The First Cut

21Martha

The seagulls were grotesquely distorted, no longer sleek, white, bullet-faced birds. Their feathers were mottled with ash gray, and their bodies were bloated almost beyond recognition. They could hardly stand. Their wiry legs, above webbed feet as yellow as egg yolk, couldn’t support their distended bellies, which were stretched so tight that a pattern of blue veins bossed through the gray and white markings. Their wings creaked and flapped like old, moth-eaten awnings in a storm as they tried to fly.

But mostly it was their faces that were different. They still had seagull eyes-cold, dark holes that knew nothing of mercy or pity-but their beaks were encased in long, gelatinous snouts smeared with blood.

They still sounded like seagulls. Even though they could no longer fly, they waddled on the dark sands and keened like the ghosts of a million tortured souls.

Martha woke sweating in the early dawn. Outside, the gulls were screeching, circling. They must have been at it for a while, she thought as her heartbeat slowed. She must have heard them in her sleep, and her mind had translated the sound into the pictograph of a dream. It was like dreaming of searching for a toilet when you’ve had a bit too much to drink and your body is trying to wake you up before your bladder bursts.

Just the thought of moisture made Martha thirsty. She got up and drank a glass of water, then crawled into bed again, the sour taste of vomit still in her mouth. Unable to get back to sleep immediately, she found herself thinking of the gulls as her allies. She could imagine them with their sharp hooked beaks picking and pulling at the body in the cave, snatching an eyeball loose or making an ear bleed. Did they never stop? For them, life seemed nothing more than a long, drawn-out feast: one for which you had to go out and catch your own food and tear it to pieces while it was still alive. Had she become like them?

Martha glanced at her watch: 6:29. That day, she remembered, high tide was chalked in as 0658, so the gulls couldn’t have found the body unless it was floating on the water’s surface. Already the cold North Sea would have stuck its tongue into the cave and slurped Jack Grimley’s corpse into its surging maw.

Shivering with horror at what she had done, Martha turned on her side, pulled the covers up to her chin, and drifted back into an uneasy sleep with the paperweight in her hand and the harsh music of squabbling gulls echoing in her ears.