By Thomas C Mavroudis
If he hadn’t just read “Slime” in the Alfred Hitchcock monster book his sister bought him specifically for the trip, perhaps George would have ignored the jellies completely. But who could ignore them, strewn across the sand of the bay? What were they doing? How did they get there? Did they sting? Were they even jellyfish? They were like moons set free from the gravity of an imploded planet.
It was the first time he’d been away from his dad and second time on an airplane. So far, mid-June drizzle had kept them mostly indoors. Still, his feet hurt; a nauseating pain from days of flat feet clip-clopping around the pavement in leather sandals. But he was bored after their doomed excursion to a Victorian tall ship moored in the harbor. His mother suffered innumerable chronic ailments and occupied her bed or recliner most of the time at home, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Being on vacation didn’t adjust her that much. Likewise, his sister Allie was prone to motion sickness and thunderclap migraines. The strong cologne of the driver in the cab to the harbor set her current headache on course.
He didn’t mind being on his own, exploring. In the summer when his dad was not on-call, just the two of them in the mountains, he trail blazed through high altitude wetlands and over alpine streams while his dad tended the campsite. Those camping trips would never happen again. If he was ever going to grow up to be a great adventurer like Indiana Jones, he needed to continue exploring.
Their hotel was not on the beach, but on the islets that made up the bay, the surrounding shores absent of the waves that made the beach fun. That didn’t mean the quiet shoreline did not hold secrets or adventure.
Finally, in the tennis shoes he wore on the plane, George trekked seaward, passing a motel with a large exhibition pool in front housing a lone, sad walrus that sat upright on its perch, out of the warm water littered with cigarette butts and faded cans of pop. For a quarter, you could buy a handful of dog food to feed to the poor creature.
Not wanting to get too far from the hotel, he stopped at an overpass spanning a wide shoal, then trudging absent mindedly to the water, until he came upon the patch of creatures like a mine sweeper guided by fortune’s hand on his shoulder.
The previous summer, in a hotel lagoon in Hawaii, George had his first jellyfish encounter. The warning sign his sister and him saw after the incident said “jellyfish,” but Allie said they were Portuguese man-o-war, which made it all the worse. It didn’t matter that the sting was not that bad, or that he was in fact still alive, it didn’t matter that later his dad braved the inlet—he was only eight.
A year older and wiser, George was still afraid, but also curious, as the monstrous may induce. It was like the Creepshow comic in Allie’s room; he didn’t want to look at the rot and gore, he hated it, but he also couldn’t stop himself from sneaking in and viewing every repulsive panel.
Why weren’t they in the water? Did they move, were they slowing crawling over the sand? Under the overcast summer sky, they rippled, blue and red insides (were they veins or nerves?) faintly pulsing. That’s how George observed them. They looked like little flying saucers; organic flying saucers that breathed and fed. Aliens, for sure. Like the thing in “Slime,” but from outer space. Did anybody else know about these things or did he discover them? He had to tell his sister. He might have ran all the way back, praying her headache away, his own feet feeling bruised, pummeled with fists despite his sneakers.
Allie was better, groggy, but anxious to get out and do something besides sleep. She was not surprised by the creatures when she saw them. All she said was, “Cool.”
Why they did it, George didn’t know. It happened as though that was the plan all along.
They went back to the hotel. Allie carried him partway. They got the room’s ice bucket and returned. Night had come, it was dinnertime, but the sun was still hazily above the horizon.
Allie poked one of the things gently with two fingers. It reacted somewhere between a water balloon and a fried egg over-easy. Then she scooped it up in her hand. George flinched, expecting to feel the sting in sympathetic stimulus. Allie dropped it into the ice bucket with a wet and fleshy plop.
“Look.” George showed his mom the soft thing almost invisible against the white plastic of the ice bucket.
She was on the bed smoking, still in her nightgown. “You better put some water in there or it will die.”
It did and did not make sense. He filled the bucket halfway with cold water from the bathroom sink. The creature jiggled. Perhaps it fluttered.
Their mom sent them out for something to eat. Allie wanted to get pizza down at the boardwalk and see the punks and skaters, but the front desk clerk said the beach was dangerous at night; Hare Krishnas, too many drugs, someone might snatch them both up and take them across the border. So, they got Carl’s Junior a few blocks away from the hotel instead.
Before bed, George brushed his teeth, peering at the thing in the ice bucket set beside the bathroom sink. Was it safe to leave it there? Safe for his mother, sister, and him?
He was exhausted by the adventure of the day, but with the lights and television off, the sounds of sleep permeating the room, any “other” noise could be the creature crawled out of its new habitat. He imagined leaving the bed, his foot planting into cold, digesting jelly. Eventually he gave in to his fatigue, not knowing if he would wake or not.
In the morning, after his rush to use the toilet, George checked on the ice bucket. Inside, all that remained were the blue and red brain, veins, whatever, like scraps of yarn floating in the water. He wanted to touch it, swirl a finger in the bucket. Would it sting, burn? Poison, infect? A sadness crept over him, as they had, clearly, killed it, whatever it was. But there was also a sense of relief.
He woke Allie, showed her.
“That sucks,” she said, more than half asleep.
He almost poured it all down the sink, then thought better and disposed of it in the toilet, actually taking the courtesy of wiping clean the splash from the seat.
When he went to the beach later, during his sister and mom’s usual respite, they were gone. All of them. As though they rose out of the sand and hovered away, their mission complete, their hunger satiated. But that wasn’t it. They had fled, hadn’t they? Or retreated. He wanted to refer to the story in his book, but was afraid. He wished his dad was coming.
His sister explained it was the tide. “That’s all,” she said. “That’s how they got there, and that’s where they went.” The magic, the mystery dissolved, George wanted to believe her. It made sense, after all. Just like the sea creature dissolving in a bucket of tap water. Except, he wanted to believe in monsters more. It would help him from feeling such despair over their innocent cruelty.
Finally, the sky yielded to blue and they all went up to a beach north of the hotel. His mom’s skin was brown as the sand, tanned since late spring from mornings lounging in the backyard at home. Allie needed to catch up on her summer color. The minutes—five at the most—while George waited for the sunblock to sink into his skin were excruciating. But when it was all said and done, the water was blindingly cold, not to mention the swaths of kelp grasping at his ankles. He didn’t understand how this beach could be so different from Hawaii. It was the same ocean, right?
At least the sand seemed nice, nice for digging and building. At the bottom of the swim bag were five Hot Wheels perfect for a wild beach rally over bridges and through tunnels. But as he clawed through the wave receding sand, multitudes of sand crabs scurried and scuttled from his hands, the tiny harmless creatures vermin in his mind.
Among the scattered heaps of washed up seaweed, there was however treasure: artifact after artifact of driftwood. They were anything and everything, from laser guns to horses and panthers, to beasts of myth and alien hands to a pipe like his father smoked. Discarding his race course, he fixated on collecting every fantastic relic, which was each piece he came upon.
His quest drove him further from his family, and when he realized he had moved so far up shore he panicked. But there they were a hundred or so feet away.
“Are you lost?” he heard from behind. The girl appeared from nowhere. She had red hair that brushed her shoulders like a curtain of seaweed and eyes the color of the sky. She was pale and wore a white one-piece so that she looked like sea foam or the glint of sun reflected just right from a grain of sand.
George checked again for his mom and sister, ensuring he was not lost. “No,” he told the girl, “I’m over there.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “I was lost before.” At first, George thought she was the same age, but despite her size and general look of innocence, she gave him a sense of being older.
“Have you seen Ghostbusters?” he asked. “Look at this.” He held up a piece of driftwood like a bent T and pretended to scan her for psycho-kinetic energy.
The girl pushed his hand away. “Don’t,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to shoot you.” George dropped the wood on his pile.
“What are you doing with all that?”
George shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”
The girl nodded.
He picked up another piece, held it out. “This one is cool. It’s a hawk or something. Maybe a gryphon.”
She took it with both hands, her fingers glancing his. Her touch was cold and damp. George shivered and felt ashamed about it, but the girl didn’t seem to notice.
He could tell the wood looked like something else to her. He couldn’t imagine what, but he didn’t think it was a bird. She handed it back and George took it trying to avoid touching her again.
“Do you want to swim with me?” she asked.
George looked at the water. “It’s too cold,” he said. “And all the seaweed is gross.”
“Alright,” the girl said. Then she hugged him. She felt like a ghost, not incorporeal, but not solid. Squishy, George thought, struggling not to shudder. He couldn’t even feel any bones. But how could she not have them?
“See you later,” she said, letting him go. He felt covered in an invisible film.
She went to the water, sitting down in the shallow break. George stood there for a moment watching her. He shivered, not entirely with cold, although he was cold, a breeze setting in with gusts of sea spray, but something else, something inside. His mouth burned with seawater.
Abandoning his horde of wood, he shuffled through the dry sand back to his family, every so often looking back at the red haired girl until she was gone, getting out of the water at some point when his back was turned.
“What you been up to?” Allie asked, dog earing a page in her paperback.
“Exploring,” George said, dejected. He sat down between his mom and sister, eating a couple of chips from a sweating sandwich bag. They were too salty.
“Can we go to the pool when we get back?”
Their mom sat up, taking off her sunglasses. She looked at the grey sky rolling in.
“Oh bother,” she said. “Looks like rain, again. I guess we’ll pack up and head back.”
“But will someone swim with me at the hotel?” George asked.
“We’ll see,” Allie said.
But as always, his sister and mom succumbed to their ailments. Why were they always so sleepy?
“Go on to the pool,” Allie said, “I’ll be down in a little bit.”
“Take a key,” his mom said. “Have fun.”
George took his diving mask and Garfield towel and went to the empty hotel swimming pool. The beach was an immense disappointment.
Mask affixed to his face, he jumped into the deep end, letting his breath go so he could sink to the bottom. Eight feet seemed pretty deep. He launched himself from the pool floor to the surface, paddled towards the shallow end until he could stand, then took a deep breath, diving under water to swim to the wall.
Touching the wall before he popped up for a breath, he saw something waving on the stairs from the corner of his eye. Legs. But when he looked outside of the water, there was no one there. Ducking under again, he rocketed off the wall, swimming to the deep end on a single gulp of air. He crawled hand over hand along the wall to the corner, letting out some air and climbed downward, pretending he was sticking to the wall like Spider-Man. He turned around halfway down, ready to spring from the wall when he saw again over on the shallow steps a pair of legs, thin and almost translucent. Coming to the surface, indeed, he was all alone. He swam to the steps, searched for rope, trash, a towel, something, but it was only a trick of the grey sunlight and the safety railing.
George wanted to see if he could walk all the way to the other side, only taking his feet from the floor for air. He made it to the deepest part at the center where the drain was. He wanted to stand there for as long as he could without floating up, but not blow out all his air. He managed to stand there for a few seconds, his lungs constrained. He looked up. The surface shimmered. He was in another world. And suddenly, he didn’t feel the struggle of his lungs. The cloud occluded sun, somewhere way up, far from the bottom of the water undulated. It looked like a translucent brain, or some other organ. And George realized he was drowning.
Too depleted to push off the floor, he flapped his arms, kicked his weakened legs and broke the surface, coughing and gasping for air. Holding onto the wall, resting, when he was ready, he paddled to the shallow end, to the stairs. The delusion had gone, but the water there was briny and colder.
George was ready to go home, both the world famous zoo and (especially) the marine park no longer places he was excited to see, places he was now uneasy of. But what was home, anyway?
The hotel room was dark and dank, like the outside. Even the carpet hinted at saturation, as though the room had contained a heavy, wet fog that dispersed just before he opened the door. His mom, he presumed, was the mound lumped still in the center of her bed, but the bed he shared with his sister was still made, untouched since housekeeping serviced the place while they were at the beach.
George crept to the side of his mom’s bed. “Mom?” She roiled in the bedclothes.
He shivered and had to pee. Standing at the toilet, he noticed Allie’s red swimsuit was not hung to dry with his mom’s on the shower curtain rod. The stress and strain clamped his urethra, and he had to push to relieve himself.
Hesitating to leave the room, to leave his mom, he had to find his sister. He knew, somehow, where she was. He was cold, like he had a fever. Without changing from his swimsuit, he put on his blue windbreaker and left for the bay.
How late was it? Early evening, or earlier? The roadway was vacant. If he didn’t know better, know that it was impossible, George could believe it was midnight, the grey sky illuminated by a vast full moon.
If she was there, George should have seen her from the road, the coastal plain straight and flat. It wasn’t until he stepped onto the sand that Allie materialized, like a mirage in reverse. She stood mid-ankle in the gentle wash of seawater. She turned and waved to her little brother.
“Allie,” George called, his voice lost in the sand. He tried to run to her, but the ground was thick, wouldn’t let his feet and legs work.
Allie bent down, plucked something from the shallows, and held it like a pastry. She bit into it, thick liquid dribbling slowly from the corners of her mouth. In four bites, it was gone and Allie shimmered with a wet glow that ran from her face and beaded her pores. She must have eaten more than a few.
Before he could reach her, his sister dissolved. She wriggled and slowly collapsed before his eyes, leaving only her bathing suit behind, rotted tatters of fabric. Tears erupted from his eyes, cutting tracks in his cheeks with scorching saltwater.
The sand was bare, the still water, lifeless. The sky above was absent. George was alone, a specimen inquisitively collected by a force greater than himself.
Member of the Denver Horror Collective, as well as the Horror Writers Association, Thomas C Mavroudis has an MFA from the University of CA, Riverside – Palm Desert under the direction of Stephen Graham Jones. His debut novella, Bergdorf & Associates, was released in May of 2021 and his short stories have appeared on Creepy, A Horror Podcast and The NoSleep Podcast, and in Weirdbook, Mooncalves, and elsewhere and forthcoming in December Tales II.