"Who tucks it in?" a boy asks me on the quay at Ings, pointing his fishing line at the headland. He is eight, perhaps nine. I tell him nobody does, and he looks at me as though the parish has been let down. Bram Hosk, who mends nets and owns the only flat-bottomed skiff that crosses the channel, agrees to take me out on the ebb. Before we go he tips a pail of cockles onto the end stone of the causeway for the gulls. Ings people do not rake the day's first cockles within sight of Lunt, and nobody says why.
The flat at Lunt is black mud two miles long with a slab of dressed stone in the middle, green to the tide line and white above. Halfway across, I notice a pool the size of a threshing floor filling while every other pool drains toward the sea. Water climbs its rim in a slow, even push. Hosk walks wide of it, and so do I. Beyond it the slab becomes a doorway nineteen feet across, hingeless, set at an angle that agrees with no wall near it. Warm air comes out smelling of boiled kelp and wet iron. Then the pool behind us falls, and I understand I have been watching a breath.
It lies in the doorway on its side, about ninety feet from crown to heel, green-black and glossy as a drowned boot. Feelers hang over a closed mouth. The eyelids are as thick as sail canvas, and the wings lie folded along its back like wet umbrellas. Then it does something I had not expected, which is nothing grand. One clawed hand drifts up, drags along the doorpost to scrape barnacles off its own knuckle with a noise like a rake on a gate, and drops again. A cow does as much against a fence post. Hosk, asked what he will do if it wakes, says he will finish the net first.
Its breath blisters paint, which is the grievance the parish actually carries. Every hull at Ings is tarred black, and the vestry has sent the cost of repainting to the Crown eleven times without an answer. A slime trail runs from the door to the channel, and that is how the flat is tracked: Hosk keeps his boards forty yards to its east. At the first pool I had pushed a folding rule into the mud at the rim. It reads nine inches deeper than when I left it. The Ings quay gauge, that evening, showed the tide had fallen two feet in the same hour.
- Classification
- Dormant tentacled aberration, winged
- Habitat
- Sunken stone doorways on tidal flats
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- about 90 ft from crown to heel
- Activity
- Unknown
- Realm
- Tidal flats and drowned masonry
- Binomial
- Cephalodraco somnians
- Diet
- None observed; gulls ignore it
- Temperament
- Dormant and indifferent