‘Frank! Oh, Frank!’
She pushed the squeegee, with the first jellyfish still wrapped around it, deep into the tank, then dropped to her hands and knees to help him. No, that was no good, she thought, biting her lip; mustn’t touch them with bare hands. Gloves… she needed gloves… Pair on the bench, wasn’t there? Jocelyn’s rubber gloves?
Frank was writhing on the floor with the two jellyfish spread obscenely across his skin, their speckled pink-and-red bodies pulsating as though they were busy sucking his life blood. To get to the bench she found herself forced to step over him.
She seized the gloves, but they tore as she tried to tug them on. In desperation, with hot tears in her eyes, she decided merely to wrap them round her hands and hope for the best. If only she could pull those jellyfish away from him, then drag him outside perhaps…
But in that first tank, the big jellyfish — ‘Grandad’, Jocelyn affectionately called him! — was already partly over the top again, having used the squeegee handle as a ramp; and half-way across the laboratory, the cover of yet a third tank slithered and bounced to the floor. Then a fourth.
She screamed, unable to help herself. They were coming at her from every side, leaving her no way of escape. As for Frank — oh, poor Frank, what harm did he ever do anyone? — he lay quite still now, flat on his back, his arms apart as if in a gesture of total surrender. And still those jellyfish fed on him.
Yet how could she leave him there?
Shouldn’t she tug him clear somehow, if only to save his body from mutilation — out of respect? She bent over him, the torn rubber of the gloves stretched around her hands, knowing she couldn’t let it happen like that. It was her fault, wasn’t it? If she’d never brought him here in the first place, none of this would have happened. He’d still be alive, still strumming his guitar… spouting his poetry…
She had a duty: yes, that was it. A duty.
Her face set with grim determination, obsessed with the idea that she had to save his body despite the fact that he was obviously dead, she bent down to slip her fingers beneath the jellyfish feeding on his stomach. Its grip was firmer than she imagined, but somehow she managed to tear it away.
A shudder of despair shook her as she saw the mess of raw flesh and exposed guts where it had been squatting. In horror, she dropped it — taking no notice of where it landed — and stumbled away. No, that wasn’t Frank… it couldn’t be Frank… in a minute or less, was that all that was left of him?
She wanted to vomit but nothing came; she merely choked on her own revulsion.
More covers came tumbling off the aquaria as she staggered towards the telephone at the end of the hut. Every few seconds she heard yet another slopping sound as more jellyfish escaped from their tanks. She had to get help. People ought to be warned.
Already the pains were shooting up her leg as she dialled 3 for the house. Clinging to a shelf in an effort to stay on her feet, she listened impatiently to the brr-brrr, brr-brrr, brr-brrr at the other end. At last someone answered.
‘Help me… please…’ she gasped, feeling her legs giving way as a fresh bout of that excruciating pain spread up to her hips. ‘Jellyfish are… out… Need… help…’
‘Who is it? Is that Roberta?’
Jane stared in exasperation at the phone in her hand. The line had gone dead. Was it serious, or some sort of practical joke? To make sure, she dialled the laboratory herself, only to hear a steady high-pitched sound. It made no sense at all.
Yet if the call were genuine…?
She opened the back door and stood uncertainly on the step, but as far as she could see through the rain both laboratory huts seemed perfectly normal. The lights were on in no. 1 hut. No sign of any break in the telephone cables linking it with the house. Yet she felt she was somehow responsible, Joss and Robin both being out for the day — although Roberta was really in charge down there.
Best go down to have a look.
Behind the kitchen door was one of Joss’s old raincoats with a hood. Jane swung it over her shoulders and hurried down over the muddy path. Cold rainwater splashed over her flat open sandals, chilling her feet. Up here on the hill was the only place she now felt safe from jellyfish. Night after night they watched the weird illumination of the Bristol Channel, sometimes appearing to move in shifting patterns, sometimes unnaturally still. Nothing could be seen at the moment through the rain and mist; in any case, in daytime the scene tended to look quite normal from this distance, although every day the line of jellyfish moved farther inland. Yard by yard. Mile by mile. Portishead, Clevedon, Weston-super-Mare, Burnham-on-Sea — that whole coast was now empty of people.
Yet Joss still hated the idea of burning the jellyfish alive. She was deep in her study of their digestive system, occasionally muttering something about finding a suitable poison — a medusicide, as she called it — or surveying the natural enemies of the jellyfish in the hope that one would turn up to save the situation. Sharks? Whales? Pug-nosed dogfish?
‘They need to be culled, not exterminated,’ she would repeat stubbornly after even Robin had failed to convince her that they were faced with a major emergency. ‘We humans have already killed off too many species.’
Robin’s rejoinder was always the same: ‘We’ll be extinct ourselves if we don’t soon find some way of dealing with them.’
But she took no notice. She’d disappear to the laboratory and not emerge again for hours. She’d turned the whole set-up over to jellyfish, clearing everything else out: no. 1 hut was for those she called ‘adult’ jellyfish; no. 2 — dubbed the ‘nursery’ — was for polyps and baby medusae.
Jane squelched up the wooden steps to no. 1, her sandals soggy. ‘Hello! Roberta!’ she called out as she pushed open the door. ‘Are you there?’
She saw the wet raincoat hanging in the vestibule, with Roberta’s green wellingtons and a pair of men’s shoes. There was no answer, but she automatically kicked off her own sandals and took off her mac before going into the laboratory itself. No reason why, except she felt more comfortable that way and she would never dream of messing up Jocelyn’s lab for her.
‘Roberta! It’s me — Jane!’
The door was locked, or so she thought at first before she realised there was some obstruction behind it, near the bottom.
‘Roberta! Are you all right?’
She put her weight against the door, her apprehension growing, and it began to give way. Whatever the obstacle was, she was gradually able to push it back until she could squeeze through herself. At that stage it was not the jellyfish she feared, for they were all safely in their tanks from which she was convinced they couldn’t possibly escape. No, if anything had gone wrong, there must be some other cause: an intruder, perhaps.
‘Oh, no. What —?’ The obstacle behind the door was Roberta’s body, lying face down on the floor with the telephone beside her, its cord torn out of the wall. ‘Roberta, I came when I could. What happened?’
The moment Jane touched the girl’s shoulder she rolled over, her head lolling to one side. Covering one cheek and part of her throat was the most evil-looking jellyfish she had yet seen, its speckled pink-and-red body bloated out of all recognition.
Jane screamed, starting back. Her heel slipped on some hard, gristly substance on the floor. In disgust she pulled away from it, a quick reflex action, just in time to avoid its exploring tentacles. Her screams echoed round the hut, throwing themselves back at her, building up her panic until she was staggering about blindly, not knowing which way to turn. In every direction she saw jellyfish, some lying — pulsating — in the gangways between the rows of tanks, others perched on the edges of the tanks as if waiting to launch themselves on anyone coming within reach. Near the bench lay the body of the boy she’d seen earlier with Roberta. He was naked from the waist up, with at least four jellyfish gorging themselves on him.