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

No, not a crinoid, she thinks, Not a crinoid or a cystoid, not a plate from a primitive sea urchin, because these beds were laid down in fresh water. And so maybe a bit of bony armour, then, from one of the placoderm fishes. And didn’t she see a note somewhere in Morris’s papers, or something Maire mentioned in passing, that they found remains of the placoderm Bothriolepis in nearby strata? But under the dim lamp light the thing looks metallic and her first impression, that she was seeing a coin, lingers stubbornly in her mind and Anne rubs at her tired and burning eyes.

‘Jesus,’ she whispers, still too exhausted from the flight and then the long day out at Culloo, and it’s no wonder she can’t think straight. The reality of Morris’s death not even sunk in yet, and Anne Campbell gathers up the photographs and slips them all back into the big, manila envelope, the mystery shot lying on top. In the morning she’ll ask Maire about the odd fossil, or Billy if he’s at breakfast. But it can wait until then. The clock on her nightstand reads ten twenty-five and Anne switches off the lamp and sits for a moment in the darkness, thinking of home as the wind buffets and rattles at the window.

In the dream, she’s standing on the marblesmooth steps of the American Museum, and there are pigeons on the great bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt; bronze gone to verdigris and Roosevelt proud atop his horse, noble tarnished savages on his left and right as he leads them away, and where the street ought to be there’s a shallow brook with sandy, sidewalk banks, restless water sparkling bright in the New York sun and Anne looks past the stream, expecting the autumnfire of Central Park, all the uncountable shades of orange and gold and ruddy browns, but instead a green so dense, so primaeval, the inviolable green of the world’s first forests. Eden past Central Park West and as she descends the steps, bare feet silent on stone and discarded hot dog wrappers, she cannot take her eyes off the strange plants rooted on the far side of the stream, the mad bloom of foliage sprouting from the cracked and weathered cement; towering canopy of club mosses and Archaeopteris and the sun slanting in cathedral shafts between the impossible branches, falling across scalebark and the impenetrable underbrush of ferns and scouring rushes. Only a dozen yards in and that forest already so dense the green has faded black and Anything might live in there, she thinks, anything at all.

Past Roosevelt and the Indians and a man selling Snapple and hot pretzels, she stands at the shore, the concrete and sand and there’s no rude blat of taxi horns here, no ceaseless background drone of human voices; an always-summer wind through the trees, the cool murmur and purl of the water between avenuestraight banks and the buzz of dragonflies the size of ravens. Earth turned back, past man and ice ages, past the time of terrible lizards and screeching, kite-winged pterodactyls; continents torn apart and reconfigured for these long, last days before all the world will be squeezed together into Pangea. This is not a new dream, her entire adult life spent chasing these ghosts, her unconscious always resurrecting and refining this wilderness. But never half this real. These sounds and smells never half so alive, the quality of sunlight never this brilliant, and she kneels beside the stream, stares down at the logs jammed together just below the surface, the water plants she knows no names for and tiny, alien fish dart away into the submerged jumble of shattered limbs and trunks. The water not deep here and there are tracks on the muddy bottom, prints left by fins that will be toes some day, toes that haven’t yet forgotten fins, and her eyes follow the tracks upstream and there’s something big slipping off this shoal into deeper water. Frogwide head breaking the surface, wary black eyes watching her and then it’s gone, one flick of its tail and the sinuous thing glides away in an obscuring cloud of silt.

And Anne Campbell knows where she is this time, not just when, this wilderness that will be a rocky Irish coast someday, and she glances back at the forest. The forest darker and deeper than all the tangled dreams of humanity, and she closes her eyes, can hear the cold rain falling on the hotel’s roof eons and eons away, and ‘Not yet, Anne,’ someone says close behind her, someone speaking with Morris’s voice and so she opens her eyes again but there’s no one there but the pretzel vendor and he hasn’t seemed to notice her. She stands up and brushes the sand from the knees of her jeans.

And spots the silver thing shining up at her from the water’s edge, seven-sided disc that isn’t a coin, she knows that now, knows that it isn’t part of anything that ever lived, either. Something shaped from metal, fashioned, and she bends down, picks it up, ice cold to the touch and it burns the palm of her hand. But she has to see the markings worked into the thing, the symbols she doesn’t recognise and cannot read, runes or an unknown cuneiform set around the image at the disc’s centre, the tentacled face, its parrot beak and then a deafening clap of thunder from the clear sky and Anne drops the thing. It falls into the water with a small but definite splash, sinks between the dead branches where the little fish disappeared. She almost reaches for it, but thinks of the jointed, razor jaws of arthrodires, the serrate claws of scuttling, scorpion-legged eurypterids and looks up at the infinite blue vault of Heaven overhead.

‘What was I supposed to see?’ she dreams herself asking the unclouded sky, no clouds but there is thunder anyway, just as there was Morris Whitney’s voice without his body. And she’s scared for the first time, wants to wake up now, because there’s something moving about in the ferns on the other side of the stream, something huge, and the sound that isn’t really thunder from the sky again, the sound like a tear in the sky and it’s raining but it isn’t water that falls, and Anne shuts her eyes tight, no ruby slipper heels to click so she repeats Morris’s name, again and again, while the scalding filth drips down to blister her face and pool red and steaming at her feet.

Morning and the storms have passed, blown away south to Bantry and Skibbereen, the Celtic Sea beyond, and the sky is perfect blue as Anne makes her way back to the cliffs alone. A rusty purple bicycle borrowed from the hotel’s cook and she follows the winding road north through the Glanleam woods, on past the lighthouse and then takes a narrower road west, little more than a footpath for sheep, really, past the steep rise of Reenadrolaun and down to Culloo. The sea air chilly on her face, on her hands, and her legs aching by the time she reaches the site.

She sees the girl standing by the cliffs long before she’s close enough to recognise it’s Maire, tousled black hair and one of her heavy wool cardigans and she’s staring out at the foamwhite rollers, something dark in her right hand and Anne stops, lowers the bike’s kickstand and walks the last ten or twenty yards. But if Maire hears her, she makes no sign that she’s heard, stands very still, watching the uneasy, storm-scarred sea.

‘Maire?’ Anne calls out, ‘Hello. I didn’t expect to find you out here,’ and the girl turns slowly, moves stiff and slow like someone half asleep and Anne thinks that maybe she’s been crying, the red around her eyes, wet green eyes and bruisedark circles underneath like she hasn’t slept in awhile. ‘I want to ask you a question, about one of the photographs. I have it with…’

And then Anne can see exactly what she’s holding, the small, black handgun, and Maire smiles for her.

‘Good morning, Dr Campbell.’