has been living inside it. [NB: Wotsit is Dolores’ cat.] 

Extract 

What I saw was heart-shaped, with myriad legs or tendrils emanating from it. These were coiling and uncoiling so rapidly and so dynamically connected to the heart-shape that I could not see how many there were. Perhaps twenty, perhaps a hundred. They were both insect-like and plant-like, shiny and phasing through the full colour spectrum, then disappearing altogether, perhaps as my eye lost its skill, though it seemed to me they somehow existed both here and elsewhere at the same time. The heart-shape also shone, as if made of glass, and at its centre was a kind of shifting ‘stain’ that looked the same colour as the wood, brown-grey like sepia, but then changed suddenly from a random blob to a golden-green perfect circle as I stared at it. There was a soft, shushing sound coming from the heart-shape, like the breathing of someone peacefully asleep. I knew at that moment that it was a living thing. I understood this from what I saw, what I smelt and heard, but also with a clear and definite thought that came into my head. It was my own thought, but unusually sure. (I have had few trustworthy thoughts for a while). It was a trust that this weird thing hidden in the deadest of wood, was living. 

Once I had seen it, it seemed in some way to see me. It drew closer to my eye. I felt repulsed by the intimacy of our meeting, but I kept staring at the perfect green-gold circle on what I will call its ‘face’, how the edges of this shape shimmered and then settled. The shape was familiar to me and I suddenly realised it was my own eye, the exact shade (my mother and I are the only green-eyed people in the family) and the stain on the creature’s surface had altered its shape once it had encountered my eye. I wanted it to watch me, but I was also so afraid to move my heart pulsed.  

I drew back and returned to my familiar world, this little dark cottage with its square room and kitchenette, the battered blue kettle and Wotsit hiding under the sofa, the old oat tins on the windowsill holding dry paintbrushes and Michaelmas daisies, and my scrubbed oak table with the driftwood resting there like the subject of a still-life.  

Funny the moments in your life that you won’t realise are turning points until later, that will come back to you over and over. How you’ll try to visualise the exact colours, recall what you saw, felt or heard. With these moments you’ll always be convinced you have a perfect memory; they are so important, how could you not? So clear as they replay that you may as well be experiencing them for the first time right now. But ask someone else who happened to be there too, and there will be discrepancies: but he didn’t say that, he said…or it wasn’t raining, just cloudy, it was a VW, not a Mini-Cooper, a doctor, not a nurse, Friday and not Wednesday…And so the fierceness of your memory must soften or replay differently. As you tell it to others, you begin to doubt yourself. 

But nobody was here tonight but me and a big orange cat who slunk out from under the sofa and climbed up onto the table and sniffed the driftwood. And whatever it was in there came out, slid out…no, somehow oozed out, was iridescent and transparent at the same time, like the skin of a soap bubble. I could only see it slant-wise, closing one eye, concentrating hard on seeing differently in order to perceive it at all. I think Wotsit may be able to see it, or he senses it in other ways, because as it moved, his gaze followed it and he sniffed at the air around it. Its creeping legs shimmered in and out of my vision and the circle that had mimicked my eye disappeared. Now it was a kind of stain again but shifting and morphing into different forms. This stain is the only part of this being that has colour, the only thing my vision can latch on to; when its legs move, they flash colour, but it doesn’t stay for more than a second. The stain shifted like iron filings to form two orange triangles that I quickly realised were images of Wotsit’s ears. So this is, I think, a kind of mirror, or a mimicking back to those it encounters, though I haven’t figured out the purpose. I stood there holding my breath. Because the legs coiled and recoiled so quickly, I had the sense it could viciously strike at any moment at me or Wotsit and perhaps sting us. I found myself holding out my palms and saying, “Shhh…”  

One of its limbs uncoiled like the proboscis of an insect, felt towards my arm and rested there. Its touch was light and moist like the catch of a cobweb. It dabbed only my skin and the stain on its face moved and shifted as its limb felt mine. Again, that creamy coating on its surface. I thought it must be a sea creature, an unusual squid or eel capable of changing shape, but able to exist outside of the water, like a seal. It doesn’t make sense. And then I thought about the power station. I do not know what radioactivity does. There are protestors there sometimes, invoking Chernobyl and the mutations it has caused. I know the power is made by splitting the tiniest version of the universe, harnessing the very spin and whirl of time and space. I don’t know what it might do to a creature from the Headland’s dark seas if it were to be contaminated, if something leaked, if…  

My skin prickled. But it did not hurt me. All the time it was on the table, reaching towards us, but I could not say if it needed the table to ‘stand’ on or if it was floating just above it. It went to touch Wotsit next. Before I could think, as one of its limbs touched Wotsit’s delicate whiskers all his fur stood up and he arched his back into a horseshoe and hissed, his tail quivering. 

“No, No,” I said, and the creature was no longer there. Gone. I squinted. I closed each eye in turn. I saw no weird iridescence or transparent skin, no moving stain, no arms or tentacles or whatever they were. I wondered if Wotsit could have eaten it or shredded it so quickly I didn’t see; I have no idea how delicate it is. I peered back inside the driftwood and saw nothing but the knotted lines of the tree. 

And here I am now, on the sofa. I got out the old encyclopaedia – thinking perhaps this was indeed a sea creature and it had suddenly dried up and disappeared, a death appropriate to its delicate there-ness. I felt I had failed it. I should have put it in the sink and covered it in cool water. I saw in the encyclopaedia that it shared some characteristics with the mimic octopus: colour changing, probing tentacles that have independent senses. But its legs are many more than eight and they are insect-like somehow, as is the feeling of friability it gave me. And the legs seemed almost to have their own consciousness, never mind their own senses. Perhaps it can change shape like the mimic octopus does, to fool its prey: one moment flat like a ray, the other spiky as a lionfish. But it does not seem to need to be in the sea as an octopus would; it retains its ‘shape’ outside of the water. In any case, I’m too spooked to sleep upstairs, imagining seeing it flattened in the bathtub or landing across my face in the night like a damp hand or eating Wotsit from the inside out. In the morning I will be brave and put my hand inside the driftwood again. In the morning, one day on from the great storm, things will look different. I will sit up now while the candles I lit burn down, looking out to the dark sea. 

The Headland will be published by Gold SF in August 2024. 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/GP4/goldsmiths-press–gold-sf