The girl cyclist merely looked on helplessly, dazed with terror.
A light flashed several times. At first Sue took no notice. Mark was still in the water, trying to ease the boy’s bare legs over the hefty stones used to strengthen the bank.
‘Mark, get out of the water!’ she yelled at him fiercely. At any moment those jellyfish were going to shift over on to his skin, she was sure of it. ‘For God’s sake, Mark! Oh, no!’
Already they were attaching themselves to the backs of his hands… moving up to his wrists…
With a heave, Mark threw himself on to the bank, rolling over away from the river, his face twisting with pain. Again that light flashed, and this time Sue realised what it was. Furiously she swung around to find a girl she’d never seen before calmly taking photographs.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’
‘Press.’ Quite calmly, the girl took one more, then stuffed the miniature camera into her jacket pocket. ‘You’re Sue, aren’t you? I came here to interview you. What’s going on?’
‘What does it look like?’ Bitterly, Sue began to examine Mark’s hands. The baby jellyfish were scattered over his skin like freckles — a dozen or more, the largest being about the size of a five-pence coin. ‘Oh, why don’t you call an ambulance or something?’
She felt dizzy with exhaustion.
‘The barman’s already phoned.’ The girl bent over Mark who was muttering incoherently that his hands were dead, he’d no feeling in them. ‘They’re a bit small. Are you quite sure they’re jellyfish?’
Sue had a vague impression of two men running towards them from the hotel. Somewhere very far in the background an ambulance siren wailed, approaching. Her hands were smarting intolerably, as though she’d dropped acid on them. She felt herself swaying, her eyes losing focus.
Focus? Was Tim filming?
She’d seen his documentary on TV, him standing there in that sea of jellyfish. She’d wanted to scream then. To scream now, out loud. But she held it back, refusing to give way. There’d been a girl reporter with him that first time, hadn’t there?
‘Of course I’m… bloody… sure…’
With a great effort, she managed to get the words out before she fainted.
Jane drove back to Somerset that afternoon with two Kilner fruit-bottling jars on the seat beside her. Each contained a dozen or more baby jellyfish swimming in river water, knocking futilely against the glass. She’d fished them out herself, buying a kid’s fishing net on the end of a stick for the purpose. All in all, she felt, she’d accomplished quite a bit on her journey to Totnes.
She had her story; in fact, more than she’d dared expect. Tim’s wife living with another actor, a divorce in the offing… That was a scoop in itself, and the boobs-and-bums merchant who edited the magazine would love her for it, bless his cotton socks. Two actors from the company had filled her in on a few details while they waited at the hospital for news.
All three casualties were to be kept in overnight. The young cyclist — just twenty-one years old and recently engaged, she discovered — was still unconscious when Jane left the hospital. Surgeons had already extracted thousands of the little hair-like tentacles which had penetrated his skin and then broken off. Hardly any part of his body was free of them. With Mark the damage was less extensive: only his hands and forearms seemed to have been affected, although an off-duty nurse Jane had chatted up afterwards had said the doctors were uncertain what effect that amount of poison might have on the nervous system.
As she reached the motorway Jane wondered whether or not to phone Tim about Sue being in hospital, but she decided against. It was better he shouldn’t know she’d been anywhere near the place. Sue was suffering from shock more than anything else. A good night’s rest and a sedative was all she needed, one of the doctors had announced. But then Sue had been lucky in having no more than four or five jellyfish on her hands, sticking flat against her skin like little round patches. Jane had tugged on her driving gloves and already held one between her finger and thumb, trying to squeeze it to death, when the barman came with a bottle of Johnnie Walker which he sloshed generously over Sue’s hands. One by one, the tiny jellyfish curled up and fell away.
‘Only way to deal with the buggers!’ he declared cheerfully. ‘Pour some spirit over ’em! They don’t like that. Meths is just as good. Don’t ask me why. Stings ’em, I imagine.’
When she got home, Jane passed the tip on to Jocelyn who merely grunted and said it was worth remembering. She held the Kilner jars up to the light, unable to take her eyes off the baby jellyfish. Oh yes, these were probably the young of the red-and-pink speckled variety they were investigating, she confirmed enthusiastically. There were of course a number of medusae which never grew any larger than these, but from what Jane had told her…
‘How do they give birth?’ Jane asked bluntly. ‘I mean, do they lay eggs or are they…?’
‘Or are they viviparous?’ Her sister finished the question for her. ‘No, what happens is this. I showed you the genitals — those little U-shaped organs. Each jellyfish can produce both eggs and spermatozoa, but they can’t fertilise themselves. A jellyfish releases a cloud of spermatozoa into the water. This is ingested by other jellyfish with their food — through the mouth. The fertilised eggs become planula larvae and when they’re released — after a time — they attach themselves to some suitable surface such as a rock. Something firm.’
‘How big are they?’ asked Jane.
‘You’d not see them without a magnifying glass.’
‘So they could be swallowed — say, by a fish? Or a bird?’
‘Or a bird that eats fish.’
‘And stay alive?’
‘Possibly. But they’re not jellyfish yet. Once the planula finds a suitable home, it becomes a polyp. And that feeds in much the same way. It has tentacles, and so on, though of course it doesn’t swim around freely. It’s fixed to the rock.’
‘So where do jellyfish come in?’
‘The next stage.’ From the note of excitement in Jocelyn’s voice Jane realised once again how fascinated her sister was with this whole underwater world. ‘The stem grows and becomes segmented. It’s like a pile of plates. Each segment breaks away and becomes a tiny jellyfish.’
Again she held up the jar to look at them.
‘That river where you found these,’ she added soberly, ‘must have quite a number of polyps around the rocks. The only question is — how did they get there?’
For some time they went over the possibilities. That part of the river was well above the reach of the tide, although it was still conceivable that a few jellyfish had swum upstream against the current. It was the explanation Jocelyn favoured. Jane had doubts, and so did Robin who argued that, if that were the case, why had no one seen them?
After an early supper, Jocelyn excused herself and went down to her laboratory bearing the two jars of baby jellyfish. Jane tried to telephone Alan Brewer but was unable to get through. She could not rid her mind of the thought that some planula larvae might well be carried in bird droppings, which meant that any pond, stream, lake or reservoir anywhere in the country could sooner or later breed a population of jellyfish. That might be fantasy of course, but people ought to be warned.
Once again she dialled Alan Brewer’s numbers, both home and office, but there was still no answer. She had to content herself with leaving a message at the office switchboard for him to call back. The best approach, she thought as she went upstairs to her room to write up her notes, was to suggest they should send a camera crew to film the ‘babies’.
And Tim could come down at the same time to do the commentary.