The Essex Serpent(83)

On the common Traitor’s Oak was so thick with rooks it might’ve been a crop of feathered fruit – Will walked in its shadow – the avid flock fell silent. The stench grew intolerable, and Mr Caffyn, seeing the lit windows of the school, peeled away to find refuge, saying that he ought not to’ve taken up a post in so remote and muddy a location, but that at any rate he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Then the pitying wind relented, and changed its course; rooks lifted from the oak with a look of black ashes blown up from burning sheets of paper. With the changed air the odour began to recede, blown back out towards the estuary, where others would wake to foulness in the morning; Banks, taking courage, sang a scrap of sea shanty and took a nip of rum.

Then there was World’s End, and each averted their eyes: though they’d seen the mossy tump where Cracknell lay waiting for his headstone it was nonetheless impossible to think that he could not be there behind the mottled glass, picking at earwigs on the sleeve of his coat. A handful now, that was all: William Ransome, with a mother on his left hand and a riverman on his right, and behind them Evansford, mercifully silent.

The two women gone on ahead talked cheerily enough, gesturing at scraps of cloud stained red by the sun’s rising, turning to bat at the air as if they might fend off the odour which strengthened again as they drew near the saltings. Will’s stomach turned in revulsion and fear: he did not believe they were shortly to encounter the Essex Serpent sunning its thin wings on the shingle, snapping its beak, regurgitating a fragment of bone – but oh, he was uneasy. ‘Cora,’ he said, aloud, appalled at his own voice, which had the inflexion of a man blaspheming: Banks at his side cast up a glance of confusion, and may himself have spoken had one of the women ahead not paused on the path, flung an arm down towards the shore, and begun to shriek. Her companion reeled with the shock of it, and stepping on the hem of her dress tripped, and unable to right herself staggered down the incline, her mouth gaping in fear.

There was a moment which Will later recalled as having been fixed, as if on the photographer’s plate: the falling woman – Banks arrested in motion as he moved towards her – himself, useless, in his mouth a sweet foulness that lifted up from the rising estuary tide. Then the image broke, and by some means he could never adequately explain they were all down on the salt shingle, standing by the black bones of Leviathan, looking in terror and pity at what the sea had given up.

In parallel to the lapping water’s edge the carcass of a creature lay in putrefaction. It measured perhaps twenty feet in length, so that its further end seemed to taper almost to a point; it was wingless, limbless, its body taut as a drum’s skin and gleaming silver. All along the spine the remnants of a single fin remained: protrusions rather like the spokes of an umbrella between which fragments of membrane, drying out in the easterly breeze, broke and scattered. The falling woman had stumbled upon its head: eyes large in diameter as a clenched fist looked blindly out, and behind them a pair of gills split away from the silvery flesh and showed, deep within, a crimson, meaty frilling that resembled the underside of a mushroom. Either it had suffered an attack, or caught against the hull of a Thames barge making its way to the capital: in places the taut hide – which gleamed where the low sun struck it with the colours of oil on water – had opened up to show bloodless wounds. Wherever it had touched the mud and shingle it had left a greasy residue, as if fat had begun to render out of its skin. Within its open mouth – which had about it something like the blunt beak of a finch – very fine teeth could be seen. As they watched, a portion of flesh fell away from the bone as cleanly as if tugged with a diner’s knife.

‘Look,’ said Banks, ‘that’s all it was, that’s all it was.’ He plucked off his hat, and held it to his breast, looking absurdly as if he’d encountered there in the Essex dawn the Queen on her way to Parliament: ‘Poor old thing, that’s all it was, out there in the dark, lost, I daresay, damaged, cast up on the marsh and sucked back out on the tides.’

And it did seem a poor old thing, thought Will. For all its look of having detached itself from the illuminated margins of a manuscript, not the most superstitious of men could’ve believed this decaying fish to be a monster of myth: it was simply an animal, as they all were; and was dead, as they all would be. There they stood, reaching by silent agreement the conclusion that the mystery had not been solved so much as denied: it was impossible to imagine that this blind decaying thing – cast out of its element, where its silver flank must’ve been lithe, beautiful – could have caused their terror. Where, besides, were the promised wings, the muscular limbs from which claws protruded? Perhaps it might’ve coiled Cracknell in a wet embrace, out there in the Blackwater estuary, but Cracknell had died on the dry shore and with his boots on.

‘What should we do?’ said Evansford, looking as if he rather regretted the bright sun rising, the pathos of the corpse at his feet, the staying of the hand of judgment. ‘It can’t be left. It’ll poison the river.’

‘The tide’ll take it,’ said Banks, sure-footed: no-one knew dead fish as well as he. ‘The tide, the gulls.’

Then – ‘Something is moving,’ said Harriet’s mother, who’d walked a little onward, and stood at the place where the creature’s belly bulged against the shingle: ‘Something inside is moving!’ Will came near, and saw a kind of shiver and writhing behind the skin; it paused, so that he rubbed his eyes, imagining that his vision had grown disordered by the early morning and the low sun; he opened them again, and all at once, as if slipping free of many small buttons, the belly opened up along the seam and spilled out a pale and writhing mass. The stench was unbearable: each staggered back as if struck by a blow, and Banks could not prevent himself from running to Leviathan’s bones and vomiting. He could not look – he could not: he imagined that there among the white fragments still moving he might see a skein of red hair. But one of the women, indifferent to the sight, stirred at the glistening mess with her foot and said: ‘Tapeworm. Look at it, yards long and still hungry. Probably did for the beast: starved it from the inside. Seen it happen before – you not going to take a look, Reverend? Found you had something to fear, after all?’ Inclining his head (he knew when he was bested) Will did take a look, reeling a little; saw the worm’s last movements, and its peculiar look of a length of white ribbon into which threads had been irregularly woven. What was the creator thinking of, to come up with so revolting a creature, which moreover lived off the life of others? He supposed it served some purpose.