FICTION BY BASILE LEBRENT

Basile Lebret is French and lives south of Paris. His work has been published in SlicedUp’s Monstroddities, Atonic Vision’s Strange Weeds, Bag of Bones’ Step into the Light, Off Topic Publishing’s Home, Underland Press’ Even Cozier Cosmic and Arcana 12, Dark Moon Rising’s The Devil’s Playground, The Best of Carnage House Year One and Two, Season’s Grievings by ROF Publishing, Witch House 5 and soon in Squirm Books’ Skin  Deep. In France, in Lufthunger Club’s Les Feux de la Révolte and Malpertuis XVI.

Find him on any network:
@evoripclaw or amazon.com/author/basilelebret

THOSE WE LOST TO THE SEA
by Basile Lebret

Mary was still alive the first time Daniel saw the Drowned People.

They had settled in Brittany before the walk to Port-Blanc became a tradition. It was a subtle routine Mary had made up in order to get him out of the house. She noticed—for Mary noticed everything—that ever since they’d come to the West, Daniel stopped walking.

At first, he had worked the garden, built a few sheds, but soon enough all his days turned into constant naps. After a few months, he could barely work. Mary was living a busy life, grocery shopping, attending her bridge competitions, being involved in the nearest homeless shelter…so she was concerned that she was the only one who got out into the world.

Daniel was decaying. Not dead yet, but given enough time, who knew? He couldn’t walk anymore, that was for certain. He spent his days either in bed or on the couch.

Until Samantha came to visit them. Samantha was Daniel’s daughter, hitting forty.

Samantha announced, “What a lovely day…why don’t we all go for a walk to enjoy it?’’

“Daniel can’t walk,” Mary said.

“We’ll go slow. You’ll be fine,” Samantha said as she grabbed her father’s arm to pull him off the couch into a standing position. Daniel tried to protest but she would have none of it.

*****

Daniel was sure he could not cover the distance, but decided to try anyway since that seemed to be expected. He stepped out of the home’s front door and immediately became red and sweaty and wide-mouthed. Still, he trudged forward and reached the ocean with the rest of the group.

The sky hung gray and menacing over the horizon. The wind was blowing fast and hard, and the cluttering dark clouds looked like ugly sheep. The married couple wore heavy wind-breaking coats, his red, hers yellow. They sat on a bench overlooking the sea, Samantha beside them.

A fat boy passed them and Daniel noticed that the passerby was bare chested, the fat on his torso trembling as he stumbled down the incline that led to the rocks…which led to the sand…which led to the Channel.

Surely the boy wasn’t intending to swim in this cold weather? What if the lad was intending suicide? Nonsense, Daniel thought. I’m too morbid. Before returning to the conversation.

When all was said and done, Samantha once again pulled Daniel up to a standing position and they all headed for home. But before they all walked away, Daniel took notice of the boy’s stuff still laying on a rock on the beachside. No swimmers were anywhere to be seen.

And you could see pretty far.

*****

If anyone asked, Daniel could have recounted how when he first got back into the house, he didn’t think anything was “off.” Not immediately, anyway.

Pressing him hard enough, he would have later admitted he felt guilty he didn’t notice right away. As was routine, he went into the living room and turned on the TV. The fact Mary didn’t get up and close the door of the kitchen was what alerted him. When the soft chuckle of the kitchen door didn’t blossom, Daniel became worried. Something was indeed “off.”

Daniel went to investigate the silence in the kitchen.

Mary lay on the ground, wrapped in the yellow windbreaker she would use to go on hike with him. She always said there was no need to burn fuel to heat the house and she now lay on the cold, cold floor. There was no blood. Daniel had known and heard of people who died of aneurisms or sudden heart attacks. But not his Mary!

She couldn’t be gone!

Mary was pronounced dead on that same day. Despite him straining all his muscles to get her into the car and trying to make the GPS work with shaking hands, he, Daniel Beaubois, had just rode thirty kilometers next to a dead body.

He had seen her corpse, yet he could not believe—could not make his mind she wasn’t just “not there.” She wouldn’t be there anymore. The mere thought left an iron-like feeling on his tongue. As sour as the salty air that was sometimes charred by the dark sea, the sodium residue only exacerbating the ordeal.

It was this precise taste Daniel was inhaling as he sat on the ledge in Port-Blanc.

To one side of the beach resided this arcane forgotten chapel, with its high white walls and its crucifix towering over anything. On the other side laid the hills full of grass that disintegrated into rock formations. The minerals had dark nets embedded in them that looked like spider’s nest. His grandson, Stan, had once told him those weren’t really rocks, but some forgotten monster transformed into stones through an infanticide. The kid said this happened when men knew their place and sent their women into the heart of the forest to beg a green-eyed goddess.

He recognized that he was old, and had never hiked all the way up there before. The closer he got to the grass and the rocks and the spiderwebs, the harder it became to walk. It wasn’t unusual to see tourists on this spot, taking pictures of the raging waves but even they left the spot as soon as they could, because even though most tourists could not see The Drowned People, they felt them.

Daniel wanted to see the Drowned People, to baptize them in the ocean water. And then one time, a woman fell over and shattered her teeth and spat blood, yet continued through the waves as if nothing had happened. He did try to get to her, cracking knees and all that but by the time he’d fought with the pebbles, she was already gone. He named them The Drowned People right there and then.

Only her footprints and the blood and teeth she had shed remained.

*****

“You really think you can live here alone, Dad?” asked Samantha when she came back, worried sick that Mary was dead and that Mary’s daughter Jules hadn’t reappeared, not even to attend her mom’s funeral.

Mary’s TV spat a joyless police show. Samantha put it on, maybe per habit or maybe because she loved them, too. His grandson was playing on his smart phone on the other side of the table.

Daniel said, “I didn’t think about this yet. The way I see it, I’m still able to cook me some meals…”

“You only eat sausages, Dad, I’ve seen the fridge.”

“I can still go on!”

“Okay, okay!” Samantha said. “I just want you to be safe. That’s all.”

“I’m the one who keeps y’all safe,” mumbled a grumpy Daniel.

Daniel stared at his grandson Stan, who looked bored while he ate. Stan made a face, which the grandfather translated into ‘I feel you.’ before he started to doom scroll again.

They both ate their casserole of leeks and haddock while his daughter’s voice could be heard in the living room. It was distant, subtle. The kitchen felt cold without her.

Mary would've thought to light the chimney, Daniel thought as he got up. He surprised himself by involuntary moaning.

“It's not that cold,” said Stan, eyes still fixated on his screen that laid to the right of his plate.

Daniel studied his grandson. He felt cold. It came with age. He hadn't worried about temperatures before turning sixty. Mary had always been cold. Has she been here, she would have sat where Stan was, cocooned within a bucket of blankets.

“What are you watching?” Daniel asked while getting the matches.

The rumble of waves answered him.

“What are you watching?” he asked again, closing in on the teenager with a raspy sound of slippers.

On the small table laid the screen. And onto it, filmed vertically, was the video. A gray beach, he recognized instantly. Cold waves. There were people within the shot, their backs turned to whoever was recording. The silhouettes walked then vanished into the foam before Stan’s index finger passed the video.

“Stop, stop, stop! What is that?”

“What’s what?”

Daniel exclaimed in frustration, “The video! The video that was before this video. The one of the ocean.”

Stan tried to scroll back. “What video?”

“The one with the Drowned People!”

Once again, Daniel had raised his voice. Samantha's banter ended as she passed her head through the kitchen door frame. Phone stuck to her left shoulder, she asked: “Everything all right?”

Daniel noticed the look that Samantha gave him. It was the same scared look she gave him when she and her son left to go back home the next day.

*****

Daniel had been amazed by the local population’s tendency to ride the bad weather ever since he and Mary moved in. It took a bunch of gardening sessions, lost in the drizzle, to ensure he built a good enough resistance to the cold dampness.

Gardening through the rain was one thing, but looking at the autochthones while they swam through November was something else entirely.

Daniel still wondered how ‘them Britons’ could suffer through this. The Channel was cold as is through summer. He would not fathom setting a single toe in it when winter came. Yet here they were, basking in their hidden sun. Children’s howls filled the humid air. Bare chests, naked bellies.

The bravest ones, those who came to stay long, put on swimmers’ garb. Daniel would have bet on them not surviving otherwise.

The old man sat on his usual bench, while gray clouds hung low. Those were the end of times and above the cumulus mediocris cover, the winter sun spread fragile light. It pierced the heavens in webbed rays over the sea and Daniel was looking at those shards of light, mesmerized, when the silence caught to him.

The widow scanned the beach. All the others now stood. Some on their towels which clacked in the wind. Others on the humid sand, on the rocky ground, a few already knee-deep in the Channel. They did not move while they peered intently.

All the beachgoers were turned towards the sea.

Daniel did not like their immobility. It bordered on calcification. Like the spongy stone structures that had taken his knees. He pictured it gnawing at their ankles beneath the tumbling waves. The first step they took that really made him uneasy. How the wind caught to their affairs, their towels, their books and newspapers…

…the way they did not care what the breeze could take from them.

“What is it!” he screamed, knowing full well they would never answer.

None of them turned. Most were already disappearing into the foam. Daniel got up and groaned at the popping of his knees. He then did what he thought was right and called the police.

When law enforcement arrived, the beach was deserted. Gone were the folks and gone was their stuff. The gendarmes’ van came and they thought him crazy.

The officers didn’t say it to his face. It was something Daniel guessed from their smirk: the way they nodded their heads.

But what else could he do?

Twenty, maybe fifty people suddenly stood up and entered the Channel. That was important! He was not crazy!

The gendarme listened to him, apparently taking notes. “For my report,” he said. Before taking Daniel’s identity. Checking on his papers. They wrote everything down and then left the old man to walk back home alone.

It was through this walk that Samantha called and he put her on speaker. His daughter said she worried that he was unfit to live alone. Again. She was pushing her agenda upon him again.

Daniel wanted to yell but did not. He didn’t even try to tell her for the millionth time how he was just fine as-is. Instead, he asked how Stan was doing.

Through the phone speaker, he thought he could hear the rumbles of ocean waves. Samantha didn’t live anywhere near the ocean.

*****

“I believe you, you know that?” Jules said when Daniel told her about the Drowned People.

Daniel did not remember Mary’s daughter to have so many tattoos. He looked at her arms while she scarfed on the red beans and eggs he had fixed for the both of them.

“It’s the type of stuff the government would hide,” she continued, some beans stumbling onto her plate. “Sorry,” she said, looking at him sheepishly.

“It’s all right,” Daniel reassured her.

On her lanky right arm, a dancing cow moved as her bone structure stuck out. “It’s like murder or violence; the government says that the numbers don’t go up, but we can all see that they do, right?”

“Murders are on the rise, Jules. So are assaults. It’s a worrisome world we live in.”

“Who told you that?”

“The media.”

“The mainstream media? And you listen to their bullcrap? Next thing you'll know they'll tell you Thomas Pesquet was in deep space or some shit.”

Jules had Mary’s eyes, yet her skin already seemed tired and Daniel doubted she would become as old as her mother. “Your mom would not have liked this kind of language.”

“Look the good it did to her.”

Daniel nodded to the remark. He wanted to assert Mary’s death had nothing to do with vernacular, that he had been the one to find her on the kitchen floor. A tear in his eye, he looked at Jules silently. The woman seemed to comprehend.

“I’m sorry about that. And thank you for… dealing with all this. You know.”

“I know.”

“It's weird. Knowing she’s not around anymore. Like I’ve got no safety nets anymore, eh.
I mean, I’ve got you,” she corrected. Her right hand trembled in the air like a little moth. “Apparently.”

“You’ve got me.”

“And this is why I believe you. Tomorrow, you’ll take me there, right?”

“Take you where?”

“To this beach, Port-Blanc. We might need evidence. For later.”

“We could walk to Port-Blanc, yes. It will be good to have some company.”

*****

When Daniel awoke the next morning, he fixed himself some coffee and waited for Jules. He stepped outside to check the mail when he realized that his entire block was void of people.

It was just the sea; the sea was taking all of them. There was no trap, no endorsement, no sense. Just the sea and the people she took from us.

He went back inside and entered the kitchen, Daniel noticed Mary’s TV set was gone. His personal computer had vanished too. Food missing from the fridge. All cupboards open haphazardly.

The old man sat quietly, stared at the TV cables that stood like defiant snakes.

Daniel sat, eating his lunch while watching the news on his phone when the presenter spoke to him directly. “It’s the sea,” the journalist said. “It calls to us, can’t you see?”

With that, the journalist got up and left, leaving an empty TV studio. It reminded Daniel of François Mitterrand’s Au-revoir way back when. He thought it fairly unusual to stare at a vacant news studio on a cell phone screen.

And what was it with an ocean so enamoring that it drew a TV announcer into its depths?

Although the sky hung low, Daniel got up, put on his red windbreaker and left home. Inside, Mary’s yellow coat hung sadly.

Daniel went to Port-Blanc. There were no sounds. No motor. No birds. He wondered through the hike when he last heard an engine roar. Maybe he did turn deaf.  

Houses and gardens became rundown the closer he got to the Channel. But he was already used to it. Had they been any different, Daniel would have been scared. The village was now alien territory, a liminal space devoid of human life. He realized the air did not smell like gasoline anymore, just salt and decaying weeds.

The widow walked down the slope which led to the beach. No cars in sight. Plants had outgrown their gardens and now spilled like drying liquids on the sidewalks. Some had dried up; others had flourished and carried off a whiff of honey. Daniel turned right, onto his platform and sat on the bench.

The sea stood clear and cloudy as ever. Waves rumbled like sawmill. The old man didn’t care. He wanted to know what people saw in the Channel. What hid within the sea. What made them go never to return.

He peered not at the foam, nor the water but behind the veil they offered.

And then he saw the yellow shape. It was laying on the sea floor. In a fetal position. There was no blood.

Daniele recognized her instantly.

He could almost hear her call and he got up but didn’t moan.

For a moment that was long enough for babies to be born and live and die, the old man stared at the beach and beyond that at the sea. The wind grew suddenly cold and he closed his collar.

This was when Daniel decided to walk back home. He was not ready. He would not join his dead wife…yet.

Mary would have liked it this way.