The Byssus Killer by Charles Tucker (read a book .TXT) 📗

the Falmouth Coastguard was west into the Atlantic, turning south to Gibraltar and then east through the Mediterranean to Bourgas on the Black Sea. His clandestine destination was Murmansk Navy Base on the Russian Arctic Circle in the belief that an American 1950s’ atom bomb had been trawled into the Bulgarian’s fish processing deck. The Russian refused to give his destination and refused to file a new course. He aroused suspicions by not allowing a pilot to board the Bulgarian vessel under tow. He was held in Dover Harbour before agreeing to accept pilots on both vessels to take them across the shipping lanes and return them to the control of the Falmouth Coastguard.

Several days later, the Russian and his tow left Falmouth Bay bound on a filed course for Bourgas. Bourgas it was not. He sailed west into the Atlantic clear of Ireland’s international waters, turned north and plotted a course for Murmansk.

The Bulgarian was a seaworthy ship capable of sailing under its own power. With the Bulgarian crew rendered inactive by the byssus shell attack, the Russian had effectively captured the Bulgarian under Red Navy instructions.

In the North Atlantic, the weather broke into storm force 10. The tow made no forward progress and hove to. When conditions eased, the Russian put a skeleton crew aboard the Bulgarian and brought the ship up to self-power. The two ships continued northwards in convoy. The Bulgarian fish processing deck remained sealed off.

In the Plymouth lab, progress had been made to free the Irish Setter from its tubular byssus casing. The application of starfish digestive chemicals had promoted a full length split along the back of the casing. The technicians were finalising a repeat application along the front of the casing and were waiting for the enzymes and digestive chemicals to take effect. The medical scientists were getting ready to perform an autopsy focussing on the nervous and vascular systems, assuming the dog was dead.

The technicians signalled the casing had cracked along the front of the animal and they were ready to ease the two halves apart. They parted with little effort. On first inspection, the dog seemed perfectly intact, the fur in good condition and the eyes open and bright. It remained motionless for several hours, a faint heartbeat detected every forty minutes. The autopsy was delayed pending the miracle that the dog might recover.

There came a huge shout from the lab.

Doggy was upstanding on wobbly legs and weakly waving its tail. The biologist who advocated the suspended animation theory was jumping for joy. “Vindicated!” he kept shouting, “Vindicated!”

A technician was sponging the dog’s tongue with water until it could lap unaided. A real dog had come back to life. A crate of dog meat appeared from the boot of a car. A vet came to do the most extraordinary examination of his life, declaring a dog that had been underwater for months alive and well.

Revelling in the joy of the situation, the lab people failed to notice the rumpus emanating from the ‘dead’ in the morgue. When realisation dawned, they went white with shock. Nobody dared open the morgue doors.

In the North Atlantic, the skeleton crew were scared witless by clattering and banging coming from the ‘dead’ on the fish processing deck. A crew member dared to crack open the companionway door. Transparent byssus shells were banging against it. At the bottom of the ladder, he glimpsed the encased ‘dead’ rolling to, and piling up against the ladder. He slammed the companionway door shut. Found incoherent and shaking, he had to be restrained from jumping overboard.

The demons had been released.

The ‘Soul of the Sea’ was restless.

 

 

 Stone Man Revived

The original byssus victim washed up on Sennen Cove beach had been preserved in cryogenic conditions. He had been subjected to MRI scans and was the first example, according to the biologist’s theory, of suspended animation. At that time an autopsy was not possible due to his cover of impenetrable diamond hard byssus coating. A complexity for the marine scientists was the state of his brain. During his extended time submerged on the Seven Stones reef a starfish had chewed a tiny hole in his skull and eaten a good section of the fleshy part of his brain. The network of neurones and ganglions remained preserved in sea water. If revived, would his brain regenerate and would he be viable?

Propped upright in his cryogenic drum, he was rocking and banging the sides, creating the noise of distant rumbling thunder. His depleted brain had been agitated into a reflex reaction despite the low body temperature.

The unanimous decision was taken to free him from his hard coating and bear the consequences if he was brain dead. Work on him could not start until the Newlyn trawlermen had dredged up a large quantity of starfish. The trawlermen were getting wise. A price of ten pounds a kilo for the five-armed predator was better than white fish. And there would be more. The four Sardinian trot boat crew had to be freed from their byssus coating purgatory. They were rumbling in the morgue.

The biologists were astonished at the combined reaction of the five human byssus victims to the freeing of a dog from its physical lock up.

As they had noted previously, there seemed to be a collective consciousness between the millions of nano-sized byssus platelets in Stone Man’s blood plasma. Now, they were seeing a collective consciousness at the full-sized animal level between humans and a dog.

Unknown to the lab scientists, the collective consciousness had struck the hundred byssus encased crew members of the Bulgarian factory ship far out in the North Atlantic. Distance between byssus affected victims appeared to be no barrier to the collective reaction. The stirring of the hundred crew victims and the crashing racket of the byssus shells trying to escape to the ocean put the fear of Lucifer into the