‘Hell! Miasma!’ said Will, growing exasperated, and discovering that either the smell had begun to recede, or that he’d grown accustomed to disgust: ‘Serpent! Plague! Mr Caffyn, you’re not ill: it’s just that you could do with a cup of tea. What! I know you all for sensible folk – Banks, it was you yourself who showed me how the sextant worked! Caffyn, I’ve seen you teach my daughter how to calculate the distance of a storm! We’re not in the Dark Ages – not children kept in line with tales of ghouls and demons – the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light! There’s nothing there, nothing to fear, there never was: we will go down and find nothing but a sheep washed up from Maldon way, not some – some abomination sent for our punishment!’
But was it so great a stretch to imagine the Intelligence that once had split the Red Sea taking the trouble to send a little admonition to the sinners of a briny Essex parish? The apostle Paul had put his hand in a nest of snakes and come away unpoisoned by way of a sign: certainly the world had turned its many thousand revolutions since, but was the season of signs and wonders really over? Why had it always seemed to him so preposterous that in the estuary something was biding its time – was it a question not of failure to believe in the serpent, but of failure to believe in his God? The fear of the crowd came then to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue; and it was not the fear that they were under divine judgment, but that they were not, and could never be. Cora, he thought, finding himself grasping at the empty air as if he might somehow summon up her strong hand: Cora! If she were here. If she were here – ‘Right then,’ he said, grown angry, attempting to conceal it: ‘What use is it to stand here, and choke, and imagine? I’ll go down and see for myself, and you may come or not, as you like, but I tell you by sunset there’ll be an end to all this, and there’ll be no more talk of serpents.’ He struck out east up the High Road, towards the Blackwater and the source of their disgust. Muttering and squabbling in his wake the small crowd followed; Harriet’s mother took his arm confidingly and said, ‘I bid goodbye to the child at the door as I left her, not knowing if I’d make my way home.’
On the common Traitor’s Oak was so thick with rooks it might’ve been a crop of feathered fruit – Will walked in its shadow – the avid flock fell silent. The stench grew intolerable, and Mr Caffyn, seeing the lit windows of the school, peeled away to find refuge, saying that he ought not to’ve taken up a post in so remote and muddy a location, but that at any rate he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Then the pitying wind relented, and changed its course; rooks lifted from the oak with a look of black ashes blown up from burning sheets of paper. With the changed air the odour began to recede, blown back out towards the estuary, where others would wake to foulness in the morning; Banks, taking courage, sang a scrap of sea shanty and took a nip of rum.
Then there was World’s End, and each averted their eyes: though they’d seen the mossy tump where Cracknell lay waiting for his headstone it was nonetheless impossible to think that he could not be there behind the mottled glass, picking at earwigs on the sleeve of his coat. A handful now, that was all: William Ransome, with a mother on his left hand and a riverman on his right, and behind them Evansford, mercifully silent.
The two women gone on ahead talked cheerily enough, gesturing at scraps of cloud stained red by the sun’s rising, turning to bat at the air as if they might fend off the odour which strengthened again as they drew near the saltings. Will’s stomach turned in revulsion and fear: he did not believe they were shortly to encounter the Essex Serpent sunning its thin wings on the shingle, snapping its beak, regurgitating a fragment of bone – but oh, he was uneasy. ‘Cora,’ he said, aloud, appalled at his own voice, which had the inflexion of a man blaspheming: Banks at his side cast up a glance of confusion, and may himself have spoken had one of the women ahead not paused on the path, flung an arm down towards the shore, and begun to shriek. Her companion reeled with the shock of it, and stepping on the hem of her dress tripped, and unable to right herself staggered down the incline, her mouth gaping in fear.
There was a moment which Will later recalled as having been fixed, as if on the photographer’s plate: the falling woman – Banks arrested in motion as he moved towards her – himself, useless, in his mouth a sweet foulness that lifted up from the rising estuary tide. Then the image broke, and by some means he could never adequately explain they were all down on the salt shingle, standing by the black bones of Leviathan, looking in terror and pity at what the sea had given up.
In parallel to the lapping water’s edge the carcass of a creature lay in putrefaction. It measured perhaps twenty feet in length, so that its further end seemed to taper almost to a point; it was wingless, limbless, its body taut as a drum’s skin and gleaming silver. All along the spine the remnants of a single fin remained: protrusions rather like the spokes of an umbrella between which fragments of membrane, drying out in the easterly breeze, broke and scattered. The falling woman had stumbled upon its head: eyes large in diameter as a clenched fist looked blindly out, and behind them a pair of gills split away from the silvery flesh and showed, deep within, a crimson, meaty frilling that resembled the underside of a mushroom. Either it had suffered an attack, or caught against the hull of a Thames barge making its way to the capital: in places the taut hide – which gleamed where the low sun struck it with the colours of oil on water – had opened up to show bloodless wounds. Wherever it had touched the mud and shingle it had left a greasy residue, as if fat had begun to render out of its skin. Within its open mouth – which had about it something like the blunt beak of a finch – very fine teeth could be seen. As they watched, a portion of flesh fell away from the bone as cleanly as if tugged with a diner’s knife.
‘Look,’ said Banks, ‘that’s all it was, that’s all it was.’ He plucked off his hat, and held it to his breast, looking absurdly as if he’d encountered there in the Essex dawn the Queen on her way to Parliament: ‘Poor old thing, that’s all it was, out there in the dark, lost, I daresay, damaged, cast up on the marsh and sucked back out on the tides.’
And it did seem a poor old thing, thought Will. For all its look of having detached itself from the illuminated margins of a manuscript, not the most superstitious of men could’ve believed this decaying fish to be a monster of myth: it was simply an animal, as they all were; and was dead, as they all would be. There they stood, reaching by silent agreement the conclusion that the mystery had not been solved so much as denied: it was impossible to imagine that this blind decaying thing – cast out of its element, where its silver flank must’ve been lithe, beautiful – could have caused their terror. Where, besides, were the promised wings, the muscular limbs from which claws protruded? Perhaps it might’ve coiled Cracknell in a wet embrace, out there in the Blackwater estuary, but Cracknell had died on the dry shore and with his boots on.
‘What should we do?’ said Evansford, looking as if he rather regretted the bright sun rising, the pathos of the corpse at his feet, the staying of the hand of judgment. ‘It can’t be left. It’ll poison the river.’