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

the sea between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. Sennen Cove looks westward over Lyonnesse. The surfing victim was washed ashore from the Lyonnesse direction.

Cornish legends go back two and a half thousand years about a land called Lethenson. It extended north and south of Cornwall and as far out as the Isles of Scilly. To the south it swept around to Mount’s Bay where St Michael’s Mount is a rocky remnant. Across the Channel, the French legends record the name as Leonais, Mont St Michel being the rocky remnant over there. The Cornish name of St Michael’s Mount is Korek y’n Koos, Grey Rock in the Wood. At very low tides, tree stumps and evidence of buildings appear. On the Isles of Scilly, archeologists have excavated bronze age settlements of the same era.

Arthurian legend records King Arthur and Sir Mordred fighting many battles on Lyonnesse. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King describes their final battle taking place on Lyonnesse.

More well-known is the tragic love story of Tristan and Iseult, Tristan and Isolde in Richard Wagner’s 1865 opera, in which Mark, king of Cornwall, sent Tristan to Ireland to bring the beautiful Princess Iseult to Cornwall. King Mark and the princess would marry with great celebrations, but Tristan fell in love with her and the pair eloped. Many books and poems have been written about this Lyonnesse love tragedy. Donizetti set it to song, performed by a joyful soprano, King Mark in desolation.

Folk memory records the settlements in Mounts Bay and those between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly as being inundated in a single night by a huge wave sweeping in from a great storm. Priests declared it was retribution against Lyonnesse for descending into sin and fornication. The land plumbed the depths, a new Sodom and Gomarah. The evil ones would be turned into pillars of stone.

The priests suffered the loss of one hundred and forty churches. The cathedral built on the one visible mount twenty miles west of Sennen and eight miles north west of the Isles of Scilly was destroyed. The remains of the mount exist today and are known as the Seven Stones Reef. The sea breaks over this reef whatever the tide. Strangely, the colour of the breakers is creamy, not the usual brilliant white. Locally the Seven Stones are known as the Milky Ones. The sins have not yet been washed away, but on a calm night, fishermen claim they can hear the church bells ringing beneath the sea.

One man, Trevelyan, fled the wave on a terrified white horse. The horse lost one shoe in its manic panic. Both horse and Trevelyan survived. In tribute to the desperate flight, many Cornish crests carry the three-horseshoe emblem. The Vyvyan family crest depicts the white horse and the three horseshoes. The Lyonnesse legend lives on, even if it is a pub sign.

The superstitious Cornish soon linked the body’ heavy as granite’ to the great Sodom and Gomarah storm of retribution when the evil ones were turned into stone. Washed up from the satanic depths it was. Nobody would go near Sennen Cove. Great relief was expressed when the body was moved over the Tamar into Devon.

 

 

 The Autopsy

Dismantling the bank of morgue cubicles revealed the shining diamond hard coating had spread into the running rails. A technician thought it had grown, but the medics disagreed. The keen technician came forward with a diamond wheel cutter, declaring the coating would curl up if it was alive when he attacked it. It did not, but two diamond wheels wore out freeing the body from the morgue tray. It would be impossible to cut the shrink-wrapped coating off the body without slicing into the flesh. The innovative technician cut through a lock of head hair, accidentally removing some scalp with it. DNA was requested.

A decision, somewhat strange, was taken to immerse the body in sea water because the coating had not grown in that medium at Sennen Cove. ‘Stone Man’ found himself standing in a corner of Plymouth Aquarium’s shark tank facing inward so as not to frighten customers.

The DNA results were intriguing. Aged about thirty the surfer was of Nordic extraction. A family somewhere in the region from Finland to Denmark had probably recorded him as missing, but not in England. The most startling result stated the scalp tissue was viable, capable of skin grafting.

Stone Man was removed from the shark tank. DNA had shown the man’s tissue to be living. If he was, the medics had no wish to drown him. Unexpectedly his coating had extended to encase a large shell on the bottom of the shark tank. The coating seemed to have a mind of its own.

A second momentous decision requested a total body MRI scan, a big risk. The coating could attach to the MRI scanner’s tunnel, putting a million-pound machine in jeopardy. Scanning only the head minimised the risk.

The result was astounding. Stone Man had no brain! The grey fleshy matter had gone. A tangled network of neurones and synapses remained in a skull full of sea water. He was brain dead. Detailed examination of the skull’s bone structure revealed a small hole in the top of the head, a hole about an eighth inch diameter. The brain had been sucked out!

The altruistic medics thought the decent thing to do was to lay Stone Man to rest from whence he came, the Seven Stones reef off Sennen Cove. Then professionalism got the better of them and they decided to freeze-store his hard-coated body for medical research.

In later discussions with aquarium marine scientists, one of them said eighth-inch holes were common in the tops of limpet shells. Starfish had extremely sharp teeth, climbed over living limpet shells, chewed off the tops of the shells and sucked out the limpets’ flesh.

The medics were unimpressed, but the marine scientists were excited about the possibility of a large