Another creature on the beach...

A friend of mine asked a while back when I was going to make another beach creature. Thing is I never quite know where or when one is going to appear. One minute I’m wandering around the rocks on the beach on a sunny afternoon trying to avoid wet dogs and screaming kids and the next, by that rock over there, the one that’s shaped like a flat-out chicken, a creature suddenly appears out of nowhere.

That’s what happened on Sunday. It was such a glorious afternoon that we decided to have a wander along to Penlech beach and catch a couple of hours in the sun. I have to say that when the creature appeared it quite took the warmth out of me.

There it, well not exactly stood, more sort of quivered, sucking and tutting in a whistling, reedy, birdlike whine as the creature’s tenuous, multiple, stick thin legs scratched and scraped along the sand. Half prehistoric bird, half badly made spider with just a dash of alien thrown in for flavour.

The three horned head on top of the long wavering neck was looking this way and that with those empty, bead-like, silver eyes. Just what was it searching for?

Such stilted movements too, all jerk and jump, like a scrawny, featherless, fledgling bird not quite yet ready to be out of the nest, but out nonetheless as its almost endless tail flipped and whipped and dragged along behind it like a thing with a life of it’s own. Who knows? Perhaps it had.

You could see it wasn’t clean. No, I’m not simply talking grime - there was something distinctly unwholesome about the way it picked its way carefully across the sand sniffing the air as it went. It was looking for something, and that something wasn’t good either.

That’s the thing with beach creatures, they arrive out of nowhere and inflict themselves on an unsuspecting world - well, at least they inflict themselves upon mine.

I didn’t stick around (if you’ll forgive the pun). Instead I moved on along the beach in a hurry, trying to get the sunshine back into my bones. I didn’t want to be there when the creature found whatever it was it looking for. I had an idea that once it found it things were going to get very messy on that sunny beach, very messy indeed.

Word is that some beach creatures go looking for the one that wished them here. Maybe my friend should have kept schtum.