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

starfish sucking the brains out of a surfer. The Seven Stones reef needed investigating.

 

 

 Sennen Revisited

Notoriety had struck Sennen Cove. Through the winter tourists came to stare and wonder at the beach where Stone Man had been washed up. In the summer months dogs were allowed on the beach if kept on a lead. In winter dogs could roam free, most of them dashing into the water. The owner of a lively Irish Setter watched it careering through the shallow incoming tide thoroughly enjoying the freedom of being off the lead.

Suddenly, in mid-gallop, the Irish Setter was snapped up by invisible jaws, pulled rod straight and rolled into the sea, never to be seen again. The duty sergeant tried to calm a distraught owner incoherent about some invisible sea monster stealing her dog and demanding the police send divers to retrieve her pet. The sergeant cast his eyes to the ceiling. Stone Man was still on his books. Now, it seemed the lady had described her dog being turned into a petrified log in the blink of an eye. He entered the case into the book under the heading ‘stone dog’.

Unfortunately, the invisible sea monster had a taste for sprinting dogs, Jack Russels, Labradors, there was no distinction of type. People were afraid to let their toddlers paddle along the shallow shoreline, but their movement seemed too slow to alert the dog snapping terror.

These events attracted the marine scientists’ attention. They needed to do some research into the Seven Stones reef area before arriving with their undersea kit. Reefs are unforgiving. Whether drifting or blown on to them ships rarely break free. It is a heroic task for RNLI lifeboats to close in on a sea breaking reef and save stranded sailors. The Seven Stones is probably the most unforgiving and dangerous reef off western Cornwall. The marine scientists needed to know how many broken and rusting wrecks existed beneath the surface.

Before entering the water to see what lay beneath the waves breaking over the reef, the marine investigators sought the views and tales of the local villagers from Sennen, St Just, Porthcurno and Pendeen. They were all convinced there was something strange happening around the reef. The colour of the seas breaking over the reef had always been known as the ‘milky ones.’ Pilots flying low level light aircraft from St Just airport on Land’s End to the Isles of Scilly noticed the milky breakers had developed a luminescent green tinge, confirmed by onshore binocular sightings.

The big clue came from a Sennen villager walking the cliff path, who saw the Irish Setter transfixed in mid-air by nothing visible, except, the walker added, there was a flash of reflected light as if the sprinting dog had hit a sheet of glass. When it fell stretched out and stunned into the shallows, the observer thought the dog was in an air bubble. The water was not touching it as it rolled into the waves.

This prompted a fisherman to relate how in September, the grey mullet ran in great shoals next to the shore. Watchers on the cliffs would signal the mullet were running. Sennen villagers then grabbed the communal seine net, entered the water, and encircled the shoal. There would be enough dried fish to last the winter. One year the feast was compromised. Out of the hundreds in the seine net, some grey mullet was encased in glass, glass too tough to break.

The marine scientists were in possession of Stone Man cocooned in an unbreakable, invisible coating. The two examples given by the villagers were enough to confirm something had the ability to instantly petrify living creatures. The legend of sinful inhabitants of Lyonnesse being turned into pillars of stone possibly had some truth in it.

The final recollection of several older members was of an American jet bomber hitting the Seven Stones in 1950, but there was disagreement. It dived and crashed was one ardent view. It flew low over the Isles of Scilly and Land’s End before climbing away, was the second firm view. One dominant old codger was adamant the bomber flew low and dropped a bomb on the Seven Stones. He claimed to have seen the enormous splash, adding that you other blind lot thought it had crashed.

If true, what kind of bomb was it? The Cold War was on. The scientists had to exercise caution. From war records, they had to have proof that no A-bomb lurked in the depths seventy years later.

Dwarfing these memories was the Torrey Canyon disaster. All southern England, the Isles of Scilly, Brittany and the Channel Islands suffered black crude oil spilling ashore when the tanker, Torrey Canyon, carrying 120,000 tons of crude oil slammed into the Seven Stones reef at full speed. Marine life was cruelly killed or damaged and the shore environment of the western approaches ruined for decades. The marine scientists, however, considered the fifty years since the disaster was enough to have refreshed the natural life of the reef. They were more concerned with the possibility of a cold war A-bomb lodged in the reef. The old codger swore blind the American jet had dropped a bomb. The marine scientists were more baffled about the origin of the diamond hard glass coating, and why was it killing the living? If there was an A-bomb, had the bomb leaked radioactivity sufficient to melt rock strata into glass sheets?

 

 

 The A-bomb Search

In the Cold War of the 1950s atomic bombs were carried by a huge fleet of Boeing B-47 Stratojet bombers. Over two thousand were built and put into service flying across the Atlantic to bases in Europe. Each aircraft carried two A-bombs weighing a total of 15,200 pounds. One A-bomb had the devasting power of three hundred and fifty times that of the destruction of Hiroshima.

How many A-bombs were flown into RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, and RAF Greenham Common, Berkshire