The Creeping Past
Preface
The night crackled at the edges with fireworks exploding all over town. An enormous moth battered a street light. Back down the beach, not matching the moth’s struggle to find a fiery death, the rigging on sailing dinghies clattered against the masts. In the distance, unseen, the sea boiled. The lanyards on metal marked time in the coming gale. The sound of a high-pitched, eerie musical wail could hardly be heard above the crunch of stones, the howling wind and the smash of the sea.
With a shriek of torn metal, the massive ballroom danced with its historic self, waltzing sideways, and with a slow twist the whole structure bucked. Its back broken, the aged palais de danse made a slipway of its mooring and sledged backwards into the green sea.
Deep in sleep, Mat heard it wail.
——————————————–
Some 18 months previously, Mat moved to Brighton from deep inside Devon. After a few months he got bored with the indie circuit and, after hanging around watching dull groups play mod clubs in London and locally, he’d started a band of his own. True to his love of 60s sounds, he’d named it Seven and Seven is. It was known locally as the Sevens.
The Sevens took advantage of the generosity of a middle-aged garage rock fan and recorded and released their first LP, Cheat Death. The LP only took a day and £150 to record. Given that the then current crop of garage rockers were boasting about spending only £5,000 on their products, the Sevens imagined that their economy would doubltess endear them to the punk purist crowd, and their grasp of 60s power chords and late-70s tunnel-riffing would get every right thinking rock fan on their side. This was before The Darkness.
Since the music business is mostly run by business studies junkies, media studies simpletons and dull-witted fans seeking various individually-fashioned musical grails, the Sevens were forced to tour in order to provide the punters with the necessary authenticity fix that would impel them to buy Cheat Death. As a consequence, they found themselves on tour on the south coast. They’d opened in London, with gigs planned in Brighton, Shoreham-by-Sea, Worthing, Portsmouth, Hastings, Eastbourne, and ending in Bournemouth.
Earlier on in the evening they had pulled off their best ever gig at the Free Butt in Brighton, in front of a hometown crowd who were loving it. The Free Butt was a miniscule sweatbox, but since every other live music pub had been turned into a brasserie, grill, or wooden floored ersatz chill-out pub-lite, and there was nowhere else left, it was packed every time the latest thing in guitars came to town.
After the gig, Mat, Duncan, Vince and Gaz had been lured to an electroclash/Kraut/Punk club night by some of the local talent. Run by Jim Smith, a Crawley asylum-seeker who’d claimed asylum in Brighton some years earlier, deTournement paid heavy tribute to the Greil Marcus/art-school idea of situationism while replaying the 80s to a crowd of poorly dressed teens and early-20s. The tune of the night was Amon Dull II’s ‘Yeti’.
The two birds who pulled them went right through the card with the boys in a marathon of sexual olympics. But the chaps were kicked out of the flat the girls shared, because their boyfriends were due back from holiday in Cuba later the same morning. On viewing his DV footage of the sex session the next day, Duncan understood that although his desires had been fulfilled, he remained disappointed.
The rest of the lads went back to their rented rooms, but Mat walked around for a bit, into the dawn, avoiding the fights still running out of control around West Street and Middle Street. Then he got his head down on the beach near the West Pier. The pier had partly collapsed the night before and individual sightseers, photographers and architectural salvage dealers were gathered round looking at the broken-backed hulk. As he walked towards it, in a fog of impending sleep, the pier looked like a marine woodlouse crawling out onto the land. The image stayed with him even as he drifted off.
Mat woke on the beach, curled up on the pebbles. A plaintive tune was going round and round in his head. Unsurprisingly, he’d slept badly. But he was sick of touring after only three nights and hard pebbles offered a welcome draught of reality.
His dream concerned the events of the previous stormy night. It was as if the pier had been seized by a great paw and cracked like a lobster, only to reveal an empty carapace. Or, in a different part, as if a massive foot had trodden down and snapped the backbone of the Grade 1 Listed creature. Later yet, a third scene manifested. In it, a sea-going craft, or Kraken, had broken the surface near Hove and steamed full tilt, breaking the pier from beneath, with a razored humpback.
He got a double espresso from the Meeting Place cafe, where some 13 years earlier Simon Strong, the compiler of one of his favourite novels, A259 Multiplex Bomb Outrage, had discussed its composition with various well-known underground writers, such as Simon Dwyer, editor of Rapid Eye and Stewart Home, novelist, former neoist and baiter of literary writers and stupid anarchists. It was a significant location indeed.
Mat considered the coincidence that A259 Multiplex Bomb Outrage was one of the catalysts that had led him to Brighton, and that one of Strong’s friends from the A259 era, Neil Palmer, was now funding his first LP. Strong had also contributed an essay on measuring the punkness of music, which was included in a booklet accompanying the Fire Dept’s Elpee for Another Time. The Fire Dept was Palmer’s old band. Perhaps these things were no more than coincidence.
His mobile being out of credit as usual, Mat used a payphone on North Street to phone the rest of the band. He got no answer from any of them, they were all out. They’d gone early to pick up the hire van. So they would be in Shoreham already and he’d have to get the train.
The Shoreham train carried on on its journey west, leaving Mat standing in the clothes he’d slept in. It was due to Strong’s apocalyptic reference to Shoreham in the ending of A259 Multiplex Bomb Outrage that Mat had decided to play there. Otherwise, the Sevens would have gone straight to Worthing.
There was no sign of the van outside the Burrell Arms, where they were playing later that night, so Mat wandered into town through the main street.
The parish church of St. Mary de Haura, an unusually tall Saxon building with Norman and later additions, lay at the end of the old town. Its name was Norman for harbour — hence, Le Havre in northern France. Beyond it were two-storey 1970s shop units with upstairs accommodation. St. Mary’s boasted some indistinct, weather-ruined gargoyles high up on its bell tower. Like most southern and eastern parish churches it had little external decoration.
Shoreham had few visible frills, but it was well served by the kinds of organisations that excel in opening charity shops in areas with multiple vacant units and government funding to keep open them up. Mat stopped in every charity shop along the high street, remembering the great finds he’d made in Devon. He checked out the books, mainly. The dealers had taken the best, but there were still some minor antiquarian works and local histories. But Shoreham wasn’t Devon
Momentarily startled by a small, fast shape that darted out of a twittern, then hopped and hobbled off down the road, Mat gasped. The tiny figure glanced back, looking at him with dead fish eyes, then it skipped away on great flat feet. Having lived most of his life in Devon, he was used to odd-looking locals. He simply raised his eyebrows and walked on.
In the Sue Ryder shop, he got Ancient Tales of Bygone Shoreham. It was slightly damaged by damp, but all the black and white plates were included. Chapter 4 was subtitled “Personalities & Eccentrics”. One of the the tales was of a family of misshapen, reclusive fishermen rumoured to have webbed hands and feet and whose success with their nets brought them a fortune over the years. They were also said to have links with a submerged village off the Hove-Shoreham shore, which was lost in ancient days.
Mat walked down to the river and crossed the iron bridge to Shoreham Beach and the sea. From the bridge, he watched a fisherman steer a boat in circles. Abandonded cabins and masts, stilted on sunken domestic wrecks, kept watch on each other across the estuary, green weed bound. In the distance, across the marshy flats and way beyond the main road, Lancing College rooted upwards, like Dracula’s castle.
On the sea shore, drift plastic, stranded rope, chemical containers, spread the length of the high tide mark, from west to east. Blackened pebbles marked the spots of after hours flare-ups. Low houses backed off behind the heaped stones, below sea level. The sea was light grey and perfectly still.
Walking back into town down the High Street, Mat was ambushed by the other Sevens, who’d hidden behind the Marlipins Museum, a 14th century Grade 1 listed building with a Caen stone chequerwork facade. Naturally, Mat was surprised to be hijacked outside one of the oldest secular buildings in England.
“Nice one, lads.”
“Where’ve you been?” Duncan shouted.
“On the beach, on a train, but mainly on my fucking own”, Mat replied.
“Yeah, well. If you’d been there, you’d have got a lift.” Duncan shouted.
“Why did you leave so early?”
“We wanted to get an early start and avoid the traffic”, Vince mumbled.
“What time can we get the gear in?”
“About six, I reckon”, said Duncan.
“Great.”
Luckily, the pubs were open, so the early afternoon went in a flash.
At six o’clock, the Sevens rendevouz-ed at the Burrell Arms in time to meet Simon, the promoter, who emerged, swaying from the double doors, holding a can of super strength supermarket lager, brushing pastry crumbs off his battered sheepskin car coat and wiping his mouth with his hand.
The Sevens, together—“Ah! The promoter?”
“Welcome to Shoreham. All right? I tell you what, I needed that. I had the afternoon off work. I’ve just spent half an hour plating my old lady.”
“For pity’s sake”, Mat muttered under his breath.
“The owner wants you in by half-past, on by nine and off by ten-thirty. All right? Let’s turn this rock machine on. This is my daughter, Kerry, she does the door.” Simon pointed a stubby red finger at a young woman twice his height walking towards them.
The punters came from Brighton, London and as far away as Chelmsford. The Sevens played the best gig they’d ever done and the crowd went mental. The Shoreham show had been Mat’s idea — the rest of the band had not read A259 Multiplex Bomb Outrage — and it was organised long before the south coast tour. They could have cancelled, but they decided to do it for a laugh.
Simon paid them £75 cash, saying, “Good show, you fellows. If you ever come back to Shoreham, ring me first.” He flashed a grubby business card, but when Vince grabbed it, he pulled it back on a piece of string, snorting with laughter.
Vince, puzzled, chimed up: “Have you got a pen?”
As they were packing their gear away, Kerry sidled up to Mat, her eyes transfixed on Simon, who was chatting up a young raver.
“He mustn’t see me talking to you. I haven’t got long,” she whispered. “Whatever you do, you cannot stay here. Get out as quickly as you can. Flee inland for safety. There’s no time to waste.”
“Actually, we’re going back to Brighton tonight, so…”
“But promise me you will be out of here before night falls.”
“It’s half-eleven now, mate.”
“It grows late, but still there is time. For pity’s sake.” Kerry sprinted to the ladies, sobbing.
Simon swaggered over to Mat.
“Have you been getting a friendly with my little girl?”
“Not really. She said we were really good, then she went for a slash.”
“I hope you’re not going to meet her later, perhaps in the an abandoned pill box on the marshes, or by a gaudy angelic Victorian monument in the churchyard. I tell you what, why don’t the whole band take turns? For fuck’s sake.”
Mat grinned, looking round for his crew. They were standing at the bar, laughing at him.
Later, outside, the rain punished the van. It wouldn’t start. Thunder cracked, but without a lightning accompaniment.
“Looks like you’re fucked,” Simon howled as he pedalled away on his bike.
“Anyone know where we can hire a van?” Gaz offered.
“Any chance of a taxi,” Duncan ventured.
“That’ll cost a fortune,” Mat said. “Hang on, we’ve got a load on us.”
Vince said, “Look, the money from tonight is all we’ve got for now. Let’s kip in the van.”
“Fucking hell”, Mat sighed.
The fisherman was sitting in the clear dawn, smoking a spliff and mending his nets. The Sevens crawled from the back of the van, coughing out of control, their hair in various stages of mad extension.
“Did you hear that howling last night?” Duncan rasped.
“Too right, I was shitting myself,” Vince shouted.
“You’re from Shoreham, Vince. Is it always as awful as this? And anyway, why are you sleeping in the van when you could have stayed at your mum and dad’s?” Duncan ventured.
“We’re on the road, aren’t we? It’s not too bad if you have a drink first.”
The fisherman rolled his eyes to the sky.
“Now, that was a storm last night,” he hissed. “I was lucky to get back safe. By rights I should be floating in the channel.”
“We were in the van,” Mat said.
“I know that, you berk.” He sneered. “I heard there was a group playing last night. I used to play in a group, ’67 to ’69. South coast, mainly. Brighton, Worthing, Bournemouth. Even London, once or twice.”
“Did you do any recording?” Mat asked.
“Not much. One demo disc, but it never came out.”
“What were you called?”
“The Creeping Past. Here, look at this. What do you reckon this is?” He showed Duncan a dried out husk, rubbing it with his fingers.
It could have been the skull cap of a yeti, as seen in 1970s paperbacks on mysteries of the unexplained, a hairy fin, or a rough claw casing, a larger version of those shed by domestic cats.
“I found this last night. Thrown up by the sea in the storm. Look at this one.”
He showed them the twin of the other piece of detritus.
“I found it some 30 years ago. What do you think of that?”
The Sevens just looked at each other.
The fisherman related the history and significance of the drift finds to the Sevens. He explained his theory that the storms, which always lasted three days, coincided with the same monstrous melodic sounds that they had all heard emanating from under the sea in the night. The foul, sweet musical keenings prefigured the appearance, once every generation, of a group of musicians, who were enchanted by the weird sounds. The presence had been lurking since elder days. It was inextricably linked with the underwater village lying some way off shore. The last such group was The Creeping Past, and they’d vanished without trace, apart from the fisherman telling the tale. He continued.
“We were into witchcraft and magic, so I already had a fair idea what was happening. During the storm of ‘69 we were having a mushroom happening on the beach. We saw the underwater group emerge from the surf as ‘Black Mass’ by Jason Crest played on the portable record player.
“Nice one”, Mat grunted uneasily.
“I never saw the others again.” He shifted in his seat, scratched his arse and said, “Ooh! Me gills.” He went on: “the same thing happened with my great uncle’s dance band during the war. February 1945. They were due to take a plane to Scotland to entertain the troops and that night there was a terrible storm. They never left Shoreham, the plane just disappeared.”
It was clear that some eldritch influence was abroad. Mat and Duncan recognised its signage.
Gaz: “I tell you what. Let’s do some research in the local studies section of Shoreham Public Library. I bet there’d be loads of good stuff there, antiquarian tomes, maps and such.”
“Local history. Right on!” Duncan sniggered.
Later, in the library, Mat, Duncan and Gaz chanced upon a book of local history and myths containing a weird tale illustrated with an ancient map. It seemed the fisherman was right, the creature resurfaced periodically and had done so since at least the 16th century. But the book told a different story. The sea being was indeed said to be summoned by the sounds of human melodies. But its rising to the surface satisfied a baser desire than the search for good tunes. Like the eel, the creature returned to inland waters to spawn. But unlike the eel, the ancient aquatic thing was said to couple with people, rather than its own kind. Music, it appeared, was merely the prelude to its secretive love-making. The tale mentioned the degenerative descent of a certain fisher family, who were said to have had a closer association with the sea than was natural.
“This is like something out of Lovecraft. Is there a Shoreham in Rhode Island?” Mat intoned.
Gaz responded: “Alternatively, maybe it mates in the wide oceans and comes in from the sea to spawn in the waters of the Adur, or Arun.”
“I take my hat off to you; you were right.” Duncan nodded, beaming. “This place is great. It’s well stocked and there’s a nice balance between reference books, text books and archival material. And the manager and her staff are really helpful and knowledgeable.”
“I couldn’t help overhearing you talking.” A man wearing a sharp suit and a knitted tie sidled up to them and spoke softly. “Perhaps I could help.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m generally known as Dave Suit,” he offered. “Amatuer local historians, eh?”
“We’re a punk-rock freakbeat-influenced band from Brighton,” Mat offered.
“Punk? Freakbeat? With a local history angle. Interesting.”
Dave Suit told Mat and Duncan about the importance of local history, especially as it impacted on the many layered, unfolding story of people’s everyday lives. He then told a brief history of Shoreham Airport and advised them that the best way to discover the tracks of the by now river-bound creature was to search from the air.
“I’ve got a contact at there. We could fly above the Arun and the Adur and conduct an aerial survey of possible sites.”
Vince was having a cup of coffee with Kerry in a cafe, surrounded by OAPs.
“You looked smashing last night.”
“Thanks. I really like your early-80s lead guitar style. Especially the tunnell-riffing. It’s a lost art.”
“Too right.”
Kerry grasped Vince’s hand quickly, saying, “You must not stay here. There’s not much time.”
“I’ve been thinking about going anyway. You know. Doing something different. Let’s run away together.”
Duncan and Mat met Dave Suit at Shoreham airport. They flew over Shoreham, following the Adur over Lancing and beyond. Ancient tracks ran across the land, but few field systems were visible on the ground. And there was no obvious sign of the expected massive disturbance across the extent of the floodplain.
“Mmm, that’s not much good?” Dave sighed, as they walked back into town.
“No,” Duncan whispered. “We need to get nearer to the ground, on the river bank, in the reeds, through the brooks and becks, in among the living landscape, and search for signs that it passed this way. Anyone seen Gaz?”
Mat, horrified: “But the group! We’ll drop off the fucking map.”
Duncan, resignedly: “I know. This is all the things I’ve ever dreamed of.”
“Fucking hell!”
“Walk this way,” — Dave motioned with his head — “My camera’s charging indoors. I’ll go and get it. Then we can film everything we see.”
Neil Palmer, 2003
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