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

a storm. It had been rolling in and out with tides for a couple of days. Now, it was resting above the high-water mark, beached. Intrigued, two walkers strolled down through the dunes thinking about rolling the log back to the sea. What they saw horrified them. The log was a surfer, rigid in a black wetsuit. It was the eyes, staring at them out of a head so perfect they thought he was alive and about to sit up and speak.

They fled.

The duty sergeant in Penzance Police Station received a forwarded 999 call. An incoherent woman was raving about a dead body on a beach, alive and staring at her and she’d never be able to sleep ever again. The sergeant calmly got her to tell him the body was on Sennen Cove beach. He slowly asked her if she had pulled the body above the high-water mark. She screamed in terror and banged the phone down.

The alarm blaring ambulance hung on to the blue flashing police car speeding crazily through the narrow Cornish lanes almost to Land’s End before hurtling down to Sennen Cove. The paramedics sprinted over the dunes and straight to the body. Normally used to blood and broken bones, the staring eyes of this silent static corpse terrified them. They had never witnessed a ramrod straight body before, the legs locked together and arms to the sides as if glued in position. Only the head was free of the black wetsuit, the facial skin clear and fresh as if from a walk in the May spring air. The wide-open eyes were like magnets, drawing and penetrating the observer into heart-stopping panic.

Lifting the body on to the stretcher proved difficult. The paramedics could not get a grip on it. The wetsuit and the bare head were as smooth as glass. Getting the wetsuit off the body proved impossible. They stood back to have a rethink. Putting webbing straps under and around the body with tightening fixings did the trick. Back in the ambulance the paramedics agreed it was remarkable that this body had rolled around in surf, over reefs and rocks, scraped along in the sand and yet there was not a tear or scratch on the wetsuit, nor was the face bruised or cut nor bloated by sea water. It seemed to have been protected by a coating of diamond hard glass.

What was this coating, slippery as ice, and for what purpose had it been applied?

Called in to certify death and time of death, the police doctor spent several minutes studying the inert body, most of the time tapping the diamond hard coating with some force. He struck the open eyeballs, but his pen bounced off. Observers winced. He shone an optical light into the eyeballs for some considerable time, stood up and asked for a cup of tea. Getting his thoughts together, he addressed the senior police officers:

“You claim the body coating is too difficult to remove. It has not yielded to cutting, sawing, drilling or moderate heat even though it is less than a millimetre thick. Unless the coating is removed, I cannot determine the cause of death nor if the victim is actually dead. Indications from the retinas in both eyeballs tell me they are still viable. He might be dead, but he can see you! There is no discernible pulse to create a blood flow, but the retinas are getting a minimal blood supply, preventing organ decay. This case is out of my league. Until you remove the coating, I cannot give you answers.”

The unfortunate victim was loaded on to a refrigerated truck and taken to Plymouth mortuary for a full autopsy.

Meanwhile, the Penzance police were hoping someone would call to register a missing person. It would get this mystery case off their books. Surfers were a fanatical bunch, driving their battered pick-ups from beach to beach searching for ‘the wave’. They slept in their trucks. Records of who came to Cornwall, where they went and when they left were non-existent. Normally they came in groups or pairs. This man was a loner, unusual that he surfed alone in mid-October when the RNLI lifeguards had been stood down and the weather was rough and cold. The weeks went past. Nobody claimed him.

In Plymouth, the decision was taken to go ahead with the autopsy, despite the lack of a relative’s permission. Problem, the mortuary attendants could not slide him out of his morgue cubicle. His coating had grown over the sliding rails and seized them. Progress was halted while the complete bank of cubicles was dismantled.

The victim’s staring blue eyes haunted marine biologist, Dr Jones. An inveterate collector of seashells since boyhood, he felt pure horror looking at a man turned into a seashell. Jones kept a small rare mole cowrie shell in his pocket. When in deep thought unable to find an answer, he would roll the cowrie around in his fingers. The solution to his problem would come to mind through his angel cowrie.

He could not tear his gaze away from the haunting eyes. The cowrie was rolling around in his fingers, alive? And getting warm! The eyes were pleading. ‘Get me out of this cruel death.’

The cowrie was burning Jones’ fingers. He could not let go. It would not let him. Only when he gained strength to look into those eyes, knowing he had to rescue that poor man, did the cowrie relax its hold.

 

 

 Lyonnesse

The Cornish people are a superstitious lot. A wildfire rumour passed around the county at salivating speed. A body as black as coal and as heavy as granite had been washed up in Sennen Cove. Anyone looking at its eyes went mad on the spot. The body had surely come from Lyonnesse, a land that suffered damnation for sins of the flesh. A great inundation was wrought upon it.

The legendary lost land of Lyonnesse is buried beneath