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

 Bouillabaisse Poisoning

Conconeau and Douarnenez fishing villagers were suffering severe stomach upsets after an alfresco feast of mutated Pinna nobilis king mussels. Local doctors were could not understand why the common factor appeared to be internal bleeding showing up in bodily emissions. Blood tests were normal. There was no fever. The doctors were puzzled by a strange coincidence. The patients described their symptoms in remarkably similar terms, backed up by similar hand gestures, as if they had been choreographed.

Collective consciousness had not yet reached medical diagnosis on the French Brest peninsula. Treatment followed gastro-enteritis formulas.

In the summer evenings, Concarneau villagers gathered on the walls of the ‘ville clos’, the walled port. The usual haunts would have been cafés and bars. They were drawn to the walls in particularly high ten metre tides as if the acrophobia scare factor was uniting them before they made a common decision to jump.

A similar silent gathering of bouillabaisse victims happened nightly in Douarnenez. Here, as in Concarneau no one succumbed to acrophobia and jumped. They all trooped silently back to the village centre. The bouillabaisse poisoning was building up to a level where they would soon do a collective jump into the Atlantic.

If Jones had witnessed the silent nightly pilgrimages to the Atlantic Ocean, his fears of collective consciousness taking over peoples’ lives with virus-like power would have set him on fire to act. As it was, he was working in his Plymouth lab on chemical destruction of the byssus-chitin bond. He then had to advance to live tests destroying the bonds in millions of platelets in human blood streams.

Jones had a human guinea pig in mind, the man who frightened Jones to hide away in his lab.

Stone Man. He was brain dead, incapable of speech but he would be a hero if he proved Jones’ work to save victims from the byssus killer.

While Jones beavered, walkers on the rocky shores of Douarnenez were treated to a marvellous exhibition of aerobatics by herring gulls! More than one hundred gulls were performing a collective murmuration superior to that of any mass starling show. These were the gulls that had devoured the two storm-smashed mutated Pinna nobilis shells set down for breeding. Collective consciousness had joined up their minds. Douarnenez could not have had a better tourist attraction.

The most westerly point of the Brest peninsula, and most dangerous, was guarded by the Ushant Light. Ushant, was the Breton and Cornish name for the small department of Ushant mirroring Cornwall County. The modern French name is Ouessant. Ushant Light is now named Phare de la Jument. There exists a collective emotion between Ushant and Cornwall. In the days of sail, two lighthouses stood guard over the Western Approaches to the English Channel, Bishop Rock on the Isles of Scilly and Ushant Light on the most north-westerly point of mainland France. Both lighthouses have twenty-five- mile visible beams. The actual distance is five times the beam distance. On a crystal-clear moonless night, the old salts of Scilly and Ushant would take their grandchildren out under the sweep of a myriad of stars and look to the depths of the twinkling heavens. Reflected high in the canopy to the south, the old salts of Scilly would point out the regular flashes of Ushant Light. And the old salts of Ushant would point out to the north, the regular flashes of Bishop Rock lighthouse. The emotion of joining two foreign counties under millions of stars was never lost on seafaring grandchildren.

And the legendary affinity of the Lost Land of Lyonnesse, Cornwall is all that remains; with the Lost Land of Lyonnais, Ushant remains; and it will forever pass down in folklore under those same stars.

Collective consciousness was always there through the ages. Perhaps Pinna nobilis tapped into it.

 The Bourgas Hundred

Jones had been concentrating on the mass revival of the one hundred Bourgas factory ship fishermen. The byssus-chitin platelets in their blood streams had to be destroyed. The lysozyme enzyme in starfish stomachs dissolved the chitin shells of oyster, mussel and clam. Jones considered his task of dissolving microscopic platelets in a blood stream an easy one compared to dissolving a thick mussel shell. Injecting lysozyme into a patient, however, might harm or kill him. Breaking up the platelets into aragonite and chitin could cause kidney stones or block their filtration ability. He had lined up Stone Man for the trial. A change of plan was forced on him when Mason and James suffered Stone Man’s bloody attack. They were the priority. They had to agree to a trial cure, or they would be afflicted by collective consciousness with one hundred Bulgars, Stone Man and a dog.

The Maritime Agency agreed to a temporary annexing of the factory ship. Jones believed his army of technicians could convert the factory ship floor into a military hospital ward. Drawing on previous experience of releasing Stone Man and the Sant Antioco trot boat men, Jones reckoned his technicians could do the basic release. He would do the pre-mass injections of diazepam (valium).

Because of his admiration of Senora Vigo’s work in Sant Antioco island, Jones asked his technicians to preserve and store all the golden Pinna nobilis shells and every broken piece on the factory ship. He believed he and the scientists owed it to Senora Vigo to return the protected shells to their home on Sant Antioco island.

Mason and James grimaced as Jones prepared his lysozyme syringes. He would do before and after blood tests, checking if the lysozyme had been effective after a week, “If I haven’t killed you.”

Jones had a week to release the one hundred Bulgars.

The deck of the factory ship was as clean as any hospital ship. Security doors were in place should any reviving trawlerman run amok. These men had not been underwater nor encased for decades. Their reaction would