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

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘well, now that is a bloody wonder, wouldn’t ye say?’

And Morris on his knees, a cheap, black plastic Instamatic camera from his backpack and he was staring at the fossils though the viewfinder. ‘Yes sir, it is. It certainly is that,’ and he snapped away a whole roll of film before following the old man back across the field.

Two hours after dawn and Anne Campbell, jetlagged and shivering in the October gales, stands beside the tracks, a single bedding plane exposed along the thirty-foot ledge, narrow, almost horizontal rind of bare stone to mark this place where the island is slowly being reclaimed by the Atlantic. Overhead gulls and kittiwakes wheel and cry like lost and hungry children. Behind her, Maire is still talking to the constable, redcheeked, potbellied man who escorted them from Kingstown; they speak in hushed voices, as if they’re saying things they don’t want Anne to hear.

There are still traces of Morris’s chalk marks, despite the tides and salt spray, despite everything his killers did to the site. White chalk lines to measure the width of manual and pedal strides, faint reference numbers for his photographs; another day or two and the sea will have swept the ledge clean again. Tears in her eyes and she isn’t sure how much of that’s for Morris, how much for the ruined treasures, and how much is merely the stinging, icy fingers of the wind.

Over a hundred tracks to begin with, according to Morris’s notes, a hundred already exposed when he first saw the ledge and another fifty or sixty uncovered as he and Maire and Billy followed the prints back into the cliff’s face, sledges and pry bars to clear away the heavy blocks of Valentia Slate. And now only five or six that haven’t been damaged or obliterated altogether. Desecrated, Anne thinks, This place has been desecrated. As surely as any church that was ever burned or any shrine that was ever looted, and she sits down beside one of the few tracks that hasn’t been chipped or scraped or smashed beyond recognition. The gently rippled surface of the rock shimmers faintly, glitterdull interplay of mica crystals and the sun, and she puts her fingers into the shallow depression on the ledge, touches the clear imprint left by something that passed this way three hundred and eighty-five million years ago. She looks up, past the trackway, at the rest of the ledge; patches of algal scurn the unhealthy colour of an infection and small accumulations of brown sand, bright against the slate, a few stingy pools of water stranded in the low places, waiting for the next high tide.

‘He got everythin’ on film,’ Maire says behind her, trying to sound reassuring, trying to sound responsible. ‘And we have the casts. Dr Whitney sent a set of them off to Cork just last week, and another to the Survey in Dublin.’

‘I want to see the photographs, Maire. Everything that’s been developed. As soon as possible, okay?’

‘Aye,’ the girl says. ‘They’re all back in town. It didn’t seem safe to leave anythin’ in the field house.’ And ‘No,’ Anne says, as much to herself as Maire, ‘No, I guess not.’ And then Maire’s talking with the constable again and Anne stares past the ledge at the wide, cold ocean.

Her room in Kingstown, dingy plaster walls and faded Catholic icons, the oilyfaint smell of fish, but some place warm and dry against the rain that started falling an hour after sunset. Cold drops that pepper the windowpane and she sat there for a while, waiting for Dr Randall to return her call, stared down at the drenched and narrow streets, a pub across from the hotel and its windows glowing yelloworange through the downpour, soft and welcoming glow and she wished she’d asked Maire to stay. She could have thought of an excuse if she tried, help with Morris’s records, questions about the sediment samples sent to Dublin for radiometric tests, anything against the sound of the storm and her loneliness. But the girl made her uncomfortable, nothing she could quite put her finger on, and on the way back from the site Maire leaned close and asked if it was true, that Anne and Morris were lovers, whispered question so Constable Bryce wouldn’t overhear. Anne blushed, confused, embarrassed, and ‘That was a long time ago,’ she replied, nothing else, though, her surprise turning quick to anger and unasked questions about what this girl might know about her, what she might think she knew.

So relief when the phone rang, the voice at the other end sounding far away, distance-strained, cablefiltered, but relief anyway. The familiarity something to push away her homesickness for a few minutes, at least, and Arthur Randall asked if she was okay, if she was holding up, and ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘Sure,’ unconvincing lie and he sighed loud; she could hear him lighting a cigarette, exhaling, before he asked her about the trackway, if there was anything at all that might be salvaged.

‘Only if it’s still buried. You absolutely would not believe this shit, Arthur. I’ve never seen a site so completely… so…’ and that word from the ledge coming back to her again … so completely desecrated, but nothing she wanted to say aloud so ‘They trashed everything,’ she said instead, and ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘Then you don’t think it was someone after the tracks?’

‘No. If this was someone trying to steal fossils, it’s the most fucked-up attempt I could imagine. And there’s no sign they actually tried to remove anything. Whoever it was, they wanted to erase the tracks, Arthur, not steal them.’

And now she sits on her bed listening to the rain on the roof, the rain at the window, and all Morris’s photographs are spread out in front of her, glossy 8” X 10” document of his month on Valentia, every inch of the trackway painstakingly recorded, these photos to back up Maire’s maps and diagrams of the ledge, carefully gridded sketches recording the relative position and size of every footprint. And so at least the data has been saved, the fossils themselves gone but not the information. Enough that she can finish what he began, a description of the oldest-known tetrapod ichnofossils, the earliest evidence of the ancestors of all terrestrial vertebrates. Something a little more than a metre in length, no longer fish, but not quite yet amphibian, either.

Anne puts down one of the photographs and picks up another, no tracks in this shot, the fossilised ripple marks from the bed of an ancient stream and for a moment she thinks that’s all. Silt and sand shaped by the currents of warm Paleozoic waters and that pattern frozen here for almost four hundred thousand millennia and she’s about to put this picture down, too, when she notices something small in the lower, lefthand corner. Something embedded in the slate, glinting in the sun like metal, and she holds it under the lamp beside her bed for a better look.

And her first impression is that Morris has placed an unfamiliar coin in the shot for scale, one of the seven-sided Irish fifty-pence pieces, maybe. She leans closer to the photograph, squints, her nose almost touching the paper now, and she can see that the surface of the thing is smooth, so no coin, and there’s no doubt that it’s actually embedded in the stone, not merely lying on the surface. She chews at her bottom lip, turns the print upside down and at this angle she can see that it isn’t perfectly smooth after all, faintest suggestion of a raised pattern on its surface, ridges and dimples worn almost away by years of exposure to the wind and sea. A crinoid plate perhaps, broken away from the calyx, or some other echinoderm fossil, only a heptagonal bit of silica and a trick of light and shadow to make it look metallic.