"Boyett-EpiphanyBeach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Boyett Stephen R)

Time for a swim and a stroll on the beach.

THE WATER is fine and dark. The ocean is unusually warm for this time of year.
The Creature moves through the water; the water flows 'round him. Swimming
quickly, he extends his huge pale webbed hands ahead of him. The flowing water
tickles the fleshy crests in his palms and along the backs of his thick wrists.
He kicks with splayed feet, and cups his hands to feel them redirected by the
water, feel them turning him in the water like rudders.

A fish swims into his open mouth. He bites and swallows.

Grunion.

Well, no one on the shore. No ooga-booga today. Just as well. Wanted to sun a
little anyway.

Before he lies on the hard-packed sand, the Creature combs the beach. Always on
the lookout for things to make life more pleasant in the grotto. Sometimes he
finds useful objects. Or objects from which he can make useful objects. Coke
cans and potato-chip bags have little practical value for him, though he likes
the bright colors. Plastic he likes. Plastic lasts forever underwater. Even
slime doesn't stick to it worth a damn.

Often the best things the Creature collects are the result of putting the
heebie-jeebie into some unsuspecting tourist. He's pretty much got it down to a
science by now. Make sure you're still wet and glistening; drape some seaweed
here and there for effect, come up behind them, let your shadow fall across
their beach blanket, give 'em lots of teeth and eyes.

Ooga-booga!

They leave all kinds of things behind. Novels, cigarettes. Towels, radios, food.
He'd really got to liking that Kentucky Fried Chicken. Plus the occasional
terrier. And those enormous radio/cassette-player things people had started
bringing to beaches in the last ten years or so are great, much better than
those scrawny, fuzzy-sounding things he used to find. Reception in the grotto is
terrible, but over the years he's compiled enough wire to rig an antenna that
pokes up into the air. Boats run across it sometimes, but it's easy enough to
fix, when he's motivated. When he's not, he has Hotel California, by the Eagles,
and Nasty as They Wanna Be, by something called 2 Live Crew.

Stuff he can haul to the grotto is great. Stuff he wants but has to leave behind
is infuriating. One night the heebie-jeebie act netted him a Suzuki Samurai
jeep, keys and all. What the hell good was that? He drove it around a little
while, just to see what it was like, but the jeep had no doors and the wind made
him dry around the gills. The suspension was so tight he felt every bump in the
road. He ended up salvaging some wiring and gas, the alternator, generator,
battery, antenna, and a tool kit and patch kit (which he used to fix his
inner-tube raft), and left the rest.