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

the seabed. Her head was illuminated by a golden Pinna nobilis shell behind it outlining her head like a halo. When he opened his eyes on the quayside the vision was still there. He said it faded as he recognised his quayside surroundings. He thought he had been away for one day, just one day! Two decades had been wiped from his life’s event horizon.

The resuscitation team restrained their joy and astonishment at reviving all four crewmen, making copious medical notes for learned journals. Jones insisted on the crewmen avoiding celebrity status, remaining on Sant Antioco island and recovering their place in the quiet fishing village society. The priest had other saintly thoughts, celebrations, thanksgivings and coffer rattling, but he would never beat the eternal legend of Saint Bisso and ‘the Soul of the Sea’.

 

 

 The Stone Man Curse

Scientists Mason and James were greatly encouraged by the success of Jones and his team restoring the trot boat crewmen from apparent drowning to their village lives. Mason was fully charged up to take on the challenge of Stone Man.

The morgue and resident technicians were wearying of the overbearing presence of Stone Man. Earlier his diamond hard casing had expanded to cement itself on to the cell walls. He had to be stood in a liquid nitrogen barrel to freeze the diamond hard casing’s activity. When the dog was freed Stone Man was afflicted by canine collective consciousness urging him to break out of his diamond hard prison. He had been chuntering and banging inside his casing for weeks, alive in some manic form. Jones could not stand his rolling eyeballs. Mason requested Jones’ presence to supervise the shell softening enzyme application. Jones refused to apply anything to Stone Man other than being as far from him as possible. The technicians were instructed to the dangerous task.

Mason could not believe a man who had been held in suspended animation under the sea for decades could be even a small tad dangerous. Mason acceded to Jones’ caution. He agreed to soften the casing covering Stone Man’s jugular vein and load him with enough valium to flatten an ox. His eyes did not stop rolling. Jones knew there would be trouble. He left the marine lab for the quiet cloister of Plymouth University.

The technicians ladled the enzymes on thick and fast. They needed to get the casing off and lash Stone Man into a strait jacket before he took violent umbrage upon all within reach.

The softening of the casing took some time. After a couple of hours, the technicians made a breach in it near his chest and levered it open, ripping the whole lot away. Stone Man was lumped around, expediency equated to roughness and fear factor. The casing was off. Stone Man remained corpse-like. Had the ox dose of valium killed him? The technicians relaxed. Dr Mason leant over the ‘still life’ to test for vital signs of life.

Mason was flung to the floor. Stone Man did a coiled spring act and sat bolt upright. Air was rasping into his lungs, the first for decades. Only his eyes moved, piercing any unfortunate within range. Then his arms shot out in a paroxsismic jerk. The strait jacket hurtled across the lab. True to his Nordic origins, Stone Man let out a Viking howl and flopped back, exhausted.

The medics were confident they had witnessed a show of pent up power. It would take weeks to build up that power again, weeks of physical muscle toning and mental adjustment. They could work on him, a unique medical case history.

They were wrong. Stone Man sprung off the stretcher, clawing at anything that moved. Four technicians, Mason and James could not restrain him. Stone Man’s super-fluid blood gushed over the restraining medics, mixing into their deep gashes. A blood clotting agent was stabbed into him. More diazepam was rushed from the pharmacy. It seemed an age before Stone Man subsided into a drug induced coma.

The medics had to clean their wounds, hosing them out with copious amounts of water. They shrugged, resigned in the knowledge that whatever was in Stone Man’s circulatory system was now in theirs. Most certainly their blood systems would have millions of byssus-chitin platelets flowing around their bodies every two minutes.

Mason gave a despondent doctor’s view. “If you recall, one of Jones’ technicians discovered a small hole in Stone Man’s skull. A starfish had bored into the man’s skull and sucked much of his brains out. A CT scan showed the fleshy part of his brain much reduced, but the arteries, veins, neurons and ganglions remained intact. He had to be acting on reflex stimuli. He is medically brain dead! But here is the weird corollary: if Jones was right and the byssus shells are driven by a collective consciousness, we have seen it when Stone Man reacted to the dog being brought to life. We witnessed it when the one hundred factory ship crew reacted as a unit when we started to take samples from Stone Man.

“My fellow medics, the Stone Man has infused us through his blood, with the genes of collective consciousness. When we release the one hundred Bulgarian seamen, they will have a collective desire to return to Bourgas on the Black Sea. And, so will we! Because their collective desire will swamp our consciousness. This byssus-chitin invasion into our bodies is worse than any virus. It will control us. We cannot stop it by drugs or vaccine. And we cannot kill it. It is not alive. The thought of a whole city, country or continent being taken over by a collective consciousness, and we do not know the prime mover behind it, is too terrible to contemplate.

“Jones is going to need all his intuition and brilliance to find the antidote to this screamer. He was wise to keep away from Stone Man.”

Mason and James would be drawn into a tragic collective