by Adam Nevill
Even with the sound lowered, Cleo no longer cares to watch the great dust clouds of the continual air and drone strikes, the detritus of devastated vehicles, the moonscape of obliterated cement blocks that is now much of the Middle East, Kashmir and North Africa. Cleo assumes Yolanda has been following updates on the various escalations.
‘Something terrible has happened here,’ Yolanda says, her face stiff with shock.
‘Here?’ It is local news on the screen. ‘Turn it up! Quickly.’
There have been several arresting events of late, portents and signs on her doorstep, but they rarely make the local news. But this was national news on the screen broadcasting from Berry Head, not two miles from where she lives.
Cleo can see footage of the nature reserve’s unmistakable shape, shot from the air. A limestone headland, and the vestiges of what was once a great tropical coral reef, 375 million years before. The women of her family, whose portraits stood on the sideboard, had even considered Berry Head to be one half of a very old doorway.
As Cleo watches the report, augmented by Yolanda’s excited narration, she can see that a great many people recently tried to step through that doorway.
‘Dear God,’ Cleo says. ‘Those people are from local care homes.’
‘It is terrible. I do not think you should watch.’
‘Nonsense. You think I am surprised by this? They’ll do anything to get them into the water.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Open Heart, Open . . . never mind.’
How those poor creatures flap and flail after they step from the edge and plummet to the sea. At least seventy people from two local care homes. The infirm and the demented, all shrieking as they plummet through two hundred feet of empty air.
There are only two films of the incident that took place during early morning as Cleo slept: footage from the lighthouse security camera, and a shaky film taken by a carer who is now in police custody. Yolanda says the films have been on repeat every thirty minutes since she arrived at eight. Despite all that is happening in the world, Torbay is making international news; the elderly people from two retirement homes have all leaped from the edge of a cliff, together.
The police are looking for the staff who drove these confused people to the precipice. Speculation is rife. The carers helped the victims on and off the buses, before guiding and wheeling them by torchlight to the terrible precipice that Cleo had never liked standing near.
In the recordings, the din of the seabirds is excessive: guillemots, razorbills, black-legged kittiwakes, the gulls. They are always noisy in their cliff-side nests, but as that tired and stooped parade of the thin and infirm hobbles and shuffles off and into the abyss, and down to the terrible black rocks and the churning, bitter sea below, the noise of the birds becomes a cacophony rising to a crescendo of panic. Those birds should have been sleeping. But in that riotous avian climax, Cleo hears the name screamed with abandon and with the ecstasy that precedes tribute. Because that is what she is watching: sacrifice. Those were sacrifices at Berry Head; not the victims of mass suicide, or mass murder, as the press are claiming. This is human sacrifice at the doorway, at the very threshold of what is waking.
Those poor fools who were taken to the cliffs by their carers, nurses, doctors, porters and orderlies of the Esplanade and Galmpton Green nursing homes all shrieked the name, raising their frail but impassioned voices to join the din of the birds. They dropped out of sight individually or as couples holding hands, and even in one disoriented clump, down into the waves and the rocks where they must have come apart like kindling. None was pushed; all walked, calling the name.
The residents of those care homes were promised they would see out their final days in as much comfort as anyone could hope for in such desperate times in the country. But Cleo knows that long preparations had facilitated this mass evacuation from life.
The news moves to breaking reports about a dozen similarly affected retirement homes in Plymouth and North Cornwall. There, many elderly residents have been discovered making their way, slowly, on walking frames and in wheelchairs, in the early hours of the morning, toward Whitsand Bay and other beaches. Perhaps with the intention of throwing themselves into the sea too. It is unclear how many were not prevented from achieving their goal.
Cleo always thought it strange, and perplexing, and unnerving, how local fossils have been shaped into the exterior walls of the Esplanade Care Home in Roundham Gardens in Paignton, as if to create some decorative feature using local materials. This alteration occurred once the property came into the possession of One Eye Opening.
Cleo has written to the council to explain the hidden activity within these very stones, but never received a reply. The same innovation has been replicated in the churchyard walls in Paignton after the crucifixes were taken down. Cleo guesses those fossils were embedded in the mortar to influence the end-of-life decision made by so many last night.
She can only assume that the dimming and deranged minds of the aged provided the best material for such manipulation. They were the best receivers of transmissions from down beneath the waves of the bay; such transmitters, the fossils, were deliberately placed in proximity to these poor, confused minds.
Each of the affected care homes in the morning news is owned by One Eye Opening, a wealthy nonconformist religion, or so it is being described on the news, for want of a better definition, which Cleo has ready: a cult. A cult that made its disingenuous inroads into the religious community, and end-of-life care, in a county overrun by an elderly population.
It seems unfair, and horribly Darwinian, that some are being transformed while others were sacrificed to the sea in this manner. Though the residents of Churston Ferrers, like the Kudas, are wealthy; perhaps the selection of who swims and who leaps to their death depends upon nothing more sophisticated than money.
Cleo is shocked but not surprised. During the last five years she’s noticed many other local curiosities. The great ructions on the seabed reported by both the Royal Navy and the marine biology unit at Plymouth University. Fishermen using sonar have also claimed that new topographies are emerging upon the seafloor. Sailors, from what was left of the South Hams fishing fleet, have long been fetching unusual catches from local waters.
With her scepticism in suspension, Cleo never debunked the stories she found online about what was tugged out of the fishermen’s nets and quickly confiscated by the Environment Agency. Some of the catches were still being examined in the Plymouth University labs. The two marine biologists in Brixham, Harry and Phillip, with whom Cleo retains a vague and hardly reciprocal association since her retirement, are desperate to eschew any classifications or rumours of a Fortean nature that Cleo immediately attaches to them. Harry and Phillip know why Cleo was retired, but won’t admit that they have personally examined five specimens of Eledone cirrhosa, the curled octopus – creatures generously exceeding all previously recorded sizes and weights. They were caught in waters off the South Hams coast during the previous year.
Cleo’s contacts have also confirmed that the rumours of a giant squid spotted in local waters are not entirely fictional either. They have yet to refute claims that an impossibly sized Haliphron atlanticus octopus, with only six legs but of lengths stretching to ten metres, has been caught and killed by a Royal Navy PT boat near the mouth of the Dart Estuary. There were reports that the creature had menaced a ferry, and made several attempts to drag at least one passenger overboard. Her contacts claim that what was found in the thing’s belly, partially digested, link to the rumours of the fate of three missing canoeists, who were last seen in the channel below Greenway and heading towards Totnes the previous year.
Has Plymouth’s harbour not been deluged with Octopus vulgaris, not three years ago in 2052? A species not seen in British waters since the early sixties of the previous century.
And it didn’t stop there for anyone predisposed to seek synthesis amongst the freakish incidents and recent curiosities found in
the county’s waters. Stone plinths, carved with designs the Celts had imitated and Iron Age man replicated in stone throughout Cornwall, were found off Salcombe by engineers tasked with building a wind farm. Great undersea basalt circles, arranged like teeth in the untidy mouths of what resemble eyeless faces, have been discovered close to Start Point, South Devon, during the laying of new cables to transport British nuclear power to the drought-stricken parts of Southern France. Two discoveries that revived local folklore about the possibility of the ruins of Atlantis existing off the coast of Devon and Cornwall. Something is down there for sure, though Cleo doubts it is Atlantis.
The newly managed care homes of Torbay have fossils in their walls, and the windows of the churches have been altered to represent an eye. A geriatric cult has willingly extinguished itself at the cliffs of Berry Head the night before the solar eclipse. Have they not been hearing the name and receiving its imagery inside their failing minds? Cleo wonders if she should cuff her own ankle to the bedstead and swallow the key, during what time remains before the cosmic event, lest she join Torbay’s flightless snow birds who seem so intent on leaping to their deaths.
Yolanda returns at 4 p.m. that day, thirty minutes late, and wakes Cleo from a short doze.
Yolanda claims the news from Berry Head is upsetting for her, and asks Cleo if she can change the television channel. ‘I cannot see it again. But it is all they show today. They are bringing in some bodies. I would rather watch the wars.’
Cleo acquiesces as Yolanda will only be around for an hour. The nurse’s visit was delayed by the traffic congestion that has built ahead of the eclipse. Thoughts of the cosmic event are making Cleo feel sick.
‘Why not tell me about your family?’ Yolanda asks as she carries Cleo’s tea into the room on a tray. ‘I know these women are so important to you. Maybe they can take our minds from this terrible day.’
I doubt that, Cleo thinks, but she looks at the pictures of her grandmother Olive Harvey, who continued her own mother’s work, with the weeds and rock pools. Olive was a conservationist and artist, selling shells, polished madrepores and pressed weeds to tourists.
As she eats, Cleo tells Yolanda how Olive spent most of her life outdoors and on the Paignton Coast, south of Goodrington Sands, dipping into the rock pools of Saltern Cove and Waterside Cove. A woman who fastidiously continued the family trade, photographing and collecting the intertidal flora and fauna: the flat wracks, knotted wracks, red seaweed, snakelocks anemones and spotted gobies, and, most importantly, Galathea strigosa, the squat lobster. Olive’s mother, the brilliant but tragic Amelia Kirkham, had both dreamed and then screamed about what that thing had originally dispersed from.
Olive spent decades scraping and digging her way into the cliffs, and in places where fluvial breccia from the Permian Age amassed about the slates and sandstones from the Devonian Period. The locations of the best fossils were suggested to Olive by the work of her predecessor. With the promise, or warning, that future generations of scientists would uncover even greater marvels and terrors from those cliffs, her forebear led Olive to the shore at low tide.
After decades of coastal erosion, the shore of Goodrington revealed a submerged forest bed, the very tree stumps emerging after the last ice age. That was Olive’s own find. The discovery made her name in the circles that cared about such things. It was Olive Harvey who also discovered the breccia burrows and then quickly reburied them.
In those preserved burrows were the restless relics of animals that had lived in the deserts of the Permian Age, 248 million years before. One extinct occupant issued the grave songs that initiated the destruction of Olive’s mind; the song wailed from a burrow left by a giant Arthropleura myriapod, a millipede at least four metres long.
In her journal, Olive recorded how she’d once sat in the fossil bed to rest and lost two days and nights. Her mind, in her own words, ‘unravelled through its substance and memories’ and entered a psychosis that Cleo most commonly associated with a bad experience on LSD. What Olive had rubbed against, and become irradiated by at a deep subconscious level, was nothing more than a near-microscopic fragment of a substance that had originally dripped from the writhing and shedding of some monumental form. This occurred 248 million years previously, when this part of the British Isles was a desert, near the Equator. But so began another member of the family’s inexorable decline into socially unacceptable enlightenment.
Cleo continues with her story and tells the captivated Yolanda about her own mother, the tormented and twice-divorced environmentalist Judith Oldway. Judith put an end to her own severe and unmanageable cerebral rout at 59. Judith succumbed to what was thought to be early onset dementia and took an overdose. Despite the great blanks in her memory, Cleo had never forgotten that day.
When she’d been alive, Judith often reminded Cleo of what Amelia and Olive had each explored, discovered and subsequently believed. She told Cleo all about what her own mother, Olive, had passed down to her: the knowledge that our planet was but one tiny krill floating amongst billions of fragments in a cold, hostile ocean of gas and debris. And that our infinitesimal fragment was transformed by a visitor 535 million years before. A world subsequently destroyed and remade so many times over as a consequence of the visitor’s dreadful whims and rages as it stirred. Her forebears all shared the same dreams; the fossils they exposed were the equivalent of a few smudged fingerprints on the walls of a vast crime scene, as big as a planet.
Cleo’s mother would flavour her own interpretation with her background in Earth science. Judith passionately claimed that had we crept across this Earth in smaller numbers, and not congregated in such carbon-rich cultures, while flashing our arrogant, thoughtless presence into the stars, and had we not made toxic and eroded the soils, bled our faecal wastes and effluents into the black deeps, crisscrossed the ocean floors and mountain ranges with cables to broadcast our infernal jabber, exhausted the fresh water and melted the glaciers, changed the wind and rainfall, heated the Earth’s belly and melted the ice caps, exhausted the great populations of fish and mammals . . . if . . . we had not grown to nine billion minds and created such an intensification of teeming consciousness on one small planet, whose neural activity transmitted so far outwards . . . if none of this had happened then it, the visitor, might never have half-opened that one eye, down there, where it slumbered.
In the preface to Amelia Kirkham’s A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, the author wrote: ‘Just as every God has slept through our Godless endeavours, any God can yet awaken.’
Amelia’s final words to the priest who administered the last rites were also alleged to have been: ‘What have we done? Oh, God, what did we call out to? Is that thing God?’ Not ‘a god’, but ‘God’, the God: the ultimate creator.
Judith used to wonder aloud to Cleo, and ask why, as a species, we’d not had more sense than to create the requisite conditions in which that name could be called out by the exhausted, dying planet, and by what expired upon it. The Earth now heralded an awakening; Judith had told her that before she was ten.
Near the end of her life, Judith even begged Cleo to bear no children. ‘For God’s sake,’ she’d cried from the bed in which she was often restrained, ‘don’t continue this!’
Cleo had assumed ‘this’ was the hereditary taint of insanity, but had subsequently realised that Judith referred to us. To all of us, the species. Judith had wanted to end our burden upon the outer skins of this little planet in our solar system, in which resided a far older occupant, one that had dreamed such foulness as the great lizards, the food chain, viral life, decomposition and mortality, and us too, around its eternal self, and across so many billions of years that our understanding of age bore no relation to its own. Cleo had obeyed her mother and remained childless.
And Judith always made sure that Cleo wrote down her dreams.
When Cleo has finished speaking, she remains unsure for how long she has been talking, or whether much of what she’s said, has been said only t
o herself. The medication is strong.
Yolanda is already putting on her sunhat. ‘On Friday, we watch the eclipse together, from here, yes? On the balcony. I will come early.’
‘I’d rather you spent that day with your family, my dear.’
‘Oh, Cleo! You still think the world will end during the eclipse?’ Yolanda laughs.
No, Cleo doesn’t think that. Not exactly. ‘The end of us will be the end of us, my dear, but not the end of everything.’
She does often wonder, though, if the coming eclipse will herald an extinction-level event. How can she not after all of those dreams? And will it be a cataclysm heralded in true biblical fashion by the transformation of the firmament?
Cleo is not entirely convinced by the idea, or by her predecessors’ thoughts in this area, or by proclamations made by the new churches, who are far too dependent on A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, among the other, older texts that they favour from Providence, New England.
‘I believe our end will be near total, Yolanda, but with a partial evolutionary transformation of whatever survives. I can’t give you any timescale, or date, but it will be relatively swift in Earth-life terms. And miserably incremental like the consequences of climate change, surrounded by diebacks we’ve not seen since the bubonic plague in Europe and Asia. So, I’m giving us, at least, another two centuries amidst the rubble of our civilisation. But those will be times like nothing we’ve had to cope with so far. I mean, how many of us can breathe underwater? It may really be that simple, in most places on the Earth.’
‘Oh, Cleo! You make me smile.’
‘The world has been changing rapidly and bewilderingly towards a critical mass, Yolanda. Surely you have noticed? And I believe dear old Torbay has a specific role to play in this epochal event.’
Yolanda laughs as she swings her bag over her shoulder. ‘Whatever you say, Cleo! There is so much going on in your head. But you are making great progress. You must take the relaxants if your mind races. The doctor says so.’