The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki by Ramsey Campbell Page B

translucent and flabby. Quite a few of the tendrils seemed to have ambitions to gain more of a shape, swelling to form excrescences reminiscent of embryonic hands. When Fairman started to fancy that he could distinguish small splayed fingers, in some cases fewer than a hand should have and in others an unpleasant profusion, he did his best to fix his attention on the promenade as he tramped faster towards the hotel.
    At last all the inert misshapen lumps were behind him. He refused to imagine that he'd seen tiny greyish nails on any of the finger-like protrusions, still less that he'd glimpsed one gelatinous slab beginning to extrude features that suggested a rudimentary face. He needed sleep, that was all, once he'd spent time with the book. Just now he could hardly control his thoughts, which was why he needed to fend off the notion that all the creatures washed up on the beach were only playing dead. The prolonged slithering noise somewhere behind and below him must be a wave on the beach, but it made him look over his shoulder. As the fog surged towards him, hiding the stretch where he'd seen all the jellyfish, he was sure he glimpsed an utterly deserted beach.
    He was about to hurry onwards when he heard the movement again. It sounded close enough for its source to be hidden at the base of the sea wall. Fairman gripped the chilly railing and made to crane over, and then he dodged across the promenade instead. As he hastened past the hotels, all of which were lit only by the streetlamps, he kept glancing behind him. Were lumpy greyish shapes crouching almost flat on some of the ramps that led up from the beach? While he couldn't be sure about that, he was glad to see people seated in the shelter opposite the Wyleave, though the scarves around their faces made them unidentifiable. "Sea wall," their muffled voices called—no, surely they were telling him to sleep well, not even to see that way. As they raised their left hands to wave to him if not to dab at their glistening foreheads, he let himself into the hotel.
    Apart from the lobby and the upstairs corridor, it was dark. The silence felt as expectant as a held breath, and prompted him to make even more noise with the plumbing than usual. He was shutting himself in his room when he thought he heard a restless movement, too large and undefined to be anything except a wave, not an indication that all the neighbouring rooms were occupied. Just the same, he couldn't help reminding himself of Headon's reassurance as he sat down with the latest book.
    "We are all but symbols of the vagaries of the becoming of the universe. May a symbol read a symbol?" Presumably the book was setting out to convey how that was possible, but Fairman found the text at least as obscure as the colophon, a circle that appeared to be blank until his fingertips traced a series of irregularities that might form a secret diagram or motif. "The old dances conjure the ancient patterns and celebrate the imminence of revelation..." This was among the more intelligible sentences, and even then he felt he hadn't entirely grasped the point. "Most potent are the words of becoming, which shape the voice and the mouth when spoken, and mould the brain which seeks to comprehend them. No wholly human lips may pronounce the language of creation, and the brain must yield its customary form to rediscover the making of the universe..." Beyond this the book might as well have been composed of the language it regarded as unfathomable by the ordinary reader. When Fairman shut the book at last he felt as though it had been a dream he was already forgetting, its details sinking out of reach in the depths of his mind.
    He might have liked to think the view from the window was a dream. The denizens of the shelter had entirely covered their faces with scarves, and their hands lay so slackly on their knees that there might have been no fingers inside the whitish gloves. The clumps of hair perched on their heads accentuated