by Martha Wells
‘The women of your family were beautiful,’ Yolanda said, as she fastened the tray on the armrests of Cleo’s chair, following her patient’s gaze to the photographs on the sideboard.
‘And clever too. Thank you, dear,’ Cleo said, her interest briefly moving to the neatly cut sandwiches. ‘My great-great-grandmother was none other than Amelia Anning. You won’t have heard of her, Yolanda.’ She wasn’t sure if she had told Yolanda of this before. But evidence of the visitor was first discovered by Amelia Anning, and that knowledge alone had driven her mad.
‘Amelia was an amateur fossil collector, a palaeontologist too. A near-unique woman in her time. This was the early nineteenth century, dear. Careers in science were forbidden women. But she, my dear, was a true pioneer. Much of what we know of prehistoric life and the earth’s history is owed to her. She died in her nineties, but was still hiking up her skirts and scrabbling round the Jurassic fossil beds at Lyme Regis in her seventies.’
‘You too, I think, will live so long.’
Cleo tried to smile but lacked the strength.
After winter landslides on the Blue Lias cliffs, it was Amelia who found and correctly identified the first ichthyosaur. She also uncovered a plesiosaur from the same rubble, and the first pterosaur beyond the borders of Germany, as well as many other fish fossils whose uncanny influence contributed to her decline.
‘Your lunch, ma’am. You need to eat.’
‘Yes. But it was those damn belemnites, Yolanda. They began her obsession with a set of ideas. An astonishing leap of faith. Few scientists will even acknowledge this. Though in secret, oh how they whisper now.’
‘Of course.’
Amelia’s only child, and Cleo’s great-grandmother, was Mary Anning, who moved to Torquay in Devon to be close to Shiphay Hospital where her mother eventually died, raving aloud her belemnite dreams to the very end.
‘That’s Mary, next to Amelia. A brilliant woman. But the great love of Mary’s life was seaweed, Yolanda. Not fossils. Her first two books are still in print. The first editions are on display at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. That’s in London. I’ve seen them.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Mary’s first two volumes of Algae Danmonienses (Seaweeds of Devon) were relative bestsellers, and much of Phycologia Britannica, that catalogues and illustrates all known British marine algae, was dependent upon Mary’s lifetime of study. Though Cleo did not share this with Yolanda, because any talk of Mary’s books inevitably led Cleo to thoughts of Mary’s third and final volume. That was mostly destroyed by embarrassed members of the family, but a surviving copy was passed down to Cleo by her mother, before she too was put away to scream that name.
Cleo spoke in between the mouthfuls of bread that she chewed slowly. ‘My great-grandmother, Mary, collected seaweeds, all the way from Cornwall to North Devon, and along the East and South Devonshire Coasts. You know, one large weed was even named after her: Anningsia.
‘The leading botanists of her day were her close friends, dear. With them she shared her finds, and some of her theories…’ And even those ideas augmenting her own late mother’s more radical ideas about the southwestern coastline. But why trouble Yolanda with that? She couldn’t possibly understand. And as with her mother, Amelia Anning, Mary’s end was neither illustrious nor happy.
Mary Anning’s third volume, A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, caused grave damage to her reputation because the work was a near-surrealist dream narrative. Mary was a scientist who attempted to encapsulate great spans of time and the local coast’s ever-changing position, shape and environment, but through poetry, water colours, pen and ink. The book never enjoyed anything but a brief, meagre print run at a local publisher, partly funded by Mary. But the lurid contents of Mary’s only nonscientific work remained the only indication of what had beset and preoccupied the woman for the ten years prior to her incarceration in the same asylum that claimed her mother.
When Mary took up with the unorthodox spiritualist group, The Fellows of the Broken Night, towards the end of her liberty, she was already binding her eyes with scarves, and threatening to claw them out from the root should her blinds be removed. But layers of linen strips did nothing to stop the sights unfolding behind her eyes. And these sights formed the ghastlier revelations recorded in A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood. The visions that she was stricken with also informed her notorious ravings upon the seafront and piers, where she had stood upon a wooden crate, with her face bound save for her mouth, to address the ladies and gentlemen of Torquay.
A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood was filled with drawings of the fossilised marine life that Amelia Anning had uncovered and scraped clean. But more complete and detailed impressions of what she derived from the partial fossil forms were fleshed out in Mary’s imagination; a creative faculty informed by her own visions. And it was those images that resembled this creator, this destroyer, and remaker of worlds. A visitor Cleo’s lineage had long dreamed of, but solely recreated and expressed in ways only communicable through the medium of insanity.
Cleo didn’t even need to open Mary Anning’s book to see again the gelid grotesques that had drifted through the last, harrowing, tormented years of her great-grandmother’s turbulent consciousness. Merely imagining those things had driven her witless, and when they had opened their flabby mouths to sing the name in her dreams, Mary had been lost to the world forever. But Mary had always believed that she was seeing an alien species, adrift amidst the deepest oceans of space and time in the cosmos. Forms that had been creating life out of themselves, and then extinguishing that very life, for fourteen billion years: the lifespan of the universe.
***
The following week, on Friday, at dawn, Cleo attempted to see through the dimpled glass panel set beside the Kudas’ front door. She was confronted by the greenish light that rippled in the manner of water reflected upon the wall of a swimming pool. During her first hurried scrutiny of this reception, four years before, she’d realised that the entire lower floor of the Kudas’ home had been sunken beneath the level of the ground, and tiled aquamarine like a swimming pool.
Cleo opened the letter box and stared into one of twenty-four houses in Churston Ferris with ground floors permanently converted to the storage of liquid. And could she have subsequently suffered the same hallucination so many times in the same place? Her dementia was better controlled than that.
Despite three restraining orders and two cryptic threats upon her life, she still came here. The death threats, she believed, had originated from a local faith group, either The Latest Testament or One Eye Opening. Her age and mental instability had been the only factors that had spared her the punitive sentences of the magistrate’s court.
She moved to the rear of the Kudas’ property and felt a familiar delinquent glee at her daring trespass.
Like always, the windows at the rear were shuttered, as were those of the Kudas’ similarly affected neighbours. The garden was ordinary and typical of the neighbourhood: palm trees, the Trachycarpus wagnerianus, pink stone paths, tall fences, immaculate lawns and flower beds, and a honeysuckle covered pergola. The only remarkable feature of the orderly rear gardens was the variety of stone lawn ornaments; all of which, inside the Kudas’ yard, depicted black sea horses, perched upon what were either castles or reefs. She had never been able to decide which. But as if the Kudas’ sculptures had been interpreted by an artist with nothing in mind beyond a stark realism, Cleo intuited an ugly provocation in the bestial eyes of the four Hippocampus pieces on the lawn.
Her suspicions about this village were first aroused when she followed tracks from Elberry Cove, through Marriage Wood, and linked them to the activity of the private ambulances in the surrounding lanes of Churston Ferris at night. And at a time when one of the newer ‘scientific’ religions burned through the area with an intensity of devotion not seen since the Black Death cursed Devon, 700 years before.
The arrival of the new faith groups preceded her discovery of the statue
beneath the sea in Elberry Cove, by a few years, though she believed the churches had been active for a long time, albeit disguised in plain sight as something else. The ambulances belonged to the age care charities created by the new churches, who had bought the old Church of England buildings of Paignton, Brixham and Torquay, and then set about changing all of their windows into a single curious design. Few antiquarians had seemed bothered, or they had been silenced. Cleo never really knew. But attendances, she’d heard, were way up now. The congregations were almost entirely elderly, though Cleo had resisted their repeated attempts to entice her into their faith-based care programme, and their extensive leisure programme within the community. Her neighbours used to regale her with stories about the wonderful entertainments and events, until she told them to shut up. The mayor and council were happy because the church groups were relieving the beleaguered local health services of much of their burden. 70% of the population of the bay was now over sixty. The corporate charity wing of the church, Opening Eyes, had purchased over half of the region’s care homes in the last five years, and the quality of the care was unsurpassed.
But Cleo would never consider an association with any faith that reshaped church windows into what she believed was an eye. One great eye. Big, luminous, but somehow idiotically blank and unsympathetic, and always coloured with a green-, yellow- and black-stained glass that she considered reptilian. The windows suggested they were engaged in some form of penetrating scrutiny, directed at those who passed below. Surreptitiously, building by building, and even in the listed buildings, she had noted the removal of the cross.
These days, the garden ornaments of Churston Ferris were no longer odd to her, because the actual interiors of that settlement, upon which she had spied so diligently, had proven far more interesting.
Much of the rear patio closest to the Kudas’ house had been taken over with an apparatus consisting of white plastic tubes or hoses attached to some kind of a squat generator that produced enough heat to warm her entire body when standing a few feet away. The air expelled by the machine contained a hot, electric, oily odour. The two largest tubes passed through the rear wall of the affected houses. Vibrations could be felt through the hoses, and if she moved her face close enough she could hear water bubbling through the PVC piping. The apparatus was some kind of pump. Above the machine, an extractor fan expelled a tepid air and a not unpleasant odour of salt water. Each of the church’s ambulances that visited this village had been fitted with a not dissimilar mechanism for filtering water.
Reaching to her tiptoes, Cleo peered through the mesh screen before the whirring plastic blades of the fan. Until the balls of her feet burned and her old spine cramped, she remained fixed in position and stared with wonder and revulsion at the Kudas’ wide living room.
The lens of a light fitted into the front of a limestone rock helped to illumine the watery room. There was no conventional furniture in sight, only several large boulders, arranged around the edges of the room and all containing embedded lights. Upon the floor, a gentle swaying motion was produced by a pasture of submerged Alismatales, or sea grass.
In the dim, greenish illumination she saw Mrs Kuda first, crouched upon her rocky perch. And above this bizarre grotto, the naked lady of the house sat observing some activity out of her sight, in another region of the room.
Until she found this pair, Cleo had never before seen a human being covered in such unsightly skin below the neck. Not only had Mrs Kuda been cursed with a hunched back, or a great mane of flesh, spiked by the vertebrae beneath, but her skin was also mottled by large plates of pink-orange psoriasis. Her first suspicion was of the presence of a rare disease in which an amphibian environment offered comfort to the sufferer. But this was no medicinal pond. Judging by the rock-effect walls and lifelike encrustations—the shells, molluscs, and several kinds of hermit crab—the Kudas’ living room had been fashioned into a facsimile of a rock pool.
That morning, at least five minutes passed before Cleo caught a glimpse of the man of the house; if his condition made him worthy of the title. What Cleo saw of Mr Kuda was often obscured as he mostly remained submerged and positioned facedown. And whenever his gleaming body passed through the beams that shone upon the water, the three rock lights offered insufficient illumination for a fuller assessment of his disability. His skin condition matched his wife’s, while his chest, arms, shoulders, head and neck, were the same as an adult man, albeit one aged, hunched and stooped. But Cleo had become convinced that Mr Kuda had no legs. Or perhaps only one leg. And that morning, whatever it was that extended from his lumpy abdominal region, had curled around a clump of grass in the manner of a tentacle. Using the long, wavering weed for grip, he then wheeled his large body around in the water while his head remained hidden. In fact, Cleo had never yet observed him rise to take a breath.
Agilely, he swished himself through the water. Ripples from his silent, circular activity spread out and lapped about the rock upon which his wife sat. At the foot of his wife’s outcrop, he stopped wheeling and, like a child, gently raised his face to just beneath the water’s surface. Carefully, unsteadily, his scaly wife shuffled off the stone seat and sat beside him in the water. Facing each other, they engaged in something approximating a kiss.
What troubled Cleo about this intimate activity was the gap between their faces, and the way in which Mrs Kuda rolled her eyes upwards and so whitely within her lined face. What remained of her withered bosom also palpitated, suggesting a pumping action or rapid respiration. When Mr Kuda eventually detached himself from the ghastly contact, Cleo saw a thin, dark object, like a long tongue, dart back inside her wide open mouth.
Without mistake, Mr Kuda had been dancing, down in those verdant sea grasses, to woo his partner. That hideous wheeling in the paddling shallows was some kind of mating display, and one that she had repeatedly observed in the Hippocampus of the local coves.
Since her first sighting of this pair, and the other less well-formed couples in this village, she found that the sound of the Kudas’ generator and fan would follow her home, locked inside her skull. Every time she closed her eyes to sleep, she was sure that the white ceiling of her bedroom rippled like the ceiling of a cave into which the sea flowed at high tide. What also abided and returned in an unwelcome fashion, and repeatedly, like an incorrect slide inserted into a projector, were her unpleasant observations of Mr Kuda’s belly, and of the bellies of the other retired men in the neighbourhood. After they broke from the kisses with their wives, and gradually glided out of sight, across the watery floors of their living rooms, their gently distended bellies would often move, as if from the squirming of a multitude within.
In the warm shallow seawater of their village dens, she had observed so many who had been rendered infirm by age on land, but who had managed a miraculous transformation, or second life, in water. People who now frolicked and glided through the swaying sea grasses with which they had sowed the sunken floors of their living rooms.
If she were to tell anyone, she would be thought mad and delusional, hallucinating, and although she did plenty of that, the same was also said of her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother, and her great-great-grandmother. But the burden of what she knew, she was quite sure, would soon bear the most unappealing fruit in the local waters of this now cursed bay.
***
That night Cleo dreamed of small islands whose faces were made black with shadow from the great sun that rose behind them, to nearly blind her sight, while turning the seawater the colour of highly polished steel. She stood upon a cliff edge she didn’t recognise and looked across a vast panorama of new red cliffs. Great, fresh gouges of scarlet rock were exposed along the front of the cliffs. Vast slopes of rusty-looking sand and rubble had tumbled into the shining water below, leaving fresh wounds upon the coastline as far as she could see, as if some great storm had caused a century of erosion in a matter of days. From what she could see of the distant hills, she thought she must have been somewher
e near Kingswear, but if so then the coastline of South Devon was being rapidly reformed.
And whatever was in the sea below her position was trying to attract her attention. Large black shapes, lumpen, but slippery and shining as they turned and wallowed, dived and surfaced, barked out sounds that she believed were human voices if she listened closely enough. All she could make out of the distant, black faces were the doglike suggestions of the whiskered snouts and flattened ears. But the eyes and teeth were definitely human.
***
Cleo awoke in the living room. The first thing she saw was Yolanda rising from her chair. The nurse came to her on soft feet, her face one big smile, her lovely eyes wide and glittering with an excitement that Cleo assumed had little to do with her patient waking up.
The nurse must have let herself in as Cleo slept; it was after nine. She had slept badly for the first half of the night, and then tried to stay awake on account of the dreams that her antipsychotic medication was either worsening or failing to suppress; she never knew which. But she’d been in a bad way for a week after her visit to the Kudas.
On the far side of the room the media screen flickered and flashed, the sound muted. Her carer had been watching the news and leafing through the journal Cleo kept to keep track of each day, the sudden emergence of memories, and the effects of the medication cycles. Perhaps Yolanda had been amused by some of Cleo’s recollections. She didn’t think the journal had much comic value, but then couldn’t entirely recall much of what she had written in it. Her prescription would never preserve her mind, but had slowed her deterioration and moderated her mania successfully, providing Yolanda came to her home three times each day to make sure that Cleo took what had been prescribed.