Bokrug and the Boy

by Liam Hogan

“You know we don’t care?”

“Yes. You’ve said.”

It wasn’t much of a beach. Estuary mud, littered with debris from both river and sea. A hulking, concrete sewage outlet, that only discharged at the minimum recommended distance from land when measured at high tide. Betwixt and between, neither ocean nor shore, even the seabirds avoided the area, as Samuel Pelsey trudged through the boot-sucking sludge, half-heartedly poking a stick.

No more than a giant step behind, the Great Old One lurked. Against the grey sky, reflected by the grey sea (or was it the other way around?), foregrounded by grey mud. The eldritch horror’s powerful limbs and webbed feet were better suited to the conditions than an eight-year-old’s short legs and hand-me-down, but still-oversized wellingtons, one of which had long ago sprung a leak, the cracked and weathered seals not up to the pull of the thick mud, rank water oozing in with every second step and soaking his doubled up socks. His jeans were turning the same dismal grey, caked layers that would only flake off when next he went to put them on, there being little point in being washed until the “holiday” was over.

The horror, which went by the name of Bokrug, (but not to many, not in these unenlightened times,) had first observed this dirty-straw-haired youngster as he’d stood, hands in tight fists, backed up against the rough, slime-covered sewage outlet, facing down a motley crew of older, local kids. Something in Samuel’s stance, in his refusal to cry and run away as the taunts and handfuls of mud flew in, had snagged the water god’s attention. Finally, the gang had tired of their sport, perhaps assuming their victim was mentally incapable of the response they sought. And so they’d wandered off, hurling the casual “loser!” and “dumb kid” in their wake.

The horror had taken a short step forward, into the space the bullies had vacated, and the boy’s wounded gaze snapped to it.

“Your turn,” Samuel said, with more defiance than either hate, or fear. “Go on. Do your worst.”

Bokrug’s worst was very, very bad indeed. Apocalyptically bad. The total destruction, overnight, of a thriving city, of a prosperous kingdom, bad. Only psychotic heads of cults who, deep in their soiled, shrivelled hearts, believed more in themselves than in legends of River Gods, ever asked Bokrug to do their worst. And the horror sometimes gave the fools the merest taste of what they were capable of, just for the remote pleasure of watching those so-called ‘priests’ claw out their own eyes, and other organs.

But this kid?

“That would mean we’d noticed you,” the horror replied, after a lengthy pause. “Would mean you were worth noticing.”

The boy nodded, just the once, and then shrugged, drifting towards the water line, following the receding tide.

“I’m Samuel,” he offered over his rounded shoulder.

“We don’t care,” the horror replied, which is why the boy didn’t get to hear the horror’s true name, and reality didn’t shred itself around the unspeakable syllables, as those unwise priests had once done, their eyes swelling and their bodies hunched, the snap! as bones broke and reformed to become frog-like, to better serve Bokrug’s unfathomable will.

After a while, the horror, not having anything better to do this side of this century, had slithered in the boy’s footsteps, sniffing the pools of grey water that filled them. The horror’s own feet were fleshy and three pronged, ending in sharply curved talons capable of ripping through the hull of even metal boats. The pools Bokrug left behind spanned six or so of the boy’s smaller impressions, but because they were shallow, the horror could still see where Samuel had stepped, the combined footprints even more bizarre than theirs alone. If Bokrug was careful enough, it looked like an extended arrow, the dotted shaft pointing back the way they had come.

The boy didn’t appear to pay Bokrug much attention as he worked his way down the gentle slope, and then up again, hours later, chased by the turn of the tide. Samuel’s pockets didn’t have much space for finds, but then, he didn’t make many. Plastic bottle tops and rusty drinks cans; these were not treasures that he could make use of, that would fill the void of time, and so on he probed, the hiss of the waves and the oh-so-soft tread of Bokrug for company.

At the end of the long day, as a baleful sun touched the horizon and a chill air lifted a foul miasma into the air, Samuel had nodded from the top of the low rise behind which sheltered a caravan park, hell on Earth. “See you tomorrow,” he’d said.

Had it been obviously a question, had it been said in a way that could be thought presumptuous, had one of the thousand and one insults and put downs and vile curses escaped Bokrug’s rubbery lips… but Samuel hadn’t even waited for a reply, trudging towards the distant lights of Sandpiper: Holiday Homes and Caravan Park.

And so Bokrug had hunkered down, staring out to the darkening sea with myriad eyes as night settled around them.

“You’re not my first, you know.”

“No?”

“I’ve had monsters before.”

Bokrug tilted their head, ran a bifurcated tongue over serrated teeth, the noise like chalk on a blackboard. “We don’t–” they started to repeat once more, but let the truncated phrase drift on the stiffening breeze.

“They come at night,” Samuel went on, ignoring the interrupted interruption, or maybe just completing it mentally on the eldritch horror’s behalf.

Bokrug wasn’t foolish enough to dismiss such comments as merely a creature of the child’s mind, of the dream realm, and even if they had, would that make them any less potent? Maybe such visions explained why the boy accepted their ominous presence, their dreadful existence, without doing all that pointless screaming and running away that those who normally stumbled across them did.

“Not for a while, though,” the boy added, as an afterthought.

“No.”

“I’m a big kid,” Samuel said, from beneath Bokrug’s looming shadow, the skies today a lighter shade of grey. “Can’t go running to my parents’ bed, whenever I get scared.”

“I suppose not.”

The boy squinted up at the monstrous form, at the jagged spines that ran along Bokrug’s elongated arms and down the broad back. “I’d get into trouble if I even mention them. Or you.”

Bokrug wonders, idly, if they would be doing the boy a favour by devouring his absentee parents. Parents who sent their young kid off for the long summer day, without food or drink or even a few coins for entertainment, while they did whatever it was adult holiday makers did when kid unencumbered. It would be easily done; the horror’s wide jaw unhinged, so that they could swallow prey larger than they were. A whole, rust-flaking static caravan, at a stretch. But such direct action wasn’t really Bokrug’s style, unbecoming of a god. Perhaps they would wait a thousand years instead, before destroying every one of their descendants. Revenge was a dish served so frigid that few could even remember what their ancestor’s transgression had once been.

Though that probably wouldn’t help the boy much, especially as their descendants included his descendants… This was why Bokrug avoided the pitiful affairs of humankind. It’s complicated, kind of summed them up.

Still. The horror wanted to do something. Some small act, not to show that they cared–for had they not said that they did not?–but just to nudge the balance of the universe an insignificant smidgen in Samuel’s forlorn direction.

Though perhaps just being there was enough? The boy seemed to think so, as another day came to a close and he repeated his backward “see you tomorrow.”

As dusk descended once more, Bokrug shaped the dream creatures they had glimpsed in the boy’s thoughts from the estuary mud. It would take the merest breath, the slightest touch, just their will, to bring the blighted fiends to awful life. Perhaps then the boy’s parents wouldn’t be so ready to dismiss his nocturnal fears. Perhaps those fears, rendered in effluent tainted mud, would do the irksome chore of punishing Mr and Mrs Pelsey for their contemptuous ignorance.

But would they stop there? Doubtful. And even if they did, would Samuel truly be better off an orphan? The kid was lonely enough already.

It was, indeed, complicated.

They watched, as the tide washed the creations away, wiping the slate, if not clean, then at least uniformly filthy, resetting it for tomorrow. In the distance a one-eyed lighthouse turned and blinked, turned and blinked, slow and sorrowful, as the lights on passing container ships drifted across the horizon.

Bokrug sat and watched and pondered, as high above the moon tugged the water back and forth. It would be fuller, tomorrow. Already it glittered on the wet mud and shallows, pointing the way with its own arrow, tempting the horror to go on their way, to leave this doleful place, Samuel included, far behind. They had not, after all, made any promises.

Had they?

Samuel was not alone when he returned the following morning. Though nor, as Bokrug batted irritation aside, could he be truly said to be with anyone either. It was the same group of older boys as last time, hounding his footsteps. The same torments, a little slicker perhaps, a little more personal, their edge honed by a day’s absence.

Once again, Samuel backed up across the mud to the concrete sewer pipe, and once again, the boys followed, their prey cornered, helpless, alone.

Bokrug watched, unmoved and unmoving, until the serpent like, half-buried tail gave the tiniest twitch.

For a moment, the boys stopped, sensing something they didn’t understand, couldn’t compute, a ripple that wasn’t repeated.

It didn’t need to be.

The mud remembered. That’s what mud is, the vague persistence of the land the river that had bore it had passed through. Memories, of fields, yes, but also of long gone villages, and burial mounds, and of things much more ancient.

The shapes Bokrug had formed might have been smoothed and flattened by time and tide, but the same mud lay beneath the boys’ feet. That tremor was all it took to summon back Samuel’s nightmare creatures. And Bokrug needed to do nothing except stand by, as pustulent arms, and wicked claws, and tentacular tentacles, reach up through the soft mud to wrap around the older boys’ feet, slithering up their bony ankles and slapping against their pale calves and gripping them tight, as they belatedly realise their terrible plight.

Needed to do nothing at all, to let those dream realm abominations drag Samuel’s tormentors down, to smother them, to tear them apart, to show them the real meaning of–

“No.”

Bokrug looked over in surprise. The boy wasn’t watching the plight of his foes, the green fog that swirled around their imprisoned feet, eating away at their trainers and sandals, but was staring right at Bokrug instead.

“Not with my monsters, if you don’t mind,” Samuel said, before dropping his gaze. “Let them go.”

And Bokrug, who hadn’t been asked to do something in nearly two thousand years, (“do your worst” having already been discounted) and hadn’t been told to do something for far, far longer, let the boys go.

“They’re bullies and louts, but they don’t deserve that, and they’re not worth it–barely worth noticing, in fact.”

“Are you sure?” Bokrug asked.

“Positive.”

The boys, released from the mud, made desperately for higher, firmer, safer ground, stumbling and falling as often as not in their haste. By the time they got to the low ridge overlooking the estuary, they were six grey golems, their limbs shaking with unquenchable fear. Just one of them stopped to glance back, whether in fear for Samuel or in fear of Samuel, it was strangely hard to tell. Bokrug’s shadow darkened the mud between the waste pipe and the shore, and seemed to stretch towards the trembling watcher. The kid shuddered, mouth wide open, and stumbled on.

Samuel, after a moment’s pause, carefully and steadily waded through the churned up mud, following in the gang’s footsteps, picking up the loose change the boys had shed as they’d struggled to escape the unseen but very much sensed threat.

Up on the pier, adults shifted out of Bokrug and the boy’s way. They’d claim, if pressed, that it was because the boy’s legs, and hands, were covered in foul-smelling mud, which was true enough. They’d claim, if asked, that the boy was alone, which was not.

They certainly wouldn’t be able to explain the very large candyfloss, hovering in the air above the boy’s more normal-sized one like a pink cloud, any more than the shop that had sold them both could explain why it only charged for the one, and how come the girl who normally operated the machine with practised apathy had been unable to stop twirling the long stick in the drum around and around until it felt like her arms were about to drop off, until the machine finally ran out of sugar.

Bokrug looked out to sea. Away from the unfrequented and unpopular estuary the view was more like you might expect a seaside town to offer, gulls riding the wind, a few brave souls splashing in the always cold waters, even a sparkle of sunlight as the day brightened.

The river god preferred lakes. Placid ones, where a sudden ripple could send the right sort of dire warning. And there were other eldritch beasts of the oceans, hidden in darker depths. Even on the wooden planks suspended above the waters, Bokrug felt a little like an uninvited, unwanted guest.

But… but they had been invited. They were, implausibly, wanted. They licked at the sugary, light as air confection with a tongue that could oh so easily rasp the living flesh from bone, and sighed contentedly. Bokrug could almost imagine getting used to this. Perhaps. Given another thousand years?