“You are a geologist?” someone asked at that point, a man’s voice, giving me a start, and I turned to see a very tall, gaunt man with a narrow, aquiline nose watching me from only a few feet away. He was smiling very slightly, in a manner that I thought oddly knowing at the time. For all I guessed, he might well have been standing there for an hour, as I have a habit of becoming so intent upon my collecting that I often neglect to glance about me for long stretches.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “A paleontologist, to be more precise.”
“Ah,” he said. “Of course you are. I would have seen that for myself, but I’m afraid the wreck has had me distracted,” and the man motioned in the direction of the quay, the Esk, and the stranded Demeter beyond. “You are an American, too, and a New Yorker, unless I miss my guess.”
“I am,” I replied, though by this point I confess that the stranger was beginning to annoy me somewhat with his questions. “Dr. Tobias Logan, of the American Museum of Natural History,” I introduced myself, holding out a hand which he only stared at curiously and smiled that knowing smile at me again.
“You’re hunting the sea monsters of Whitby,” he said, “and, I gather, having blasted little luck at it.”
“Well,” I said, taking the urchin from my pocket and passing it to the man, “I admit I’ve had better days in the field.”
“Extraordinary,” the tall man said, carefully inspecting the fossil, turning it over and over in his hand.
“Quite so,” replied I, relaxing a bit, as I’m not unaccustomed to explaining myself to curious passersby. “But, still, not precisely the quarry I had in mind.”
“Better the luck of Chapman, heh?” he asked, and winked.
I realized at once that he was referring to the discovery of William Chapman in 1758 of a marine crocodile on the Yorkshire coast, not far from where we were standing.
“You surprise me, sir,” I said. “Are you a collector?”
“Oh no,” he assured me, returning the urchin. “Nothing of the sort. But I read a great deal, you see, and I’m afraid few subjects have managed to escape my attention.”
“Your accent isn’t Yorkshire,” I said, and he shook his head.
“No, Dr. Logan, it isn’t,” he replied, and then he winked at me once again. The man turned and peered out at the sea, and it was at this point that I realized that the tide was beginning to rise, the beach being appreciably more constricted than it was the last time I’d noticed.
“I fear that we shall certainly be getting our feet wet if we don’t start back,” I said, but he only nodded his head and continued to stare at the restless, gray expanse of the sea.
“We should talk at greater length sometime,” he said. “There is a matter, concerning an object of great antiquity, and uncertain provenance, that I should very much appreciate hearing your trained opinion on.”
“Indeed,” I said, eyeing the rising tide. “A fossil?”
“No, a stone tablet. It appears to have been graven with hieroglyphics resembling those of the ancient Egyptians.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you’d surely be better off showing it to an archaeologist, instead. I wouldn’t be able to tell you much.”
“Wouldn’t you?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow and looking thoughtfully back at me. “I pried it from those very strata which you’ve spent the last hour examining. It’s really quite an amazing object, Dr. Logan.”
I believe I must have stared at the man for some time then without speaking, for I am sure I was too stunned and incredulous to find the words. He shrugged, then picked up a pebble and tossed it at the advancing sea.
“Forgive me,” I said, or something of the sort. “But either you’re having me on or you yourself have been the victim of someone else’s joke. You’re obviously an educated man, so—”
“So,” he said, interrupting me, “I know that these strata are too old by many millions of years to contain the artifact I’ve told you I found buried in them. Obviously.”
“Then you are joking?”
“No, my good man,” he said, selecting another pebble to fling at the tide. “Quite the contrary, I assure you. I was as skeptical as you when first I laid eyes upon the thing, but now I am fairly convinced of its authenticity.”
“Poppycock,” I said to him, though I had many far more vulgar expressions in mind by this point. “What you’re proposing is so entirely absurd—”
“That it doesn’t even warrant the most casual consideration of learned men,” he said, interrupting me for the second time.
“Well, yes,” I replied, somewhat impatiently, I’m afraid, and then returned the urchin to its place in my coat pocket. “The whole idea is perfectly absurd, man, right there on the face of it. It runs contrary to everything we’ve discovered in the last one hundred years about the evolution and development of life and the rise of humanity.”
“I suspected,” he said, as though I’d not even spoken, “at first, that someone might have planted the artifact, you see, that perhaps I had stumbled upon a prank aimed at someone else. Someone who, unlike me, makes a habit of collecting shells and rocks and old bones on the seashore.
“But I was able to identify—oh, what is it that you geologist fellows say? The positive and negative impressions—yes, that’s it. The positive and negative impressions of the tablet were pressed quite clearly, unmistakably, into the layers of shale immediately above and below it. I have succeeded in recovering them as well.”
“I’m sure you did,” I said doubtfully.
“But, even more curiously, this isn’t the first such inappropriate artifact, Dr. Logan. Two years ago, a very similar stone was found by a miner up the coast at Staithes, where, as you surely know, these same shales are mined for their alum. I have seen it myself, in a private cabinet in Glasgow. And there was a third, discovered in 1865, I think, or 1866, down at Frylingdales. But it seems to have vanished and, regrettably, only a drawing remains.”
The man stopped talking then, for a moment, and gazed toward the walls of the quay. From where we were standing, one could just make out the splintered foremast of the ill-fated Demeter and he presently motioned toward it.
“There are dark entities afoot here in Whitby, Dr. Logan. Ay, darker things than even I’m accustomed to facing down, and I assure you I’m no coward, if I do say so myself.”
“The tide, sir,” I said, for now each wave carried the sea within mere feet of where we stood.
“Indeed, the tide,” he said in a distracted, annoyed way, and nodded his head again. “But perhaps we can talk of this another time, before you leave Whitby. I will be glad for the chance to show you the tablet. I will be here another week, myself. I would rather prefer, though, if you kept this matter between us.”
“Gladly,” I assured him. “I have no particular wish to be thought a madman.”
“Even so,” he said, and with that enigmatic pronouncement at once began the perilous ascent up the rickety stairs to the Pier Road. I stood there a bit longer, watching as he climbed, expecting those slippery and infirm planks to give way at any second, dashing him onto the rocks and sand at my feet. But they held, and seeing that the sea had already entirely engulfed the beach to the west of me, and having only the high and inaccessible quay wall to the east, I summoned my courage and followed him. By no small stroke of luck, I also survived the climb, though the structure swayed and creaked and I was quite certain that my every footfall would be my last.