Stephen Jones: Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

All night tossing and turning on the flight from JFK to Shannon, interminable jet drone and the whole autumnlong night spent sailing through ice crystal clouds far above the black roil and churn of the Atlantic. Finally, the ragged west coast of Ireland appearing outside her window like a greygreen gem, uncut, unpolished, and then the plane was on the ground. Routinely suspicious glances at her passport from the customs agent, her short hair still blonde in the photograph and now it’s red, auburn, and Anne was grateful when she spotted one of Morris’s grad students waiting for her with a cardboard sign, dr campbell printed neatly in blue marker on brown cardboard. She dozed on the long drive down to Kerry, nodding off while the student talked and the crooked patchwork of villages and farms rolled by outside.

‘It’s so terrible,’ the student says, has said that more than once, apologised more than once, like any of this might have been her fault somehow. Maire, pale, coal-haired girl from Dublin with her tourist brochure eyes, green eyes that never leave the road, never glance at Anne as the car rolls on south and west, the slatedark waters of Dingle Bay stretching away to the north and all the way down to the sea. Past Killorglin and there’s a tall signpost, black letters on whitewashed wood, paintwhite arrow pointing the way on to Cahirciveen, still forty kilometres ahead of them and so Anne closes her eyes again.

‘Do you have any idea how it happened?’ she asks, and ‘Ah, Christ. I’m so sorry, Dr Campbell,’ the girl says, her voice like she might be close to tears and Anne doesn’t ask again.

Two hours later and the blue and white car ferry from Renard Point is pulling away from the dock, ploughing across the harbour towards the big island of Valentia. Only a five-minute crossing, but the water just rough enough that Anne wishes there was a bottle of Dramamine tablets packed somewhere in the Army surplus duffel in the rental car’s trunk. She stands at the railing because she figures it’s more polite to puke over the side than on the decks, stands with nervous, green-eyed Maire on her left, puffyred, emerald eyes and wringing hands and None of this feels real, Anne thinks. None of this feels the least bit real. The girl is clutching a rosary now, something shiny from a sweater pocket, silver crucifix and black beads and Anne turns away, watches the horizon, the indefinite confluence of the grey island and greyer sea. The air smells like saltwater and fish and coming rain and she concentrates on the questions she’s carried with her all the way from New York, unpleasant thoughts to drown her old dread of seasickness. The questions that began two days earlier with the first news of Morris Whitney’s death, with Dr Randall’s Sunday afternoon phone call and ‘Can you come in this evening, Anne?’ he said, sounding tired, sleepless, sounding like all his sixty years had finally, suddenly, caught up with him.

‘It’s Morris. Something’s happened. There’s been an accident,’ but she didn’t want to hear the rest, said so, made him stop there, no more until she took the subway from her TriBeCa apartment uptown to the museum. No more until she was sitting in her tiny, fifth-floor office, listening to Arthur Randall talk. Everything he knew, scant and ugly details and at first none of it seeming to add up — the phone call from the police in Cahirciveen, Morris’s body hauled from the sea by a fishing boat out of Knightstown, the vandalised excavation. But Anne listened silently, the old man’s shaky voice and her eyes lingering safely on the cover of a back issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology lying on her desk, glossy orange-and-white paper, black print, the precise line drawing of an Eocene percopsid, all safe and sensible things so she wouldn’t have to see the wearysad look on Arthur’s face.

‘Do you have any idea what he was doing out there after dark?’ she asks, almost a whisper, and Maire turns her head slightly, her eyes still on the rosary in her hands and ‘No,’ the girl says. ‘None of us do.’

Anne glances back at the mainland, growing smaller as the little ferry chugs diligently across the harbour and she knows now that she shouldn’t have come, that Arthur was right and there are probably no more answers here than would have found her in Manhattan. Not if this skittish girl at her side is any indication, and something else, besides, a quiet anxiety beneath the leadweight ache of her loss, beneath the disorientation. A vague unease as the shores of Valentia grow nearer; He would have come for you, she thinks, and then Maire is talking again.

‘Dr Whitney had us back in Knightstown, you know. Me and Billy both. He said he was worried about whether or not the grants would be renewed. Said he needed the solitude to write at night, to work on the progress report for the National Geographic people, but we knew he was havin’ bad dreams.’

‘So you weren’t at the field house Friday night?’ and Maire shakes her head, no, ‘This last week, we’ve been riding out on our bicycles every mornin’, an’ ridin’ back again in the evenings. It’s only half an hour, maybe.’

And then the ferry whistle blows, shrill and steamthroat bellow to smother whatever Maire said next, and the girl slips the rosary back into the pocket of her sweater.

Valentia Island, seven miles by three, rocky exile cut off from the Irish mainland long ago by the restless Atlantic and the thin, encircling finger of the Portmagee Channel. Sheep and cattle and a century ago strong men mined slate from a huge quarry near the island’s northeast corner, mined stone for roofing tiles in London and railroad pavement in Nottingham and Leicester. A small but sturdy white lighthouse where Valentia Harbour meets the ocean proper, once upon a time a fortress for Cromwell’s men and its beacon automated years ago. Further west, the land rises abruptly to Reenadrolaun Point more than a hundred feet above the sea, rocky precipice where the rollers have carved away the world, and from there the raw charcoal and ash periphery of the island stretches from Fogher Cliff to Beennakryraka Head. And on these weathered ledges Morris Whitney found the ‘Culloo trackway’ in 1992; two months in Ireland on an NSF grant to study a poorly curated, but valuable collection of Devonian lobe-finned and placoderm fishes at the Cork Geology Museum and led away to Valentia by persistent rumours of footprints in stone. A local farmer’s stories of ‘dinosaur tracks’ and then a letter to the curator of the museum from a bird-watchers’ club, and so he finally took a day off and made the drive from Cork. And not believing his eyes when the old man led him across a pasture to the ledges, gap-toothed pride at the expression on the palaeontologist’s astonished face when he saw the perfect, single trail, winding across the slate towards the sea.

‘Didn’t I tell you? Are they not dinosaurs, then?’ the old man asked and Morris could only shake his head, his grin almost as wide as the old man’s, clambering down to get a better look as the waves slammed loud against the rocks.

‘No, Mr O’Shea, these are definitely not dinosaur tracks. Whatever made these tracks lived…’ and he paused, doing the maths in his head, calculating the age of rocks and the duration of geological periods. ‘Whatever made them was walking around a hundred and fifty million years before the first dinosaurs. These are something much, much better than dinosaur tracks.’ The old man’s eyes wide and doubtful, then, and he sat down on the grass and dangled his short legs over the edge of the little cliff.