It shouldn’t be there.
He shouldn’t be there.
The beach wasn’t closed, but only because no one thought they had to.
First of all, it was barely a beach to begin with. A strip of shingle at the bottom of a cliff, and at the sea’s edge, a sharp drop off, straight down into the grey green waters.
And that sea.
The narrow, rocky cove brought the waves rushing in, even on calm days. In a storm it was a pit of foam and roaring. Some trick of the steep shoreline and the tight inlet brought the tide in quickly, too. It was easy to get caught there, caught between the rising, roiling waters and the wet slate and slippery clay of the implacable cliffs.
It was easy to get caught because there was only one feasible way down, in one corner. Barely even a path, more climb than a walk, better suited to a goat or a gull than to a middle aged fossil hunter.
Get caught at the wrong end of the shoreline when the sea whipped up and you had little chance of getting back to that path, and even slimmer chance of getting back up it. Get caught and it was all over.
And those were just the physical dangers. The locals told stories. A great many of the disappearances in the cove were ascribed to ghostly smugglers, or cursed wrecks, or sea spirits, mermaids and selkies and things from the waves, tempting the unwary, dragging them down into the depths.
The locals told stories because when it was stormy and the seas were throwing themselves against the cliffs in relentless fury, there was little else to do but sit in the pub and make up nonsense. It was all ridiculous. It seemed to Mallory that the sea was enough of a danger without adding in spectres and bogeymen. Or bogeywomen. These people had disappeared because they had misjudged the sea and the sea had little time for those who took it lightly. This was nothing that tide tables, a good weather eye and some common sense couldn’t circumvent.
He knew the cove was dangerous, that going there was risky, and he took that risk seriously and prepared for it. You just had to have the appropriate respect for the natural world.
But he still went because there were those other stories. Not even quite stories. Whispers, rumours. Finds, extraordinary finds, that had been kept secret and hidden away in private collections and yet that everyone had somehow heard about. Things out of time. Things that shouldn’t have been there. A block of mud with a print freshly made by feet that should have been dead for millennia, a cutting from a plant supposed to have been extinct for millions of years, an ancient insect unnaturally preserved.
And there was something a little unnatural about the place. There had been a moment, as he was carefully climbing down that slippery trail to the shingle, that there had been the most peculiar smell. Not the usual smell of the sea, of rotting seaweed and salty mud.
He had, for a moment, felt unaccountably hot. This happened, sometimes, in these little coves. You climbed down out of the wind, into some sheltered cleft, and the full sun struck you, a little sub-tropical microclimate down between the cliffs. But this had been a thick heat, oppressive and dull, and the sound of the sea had somehow grown fainter, a trick of the acoustics. A bird had called, a call he didn’t know, not a gull or a chough, and there had been a smell. It was a smell he couldn’t place. A little of something of a hothouse, of fleshy, dank vegetation, a little of rancid silt, of mould and wet and forgotten places. A little something of the sea but then also something he didn’t recognise, some spice, pungent and sickly sweet.
And then it was gone.
Whatever odd breeze had brought it to him had blown out. The air shifted, a cloud passed over the sun, its heat dulled, and a gull turned overhead, shrieking at his incursion.
He carried on climbing down.
After all, if it hadn’t been such an odd place, and so dangerous, if it hadn’t collected so many stories and so many tragedies, then he wouldn’t have been the only one who dared. He wouldn’t have had it to himself, he wouldn’t have been the one to find what he found.
Standing at the bar in the pub that evening, Mallory held his pint with one hand, the other stuffed into his jacket pocket. In that pocket he made a fist and in that fist, wrapped in his handkerchief, he held the object. He was trying to make a decision.
He knew a few people there, a couple of them fossil hunters like himself, the friendly competition. The only one he really trusted was Waldron. He realised he had already made up his mind. He had come to the pub because he couldn’t bear not to share his find, he was already going to show someone. He was just waiting for his moment.
Finally he realised that Waldron and he were alone at the bar and, with a conspiratorial, ‘look at this’, he took his fist out of his pocket, and unfolded the handkerchief on the counter top.
At first, Waldron raised his eyebrows in polite interest, and then they stayed raised, startled into motionlessness. He flicked a sideways glance and, at Mallory’s affirmatory nod, picked up the object to look at it more closely.
“Lost a tooth, old man?” it was Aldrich, right in his ear. He hadn’t realised the man was standing behind him.
“No,” he said instinctively, "It's nothing.”
“It’s a tooth, isn’t it?” said Aldrich, too loudly, “Not much of a find. Thinking of changing hobbies, old chap, going to be the tooth fairy instead of a fossil hunter?”
“Oddly,” said Waldron, “No. What do you think?” He passed the tooth to Aldrich. Mallory wished he hadn’t done that. He didn’t like Aldrich. The man was too jolly, treated everything like a joke.
“Good lord,” said Aldrich, “You’re right, that’s fossilised. A stone tooth, well, well. That is odd.”
“A stone human tooth,” said Waldron, “Isn’t it?”
“I’d say,” Aldrich held it up to the light, and something in it glinted, “There’s some metal in there… no, it can’t be…”
“A filling,” said Waldron, “A fossilised tooth with a filling. I’m not sure odd covers it.”
“I know amalgam fillings are considered old fashioned these days, but…” said Aldrich, and then he caught the look of apprehension and disgust Mallory was giving him as he held the tooth up in full view of the bar, and he smiled to himself and tossed it back, “Got some of those fillings yourself, eh? Dare say I do too. We’re all pretty old fashioned ourselves, these days, if not yet entirely fossilised.”
“Must be some freak of the geology,” said Waldron, looking at it lying on the handkerchief, “I don’t suppose you’d tell us where… No? Well, fair enough. I’d just be curious to see the conditions, you know.”
“Ever heard of the Silurian hypothesis, old chap?” said Aldrich. “The idea is that plate tectonics being what they are and history being what it is, if humanity disappeared tomorrow, future paleontologists might never know it was here. Modern civilisation could simply not show up in the fossil record. And this then suggests that technological civilisations could have existed in the deep past and we might never know. Whole cities of dinosaur men with dinosaur dentists and dinosaur fillings and all that’s left of them is one tooth.”
“That’s a mammal tooth,” said Waldron.
“Nature,” said Aldrich, “Is mysterious.”
“What a find,” said Waldron, “What a find.”
Mallory went back to the cove, of course.
If anything, aware of his excitement, he was even more careful than before. This was the sort of man Mallory was. He knew he was eager to return, to look for more of his find, and he knew this enthusiasm could make him take risks that he shouldn’t. He double checked the tides, sought out long range satellite weather images, planned his route carefully. He parked further away this time, not trusting Aldrich, doubling back through the woods to hide his trail. At the bottom of the clamber down, he discovered that he was running half an hour behind his schedule. He set an alarm on his watch to remind him.
He scrambled along the sliding shale of the beach to where he had found the tooth and started carefully scraping away at the cliff-face, revealing the stone under a thin film of clay. There was something there. He glanced around, reassuring himself that he was alone, and then fished out a hammer and chisel, gingerly, guiltily tapping away at the rock.
There was definitely something. Something straight-edged and unnatural. A little square, perhaps four or six centimetres to an edge. No, not quite square, odd protrusions at the end, Like a… like his watch. He looked at the watch on his wrist, a fat rectangle with a button at each corner, just like the shape in the rock. He felt momentarily dizzy and hot, as if feverish. His hearing was suddenly dulled, the sound of the sea distant and soft. And then… the smell. There it was again, the oppressive heat on the back of his head and that strange smell.
He turned.
The cove was… wrong. The steep cliffs had opened out, the sea receded away, before him was a wide flat shelf of rock, baking under a white and featureless sky. Across the shelf, all around him, were little monoliths, carved into peculiar, undulating patterns that could have been entwining animals or the shifting of strange waters. And between the stones stood people… were those people?
They were tall and thin, their shining skin dark and mottled with spots of green and blue. They were bare and hairless, but bedecked with feathers, leaves and shells, so that they rustled and rattled as they moved, gently, carefully, around him. And great and golden were their eyes, gazing at him with an intent he could not fathom, watchful and too silent.
Then there was a clucking noise behind him and he turned. The cliff face was gone. In its place a great block of obsidian, its surfacing writhing with more carvings, with knots and eyes and grimacing creatures, all encrusted with something clotted and dark. And before the stone, stood another of the people, tall and gleaming and golden eyed, great horns of beads and pearls on its head and a shard of shell in its hand.
Behind it, on the top of the stone, was an odd collection of objects. A row of bleached white skulls, all decorated with stones, pigment and odd accessories. A pair of glasses, a watch face in an empty eye socket, a mantle made out of an OS map.
Things out of time, that shouldn’t be there, he thought, and then, what a find that would make.
And the figure behind him made a loud noise and raised its arms, and the pearl knife gleamed as it fell.