by Adam Nevill
The subtropics and mid-latitudes have all but lost their rain. The great collision of the polar cold and the heat from the equator, up there in the sky above the vast, heaving, warm bodies of water, now retreats like another refugee upon the exhausted Earth. Tired, spreading out and meandering to higher latitudes and distant poles, the great writhing cables of wind that once reeled so fast and so high, those great definers of air masses, are taking their precious cool air and delicious rain away with them. The winds are removing all that they can carry out of the heat. The fresh water and the nourishing blankets of gentle, golden warmth are vanishing, along with those near-forgotten climates that allowed so many to exist.
Her own precious oceans are becoming deserts. Canadian salmon are all but gone. North Sea cod is as extinct as the pliosaur. The shell food upon the rocks is dissolving to debris. Great coral reefs from Australia to Asia, the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands and Antilles are a cemetery of exhumed white bones, patchily buried beneath six feet of seaweed.
One in three of all the creatures in the oceans is dying. Corpses blanket the ocean floor in the way that dust and ash sand-dune the crematoria. If any human foot could walk where there were once great vivid cities of coral antlers and waving banners, the ruins would crumble like sandcastles bleached by the sun’s relentless heat and aridity.
Vapours and gases have carbonated and acidified the monumental depths and vast glittering surfaces of the seas. Great masses of life, the megatons of phytoplankton that were responsible for producing half of the biosphere, have slowed their engines – vast green factories poisoned by man, the blundering chemist.
The colossal leafy lungs in the Amazon produce the other half of the atmosphere. But the trees burn while the sea bleaches.
Momentarily paralysed by the range of her thoughts, Cleo imagines the epochal destruction man brought to the fetid shores around it, where it lay stinking.
The old trespasser. He created us a long time ago, accidentally, unthinkingly, beneath the grey and furious waves. The great visitor has always existed beneath the surfaces of the world, never upon them.
As her mother taught her, as her mother was taught by her mother, and so on, and as Cleo reported to all of the scientific journals that no longer even replied to her submissions: all life evolved from the tiny organic scraps of an impact against the planet.
Something once tunnelled through space, 535 million years gone.
As a subspecies of it, we have grown into a multitude of treacherous usurpers.
She has no doubt now that it will finish the destruction initiated by the burning of coal on an industrial scale. Mankind has obliviously, yet fastidiously, spent its last two hundred years waking an angry parent.
Cleo long ago decided to see out the end while close to her beloved coves: near the shoreline where her family had been finding the signs for generations, and where she too found her own first signifier. Portents that the world should have been studying, signs obscured by the incremental collapse of civilisation.
New voices now sang through the wind, rain and relentless tides, and in dreams that required a lifetime of interpretation. But every shriek in her nightmares foretells far greater horrors, yet to be endured.
Who has listened to a 75-year-old woman, fighting her own last stand against dementia, the local eccentric whose mother committed suicide in an asylum? As Cleo ambled round supermarkets and the seaside attractions of this insignificant little bay in the southwest of England, she has told the few who will listen that something too terrible for anyone to fully comprehend, let alone believe in, exists. She has told them that it has been stirring for many years in local waters.
Out there, under the world, but also within life as we know it.
Eventually Cleo finds the strength to break from her inertia, a blank listlessness often interspersed with racing thoughts. She turns off the media service.
The darkness of the room intensifies. The heat about her chair thickens.
That night Cleo dreams of polyps, tens of thousands of blue gelid forms rising from the seabed, growing and trailing their translucent rags until the water of the bay resembles a pond dimpled and thickened by frogspawn.
Among them many elderly men and women stand upright, submerged to their chests. They raise their withered arms to a night sky unlike any Cleo has seen before. A canopy of impenetrable darkness wreathed by distant whitish vapour trails that appear wet, or webbed, and glisten like dew-drenched spider webs.
The old people wear hospital gowns, tied at the neck. They laugh or cry with happiness as if witnessing a miracle. One or two call out for help. Among those, she recognises her dead mother.
When the surface of the water is a vast, rubbery carpet reaching unto the distant horizon, that rises and slops nauseously in the swell, the thousands of grey and white heads call out a name in unison.
Issuing the scream of a frightened child, Cleo breaks from sleep.
In the early morning it is cooler. Cleo begins the short walk to Broadsands Beach, intending to walk over the headland to Elberry Cove. She inspected and protected the seagrass in that cove during forty years of marine conservation work for the Environment Agency. Too old to dive now, she still visits the cove, as often as she is able, to monitor the progression of another matter.
Cleo isn’t supposed to leave her home unsupervised. Yolanda, the nurse and carer who visits her home three times each day, isn’t due for another two hours. By then it will be too hot to venture outside.
Before someone sees her in the street and calls an ambulance, Cleo shuffles home; she’s left the house without dressing properly. Halfway down Broadsands Road, as she passed beneath Brunel’s abandoned viaducts, those stone Leviathans that still bestrode each dawn, she realised she was wearing nothing besides a nightshirt and underwear.
By the coatrack in the hall she looks at the notice she can’t remember writing or tacking to the wall, reminding her to take her medication as soon as she awakes each morning.
Finally dressed and medicated, she stands upon the sea wall on Broadsands.
Five a.m. and the sun is rising, turning the bay a withering blue. The sky is polished a piercing silver that will broil brains in a few hours.
Cleo watches an unusual formation of black-necked grebes. So strange again are their number and positioning on the sand below. She fumbles for the camera about her neck and finds it missing. She has forgotten to bring it, and not for the first time.
Until this last year, she has never seen more than three grebes fishing together at this spot. She spots twenty today. A white debris of gulls litters the sand. They gather in their hundreds. They watch the sea disconsolately. None take flight or call out.
Where the beach huts once stood, a viewing platform has been erected by the council for the coming solar eclipse. That too is festooned with seabirds engaged in an uneasy silence and a motionless peering at the horizon.
As with each recent summer, a great green skirt of Himanthalia elongata, or thongweed, coats the beach like wet wool and is piled at the water’s edge. It floats, entirely concealing the surface of the sea for a good fifty metres offshore. Within the broad blanket of immobile weed that appears to have suffocated the very tide, she sees a vast barrel jellyfish, stranded.
Other large, pale discs of barrel and moon jellyfish become visible along the shore. They resemble unsightly blisters poking through the diseased pelt on a large animal’s back. Beneath the weed she imagines their great white tendrils coiled about the impenetrable green fronds of the weed.
Once, the waters of the bay resembled those of the Mediterranean. The officers in Nelson’s navy settled the area because it had reminded them of Gibraltar.
Cleo ponders the hundreds of thousands of spectators who will soon flock to Torbay to watch the cosmic event. She believes they are destined to see a sight that the subdued birds, who are too afraid to fish, already anticipate.
Her progress is interrupted by frequent stops to catch her breath as she walks t
he coastal path, and crosses the common, to reach Elberry Cove. She has less than two hours before the heat becomes unbearable. Power shortages have rationed the air conditioning so her apartment won’t be much cooler, but her thoughts are convoluted and troubling enough without the sun’s heat lighting a fire under them.
As she walks along the cliffs, the defunct fishing port of Brixham visible ahead, a familiar hot wind picks up from the sea and rustles the trees circling the common. Cleo struggles with her balance and wayward hair. She believes she just heard those trees call a name.
From the beach behind her, as the wind strikes the shore, the gulls break their unnerving silence and cry out in alarm. They take flight. Cleo watches a great squadron of dry wings beating a passage inland, away from the bay where they once felt safe.
About her on the coastal path, the gnarled trunks of pine, sweet beech and larch bow away from the sea. Their posture suggests they are striving to uproot and flee the moorings that anchor them perilously close to the water. Across the last decade, from Dorset to Cornwall, the leafy heads of the remaining trees on the cliffs and open shores have taken on an aspect of fearful supplication. Or perhaps their decrepit tilt is a despairing acknowledgement of the danger restlessly building out there, deep down, that nothing will evade.
Few notice how these trees lean, or they attribute the slant to the wind. Most people have lost the ability to understand what the natural world whispers. But not all. Ever restless in winter, or motionless and sullen in summer heat, the trees of the bay know only a tense expectation of what nears the shore, something felt but unseen. Right here, she is sure, is clear evidence of a peculiar apprehension that shudders through the natural world.
Long ago, Cleo learned to identify the Earth’s signs, just as her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother had done before her. She knows the trees will soon thrash their last in the coming storms. They will crash beneath great carapaces of turbulent seawater as the oceans rise even higher than the levels reached in the last three decades.
At the end, as the creator rises, the trees will shriek out that name, in a deafening chorus of panic before they all fall silent for ever. As we must too. She has seen and lived through the coming when she sleeps; has visualised what comes after. Sometimes, now, the portents flicker into chaotic life within her open eyes.
The name: the younger trees sheltered in Marriage Wood call it now too. She can hear them responding to the unnatural wind in the distance. Older members of that ancient woodland hush them.
And as she rounds the headland and descends to Elberry Cove, Cleo hears the name arise from the very water. Not for the first time either. In the retreating pull of the surf across a myriad pebbles, all rolling together, she often hears that name. In the slap and hiss of the sluggish waves upon the baked shoreline exists that dreadful signifier.
No one has seen the face of God and it remains ineffable, but Cleo believes she knows its name, in the many languages of the trees, the birds, the sea, and also from the strange languages of her dreams. Her mother once told her that it was only a matter of time before she would hear that name everywhere and in all living things. That she would become a receiver.
When Cleo first heard the calling of the name her doctors were certain that the voices were the beginnings of the family taint, the early onset of the bedlam in her bloodline, a hereditary taint of dementia that remained strong after three generations of daughters were all declared insane. Mercifully, Cleo is childless and the curse will end with her; she would never willingly inflict what she knows upon a child.
Most days, she struggles to recall her dead husband’s face, or even when he died. Yet Cleo refuses to believe a hereditary illness is transmitting this name into her thoughts. She believes the disease that slowly shrivels her brain creates a susceptibility to the natural transmissions from the Earth. Messages that only a disordered sixth sense can detect.
She takes the pills, or some of them, and never utters her family’s theories to her doctors.
Her ancestors all claimed the name was first heard in fossils in this bay. Her own experiences began in this cove too, though not in fossils, but at the edge of the seagrass pasture.
In the woodland dividing the cove from the drought-resistant maize that grows on the old golf course, Cleo scratches about the paths and undergrowth until she finds the tracks she seeks.
The ‘ambulances’ have made recent deliveries at high tide; tyre tracks, the thinner tracks of barrows, and the parallel furrows of the gurney wheels carve the pebbles apart.
The grooves lead Cleo to disturbances upon the red clay in the wood behind the cove. More evidence of a commotion – a procession, no less, of those who try to adapt to the future world they have dreamed. Some local people wish to undergo a great transformation for a creator whom they have worshipped in secret for generations. A few of their number have already sunk beneath the waves and not returned.
Cleo wonders if some of them survived in the colder water, beyond the seagrass, or if their drowned, contorted carcasses were washed ashore to be buried amongst the bent and mournful trees of the woods.
The sea quickly grows deep in the cove. A bank of pebbles drops to smooth red sand. Thirty metres out, at a depth of six metres, eighty hectares of seagrass still thrive. One of the largest surviving meadows in the British Isles. Until she was too old to dive, Cleo spent hundreds of hours in the pasture. Down there she would scour the marine flora with torch and camera, watching the thick, lustrous grass moving in the currents. She took a thousand samples across three decades and discovered nothing untoward amongst those fronds. But she still asks herself now, from where did that stone come? A dolmen that stands sixty metres offshore, hidden on the sea floor where the sun’s light barely reaches.
During one of her last dives, before she was retired, she caught sight of a large, black silhouette at a distance, at the end of her torch’s reach. Where the currents caused by the slipway and the reef made it unsafe to swim, something had been deposited. She found the effigy five years ago and believes that it remains in place.
Once her fear and panic crashed, Cleo realised that the object was stationary: a rock formation. Drifting out another ten metres – a risky business as the tide was turning and she was not at her fittest when pushing seventy in the spring of 2050 – she had been able to see more of the rock that reared from the underwater gloom like a saurian head. To her enduring astonishment, Cleo found herself approaching what suggested the presence of a large black chess piece – a knight, no less – upon the sea floor. Emerging from preserved grasslands was an installation, clearly manmade, though crudely, and casting an onyx gaze around itself over the seabed.
The object suggested a monument or underwater marker; even an idol. At first she believed it must have been pitched over the side of a boat. Eventually she found evidence of its congregation, and one that needed no illumination by a marine biologist’s lamp; because those responsible for the sculpture existed on land, in the village of Churston Ferrers.
The memory prompts her to make another visit to the Kudas, who live in the village. And soon, when she regains the stamina to walk that far, because she wants to determine whether the Kudas have made their final leap beneath the waves. They seemed due the last time she looked in on them.
It is getting late and will soon be too hot to move around. Cleo takes a pained look at the water and marvels again at what has lain hidden here for so long. According to the women of her bloodline the visitor relocated to this bay from south of the Equator, 235 million years ago, to slumber as the Earth reshaped its surface.
Time was running out; that was all that mattered. The eclipse was mere weeks away. The sun had turned up its infernal heat. There would be no autumn.
Cleo sits alone and perfectly still inside her living room. The blinds are drawn across the balcony doors. The media service is silent and blank. A familiar agitation spreads through her body as the anti-psychotic medication nears the end of its cycle. A palsy quiv
ers in her hands and feet.
Yolanda medicates Cleo until she has calmed, stroking her hair until she settles. Yolanda is a former refugee from Portugal who works as a carer for a few of the multitude of dementia sufferers in the bay. She arrived minutes after Cleo returned from the cove.
Reclining on the sofa, while Yolanda busies herself preparing a midday meal, Cleo’s attention drifts to the portraits of her forebears: Mary Anning, Amelia Kirkham, Olive Harvey and her mother, Judith Oldway. She wipes at the tears that immediately film her eyes.
As you were, so am I.
Around their pictures are the polished madrepores that her mother had passed down. Upon the walls, pressed seaweeds hang, mounted and framed by Amelia Kirkham; Cleo’s great-grandmother.
After making significant contributions to marine botany and Earth science, Cleo’s forebears all died raving. Once Cleo began to hear the natural world issuing that name, five years ago, and building to a veritable din inside her own head, she took measures to prevent a repetition of her ancestors’ fates. To dampen the shrieks and the visions, she swallows the psychotropic salves that her earliest forebears had lacked.
Her mother Judith chose to eschew anti-psychotic medication. As a result of what her mind struggled to contain and process, Judith was one day shy of her sixtieth birthday when she took her own life.
Looking at the family portraits never fails to make Cleo ponder the futility of her conservation work in a world that could not reach consensus. A world incapable of saving itself. And a species that could not conceive its insignificance upon the Earth, let alone the Earth’s insignificance in the cosmos. The women of her family all endured their own Damascene moments, haplessly. They had changed none of the minds around them, but had deranged their own.
‘The women of your family were beautiful,’ Yolanda says, as she fastens the tray on the armrests of Cleo’s chair. She follows her patient’s gaze to the photographs on the sideboard.