Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“Mr. Kimball?” said Paul's voice from the part of the office closest to the door. “What the hell are you doing?”

Chuck dropped his weapon on the desk of the Oval Office. Like some sort of offering to his parent. On the other side of the office windows, the battle seemed to be at its most bitter moment. It was almost impossible to hear over the booming explosions.

“Mr. Kimball!” said Paul's now openly alarmed voice. “Get away from it!”

But it was too late. Chuck had already given himself over completely to that yellow gaze. His entire being devoted to it. He fell to his knees and hugged that monster's leg and rested his head on its lap. Happily.

The lights come on over the dunes. Somewhere someone puts on a record. The lights that come on over the dunes are the kind that often illuminate dreams: like spotlights on a stage, although they don't seem to be hanging from any ceiling or supporting structure. And this is a dream. The Filial Dream of Camber Sands. As can be inferred by the partially destroyed, seaweed-covered sign that Lorenzo Giraut and his son Lucas are now looking at. “WELCOME TO CAMBER SANDS.” Sitting on the dunes. At night. That's another of the main characteristics of the Filial Dream of Camber Sands. It's always at night.

“This doesn't make much sense.” Lucas Giraut looks in the general direction of the beach's cafés and restaurants and a parking lot filled with cars. At its highest point, the sea is a half mile from the first buildings on the coastline. “I've never been to Camber Sands. You're the one who was here. This is where it happened. Where someone sold you out. I don't even like the beach.” He shrugs. “Though I don't suppose you'd know that.”

The relative ages of Lucas Giraut and his father are clearly off. As often happens in dreams. Lucas must be around thirty. His father is that indeterminate age fathers have when their sons are little kids.

“You have been here.” Lorenzo Giraut smiles distractedly. “But you couldn't possibly remember. Because you haven't been here yet. But you will have by the time you have this dream.”

Lucas Giraut furrows his brow. He searches in the pocket of his suit pants. He takes out a glossy brochure. With seaside views and full-color landscape photographs. The first page says: “THE FILIAL DREAM OF CAMBER SANDS: GENERAL OPERATING PRINCIPLES.”

“If you've gotten this far,” reads the brochure, “you must already have a pretty good idea of how this works. It's not like the signs are very subtle. Right, Lucas?”

Lorenzo Giraut shakes his head. Smiling.

“You never were very smart,” he says. His tone isn't exactly mocking. It's that vaguely unintelligible something that Lucas has always associated with his father. That refusal to say things outright or to speak in any other way besides in enigmas. As if every conversation between father and son was some sort of unofficial test of his deductive reasoning skills. As if every one of his father's sentences was a reaffirmation of his father's essential unintelligibility.

“Wait,” says Lorenzo. Looking into the distance. Toward something bright that approaches, floating over the beach restaurants. “One's coming. Hit the ground.”

Lucas throws himself to the sand and lies facedown with his hands behind his head, just as he had seen somewhere that people do in potentially dangerous situations. Something moves a couple of inches from his sand-coated face. Maybe a crab. After a moment he can see a green glow reflected in the sand. Like the glow of radiation you see in some movies. He lifts his head slightly. Surreptitiously. The thing approaches, floating through the air. Over the restaurant roofs. Slowly. Bathing the coast of Camber Sands in its green glow. With its feet about four yards off the ground. The truth is it doesn't look like an angel. Its face is green. Green and very long, and it looks like the face of a corpse, except for the fact that its eyes are like very powerful flashlights or maybe like car headlights. It's missing a piece of its face, although it's hard to see because of the hood of its raincoat. Because the figure that floats over the rooftops giving off a green glow is wearing a raincoat. One of those long yellow raincoats fishermen wear. With seaweed and mollusk shells stuck to it and green fluorescent slime everywhere. With a starfish on its shoulder the way some storybook pirates have parrots.

“Is it one of them?” Lucas rests his face back on the sand. “One of the Captors?”

“I've never heard them called that,” says his father. “Do you really think these things come from another planet?”

They both remain facedown on the sand for a minute. The floating green being approaches them and passes over them without making any sign of having seen them, and then finally heads off. Toward the north-northwest. During the seconds when the thing is right above their heads, Lucas can hear the sound it makes. An electric sound. A sound similar to an electric generator or the hum of an appliance. Like that sound refrigerators make at night, thinks Lucas Giraut.

Lucas waits for his father to get up before getting up himself and shaking the sand off of his suit and out of his hair. Over the roofs of the town, at least two hundred yards from where they are on the beach, there are more than half a dozen of those floating things. Floating. With their yellow slickers. With their arms extended out in front of their bodies. Some of them carry fishing rods in their hands. One of them has fishing nets tangled around its arms and head. The figures float and look down with their headlight eyes and Lucas understands what they're doing. They are searching. They are searching for survivors.

“Wait!” shouts Lucas to his father, who is already running with his bowed body toward the town. “I figured out who did it to you! Who betrayed you!”

A moment later he regrets having shouted. He covers his mouth with his hand. For a moment he had the impression that one of the floating figures turned its head and looked in his direction. With a pipe in its corpselike mouth. With the slime and the putrefaction eating away at its face. Then he starts running after his father.

The town of Camber consists of little more than a dozen tiny streets around the Lydd highway. That leads either to Rye or to Lydd-on-Sea. With the redbrick mass of the Hotel in the Sands at one side. The streets are small and have paving stones instead of asphalt and in general retain the placid picturesque atmosphere of the sixteenth century, which is when they were built. A placid, picturesque atmosphere that's quintessentially English. Now bathed in a radioactive green glow.

“Avoid open spaces,” says Lorenzo Giraut to his son when they get to the first house in the town. Sitting on the ground and leaning on the back wall of the house. He picks up a stick and draws a sketch of the town on the sandy ground. “We have to get to the Map Store.” He draws an X on the ground. “It's here, in the middle of town.”

Father and son begin to walk, staying glued to the walls. At one point a space appears between the houses to his left and Lucas can see the far-off roofs of the village of Rye, bathed in green light. At a nearby corner they bump into a sign put up by the Local Tourism Office.

OLD LYDD ROAD

FISHING TROPHIES AND AWARDS

MERCHANTS DRIVE

SEA ROAD

OUTER DREAM & RYE

OTHER DREAMS

Following the sign's indications, they arrive at the enormous building that houses the Fishing Trophy Room. Lorenzo Giraut enters and makes a sign for Lucas to leave the light turned off. Lucas nods. Lorenzo flicks on his lighter and looks around. The walls are covered with display cases filled with fishing trophies and framed photographs of people wearing yellow slickers with fish in their hands. The decoration consists of fishing nets filled with mollusk shells and starfish and taxidermied fish. Lorenzo points to the other end of the room.