Oh, I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside
Portobello Beach, three miles from Leith, Edinburgh
Before the advent of cheap foreign holidays the seaside town of Portobello (which lies where the Forth estuary meets the North Sea) was a place where ordinary, working class holidaymakers went to lie shoulder to shoulder on the crowded beach, or sit on rented deckchairs.
Although it would never reach those heights again, it was still busy on that cold but sunny Sunday afternoon, which might not have been the case if the people there had known what had been happening in Leith over the last couple of days, especially as many of them were starting to suspect that magick was real, a belief they mostly kept to themselves.
Dog walkers, joggers, cyclist as well as couples and families were on the promenade and beach that day, all wrapped up for warmth as the waves lapped over the golden sands.
Seagulls circled overhead, making their high-pitched cawing sound as the smell of cooking burgers wafted from the amusement arcade below.
A few hundred yards offshore several yachts were cutting lazily through the waves, as about a quarter of a mile to the right four rowers were powering a rowboat through the water urged on by the cox as two kayakers passed nearby.
“Still not able to get online?” Bill Gordon asked his wife as he ran his metal detector over the beach, he’d taken that up as a hobby when he’d retired at sixty-five, three years earlier, but was yet to discover anything more valuable than loose change.
“No, I’m trying to find out what’s happening, but Facebook won’t open, and I can’t even make a call now,” Victoria Gordon replied, looking up from her phone, “I saw Steph walking her dog this morning, while I was waiting for you to get the car out of the garage. She said that Babs said that Angie said that Trisha, who works at BT, said that the Internet is down all over the city and they haven’t been told when it’s coming back up again.”
“Mobiles and broadband both out at the same time: that has to be deliberate, I wonder what they don’t want us to know,” Bill said, bending over and carefully brushing the sand off what turned out to be an empty beer can.
As he was straightening back up something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye and, pulling a pair of binoculars out of his shoulder bag, he focused on where the Firth of Forth flowed into the North Sea, “Vicky, weren’t there three yachts out there a minute ago?” he said, handing them to his wife.
“I’m not sure, I wasn’t really paying attention,” she said, taking her spectacles off and putting them carefully in her handbag before holding the binoculars up to her eyes.
She saw two sailboats that looked perfectly normal, except for the sailors, who were waving frantically at the shore. Suddenly she gasped in horror, the binoculars slipping from her grasp as her hands flew up to cover her mouth.
“Hey, be careful, those things cost a fortune…,” he chided gently, his voice trailing off when he saw the shocked expression on her sheet-white face.
He picked them back up, brushing the sand off and used them to scan in the direction that one of her trembling hands was pointing, the other one still clamped over her mouth, holding back a scream.
“There’s only one now, where’d the other one go?” he said as he stared at the remaining yacht, there was no sign of survivors or any debris from the two other boats. As he watched, something long and black with a greenish sheen reared up, gallons of water spilling off of its back, like a surfacing submarine.
Over a mile out to sea, its stubby tail appeared above the surface for a second as the creature turned to face the last sailboat, the middle-aged yachtsman stood transfixed in horror, the enormous head casting a shadow as it loomed over him.
Then it swooped down, swallowing the yacht whole, along with a hundred-thousand gallons of water before disappearing beneath the waves again.
Neither Vicky nor Bill knew that the creature was an ancient sea serpent called the Stoor Worm; not that it really mattered, anyway; nobody ever stopped running to check on what species of predator was chasing them.
The outline of its shape was visible cutting through the water, just beneath the surface, heading for the rowing boat, it was travelling so quickly that its trail sent waves crashing onto the shore. The crew spotted it and rowed frantically towards the beach. They were very fast, but even a speedboat wouldn’t have been fast enough. A second later it gobbled them up without even slowing down, taking both kayaks in one gulp almost immediately.
A scream came from the promenade, and when he looked around, a young woman was pointing with the burger in her hand towards where the boats had been seconds earlier, the tomato ketchup spilling onto the tarmacked path.
Bill grabbed Vicky’s hand as she stood stunned, pulling her after as he started to run for the safety of their car, parked in a side street off of the prom. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his asthma inhaler, sucking on it. “Drop…it,” Vicky gasped, pointing to the metal detector, as she passed him as fast as she could go over the soft, uneven surface.
“Need…it,” he panted, digging it into the sand with each step to help keep himself upright, as he didn’t have as good a sense of balance as she did.
Behind them, clumps of wet sand flew in to the air at the water’s edge as the sea serpent burrowed just below the surface.
Dog walkers scattered frantically in all directions, dragging their barking animals away as they strained to attack.
The beach heaved up under their feet, sand spraying into the air as they both landed painfully on their backs with a whump. The Stoor Worm stopped suddenly, its head shot up out the sand and it turned to face them. Its mouth was perfectly round, the sharp teeth facing inwards. It had no eyes or ears, spending most of its life in the murky ocean depths, using vibrations to detect and swallow large ships and shoals of fish whole.
There was a moment’s stillness when the universe seemed to hold its breath, then the gaping maw plunged down towards them. Bill rammed the metal detector sideways into the mouth. The detecting coil at one end and the plastic handle at the other shattered, leaving the five-foot long metal shaft jammed between its teeth. In the distance, its tail broke the surface, lashing the sea in agony, sending a tidal wave hurtling towards the beach.
The serpent tried to close its jaws to swallow them, but the carbon fibre pole held as Vicky helped her husband to his feet and they stumbled towards the prom. Overhead a British Army, Apache attack helicopter flew into sight, dipping down low and dropping cluster bombs along the creature’s length. Water erupted as the line of explosives detonated one at a time. The Stoor Worm raised its sightless head to the sky, roaring in pain. It was a pitiful sound, sounding like any injured big mammal as its black blood, looking like an oil slick, spread over the water.
As Bill and Vicky lurched along the side street, the tidal wave hit land, blasting the sand that covered the dying beast away, it did look a lot like an overgrown worm, although its skin was thick enough to protected it from the crushing pressure of the great depths it called home.
Bill had lost his inhaler and wheezed loudly as Vicky led the way. They staggered left along Figgate Bank, to where they’d parked their car. The tidal wave crashed on to the promenade, the houses taking the most of devastating blow, and what hit them just felt like driving, torrential rain.
The storm rocking the car as Bill pulled a spare inhaler from the glove compartment and took a deep hit. “You know,” he said, driving away after he got his breath back, “I’m officially done with metal detecting, what do you think of Scrabble for a hobby?”