Larry and The Lurker

Larry and The Lurker

~ a short story / Curb Your Enthusiasm fan fiction

At the coast, there was a bulge in the waves.

It rested there, buffeting the sea’s recursive embrace; it was alive and it was watching. Sunset was long gone. The day past away into a zone of twilight. Something uncanny harbored itself here upon the beach. Only one man walked it, a Wednesday evening during Lent. Only one Man could. A great and terrible and ancient beast skulked under the water there. And it contemplated him.

On the shore, an old doddering man strolled by in a chipper meander. Transition glasses unfogged as a tempestuous overcast blew in; Larry looked upon the approaching darkness with an embracing frown-and-nod.

In the water, the titanic, tenebrous folds of only the most abyssal imagining lurked just beneath the surface. Its too many eyes glowed with sight beyond sight; the waves shimmered in a mesmerizing flow. It sighted the man with incomprehensible ardor, the likes of which only leviathanic beings such as it could nurse.

On the land, Larry David stepped into a pile of bones in the sand. His ill-fitting sandals shattered the rib cage of one Susie Greene.

“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING YOU BALD ASSHOLE!!”

Larry heard the disembodied shriek, front-loading the vicious send-off.

“Susie? Where are you?” Larry turned in place upon the sand, looking about, crushing more of Susie’s bones and Jeff’s too beside. He momentarily danced in their graves like a maimed fool, shuffling heels against the strewn waste of their exenterated bodies.

“What the hell Larry!” Jeff crooned.

Larry looked upon the jumble of broken bones and bleached skeletons caked with sand, half-buried in a lurch of beach somewhere near Santa Monica. He gasped upon the sight of the dead as they continued to sing to him from some anguished hereafter.

“Larry, you four-eyed fuck!” screamed Susie. “You just crushed my pelvis, you heartless piece of shit!!”

“I didn’t see! I’m sorry!!” Larry said.

“Femur is totally busted. In two. In two!” Jeff groaned in pain.

“What the hell are you doing here anyway!” complained Larry; nearby, the Lurker watched his imbecilic twirling with an unblinking horde of eyes.

A man in dark robes confronted Larry. He stood on the other side of the blighted road of remains. The fabric glimmered from the ocean’s exhalations. Menacingly, the cloaked one did not unveil and did not speak. A long silence heralded a longer stare between the two.

“Danson! Is that you?” asked Larry.

Ted Danson’s face appeared from the darkness of the hood, he spoke with a matter-of-fact patience.

“The Lurker requests an audience.”

“Ehh…come again,” Larry returned in a husky tone.

“The Lurker. Requests. An audience.”

“Audience with the Lurker, huh?” Larry grinned, nodded. “What is he…Boo Radley? I mean, c’mon you can’t be serious with this one Ted. This is ridiculous…you come here and you murder Susie and Jeff in cold blood? Some kinda joke, to get to me? With necromancy?? I don’t care.”

Ted shook his head, put up his hands, “You know what Larry, forget it. You should be honored.” He pointed a long, bony finger at Larry’s chest. “That the Lurker would want to see your insufferable bald ass is a privilege. But nope. Caught up in your own bullshit again, can’t see straight…”

“Straight? Is this about my sexuality? The Lurker wants to fuck me? He wants to fuck Larry David! Well, come on out Lurker. Let’s see what you’re working with. Or no! Someone with that name isn’t interested in consent, is he? No way. He must be some kind of raper!”

“It summons you! It doesn’t respond to you!!”

“And then it rapes me, is that it?”

“The Lurker doesn’t rape, Larry. The Lurker saves!”

“Saves us from what, our eldritch virginity? No thanks, pal!”

“He’s incomprehensible, you stupid, sniveling bitch. Honestly, I always thought you were a blight on humanity.”

“Incomprehensible? So what? There’s plenty of things I can’t comprehend, like how you and me got so many years on TV!”

Ted motioned with force and Larry recoiled, two gnarled hands up.

“Get outta here Larry. You’re done.”

“This is the beach. You can’t make me leave!”

Ted grabbed Larry and they took each other to the ground. The bulge watched as the two men, one robed and the other sneakered in baby blue jeans and an old Lakers crewneck, rolled around in the bone shards, moaning and grunting. The screams of the damned met their ears. Without the hood, Ted began to bleed from the eyes; his struggle slowed and Larry turned from him as his head exploded. His favorite overshirt became splattered with the gore of Ted Danson’s skull; he sighed and rose up, brushing the ivory dust and brain matter from his grey pullover.

“Never much of a fighter, that Danson. Never much of nothin’.”

Larry turned to the waves from Outside, hands out. They lapped over the Lurker’s amorphous, translucent, and utterly hairless head. The many-eyes glared. It was the thing the river of bodies swam to. Or from? One could not be sure.

“…The lurker? That really the best you can do? What? You lurk. That’s it?”

“Yes, Larry. It lurks,” said Susie.

“Lurking. What is lurking? You watch, you’re there, but not really. There’s no influence. Nothing but a voyeur. A bupkis. Big, bulging nobody. A lurker, by definition, does not influence. Just watches!” Larry chuckled. “So you’re good over there, huh?”

“It lurks, Larry,” Jeff said. “That’s what it does. So that’s what it is called.”

“The Loiterer. Buncha sickly eyes. Watching with ’em from dark corners, from under the water. Won’t even surface! I’ll tell ya, your Lurker is a real sicko. A freak that likes to watch old men walk on the beach. With a foolish name. Pure lurk, no influence! None!!”

Larry put up his hands with a guffaw and a great storm summoned itself on the horizon. Torrential rain poured back into the World and empowered the deeps with the blood of The Ones Older Than Time.

The Lurker rumbled with laughter, bubbling the coast, boiling the ocean’s trenches.

Larry’s big o-face realized itself upon his countenance for one last time as winds from Beyond swept over the beach and through his soul.

In the wake of the Lurker’s heaving uproar, was a skeleton, bald all over and still spectacled, the crackling and blasted lenses still transitioning from shade in the eveningstar’s drapery. A harsh night fell over an earth shorn of yet another restless spirit.

Larry’s skull landed among the others in a plop; he now lay amongst the cacophony of the endless dread that was unlife.

“Will all you quit that damned wailing!” he snapped.

“Bad motherfuckin’ day for a stroll, lemme tell you!” said Leon.

“What were you doing out here anyway, Larry?” Funkhouser asked. “Walking all by your lonesome, like a loser.”

Larry chuckled, took a deep breath,

“Believe it or not…it’s because I lost my faith.”

“You don’t believe in God,” Jerry returned.

“Sure I do, when I’m on the beach!”

“No way.”

“Yuh-huh.”

“Prove it!”

“How can I? It’s faith!”

“And you lost it,” Jerry stated, playing along.

“Lost! Gone.”

The ghost of Jerry Seinfeld let out a strange sound,
“I can’t believe it…What is this? Did you finally go insane?”

Larry laughed.

“Yes! We all are!! That’s become very clear to me now!!!” ~