by Adam Nevill
‘And you may ask –’ Cleo was not to be stopped, even as Yolanda was halfway through the door ‘– why don’t I flee to higher ground? But if you consider what the women of my family discovered, who would want to survive what is coming?’
[Excerpt from the diary of Cleo Harvey]
July 18th, 2055
My dearest Yolanda,
I may not remember to tell you this. I may become distracted, or sleep through your next visit. But as I am enjoying a good period of clarity this afternoon, I feel I owe you some explanation so that you can better make sense of the disparate stories that I have been telling you over the last two years; stories about my family and our work here in this bay.
My great-grandmother, Amelia Kirkham, whom I may have mentioned to you during our association, was certain that what she called the Old One, or Great Old One, as she was wont, arrived on our planet in the Ediacaran Period, 535 million years ago, and during the last gasps of the Pre-Cambrian ages.
Her methods for deducing this timeline were complex, and involved as much science as imagination; or where the two enmeshed in her dream life. Even with her eyes closed, and while she was away in other places and times as she slept, she still had an eye for the landscapes that she saw, and for the forms of those things that left the imprints she found in the cliffs.
Amelia surmised that the arrival occurred during the time of the great soft-bodied inhabitants. Those that had existed for hundreds of millions of years, ever consuming each other and recycling their drifting forms. These indigenous denizens of the young Earth left almost nothing for fossil hunters to find, because they had no bones, shells or teeth. But she learned that vast creatures had burrowed through the Earth during Ediacaran times, and trawled the oceans too; great tunnels and gouges were found here in Torbay and in Australia, though nothing of what left the creases in the stones.
Amelia, however, caught sight of them, the vast iridescent jellies and the great drillers of the planet, as if she was floating among them, or scurrying through the debris of their excavations. And in her waking life what Amelia recalled both fascinated and traumatised her. These tremors of shock loosened her rickety mental foundations. But the monstrous shapes, the diaphanous swellings of the poisonous skirts, the viscous trailings through the hot green deeps and the blind squirmings that she tried to describe and paint, were nothing compared to that which blasted through the atmosphere and then dispersed itself into incalculably new forms. The visitor.
The Cambrian Period, as we know, is renowned for the creativity of its seas. Nothing lived on what little land existed. That far back, the maelstrom of creation was still in the deeps, and what wallowed in the watery expanses became varied and all too abundant. But it was our visitor who made these new ways of life possible. What it stimulated into being about its landing site crept and leaped, crawled, swam and burrowed to escape parental predation. There were shells, encasing such young life, at least in these Cambrian times, carapaces made in the image of the old visitor’s armour. What was still soft and boneless was mostly swept away, or simply reinvented.
But the visitor, the Great Old One, was not satisfied, or so my forebears all muttered in their bloodless and traumatised states in a local hospital that is now long gone (luxury apartments, would you believe?).
Great ructions and upheavals were emitted as the slowly rusticating visitor remade and remade again the environment that flooded past its often slumbering form beneath the waves. One such mighty cataclysm was the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. The trilobites, brachiopods and graptolites were mostly rendered obsolete because of decisions that we can only guess at, if ‘decision’ is the right word. Human terms are imprecise, for although we share a minute fragment of the Old One’s vast consciousness within our own sentience, we are not like it.
This slaughter or genocide of what had either been created or adapted from the insensate drifters of the fathoms occurred 443 million years ago, in two stages divided by hundreds of thousands of years in which the monarch of our watery rock rested between its annihilations.
My poor forebears all cited the alien deity’s sensitivity to temperature and climate, and claimed that it drew great ice sheets over itself and its resting places following the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. It also used a new armour of ice to drastically alter the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere above the waters. But the ruler continued to vandalise its own newly created habitat, repeatedly, across the next 380 million years, whenever its meditations became fitful or disturbed. The planet was plunged into apocalypse and collapse in the Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. There were smaller mass extinctions too, and in each of these eruptions of the roused tyrant’s rage, half of the species that it had formed or evolved were destroyed again.
Varied evolving parts of itself were discovered upon our shores by my fossil-hunting family. Most of the clues to what came before mankind were from the Devonian and Permian Periods, and because the slaughtered littered their corpses in the bare cliffs of our beautiful, sheltered Torbay, my forebears dug them up. Do you see?
The Devonian was the Age of Fishes. The sea levels were so very high and the temperature of the water too hot for some, like our ruler, at thirty degrees in the tropics. So a great wrath from below was invoked by this heat. Now this is important, if you consider the temperature of our own world now. But three quarters of all the species on this planet were made extinct across a slow, deliberate and sadistic cull lasting for several million years. At one point, you could say chemical weapons were employed by the Great Old One. The oxygen was removed from the waters, as the creator noted such a chronic dependence upon that gas amongst its myriad subjects. The wiping of the slate was also embellished by the Old One’s wilful alterations in sea level, by changes in the climate and by disruptions in soil fecundity.
Even great rocks, passing through the heavens, were pulled down by its rage on the seabed; a rage that our own baboonish antics today inadequately mimic. The fury that destroyed what had been created must have been incendiary, incandescent, and so cruel. My relatives only found fragments of the war-torn carcasses. They had been buried in rubble for 359 million years, but they were still smoking with a psychic trauma at a bacterial and subatomic level.
The visitor covered the world with ice again. It banished the Earth from its sight and slept in the ruins. The survivors struggled on. The land welded together its wreckage into the Pangaea supercontinent, in which every bleeding and shell-shocked continent came together to shiver in the ice. This diaspora began 290 million years ago. But what life and activity there was heated the planet all over again and melted the ice.
Such was the savagery and merciless genocide of the visitor upon awakening this time that all previous mass extinctions were rendered irrelevant. You could say that the Great Old One came out swinging with both eyes open, and The Great Dying began. The fish, and even the insects, were smashed and cast aside. He called down a rain of stones from that canopy of debris that flowed through the solar system. He opened his bellows and poisoned the Earth with methane, rid the air of oxygen and suffocated his multitude of abandoned children. Up rose the tyrant’s seas and down they crashed upon what we call life. The annihilation was near total. All but four per cent of the species of the Earth were put to death. My mother told me that his indifference alone had allowed the four per cent to survive. All of what is left alive today began life in the four per cent that survived The Great Dying.
Two hundred million years ago, and then 65 million years ago, he laid waste again and again to what swam, flew and crawled anew around his throne. And again, he used the climate as his weapon.
Sixty-five million years after that final massacre, our species heated this Earth again, and we have become noisome, noisy and populous. Only the flora, water and the animal kingdom can sense the destruction and extinctions of the past ages, and they have begun to scream that name in alarm and terror again. They know that one of our creator’s e
yes has opened. Bleary with slumber maybe, but red with a demented rage that is as hot as a star.
As I watch the news on the screen in my home, and as I reel through the data from every kind of scientific observation and analysis that overloads our poor and troubled minds, in all of this chaos, I believe that we have fatally roused the Great Old One with our careless tenancy. We have begun to wake him with the heat we created. The visitor is the sole creator, and always has been, but we have dared to ape a deity’s excesses. So this time his wrath will explode with a creativity that not even the cruellest god or devil in any of our mythologies could imagine to inflict upon its subjects.
This is why I think it best that you spend the day of the eclipse with your loved ones.
I sincerely wish that I, and my mother, and her mother, and her mother, really were nothing but insane, deranged and delusional old women.
Your fond friend,
Cleo
At the end of sleep, Cleo dreams of the bay. The same dream she’s suffered for months. Or has it been months? It feels familiar, but how will she really know? But from Hope’s Nose to Berry Head, she dreams of the great body of water turning as black as oil before roiling like a weir as wide as an ocean.
The thin outline of the sun’s silhouette diminishes, then vanishes.
Stars she recognises, and many that she does not recognise, and many other shining objects, crisscross the vast canopy of sky, leaving silvery trails like snails upon patio stones.
And when the sun begins to reappear the people who gather on the shore all call out a name. Their myriad, faraway voices sound like a small wave washing upon sand before dying into silence.
The horizon changes its shape.
Soon, it is as if all the water in the world is rushing forward from out there, in the form of a long black wall. Behind the great wave, she thinks she sees something, vast and lumpen in shape, that could be a new mountain emerging from the Earth’s crust, rising to conceal the sun again.
Cleo awakes to the sound of screams. Tens of thousands of them. Screams on the shore one mile away combining in unison with the screams on the television screen that flickers beside the balcony doors of the living room. The whole world seems to be shrieking at the same time.
Yolanda is on the balcony. She is naked.
In her waking delirium, for some reason that Cleo cannot understand, her nurse has entered her home that morning and removed all of her clothes.
‘Yolanda!’ Cleo calls out with a throat so dry the word sounds like a croak.
Even in the din below the balcony that now resembles a crowd in a football stadium, or a hundred school playgrounds filled with terror, Yolanda hears Cleo. The nurse turns around, smiling.
As Yolanda steps into the room the first thing Cleo notices is the eye tattooed upon her flat brown stomach. An eye that she recognises. She’s seen it around and the tattoo is a good likeness.
The wind that hits the building turns the curtains vertical and Yolanda staggers, but never stops smiling. Her face is wet with the tears of an intense, private joy.
The ground shakes and everything in the apartment rattles. Amelia, Olive and Judith’s pictures fall upon the sideboard, as do the preserved and pressed weeds that hang upon the walls.
The din outside might have been caused by a plane crashing in a thunderstorm; or the roar might have been the very Earth being twisted and broken within a pair of great hands. The sea doesn’t sound like the sea any more. It becomes a bestial roar.
No more than a few feet before Cleo’s seat, Yolanda opens her mouth, but Cleo has no chance of hearing what comes out of it. From the movement of the nurse’s lips she can still be certain that a name has been called.
Yolanda helps Cleo out of her chair and begins moving her towards the balcony, either to see what is happening or to make her a part of the commotion. Cleo winces and whimpers when she sees the long, livid gills where Yolanda’s ribs should be.
White Light, White Heat
There was no true light in that place. Nothing at all to transport the spirit. Nondescript and forgettable, like so many others in the company, I would sit at my desk in silence, facing forward, staring at a screen. Sometimes my body suggested to me that it could catch fire from the inside. Frustration was incendiary. It had the potential to ignite the black lump of my despair, a slow-burning and inexhaustible fuel. Boredom fanned the embers red. Futility was the by-product of my smouldering; the cinders and ash that my hopes and purpose had been reduced to. My efforts and thoughts were the smokeless exhaust from a life wasted and rendered meaningless.
A silent furnace of anxiety and dissatisfaction dressed in a white shirt. That was me, sitting before a computer monitor with my face reflected in the screen, same every day, year after year after year. My features were made ghoulish by the glow of the monitor that I longed to smash my forehead into.
I was one of many. Call us Legion.
I worked in a long room of many desks. Behind each desk sat a hunched, tense and mostly silent colleague. With an increasing regularity towards the end of my tenure, the woman at the neighbouring work station would occasionally expel a huge sob, and then declare, ‘Oh God’, in a voice made thin and unstable by her misery. After each episode she would sniff and swallow noisily, then dab her eyes and nose with a tissue, before falling silent again. No one looked at her during these outbursts. We all knew that she was approaching the end of her consultation period and would soon receive the white envelope from the executives.
During my last days at the company, other than the sobs of the woman in the midst of an emotional collapse (who resembled so many others in the past, whose faces and names I have mostly forgotten), and beside the creak of the chairs, the predominant sound that arose from the other thirty eight desks in the office was the incessant clicking of fingers on keyboards. Hands raced across dirty plastic keys all day long. I was reminded of termites or beetles, relentlessly chewing rotten wood. Or ants burrowing inside a mound of soil, somewhere sunless and sealed from the world, behind wire fences on forgotten and forgettable waste ground. Like the very site of the industrial estate that housed the company.
Sometimes I would also become aware of the buzzing of the lights in the ceiling. I imagined they were broadcasting the ghostly monotones of the dead insects that littered the transparent plastic sheaths, beneath tubes emitting a sickly illumination. Outside the windows, the sky invariably resembled the smoke from an oil fire.
The office was a large rectangle, flanked on two sides by identical rows of glass-fronted cubicles. There were eight of these private work spaces allocated to the middle managers. The blinds were always closed and these offices remained in darkness. We never saw the managers enter or leave their offices. Some claimed that the offices remained empty unless a consultation period was under way, and that they had been largely deserted for years; others said the middle managers were forbidden to leave their offices while a single employee remained at their desk; that’s why you never saw them come and go. I never knew what to believe, but I often sensed a presence behind the black glass and the drawn blinds: someone monitoring every message, phone call and open file on our screens. How else did they know so much about our work?
The executives occupied the floor above. We were never sure what they did up there. But they were never ferried to and from the company, like cattle, in public transport. They arrived and left the building in black cars that were parked at a subterranean level. During the working day, they never left the executive floor. Their only face-to-face contact with the staff occurred during our consultancy periods.
Many former colleagues whose performances for the company became unsatisfactory, and were deemed incompatible with the company’s brand values, were eventually summoned into the glass cubicles of the middle management. After the consultations began, an employee would then be called upstairs, only once, to the executive floor. That meeting was always final. Following their exit interview, the employee would return to the office clut
ching a white envelope, flanked by the building’s security, to clear their work station. A replacement would be sitting in their chair the following morning and the redundant employee was never seen again.
Only the recipients of the white envelopes ever met the executives, but their departure from company premises was so guarded that we were never able to ask them about the contents of the white envelope, nor what, or who, they had seen upstairs. Fraternisation outside work was forbidden. Those that somehow formed office romances quickly received the white envelope. Perhaps they held hands as they starved together out there.
We all lived in terror of the white envelope.
The momentum of the process that advanced a colleague toward the receipt of a white envelope was unstoppable. I had worked in the office long enough to know that the consultation process could never be curtailed or even slowed, no matter with what renewed vigour one worked. Earlier starts and later finishes were irrelevant. Irrespective of a change in one’s demeanour as one approached the office block, through the footpaths of the industrial estate, and walked up the cement stairs, or rode the lift to enter the spoiled-cream uniformity of the company premises, once the consultation process had begun, the white envelope would always find its way into a pair of trembling hands. I observed the process 213 times in 15 years while sat at my desk. Only one man, whom I stopped making an effort to speak to a long time before my own demise, and who reciprocated my indifference, outlasted me in the company.
Work was very hard to find in the city. We were fortunate to have those awful jobs. The alternative out there did not bear thinking about. We were professionals.
Towards the end, my end, I often found blood in a sink in the staff toilets. One of my silent, anonymous colleagues had been self-mutilating.
