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The Things That Wash Up on Marble Beach

by M.O. Pirson

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The phone’s ring echoes through the beach house. The fifth time today.

I grit my teeth and grab the infernal machine, ready to send my daughter to voicemail again. Cassie won’t like that, but she has enough to worry about with the pregnancy and whatnot; she doesn’t need to hear the rasp in my voice, the pauses I have to take to catch my breath. I all but hear her shrill reprimands. It’s been months, Dad! Either make an appointment or I’ll do it for you.

The name lighting up on the screen isn’t Cassandra’s, however. I blink at the bright screen—‘Dept of Fisheries’—and answer with a grunt.

Roy’s voice carries over the line. “Hey Elias, you there?”

“I am, Roy. What can I do you for?”

“A report just came in. Mid-sized marine mammal or fish washed up near your place. You available to take a look?”

I’ve been doing contract work for the Department for years. ‘Take a look’ actually means ‘carry out a full post-mortem’, and I’m feeling closer to my grave than to my college years. I’m about to decline, pretend to be ‘out of town’, when my eyes drift out the window and land on a smooth, dark shape sprawled in the wet sand, as if a massive lead-coloured pebble had been left behind by the ebbing tide. Couldn’t be more than seventy yards away.

Something stirs inside me—a spark of excitement.

I shake my head. It’s not reasonable, not in my state.

Then again, it might be the last time…

I clench my teeth, cast another look through the window. Sod it! I give Roy the answer he’s looking for. “Sure, you’ll have my report by morning.”

I cut the call and dial Duncan’s number, then take a deep breath, fighting the cancerous vice choking my sick lungs, and brace myself for the task ahead.

---

Stuff just washes up on Marble Beach—it’s the way oceanic currents caress the bay, stoking the already strong inbound tides. Mostly flotsam and jetsam, rotting algae and jellyfish, but we get our share of sharks and dolphins, and the occasional excitement of a deep-sea creature.

I pant and wheeze my way across the beach, the thrill of finding out what the sea has brought in pushing my pace beyond what’s sensible. When the itch in my chest becomes too much, I hack a cough into my handkerchief, pleasantly surprised, when I take it away, to discover the fabric isn’t stained red.

Duncan Forrester and his gang of pub-dwelling handymen get there shortly after I do. Thankfully, by then, I’ve regained my composure and some of my breath.

“What do you reckon it is, Prof?” Duncan asks.

The blunt snout and underslung jaw, the folds of false gills behind the small, lifeless eyes. “Pigmy sperm whale,” I say. “But I’ve never seen one this beaten up.” I sag to one knee with all the grace of an aging pensioner and run a hand over the whale’s skin, feeling the unevenness of countless scars and barnacles. “Looks like it’s lived well beyond its natural lifespan.”

“Takes one to know one,” one of the men mutters, raising a few chuckles.

I might have laughed a few months ago, but I don’t laugh now.

“What about those?” Duncan points at the whale’s underside, at what seems to be lemon-sized pimples breaking through its hide.

At first, I think they might be impacted barnacles forced deep into the creature’s flesh when the poor thing trashed on the beach, trying to make it back to sea. But they’re too smooth.

“What in God’s name—” I lean forward to get a closer look. “Some sort of parasite…” The spiny, leathery skin, the radial symmetry… Could they…? I fix my glasses and squint, my face just a couple of inches away, and realise they are. “I’ll be damned, they’re echinoderms.”

Duncan frowns.

“Starfish family,” I say, assuming it’s the jargon that tripped him up rather than my overexcited tone. “Based on the body plan, I’d say they’re ophiuroids… er, brittle stars.” I shake my head and add, speaking to myself more than I am to Duncan, “Parasitic echinoderms… It’s unheard of.”

“Don’t starfish have legs?”

“They do.” I pull the whale’s skin back near one of the lesions and show him where the five legs sink into the pink flesh. “They’re inside the whale, the parasites probably use them as hooks.”

In my peripheral vision, I notice one of Duncan’s men flinching. Another one lets out a loud “Urgh!”

“It’s not all dolphins and seahorses out there, boys,” I say, gesturing to the great blue sea, but a hint of nausea tickles my throat and I’m quick to drop the teasing smile. I’ve seen my share of nasty critters over the years—goblin sharks and hagfish and moray eels with teeth like broken glass and mouths full of bacteria—but I don’t think I ever encountered something quite like this.

“Is it… normal?” Duncan asks as he helps me back to my feet. Wrinkles streak his nose.

I brush the sand off my corduroys as I ponder the question, and realise I have no answer to it. “Let’s find out,” I say finally. “Be good lads and get this fella up to my lab, will you?”

I turn around and walk back to the beach house, taking it slower this time. It’s going to be a long evening.

---

I lower the mechanical dissection table to ground level, ready my tray with clamps, sampling tools, all manners of blades, and slip into my lab coat, making sure my trusty recorder is in the pocket.

My phone beeps with a text message.

Hey Dad, it’s your daughter, Cassandra. Remember me? Either you’re ignoring my calls or your phone has fallen into the ocean (in which case I hope you didn’t fall in with it). Just wanted to let you know about the scan: still ten fingers, ten toes, everything where it should be, Baby’s doing great.

Outside, on the beach, Duncan and his men shout and curse.

I text back. Sorry, I’m at a conference in Vancouver (last minute thing). Glad to hear all well with the little one. What about soon-to-be mummy?

I’m ok, I guess, apart from the fact that I look like a whale.

I picture the creature that’s on its way to my dissection table and shake my head. I’m sure you’re glowing, darling.

Yep, like a bioluminescent sea cucumber. How’s that nasty cough, by the way? All better?

I bite my lip as I type. Just a touch of bronchitis, according to the doc. Nearly gone.

Glad to hear/read that. Gotta go, Baby’s kicking my bladder. Enjoy the conference and Vancouver. Give me a call when you get back. XX

Will do. I type ‘XX’ then erase it before sending the text into the ether. I pocket my phone just in time to hold the door for Duncan’s crew.

Huffing and puffing, the handymen push and pull the small whale’s 800 pounds into the lab, its slender tail sticking out from the tarp and dragging along the floor, leaving a moist, sandy trail on the tiles. They place it on its side over the lowered table and hold it in place as I raise the workbench.

Duncan wipes sweat from his face. His cheeks are flushed a healthy pink. “Anything else we can help with, Prof?”

“Thank you, Duncan, that’ll be all.” I hold the door for the men again. “If you don’t mind, I have to get started on our friend here, he won’t stay fresh forever.”

I wait for the men to leave, then start the recorder.

“August, 26th, 2011. Time is 17:45. This is Professor Elias Mortimer Lachs with a post-mortem of a pigmy sperm whale washed up on Marble Beach earlier today, presumably at third tide. The whale shows no external signs of decay or scavenger activity, which places ETD less than twelve hours ago.” I circle the table, scanning over the creature’s desiccated skin through my thick lenses. “Extensive epidermic scarring can be observed; however, cursory inspection reveals no signs of recent trauma that could explain death or stranding…” I pause the recorder, take a beat to catch my breath. “… there are several specimens of unidentified Ophiuroidea attached to the whale’s underbelly, I count…er… five. These appear to be parasitic in nature”—I pause, purse my lips, then allow myself to smile—“which is something I haven’t heard of in my forty-two years as a marine biologist.”

I put the recorder down beside the tray, slap a pair of latex gloves on. “No traces of necrosis or bacteraemia that could have led to sepsis.” All the same, in the spirit of scientific thoroughness, I scrape some skin from around the lesions. “Samples taken for confirmatory analysis.”

I grab the scalpel, slice a circle around each parasite and carefully peel the skin and blubber back from the underlying muscle.

The ophiuroids’ legs branch out into a multitude of smaller tendrils that snake their way in and out and across the corset of muscle, most disappearing deeper into the whale’s thorax and abdomen. I cut away muscle, snap ribs, and coax the ribcage open. “What in holy hell…”

The whale’s innards look like they’re covered in cobwebs. A meshwork of ophiuroid tentacles connect every inch of tissue, wrapping vital organs in ochre threads. Something shifts along the glistening surfaces, the slightest of ripples coursing these sallow tendrils. The whale might be dead, yes, but the ophiuroids are alive.

I take a smaller blade and endeavour to extract one of the parasites from its host. At first, I try slicing through the branched legs, but they are too sinewy and strong. I end up having to use the bone cutter. It’s laborious work that sets my lungs aflame, but after much effort, I succeed in separating one of the parasites from its host. I drop it into the empty aquarium beside the workbench and watch it sink to the bottom, the stumps of its branched legs flailing in slow-motion.

I return my attention to the whale’s open thorax and nearly drop the forceps I’m holding.

The ripples, barely noticeable so far, have spread through the network of ophiuroid vines, the web of tendrils twitching and quivering, seemingly at random. Then the ripples synchronise and the mass pulsates as one, waves converging to the whale’s heart, creating the illusion of a single, lonely heartbeat.

I chuckle nervously, struck by how uncanny nature can be sometimes.

Then it happens again.

Metal digs into my palm as my grip tightens around the forceps.

The aorta stiffens as blood is forced out of the heart’s chambers. Once, twice…

The sluggish pulse grows stronger, faster. Inside the ribcage, lungs swell. The creature’s jaw drops to let out a deep sigh.

I stagger back, trip and crash down to the floor as the dead whale’s lungs inflate fully and collapse into a scream unlike anything I’ve ever heard.

I scream as well.

The whale jerks on the table, knocking over samples and dissecting tools as it convulses. Scalpels and pinning needles rain down on me. A cleaver lands on the tiles with a sharp metallic clatter, coming to a rest near my outstretched hand.

I grab it, staggering to my feet, and lunge at the whale’s head. The blade sinks through flesh. Again and again and again.

The whale’s screams wane, fade to moans.

I continue hacking at it well after it’s gone silent. My chest heaves and I collapse to the floor, covered in blood and brains and spermaceti. Black stars blink over my tear-blurred gaze. This is it, I think, the end. I sputter, cough and spit up blood that dribbles down my chin and mixes with the whale’s.

The tiles feel wet and warm under my hands. My chest hurts, but the stars fade, and my breathing eventually steadies. I push myself up and stare at the mutilated creature on the table, then my gaze drifts to the aquarium, to the ophiuroid squirming at the bottom, and I wonder, what if…

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I rewind the recorder and listen once again to my observations of past weeks. Despite the excitement in my voice, I can hear the strain there too, the breathiness under the words, the ever longer silences between them.

Date is September 20th. Where to start? Following my astounding discovery of late August, I extracted the five ophiuroids from the pigmy sperm whale. Two perished, but the remaining three quickly regained vigour once provided with new hosts; in this case, black sea bass kindly supplied by Duncan Forrester.

My phone rings. It’s Cassandra. Of course it is. I ignore the call, instead casting a look at the aquarium across the room. The dozen fish I keep for future experiments are tracing circles in the water. Hidden behind the first tank, a second one carries only a pair of the fish. New hosts.

While the ophiuroids display characteristic parasitic behaviour after initial attachment, quickly draining the host of nutrients and resources, this interaction halts as soon as the host’s health declines and even switches to a mutually beneficial one following life-threatening injury or death.

I stop the recorder as I make my way to the aquarium with the two host-fish, and peer through the plexiglass.

The pair of decapitated fish swim around the tank. Ophiuroid bodies protrude from their sides. Pale tendrils show in the gaping wounds where fish heads should be, busy repairing damaged tissues and regenerating new structures, nursing their revived hosts back to health.

I lean in closer and tap on the glass as one of the fish swims by.

Among the mess of tendrils and fluffy white flesh, the brick-coloured orb of a brand-new eye stares back at me.

I fast-forward the tape, press record, start speaking. “A miracle. As a scientist, I can’t help but feel fraudulent for using the term, but, as far as I can tell, this is nothing short of one. A miracle of colossal potential. Harnessing this discovery—the ophiuroids’ abilities—it could yield new therapies, regeneration to levels we’ve never even come close to… We could cure anything, everything. In essence, I could…” I weigh my words. “…I believe we could defeat death itself.”

I stop the recording and put the device back in my lab coat. The itch in my chest has grown stronger with every word. I cough into a mottled handkerchief, fresh red stains falling in among the brown.

The feeling my lungs are made of sandpaper recedes. I straighten up, wipe the cold sweat beading on my forehead with my cuff. One last experiment…

My phones rings and I jump. Cassandra again

I pick it up, put it back down. I’m compelled to sigh but I have no breath to spare.

Soon, Cassie. Soon…

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The chair creaks to the rhythm of my anxious rocking. I gaze through the open window, at a horizon that barely seems to exist between the pewter sea and flint-coloured sky. The curtains shiver as oceanic winds sweep into the room, carrying the songs of the sea. Beside me, on an end table scarred with mug rings, lies a nigh-empty glass of my favourite tawny port, and my letter to Cassandra. If things go according to plan, as I hope they will, she’ll never have to read it.

My chest is heavy, but there’s no pain at the minute. I put a hand over my belly. Through the fabric of the lab coat, I feel the gibbous shapes of the creatures that are now working into me, threading their tissues into mine. Are they to thank for the momentary respite?

My other hand tightens around the revolver’s grip.

I was never a godly man, but I pray now. For my theories to be true, to live to see another day, to hug my daughter again, to kiss the grandchild I was not destined to meet. I chew my lip and, for what must be the hundredth time, check that the recorder’s still in my lab coat’s pocket. Then, I place the gun’s muzzle against my chest, just above my heart, and wrap both hands around the handle, fingers intertwined.

My thumb slips through the guard, finds the trigger.

The world roars in my ears. The song of the sea again, rising to a scream.

---

Cold is the first thing I register—a chill so deep it feels like my bones are made of ice. I smell brine and rotting algae, hear the rumble of the surf breaking on the shore, feel the ground press into my chest with every breath I take. Through a fog of needles, my brain conjures three successive thoughts: I feel. I’m alive. It worked. It’s all too hazy for me to remember what it is just now.

Opening my eyes, I recognise the blurry outlines of Marble Beach, the house jutting from the dunes a little way farther.

Waves of numbness and nausea rip through me. I roll over, every muscle stiff and aching. My hands—sallow from the cold, red-splotched with sand rash—slip between the lapels of my soaked and rotted lab coat and find the bulging masses of my parasitic saviours.

Memories spark to life: the whale, the necropsy, a heart impossibly beating, the experiments on the fish, and then… Chapped lips stretch into a smile as I remember what it is.

I don’t know if the cancer is gone, if the ophiuroids really fixed me, but I’m alive for now. I think of Cassandra and the baby, think of the magnitude of my discovery, what me being here, alive and breathing on this beach, what that really means. There will be time to marvel later. I need to get to the house, need to talk to Cassandra, to burn the letter. I need a warm blanket and a cup of tea.

Something in my pocket digs into my thigh as I squirm back onto my belly. The recorder! It’s ruined, but no matter, I remember it all now.

A furtive sense of doubt filters through my throbbing migraine. Is that true? Have all the memories come back?

I start pulling myself across the beach. Déjà vu nags at me, swelling and filling me with vertigo, before drowning me in fresh memories. I’ve done this before. Many times. Sometimes during the day, other times at night—my breathing quickens, I don’t understand—I even made it to the beach house once, splinters from the door stabbing me as I scratched my way inside. That can’t be right… I wouldn’t be on the beach now if I’d made it home.

I draw my hands out of the sand and peer through overgrown nails. Pierced deep into the pulp of my fingers I see them—wooden needles.

Pain shoots through my abdomen, lightning in my guts. I curl up. The ophiuroids squirm under my hands as I try to quench the pain. What’s happening? Pressure builds. Several somethings shift inside me, slithering under muscle and skin.

One of the ophiuroids’ branched legs tears free. Blood and pus spurts between my fingers.

Cries travel up my throat only to erupt mutely from my mouth.

Two more legs burst from my side, creeping out from under my clothes, tendrils spreading over the sand. They begin dragging me back across the beach in synchronised spasms.

No!

The freezing tide licks my feet, my legs, my chest. I try to fight, to keep my head above water, but my body is no longer mine to control.

I find my voice and scream, “No!”

Saltwater fills my mouth and my lungs.

More memories breach the surface, only to sink into oblivion with me.

---

Cassandra tosses and turns in bed. It’s one of those nights.

Little Elias stirs in his crib, then settles again.

Cassandra gets up and walks out, leaving her husband and child to sleep undisturbed. Downstairs, she sits at the desk, unlocks the drawer, and pulls out a kraft envelope. Inside, there’s a sheet of paper, dogeared and crimped, stiff from having been soaked then dried again.

“It was on the ground by the rocking chair,” Duncan had told her. “The door was open when I got there, and there were puddles everywhere, but the Prof, he was nowhere to be found. I’m sorry, Miss Cassandra, I’m so sorry. I just… I just don’t understand what happened.”

Neither did Cassandra. Not then, not now. She pulls the letter from the envelope, her gaze brushing over words she no longer needs to read.

My dear Cassandra,

Do you remember the nasty cough I was dragging around since Christmas? I did go to see a doctor about it after all. Not a silly little virus, it turns out. It was lung cancer, metastatic, terminal.

I’m so sorry for not telling you at the time or any time since, but I know how you worry and with the baby on its way, I didn’t want to burden you with my own problems. Unfortunately, things have recently taken a turn for the worst and though the oncologist didn’t give me any estimates, she made it clear my days were numbered and that the number was quite small.

Twist of fate or cruel irony, my research of the past months has uncovered the most startling results of my career. It has taken me down an unfathomable road, to a cliff from which I must leap with faith that I will land. I won’t say/write more about it here, all you need to know is documented on the voice recorder, which you’ll find in the left pocket of my coat.

If you are reading this then the cliff was too high, and my predicament boils down to a simple, but very difficult choice I had to make: either I let the disease run its course and die crippled and agonising while you fret over me instead of looking after yourself and the little one, or I go according to my own terms, swiftly and without bothering anyone, with the sound of the waves crashing in my ears and your smile in my mind’s eye.

I know you won’t understand my decision, but I pray you’ll find in yourself a way to forgive me.

I love you, I love you more than all, never forget it. And please do tell the little one how much I’d have liked to meet him/her.

Dad

XX

The note filled her heart with sorrow and anger. Confusion too; despite searching every corner, scouring the beach house from the lab to the attic, she never found the recorder.

But what keeps her up at night, restless, unable to sleep, were the words strung together at the bottom of the page, penned with a trembling hand, the ink smudged and washed away.

I live

live and drown

the starfish

again and again and again

Will it ever stop?

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 924
June 14^th 2024
The Things That Wash Up On Marble Beach by M.O. Pirson
Narrated by Wilson Fowlie and Wendy N Wagner
Audio Production by Chelsea Davis

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart

Welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror podcast and welcome to 2024! Hope you’re settling in okay. This week’s story is The Things That Wash Up On Marble Beach by M.O. Pirson.

M.O. Pirson is a Belgo-Irish crossbreed, currently based in the Walloon countryside. He is a biologist by day and speculative fiction writer by night—and therefore a very tired person, generally speaking. When he isn’t working or writing, he enjoys the occasional banjo lick and being bossed around by two tiny (and far cuter) versions of himself. His short fiction has previously appeared in the Strange Wars: Speculative Fiction of Coalitions in Conflict and Revolutions 2: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction set in Manchester anthologies.

Your narrators this week are the amazing Wilson Fowlie and Wendy N Wagner. Wilson Fowlie lives in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada and has been reading aloud since the age of 4. His life has changed recently: he lost his wife to cancer, and he changed jobs, from programming to recording voiceovers for instructional videos, which he loves doing, but not as much as he loved Heather. Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the forthcoming horror novel The Deer Kings (due August from Journalstone), as well as the SF novel An Oath of Dogs, and two Pathfinder tie-in novels. Her short fiction has appeared in nearly fifty publications. She is the incoming (2021) editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and also serves as Managing/Senior Editor at both Nightmare and Lightspeed. She lives, works, and makes mischief in Portland, Oregon. You can keep up with her at winniewoohoo.com.

So, follow us down to the shore. Because the tide’s brough something in. Something true.

But now, it’s time for a true story. Because that’s what we do.

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This one rungs me like a bell. Not just because I used to live on the shore (In fact, in a place which is technically All Shore) but because of the way the inevitability of the tide, and the impossibility of the ocean, is in the story’s DNA.

That inevitability first, because there’s a triple headed metaphor there if you care to see it. The constancy of life embodied in the tide, the sense of the tide inexorably going out on the hapless protagonist and the way he isn’t allowed to do. A heart that never stops beating, it could be argued, isn’t a heart but a machine. One designed only to live. Only to do what it’s always done. That leads to the fourth metaphor too, the continual attempts to escape the ocean. The continual failures.

That’s where the impossibility comes in. This is from the website of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

‘As of 2023, 24.9% of the global seafloor had been mapped with modern high-resolution technology (multibeam sonar systems), usually mounted to ships, that can reveal the seafloor in greater detail. While almost 50% of the seafloor beneath U.S. waters had been mapped to these modern standards, the nation’s seafloor is larger than the land area of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the five territories combined. Thus, there’s still a significant amount of seafloor left to be mapped at high resolution.’

That’s author catnip. The idea that around 75% of the global seafloor is unknown? Every Call of Cthulhu GM, at the very least, just started sharpening some mildly disturbing pencils. The unknown is, in this instance, known. We can see exactly where our knowledge fades and where the water never stops getting darker. The idea that something out there could save you is the delightful polar opposite of the usual horror belief that we stay safe by staying with what we know. It’s the science fiction ideal in fact. Boldly go. Take a chance. See what’s out there.

Become what’s out there.

That’s where the horror lies for me in this one. Not in the starfish and what they can do but in the way our protagonist does everything right, does everything we’d be tempted to do but ends up in a very particular hell of his own devising but which he cannot escape from. Boldly going. But never being in control. Inevitability and impossibility, wrapped up in one hell of a story. Thanks, all.

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As is always the case, we rely on you to pay our authors, our narrators and our crew, and to cover our costs. We’re entirely donation funded and last year that changed in some very exciting ways with becoming a registered US nonprofit. We ran a great end of year campaign in 2023 to raise awareness about all the new ways you can help us out including the fact that if you pay taxes in the US, you might be able to claim a deduction. Check out the short metacast on escapeartists.net for more ideas, and how to get in touch if you think of something else that’s more meaningful to you.

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Join us next week for two by Robert Bloch: “Black Bargain” and “What Every Young Ghoul Should Know” (Leeman Kessler and Rish Outfield will be your narrators, Chelsea will be working production and your host will be Kat Day. We’ll see you then, but before we go, PseudoPod wants you to remember ‘This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you–the ability to imagine.”

We’ll see you next time. Have fun, folks.