The Feeding Process (aka ‘The Umbilicus Horror!’)

Seconds after Daniel Philbin’s birth, the machine monitoring his mother’s blood pressure abruptly let out a series of sharp sounds, and the jagged line showing her heart rate started to spike erratically, adding to the cacophony in the delivery room. Still holding Daniel, the midwife stepped back to allow the other white coats gather around the woman, whose head had fallen back, dark hair slashed across her damp forehead. The midwife drew the child closer, placing a gentle kiss on its forehead despite the fluids and membrane sloughing from its body like a second skin. “It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s okay.” But it wasn’t. The mother went into complete cardiac arrest, slipping in to a coma. Within the hour, she had died. Somewhere between, the midwife laid the child down and cut and clamped the umbilical cord, and Daniel was taken to the maternity ward to be placed in a clear cot with the rest of the newborns.

Nothing happened that night, or the next. The withered stump of Daniel’s cord curled from his navel like that of every other newborn in the ward. On the morning of the third day, though, it was gone – far earlier than expected. But the child’s navel had healed as expected and, otherwise, he was healthy if a little undernourished. Elsewhere, the machinations had started to find someone to take care of him, his mother dead and his father absent. Papers were passed from desk to desk, a woman with a drawn face like warped wood came to the hospital and nodded at the child. They would take him when he was ready.

It was on that third night that the affliction which would follow Daniel throughout his life became apparent. The sister on duty had checked in on the mostly sleeping infants shortly after one in the morning and noted that Daniel, though asleep, seemed agitated. His small hands grasped at the air and he kicked out in uncoordinated bursts, his head lolling around and small chokes coming from his mouth. After performing some routine checks, she was satisfied that there was nothing to worry about and returned to her station desk near the entrance to the ward. There she picked up the misery memoir she was reading and nestled into her chair. Hard-working, and not shy of an extra shift or two, she had already worked more than her allocated hours that week and, before long, she began to tired. Placing her book on the desk, she sat back and closed her eyes, promising herself that she would rest them for a few moments only. In a second, she was fast asleep.

Had it been waiting? Later, long after the child’s death, when attempts were made to discover whether Daniel’s affliction had a conscious source it was hypothesised that it would wait until it was almost sure that it would not be observed. The counter-argument was that that that the phenomenon merely occurred at times when the majority of potential witnesses would be asleep and that the suggestion of shyness was mere coincidence. The truth of each theory remains keenly contested. Either way, some time after the sister drifted off, something awoke inside Daniel, something unrecorded before or since.

It was clumsy in its approach, but the sister was deep in her sleep and her first reaction was to wave her hand over what felt like an itch on her belly. It felt as if something had alighted on her stomach, an insect although it was far too late in the year. Unwilling to be awakened, she had scratched harder. Through the blanket of sleep, she realised that something was wrong. There was something under her nails, a thick yielding substance like soft rubber or a chew which had been left out in the sun for too long. Eyes flickering open, she looked down. When she saw it, her head told her to scream but all her mouth could manage was a throaty gag.

No thicker than her little finger, the cord lay over the table in front of her in a pool of water from an upturned glass. A pale, sick blue it was, laced with thin pink veins which she could see pulsing under the viscous skin. Its far end disappeared behind the table, but she was more concerned with the front of the thing. For it hung between the edge of the table and her own body, disappearing behind her scratching fingers and in through the gap in her uniform between the buttons. From within the folds of fabric, she could hear a muffled suckling sound.

Throwing up her hands, and finding her voice, the sister leapt back, sending her chair flying. The cord disengaged with a wet pop, but instead of falling limply to the floor it continued to hang in the air, swaying back and forth like a blind worm. A small pinch at the end opened and closed like a tiny mouth. The sister instinctively clasped both hands to her navel and screamed again and at the sound the cord recoiled then, in a moment, dissolved into a fine mist which sprinkled damply to the floor.

When the sister’s from the neighbouring ward arrived, the woman told her tale in a scattershot fashion, drawing mixed looks of concern and disbelief. Losing her composure, she flapped her hand at the damp mist which trailed off along the corridor, her other hand still clamped over her navel.

The sisters followed the trail towards the unit where the children lay. The stillness of the ward was punctuated only by the occasional child-noise. The damp track led to Daniel’s crib, where the boy slept soundly, no longer agitated. Aside from a slick trail across the dome of his stomach and over the sheets, there was no sign of the cord their colleague spoke of. It took around half an hour to convince the sister to allow them to examine her navel. The skin around it had puffed up, a blotch of raised pink flesh radiating out. She complained that it still felt irritable, but there was no evidence of the skin being broken. One of her colleagues took over the shift that night, keeping a close eye on the door to the ward, but nothing else happened.

In the morning, the sister in charge was sceptical about the story she was told, but informed the night shift to keep watch. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, although they noted that the child slept far more than any of the other newborns, usually only awakening for two to three hours a day. He didn’t consume as much as the others either, sleeping through mealtimes and rarely wailing for anything other than the need for cleaning. The children around came and went, spirited off to their homes by their parents. Only Daniel remained, tucked away in his Perspex cot in one corner like an unwanted pet.

It happened again at the end of his first week, but this time the sister on duty was alert enough to see it all. Again, it had been in the early hours of the morning when she caught a glimpse of movement near the ward door, halfway down the corridor she was facing. When she looked, she saw nothing, and at first she thought that it must have been a trick her tiredness was playing on her. Then it moved again and, under the buzzing strip lights, she saw it come forward. Almost at head height, the thin cord probed out of the ward, extending twenty centimetres or so into the corridor. Like grass in a light breeze, it swayed back and forth, turning its tip towards her. When it ‘saw’ her, it recoiled slightly then, emboldened by the woman’s distance, looped round and started off in the opposite direction.

Quietly, the sister called to her colleagues and within a few moments there were three or four of them gathered around her desk, silently watching the long hoops of the cord as it made its way to the end of the corridor. The boldest of them, a young intern keen to impress the gathered women, walked up to where it emerged from the ward and peered in. In the gloom he saw it twist back towards the corner where Daniel still slept. By now, the end of the cord had turned the corridor and, as the intern turned to join it, he could see it probing around the door where the new mothers slept, creeping around the glass partition. Curious, he reached out to touch the veined rope but as soon as his fingers touched it, it was replaced in the air by a fine mist which drifted towards him but dissipated before it could reach his face. Lightly, he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, balling the mist in to a clear jelly.

Doctor Graham Royston first heard about Daniel’s case from a colleague, who had told the story as a joke over dinner. When he had pushed for more detail, the other had laughed and shook his head, “Ah, Graham, it’s just a bad joke. You know how the night gets to you in some of those places. I’d forget about it.”

Yet he’d found it impossible to put from his mind. As a student, he’s often been drawn to the stranger afflictions he found in the medical texts they’d been discouraged to read – tales of children born with the face of their twin folded into their scalp, a single eye, conscious and following external stimuli, mouth moving as if desperate to communicate before it was cut away as an aberration. After his days studies, he would retreat to some unused corner of the medical school’s library and seek out those old volumes, with their tales of ghost pregnancies where even the midwife had claimed to, just for a moment, feel something heavy in her hands even though nothing could be seen; of children born inside out who nonetheless lived for days; of abortion bins found turned over, contents spilled, and a single trail leading to a tiny alien figure who couldn’t possibly have gotten as far as it did without crawling. Each tale brought a shiver, which Royston would be lying if he said he didn’t find enjoyable, but also great curiosity, as if these cases represented the shunned limits of his profession. Following his university days,  adult concerns left him with little time to give to these stranger musings, but he would indulge them when he could.

It was a few weeks before he had the opportunity to visit the hospital where Daniel was kept. His colleague, unwilling to give credence to what he still considered ‘idiotic rumours’, cut him loose at the ward entrance and left the sister to look after him. A slight, mousy woman, she seemed guarded at first, demanding to know why he was so interested in Daniel. Only when he’d convinced her of his genuine interest did she acquiesce to take him to the ward.

The child was in a room of his own by now. When they entered, the sister seated by the cot stood up in alarm and shot a furious look at her colleague. Even after Doctor Royston’s presence was explained, she continued to glare up him with undisguised suspicion.

“They say,” Royston said, leaning over to examine the child, who was awake and thrashing about with unbounded energy. “that the discharge comes from the boy’s navel.”

“It’s not a discharge,” said the sister who had led him in.

“Then what?”

Royston leant over the child and placed his hand over the tiny pot of its belly. Gently, he eased the material of the small garment over it. There seemed nothing unusual about it to his eye. The sister sitting by the cot still watched him warily, her fingers absent-mindedly scratching at her navel. He looked around to the first sister, who looked back with concerned eyes through her large glasses. She too had one hand flat against her stomach. Royston remembered how the story had gone when he’d first been told about it.

“You’re feeding him, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” said the seated sister. “He takes his meal times along with the other children, perfectly well-behaved-”

Royston raised a hand to silence her. “No,” he said. “You’re feeding him.”

They admitted it easily enough, embarrassed, like two girls caught in an adolescent experiment. “He doesn’t take anything from normal food,” the first one protested. “He eats it, seems to process it, but still he’s hungry… The others won’t listen, they think we’re delusional.”

Still harbouring his own suspicions, Royston asked to examine the sisters. They seemed healthy, if exhausted. He took blood samples to check over the subsequent days. When he asked whether he could stay that night to see Daniel’s condition for himself, they exchanged glances and reluctantly told him that they’d have to see whether the nightshift sister agreed.

A severe woman, with more than a little of the spinster to her, the sister who arrived later that evening took some convincing. But later that night, Royston sat in the room with her and the child and watched as a small blister of clear liquid bubbled from the boy’s navel and coalesced into a thin column which reached up four or five inches before arcing round towards the seated sister. Averting her eyes from Royston, the sister undid the two buttons around her navel and pulled the sides of her uniform aside. The cord moved slowly towards the angled slit of her belly button then, with a pulse of pressure, pushed its way in a quarter of an inch. The sister grimaced.

“Does it hurt?” Royston asked.

“No. It’s like an itch – like an insect bite.”

As Royston watched, the cord contracted as if muscled and swallowing, but he could see nothing passing beneath its translucent skin. This lasted for ten minutes or so, the sister’s stomach raising red around it, before finally the cord disengaged and wound itself in and away from her. Royston reached out then, finally giving in to his urge to touch the cord. Below it, he held a petrie dish. At his touch, it dissolved, a splash of clear liquid falling in to the dish.

For the next few evenings, Royston would come to the hospital to watch Daniel feed. He had fast-tracked his examinations and analysis, sharing his findings with the sisters. Each suffered from a slight deficiency of their key nutritional requirements: carbohydrates, proteins, minerals – a slight case of dehydration. At worst, they would suffer slight exhaustion following the feeding, but nothing more. Of more interest to him was the make-up of the cord itself. “Pieces of dead skin, dust, minerals of his own and motes from the air,” he told the sisters. “The cord comes together from whatever there is to hand, presumably guided by some aspect of the child’s mind.”

“His name,” the first sister – her name was Sarah Thedon – said, “is Daniel.”

Finally, the time came for Daniel to leave the ward. Foster care was the clear option, but both Royston and Sarah Thedon argued hard against it. With Royston’s authority behind the story, the hospital heads were forced to take Sarah’s story seriously. One evening, they were led down to the room where Daniel slept and shown the feeding process. Afterwards, they discussed with Royston what ought to be done with the child as he had grown too large for the maternity ward. But there was a sense that they viewed the child as an inconvenience, that it would be best to keep word of Daniel away from the public. “It’ll be seen as a trick, a hoax; or worse, some nonsense that belongs in the Fortean Times,” said one of the Directors. “Get the child in a foster home and let them worry about it. I don’t want this associated with the hospital.”

Barren, drawn to her work due to her own lack of children, Sarah Thedon had stepped forward. Though she lived alone, and had little to offer Daniel by way of financial support or stability, the directors had seen a way to rid themselves of their embarrassment and had coaxed the relevant agencies to fast-track Sarah’s application. Through it all, Royston had remained close despite the snide derision of his colleagues. He had nothing to gain from his closeness to Daniel’s case other than the satisfaction of his own curiosity, but still Sarah was wary of him. It took some time before he was able to convince her to allow him to continue his studies.

He thought that it was likely that Daniel’s condition would resolve itself once he was out of the hospital environment, but on the first night he spent at Sarah Thedon’s – several months later – Daniel’s cord seemed thicker than ever. It had seemed more sure of itself as well, forming quickly and making straight for Sarah’s bared navel. It seemed to drink deeper this time as well, spending half an hour fastened to its meal after which Sarah appeared visibly weakened and had to be helped from her chair. “I’m worried,” Royston told her after the fourth or fifth feeding time they’d shared “that if this keeps up you’re not going to be able to cope for much longer.” She’d dismissed him with a weak wave.

Daniel grew quickly, large for his age although not freakishly so. After a few months his feeding habits evened out and Sarah adjusted her own diet to ensure she held enough energy for both of them. Despite her well-meaning, this had some repercussions, the rapid fluctuations in her weight causing her some health problems of her own. But Royston kept an eye on each of them, helping Sarah devise a waking diet for Daniel which would supplement his night-time feeding, which in turn meant that the cord fed for less time, leaving Sarah in a better condition.

So time passed, and although Royston had kept extensive notes regarding the boy’s progress, he found the pressures of time taking his attention away from the child. By the time Daniel was a toddler, he would visit perhaps once a month on average, take notes on the feeding and then leave. The child was tall and strong for his age, and healthy. During the day he would eat sparingly, but not so little as to be conspicuous, and in the evening the cord would gulp down whatever nutrients it needed from Sarah’s body before dissolving into the air. Daniel himself remained completely unaware of the activities of his body. “One day, maybe, I’ll tell him,” Sarah said. “When he’s older.”

By the time he was going to school, Royston barely knew the child, turning up every few months after he had gone to sleep. On Sarah’s insistence, he had stayed away from Daniel during his waking hours, to avoid difficult questions. By now, Daniel was a good few inches taller than the rest of the boys in his class and, though bright, had a thuggish line to his face which meant he avoided most of the power struggles experiences in the playground. His only bone of contention, as he began to socialise with his classmates, was why he would not be allowed to stay over at their houses, or why they could not stay over with him. On this subject, Sarah pulled her motherly rank and remained steadfast, leaving Daniel frustrated and confused.

It would have suited Sarah to ensure that he remained ignorant of his condition forever, but events conspired against her. During a game of basketball in primary three P.E. class, Daniel had the misfortune of upsetting one of the children in the opposing team who promptly smashed the ball against the side of Daniel’s head at more or less point blank range, causing him to fall and crack his head on the cold varnished wood of the gym hall floor. He was unconscious for almost seven minutes. Shortly after he had hit the ground, as the teacher’s assistant tried to revive him (the teacher himself was bawling at the sore loser who’d thrown the ball at Daniel in the first place), one of the crowded children had pointed towards the prone boy’s stomach and shouted, “Look, he’s bleeding from his belly.”

Of course, the liquid seeping through Daniel’s t-shirt was too clear and thick to be blood and, slowly, the cord formed. The crowd fell back, the teacher’s assistant scrambling across the floor as it stood up, three, four, five feet. Then it twisted and, as if dazed by the blow itself, wavered from face to face. The girls screamed, as did some of the boys, and the teacher came stalking over to see what the commotion was. Seeing the pillar rising from Daniel’s stomach, he recoiled and blurted out a cough of disgust. Then, reacting the only way he could think to, he lashed out at the cord which collapsed as was customary.

Somehow, Sarah conspired to convince the headmaster that the condition was normal and nothing to be concerned about. She underplayed its frequency, and overstated its propensity for appearing only at night. As long as Daniel remained conscious, it would not impose on his school day. Reluctantly, the head agreed.

Through some naivety, neither of the two considered the effect that the site would have on Daniel’s classmates. His condition was too strange for him to be taunted for it, though it was whispered about around the playground in disgusted tones. The few friends Daniel had drifted away and no others stood up to take their place. During breaks, he would drift across the concrete, stooped as if concentrating on his navel. Sarah had failed to explain what had happened to his satisfaction and so he was reduced to wondering whether it had happened in the first place. After bed time, he would lie there fingering his navel and concentrating hard to see if he could coax this worm from his stomach, though nothing ever came.

Older, he tried to convince Sarah to move him to another school, tired of being shunned. Stroking his hair, she had told him he was normal, that he would fit in, that they would see what he was capable of and accept him again. Daniel saw through the lies almost immediately, and demanded to know what was wrong with him. In the end, she had seen no choice other than to tell him the truth.

“It’s perfectly natural,” Sarah had said. “We’re closer than any mother and child in the world.”

But Daniel was disgusted, old enough to be sickened by the notion of such intimate contact with his mother. At night he would try to stay awake, shouting at Sarah when she came to his door with her feeding jumper on. In the morning he would see the traces of gel on his sheets and throw up, as if needing to purge any nutrition his body had taken from Sarah in the night. At school he withdrew completely, working hard but building no new relationships. On the cusp of his teenage years, he told Sarah that he would “pass all the exams there are, take whatever job I can, just so I can get away from you.”

From then on, although they lived in the house, they saw little of one another. On his return from school, Daniel would skulk to his room, only emerging to eat the cooling dinner Sarah had cooked once he was sure she was ensconced in the living room. If he heard her in the hall, he would run to his door and hold it closed unless she had taken a funny turn and decided to try and talk to him. For a while, he took to barricading the door at night to stop her coming in, wishing that for once he would wake up feeling terrible and exhausted but he would always awake feeling fully nourished. Even if his barricade was still in place, it was clear that his treacherous cord had found a way.

So passed the early years of his teen age, avoiding Sarah whilst his cord still sought her for nutrition. Girls were a concern of his then, but he dared not approach them, conscious that at any moment his cord might form and reach out for the object of his affections. Not that any of them paid any attention to him in the slightest. Though the manifestation in the gym that morning years ago had taken on the hazy instability of some old legend, the general consensus around his high school was that there was ‘something’ wrong with Daniel, and still he was avoided. Diligently, he worked towards his exams, keen to escape from the prison his childhood had constructed around him.

When he left school, he took with him a reasonable set of qualifications and an ingrained hatred of institutionalised education. College was therefore out of the picture, so he took work at a small office and call-centre in the neighbouring town. For a few months he took the bus to and from his work, then he started looking for a flat nearer his work. It seemed only fair to let his mother know. “But you need me,” she had shrieked “you’ll die if I’m not there.”

“For all I know you’re the cause of this,” he’d said in return. “For all I know maybe if you’re not there, all of this will stop.”

Out of habit, on the night he moved in, he barricaded the bedsit door and ensured that the windows were closed. Come morning, the trace gel of the cord was splashed around the room, coagulated around the keyhole. In the hall, it had left a faint stain on the uncarpeted concrete floor which petered out after a few feet. Ravenous, he had made his way to the café on the corner of his street and eaten a larger breakfast than he had in his entire life. Over the course of the next few weeks, he had followed the same routine, going as far as to tape over the keyhole to ensure that there was no possible escape. When he got up for work, he found splashes of liquid around the foot of the door, but the hallway seemed clean apart from a slim halo of damp on the concrete on the other side of the door. Progressively, the reach of the cord seemed to be weakening, and on every morning he would wake to find even less residue than the previous night. He ate heartily on those days, finally taking an enjoyment in his food that had been lacking up until that moment. Yes, he’d put on a bit of wait, but it would be worth it if he could finally be rid of the affliction that had blighted his life since his first night on this planet.

It wasn’t until he woke up three days in a row to find no sign of the cord’s nocturnal activities that he started to suspect that he had finally killed it. Devoid of nutrition finally, it had atrophied, realising years overdue that it had served its purpose. By the end of that week, he’d allowed himself to hope; and at the end of a month, he broke down and wept tears of joy, convinced that finally it was over.

With the absence of the cord came the return of his self-confidence. Though he had years of reticence to overcome, he found it easier to speak to his co-workers and even to become involved in their lives. Now he would step out with them after work, enjoy drinks and allow himself to be swept along with their conversation without worrying that he would pass out from the alcohol and let loose the manifestation of his affliction. Eight months after the last night of the cord, a new girl had started at the office where he worked – Barbara Cole. Quiet, but with an engagingly strange sense of humour, Daniel had been attracted to her instantly and found to his surprise that he was able to talk to her easily, that he was happy and comfortable in her presence. It had started with the two of them pairing off during work nights out, spending the night oblivious of their colleagues and chatting about everything under the sun. Later, they would step out on their own, enjoying meals and evenings at the cinema. Finally, Daniel thought, I get to behave like a normal human being.

The time would come though, he knew, where they would have to take things further. His nerve had failed him on the first night they had slept together, and he had stammered a poor and ill-conceived excuse to avoid spending the night afterwards. The look of hurt and confusion on her face had left him feeling lousy and he had walked around until dawn cursing himself. In the coffee room the following morning he had apologised constantly and asked if he could come over that night. Barbara had agreed, telling him that it would be nice if he stayed the night.

Afterwards he had lain awake, still nervous to fall asleep. But the soft wave of Barbara’s sleeping breath lulled him along with it, and eventually he drifted off. It would be okay, he told himself, it’s been months…

Wild screaming pulled him back from a troubled sleep, snapping Daniel awake too quickly for the cord to realise. For the first and last time he came face to face with his affliction and it horrified him. This was not the old photographs or videos of some child with an indistinct shape hovering around its navel, this was the here and now. The covers had been thrown to one side of the bed, revealing Daniel’s naked body. From the curve of his belly protruded the cord, thicker than it had ever been and pulsing eagerly, gulping. He could see the network of veins twisting around the transparent mass, though nothing ran through them. It coiled around in the air, like some crazy straw he’d had as a child, increasing in thickness. At its centre, it was almost the circumference of a baby’s arm. Barbara was curled in the corner, naked, one arm crossed over her body to protect it, the other reaching out to grab at the cord. It had wrapped itself around her arm, and its tip had wormed its way between her fingers to reach her navel, where it drank deeply, attached like an absurd parasite. Then it was Daniel who screamed, more in rage at the betrayal of his own body. With a comical sucking sound, the cord pulled free from Barbara and reared up, turning towards Daniel. Sharply, it arched down until it was no more than inches from Daniel’s face. Its lips flexed and for a moment, he thought that it was trying to communicate. Then the ends of it turned up and it ghosted into the air, fading into tiny motes which hung before his face before settling like rainfall in the creases of bed.

Barbara was inconsolable, lashing out at him as he went to lift her from the ground. As his hands touched her shoulders, she heaved and vomited on to the ground at his feet. Through the chokes she spat, “Get away. Get away from me.”

Daniel had gathered up his clothes and dressed in the cold hallway of Barbara’s block. In a rage he had stomped the streets of the town, wanting to scream, wanting to hit something, wanting to tear his own fucking stomach apart to pull out whatever parasite lived inside of him. The town fell away behind him and he trudged over fields, falling over fences, his hands and shoes crusted with mud. Hours later he stood in front of his mother’s house, raging at the door until she opened the door, small and – without her glasses – looking like a small subterranean animal exposed to the light. As Daniel poured his blame on her, she shrunk further, finally collapsing in the hall in tears, her adopted son screaming incoherently. Even after he had exhausted himself and ran off into the dawn she had remained there, head in hands, weeping.

Later, when they traced Daniel’s movements, the police concluded that he had stolen a car from the all-night supermarket car park and driven to the coast. They showed Sarah footage of him at petrol stations, buying dozens of sandwiches, pints of milk, chocolate bars. CCTV revealed him walking the streets of one of the seaside towns near the maw of the Forth, stopping along the way to pick up broken rocks and bricks from building sites and cramming them in to the deep pockets of his combat jacket. They had found the car abandoned on the beach, the back seat scattered with empty wrappers and cartons. Daniel’s clothes had been found strewn by the surf. The final verdict was clear.

It was years before the stories began to filter through from rumour to established legend. They came from the fishermen at first, who spoke of something tangled in their nets, some kind of eel which would always work its way free and fall back into the ocean. Others, those with a wilder imagination it was said, would speak of something rolling in the waves – a pale blue and veined hump which broke through the waves then sink under again. With a drink in them, they would sometimes half-heartedly refer to it as a serpent, though no one took it seriously.

It was only when it was seen by a boatload of schoolchildren, making their way to Inchcolm island that the serpent, or ‘Nessie’s Nephew’ as it was known, worked its way into the national consciousness. Reports stated that a blue-pink form, thick as a man was seem breaking through the water twenty feet from the ferry, showing three to four hooped humps and a long neck which tapered off into a grasping mouth. Several photographs, blurred by sea-spray and the roll of the ferry, made their way on to the front of various national newspapers and for a while the hunt for the sea-serpent was big news. But as with any such phenomenon, visibility is the key, and the serpent was as shy as its host had been. The reporters moved away, leaving only a dedicated selection of amateur crypto-zoologists. Before long their heads were turned away too, and the serpent became just another one of those tales. There were hoaxes, but few confirmed sightings. Interest waned.

Sarah knew. The moment she had seen the magnified and distorted photographs in the newspaper, she had recognised her boy. Long sacked from her job at the hospital, sullen and taken to self-harm following Daniel’s denouncement of her, she had nothing to stop her obsessing over every little sighting of the serpent, hoax or otherwise. When she had the money, she would take the train across to one of the small villages and towns along the waterfront and stand by the shore, watching for some shape in the water. More often she would come, pestering the locals and anyone else she saw on the beach, demanding to know if they’d seen her boy. When they asked where, she would point out towards the grey water and tell them, “He’s out there, at the bottom of the sea, but he’s reaching up to me. I know he is.”

Come the summer she started to sleep rough in the towns close to where the sightings had been. Sometimes she would seek out shelter, but more often she would be found asleep on the beach having waited all night for Daniel’s cord to show itself. When asked, she would explain why she was waiting there calmly and simply, maintaining her composure lest they take her for a mad woman. Considering her harmless, the local constabulary would usually chide her and send her on her way. Eventually she came to ignore them, surviving on the kindness of a small number of people around the town, who looked at her and saw only a lost soul despite her attempts to behave as normally as she could.

In the end, she contributed a mystery of her own to the local community. Her body was found one morning on the edge of one of the cliffs overlooking the point where the firth gave way to the sea. Curled in the long grass, it was supposed by the coroner to have been there for almost a week, yet her body was so desiccated and brittle that one of the officers who attended the scene was quoted in the local paper as saying that she looked “mummified, like she had been there for thousands of years.”

Few made the connection between Sarah’s death and the stories of the serpent which still continued to appear amongst the sailors and fishermen around the area. Only Royston, old and over what he thought of as an almost adolescent fascination with the strange mysteries of the human body, saw the line between the child and woman he had known in his younger days. He didn’t think of them often, for it upset him consider the difference he could have made if he had insisted that Sarah allow him in to the child’s life. When he did, though, his mind would always turn to how he supposed their final night – Daniel and Sarah’s – had been: Sarah stood on that outcrop of rock looking out at the ocean, waiting. Had Daniel’s cord rose up, thick and strong like bound wire, hundreds of feet from the sea bed? He supposed it had. And of course Sarah had given herself to it completely, allowing it to suck every last morsel of nutrition from her body, leaving her as a broken husk. Now the cord had sunk beneath the waves again, satisfied. These musings would normally end with Royston imagining Daniel’s body, rooted to the bottom of the ocean, arms above his head swaying gently. The great length of the cord was coiled around his body, trailing off through the rocks and ferns, its tip lost in the dark depths. For now, its hunger was satisfied, but still Royston couldn’t help but wonder what would happen, and who the cord would seek out, when the time came to feed again.

3 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI