Fossils

A Willerby Story

The children spent the spring filling Willerby with fossils.

They filled their homes and gardens with ammonites, belemnites, brachiopods and bivalves.

They filled them with skeletons of strange fish and sharp stone teeth.

Some were the size of toddlers’ fingernails, and some were so large they had to be dragged back from the HS2 Scar in tottering wheelbarrows.

They swapped and bartered for them, displaying their best finds in wooden treasure boxes and filling shoeboxes, old bowls and chipped plant pots with superseded discards.

Their parents did not mind - even encouraged it.

The Scar was shallow with gently sloping sides and there would be no more dangerous construction unless HS2 started up again and there was no sign of that.

It was safe enough and everyone thought prehistoric exploration a better use of good weather than cartoons and game consoles in dark rooms.

Then May became June.

June became July. The days grew hotter.

The air stilled.

Time thickened then slowed.

Watery mirages hazed the road and at night the sound of cars miles away on the motorway broke on the village like waves on a faraway shore.

It was hard to sleep, and the nights were strange; the adults dreamt of spinning backwards, over and over through infinite black voids and woke breathless in damp bedsheets with a sense there was much further still to fall.

People felt tired all the time. They didn't move if they could avoid it.

Willerby hunkered down.

In sunhats and carrying bottles of water the children did not mind the heat and continued their work.

While the adults sweltered with cold drinks under fans, the children continued to fill the village with ossified shell and bone.

Soon, the adults hardly ever left their houses and only Jamal and Lisa were unbefuddled.  

Jamal needed his computers cool for work, and he’d had air-conditioning fitted to his home office before moving in two years before. The company had offered him a discount on extra rooms, so he’d put it to his bedroom too. 

He slept well.

Co-incidentally the only other cool place in the village was in the house opposite.

Lisa had air-conditioned only her fitness studio, but that was enough to keep her comfortable. She spent most of her days there and when the heat became insufferable, she thew her sheets over stacked up yoga-mats and slept on them, waking each morning well-rested and clear-headed.

Neither left their homes much, and when they did, they were soon driven back by the curtain of wet tropical heat that met them when they stepped from their temperature-controlled cocoons.

Jamal spent a lot of time looking from his office window, which looked out onto the village green. He noticed the trees and plants changing.

Creepers with grotesque white flowers were climbing the trees and the grass on the green itself grew longer and longer, choking the bandstand, benches and picnic tables in its widening blades.

Then the rainstorms began – late morning and late afternoon as regular as clockwork - sudden, violent downpours flooding drives and the street and ending as quickly as they began.

When Lisa tried to leave the village to go shopping, she found the turn onto the main road going to Beckworth blocked. The hedges had grown to an enormous size and intertwined themselves over the tarmac like the fingers of two clasping hands.

By pushing the leaves aside, she could just see through.

Cars were rushing past, but none slowed, and Lisa wondered if Willerby was being forgotten.

There was no way through, so she got back into her car and retreated to her studio.

It felt safer there.

Then, one morning, Jamal and Lisa woke to find their houses divided by a brown river meandering lazily where the street had been the night before.

They stood in their gardens, looking at the river and sweating.

“That wasn’t there last night”, Jamal called across.

“No,” Lisa called back, shaking her head, “it wasn’t.”

She did not like it.

Across, it was only the size the road had been, but there was no telling how deep it was.

Up to then Jamal and Lisa hard not talked much, their interactions limited to polite nods and the odd knock-round to collect misdelivered parcels. They looked at each other at a loss for words.

“What do you think we should do?” Jamal asked.

Lisa shrugged. “Well, something,” she said, “we can’t all stay in our houses forever.”

“Could you come over here?” Jamal said, “or me to you? I don't know how though unless you've got a boat?”

Lisa thought for a moment. She did have an inflatable lilo somewhere with her holiday stuff but she would not want to be on that brown water with just air between it and her. “Maybe we could use the bridge?”

The Willerby Bridge, a relic of the time before the bypass, was half a mile down the road and barely used. Now, the village was practically a cul-de-sac with little traffic, and walking all the way there to cross wasn’t worth the trouble - snared in brambles and thorns, it was only used by the children, who enjoyed peering down onto the road like hidden outlaws in a medieval forest.

“OK,” Jamal said, “shall I come to you, or you to me?”

Lisa looked up the river and then back down it.

Its edges lapped the pavement and reached over it in the places the kerb was lowered.

“I think,” she said, “it’d be better if we both went. That way we can keep in sight of each other and then meet their – that way we’ll also get a better idea of the state of things and see what everyone else makes of all this. Fifteen minutes to get ready and then meet back here?”

It was an uncomfortable walk.

The path was narrow. The fields the village houses backed onto had become jungles of high trees, vines and creepers. The new growth choked the gardens and tight-roped the pavement against the river, as if this new world that felt old was trying to squeeze them out of it.

Although both Jamal and Lisa were in shorts and vests, the heat and humidity and made them breathe hard. Sweat stung their eyes and insects bit their exposed skin making them slap, rub and scratch.

Every few steps Jamal looked behind him, afraid he’d see their way back blocked and not sure what they would do if it were.

“Stop here,” Lisa called over to him, waving, outside a large, detached farmhouse, “just for a minute – I want to see if the Donaldsons are alright.”

She walked to the front door down a path that was already melting into the jungle and knocked. There was no answer. “Hello?”, she called. “Anyone home?”

There was still no answer, so she pushed open the unlocked front door.  

Over the sound of buzzing insects and calling birds, she heard the murmur of a television in the lounge.

She went in and saw Carol and Gary on the couch, but neither turned to look at her. Every now and again they raised bottles of water and tried to drink, without seeming to notice their bottles were empty.

“Hello?”, Lisa said again. “Everything alright?”

Gary’s eyes did not move.

For a moment Carol didn’t move either but then, slowly as if it were hard to do, she turned to the doorway.

“Oh, hi, Lisa”, she said, flatly. “If you need something, can you get it yourself? It’s too hot to move.”

“Have you been outside recently?” Lisa asked. “The street’s under a river now.”

Carol shrugged, pushing her sweat-sodden hair out of her eyes with an absent-minded hand. “No,” she said. “Not for ages. It’s too hot.”

“Where are Thomas and Theresa?”

An expression of concern flickered over Carol’s face, but only for a moment, “About somewhere,” she said vaguely, “Maybe at the Scar? Could you come back later, actually? And close the door on the way out?”

Lisa started to say something but saw it was pointless.

As she turned to go a winged iridescent beetle landed at the corner of one of Gary’s eyes.

Outside, on the other side of the river, Jamal was waiting.

“Carol and Gary are in there,” Lisa called over, “but there’s no sign of the kids. And they say it’s too hot to go out.”

“The jungle’s growing all the time,” Jamal called back, “there’s plants over the pavement now, and ferns are coming up through the cracks. Maybe we should go back? If we go out too far, we might get stuck.”

“If we do that what then?” Lisa said. “I think we should meet and make a plan. And we should find the kids. The Donaldsons keep their tools in the garage around the back – I’ll duck back in and see if they’ve got anything we can use to cut plants and stuff back.”

On the way back, a pair of long handed garden loppers under one arm and a battery powered strimmer in the other, Lisa looked in in Carol and Gary.

Neither had moved. The beetle was still at Gary’s eye, winking at her like grotesque jewellery.

Not wanting to risk them falling in the water, Lisa overcooked throwing the loppers. They went over Jamal’s head and smashed the windscreen of the Porsche on the drive behind him.

The crash was startling and set of the car alarm which raised a chorus of birdcalls and the hoot of something that sounded like a monkey. Then the alarm slowed, stretched and quietened as if the battery was wearing down. Then it stopped.

“I hope that hasn't.. woken anything up,” said Jamal.

Keeping each other in sight, walking the thin line between the brown river and green jungle, they went on.

To get to the bridge Jamal had to go past the pond – called Jack’s Pool for reasons neither Jamal nor Lisa understood or had ever cared enough to ask about.

There, something odd inside all the other oddness was going on.

It had not changed. The rough grass was no longer and the sycamore next to it stood free of climbers and creepers. The fence around it seemed a barrier to encroachment - ferns and young, tall trees pressed up against it but there were none within its circumference.

Next to the pond itself, the thin plastic sign reading “Danger, Keep Out”, and it was – if anything – clearer and bolder than it had ever been.

This normality in all the strangeness seemed unnatural and made Jamal even more uncomfortable. He was glad when they were passed it.

When they got to it, they only recognised the bridge because there was nothing else it could be.

All traces of its built structure were gone – if they were still there at all they were hidden under matted vegetation, woven together by a lattice of finger-width vines and creepers. The ends of the bridge were obscured by growth, and the arc over the river seemed more plausibly part of the natural landscape than something people had built.

They stopped and looked at each other across the water and as they did, there was a great heaving. Then, just for a moment, the glimpse of a reptilian back of hard-ridged rusty scales humping the surface and then slipping back, leaving a widening circle of ripples washing up against the kerb that was now also a riverbank.

“What was that?”, Jamal said.

“I don’t know, Lisa said, “But I think we’d better get off the pavement. You check your end and I’ll check mine.”

To the surprise of them both, once they were off the pavement and through the first mass of ferns and grasses, a neat path had been cut to the entrances of the bridge, which were also clear of vegetation. Looking up the steps was to peer into a green and glowing translucent tunnel.

There were voices.

“We should start putting them back,” said eleven-year-old Thomas Donaldson, “try and get things back to normal.”

“Yes, for sure later but why right now?”, said someone else, “It’s fun like this. Doing what we want. We should wait until school starts at least – so we get more summer holiday.”

A younger voice spoke up. “I miss mummy.”

Lisa recognised it as five-year-old Lily-Rose, whose dad used to attend Lisa’s spinning classes before it got too hot.

“Your mum is fine,” Theresa Donaldson said, “remember we checked this morning? She’s got water and everything. She’s happy listening to her music.”

“She isn’t the same,” said Lily-Rose, “when I went to cuddle her, she pushed me off and told me to leave her alone. She said it was too hot.”  She began to cry. “It is too hot.”

An argument broke out – lots of voices all speaking over each other, about equally split between those who were happy with things and those who wanted them to go back to how they were.

“I miss swimming and gymnastics.”

“We don’t have to do anything we don’t want now.”

“But I like school!”

“It’s so fun seeing everything change!”

“It’s scary now – there are things moving about.”

“Hello!”, Jamal called, “Can we come up?”

The squabbling voices stopped instantly.

“Adults!”, Theresa hissed and then, “who is that?”

“We’ve just been at your house.” Lisa said. “Your parents have run out of water but don’t seem to have noticed.”

“Thomas, I told you they needed more than one bottle,” Theresa said, “we’ll have to go back now.”

Lisa and Jamal climbed the stairs at either end of the bridge and found the village’s twenty or so children sitting or standing in the middle of it. They were sweaty and grubby, with matted hair and ragged, torn clothes. The two adults were looked upon with suspicion from some and relief from others.

“Lisa!”, Lily-Rose called. She ran to her and grabbed her around the waist in a sticky embrace, “can you take me home, please?”

“How come you aren’t back at your houses?”, Theresa asked, glaring at them both with her arms folded.

“We came because of the river,” said Lisa, “It wasn’t here yesterday.”

“And because everything is still growing,” Jamal said, “I don’t think it will stay as it is now. Look – let’s go back into the village to get water for Thomas’ and Theresa’s parents and you’ll see for yourself.”

Thomas and Theresa looked at each other.

Thomas shrugged. “Well, we’ve got to go back anyway,” said Theresa.

The river was now over the kerb and the jungle two feet over the pavement, so they had to walk in single file. The cars, drives and houses were hidden from view by the new growth and Jamal, at the front of the column, had to use the loppers to cut through all the trailing vines and creepers.

At the back with Lily-Rose, Lisa could not stop thinking about the great, humped back under the bridge.

She looked over her shoulder, unable to shake the feeling they were being stalked by something terrible and then, for an instant, she saw two white eyes, as big as her clenched fists just beneath the surface.

She thought about shouting out a warning but didn’t – they were moving quickly, and she didn’t want to panic the children.

It must have been late afternoon, because just as they drew opposite the pond – Jack’s Pool – the sky opened into its regular downpour, hissing on the greenery and hazing the top of the river in a violent spray.

In front of Lisa the water churned up into a great fountain and a monstrous, snouted head reared up and split open, revealing a double row of black, conical teeth inside a shockingly red void.

It lunged forward and grabbed Lily-Rose’s foot.

The girl screamed and an instant later was lost in the water.

Lisa spun towards it, turning on the strimmer, knowing even as she did there was nothing she could do to help.

Then, with a small, neat splash, something dropped into the centre of the river from above.

At first, she thought it must be either Jamal or one of the children but that was impossible – whatever it was had dived from too great a height. 

Then the monster that had taken Lily-Rose reared from the water again.

It was twenty feet long from blunt nose to and thrashing tail.

There was something on its head, and the monster was trying to throw it off, but the thing was shifting and adjusting its balance so fast it was as if it existed in a sped-up different sort of time.

With arms, hands, claws or perhaps even tentacles– it was too fast to tell - it was ripping out great chunks of flesh, frothing the spray around it pink and red.

There was a vast, deep bellowing and all the children were screaming.

The great beast seemed to be trying to dive back under the water, but every time it dipped its head it was jolted back up like a fish played by a cruel angler.

Something heavy and wet hit Lisa on the head and bounced off onto the path in front of her. When she looked down, she saw it was one of the monster’s huge eyes.

When she looked back, she saw whatever was attacking the river-monster had dragged it to the opposite bank and was pulling it out.   

The monster’s scaled feet scrabbled for purchase, ripping and splashing, and for a moment it got claws into ground and stopped – but then it was airborne, head over tail, flipping over and over, writhing and still bellowing.

It landed with a thunderclap splash, but in the pond not the river – Jack’s Pool.

There, through the driving, pounding rain Lisa saw it tossed up again and again, turning over and over again and again, splashing down again and again.

The bellowing and roaring became a sort of deep screaming, indistinguishable from the cries of Jamal and the children; the hiss of the rain, the splashing and the screaming.

Then, beneath it all at her feet, a different sound.

“Help me, Lisa. Lisa, help me, Lisa, pull me out.”

Lisa looked down and saw Lily-Rose. At first, she thought the girl was treading water but then saw she was clinging to the kerb just below the surface. She reached down, grabbed her wrist and pulled her back onto the pavement.

Her foot was bleeding but to Lisa’s relief, not much.

Nobody else had noticed Lily-Rose had been in the river at all.

Lisa swung her up onto her back and chased after the rest of the group. They were running, Jamal in front, swinging the loppers, knocking the greenery to the side to make space for those behind him.

He ran them past the Donaldson’s, to the green and into Lisa’s house.

Above the hum of the air-conditioner in his bedroom, above the crying of the children and his own heaving breath he could still hear the bellowing and screaming of the dying monster.

It was not quick.

Whatever had taken it wanted to play.

A long time later, when it was dark, and quiet, and the small children were asleep, the two adults and the Donaldson children huddled in a corner of Lisa’s studio to talk.

“We have to put them back,” Thomas said, “And we have to start tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Theresa. “I know.”

To begin with only Lisa, Jamal and the Donaldson’s made trips back to the Scar.

On their first trips they took bucket loads of bright shells and slid them gently into the tree-lined lagoon the Scar had become. To begin with they had to slash and hack their way there with eyes always on the river and on the jungle too, where there were things moving about.

Jack’s Pool was bright red at first then, as the days went on, darker - a cauldron of stinking, clotting blood. The sycamore was festooned with strips of shredded flesh and skin, which hung like dripping ribbons from its branches, shrivelling and blackening.

The jungle retreated and the water fell with each load of creatures they returned, making each trip a little easier than the last.

The temperature began to fall and then one day, the river was a road again, and the children found their pots and boxes once more filled with stone, making them even easier to carry.

Soon it was safe enough for even the smallest of them to help. Except Lily-Rose. She would not leave and cried whenever Lisa was not there.

The temperature dropped again, and the village adults began to emerge, stirring slowly, absent-minded in their gardens, yawning and stretching.

The children went back to their homes and began to forget.

They soon forgot almost all of it.

This was a very good thing for Lily-Rose – there was no deep injury, the Scar did not scar her.

Then Jamal and Lisa began to forget too, until one day, in the cool of an early morning – Jamal sat down to work and looked at the date on his computer and was surprised to see it still early June with the whole summer still ahead.

But however big a change things are always left behind.

Especially in Willerby.

Lily-Rose knocked on Lisa’s door a lot as she grew – when she felt scared or sad about the sorts of everyday things that scare and sadden all young people as they mature, and Lisa always tried to help, feeling an investment she could never explain and didn’t need to.

And sometimes when an errant package needed to be redelivered, Jamal and Lisa talked for a while in an easy, comfortable way they didn’t understand but liked and valued, and later over years built a friendship on.

When things change some things always remain – signs of things that happened before.

Everything leaves a trace.

There are always fossils.