Welcome again, friend, to the Scarlet Vault. Tonight, I’d like to show you one of our oldest artefacts. This conch shell once belonged to a sea snail – a big one, judging by the size. It’s now so unbelievably ancient that it’s virtually fossilised, yet it can still generate a musical note or two, if blown into at this end. Or so I’m informed. Don’t worry, I’m not going to. You may be wondering why this seemingly innocent relic of a bygone era would be placed in the Scarlet Vault for safekeeping. Well, I’ll tell you…
Call of
the Sea
The smell of the sea air always made Graham Munro hungry. It
conjured mental images of fish, chips, ice cream, and memories of happier times
as a kid. Stress-free times.
He’d been looking forward to this holiday and had felt
himself drawn to the place – some much-deserved time away from the city and his
overbearing family. He had been signed off work by the doctor, due to suffering
from stress. Some solitude and fishing was in order. But first, he had to check into the bed and
breakfast, and that was proving difficult, since no one was responding to his ringing
of the bell. The reception area was deserted. Come to think of it, he hadn’t
seen a single person since he had returned to the seaside village of Glaucus
Bay.
He gave the bell another ding and waited. Then, giving up on
the bell, he knocked hard on the counter to try and get some attention. ‘Hullo?’
he called. ‘Anyone there? Customer here!’
He was replied to by nothing. Total silence.
Graham decided that he had waited long enough. Leaving his
bags by the desk, he vaulted over the counter and walked tentatively into the
small room behind it. Staff Only. ‘Hullo?’
he tried again, quieter this time. Still no sign of anyone. A half-drunk cup of
tea was evidence that someone had been here recently, but he touched the side
and it felt stone cold. He looked around, wondering if he should go upstairs
and bang on some doors there, when the trill sound of the telephone made him
jump. He reached into his jacket pocket for his blood pressure pills.
Swallowing one neat, he looked at the still ringing phone. It wasn’t his
responsibility, of course, but he lifted the receiver and answered the call.
‘Is that the Beachside B&B?’ came the voice of an
elderly woman. ‘I’ve been trying to get through to you for an hour now!’
‘This is the Beachside B&B’ Graham replied. ‘But I’m a
guest, not a member of staff. There’s nobody here, love.’ He suddenly felt a
pang of fear which he brushed away with a joke. ‘Everyone seems to have gone on
holiday!’
Suggesting the lady call back at another time, he replaced
the handset. Forgetting his bags for the moment, he went up the stairs. Surely
if the place was closed it would be locked? He wouldn’t just be able to walk
around the place, would he? He came to the first guest room and banged on the
door. Upon receiving no reply, he tried the handle, and the door opened to an
occupied but occupier-less room. Their luggage had been unpacked, the bedsheets
wrinkled and recently used. Someone had been there recently, certainly, but
they were not there now.
He tried other rooms, always calling, always knocking first.
Nothing.
Returning to the reception area, he picked up his bags and
took them back to his car, pausing to look around the charming coastal village
one last time before he slammed down the boot on his luggage. No one was in
sight. Yet, it was a sunny day, just before lunchtime. Someone should be up and
about, surely?
He’d travelled far to get there, and needed a drink. Perhaps
the local pub would serve him. If there was anyone there. He found the Sailors’
Arms on the high street and went in, but the place was also empty of people.
Like the B&B, there were signs of recent habitation – half-drunk pints of
beer, full astrays on the outside seating – but no humans at all. The pub was
eerily silent.
Graham had had enough of this now. Was this some sort of
joke? Surely not. He tried to think of a reason for what was happening. He was
vaguely aware that some Dorset villages were owned by the army, so in theory
they could become restricted zones upon some order received from higher up, but
he was sure that Glaucus Bay wasn’t one of those places.. Besides, there would
have been roadblocks, surely, or at least some signage turning motorists away.
This was a mystery.
He went back to his car and sat inside and googled the
village on his phone looking for possible explanations. There was nothing that
could explain why Glaucus Bay was deserted, only pretty photos and trip advisor
comments saying how lovely and welcoming the locals were.
With a sigh of disappointment, Graham realised his holiday
plans would have to be forgotten. He would have to call the police and tell
them… what, exactly? That a whole village of people seemed to have disappeared?
He’d be laughed at. And besides, this wasn’t his problem. He was on holiday,
after all. And he certainly didn’t need the extra stress. No, not his problem. He
would just leave and -
A face appeared at the passenger door window. A long face
with haunted eyes. Graham jumped in his seat.
‘Didn’t you hear it?’ the stranger asked, trembling with a
mixture of fear and adrenaline. ‘Didn’t you hear the sound?’
Graham recovered from the shock of this sudden arrival and
leant over and wound down the window so they could hear each other better. He
wasn’t quite comfortable enough to get out of the car with that lunatic out
there. ‘Hear what, mate? I’ve only just got here.’
The man stared at his mouth as he spoke, and seemed to take
a second to understand his words. ‘That explains it,’ he said finally. ‘You’ve
only just arrived.’
‘That’s what I said. Look, where is everyone? What’s going
on here?’
‘You’ll have to talk slower, or look at me while talking or
I can’t understand you.’
Graham huffed and rolled his eyes. ‘Where… is … everyone?’
‘Gone.’
‘I can see that!’
‘They’re all gone. At one with the sea now. I warned him not
to blow into the shell horn. I warned him.’
‘Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Graham
stepped out of the car and walked around to face the man, noting for the first
time that he was carrying a large coral shell in his shaking hands. ‘What’s
that you’ve got there?’
‘The instrument of mass suicide.’
Which was not the answer he was expecting.
‘I’ll try to explain. If you’ll listen? But first, I need to
get rid of this… thing. Come with me to the cliff top, I’m going to throw the awful
thing back into the sea. Where it belongs. We should never have brought it
ashore.’
Graham found himself chasing after the strange man, needing
to understand what was happening. This was against his desire for rest and
relaxation, but he couldn’t resist the mystery. He was led up a footpath which
took them up the hillside.
‘I’m Professor Sebastian Jarred, a marine paleobotanist ’
the man seemed pleased to have someone to talk to and he strode purposefully
onwards, ‘I’ve been one of team studying the shoreline here for ancient
fossils. We found some interesting items, I’ll leave it at that. One of them
was this conch shell.’
‘I didn’t think we had shells like that in this country,’
‘You don’t, and this one is nearly 300,000 years old. I knew
that it was evil the moment I saw it. But Dr Adams – the leader of our group –
ignored my warnings and treated the thing as a toy. He blew into it, producing
a sound that resulted in…’
‘Resulted in what?’
‘It was a clarion call. A call recalling human beings to
where they began. The sea!’
‘That’s nonsense,’ Graham nearly tripped over a rock. ‘You’re
not making any sense. Even if this were true, how could you know all this?’
‘It came to me in a dream. I’ve been troubled by weird
dreams ever since arriving in this village. Race memories, I think they are
called – images, snapshots, sensations of man’s distant past. About our ancient
masters. I tried to warn them. I tried!’
They came to a halt at the cliff edge, the churning sea
below them. ‘I’ve tried stamping on this damn thing, I even tried burning it,
but it’s indestructible. It’s not of this earth! It’s a tool of the ancient
Gods! It must never be used again!’
Graham stopped the Professor from tossing the shell over the
edge. The man was off his head on drugs or something, surely. ‘Just hang on a minute. These things are
valuable! Are you really saying blowing in this makes people throw themselves
in the sea like lemmings?’
‘Everyone who heard that sound responded to the call. Even
Dr Adams. It triggers parts of our brain that have lain dormant for thousands
of years.’
‘But it didn’t affect you because…’
‘I’m partially deaf.’
That explained the strange manner in which the Professor
stared at him whenever he spoke. ‘Okay, right, well I think we need to get you
some help,’ he tried to take the shell from the strange man, but he held on to
it firmly. ‘Give that to me,’ Graham commanded, snatching it from the older
man’s grip. He turned it in his hands. It felt cold, ancient, but surely it was
quite harmless. A pretty thing, really.
‘Don’t be tempted to…’
It would be great fun to blow in to it, to hear if it could
make a sound.
‘Don’t do it!’
Graham put the smooth rim to his lips and blew inside.
…
The sound stirs something inside him, triggering a set of
commands buried deep. He finds his feet are moving. He is walking closer to the
cliff edge. He is not in control.
Professor Jarred is saying something, screaming and
shouting, but he does not hear. It is not important. All that is important is
to respond to the summons.
The land beneath his feet disappears and a new existence rushes
forth.
He is falling now, headfirst into the turbulence of the sea.
The waves are getting closer, closer, and then with a loud splash – again,
inaudible to him, his body strikes the top layer of the water and he plunges
down into the cold depths. He feels nothing. A mercy.
He is sinking now into the murk. The surface of the bottom
of the sea is getting closer, closer, and then with a thud that snaps his
spinal cord his body strikes the seabed. He is surrounded by other bodies, all
of them planted face-first in the gravel, legs swaying in the undercurrent.
Men, women and children. The missing villagers. Still he feels nothing.
Then the hypnotic numbness installed by the calling begins
to subside. The pain registers. Suddenly he is utterly conscious of where he
is, that he cannot breathe, that he can barely see. He screams and his lungs fill
with dirty water. He panics but can’t move.
Then the fish come. He recognizes a few, even looking at
them upside down in the darkness. A roundfish. Two flat fish. An eel. Dozens of
tiny sea urchins. They are tentative at first, but after recognizing he can put
up no defence, they swarm around him, taking exploratory bites and nibbles that
he is sure will grow to become sustained attacks.
He is no longer a human being. He is sustenance. Food. There
are no more worries, no more stress. He feels strangely at home, oddly
fulfilled. This is where he is meant to be.
…
Over fifty villagers from the coastal village of Glaucus
Bay ‘disappeared’ because of this shell. I hasten to call them dead, perhaps
‘transformed’ is a better description. But how and why should such an event
come to be triggered? Is the terrible effect of the sound generated by this
shell deliberate, or simply a quirk of nature? Professor Jarred certainly
believes that the conch was a tool of the ancient sea gods, perhaps a method of
culling the numbers of we unruly apes. If so, what slimy amphibian lips have
pressed against this shell? How often was it used to control and transform
early man? I don’t have the answers to these questions and to be perfectly
honest, I don’t want to know… Enjoy your nightmares.
