by Martha Wells
Cleo reached for her glass of water and drank it through a straw. It had gone tepid in the languid heat of the night. She noticed her hands were trembling and hastily took the three pills that Yolanda had already placed on the side table.
Yolanda tried to block the screen with her body. ‘This news is not so good. Let me turn it off.’
‘Is it ever good? I don’t think it ever will be again. But let me see. What have I missed?’
The world. She certainly hadn’t missed that while she’d slept. A narrowing space in her mind was often fatigued in its weakening attempt to understand how people had allowed things to get so bad. And in the last few days the seemingly endless war between Turkey, Iraq and Syria had escalated to new levels, over control of the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris. The Indians still had their rain, but the Pakistanis had none, and they were also going to war again over water. Even with the sound lowered, Cleo no longer cared to watch the great dust clouds of the continual air and drone strikes, the detritus of devastated vehicles, the moonscape of obliterated cement blocks that was now much of the Middle East, Kashmir and North Africa. Cleo assumed Yolanda had been watching updates on the respective escalations.
‘Something terrible has happened here,’ Yolanda said, her face now stiff with shock.
‘Here?’ It was local news on the screen. ‘Turn it up! Quickly.’
There had been several poignant local events of late, portents and signs on her doorstep, but they rarely even made the local news. This was national news on the screen, but broadcasting from Berry Head; not even two miles from where she lived.
Cleo could see footage of the nature reserve’s unmistakable shape, shot from the air. A limestone headland, and the vestiges of what was once a great tropical coral reef, 375 million years before. The women of her family, whose portraits stood on the sideboard, had even considered Berry Head to be one half of a very old doorway.
As Cleo watched the report, augmented by Yolanda’s excited narration, she could see that a great many people had tried to step through that doorway, yesterday.
‘Dear God,’ Cleo said. ‘Those people are from local care homes…’
‘It is terrible. I do not think you should watch.’
‘Nonsense. You think I am surprised by this? They’ll do anything to get them into the water.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Open Heart, Open… never mind.’
How those poor creatures flapped and flailed as they went off the edge and down to the sea. At least seventy people from two local care homes. The infirm and the demented, all shrieking as they plummeted through two hundred feet of thin air.
There were only two films of the actual incident that had taken place during the early morning while Cleo slept; footage from the lighthouse security camera, and a shaky film taken by a carer who was now in custody. Yolanda said the films had been on repeat every thirty minutes since she had arrived at eight. Despite all that was happening in the world, Torbay was making international news because the elderly people from two retirement homes had all leapt into the sea, from off the edge of Berry Head.
The police were looking for the other staff who had driven them to the precipice. Speculation was rife. The carers must have helped the victims on and off the buses, before guiding and wheeling them by torchlight to that terrible edge that Cleo had never liked standing anywhere near.
In the recordings, the din of the seabirds was also excessive: guillemots, razorbills, black-legged kittiwakes, the gulls. They were always noisy in their cliffside nests, but as that tired and stooped parade of the thin and infirm hobbled and shuffled off and into the abyss, and down to the terrible black rocks and the churning, bitter, nighttime sea below, the noise of the birds became a true cacophony of panic, rising to a crescendo. Those birds should have been sleeping. But in that riotous avian climax, Cleo heard the name. The name screamed with abandon and with the ecstasy preceding tribute. Because that is what she was watching: sacrifice. These were sacrifices at Berry Head, not the victims of mass suicide, or mass murder, as the press were claiming. This was human sacrifice at the doorway, at the very threshold of what was waking.
Those poor fools who had been taken to those cliffs by their carers, nurses, doctors, porters, and orderlies of the Esplanade and Galmpton Green nursing homes, had all shrieked the name too, raising their exhausted and frail but impassioned voices to join the din of the birds. They had dropped out of sight either individually, as couples holding hands, and even in one disoriented clump, down into the waves and the rocks where they must have come apart like kindling. None were pushed; all walked, calling the name.
The residents of those care homes had been promised that they would see out their final days in as much comfort as anyone could hope for in such desperate times within the country. But they must all have been long prepared to engage in such an evacuation from this life.
The news moved to breaking reports about a dozen similarly affected retirement homes in Plymouth and North Cornwall. There, many elderly residents had been discovered making their way, slowly, on walking frames, and wheelchairs, in the early hours of the morning toward Whitsand Bay and other beaches. Perhaps with the intention of throwing themselves into the sea. It was unclear how many had not been prevented from achieving their goals the previous night.
Cleo had always thought it strange, and perplexing, and unnerving, how local fossils had been shaped into the exterior walls of the Esplanade Care Home in Roundham Gardens, in Paignton, as if to create some decorative feature, using local materials. This alteration had occurred once the property came into the possession of One Eye Opening. She had written to the council to explain about the hidden activity within those stones, but had not received a reply. The same innovation had been replicated in the churchyard walls in Paignton after the crucifixes had been taken down. Cleo guessed those rocks had been embedded in the mortar for different reasons now.
Like herself, she could only assume that the aged made the best material, while their minds dimmed and deranged. They provided the best vehicles to receive transmissions from down there, from beneath the waves of the bay; once the transmitters, the fossils and fossil beds were brought into closer proximity to their poor, confused minds.
Each of the affected care homes in the morning news was owned by One Eye Opening; a wealthy, nonconformist religion they were calling it on the news, for want of a better definition. A definition that Cleo had ready: a cult. A cult that had made its disingenuous inroads into the religious community and end-of-life care in a county overrun by an elderly population. It seemed unfair, and horribly Darwinian, that some were being transformed while others were sacrificed to the sea. Though the residents of Churston Ferris, like the Kudas, were wealthy; perhaps selection was dependent upon nothing more sophisticated than that.
Cleo was shocked but not surprised. Across the last five years she’d taken note of many other local curiosities. The great ructions on the seabed attested to by both the Royal Navy and the marine biology unit at Plymouth University. Fishermen using sonar who had claimed that new topographies were emerging upon the seafloor. Sailors, from what was left of the South Hams fishing fleet, had claimed to have fetched some unusual catches out of the local waters too.
With her scepticism in suspension, Cleo had never debunked the stories she had found online of what had been tugged out of the nets, before confiscation on shore by the Environment Agency. Some of the catch was still being examined in the marine biology labs in Plymouth. Desperate were the two marine biologists in Brixham, Harry and Phillip, with whom Cleo retained a vague and hardly reciprocal association after her retirement, to eschew any classifications or rumours of a Fortean nature that Cleo had immediately espoused to them. Harry and Phillip knew why Cleo had been retired, but did admit that they had personally examined five Eledone cirrhosa octopus in a lab in Brixham. Creatures generously exceeding all previously recorded sizes and weights. They had been caught in waters off the South Hams co
ast during the previous year.
Her contacts had also confirmed that the rumours of a giant squid spotted in local waters were not entirely fictional either. They had confirmed that an impossibly sized Haliphron atlanticus octopus, with only six legs, but of lengths up to ten metres, had been caught and killed by a Royal Navy PT boat, near the mouth of the Dart Estuary, after reports that it had been menacing a ferry, and had made several attempts to drag at least one passenger overboard. Her contacts claimed that what had been found in its belly, partially digested, attested to the rumours of the fates of three missing canoeists, last seen in the channel below Greenaway and heading towards Totnes the previous year. And had Plymouth’s harbour not also been deluged with Octopus vulgaris, not three years ago in 2052? A species not seen in British waters since the early sixties of the previous century.
And it didn’t stop there for anyone predisposed to seek synthesis amongst the freakish incidents and recent curiosities found in the county’s waters. Stone plinths carven with designs the Celts had imitated, and Iron Age man had replicated in stone throughout Cornwall, suddenly found off Salcombe by the engineers tasked with building the new wind farm. Great undersea basalt circles, arranged like teeth in the untidy mouths of what had resembled eyeless faces, had been discovered close to Start Point, South Devon, during the laying of new power cables to transport British nuclear power to the drought-stricken parts of Southern France. Two discoveries alone that had revived local folklore about the possibility of Atlantis having once existed off the coast of Devon and Cornwall. There had been something down there for sure, but Cleo doubted it had ever been Atlantis.
And now the newly managed care homes of Torbay had fossils in their walls, and the windows of the churches had been altered to represent an eye. A geriatric cult had willingly extinguished itself at the cliffs of Berry Head Nature Reserve, in one procession the night before the solar eclipse. Had they also been hearing the name and receiving its imagery inside their failing minds? Cleo wondered if she should cuff her own ankle to the bedstead and swallow the key, during what time remained before the eclipse, lest she join Torbay’s flightless snowbirds who seemed intent on leaping off precipices.
***
Yolanda returned at four p.m. later that day, thirty minutes late, and broke Cleo from a short doze.
Yolanda claimed the news from Berry Head was still upsetting for her, and asked Cleo if she could change the television channel. ‘I cannot see it again. But it is all they show today. They are bringing in some bodies. I would rather watch the wars.’
Cleo acquiesced as Yolanda would only be there for an hour. The nurse had been delayed by the traffic congestion that had built ahead of the eclipse. The very thought of the cosmic event was now making Cleo feel sick.
‘Why not tell me about your family,’ Yolanda asked as she brought Cleo’s tea into the room on a tray. ‘I know these women are so important to you. Maybe they can take our minds from this terrible day.’
I doubt that, Cleo thought, but looked across to the picture of her grandmother, Olive Harvey, who had continued her mother Mary Anning’s work with the weeds and rock pools, while working as a conservationist and artist, selling shells, polished madrepores and pressed weeds, mounted and framed, to tourists.
As she ate, Cleo told Yolanda how Olive had spent most of her life outdoors and on the Paignton Coast, south of Goodrington Sands, dipping into the rock pools of Saltern Cove and Waterside Cove. A woman who had fastidiously continued the family trade, photographing and collecting the intertidal flora and fauna: the flat wracks, knotted wracks, red seaweed, snakelocks anemones, and spotted gobys. Most importantly, she became an authority on Galatheastrigosa, the squat lobster. The creature had become one of her obsessions because her mother and grandmother, the brilliant but tragic Mary and Amelia, had both dreamed and then screamed about what Galatheastrigosa had originally dispersed from out of, the contemporary lobster still partially mimicking some features of its ancient parentage.
Olive had spent decades scraping and digging her way into those cliffs, where the fluvial breccias from the Permian Age amassed about the slates and sandstones from the Devonian Period. The locations of the best fossils were indicated for Olive in the work of her predecessors. Her mother and grandmother’s notes had led Olive down to the shore at low tide with the promise, or warning, that future generations of scientists would uncover even greater marvels and terrors from those cliffs.
After the decades of coastal erosion since her forebears had first scuttled, collected and processed their knowledge, the shore of Goodrington had revealed a submerged forest bed to Olive: the very tree stumps that had emerged after the last ice age. That find enlarged her reputation further in the circles that cared about such things. But by Olive’s time, more and more was revealing itself too; one century after her family began their excavations. It was Olive Harvey who also first discovered the breccia burrows, and then quickly reburied them.
In those preserved burrows were the restless relics of animals that had lived in the deserts of the Permian Age, 248 million years before, including one creature whose distant grave songs initiated the destruction of Olive’s own mind. That was the burrow left by a giant arthropleuridmyriapods, a millipede that was at least four metres long.
Olive had recorded in her journal how she’d once sat in the fossil bed to rest while she worked, and lost two days and nights, in which her mind, in her own words, ‘unravelled through its own substance and memories,’ and entered the kind of psychosis Cleo most commonly associated with a really bad experience on LSD. What Olive had seemingly rubbed against, and become irradiated by at a deep subconscious level, was probably nothing more than a near-microscopic fragment of that which had originally dispersed from the writhing and shedding of some monumental form, that occurred 248 million years previously, when this part of the British Isles was near the equator. And so began another member of the family’s inexorable decline into socially unacceptable enlightenment.
Cleo continued with her story and told the captivated Yolanda about her own mother, the tormented and twice-divorced environmentalist, Judith Harvey, who had put an end to her own severe and unmanageable cerebral rout at fifty-nine. Judith had succumbed to what was thought to be early-onset dementia and took an overdose. Despite the great blanks in her memory, Cleo had never forgotten that day.
When she’d been alive, Judith had often reminded Cleo of what Amelia and Mary Anning and Olive Harvey had respectively explored, discovered, and subsequently believed. She told Cleo all that her own mother, Olive, had passed down to her: the knowledge that our planet was but one tiny krill floating amongst billions of fragments in a cold, black, hostile ocean of gas and debris. And that our infinitesimal fragment was transformed by a visitor 535 million years before. A world subsequently destroyed and remade so many times over as a consequence of the visitor’s dreadful whims and rages. Her forebears had all shared the same dreams, because the fossils that they had exposed themselves to were the equivalent of a few smudged fingerprints on the walls of a vast crime scene, as big as a planet.
Cleo’s mother would flavour her own interpretation with her background in earth science. Judith passionately claimed that had we crept across this earth in smaller numbers, and not congregated in such carbon-rich cultures, while flashing our arrogant, thoughtless presence into the stars, and had we not made toxic and eroded the soils, bled our faecal wastes and effluents into the black deeps, crisscrossed the ocean floors and mountain ranges with cables to broadcast our infernal jabber, exhausted the fresh water and melted the glaciers, changed the wind and rainfall, heated the earth’s belly and melted the ice caps, exhausted the great populations of fish and mammals… if… we had not grown to nine billion minds and created such an intensification of teeming consciousness on one small planet, whose neural activity transmitted so far outwards… if none of this had happened then it, the visitor, may never have half-opened that one eye, down there, where it slumbered.
&nbs
p; In the preface to Mary Anning’s A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, the author wrote: ‘Just as every God has slept through our Godless endeavours, any God can yet awaken.’ Mary’s last words to the priest, who administered the last rites, are also alleged to have been: ‘What have we done? Oh, God, what did we call out to? Is that thing God?’ Not a God, but ‘God,’ the God: the ultimate creator.
Judith used to wonder aloud to Cleo, why, as a species, we’d not had more sense than to create the requisite conditions in which that name could be called out by the exhausted, dying planet, and by what expired upon it. The earth now heralded an awakening; Judith had told her that before she was ten.
Near the end of her life, Judith had once begged Cleo to bear no children. ‘For God’s sake,’ she had cried from the bed in which she was often restrained: ‘Don’t continue this!’ Cleo had thought ‘this’ was the hereditary taint of insanity, but had subsequently realised that ‘this’ had referred to ‘us.’ To all of us, the species, and our burden upon the outer skins of this little planet in our solar system. In which resided a far older occupant that had dreamed such foulness as the great lizards, the food chain, viral life, decomposition and mortality, and us too, around its eternal self, and across so many billions of years that our understanding of age bore no parallel to its own. Cleo had obeyed her mother and remained childless.
And Judith always made sure that Cleo wrote down her dreams . . .
When Cleo had finished, she remained unsure for how long she had been talking, or whether much of what she’d said, she’d only said to herself. The medication was strong.
Yolanda was already putting on her sunhat. ‘On Friday, we watch the eclipse together, from here, yes? On the balcony. I will come early.’
‘I’d rather you spent that day with your family, my dear.’
‘Oh, Cleo! You still think the world will end during the eclipse?’ Yolanda laughed.
