Vanished

2

The boy trudged across the shingle beach, six feet from where the waves were breaking on the shore. Their noise was immense: a roar, like an animal, and then a deep, visceral boom which passed right through him. When the tide began its retreat again, sucked back into the sea, the pebbles became caught in the wash and he could hear a soft, chattering sound, as if thousands of voices were calling from beyond the sea wall. On the other side of the eight-foot wall was the village: old fishermen’s cottages, a pub, a few shops and businesses. This side of it were boats, lined up on the beach, masts chiming in the wind.

He adjusted the straps of the backpack and heard the equipment clatter around inside: the line, a new net he’d bought with the money from his paper round, and some old bacon his mum had given him that morning. He was carrying the bucket in his hand. It was early November, freezing cold, but winter was always the best time to go crabbing. In the winter there were no tourists – which meant he didn’t have to share the crabs.

The village was set in a bowl, with coves cut into the faces of the hills on either side. In order to get to the coves, you had to climb over a series of rocks that rose up out of the shingle at both ends of the beach. To the boy, the rocks – polished and hewed by the relentless power of the sea – looked like the tail of a dragon, the bulk of the creature still submerged somewhere beneath. On the other side of the tail, in the coves beyond, hundreds of rock pools had formed in the grooves and chasms of the beach. That’s where the crabs would be; washed up and spat out by the tide.

The boy started the climb.

Carrying the bucket at the same time made it harder. Normally his dad hauled all the equipment for him, but he was away with work and had told the boy he was big enough now – at almost thirteen – to go by himself. ‘As long as you’re careful,’ his dad kept saying. The sea spray and the rain could make climbing more difficult but he was doing okay: after five minutes he’d got up on to the top of the tail and was looking down at the first of the coves. It was about thirty feet across by sixty feet deep, with a thin sliver of shingle running from the shoreline to where the hills at the back started their steep ascent. The rest was just rock pools, sea washing over them, foam bubbling in the clefts and rifts. He started down, bucket – gripped in his hand still – clattering against the rock, his eyes fixed on where he was placing his feet. Wind roared in, once, twice, pulling him around like it had reached out and grabbed him – but then he jumped the last few feet, on to the shingle, and the wind died instantly as he stepped into the protection of the cove. All he could hear now was the sea breaking on the beach behind him.

Placing the bucket down on the shingle, he removed his backpack, unzipped it and started taking out the equipment. Crab line. Short-handled net. Bait. He attached the bait to the line, grabbed the net and the bucket and made his way across the cove, to the rocks at the back. As long as you’re careful. He placed his feet down just as deliberately as before, not wanting to have to explain to his dad how he had managed to snap the line, or cut himself, or both. Halfway across, he heard the sea crash again behind him, an even louder and longer roar than previously, and when he looked back he saw a wave rolling in towards him. He wasn’t worried about getting wet, but he was worried about getting knocked over, so he reached forward and grabbed hold of a thin column of stone. The sea washed in, almost knee high, soaking his trousers and boots, and flattening out in the space ahead of him. Once it started drawing out again, he looked to the backpack and saw it was safe, perched in a high groove where he’d placed it after getting the equipment out. He headed to the rock pools right at the back of the cove where it would be too far for the sea to reach him. There, he could drop the line into the pools without fear of being soaked a second time. High tide had been an hour ago. The waves may have been loud, may have been fierce, but they were slowly retreating. In another hour, they’d be weakened. An hour after that, they’d hardly make it to him at all.

He placed the bucket down next to him, made sure the bait was secure and then sat next to the deepest rock pool in the cove. It was about ten feet down. The boy dropped the line in, feeding it out of a box his dad had made for him. It was like a fishing reel, with a small handle on the side that he could use to draw the line back in. He held the box with his left hand, and let the line run over the first two fingers of his right hand so he could feel any movement, however slight, if a crab went for the bait.

Then he noticed something.

Twenty feet away from him, right at the back of the cove, between the last of the rock pools and the sharp incline of the hill, it looked like someone had left some bait behind. He shifted on the rock, trying to get a better view from where he was sitting, but all he could see was a white slab of meat. Chicken maybe, or pork. His dad always said bacon was best, but the boy had caught loads of crabs with pieces of old chicken. Oily fish was good too, but not as good as meat. Crabs generally weren’t fussy eaters, but if the bacon didn’t get them interested, the boy figured he could use the bait left behind as a back-up plan. If someone hadn’t taken it with them, they obviously wouldn’t miss it.

But as he turned back to the hole, he realized there was even more of the bait, on top of the rocks in front of him, about five feet above his eye line. This time he scanned the whole cove. Within a couple of seconds he could see the same bait in three other places: to his right, down towards the shoreline; at a diagonal from him, in a gully; and one more immediately behind him, wedged in a fracture in the rocks about ten feet away.

He placed the line box down – securing it in a crevice it couldn’t escape from – and got to his feet. The surface down to the nearest bait, the one behind him, was slick with seawater. He took a couple of careful steps, then dropped down on to his backside and slid the rest of the way. Up close, he could see that the bait was wrapped in plastic – like the type he kept his bacon in – and the meat inside had been cut into five thin strips. They were much too long and impractical for crabbing – even the boy knew that – which must have been why they’d been left here. Whoever had tried using them hadn’t had much success.

He reached forward to pick them up.

But stopped.

One of the strips of meat had a shell attached to it. He leaned in closer. They all had shells attached to them: in the same place, right at the end. He glanced between his hand – still hovering over the plastic covering – and the strips of meat inside; back and forth, as if his mind had made some sort of a connection but he didn’t realize what it was.

Then a second later it hit him.

A whimper sounded in his throat as he scuffled back on his hands, reversing as far from the bait as he could get himself. He tried to gain purchase on the rocks but his feet kept slipping, the heels of his boots sliding off the surface. ‘Dad!’ he yelled, an automatic reaction, even though his dad was at work, miles away, and the boy was out here on his own where no one would hear him. ‘Dad !’ he screamed again, tears forming in his eyes as he desperately tried to claw his way back up to where he’d left his line.

Thirty seconds later he got there – but he didn’t stop for the line. He didn’t stop for his bait, his bucket, or his backpack either. He just clambered across the rocks, back over the dragon’s tail, and ran as fast as he could along the shingle to his house at the end of the sea wall. His mum was in the kitchen, organizing cakes for his sister’s birthday, and when she looked at the boy, at his tears, at the wide-eyed terror in his eyes, she grabbed him, brought him in close and made him recount what he’d seen. And he told her.

How the shells had been fingernails.

How the strips of meat had been fingers.

And how the bait had been a hand.