by Adam Nevill
Inside the second crate lies a large black stone, crudely hollowed out in the middle. The dull and chipped appearance of the block also suggests great age. A modern addition has been made, or offered, to the hollow within the stone: a single human foot. The shoe around the disarticulated extremity matches the footwear inside the shower cubicle of the crew member’s cabin.
The contents of the third crate have barely been disturbed. In there lie several artefacts that resemble jagged flints, or the surviving blades of old weapons or knives of which the handles are missing. The implements are hand-forged from a stone as black as the basin that has become a receptacle for a human foot.
Pictures of a ship and framed maps have been removed from the widest wall, and upon this wall a marker pen has been used to depict the outlines of two snouted or trumpeting figures that are attached by what appear to be long, entwined tails. The imagery is crude and childlike, but the silhouettes are similar to the embalmed remains laid out upon the tablecloth.
Below the two figures are imprecise sticklike figures that appear to cavort in emulation of the much larger and snouted characters. Set atop some kind of uneven pyramid shape, another group of human figures have been excitedly and messily drawn with spikes protruding from their heads or headdresses. Between the crowned forms another, plainer figure has been held aloft and bleeds from the torso into a waiting receptacle. Detail has been included to indicate that the sacrificed figure’s feet have been removed and its legs bound.
The mess of human leavings that led here departs from the captain’s cabin and rises up a staircase to the deck above and into an unlit canteen.
Light falls into this room from the corridor, and in the half-light two long tables, and one smaller table for the officers, are revealed. Upon the two larger crew tables long reddish shapes lie glistening: some twelve bodies dwindling into darkness as they stretch away from the door. As if they have been unzipped across the front, what was once inside each of the men has now been gathered and piled upon chairs where the same men once sat and ate. Their feet, some bare, some still inside shoes, have been amputated and are set in a messy pile at the head of the two tables.
The far end of the cafeteria is barely touched by the residual light. Presented to no living audience, perversely and inappropriately and yet in a grimly touching fashion, two misshapen shadows flicker and leap upon the dim wall as if in joyous reunion. They wheel about each other, ferociously, but not without grace. They are attached, it seems, by two long, spiny tails.
Back outside and on deck, it can be seen that the ship continues to meander, dazed with desolation and weariness, perhaps punchdrunk from the shock of what has occurred below deck.
The bow momentarily rises up the small hillside of a wave and, just once, almost expectantly, looks towards the distant harbour to which the vessel has slowly drifted all night since changing its course.
On shore, and across the surrounding basin of treeless land, the lights of a small harbour town are white pinpricks, desperate to be counted in this black storm. Here and there, the harbour lights define the uneven silhouettes of small buildings, suggesting stone façades in which glass shimmers to form an unwitting beacon for what exists out here upon these waves.
Oblivious to anything but its own lurching and clanking, the ship rolls on the swell, inexorably drifting on the current that picked up its steel bulk the day before and now slowly propels the hull, though perhaps not as purposelessly as first appeared, towards the shore.
At the prow, having first bound himself tight to the railing with rope, a solitary and unclothed figure nods a bowed head towards the land. The pale flesh of the rotund torso is whipped and occasionally drenched by sea spray, but still bears the ruddy impressions of bestial deeds that were both boisterous and thorough. From navel to sternum, the curious figurehead is blackly open, or has been opened, to the elements. The implement used to carve such crude entrances to the heart is long gone, perhaps dropped from stained and curling fingers into the obsidian whirling and clashing of the monumental ocean far below.
As if to emulate a king, where the scalp has been carved away, a crude series of spikes, fashioned from nails, have been hammered into a pattern resembling a spine or fin across the top of the dead man’s skull. Both of his feet are missing and his legs have been bound with twine into a single, gruesome tail.
Call the Name
Upon sand the colour of rust and beneath a sulphur sky, a great shape is stretched across a long, flat beach. Embedded haphazardly about the vast bulk, scores of milky eyes stare at nothing. Black salt water slaps the grey mass of lifeless flesh and cloaks the corpse with foam. In the far distance, unto the reddish headlands at either end of the shore, the body remains shiny where unbroken, and pulpy where deterioration has ulcerated the smooth flanks. The only mercy here is that in dreams there is no sense of smell. In yolky light falling through thickening, stationary clouds, a long beak is visible, open and lined with small killer-whale teeth that suggest a smile. What might have been a great fin or flipper is as ragged as a mainsail hit by grapeshot but still points to the heavens.
In other places, on a shoreline that might have bordered an empty lake on Mars, long pellucid protrusions of jelly streak the sand, as if the wall of flesh was disembowelled during a battle between Leviathans in the lightless depths of the black ocean.
Cleo cannot tell. No birds fall upon the beached giant.
Her appalled study of the corpse occurs upon a shore she now recognises as the old Esplanade of Paignton. What remains of the Shoreline restaurant becomes visible. Its supporting steel posts have fallen; the building must have been smashed onto its face and taken away by the sea. A shore as much transformed as the atmosphere and ocean. Changes that her mind aches to comprehend, until Cleo realises she is no longer alone on the beach.
Behind an outcrop of red rubble, a few hundred feet from where she stands gaping, two whiskered heads appear. The heads are black and as sleek as seals. But those aren’t seal faces that grin upon the necks of these creatures. Nor do seals have muscular shoulders and arms.
Looking over her shoulder at the rocks, Cleo moves away as fast as one can move on loose sand in a dream, which is neither fast nor far.
The smooth heads disappear only to reappear closer to her position, beside a cement wall washed as smooth as a pearl. The black things raise their snouts in the manner of expectant dogs amidst the fragrance of food.
Somewhere behind the long headland of rubble and rock at the rear of the beach, a great shriek rends the air. A terrible whimpering follows the roar. This piteous cry issues from a second party. The sound of distress breaks a shard from Cleo’s heart.
Beyond the shore, the dull thump of a heavy body being thrown to the ground registers as a tremor as much as sound. What resembles the breaking of a tree’s thick limb is augmented by a series of excited shrieks. Something large is being put to death by something bigger and fiercer than itself.
In her haste to flee, the thing that Cleo runs over is crispy beneath her bare feet and recoils into itself as she treads the form deeper into the sand. She peers down at what she has crushed.
A face, once human, looks up at her. The long bleaching body beneath the face is that of a seahorse. A spiny tail flicks hopelessly. The beast’s expression conjures a sense of a living thing reaching the end of deep suffering. An all too human mouth gulps at the air. Pink gills flutter in an increasingly translucent neck.
Cleo sobs and wishes to obliterate the delicate head with a rock to end its misery. But her own pursuers now lean over their rocky perches. They hiss as her panic and weariness increase.
Ahead, the way is barred by a mottled trunk, white-spotted with disease. The vast, inert bulk at the shoreline must have flung this appendage up the beach in its death throes.
Cleo’s belief that her attempt to escape in any direction will be futile is matched, horribly, by the instinctive certainty that her end in the sand will not come easy. Among the corpses on the beac
h, and amidst the audible splinterings of bone behind the seawall of rubble, she understands that this is the way of things here, in this time. This revelation is the worst thing of all.
Cleo shivers awake. Her face is wet. She’s been talking in her sleep, or crying out.
Her throat is sore.
She nearly weeps with relief as her familiarity with the living room’s interior slowly returns. Some parts of the room remain strange and are not part of her home; at least not part of the home that she can recall. Maybe tomorrow these alien features and objects will be recognisable and bring comfort instead of anxiety.
Another twenty-degree night.
Cleo drinks water from the teat of a closed cup that sits upon the tray attached to her easy chair. Once she’s calmed herself with two anti-anxiety tablets, she turns on the media service and watches the world fall apart on a screen.
Fifth refugee ship intercepted by Italian Navy in three days. Thousands confirmed dead. No survivors.
Night-vision footage in a live broadcast, beamed from the Mediterranean.
The metal walls inside the drifting vessel are the tragic grey that Cleo associates with war at sea or maritime disaster. Pipes traverse a low ceiling studded with rivets. Paint bubbles with rust. Dust glitters and drifts through darkness like plankton in a sunken wreck. As the moving camera pans the greenish air a moth’s frantic capering is lit up.
Immobile forms haphazardly cover the lower deck. They create a lumpen procession reaching out of sight: blankets, exposed limbs, discarded sandals, disparate piles of baggage, and the pale soles of feet that have walked so many miles to reach the ship but will never walk again. The far end of the wide space is a void.
A figure moves into view. Bulky, too upright, it emerges slowly like an astronaut in zero gravity; a CDC or military scientist encased in a protective biosuit, carrying an equipment bag. Another two men appear, identically dressed in unventilated suits attached to hoses. Waddling cautiously through the jade umbra, their faces remain undefined behind the tinted lenses of their masks. They also carry plastic crates. All are being filmed by a fourth figure with a camera attached to a helmet.
There are close-ups of swollen faces, eyes open and bloodshot, the mouths slices through which ochre-filmed teeth grimace. Long-necked, his expression a rictus chiselled from agony, one man opens his jaws wide as if his last act was to scream at death itself. Beside him, a mother clutches a motionless child in a papoose. The small head of the child is turned away as if afraid of the camera. Most of the dead face the floor, suggesting the life they have departed was too unbearable to look back upon, even once.
The footage cuts to the exterior of a large, antique merchant freighter, bloodied with tributaries of corrosion. The bridge is lightless; a vessel adrift. Flares colour the water red. PT boats and a frigate circle at a distance while white searchlights fix the vessel as if it were a specimen on the black surface of the sea. Rubber dinghies rise and fall with the swell alongside the hull. Marine commandoes huddle within the smaller craft, but peer up with their weapons trained upon the railings above.
The fore and aft decks of the merchant vessel are similarly littered with the unmoving lumps of a discarded humanity. The oily sea laps with the usual indifference about another ancient vessel that never made it across.
The children.
So far away, in the relative comfort and safety of her apartment in Devon, England, Cleo closes her eyes and her mind swims in a ruddy, private darkness. She wants these sights to remain poignant, but to see too much horror is to normalise it and stop caring.
And even this new disease and the never-ending refugee crisis are trifles in the scheme of things.
When she opens her eyes, politicians and civic authorities, military personnel and scientists are announced by subtitles that she lacks the energy to read. Each speaks in separate portions of the broadcast.
The ship sailed from Libya, its cargo entirely human, more of the desperate from east, west, central and north Africa.
A new recording occupies the report within seconds.
Amidst a panorama of dark green foliage, enshrouded by mist, a scattering of black shapes can be glimpsed amidst long grass. A subtitle and map indicates a forest in Gabon. Recent footage too, because Cleo has never seen these pictures on any of the twelve news channels that she flicks between whilst remaining motionless in the infernal heat.
Though her academic discipline and background are in marine life in British coastal waters, as a retired conservationist she is unable to resist any news story about the desecration of the natural world. Like a masochist, she watches the Sixth Great Extinction unfold in detail and at its own inexorable, determined pace in this short Anthropocene Period. Guiltily, she feels no more compassion for her kind than for the fates of the other species with whom humanity shared the world, and which it subsequently annihilated. Sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife is now extinct because the planet has to accommodate so many people: nine billion and rising. Cleo wishes she’d never lived to see this.
She alters the setting and the room fills with sound. The recordings originate from one of the last stretches of trees in Equatorial Africa. This is believed to be a record of the very end of the wild gorilla. She had no idea that any were still alive. It appears that a final 237 gorillas have clawed out an existence deep inside one of the last private forests. They now lie with their silver bellies up, or are hunched, heavily furred, stiff with death and wreathed by flies.
The news service confirms that the seventh outbreak of Gabon River Fever is responsible for this extinction event; the same pandemic that swept away the remaining wild primates from the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, and Uganda. The gorilla had become officially extinct, along with the entire complement of refugees on board another freighter carrying the same virus.
The only question she asks herself is the same one she asked over forty years earlier, in 2015: what did we think would happen once food aid and food exports eventually ceased? How could the countries of Equatorial and then North Africa not collapse? As with the viruses that have scattered across the planet in their multitudes over the last three decades, Cleo knows that Gabon River Fever is zoonotic, spread from animals to humans. Those people still hanging on in Equatorial Africa have little to eat but game. In desperation they have eaten the dead flesh of the last apes, fed upon the bush-meat carcasses and so contracted and then spread a deadly virus from its origins in bats; another species driven from its habitat and thus panicked into unleashing a pandemic that was benign in the reservoir host.
Invaded ecologies always seem to call us out eventually and fight back. But Cleo is convinced that it is not only the virus in the bats that had its survival in mind.
‘In mind’: was that even the right phrase for what was stirring beneath the world? Could something so vast and enduring be considered to have a mind that we would understand? Or was it an independent living cosmos in which our feeble shreds of consciousness make feeble comparisons between ourselves and it?
On screen, an academic commentator from Rome comments upon the irony of another species of our closest ancestors ceasing to exist, reaching its end in the very place where our own precursors emerged. He likens the burden of man upon the Earth to that of a flu infecting an eighty-year-old woman. The comparison is, at least, sixty years old. Not much use recycling it now. Metaphors only reshape horror, they don’t prevent it.
The heatwave, the forest fires in Europe, the Chinese famine and the escalation between India and Pakistan have been greedy and monopolised any news she’s seen in months. At least the fate of the last apes is given a late-night spotlight. Though even that is soon swept away by additional reports of another lethal virus; this outbreak reported from Hong Kong and not yet named.
Breaking news, reporting its endless cycles of catastrophe, continues to flicker and flash through the humid innards of Cleo’s living room as she stares at the window, a
black rectangle of hot darkness. She can smell the warm, foamy brine of high tide. The distant sighs of the wind in the bay fail to move the curtains. Those as elderly as Cleo are told to stay indoors and be still, even at night. They cannot cool down after the sweltering days. Right across Europe, for three months, heatstroke has cut another swathe through the aged. A perennial event for the continent and its islands.
But what Cleo discovered within a few miles of her own home is of far greater significance than anything that is reported on the news.
The women of her family, distinguished scientists and environmentalists, whose pictures line her sideboard and whose framed specimens decorate her home, all believed that the desecration of the planet by mankind’s thoughtless extensions disturbed something greater than we could ever amount to.
The very rapacity of her own species has functioned as the worst wake-up call since the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, 65 million years before. Life can never be still or silent; the cries of infants for succour will always be heard by predators.
Cleo knows the world will no longer continue as it is. Not while the great fields of permafrost in Alaska, Siberia and Canada so hurriedly release their terrible, long-withheld breath into the air – enough methane and carbon dioxide to nullify and exceed all revised greenhouse gas emission targets.
The forests and oceans are absorbing far less carbon dioxide now too. The feedback loops are a tourniquet around mankind’s throat.
The average global temperature is three degrees higher than it was in 1990. The higher latitudes are five degrees warmer. Nine billion pairs of fingers are clutching at the wire strung about their throats, some more frantically than others. Sometimes, in her daydreams, Cleo believes that she can sense nine billion pairs of feet kicking up the dust as the chokehold tightens.