by Adam Nevill
‘And clever too. Thank you, dear,’ Cleo says, her interest briefly moving to the neatly cut sandwiches. ‘My great-grandmother was none other than Amelia Kirkham. You won’t have heard of her, Yolanda. Her aunt was the world famous Mary Anning.’
Cleo isn’t sure if she has told Yolanda this before. But evidence of the visitor, the creator, was first discovered by Mary Anning, and then passed on to her niece, Amelia Kirkham, who pursued these curious traces of evidence with vigour. The knowledge she recovered, the very sense of it, had driven her mad.
‘Mary Anning was an amateur palaeontologist. A near-unique woman in her time. This was the early nineteenth century, dear. Careers in science were forbidden to 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.’
‘You too, I think, will live so long.’
Cleo tries to smile but lacks the strength.
After winter landslides on the Blue Lias cliffs, it was Mary 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 the decline of one branch of her family: Cleo’s.
‘Your lunch, ma’am. You need to eat.’
‘Yes. It was those damn belemnites, Yolanda. Mary Anning showed them to her clever niece. And they began my great-grandmother’s obsession. Amelia then made an astonishing leap of faith. Few scientists will even acknowledge this. Though in secret, oh, how they whisper now.’
‘Of course.’
Cleo’s great-grandmother, Amelia Kirkham, eventually died, raving aloud her belemnite dreams to the very end in Churston Hospital.
‘That’s Amelia, next to Mary Anning. A brilliant woman. But the great love of Amelia’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 Exeter. I’ve seen them.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Amelia’s first two volumes of Algae Devonienses (Seaweeds of Devon) were relative bestsellers. Much of Phycologia Britannica, which catalogues and illustrates all known British marine algae, was dependent upon Amelia’s lifetime of study. But any talk of Amelia’s books inevitably led Cleo to thoughts of Amelia’s third and final volume, though Cleo does not share this information with Yolanda. That third and final book was mostly destroyed by embarrassed members of the family. A single copy was passed down to Cleo by her mother, just before she too was put away to scream that name.
Cleo speaks between the mouthfuls of bread and ham that she slowly chews. ‘My great-grandmother, Amelia, collected fossils and 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.
‘The leading botanists of her day were her close friends, dear. With them she shared her finds, and some of her theories . . .’ She also shared ideas augmenting her own late aunt’s more radical theories about the southwestern coastline. But why trouble Yolanda with that? She couldn’t possibly understand. And Amelia’s end was neither illustrious nor happy.
It was Amelia Kirkham’s third volume, A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, that caused such grave damage to her reputation; the work was a surrealist dream narrative. Amelia was a scientist who attempted to encapsulate great spans of time and the ever-changing position, shape and environment of the local coastline, but through the media of poetry, water colours, pen and ink.
The book never enjoyed anything but a brief, meagre print run from a local publisher, part-funded by Amelia. But the lurid contents of Amelia’s only non-scientific work remain the sole evidence of what beset and preoccupied her for ten years prior to her incarceration in an asylum.
When Amelia took up with an 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 informed her notorious ravings upon the seafront and piers, where she stood upon a wooden crate, 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 Kirkham had uncovered and scraped clean. Even more detailed impressions of what she derived from the partial fossil forms were fleshed out in Amelia’s imagination, a creative faculty informed by her visions. It was those images that resembled the creator, this destroyer and re-maker of worlds. A visitor to the Earth that Cleo’s lineage had long dreamed of, but recreated and expressed in ways only communicable through the medium of insanity.
Cleo didn’t need to open Amelia Kirkham’s book to see again the gelid grotesques that drifted through the last, harrowing, tormented years of her great-grandmother’s turbulent consciousness. Merely imagining those things had driven her witless. When these forms had opened their flabby mouths to sing the name in her dreams, Amelia had been lost to the world for ever.
Amelia had always believed that she was dreaming of 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 eight billion years: the lifespan of the universe.
The following week, on Friday, at dawn, Cleo attempts to see through the dimpled glass panel set beside the Kudas’ front door. She is confronted by a greenish light that ripples like water reflected upon the wall of a swimming pool. During her first hurried scrutiny of this reception, four years before, she realised that the entire lower floor of the Kudas’ home was sunk beneath the level of the ground and tiled aquamarine like a swimming pool.
Cleo opens the letter box and stares into one of twenty four houses in Churston Ferrers with their ground floors permanently converted to the storage of liquid. Could she have subsequently suffered the same hallucination so many times in the same place? Her dementia is better controlled than that.
Despite three restraining orders, and two cryptic threats upon her life, she still comes here.
The death threats, she believes, originated from a local faith group, either The Latest Testament or One Eye Opening. Her age and mental instability were the only factors sparing her the punitive sentences of the magistrate’s court.
She moves to the rear of the Kudas’ property and experiences a familiar delinquent glee at her daring trespass.
Like always, the windows at the rear are shuttered, as are those of the Kudas’ similarly affected neighbours. The garden is 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 is the variety of stone lawn ornaments, all of which, inside the Kudas’ yard, depict black seahorses, perched upon what are either castles or reefs – Cleo has never been able to decide. She knows the Kudas’ sculptures were created by an artist who worked with living models, stark realism his aim.
Cleo intuits 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 Ferrers at night. This 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 new faith groups preceded her discovery of the statue beneath the sea in Elberry Cove by a few years, though she believes the churches were active for a long time, albeit disguised in plain sight as something else
.
The ambulances belong to one of the age-care charities created by the new churches, who have bought the Church of England buildings of Paignton, Brixham and Torquay, and then set about changing all of their windows into a single curious design. Few local antiquarians have seemed bothered, or they have been silenced. Cleo doesn’t know. But attendances, she’s heard, are way up now. The congregations are almost entirely elderly.
Cleo has resisted their repeated attempts to entice her into their faith-based care programmes, along with their extensive leisure activities 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 are happy because the church groups are relieving the beleaguered local health services of much of their burden. Seventy per cent of the population of the bay is now over sixty. The corporate charity wing of the church, One Eye Opening, has also purchased over half of the region’s care homes within the last five years. The quality of the care is unsurpassed.
But Cleo will never consider an association with any faith that reshapes church windows into that eye. One great eye. Big, luminous but somehow idiotically blank and unsympathetic, and always in a green, yellow and black stained glass that she considers reptilian.
The design suggests the church windows are engaged in a penetrating scrutiny of those who pass below. Surreptitiously, building by building, and even in the listed buildings, she has noted the removal of the cross.
These days, the garden ornaments of Churston Ferrers are no longer odd to her, because the actual interiors of that settlement, upon which she has spied so diligently, have proved far more interesting.
Much of the rear patio closest to the Kudas’ house has been taken over by an apparatus consisting of white plastic tubes or hoses attached to a generator that produces enough heat to warm her entire body when standing a few feet away. The air near the machines contains an oily electric odour. The two largest tubes pass through the rear wall of the affected houses. Vibrations can be felt through the hoses. If she moves her face close enough she can hear water bubbling through the PVC piping.
The apparatus is some kind of pump. Above the machine, an extractor fan expels tepid air with a not unpleasant odour of salt water. Each of the church’s ambulances that visit the village has been similarly fitted with a mechanism for filtering seawater.
Standing on tiptoe, Cleo peers through the mesh screen before the whirring plastic blades of the fan. Until the balls of her feet burn, and her old spine cramps, she remains fixed in position and stares with wonder and revulsion at the Kudas’ wide living room.
The lens of a light fitted into the front of a limestone rock illumines the watery space. There is no conventional furniture, only several large boulders arranged around the edges of the room and all containing embedded lights. Upon the floor, a gentle swaying motion is produced by a pasture of submerged Alismatales, or seagrass.
In the dim, greenish illumination she sees Mrs Kuda first, crouched upon her rocky perch. And above this bizarre grotto, the naked lady of the house observes an 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 has Mrs Kuda been cursed with a hunched back, or a great mane of flesh spiked by the vertebrae beneath, but her skin is mottled by large plates of pink-orange psoriasis. Cleo’s initial suspicion was that this indicated the presence of a rare disease in which an amphibian environment offered comfort to the sufferer. But this is no medicinal pond. Judging by the rock-effect walls and lifelike encrustations – shells, molluscs and several kinds of hermit crab – the Kudas’ living room is fashioned into a facsimile of a rock pool.
That morning, at least five minutes pass before Cleo catches her first glimpse of the man of the house – if his condition justifies the title. What Cleo sees of Mr Kuda is often obscured; he mostly remains submerged and facedown. Only when his gleaming body passes through the beams of the three rock-mounted lights can she make a fuller assessment of his disability.
His skin condition matches his wife’s, while his chest, arms, shoulders, head and neck are those of an adult man, albeit one aged, hunched and stooped. But Cleo has become convinced that Mr Kuda has no legs. Or perhaps only one leg. And that morning, whatever it is that extends from his lumpy abdominal region curls around a clump of grass in the manner of a tentacle. Using the long, wavering weed for grip, he then wheels his large body around in the water while his head remains hidden. Cleo has never yet observed him rise to take a breath.
Agilely, Mr Kuda now swishes himself through the water. Ripples from his silent, circular activity spread out and lap the rock upon which his wife sits. At the foot of her outcrop, he stops wheeling and, like a child, gently raises his face to just beneath the water’s surface. Carefully, unsteadily, his scaly wife shuffles off the stone seat and sits beside him in the water. Facing each other, they engage in something approximating a kiss.
What troubles Cleo about this intimate activity is the gap between their faces, and the way in which Mrs Kuda rolls her eyes upwards and so whitely within her lined face. What remains of her withered bosom also palpitates, suggesting a pumping action or rapid respiration.
When Mr Kuda eventually detaches himself from the ghastly contact, Cleo sees a thin, dark object, resembling a long tongue, dart back inside his wife’s wide-open mouth.
Evidently Mr Kuda has been dancing, down in those verdant seagrasses, to woo his partner. That hideous wheeling in the paddling shallows is some kind of mating display, one that Cleo has repeatedly observed in the Hippocampus of the local coves.
Since her first sighting of this pair, and the other less well-formed couples in the village, she finds that the sound of the Kudas’ generator and fan will follow her home, locked inside her skull. When she closes her eyes to sleep, she is sure that the white ceiling of her bedroom ripples like the ceiling of a cave into which the sea flows at high tide. What also abide in her mind, in unwelcome fashion, like incorrect slides inserted into a projector, are her unpleasant observations of Mr Kuda’s belly, and of the bellies of the other retired men in the neighbourhood. After they break from the kisses with their wives, and glide out of sight across the watery floors of their living rooms, their gently distended bellies often move, as if from the squirming of a multitude within.
In the warm, shallow seawater of their village dens, Cleo has observed so many who are infirm on land but have managed a miraculous transformation, or second life, in water. These aged people now frolic and glide through the swaying seagrasses with which they have sown the sunken floors of their living rooms.
If she tells anyone, she will be thought mad and delusional. She will be accused of hallucinating, and although she does plenty of that, the same was also said of her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother. But the burden of what she knows, she is sure, will soon bear the most unappealing fruit in the local waters of this cursed bay.
That night Cleo dreams of small islands with faces formed from black shadows cast by the great sun that rose behind them, near blinding her sight and turning the seawater the colour of polished steel.
She stood upon a cliff edge she didn’t recognise and looked across a panorama of new red cliffs. Great fresh gouges of scarlet rock were exposed along the coastline. Vast slopes of rust-coloured rubble had tumbled into the shining water below, as if a great storm had caused centuries of erosion in a matter of days.
From what she could see of the distant hills, she might have been near Goodrington. But if she was, the coastline of South Devon was undergoing rapid reformation.
Whatever bobbed in the sea beneath her position tried to attract her attention. Large, black lumpen forms, but slippery and shining as they turned and wallowed, dived and surfaced, barking out sounds that seemed similar to human voices if she listened closely enough. The distant faces bore doglike suggestions of
whiskered snouts and flattened ears. The eyes and teeth were human.
Cleo awakes in her living room. The first thing she sees is Yolanda rising from her chair. The nurse approaches on soft feet, her face one big smile, her lovely eyes wide and glittering with an excitement that Cleo assumes has little to do with her patient waking up.
The nurse must have let herself in as Cleo slept; it has gone nine. She slept badly for the first half of the night, and then tried to stay awake on account of the dreams that her anti-psychotic medication was failing to suppress. Cleo has been in a bad way in the week following her visit to the Kudas.
On the far side of the room the media screen flickers with the sound muted. Her carer was watching the news and leafing through the journal Cleo writes to keep track of each day, the sudden emergence of memories, the effects of medication cycles. Perhaps Yolanda has been amusing herself with Cleo’s recollections. Cleo doesn’t think her journal offers any comic value, but then she can’t recall much of what she’s written in it. Her prescriptions will never preserve her mind, but they have slowed the deterioration and moderated her mania successfully – providing Yolanda visits three times each day to make sure that Cleo takes what has been prescribed.
Cleo reaches for her glass of water, drinks through a straw. It has become tepid in the languid heat of night. She notices her hands are trembling and hastily swallows the three pills that Yolanda has already placed upon the side table.
Yolanda attempts to block the screen with her body. ‘This news is not so good. Let me turn it off.’
‘Is it ever good? But let me see. What have I missed?’
The world. She certainly hasn’t missed that while she’s slept. A narrowing space in her mind is often fatigued by a weakening attempt to understand how people have allowed things to get so bad. And in the last few days the seemingly endless war between Turkey, Iraq and Syria has escalated to new levels over control of the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris. The Indians still have their rain, but the Pakistanis have none; they are also going to war again over water.