The Byssus Killer by Charles Tucker (howl and other poems TXT) 📕

It was the turn of the scientists to discover the mechanism promoting super-fluidity. The effort of trying to get a mobile super-fluid under an electron microscope to see what made it tick took several weeks. At zero degrees Celsius the plasma movement was minimal, and they were able to measure the normal cell and protein content in what should have been ninety percent water. Surprisingly, the water held billions of nano sized, flat, rectangular aragonite and chitin platelets, the mother of pearl coating on the inside of mollusc shells, a mere wavelength of light, four Ångströms, thick. The area of the aragonite platelets could only be defined by an electron microscope. Analysis was put on hold while the scientists decided on their next move.

Despite Chiara Vigo’s warning to respect the Soul of the Sea, the academics concluded that to go further they needed to dissect one of the mutated three-metre long Pinna nobilis. How did mother of pearl platelets get transferred into the human bloodstream, and for what purpose? Did they have super-fluid plasma in their marine bloodstreams?

It took a high degree of persuasion before the Falmouth salvage company agreed to raise a ‘killer’ shell from the Seven Stones reef.

Late September, early October is the Cornish Indian summer. The tourists have gone. Pleasure boats are raised upon the hard for servicing and painting. The Falmouth salvage company used the windless calm to visit the Seven Stones. The shallow draft Zodiac drifted across the reef into the creamy foam and took samples. The milky water was emitting small amounts of radon gas. The Zodiac stopped where the hundred-strong platen of giant mutated Pinna nobilis lay.

Nothing! The Pinna nobilis had gone!

 A Strange Collective Consciousness

All living creatures from microscopic viruses to gigantic blue whales have the same sixteen chemical elements in their cell make-up. The biological scientists expected the super-fluid blood plasma to be normal. It was typically human. The analysis showed:

Six elements made up 99 %:

Carbon

Hydrogen

Oxygen

Nitrogen

Calcium

Phosphorous.

Five elements made up 0.85 %:

Potassium

Sulphur

Sodium

Chlorine

Magnesium.

Trace elements made up the balance:

Manganese

Cobalt

Iodine

Silicon

Zinc

The mother of pearl platelets had a higher calcium content due to the presence of aragonite or calcium carbonate. The other constituent in the byssus platelets, the elastic protein chitin, contained the normal sixteen elements. The ultra-thin aragonite, layered with chitin, measured four Ångströms thick, a little more than the wavelength of light and was transparent. In the human blood plasma, the byssus platelets remained as individuals. The biologists had been measuring the general amounts of chemical elements in the random platelet mass when the sample was sluggish and just above freezing.

Allowing the sample to rise two degrees above freezing produced a strange effect. In the blink of an eye, the random mass formed into a sheet of flexible film, all platelets pointing in the same direction. The sheet moved forward within the vial as if determined to find a way out. The scientists likened it to the murmuration of starlings, the mass change of direction of shoals of fish or the swarming of insects. But these events were the collective consciousness of animal life in which the individual living components stayed apart whilst behaving as a singular item.

What they had witnessed was the collective consciousness of inanimate life. By some inorganic drive, a ‘lifeless’ number of byssus platelets welded together into a regular patterned flat ‘living film’. A film that could wrap itself around a human body tightening the victim into a rigid corpse-like state.

Frightening!

One biologist carried the analogy further. He wondered if the migration of the huge platen of Pinna nobilis shells from the Seven Stones reef coincided with the formation of the byssus platelet film in the sample vial. Were they witnessing collective consciousness over a distance?

Extremely frightening!

 The Byssus Mutation

In his student days the marine scientist, Dr Jones, had visited the Sardinian island of Sant Antioco to study the life cycle of the king mussel; Latin name Pinna nobilis. The most knowledgeable person on the island was Senora Chiara Vigo. She was the curator of Museo del Bisso and was the expert on the colony of Pinna nobilis, a colony that had been resident on the island for more than two thousand years.

He recalled how Senora Vigo free dived down to the colony and collected saliva from the Pinna nobilis. The saliva changed its liquid status into solid woolly beard material and internal filaments to attach the shell to rocks. Senora Vigo stressed the importance of collecting only small amounts of saliva while it was mutating into beard material.

“You must not upset the Soul of the Sea,” she often said.

In her museum she showed how the extremely fine filaments of byssus were separated from the woolly beard, how they were spun into virtually invisible thread and finally woven into cloth finer than silk. Steeped in lemon juice, the cloth shone richer than gold, her fingers shining golden through the gossamer cloth.

Remembering the final showpiece brought the marine scientist into present day shock. He related to his fellow team members how Senora Vigo put two one-metre dead top shells on her table. Turning over one, the inside was shining white. Turning over the other, it was brilliant gold!

She had steeped the second one in lemon juice. It became golden, the same as the threads.

“It proved,” she said, “one Pinna nobilis could make the finest byssus filaments to attach itself to a rock and be able to make half a square metre of byssus film to cover the inside of its shell.”

The marine scientist was clear in his mind. “What we saw in the lab was not a byssus mutation. It was natural. The joining of byssus platelets in the lab by collective consciousness was natural phenomena.

“What should worry us is the unnatural growth