Beetle God, The

She'd run screaming after he'd mentioned the beetle god. He'd only
been teasing her, letting his imagination work overtime, but sitting
there on his own now, with the wind whipping grains of sand into his
eyes, he almost began to believe it himself.
Even now her father would probably be striding across the beach
towards him, with his military moustache and his gruff voice. He would
yell for five minutes and that would be it. His fists would be clenched
at his sides but he'd never dare use them. Tom's father would beat him
within an inch of his life if he dared.
This had happened before, and Tom had sat on the sand, shivering with
fear, until the bulky man's bristly head had appeared over the nearest
dune and his eyes had flickered with rage when he'd caught sight of
Tom. "Have you seen what you've done to my daughter?" he had screamed,
his cheeks reddening and his fat lips quivering. "You're a sick boy.
You've terrified her with your stories." He moved over the dune and
slid down the other side, his sandalled, hairy feet slipping. His arms
flailed out for balance. "If this ever happens again I won't bother to
go to your father first. I'll show you what terrified is." He bunched
his fists and raised them in front of his face. Tom saw with some
pleasure that his hands were trembling. Despite his bullying exterior,
the man was essentially a coward, and afraid of a 12-year old
boy.
But Kim had come back to him because secretly, deep down, she liked
his stories. She was bored with tales of wild horses and magic in
hidden gardens. Tom knew she yearned for something different, for
something that might make her wake up screaming in the night, and that
was why he ignored her father's warnings, and carried on talking about
the beetle god. The idea had been so simple at first, like all the
stories he dreamed up in his head. Then, as usual, he'd thought more
and more about it and added little details day by day until the story
became a whole mythology.
Anything could have landed on this beach over the centuries. Ships
bringing olive oil, tin and iron from the Roman province of Hispania
had sailed close to these shores on their way to Rome. Others carried
corn and timber from the North African provinces to the capital.
Everything passed through or near these straits. Tom knew. He'd made a
point of reading about it before coming to Spain because he liked to
know everything about the places he stayed in. Not about what was
happening now, but what had happened in the past, the battles, the
people, the things that made a place what it was, that built its
atmosphere.
Tom loved the atmosphere here. Not the splashing of bodies in swimming
pools and the silly children's discos. But the scent of eucalyptus from
the woods behind the dunes, the distance-blurred Atlas mountains far
over the sea, the cloud-wrapped mound of Gibraltar that seemed near
enough to touch, the bored sigh of the sea and the heat of the sand on
his bare feet. This was atmosphere, and he embellished it with his
stories.
So maybe something did land on these beaches once, something that
wasn't supposed to be there. Perhaps it had lain hidden amongst heaps
of Algerian corn in a ship's hold. Perhaps the ship had floundered in a
storm, and sank far out in the blue haze, and the beetle god had borred
through the hull and scurried to shore while its former captors had
become white and fish-eaten on the seabed. Perhaps it had arrived later
on a ship that had sailed all the way across the Atlantic from the
magical lands of the Aztecs. Perhaps it had been worshipped with blood
there, and on its long dark journey to Europe it had grown bitter with
neglect, thirsting for attention. Tom wondered if it had caused the
ship to sink; a sailor may have glimpsed it in the darkness and instead
of staying on board the crew may have preferred to jump into the ocean
and take their chances there.
But his mind was wandering again. He scooped up a handful of sand and
watched it trickle away between his fingers, like the hours, days,
years and centuries that had trickled away on this beach. He looked out
to sea, shielding his eyes from the sun's glare, and far out he saw
boats whipping up white foam and fancied he could hear their sails
rippling in the wind like distant drumbeats. Nearer, a windsurfer tried
to turn and toppled into the water. Next to the imagined sounds of the
distant boats, the splash was as loud as lightning, and Tom resented
this intrusion into his domain. He wished the windsurfer would soar
away from the coast and recede to a brightly-coloured dot on the
horizon so he could imagine the sounds he made and not actually hear
them. Only the eternal sounds were the ones for him; the hiss and sigh
of the sea, the rustle of the wind in the brittle eucalyptus branches,
the scampering of beetles in the sand. He lay on his back, squinting
until the sky had become dark and the sun's brightness was diminished
to that of the moon, and the warmth on his skin lulled him into dreamy
sleep.
Kim's house was next to Tom's parents and they'd met playing in the
communal pool. Tom knew she was entranced by him as soon as he started
talking. He knew he was already handsome; his hair was a messy heap of
gold and after nearly a month in the sun his skin was tanned to a deep
brown that made him resemble a Greek god. Phoebus, perhaps. She was
ordinary-looking and meek, a year older than Tom. She was the first
girl he'd spoken to properly in years because he went to an all-boys
boarding school and tended to keep himself shut away in his bedroom
when he was at home. They'd ben talking about girls in their dormitory
for months now; he'd felt far happier talking about science fiction and
football and tended to keep quiet when conversation turned to the next
'social' evening with the nearesr girls' boarding school. He felt
uncomfortable with it all and didn't want to start bragging about how
many girls he'd 'had' just for the sake of fitting in with everyone
else. If he wanted a girl, all he had to do was dream about her. His
imagination was strong enough for that. Kim was certainly shapely, and
he'd found himself from time to time looking down at her chest when he
was talking to her. When he found out this made her umcomfortable by
the blush that appeared on her cheeks whenever he looked at her like
that, he carried on doing it. He wasn't sure why, but maybe it was just
another way of holding her in his spell, like the stories.
"I want to show you a magic place," he'd said, soon after they'd first
met.
"Everywhere's magic here," she'd answered. "Don't you love all this
little white houses, and the smell of the flowers? I could live here
forever."
"This place was magic long before those houses were here" he replied,
looking down at the top half of her bikini. The water level came
halfway up her chest; above it, glittering droplets clung to her tanned
skin; below, her body looked distorted and blue. Tom grinned inwardly
when he realised she was blushing again. "Come on, I'll show
you."
He watched her climb out of the pool and pull a white t-shirt over her
head. The water made it instantly transparent and it came down to just
below her waist. Her legs no longer seemed pale and twisted, but tanned
and long. Tom felt something he'd never felt before welling up inside
him and stayed in the water a little longer until the feeling
subsided.
"I call this the desert island," he said ten minutes later, as they
stood on the beach next to a heap of thistle-studded sand dunes. "I
know it's not really an island, but if you get lost in it, and hear the
sea on one side and the wind in the eucalyptus trees on the other, it's
like you're completely surrounded by water." Kim looked doubtful, and
brushed her ordinary-looking black hair out of her eyes, where the wind
had whipped it. "Come on, I'll show you."
Daringly he gripped her hand and led her into the dunes. She yelped as
a thistle sliced one of her feet but he carried on tugging her
nonetheless. "We need to get right in the middle, and then lie down and
close our eyes."
When he thought they were far enough from the level sand of the beach,
he stopped and crouched down below the level of the nearest dune.
Behind them the eucalyptus forest sighed eagerly, and he caught its
sweet, alien scent on the breeze. He pulled Kim down and she squatted
beside him. "Now," he said. "Lie down, and close your eyes."
Obediently and silently Kim lay flat on her back, her arms resting by
her sides, and closed her eyes. Tom stared at her for a moment, at the
way her black hair fanned out on the sand around her head, and the way
her belly rose and fell as she breathed. He felt an urge to reach out
and touch her there but instead lay down beside her, close enough so
the tips of their fingers touched.
"Do you feel it?" he asked. "Do you feel like you're on an island?
Just imagine that we're on a tiny desert island, and surrounded on all
sides by thousands and thousands of miles of open blue sea. The sky's
nearly the same colour as the sea. There are no clouds. It's difficult
to see where the sea and the sky meet, so it's like the island's
floating way up in the sky. Can you hear the wind in the trees? Imagine
that's the sound of the waves as well, so there's no wood behind us,
but just more sea. Can you feel it?"
"Yes" she whispered, reaching towards him and clasping his hand
tightly. He felt a shiver pass down his spine. "Yes, I can. This really
is a magic place, Tom. Did you come here on your own before you met
me?"
"Sometimes," he answered, not really wanting to say that he normally
spent most of each day there, with his eyes closed and dreaming his
stories. "Now, if you really feel relaxed, if you really feel we're the
only two people around for thousand of miles, I want to tell you a
story, and you must listen carefully and promise not to fall asleep. Do
you promise?"
"Yes Tom, I promise," she said softly.
"Once there was a shipwreck and there were only two survivors. The
ship was wrecked by a sudden storm in the Straits of Gibraltar. It had
come a long way. It had come all the way from Mexico across the
Atlantic Ocean and the crew had already started to relax because they
thought the worst was over and they were nearly home. They were
Spanish. They had plundered a rich and ancient empire in Mexico and the
ship's hold was full to overflowing with gold and heaps of glittering
diamonds and precious stones. They knew they would be rich men back in
Spain. They would be able to settle in rich haciendas amongst the olive
groves and sierras and they would never have to cross the dangerous
seas again.
But when they had passed Gibraltar and the calmer waters of the
Mediterranean were ahead of them, they became complacent. They brought
up dozens of bottles of red wine from below and lounged on the deck,
gulping down the liquid whose very taste reminded them of their fast
approaching homeland. To the north the Andalusian coast slipped past,
so recently emptied of Moors when Queen Isabella had begun her
Reconquista. But the captain became as drunk as the rest of them and
suddenly a strange, inexplicable storm gathered over the Atlas
Mountains to the south and rumbled towards them across the sky. Some of
the sailors screamed and pointed to the gathering mass of black cloud;
it was the vengeance of the Moorish god Allah for the deaths of so many
of his people. Others believed the Mexican gods had pursued them across
the ocean and finally caught up with them when they were so
tantalisingly close to home. The Mexican gods rued the loss of their
treasures and would rather see them hidden in the blackness of the deep
sea than enriching the pockets of a greedy Spaniard. The captain came
to his senses and ran a panicking man through with his cutlass. This
was not the work of angry gods, he shouted over the din. This was a
storm, as they had encountered dozens of times crossing the Atlantic.
They had survived then, and they would survive now.
But he was wrong. When the storm hit them it was as if a hand had
reached down from the thunderclouds and clenched its fist around the
ship. The waves slammed into the hull from all sides; the wind roared
and roared and tore the sails from the rigging. The warm rain lashed
down and stung the faces of the desperately struggling sailors. Then,
when it seemed the storm was subsiding and ragged patches of blue were
appearing in the seething dark mass above, there was a splintering
crash in the hold and the ship began taking on water. Fast. It went
down so quickly that only two sailors managed to escape. The others,
trapped below deck or tangled in ropes and rigging, were dragged down
to the depths.
The two survivors, Pablo and Juanito, were swept off the deck by a
wave of green, crashing seawater and plunged into the maelstrom. They
swam away from the ship when they realised it was going down. For a
time it seemed the currents would drag them down with it, but they
survived, and when the ship and its entire crew had vanished, the storm
subsided as quickly as it had arisen. The skies cleared, the wind died
to little more than a light breeze, and the huge waves were flattened
until the sea was as flat as La Mancha.
But Pablo and Juanito were not out of danger yet, for they were many
miles from land and the chances of another ship picking them up were
slim. They floated on the water and tried to expend as little energy as
possible, bobbing along with the current and drifting, as it first
appeared to them, aimlessly. They began to say their prayers and
prepared to give themselves up to God.
Suddenly Juanito shouted "Thanks be to God! Here is land!"
And indeed less than half a mile from them, and appearing out of the
mist as if a mirage, was land. It was a tiny heap of gold in the blue,
an oasis of sand in a desert of water. Gasping, they staggered onto the
beach and collapsed onto the sand, thanking God and hugging each other
in disbelief. The island was little more than a mile across, at its
widest. Surrounded by a ring of golden sand was a dense thicket of palm
and eucalyptus. Pablo plunged into the undergrowth, desperate for food
and fresh water, for the salt had dried him out and blood oozed from
his cracked lips.
"Another miracle" he screamed to Juanito. His friend ran into the
thicket after him, brushing aside the palm fronds that slapped at his
face. He froze in awe when he reached Pablo. At the centre of the
thicket, at the very centre of the magic island, was a pool of deep,
crystal-clear fresh water that seemed as deep as the sky it reflected.
They both plunged in, at first gasping at the cold and taking great
gulps of the liquid. It seemed far sweeter to them than the wine they
had drunk back on their doomed ship. Then, only after they'd drunk
their fill, did they see that the pool was rimmed with more kinds of
fruit trees than they'd seen in their entire lives. There were apple,
orange, lemon and lime trees such as they recognised from their native
Spain, and vines rich with clusters of black grapes clung to their
trunks. But there were also fruits more exotic even than those they'd
seen in Mexico. There were strange, crescent-shaped yellow fruit whose
taste was as sweet as honey; there were star-shaped fruits with a
bitter yet cooling flavour. Each fruit, even those which appeared the
same, seemed to taste different from the last. Pablo and Juanito eat
until their stomachs were full and then slept on the soft sand, until
night fell.
Juanito woke first. The air had turned cold and he realised he had
been shivering in his sleep. In the night sky the stars glinted as
dully and coldly as shards of tarnished silver suspended in the air.
The moon, half hidden by the thicket behind them, shone palely on the
island's ring of sand. Juanito was about to begin pacing around the
island to warm himself up when he heard a strange sound above the hiss
of the gently rolling sea and the sighing of the fruit grove. It came
from the other side of the island, beyond the thicket. Intrigued,
Juanito decided it would be quicker to walk around the shore instead of
struggling through the undergrowth, so he ran across the sand, his
breath pluming in the cold air ahead of him. He stopped dead, frozen in
terror when he saw the source of the sound.
He had heard a slithering, grating sound, as though something unwieldy
and metallic was being dragged across the sand and its many parts were
clanking against themselves as it moved. The reality was far
worse.
A huge, spiky shape was dragging itself out of the sea, gurgling and
hissing to itself and leaving a trail of something darker than the sand
behind it. Its body was divided into three distinct parts; the largest
was at the back, a black, throbbing mass of furry armour and twitching
legs. The centre was its smallest segment from which a mass of
twitching limbs protruded. Its head swayed from side to side as it
moved; twin antennae thrust from either side and its huge, insolent
eyes glowed a dull, bile-like green. Juanito vomited on the sand when
he saw a bloodied, human hand protruding from what must have been its
mouth. His puke steamed in the chilly air.
"You," the creature spoke, its voice gurgling with mucus and its
antennae twitching in time with the words. "You are mine now. I will
let none of you escape, because you stole what is rightfully
mine."
Juanito sunk to his knees, too terrified to turn and flee. He began
muttering prayers, crossing himself and weeping. He had begun to think
he had found paradise, but here was a devil from the blackest depths of
hell come to drag his soul away to join the rest of the doomed crew. He
heard footsteps on the sand behind him, and realised Pablo must have
woken, seen that he had vanished, and come to find him. Pablo screamed,
and dropped to his knees beside him.
"We have sinned Pablo," said Juanito. "We have stolen from a god. And
now our God can no longer protect us."
The beetle god dragged itself nearer, and Juanito saw that the dark
trail it left behind was blood. Its armour-plated body bristled with
spikes and impaled on these were the remains of some of their fellow
crew-members. The captain's bodiless head stared sightlessly from the
creature's thorax, neatly speared through from ear to ear. The blood
that drenched the creature glistened in the moonlight.
"I will let you live," gurgled the beetle god. It spat, and a pale
finger landed on the beach just in front of them. "But you will soon
wish you had died. I must be fed. I hunger for sacrifice. My servants
over the ocean fed my appetite with blood. I watched as it trickled
down their golden steps, and the stench of death and murder in the air
satisfied me. You must kill for me now, because there is no one else
left. And then, when you are both dead I shall leave this place to find
your homeland and feed there. You came from afar and stole the riches
that my servants had gathered for me. But I found my way into your ship
and buried myself amongst the gold and the diamonds and the silver. I
conjured the storm. I burst from your ship and caused it to sink. Now
go, and kill for me. I feed on murder."
Pablo lunged at Juanito and gripped his neck with both hands,
squeezing tightly until the night began to grow ever darker for Juanito
and the moon began to disappear behind a veil of thickeing mist. Pablo
was screaming, frantically. "I will kill for you, demon. I will kill my
friend Juanito. I will feed you with his screams."
Juanito felt his strength begin to ebb away from him, and with his
last reserves of energy he elbowed his friend in the gut. Pablo grunted
and crumpled to the sand. Juanito turned from him to the beetle-god,
and saw that the green light in its eyes was burning more brightly now,
and it pleased him that his actions were increasing the monster's
power. Turned back to Pablo, who was tryingt to sit up and struggling
desperately for breath, he slammed his foot into his friend's face.
Pablo stopped moving, but Juanito kicked him another dozen times in the
head just to make sure. When he turned back to his new master, its eyes
were blazing with green fire, and cinders of the unearthly light were
sputtering from its head and landing on the sand where they sizzled and
steamed. "More! More!" screamed the beetle-god. Then Juanito stumbled
towards the sea and plunged into the water, his legs kicking out behind
him and his arms knifing through the surf ahead of him until the island
was distant and the ocean yawned dark and endless all around him. Even
as he sunk beneath the water for the last time, he could still see the
green lights of the beetle-god dancing and flickering in the
waves."
Tom paused, breathless. Kim was no longer holding his hand but had sat
up and was staring at him with wide-open, terrified eyes. He wiped
spittle from his mouth, realising that he'd grown more and more
agitated as he told the story until he'd literally been screaming the
words out. He got the impression his words "More! More!" were still
echoing amongst the dunes, still bouncing from thistle to thistle and
finally ricocheting off into the eucalyptus grove. He continued,
quietly and calmly this time.
"After this, the beetle-god left the island. Full of energy from its
feed, it did as it promised and reached Pablo and Juanito's homeland.
It is here, now. It is strong still, because there is more hatred,
anger and murder in the world than ever. It is grown old and shy now,
and lives fare beneath the sand dunes. It whispered its story to me one
night when I lay here alone and since then I have been feeding it a
little at a time. I hope that one day it will be able to emerge from
its hiding place. I would like that, because it is one of the oldest
things on earth, and all that we are and all that we see exist because
of it. I will show you how I feed it."
Without glancing at Kim, Tom plunged his hand into the sand and
brought out a tiny black beetle. Its struggling limbs tickled his skin
and he nearly laughed with the pleasure of it. He lowered to the beetle
to the surface of a smooth pebble, then, holding it there, grabbed
another stone and flattened the creature with it. It disintegrated, and
smeared the pebble with thick, yellow liquid. "There," said Tom. "An
act of random violence. An act of murder. The beetle-god is
pleased."
Then he turned to Kim and clumsily put his arms around her waist and
kissed her on the lips. For the briefest moment she yielded, and he
felt her hand stroking his back, but then she screamed and without
looking back struggled over the dunes towards her house, her bare feet
sliding and slipping in the sand.
That had been the first time, and since then they had spent many hours
together amongst the dunes. Sometimes Tom even let Kim talk. She talked
about harmless, trivial things and Tom mostly let his mind wonder and
thought about what lived deep below where they lay. Twice now she'd
gone screaming to her father; the first time and then on another
occasion when he thought he saw the tip of a black, furry antenna
protruding from the sand and had told her so.
And now here he was again awaiting her father's arrival. He supposed
he could just run off and hide amongst the eucalyptus trees until the
angry, red-faced man gave up and headed back to the swimming pool. But
there was a strange side of Tom that actually enjoyed these
confrontations. He loved just sitting there in the sand while Kim's
father got angrier and angrier and the veins bulged in his sunburnt
forehead. Eventually he might say something like," I'm sorry, I didn't
mean to frighten her. I just wanted to tell her a good story." This
wasn't strictly true, of course, perhaps he had meant to frighten her.
That was the whole idea. Because fear, like pain or anger, fed the
beetle-god and brought sustenance to its withered, sand-encrusted body.
He thought that mentioning the antenna would really tip the scales. Kim
would feel not only fear, but downright terror, and the beetle-god
might really appear. Not just one of its antennae, but the whole
beautiful, pulsating lot of it.
Oh dear, there he was, doing it again. Believing in the stories he
told. Of course there was no beetle-god. There was just his rather
overactive imagination.
"Kim? Kim? Tom? Are you two there?" Kim's father's shouting
interrupted his reverie and he immediately resented him for it. The
man's hulking shape appeared over the nearest dune. His hairy belly
hung down over a pair of red swimming trunks that were far too tight
for him. His burnt forehead had begun to peel and Tom thought he
resembled a leper.
"Oh, hello Tom, are you on your own?" asked the leper. "I was looking
for Kim and I assumed she was with you. It's just that we're going up
to that lovely restaurant in the hills tonight and Kim needs to come
home to have a shower and what have you."
"Oh," said Tom, puzzled. "She..er...she ran off about half an hour
ago. Didn't you see her?"
"Well, no" said the man, frowning. "Don't tell me you've been
frightening her with your scary stories again." He laughed, "Don't
worry too much about it. She's just like her mother - highly strung.
Tell her anything and they over-react."
Tom felt confused. Could this really be the same man who'd confronted
him with clenched fists and bulging eyes the last time Kim had 'run
off'? He stayed silent, mainly because he had absolutely no idea what
to say.
"Hang on a minute," said Kim's father, moving closer. "Have you hurt
yourself?" He squinted into Tom's face and Tom smelt cigarette smoke
and cheap aftershave. "Someone's scratched you on the cheek. What
the..."
Something was wrong. Tom felt his cheek and his hand came back bloody.
His face immediately began to sting, as if he needed to be aware of his
injuries to be able to feel their pain. He looked down and saw specks
of blood dotted over his tanned chest. Tried trickles oozed over his
belly and stained his swimming shorts.
"She ran...she ran into the woods," said Tom. That was right. He
wasn't quite sure why, but his memory of the last couple of hours
seemed very cloudy. "I did scare her. I'm sorry. I won't do it
again'"
He had scared her, badly, and he hadn't even mentioned the beetle-god.
They had lain together in the sandy dip between the dunes and talked
for hours and hours about everything but the beetle god. Kim had told
Tom about her life back in England, about her school and the funny
teachers that were there, and she had told him about her childhood, her
first memories, her favourite colour, her star sign, her top ten
favourite records of all time. He had talked back, and the hours had
slipped by effortlessly, like they do when you're having a really good
time. And as they talked he had felt their bodies drawing closer and
closer together, until her black hair was brushing against his cheek,
their hands were holding and caressing each other, and he could smell
something like rain in her hair. Finally they had kissed. It was the
first time he had kissed anyone properly in his life, and it seemed
that all of her body and soul was contained in the soft, warm tongue
that gently flickered inside his mouth.
It was when she tried to pull away from him that things went wrong.
"That's enough, Tom" she said, brushing her lips lightly against his.
"I've got to get back to my parents. We're going out..."
"Stay a bit longer," he said. An irresistible force was building up
inside him and there was no way he was going to be able to let her go
until it was spent.
"Tom, no..." He rolled on top of her and pinned her to the ground.
"No, please!" Her voice annoyed him. It wasn't her voice he wanted.
"Shutup," he said quietly and slapped her across the face.
Her hand reached out and fingernails tore at his cheek. Enraged he
slapped her again, harder this time, but he lost balance in doing so
and she pulled herself out from under him, sobbing.
Tom saw something black rising out of the sand in the corner of his
vision. "You've done it now!" he screamed. "Violence feeds it, you
know. You hurt me. The beetle-god liked it."
Kim screamed and ran toward the eucalyptus trees. "Not in there!" He
shouted after her. "It's dark. The beetle-god might be less shy. He
might show himself."
Something black, huge and stinking reared out of the sand and tumbled
after Kim. It reached her as soon as she plunged beneath the first
scented branches and Tom heard her body being hurled again and again
against a tree trunk.
Kim's father glanced towards the trees, then froze. "Jesus, no" he
said, as quietly as if ordering food at the lovely restaurant they were
going to that evening. He rushed toward the grove and as Tom turned to
follow him, he saw what the older man had seen. Just beyond the point
where the sand ended and the ground became carpeted by layers of dead,
yellowing leaves, a body lay sprawled, battered and daubed with
blood.
Kim's father turned back towards Tom and something cold and nasty
glinted in his eyes. His hands were clenched into fists, and this time
there was no way on earth his father would be able to protect
him.
As the punches rained down on him and he began to lose consciousness,
Tom's last thought was ' The beetle-god will be pleased.'