“Hosts and Travelers” by Maxwell Marais

From Fraidy Cat Quarterly: Volume 1

It began when the lifeboat washed ashore. Summer was only just waning to a close, then – it was cloudy and warm, and the air felt tense and electric, the way it did before storms. It was very early in the morning when Tanner woke her. Earlier, even, than either of them might rise on a normal day, and the duties involved in keeping a lighthouse did not allow for a long sleep to begin with.

“Something’s outside.” he said.

Nell rubbed grit from her eyes and rolled over to face the window. From where she lay, there was only the darkened sky visible, just starting to turn that soft predawn grey. “Hm?”

“I said there’s something outside.” He was sitting upright now. “Listen – hear it?”

The room was silent. Nell could hear nothing but the sound of waves on the rocks outside. “I don’t hear anything. Maybe you just dreamed you heard – “

“No. Listen – it’s still there.”

“What’s still – ” Nell stopped. She could hear it now, or she thought she could, at least. Very, very, faint. Very far off. A soft thump, rhythmic like a slow pulse. It was barely audible. Had that alone really woken Tanner? He was already pulling on his clothes to go investigate.

The two of them walked to the edge of the island. There was a high cliff there, and a winding, narrow path that led down to a rock-strewn little inlet below. Down there, where the waves lapped up onto the land, was a lifeboat. Empty, though fully equipped with supplies and provisions. It was the type of boat that would have come from a larger ship. Scanning the water around the island, the coastline, the sea farther out toward the horizon, there was no such ship in sight.

And no sign of who might have piloted the boat to shore.

Staring at the empty boat from a distance, Nell ran through the possibilities – there had not been any storms in the area of late. She’d not heard of any emergencies or ships that had been abandoned. Save for the possibility that someone had set out in it and drowned before they reached the shore, intended to drown, that is, there was no reason for it to be here. She moved down the path to look closer, examined the supplies crammed under one of the seats. Not the preparations of someone who never meant to survive their passage.

She thought, briefly, that she may have seen something like this before, weeks ago. On the mainland, washed up on the sand like a beached sea-creature. She had nearly forgotten, but now, looking at the boat here, the memory came creeping back.

It looked so lonely there, so hollow, so empty of the subtle traces humans leave behind wherever they go. Something about it made the hairs raise on the back of Nell’s neck. She and Tanner stood in silence for a long moment, watching the small boat gently rocking as the waves in the inlet lapped to shore.

“Maybe,” he said, “Maybe it got cut loose, accidentally, you know. Washed ashore on its own.”

“Maybe.” said Nell.

Neither of them believed it.

Then the people started arriving. Nell was not aware of them in the beginning. Not distanced as she was from the mainland. It was only when she went to restock the lighthouse’s supplies, when she crossed the stretch of water from the island to the small seaside town of Bayliss Landing, that she saw the first of them. She’d been heading back toward the pier – arms full of canned goods and lamp oil – and found one standing at its far end, toes over the edge, stalk still.

Once the sightseers and beachgoing vacationers left at the end of the season, those who lived year-round at Bayliss Landing knew everyone in town. Nell did not know this person. It was a woman – tall, well-dressed, like those who came through in summer with sundresses and parasols. Her dress, though, looked old, salt-stained, once-elegant embroidery now frayed and crusty.

Nell called out a greeting. There was no response. Nell walked closer. Vaguely, in the back of her mind, a nagging thought took root and she felt almost afraid of what she would see, should the woman turn to face her. She did not know why.

Slowly, very slowly, she reached out a hand to tap the woman gently on the shoulder. The fabric of her dress was cold and damp.

The stranger turned, and Nell thought she had never seen an expression so profoundly empty, and then she was brushed rudely past and left alone on the pier.

She tried to forget this instance. Brush it off, concern herself with other things. It had been unnerving, yes, but the woman would leave soon, surely, as the vacationers always did. She may not even see her again.

And yet, the thought lingered. Empty. Hollow like the lifeboat.

“Look at them. Look,” Nell said. She and Tanner stood in the lighthouse’s lantern room, looking out toward the beach at Bayliss Landing. There were more of the people, the strangers, there. Whole clusters of them, gathered under worn and skeletal umbrellas or standing listless and ankle-deep in the seafoam. One of them seemed to be walking along the shoreline, but it was a slow sort of shambling walk, like their feet were weighted with lead.

Nell waved a hand toward the beach. “What are they doing here?”

Tanner watched them for a long moment, staring. “They’re… hm.” He scratched his jaw. “Well they’re – they’re just at the seaside, I suppose.”

“At the seaside? They’re just enjoying the seaside, you think? Look at them.”

“I see them, but – what do you want me to say? They’re not hurting anybody, they’re just… odd.”

“Don’t they scare you, just a little?”

“A little, maybe.”

“You can see there’s something wrong with them, right?”

“‘Course I can.”

“So… so what do we do about them?” Nell asked.

“I don’t think there’s really much we can do about them.” said Tanner.

Nell did not like seeing the people up close. She began to notice fine details that made her skin crawl, every time she went back to the mainland. They looked like people, mostly, and moved like people, but every now and then… every now and then they’d be dripping saltwater, like the woman on the pier, or what looked like a mole was on closer inspection a little clinging limpet, or one of them would turn to her with eyes that were round and glassy and silver like a fish’s.

They never spoke. Just moved around the town, making a crude imitation of a summertime crowd of tourists. Several times Nell had tried to talk to them, make conversation, do anything but watch them drift here and there, pretending to enjoy a season that wasn’t. They barely even acknowledged her.

Once, one had looked at her, but it had made her realize there was something strange, something like clusters of sea-plants and sponges growing from beneath the collar of his shirt (or maybe, she thought, out from the skin of his neck). After that, she had stopped trying to interact with the people at all.

She fervently hoped they would leave soon. With every passing week that they did not, that hope began to dwindle into a sour and persistent unease.

It must have been November when she first noticed the changes in Tanner.

It was slow, at first. Almost unnoticeable. Nell thought he just seemed absent-minded. He still kept the lighthouse running in good order, still did everything he normally did, but it was… mechanical. Without thought. He was quieter, but not introspective – like his mind was distracted…or maybe just not thinking beyond the day-to-day at all.

“They still haven’t left.” she said to him over dinner one night. “The people, I mean. The odd ones.”

Tanner was poking repeatedly at a chunk of potato. He stopped. “Hm? Oh, the people. Yes.”

“Don’t you think that’s strange?” she pressed.

It seemed to take him several moments to form an answer. “… Strange. Sure.”

“Sure? That’s all?”

“It’s strange.”

Nell studied him in the lamplight. “Are you feeling alright?”

“I’m alright.”

She could tell he wasn’t, but he wouldn’t say any more than that.

The people that gathered on the shore, that moved through the streets of Bayliss Landing staring empty-eyed into shop windows cleared out at the end of the season, did not leave. Even in December when cold and icy storms swept in from the sea, they did not leave. Nell did not think the seasons mattered to them. She didn’t think anything mattered to them, in fact. Only the pantomime of a seaside town they seemed so intent on upholding. Perhaps forever. Perhaps until the elements eroded and decayed their bodies enough that they had to stop. She was not yet sure.

And then she began to realize what was happening to Tanner.

He was acting almost normal, it was true. But didn’t he keep the lighthouse a little too perfectly? Keep his routines a little too exactly? Didn’t he move a little like the people now, a little shambling and hollow-eyed? And he barely spoke, that was certain. Soon, she wondered, would he fall silent like the others? Would she be the last living person in Bayliss Landing? How long would the town loop around on itself, imitating?

How long would she be left so utterly alone?

She began to see it – it was only visible when she looked very close, only when she squinted from across the table or stared as he lay sleeping and lit by the early dawn light.

Something was growing beneath his skin. It was beginning to poke through at the nape of his neck, blending in with his hair. The beginnings of little sea plants, Nell thought. The beginnings of becoming an empty person.

She began to avoid him when she could. It was not as though he would notice. Not anymore. He moved like the people on the beach did – mindlessly. An imitation of a lighthouse keeper. She kept up with an approximation of their normal life, but something about him made her feel ill and on edge. He was not him.

She watched him rise every day, watched him walk to the lighthouse, climb the stairs. She watched him light the lantern every night, watched him trim the wicks precisely on time. She watched him in the evenings when he sat across from her, poking at a supper that grew cold, that he ate less and less of as the days went by.

Finally, she asked. “What is it? What is it that they did to you?”

Tanner did not look at her.

“What is it? Did they say something to you, did they pass it on, is it like some kind of disease they gave you? What? Why are you doing this?”

His eyes were fishy-silver in the light.

Nell slammed her fist on the table, silverware clattering. “Look at me, look at me – ” she took a shuddering breath, slumped forward on the table and sobbed.

Tanner stood and walked away. His plate was untouched. He smelt of salt and trailed cold, damp footsteps.

When the first of the people began to leave, they walked right into the sea, straight and unflinching. Nell watched them from the lantern room, alone now. It was almost spring, and the grasses that grew where the sand faded into the hillsides were a glaring shade of green in the overcast light.

The people were much less like people now. Most were covered in sea-growths, corals and weeds, bugs and little shelled things that scuttled over the skin between them.

They did not go all at once. They had not come all at once either, after all.

Tanner was not gone, but it often felt like he had left a very long time ago.

It was night-time when she took him. He did not protest as she filled his pockets with the smooth, heavy stones she’d plucked from the island’s shores. He shuffled along as she guided him toward the water’s edge. She walked with him until the water reached her shoulders and her clothes were soaked through, and the tide lifted her heels up and down as it moved. He walked the rest of the way himself. She spent a great deal of time assuring herself of that. He did. He wanted to go. She only helped him there.

She could not stand to see his face anymore.

Not with all those things grown through it.

It was nearly summer, and Bayliss Landing was empty, empty, empty. Not even false people to keep Nell company. She had begun to become afraid of what she would see, should people come. She had come to hate the town, and the island, and the lighthouse. Hate it and fear it. She would not stay to see anyone else arrive. She could not.

It was for this reason that she returned to the little inlet on the island, where the empty lifeboat still thump-thumped against the rocks. It was for this reason that she took the oars in hand and paddled away, away from the island and Bayliss Landing. She did not know where she would go, and she did not care. Maybe she would die. Maybe that was better.

She did not look back to the lighthouse. She did not look back to the shore. Along her neck and the ridges of her spine, new plants and strange fauna grated against the fabric of her clothing.

Onward, to the sea.