Toby stormed off down the road towards the dunes on the edge of town. Nat had jogged ahead to calm him down. It didn’t look like it was working. Having left her shopping bags behind in their haste, Ma waddled next to Michael. On the pavement outside the Stag and Snake, she called after Toby.

  ‘I’ll get my truck and meet you down there.’ He raised a hand without turning to show he’d heard. To Michael she said, ‘We’ll cover more ground that way.’

  ‘Maybe we should split up?’ Michael suggested.

  ‘No,’ Ma’s tone was sharp. She checked herself and softened, looking to the angry sky. ‘Stay together or we’ll be chasing our own tails. We haven’t long. Hurry now.’

  She fixed him with a look. Michael felt as though he was back in class at Westminster School when a teacher would wait patiently for an answer. But he had none, he didn’t even know what the question was; he’d been asleep in class and missed all the important information. Before he could formulate this, Ma patted his shoulder and repeated her instruction. ‘Go, find the kids.’

  Michael jogged to catch up with Toby and Nat. They hung a left, about to cut down Miller’s Walk, and just like that he was navigating their childhood map of town. As children, they imaginatively named Miller’s Walk ‘Shit Can Alley,’ on account of all mess left by errant dog walkers. Toby marched on and with his bulk Nat could barely walk alongside down the narrow cut-through, forcing Michael to follow behind. The alley had lost none of its charm, all high-backed wood panelled fences adorned with semi-literate graffiti and a slalom of dog crap.

  ‘I’m sure they’re just hanging around the park like we used to do,’ Michael said.

  Toby ignored him. Nat half-turned, ‘Aye, smoking and spitting.’

  It was a lesser card from the deck of things forgotten, but it was a bright memory of hours perfecting different styles of spitting. High arcing spittle and bullet flobs to throaty hocks and delicate jets through the front teeth. A redundant skillset Michael hadn’t used since, unless he’d swallowed a fly on a park run. But the hours they had whittled away slouched around the swings’ chains, practicing their technique, which acted like punctuation in their great debates.

  Shit Can Alley spit them out the other side. Toby crossed the road covered in a dusting of sand, Nat on his heels. The wind tunnelled down the street and hazed the air with particles. Michael covered his face and stepped out. A car screeched to a halt. He stumbled back, stomach falling away and holding up his hands in apology. The driver was nothing but a blur as they screeched away, and Michael staggered after his friends into a nameless alley, this one cutting between two houses.

  Michael rubbed his eyes clear, still wondering what the hurry was, though the storm front did look bad, dark towering castles in the sky, whose cankerous dungeons swung low as if laden with malodorous denizens. Flecks of sand continued to fall as Michael thought about the kids. They were simply teenagers, and Sam didn’t seem stupid. The social worker said he’d been doing well in school up until recently, when the seriousness of Tara’s illness must have rocked him. He really needed to sit the boy down and have a proper chat, which only underlined how underprepared he was to be a parent, let alone the parent of a grieving teenage boy. Toby’s reaction was probably the right one, reason bent by the power of parental concern. It was a thought worth pursuing, but they came out of the second alley onto a cobbled street running between the backyards of parallel rows of semi-detached houses. Michael remembered these. They weren’t that old when he was a boy; now, they were rundown and, on the row closest to the dunes, many of them were boarded up. Their roofs were missing tiles and weeds had taken root in gutters and drainpipes. The once lustrous whitewash had tarnished like a chain-smoker’s teeth. Michael looked down at the layer of sand almost obscuring the cobblestones, thinking simultaneously that someone should take responsibility for the upkeep of the town’s infrastructure and realising that in some way that someone might well be him. Though that also sounded ludicrous. Surely it was the local authority’s job?

  Toby was growing frantic. He cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed. ‘Tink!... Sam!’ He caught Michael’s eye and Michael could see how fear had replaced anger. Michael couldn’t understand it, but he felt for his friend and shouted too.

  ‘Sam! Tink!’

  Nat hopped up, elbows on the top of a garden wall, to peer into a backyard of one of the neglected homes. ‘Good bit of sand here too, Tobes.’

  That set Toby off at a clip down one final cut-through.

  ‘Wait up,’ Nat called after him.

  Sand lay in drifts against the alley walls. Toby stopped at a side door. It was open and he stepped half inside calling the kids’ names. When Michael caught up, he could see that the lock was broken, the wood dented, and the handle bent. This must have been why the sand had drifted inside. It was dark but it seemed as though it covered the entire kitchen floor and into the next room. The place must have been abandoned and kids broke in for a laugh. Their kids? Could be. Kids do stupid things. It wasn’t as if the three of them as boys didn’t get into trouble.

  Toby listened and when there was no reply, on he ran. They exited the alley onto Sandyford Row, the last street before the dunes. The three of them wandered into the road, padding over a thick layer of sand that covered it entirely but for ragged, black ridge that breached above the surface in the middle.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Michael scanned the road, disbelieving. ‘How have the dunes done this?’

  The final row of houses backing onto the coast were being swallowed by sand as if the dunes were a slow wave frozen as it broke over them. Sand pressed up the buildings’ backs to the roofline and sloughed between the gaps at their gable ends, pouring into the road on the other side of the street.

  ‘How do you think?’ Toby said dismissively. He squatted on his heels and brushed the drift away, exposing more of the crack in the middle of the road.

  Drawn over, Michael watched as Nat helped Toby clear a few more feet of the black fissure. The road looked as though it had been pushed up from below, its back cracking open like a fault line. The tarmac fractured into a ragged tessellation around the central cleft. Michael traced its route down the middle of the street. It seemed to stop outside the house with the broken door but ran back all the way to the playground. The wind picked up then, warm and sharp with particles and the tang of salt and earthy minerals.

  Michael shielded his eyes. ‘We should check the park.’

  Toby stood, dusting himself off and glaring at Michael. ‘You think?’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ Michael said defiantly.

  As much as he was an instigator, Nat was always their peace maker too when arguments went too far. He jumped up, dusting off his hands too, and slapped Toby on the back. ‘Lead the way, big boy.’

  The sand shushed under their feet. Above the rooftops, the stormfront was rearing up, dark and necrotic, like a wall of bubbling charcoal flesh, ulcerated with dirty brown lesions. They reached the end of the street, where Sandyford Row cornered with King’s Street, which ran all the way back up to Nat’s garage.

  The sand drifted two feet deep in the road there and deeper as it rose over the playground. The rusted frames of the swings and climbing frame jutted above the sand, like partially uncovered fossils.

  ‘Tink...’ Toby called, turning in a circle, desperation rising in his voice. ‘Tink!’

  ‘Sam!’ Michael joined in.

  Spikey tufts of sand sedge waved drunkenly on the top of the dunes, jerking in the wind. They beckoned to Michael, filling his mind with the idea that he should climb to the brow of the dune, where he’d get the best view and look for the kids there. He called Sam and Tink’s names as his feet moved forward. Sand shifted beneath his feet. Each step was heavy but inevitable. The thick bristling grass called him on, as the wind snatching their children’s names from his mouth. The climb was gradual, and in a few strides, he was at the cusp of the playground, its fence a long backbone weathered and warped. Nat caught him firmly around the bicep, pulling him about. Michael felt a slap of shock in seeing him.

  ‘Where you going, Mikey?’

  ‘I...’ For a beat he wasn’t sure. ‘To the top of the dunes for a better view. They’ve could have gone to the shore to watch the swell.’

  Nat gave his head a small, slow shake. ‘Tink’s not that daft. A handful, aye; daft, no.’ He led Michael back down to the road.

  ‘I thought perhaps...’ Michael trailed off. What? What had he thought? It wasn’t like thinking at all, more a compulsion and need to check. Was that his parental side coming out, a concern for Sam? He didn’t dislike that idea, but it didn’t seem like that was it.

  Toby’s shouts were being muffled by the wind. He let his hands fall from his mouth, for them only to fly back up to his hair where they gripped his skull. ‘They’re not here,’ he said, desperation setting his countenance as hard as cracked concrete.

  ‘We should at least check the dunes, right?’ Michael said.

  Nat and Toby exchanged a look before Toby eyed the coast wearily. ‘We will,’ Nat said, ‘but there are other places to check first. Fletcher could have been pulling our chain.’

  ‘Fletcher?’ Michael didn’t know who he meant.

  ‘The butcher,’ Nat explained. ‘From the beer garden. Fat guy. Smug looking twat with a porno tash.’

  He was talking about the Fuck It man, Michael realised. ‘Why would he?’

  ‘Someone’s got to play the dick, haven’t they?’ Nat said.

  ‘I thought that was your role?’ Michael quipped back. The banter was good. It lightened the mood and he needed that.

  There was a growing feeling of foreboding in the pit of his stomach. Maybe this was the existential worry he’d heard so much about from his set of London friends when they spogged up and pumped out little Ediths and Poppys and Henrys and Olivers, as though they were naming prophets in their newfound religion. And oh, by the god of Pampers, how they loved to proselytize its virtues, foundational of which was the way their egos had apparently dissolved into a nirvana of worry for this screaming, shitting bundle of joy who single-handedly brought once vivacious adults to their knees with black-eyed sleep deprivation. And yet Michael was a man at the cusp of his fortieth birthday worried for his son.

  Nat pretended to be mock-offended at being called a dick. ‘That’s brutal, mate. And there was me thinking the same about you.’

  ‘You two finished?’ Toby was scowling.

  A silent blue-white strobe guttered within the purulent thunderheads. Thunder rolled in two seconds later, as the day darkened to premature dusk.

  ‘Okay, if not the dunes, then where? The woods? The ruins? That’s where we would have gone, right?’ Michael didn’t know where that came from, but it was true. More was coming back now about his two friends and what they’d got up to. The idea settled a little more. ‘The woods first.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan, but we better...’ Nat stopped when he saw Toby.

  The big man’s face had drained of his permanent burnt pink and his gaze was fixed back along the broken backroad. There were half a dozen or so people—men, woman and children—standing in the road.

  ‘Great, we should ask them if they’ve seen the kids.’ But even as Michael said it, his flesh prickled in warning.

  It was the way they stood, hunched, swaying, heads tilted back, arms dangling by their sides and all of them facing in the same direction, staring dumbly up at the storm. The faint haze of sand blown into the air blurred them into featureless golems. Out of the corner of Michael’s eye, in the middle of the playground, the sand began to pulse in one spot, as if something was burrowing up from below. Slowly, he turned his head with a glutenous sense of dread. Two small hands flexed above the surface. They felt their way out, finger-walking like fleshy spiders, before planting in the soft ground. Between them, the sand trembled. The hand-spiders lurched forward one after the other, dragging their long bodies from the ground, which kinked into elbows as a small part of the dunes swelled up. A head breached the surface, yellow grains cascading from lank hair and the dusty features of a little girl.

  ‘Time to go,’ Nat tugged at Michael’s shirt.

  Toby backtracked, muttering forlornly, ‘Wyrmals.’

  ‘What?’ Michael said, unable to peel his eyes away. The word was familiar, but its meaning lay beyond boundaries of memory.

  The little girl crawled forward, dragging her body free. Her milky white eyes fixed on the three men. The three men backed away as one.

  The people in the street, to their right, began to move. Their heads swung down in eerie syncopation, and their feet shuffled forward.

  The little girl’s knees came free, and she jerked her left leg clear and stood. A distended belly exposed a leer of skin between her grubby sky-blue t-shirt and green shorts. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell. When her mouth opened, as if to scream, instead of sound out poured sand. At first, it came in a trickle when her lips parted and grew to a constant, impossible stream gouting from her yawning jaw. It wouldn’t stop; she was filled with the dunes.

  Michael’s mind reeled. This couldn’t be happening. Everything had taken on an unreal quality. The dunes encroaching on the town. The staggering people in the street. The sickly sky above, and the little girl, with misted eyes and an unending gush of sand from her throat, who was raising a limp hand towards Michael.

  ‘Enough pissing around now, lads. Let’s bloody well leg it,’ Nat said, hauling Michael away.

  On the flapping hinge of her elbow, the little girl beckoned. That was enough for Michael, enough for all of them. The three of men turned to retreat up King’s Street, but their way was blocked by another staggering figure, this one close enough to see the eyes. They were as glaucous as the little girl’s and his face was slack, his movements uncoordinated. They were boxed in and pressed back-to-back, when a horn blasted, and two glowing eyes cut through the gloam of the coming storm.