Nineteen Years Before

For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.
- Luke, VIII. 17 (King James Version)

Mocrocks Beach, Washington State
April 4th, 2004

"This is stupid," grumbled Dave as he followed his friend James down to the beach.

"No, come on!" James called back over he shoulder as he ran ahead. "You gotta see this!"

Dave didn't really want to see whatever it was. He didn't even want to be outside, because it was cold and windy and the sky was full of iron-coloured clouds that threatened to drizzle. It was a typical April day, which meant it was spring, and Dave hated spring because it wasn't ever sure if it wanted to carry on being winter or get a move on and get to summer already. And he lived near the coast, which made it worse. The wind blew stronger from the sea and made you wear hoodies and jackets even when the sun was out.

He should have been inside, doing homework or watching TV. Anything a normal kid did. But then James had come round and said he had to come down to the beach with him. And James was the kind of boy whom, if you tried to attack him with logic, skirted around it with his own sideways logic that you couldn't argue with even though you knew it made no sense. So Dave knew it was pointless to try.

So here he was, following his idiot friend down to the beach. The wind was blowing hard, making him fold his arms over his chest in spite of wearing his hoodie, and it definitely looked like it was going to rain. And the seagulls were screaming, which irritated him even further,

This was so stupid.

His mood wasn't improved when he stumbled over the Step. That was the informal name for where the concrete slabs of the pavement ended and the dirt path down to the beach began. Time and weather had eroded it to the pint where it was just an inch shorter than you expected it to be, and a little loose as well. It took two massive steps and a lot of flailing for the boy to get his footing back, and his ankle stung in protest.

"Come on!" shouted James, who had gotten further ahead. 

He could have left him. He could have just turned around and walked back home and left the idiot out in the cold and the wind. Who cared about some dumb thing he'd found on the dumb beach on this dumb stretch of coast in this dumb village?

Dave huffed, shoved his hands in his pockets and followed.

There were a lot of seagulls now, he couldn't help but notice. Far more than he’d ever seen even on the beach, They didn't wheel and spin in aimless circles, as seagulls normally did, but swooped in direct and purposeful lines. Their cries were high and strident, filling the air and mingling to make a sound like the average teenybop crowd at a boy band concert. They all seemed to be migrating towards one spot in the same way that smaller birds casually migrate towards a feeder in the garden.

Dave didn’t understand why until he rounded the bend that brought the beach into view.

He stared.

“Holy shit,” he said.

And then he ran down the path, down the long, winding, sloping path of dirt that slowly gave way to sand, jumping over hidden rocks and tufts of grass. Suddenly the cold didn’t matter, the wind was a mere breeze to him, the idea of rain long forgotten.

He caught up with James at the foot of the path. They stood side-by-side on the sand, not speaking.

At least five or six whales were strung along the high tide mark of the beach. 

Their bodies lay slumped across the sand, either on their stomachs or sides, some of them curled up as if seeking refuge from the April cold. Like black hills of flesh they lay, blotting the horizon with their sheer mass, blotches of dark grey standing out against their skin, shiny and taut from exposure to the air. The sound of their laboured, dying gasps filled the boy’s ears, a deep baritone to the soprano shrieking of the gulls already settling upon the immobile mountains of easy food. Already scarlet patches of exposed meat showed from where uncaring beaks had torn gobbets of flesh from the cetaceans, who made no move to resist the overeager scavengers taking the opportunity of a lifetime.

Never in Dave’s life had he seen whales for real. In picture books, yes. But books didn’t tell you how… huge whales were. How they filled the space in front of you, drawing the eye like magnets of presence. How their bodies seemed to go on for ever and ever. How you could stare at a single patch of skin or a loosely-draped fin and never be able to take in the whole animal at once, never, never.

He turned to James. The other boy was red in the face and beaming.

“What did I tell you?” said James.

He hadn’t told Dave anything, not really. But the other boy had to admit it. The other boy hadn’t been wring - this was something to see. Whales! Here! On this beach! Okay, they were stranded and dying horribly as their own masses crushed their lungs, but still!

“Holy shit,” Dave repeated.

“Language,” chided James.

The two boys giggled, knowing full well that it wouldn’t stop them. Naughty words were fun. That’s why they said as many as they could when their parents weren’t around to smack them for it. And Dave liked James, since he felt comfortable saying those words around him.

They looked back at the whales. The childish sense of morbid wonder and curiosity, the part of youth that finds dark humour in something like this, was starting to come alive. Both boys took in the scene of devastation - the dying whales, the wreaths of seaweed and debris strewn along the beach, the stink of distressed saltwater and blood, of drying seaweed and damp wood.

Of course. There had been that storm last night, hadn’t there?

“We could get into a lot of trouble right now,” said Dave. Being on this beach near huge, dying animals that might roll over and crush them at any moment...

“I know,” said James, eyes glittering. “Cool, isn’t it?”

“Hell yeah.”

The two boys walked along the beach, amongst the whales. Each one seemed bigger than the other - Dave felt that, the closer he got to any of them, the bigger they seemed. It was like there was no end to them. Their huge heads looked like the prows of battleships up close, powerful and broad, ready to ram down anything that got in the way. Tails stretched for what felt like, in the boy’s stunted imagination, miles and miles. Sad black eyes stared out at them, some already still and unseeing, little glassy islands in oceans of black, oily flesh.

“Never seen so many,” said James. “Not even on the… the…” He clicked his fingers rapidly. “What's it called? On the TV?”

“Documentaries?” Dave tried.

“Right, them! Not even one one of those!” James looked around at the line of bodies, strung out in an almost perfect semicircle. “How d’you think this happens, Dave?”

Dave shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe the storm confused them? Something about… wind and waves. Messes with their echo-whatevers.”

“That’s bullshit,” said James.

“I swear it’s true!”

“Yeah, well, you told me that there was an octopus that lived in trees,” retorted James with a grin. “And that turned out to be bullshit too, right?”

“That was one time!” said Dave, hotly. James laughed, and then Dave laughed too, because James might have been a pain in the ass, but he couldn’t ever stay mad at him. Not for very long.

“Imagine if one of them exploded,” said James. “I saw a video on the internet where one of them got all swole up from rotting. Then it burst like a balloon! Imagine if that was to happen, right now. And we all got covered in guts!”

Dave pulled his face. “That’a gross. You’re gross, James.”

They walked on. The seagulls screamed and fought over more than enough food. The wind whipped and tugged at them with thousands of tiny cold hands. The iron grey sea crashed over a beach that itself wasn;t very vibrant on the best of days.

But Dave was started to notice something weird about the whales. He hadn’t noticed it at first, because he was too busy being in awe of them. And the first time he saw it, he thought he was seeing things. A trick of the light. But he kept seeing it with every whale they passed, and the more he looked at them the more obvious it was…

On perhaps the fourth or fifth whale, he stopped and stared.

"What do you reckon that is?" he asked, pointing.

James walked up beside him and squinted. He had to squint, partly because his eyesight wasn't great but he refused to wear his glasses because they made him look like a nerd. And partly because, even if you knew what to look for, it was hard to see it in the light. The rivulets of blood had mostly dried by this point, a dark crimson trail leading from the earholes and down to the sand.

"Huh," was all James had to say.

"Yeah," said Dave.

"Well?"

"...well, what?"

"You're the egghead," said James. "Don't you know how that could have happened?"

Dave shrugged. "The bends, maybe? Come up too quickly? It happens to deep sea fish, I think. You bring them up out of the bottom of the sea, they explode. Water pressure or something."

But the explanation was like a badly made waffle cone in his mouth - weak and flimsy. He looked around the beach, although part of him knew it was pointless. What was he expecting to find to explain something like this? There was only sand here. Sand, weeds, more whales, seagulls-

He stared.

He turned and walked.

"Dave?" James turned to watch him, confused. "What is it?"

Dave didn't reply. His eyes were fixed on a large pile of weeds, slightly further up the beach than the rest. It looked... odd. It looked as if it had piled up around itself, in a way that, as young and ignorant as he knew himself to be, he knew shouldn't be possible. Weed didn't just do that, unless you had something to pile it up around. So what else was...?

The hand sticking out of the weeds wasn't moving. He knew it was a hand, because it had four fingers and a thumb, and what else did you call that except a hand? But hands weren't webbed. And nobody in the world had mottled, blue-gray skin like that. A hundred different animal names came up in his mind. None of them fit.

He knelt down beside the pile, staring. Then he picked up a stick - must have washed in from somewhere else, he idly thought - and, as curious boys are wont to do with strange things, poked it. It didn't move, and he wasn't sure if he should have been relieved or disappointed. Or which one of those he would have preferred.

There was an odd anxiety in his stomach. His mind was struggling to comprehend, as if it didn't want to accept what was in front of him, what his eyes were seeing.

"What is it?"

Dave looked up. James had caught up to him and was staring, wide-eyed. He didn't like that expression on James, because it meant something was terribly wrong. James was the braver of the two - maybe the more stupid, which explained a lot. And he wasn't one to be scared. He laughed off haunted mansions, ghost trains, halloween parties and stories of escaped criminals like big jokes. Nothing scared James. 

Until now.

Dave licked his lips. His throat suddenly felt very dry.

"I don't know-"

A horrible grip enclosed his arm. It was weak, yet the muscles underneath the skin were like steel cables.

He turned, and looked into dark eyes full of bewildered rage. He saw the hairless head lifting itself up from the weeds, saw the mouth open, saw the razor teeth standing white against the red gums. And he heard the scream, the shriek of a bat wearing the skin of a human's agonized yell.

He didn't remember shaking himself loose, or what he screamed as he fled up the beach. He didn't even remember leaving James behind with how fast he was running. If he had, he would have been quite impressed with himself. As it was, his next clearest, conscious thought was of being sprawled on the Step, half-gasping and half-sobbing with terror, while his friend leaned on a post and spouted every bad word he knew in a vain attempt at catharsis.

When Dave's mum came to find them, she took one look at their faces and forgot to be angry.

---

A lot happened very quickly afterwards.

Black vans rolled up in the evening. Lots of them, all headed down to the beach. Men got out of those vans - men in white plastic suits with breathing masks and heavy gloves. They were up and down the beach for two or three days. They took things off the beach and put them into white boxes, or scraped up bits with long poles. They looked the whales all over, and spoke to each other in quite serious voices.

They were very interested in the weed pile Dave found.

Some men in black suits spoke to Dave and James. They asked them questions about what happened, where they were, what time it was. Dave answered truthfully. James answered, but Dave got the feeling that James's answers weren't exactly truthful. He could tell that James didn't like these men. He looked at them as though they'd stolen his Game Boy or something, but he was also smart enough to not say anything stupid. For once.

Three days later, a large boat came out to sea and dragged the whales into the ocean. The seagulls screamed in angry protest, but nobody cared for them.

When Dave next went down to the beach, the thing he'd seen was gone.

---

Later that year, the US Navy put out a statement denying that testing of underwater sound weapons had been taken place during the latter half of the 1990's.

The response was a resounding "Excuse you?" Which wasn't what they'd hoped for.

But that's another story.