by M. McNamara
I walk along the beach, on the hunt for a new shell.
The one I have now is quite acceptable, sturdy and round and adorned with attractive whorls, but it’s getting a bit small. “Time for an upgrade,” Merv had said, so here I am, wandering about at low tide. Normally I like to stay submerged in the shallows, but I’ve braved the exposed sand this afternoon in the hope of a lucky find. This is one of the perils of being a hermit crab: you must wear armour that you don’t craft yourself.
“Lucky snails,” I mutter as I trundle along. “They might be soft and shapeless, but they make good shells.”
Then I stop, because I catch sight of something nearby, a spire that juts upward from the sand like the tip of a castle tower. Right away I can tell it’s a good size, and my single-chambered heart flutters. Is it empty? Or perhaps about to be emptied, in the fading possession of a snail in its death throes? I pick up my pace, hardly noticing the nearby tide pool, until a dark shadow flits across my vision.
I go still, my eyes rotating on their stalks, searching for the source.
Then I spot it.
There, hiding behind a rock, is a bulky shadow, and my hemolymph runs cold—well, colder than normal, anyway—at the sight, because it belongs to a creature of robust carapace and massive claws, a thug of the crustacean world: a shore crab. Here is a being that can crush my house with one pinch of its claw and grind my body into goo.
Crap on a crabcake.
I hesitate then, torn between greed for the shell and fear of a one-way trip through a gastric mill, and I’m still wondering what to do when the brute scuttles out of his hiding spot. He moves so quickly, I barely have time to react before he picks me up with one powerful movement. Goodbye Merv, I think as I feel his mighty pincer break my shell, exposing my soft fleshy abdomen.
I’m about to be eaten.
I think for one moment of my happy place, the pretty beach I saw in a magazine that some careless human left behind, then I prepare for oblivion.
But today must be my lucky day, because the crab goes still. It takes me a moment to see why, because I’ve lost control of my bodily functions and I’m peeing (which comes out underneath my eyestalk and trickles down my face). But after a moment, I see it: an even bigger shadow. A human is walking down the beach, all vertebrate and bipedal and upright. This lifeform is even scarier than the crab, and my attacker panics and releases me. I fall down to the sand and lie dazed.
“Ginger! Where are you, girl?”
The human passes by, whistling, utterly oblivious to my presence, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
But it’s short-lived, because I’m in a very precarious situation.
The shore crab destroyed my shell, and I’m helpless now, vulnerable not just to predators but also to drying out. I get up as quickly as I can, heading for the spire I saw earlier. Please be empty, I think as I drag my naked abdomen along the sand. At any moment I expect the shore crab to return, but no shadow crosses my path, and then I’ve reached the shell, and I throw my body into its aperture before I can even determine if it’s empty.
But it is empty, and it’s a perfect size, and I experience a moment of giddy joy as I fit myself into its vacant chambers. Yes, I think, stretching out and hooking the little projections on the end of my tail fan into the shell’s interior. Then I take a moment to settle in, to feel the texture and weight of my new home.
And that’s when I notice something odd.
An irregularity on the exterior of the shell, a set of grooves near the aperture that were not put there by nature…I run my claws over them, wondering what they are. Human letters, I think; the hairless apes are always carving runes into the sand. Merv would know, and I’m just wondering where to find him—did he go to the boardwalk to scavenge human scraps?—when I notice something else that’s a bit odd.
There, just on the end of my tail fan, I detect the presence of cool liquid, as if a few drops of seawater have pooled inside the shell. I wiggle about, trying to shift them around, but they don’t move.
Instead, they begin to fizz.
It’s a very weird sensation—like I’m sitting in the froth that hisses on the sand after a wave crashes. I go still, wondering if I’m imagining it, but the fizzing grows more intense, to the point where I think some prankster poured soda into my shell. I look nervously back at my house, expecting something to explode—but that’s not what happens.
Instead, a single black bubble emerges from the tip of my shell.
I stare at the floating sphere in dismay—nobody wants bubbles coming out of their butt—but to make things worse, the blob is utterly dark; like it’s not a bubble of something, but a bubble of nothing. One by one, more bubbles appear, and now my rear end is really going to town, and I’m so distracted that I don’t notice the shore crab until it’s right behind me. Once again I am gripped by a powerful claw and lifted from the ground, and I feel the same sense of imminent doom as I behold the hungry eyes of the crab, and then a particularly large bubble emerges from my shell, so big that it envelops me, and it’s like I walked into a sea cave at midnight, and everything goes dark, and disappears.
* * *
I wake to the sound of water lapping against me.
I open my eyes. A long beach stretches before me, much different than the one I came from. For one thing, the sand here is smooth and fine, not coarse and brown, and I can’t see a rock or a clump of seaweed anywhere. The landscape above the waterline is different, too—flatter and greener, with different vegetation. As I take a breath, I realise it’s much warmer, the air heavy with the perfume of some flower wafting on the breeze.
I stand up, try to get my bearings. The sun has only recently crested the horizon, and it shines over a tranquil stretch of clear blue water, and I have a weird sense I’ve been here before.
Then I know why—I’m in my happy place! This beach looks just like the picture in the magazine. “A tropical resort,” Merv had said when I showed him, “a place far away from here.”
I’d stared at the scrap of glossy paper with surprise. “How do you know it’s far away?”
“The palm trees. Those don’t grow here. And no,” he’d added, “it’s too far away to walk there.”
So, I had resigned myself to never seeing the place, but somehow here I am. Merv said humans got there by taking planes that flew like birds, so how had I done it?
The bubbles.
It seems odd, but the more I consider it, the more convinced I become—I’d thought of this place as the crab was about to eat me, so the bubble took me here. Either that, I think, or I’m dreaming. Or maybe dead.
But whatever the reason, I’m here now, and I decide to enjoy myself. I stroll along, savouring the sweet air, the open horizon. No shore crabs can sneak up on me here! I wave my antennae, sniffing the breeze, trying to detect the odour of something I might be able to eat, but the only things I can smell are the tropical flowers.
Then I get a strange feeling.
Something is watching me.
I spin about. The beach stretches to either side, a sparkling white expanse without a creature in sight—the picture of serenity. But the sense persists, and I’m just about to groom my eyes with my maxillipeds when I hear it: the whoosh of wings, the whistling of feathered death from above. In sudden fear I tuck myself away and roll down the beach, narrowly missing the gull that was about to snatch me in its beak. It squawks in rage, its downdraft sending me sideways, and I decide that the exposed sand doesn’t seem so idyllic after all. Better to hang in the shallows, I think as I let myself roll faster and faster. When I hit the water, the incoming tide slows me down, and I emerge from my shell and scuttle away. I don’t stop until I am several feet deep, completely immersed in the cool embrace of the tropical sea.
“Hello, little hermit!”
I turn at the sound of the greeting. A few small fish are darting about near the surface, and they call out a message with their high-pitched voices, but the dialect here is strange and I can’t decipher it. Something about welcoming me with open arms, perhaps? They are gone before I can reply, flashing like jewels, and I wonder what they meant as they disappear. I can still detect their scales from a long way off—the water here is much clearer than the turbid shallows at home, unsullied by scraps of seaweed or floating debris. The only things I can see are the dancing shadows of the waves reflected on the clear sandy bottom.
I trundle along then, on the lookout for other hermits, wondering what my tropical brethren would look like, lost in a reverie until something floats past. I glance up, but it’s gone, too quick for me to see it. No matter, I think, but then I see another object float past, and this time I get a good look. It’s thin and pale, almost like a broken piece of a crab carapace…
Suddenly I stumble. I’ve tripped over a fragment of coral, and I slow down for a moment, observing my surroundings. The sandy bottom has been replaced by the edge of a rocky reef, and here, for the first time, is a multitude of life. A nearby scallop watches me with its many eyes before snapping shut; a shrimp dances over a hovering wrasse, cleaning it of parasites; a school of parrotfish swims over the crest and begins munching on coral heads.
Time to find a place to hide.
I examine a set of rocks to my left, which seems promising, but reject them a moment later; the black crevice at their base gives me a bad feeling. No, thank you, I think, hurrying forward, because I have a sense that the crevice isn’t empty, and I don’t want to know what’s inside. The other side of the pile isn’t much better, though—once I’ve rounded it, I find myself in a field of objects, strewn about like pieces of chips left on the boardwalk, and then I get a whiff of one, and I know what they are.
The remains of a large crab.
The smell is unmistakable, and then I get visual confirmation, because I spot a fragment of a claw, the pieces of a jointed leg. There’s another, and another…that’s when I realise this is not the remains of one crab, but many. I’m standing in a crustacean graveyard.
Crap on a crabcake.
I feel a creeping dread, because these crabs are much bigger than I am, and whatever ate them is a powerful predator. Suddenly I remember the fish calling out to me, and I wonder whose arms they were referring to…
The little hairs on my claws stand up then, because I have a sense that something is very wrong. I turn back towards the rocks, but see nothing. The sense persists though, and I stare at them anyway, and that is when I spot it: a barely perceptible movement, a change in the appearance of the coral rubble, as if a piece of it is moving. I look closer and perceive a creeping tendril winding its way along the base of the crevice.
The tentacle of an octopus.
My foregut drops, because here is a formidable foe, a predator that loves eating crabs, hermit or otherwise. I turn away and scuttle off at hyperspeed (my version of it, anyway), even though I know it’s no use—I can’t outrun this enemy. An octopus is far too agile to let a hermit crab escape. Don’t look back, I think, but I can’t help it, and sure enough, my frantic glance reveals that one of the rocks has detached from the pile and is sitting right behind me. A moment later I feel a powerful coil wrap itself around my shell.
Double crap.
I panic then, because Merv told me that octopuses have beaks—like underwater hawks, but worse—and I don’t want to encounter it, and that’s when a dark blob appears in the water. For a moment I think I’ve disgraced myself, but then another one appears, and another, and I know it’s the shell doing its thing again. I wish I knew what was happening—I wish I could talk to Merv—and just as the arm pulls me towards the cephalopod’s central orifice and the beak of death, darkness swallows me up, and I disappear once more.
* * *
This time, there’s no water gently lapping on a tropical beach. Instead I see four glass walls, a plastic plant, a tiny treasure chest, and a weird-looking rock.
Crap on a crabcake.
I’m in a tank of some kind, that much is clear, but where? I walk to the edge of the nearest glass wall; beyond it is an enclosed chamber full of unfamiliar structures. They have sharp angles, nothing like the soft shapes of water-sculpted objects, and they smell of chemicals and vertebrate pheromones, and then I remember something else Merv told me.
“Sometimes humans take hermit crabs as pets, and put them into glass tubs for the rest of their lives, and feed them lettuce.”
“What’s lettuce?” I’d asked, because he’d said this last bit with considerable disdain.
“Something meant for rabbits.”
I recall that conversation now, along with the fact that I didn’t ask what rabbits were, and I feel a bit of panic as I realise I’m trapped. There’s no way out—I’m stuck here with the sand and the rock and the plant and the treasure chest. But then I remember something else: my shell. Maybe I can use it to escape—after all, it worked twice so far. I close my eyes and think of bubbles, but nothing happens.
A shape at the far end of the room creaks—a door, I think—and a human enters the chamber.
“How’s my little hermie?”
It’s a female of the species, and she comes towards me and bends over the tank until her face looms overhead, terrifying and huge. I retract into my shell, but she only chuckles.
“Are you feeling shy today? I’ve got a cure for that!”
I feel her fingers grasp onto my shell, and then I am airborne, trapped in the palm of her hand, which is warm and fleshy and throbs with a peppy mammalian heartbeat. A moment later she sets me down onto a flat wooden surface.
“You can help me study,” she says. Then she sits back and begins to read.
I don’t move. Humans, in my experience, are strange and unpredictable, and I don’t trust them—I once saw a larval biped jab a lollipop into a hermit crab shell—but this one seems absorbed in her task, so gradually I emerge. At once I feel an odd substrate beneath me, thin and dry and flimsy. “You’re on my textbook,” the girl explains as I poke my eyestalks out cautiously. But she doesn’t try to relocate me, and I sense there’s no immediate danger, so I begin to walk around. Meanwhile the girl is sitting nearby, bent over some books, her non-stalked eyes squinted in concentration. I’m just wondering if she grooms them with maxillipeds when a shrill noise bursts forth. It’s jarring and terrible, like a seabird crying out in pain, but no bird appears; instead the girl picks up a glowing object and starts to talk.
“Oh! Hey, Jo. No, I can’t now, I’m studying for my physics exam. What’s that? No, it’s pretty weird stuff, black holes and string theory. The lecturer was going on about something called the Omega Point, where the whole universe….” The girl pauses and checks her notes. “The whole universe spirals towards a singularity… It’s like some weird metaphysical cone or something that exists on the edge of time. I think he was high. Anyway, maybe we can grab a coffee tomorrow?”
The girl hangs up a few moments later, and then I hear a voice calling from downstairs, something about pizza, and she springs from her chair and runs out of the room. A moment later she runs back in, picks me up, deposits me into the tank, and runs out again.
* * *
Alone in my prison, I sit back and think. I’m not sure what to make of all this, or why I’ve been transported here, and I’m wondering how I can get back home when a voice interrupts my thoughts.
“Hello, stranger. Welcome to the tank.”
I turn around in surprise, wondering who could possibly be with me, and find myself staring at…
“Merv!” I wave my antennae in pleasure and surprise, for here is my greatest friend. “What are you doing here?”
“Pardon?” Merv steps closer to me, and I realise he was hidden behind the rock. “I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve been here for years…and I am surprised you know my name, because we’ve never met.”
“What do you mean, we’ve never met?” I flick my eyestalks in confusion. “We were just hanging out yesterday, by the dead turtle that washed up. You know, by the boardwalk. Don’t you remember?”
Merv shakes his head. “No; I’ve been in this tank all my life. I’ve never been to the beach.”
At this odd statement, I go still. What was he talking about? This was Merv, my best friend, the wisest hermit on the coast. I sit back, trying to figure out what’s going on, and as I think, he begins to walk along the perimeter of the tank.
“I cannot say much about the boardwalk, but I feel like I have travelled to many places, because Megan—that is the name of the girl— is a great reader, and she often speaks to me about her interests. And sometimes I feel as if I have been to those places.”
At this paradox, I rumble the teeth in my gastric mill. “What do you mean? You just said you’ve never left this tank.”
Merv does not reply at first. Finally he says, “Did you know that Megan is taking a course in physics? I thought it would have little appeal to me, but it’s really quite interesting. For example, some researchers think there might be more than one universe, that every choice we make generates another potential world. Have you ever thought there might be another version of yourself out there, on another beach?”
“No.” I shake my head, because the idea is ridiculous, but then I pause. “Actually, now that I think of it…maybe I do. I’ve had a pretty weird day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I just found a new shell, and something odd is happening with it. It generates these black bubbles, and they seem to suck me into another place. That’s how I got here.”
“Really?” Merv comes close to me then, sniffing and combing my shell with his mouthparts; when he detects the markings near the aperture, he goes still.
“Oh, yeah,” I say as he inspects the grooves. “I was wondering what those were. I wanted to ask you, actually. Are they letters?”
Merv is quiet for some time. Then he murmurs, “Yes.”
“What do they say?”
“I am not sure…my human is a bit rusty…but I think they spell out ‘QH.’”
“QH? What does that stand for?”
Merv does not answer. Instead he walks away; when he speaks, his voice is shaky. “By the great crab in the sky, that’s it…you’re it…”
“I’m what?”
“The quantum hermit.” He turns back to me now, his eyes wide. “There is a prophecy that one day, a hermit will find a shell containing the Omega Point…and he can travel to a place beyond space and time…some call it heaven, others call it the union of all things.”
“Really?” I look at him in doubt. “The only place this has taken me is a beach full of predators, and here.”
“Then perhaps you aren’t using it correctly.” He sits back. “If the prophecy is true, your shell is generating tiny black holes…they operate according to the laws of quantum mechanics…so to use it, you must understand physics. Here, I’ll give you the basics.”
So Merv launches onto a long explanation then, discussing particles and symmetry and tidal forces, and I pretend to listen, but really I sit back and sigh. All I want is to be at home, with my friends, and the original version of Merv…even the shore crab wouldn’t be bad, as long as he didn’t eat me. I’m lost in thought until Merv says something that catches my attention.
I put up a claw. “Wait. Can you repeat that?”
Merv looks up. “Weren’t you listening?” He sighs. “I was discussing spirals in time. They
lead to the Omega Point…the idea is that space and time collapse until they transcend the boundaries of reality. The equations are difficult to calculate, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get there eventually.”
“Spirals in time…” I repeat the words, and then I feel it again, the fizzing inside my shell, but this time it’s much stronger, and then a bubble appears, as dark and mysterious as the night sky, or perhaps the beak of an octopus, and Merv goes still, and I can see the wonder in the hexagonal facets of his eyes.
“It’s happening,” he whispers, and the floor rumbles as the bubble grows larger. First it is the size of the rock, and then it is the size of the tank, and then it leaps outward until it’s absorbed Megan’s desk and all her textbooks, and then it’s taken up the whole room, and I can’t see anymore because Merv and I tumble into another place. I blink, because this is definitely the weirdest place of all.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Outer space,” Merv replies in awe, and I look around and see that I’m floating in a sea of nothingness. Beyond me, far out in the distance, is an endless field of stars, sparkling like sunlight on a breaking wave, while below me spins a great orb as luminous as the eye of a crab.
“A planet,” Merv whispers, “and an asteroid belt.” He waves a claw at a multitude of objects forming a ring around the planet, a variety of shapes and sizes, and they remind me of rocks lying on a beach, but when I look closer I see that they aren’t just rocks, and then I can’t hear Merv anymore, because I know we’ve reached it—the Omega Point—and I realise that it’s a universe populated by spirals in time, and the humans are so silly, because the spirals aren’t some mathematical equation, they are hermit crabs nestled in their shells, and they float gracefully in the aether, as far as the eye can see.
* * *
About the Author
M. McNamara has written three books and many short stories, three of which have been accepted for publication; she also won a Halloween short story competition with her piece The Haunted Library. If you would like to know more about her and her work, please visit her website, mmcnamarabooks.com.