‘I’m seeing them, Pau,’ I whispered. ‘I’m seeing them.’
Art began to walk backwards. He tripped on a rock and landed on his backside, causing his attention to turn to the sky.
And then, back at beach level, there were other creatures. Including a goat. Coming from beyond the car park, from the shade beside Atlantis Scuba and the disappointingly empty bowl. It was Nostradamus, hobbling on his cloven hooves across the sand, a sense of determination and even hope flavouring his usual misanthropy. Indeed, every animal within a mile radius was rallying together like white blood cells to an infection, heading towards the hotelier currently scrabbling to his feet.
Lobsters again burst out of their new tank in the restaurant and scuttled towards the beach.
A bottlenose dolphin jumped out of the water and dived back into the sea, heading fast towards us.
Rabbits hopped across the sand, travelling in the same direction as geckos, lizards, snakes.
Moths and butterflies fluttered and danced their way towards the shoreline, the air between them specked with mosquitos and a loose cloud of cicadas. Every animal heading steadfastly towards Art, like iron filings to a magnet.
Sofía tried to address the crowd, telling them to leave the beach for their own safety, but no one listened to her. Well, no one apart from the Guardia Civil officer, whose fear of wild creatures was causing him to retreat back to the car park.
Alberto gave me a knowing look. ‘You did it, Grace. You sent the signal.’
And I turned to see Art trying to run across the sand, but the first cormorant had reached him, pecking at him, attacking him with the intent to push him back towards the ocean. Art stayed steady, and pushed the creature away with his mind, breaking the poor bird’s neck. The dead bird fell heavily to the sand. He then kicked a rabbit and stamped on a variety of insects. ‘Die,’ he said, trying to comfort himself with the word as well as using it as a command. ‘Die, die, die, die, die…’ It was a marked departure from the speech about sustainability and responsible tourism that he’d planned to give the assembled journalists and travel vloggers, who were still generally in a state of stunned silence as animals walked and ran and slid and flew around them.
But it was too late for Art now. A Montpellier snake similar to the one Alberto had given to the doorman at Amnesia was now biting his ankle. The light La Presencia had given him was now being taken back. It was leaking out from the wound the snake had given him, visibly diffusing into the water.
‘No!’ said Art, his voice loud but broken and fragile. ‘Come back! Come back! Come back!’
He waded further into the sea in his linen suit. He cupped saltwater in his hands and gulped it down, as if he could somehow scoop La Presencia’s light back inside him.
The whole beach by this time was so full of animals it was like looking at an army. A strange, eclectic animal army.
But in the end, it wasn’t the land animals that proved to be the problem for Art. It was in fact a Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish, a type that hadn’t been seen in Ibiza’s waters for more than seven years, whose long tentacles with nematocysts containing unusual levels of poison wrapped around Art and stung him multiple times on his calf and his inner thigh.
‘I was better!’ Art howled, his mind filled with a distant and maybe even mournful memory of torturing a woodlouse, before the pain became too much and he fell into the water.
I was better. It was an ambiguous statement. It could have meant and referenced many things, and his emotional state, fused as it was with fear and fury and a tinge of regret, certainly didn’t give a clear insight into his meaning. His mouth then made another sound before his whole body went into shock and he collapsed face down in the water.
The body was brought back onto the beach by the humans. I and Alberto joined the effort. I didn’t want Art to die. I promise you that. Even though he would have tried to surreptitiously kill Marta and anyone else who got in his way if he’d stayed alive, I didn’t want to be the cause of any more death. Alberto even made an attempt to resuscitate him. But it turned out that nature had other ideas. And, within a minute, his vital organs stopped functioning. I tried to read his mind in the last few moments, but it was impossible. It was like trying to read freshly inked words blurred in the rain.
And all the creatures – apart from the human ones, who stood there in bewildered silence – went back to their usual indifference towards humanity. The glow of La Presencia that had spread across the entire sea between the beach and Es Vedrà retreated until there was just a faint throb of light above the spot where I had first encountered it. And then it disappeared completely, back to the cloud-sphere hovering just above the seagrass, awaiting its next necessary intervention, and the surface of the sea looked as though nothing had happened. Just calm waves and the ordinary glisten of a reflected sun.
The sky soon cleared of birds, no more cicadas could be seen in the air, and the snakes slithered away across the sand. The dead cormorant stayed there, its pitch-black feathers contrasting starkly with the golden sand, its neck twisted at an unnatural angle, its head pointing towards the sea, towards Es Vedrà, towards La Presencia.
Only the goat, Nostradamus, seemed to show any real interest.
He stood there for a few seconds, staring at the dead human with a sense of something I interpreted as curiosity and relief. But then his general air of misanthropy returned, and he walked away from the commotion and the humans, to find some peace.
Alive
Of course, you knew I didn’t die. That was always a spoiler. How could I have ever written this if I had?
I love that word ‘spoiler’, don’t you? The idea that if we know what is about to happen, it takes the enjoyment from it.
It’s so strange that we don’t want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. We want to know we will fall in love, or be healthy, or finish the degree in style, get the good job or the comfortable pension. We want the solution. We want it all mapped out. We want to know everything ends well. We want it all spoiled, with as little mystery as possible. But where is the fun in that? And take it from someone with gifts of precognition beyond all the world’s population: there are no real spoilers. There is always an observer effect. There is always an unknown variable, and that unknown variable is often yourself. Embrace the mystery would be my advice.
Embrace the impossibility of it all.
Enjoy the not-knowing.
Don’t rush to the wedding or the death or the amen.
But yes, of course, it is no ghost writing this manuscript. I am very much still here and very much still alive. In fact, I am more alive than I have ever been.
The Fate We Make
So it was that Es Vedrà remained precisely as nature intended. No further goats were killed. No limestone was blasted out of shape. No habitats were destroyed. No busy route of water taxis was allowed above the Posidonia seagrass.
Sofía Torres went back to the regional parliament in Palma and, after declaring the deal with Eighth Wonder was no longer in effect following the event of Art Butler’s death, she remarkably backed a vote to proceed with a bipartisan bill stating that no future agreements would be made for hotel developments in areas of ‘ecological or cultural significance’. The bill passed.
The casino decided to drop all charges against us, as the former witnesses now said that they never saw any cheating and wondered why they had said that. The legal fees were considerably less than expected, and we donated more than half of the remaining money to the Ibiza Preservation Fund – though I kept a little of it for my shopping budget.
And, interestingly, of the journalists who had attended the press conference only one accurately reported what they had seen – but they were soon dismissed from their job and recommended psychiatric help on account of ‘delusional thinking’. A couple of journalists had managed, despite their shock, to record everything on their phones, including a sky and beach full of determined creatures. But internet users later said that the footage was an example of how clever AI-generated imagery had become.
The official version of the story soon became that the famed British hotelier Art Butler had experienced some kind of mental breakdown and had wandered into the sea, where he had been stung by a jellyfish. La Presencia or the glowing sea was never mentioned. Alberto said this is how extra-terrestrial experiences were always treated. ‘They start with a whole loaf of truth and reduce it to one edible crumb.’
Anyway, I should tell you one little thing more about that afternoon on the beach.
Marta arrived after Art’s body had been taken away. Her newfound talents – as strong as mine, I think – had told her exactly what was happening, and so as soon as she could get away she’d headed to Cala d’Hort.
‘It happened, didn’t it?’ she said, once she found us. The beach looked normal again, with only a few extra lizards and shell-shocked journalists hanging around. ‘The signal.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I think it did. But I…I didn’t want him to die.’
