"East Coast Sounds" by Joseph Bonnett
East Coast Sounds
by Joseph Bonnett
“Shut the hell up,” Avani mumbled into his pillow.
He rolled over and stared at the patches of black mold on the ceiling. Music from the apartment next door hummed in the walls and a high-pitched, cackling laugh rang out from the repeat offender to whom everything was apparently the funniest fucking thing she had ever heard.
Avani sat up and huffed. He swung his legs off the bed and checked his phone, 2:34am. He used the screen light to navigate to the studio apartment door. He stood in the hallway and steadied himself for confrontation but quickly lost his resolve and went back inside, muttering of his meekness.
He crawled into bed and checked his alarm which said he had just under four hours to sleep. He felt around for his earbuds and placed them in his ears, then brought up YouTube and typed in ocean sounds for sleeping. He scrolled and then clicked on a new upload titled Hypnotic Sounds of the East Coast. His head hit the pillow and as waves drowned out the party noise, sleep came.
“Avani…”
His eyes snapped open, and he scanned the room. “Who’s there?” The shapes of the apartment transformed into figures, a hanging jacket, the thin bookshelf, but there was no one there. The whispery tone of his name in the dark echoed in his head, but the sound of the ocean took over, and he realized his earbuds were still playing. It must have been a dream. Waves crashed and wind whistled through rock. And something else, a higher pitched noise, breathy…he fell back asleep.
He woke to a dying sun cutting through dark cloud. It felt like evening. He could still hear the ocean sounds and went to remove his earbuds, but they weren’t there. The panic started when he realized he was in his car. He snatched his phone from the passenger seat which violently ripped the auxiliary cord out of the output, and he burst out the door. A strong wind halted him, saving him from plummeting the depths, as he noticed his Honda Accord was parked perilously close to the cliff edge.
The sky above further darkened as dark clouds scudded across the weak sun. Gulls squawked and fought the wind. In front of him was endless ocean. He looked around. There was no road, just a wild grassy clifftop plateau littered with windswept coastal trees at sharp angles. He could see where his car had flattened the growth, but he had no idea how he had got there.
He heard a static-like noise and when he realized it was coming from his phone, he turned the volume to full and put it to his ear. Hypnotic Sounds of the East Coast was playing through the speaker and as it hit his ears, he mindlessly walked straight off the edge of the cliff and crumpled on a small landing just below. He pulled himself up and hobbled to his right where there was a steep but traversable path that provided the only passage to the isolated beach below.
As he scrambled down the slope onto the beach, he thought the black sand could mean he was somewhere in the Coromandel peninsula, hours from home. But the thought was fleeting and blankness returned as he walked along the coastline towards a rocky outcrop signaling the end of the bay.
The last few meters were difficult as he navigated the treacherous rocks and slimy rotten limbs of broken and drained bodies jammed in like compressed car crash victims in a pile up. He slipped as his heel flattened out the squelching neck flesh of an elderly gentleman and his big toe popped through the pale grey neck skin of the corpse. He wiggled his foot until the toe slipped free of the rubbery skin, then he dipped it in a small, adjacent rock pool to rinse it, sending a cast of small rock crabs dispersing; abandoning a fleshy feast of bodily detritus, little pieces of rotting people that danced in the water like powdered fish food in a tank.
He jumped off the final rock into the waist deep tide and his feet sunk and he dropped his phone into the water which pulled him from his trance. As he went to turn and get out, something just ahead started rising from the water. Dark green-black hair floated out to the sides like seaweed and revealed metallic looking black eyes on a murky grey face. A thin and petite nose breached and as the water beaded from the woman’s cheeks Avani felt an instant lust that drew him farther into the tide. As a mouth with rows of sharp teeth surfaced, lust was replaced by intense fear, but as a whispery voice uttered his name it was too late.
***
The man on the cliff watched through binoculars as grey hands pulled the victim under and painted the water surface red. He held his breath in anticipation of something more visceral; it was always better to see those sharp teeth puncture flesh and scaly hands dig deep to pull the best parts out. The top of a bloody head appeared, and he found himself aroused in anticipation, but it was pulled under again. “Damn it,” he muttered. He adjusted the fit on his industrial grade earmuffs to ensure they were tight and checked the signal going into his field recorder via a long-distance parabolic microphone. The little spikes around 9khz were the visual evidence that they were calling again for more. He could see them now, sirens breaching the water all around. They were beautiful and horrible, and he wanted to be with them, and to feed them. He pressed record. They were getting hungry and impatient. He would have to be bolder. The You Tube plan seemed to have worked, but he ticked over the idea of something bigger; intercepting radio signals; lining the neighboring beaches with loudspeakers; it would be a glorious massacre.