I haven't been to the beach for several years now, nobody in the area likes to mention what happened but they all know. It was on the local news for months - "9 YEAR OLD FALLS FROM CLIFF, FINDS MASS GRAVE" is a hard thing to run away from, especially when you can't get the smell of old bodies out of your hair. At least it feels that way sometimes.
I should probably start by saying that the mass grave was an old one, thankfully, but dating back to around the plague days, unthankfully. I was tested for all sorts when they took me to the hospital, even moved me to one in London "just for observations" though the only thing they found majorly wrong was the broken leg and fractured elbow from the landing. The cuts and bruises from the bone fragments never became infected so despite having to grow up with all my peers asking if I had the plague every time I was off ill, life was fairly uneventful.
They reckoned the mass grave had been exposed by me walking too close to the unstable cliff edge (read: being chased their by an older sibling who denies it to this day) and when the cliff collapsed, they all just spilled over with me. There's not a thing in the world that can make you forget hearing your parents screaming at you and opening your eyes to see an actual skeleton right next to you, all around and underneath you too. Apparently the thick clay soil kept them well preserved enough that they found dead plague bacterium in some of the bodies.
I got lucky then, after that a few fish in the area were found to carry the plague in a rare form of intestinal parasite. It all spiralled out from there to the molluscs, the birds, the seals that occasionally showed up that were coming in dead, pus-ridden lumps.
The beach has been declared plague-free for almost four years now but we reckon there's still something of it out there. you can hear it in the way the seagulls cry out, that deep guttural rattle instead of their natural high-pitched screeching. Not to mention the fact that all the fish have turned this weird shade of brown and their eyes are becoming unnaturally large for their size. I saw a photo someone took just last week of a Red Gurnard that had just one big blue eye and no mouth. Damned thing had somehow grown to two and a half feet in length when they're only meant to be forty centimetres.
I dare say my trip is leading to a lot worse than the grave and I don't plan on sticking around to see it.
I should probably start by saying that the mass grave was an old one, thankfully, but dating back to around the plague days, unthankfully. I was tested for all sorts when they took me to the hospital, even moved me to one in London "just for observations" though the only thing they found majorly wrong was the broken leg and fractured elbow from the landing. The cuts and bruises from the bone fragments never became infected so despite having to grow up with all my peers asking if I had the plague every time I was off ill, life was fairly uneventful.
They reckoned the mass grave had been exposed by me walking too close to the unstable cliff edge (read: being chased their by an older sibling who denies it to this day) and when the cliff collapsed, they all just spilled over with me. There's not a thing in the world that can make you forget hearing your parents screaming at you and opening your eyes to see an actual skeleton right next to you, all around and underneath you too. Apparently the thick clay soil kept them well preserved enough that they found dead plague bacterium in some of the bodies.
I got lucky then, after that a few fish in the area were found to carry the plague in a rare form of intestinal parasite. It all spiralled out from there to the molluscs, the birds, the seals that occasionally showed up that were coming in dead, pus-ridden lumps.
The beach has been declared plague-free for almost four years now but we reckon there's still something of it out there. you can hear it in the way the seagulls cry out, that deep guttural rattle instead of their natural high-pitched screeching. Not to mention the fact that all the fish have turned this weird shade of brown and their eyes are becoming unnaturally large for their size. I saw a photo someone took just last week of a Red Gurnard that had just one big blue eye and no mouth. Damned thing had somehow grown to two and a half feet in length when they're only meant to be forty centimetres.
I dare say my trip is leading to a lot worse than the grave and I don't plan on sticking around to see it.
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