Valentia

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

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.

‘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.

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.’

A moment before she can reply, two heartbeats before she can even look away from the revolver, the sun dull off its stubby chrome barrel, and ‘Good morning, Maire,’ she finally says. Her mouth is dry and the words come out small and flat.

‘Did ye sleep well, then?’ the girl asks and Anne nods her head and Maire turns back towards the ledge, back towards the sea. ‘I was afraid you might have bad dreams,’ she says, ‘After lookin’ at those pictures.’

‘What is it, Maire, the disc in the photograph? You know what it is, don’t you?’ and Anne takes one step closer to the girl, one step closer to the point where the sod ends and the grey stone begins.

‘I didn’t kill him,’ the girl says. ‘I want ye to know that. I didn’t do it, and neither did Billy.’ Her finger tight and trembling around the trigger now and Anne is only a few feet away, only two or three more steps between them and ‘It’s bad enough, what we’ve done. But it wasn’t murder.’

‘You’re going to have to tell me what you’re talking about,’ Anne says, afraid to move, afraid to stand still, and the girl turns towards her again.

‘You weren’t meant to see the pictures, Dr Campbell. I was supposed to burn them. After we’d done with the tracks, we were supposed to burn everything.’

Fresh tears from the girl’s bright eyes and Anne can see where she’s chewed her lower lip raw, fresh blood on her pale chin and Anne takes another step towards her.

‘Why were you supposed to burn the pictures? Did Morris tell you to burn the pictures, Maire?’

A blank, puzzled expression on the girl’s face then, her ragged smile gone for a moment before she shakes her head, rubs the barrel of the gun rough against her corduroy pants. And then she says something that Anne doesn’t understand, something that sounds like ‘Theena dow’an,’ and ‘I don’t know Irish,’ Anne says, pleading now, wanting to understand and she can see the hurt and anger in Maire’s eyes, the bottomless guilt growing there like a cancer. The girl raises the revolver and sets the barrel against her right temple.

‘Oh God, please Maire,’ and the girl says it again, ‘Theena dow’an,’ and she turns back towards the sea at the same instant she squeezes the trigger and the sound the gun makes is the sound from Anne Campbell’s nightmare, the sound of the sky ripping itself apart, the sound of the waves breaking against the shore.

‘In the west there is still a tradition of the Fomorii who dwelt in Ireland before the arrival of the Gael. They are perhaps the most feared of all the water fairies and are sometimes known as the Daoine Domhain, the Deep Ones, though they are rarely spoken of aloud.’

- Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends of Ireland (1888)

CaitlínR. Kiernan lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Trained as a palaeontologist, she didn’t begin writing fiction until 1992. Since then, her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Dark Terrors 2 and 3, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Eleventh Annual Collection, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine and Ten. Her debut novel, Silk, received both The International Horror Guild and Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Awards for best first novel of 1998. More recently, two collections of her short fiction have been released - Tales of Pain and Wonder from Gauntlet Press, and From Weird and Distant Shores from Michael Matthews Press. ‘“Valentia” was written in July 1999,’ the author reveals, ‘immediately after a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to examine mosasaur fossils (mosasaurs are a group of large marine lizards which became extinct about sixty-five million years ago), and is the sort of story that usually results when I’m in the process of “shifting gears” from my palaeontological studies to fiction writing. The Devonian tetrapod tracks described in the story are real, discovered at Valentia Island in 1992 by the Swiss geologist Ivan Stossel. However, in “Valentia” I have relocated them to Culloo. As of this writing, the Geological Survey of Ireland is in the process of acquiring the actual site so that its fossils may be preserved and protected from looters.’