#2024MakeAMonster day 20: Fossil

 #2024makeamonster day 20

Fossil

After the museum closed, they sold off the skeletons. The ichyosaur skull went to another collection, a big one in the city; it was always a big piece for such a little place. They’d only had it because James Fitzroy, the man whose collection served as the foundation, had had a lucky day on the Jurassic coast: a young girl with a talent for carving and without Mary Anning’s connections had found a marvellous thing, and James Fitzroy had stopped in to her small seaside town on his way to somewhere more important, and bought it off her for enough money to cover a month’s rent.

It was good luck for her at the time, the old placard said, although of course neither she nor Fitzroy knew the real value of such a find.

Mary Anning wasn’t allowed to join the Geological Society of London because she was a woman, but everyone knew the value of her findings. That was why gentlemen scientists consulted her before publishing under their own names. The young girl didn’t know what would be a fair price for her find, but James Fitzroy knew what it was worth. He just didn’t pay it.

Under the earth, her own bones flaked. It had been a pauper’s grave for her in the end. Her town hadn’t the splendours of Lyme Regis, and the sea shore had only so many sea shells to sell. Say that ten times fast.

Or perhaps don’t. Under the earth, her bones gave way to the worms. Frizzling bacteria separated joint from joint and the white worms nudged between the rounded ends of elbow and arm that had once bent to lift a marvellous thing from the beach.

Finder unknown said the placard at the new museum. Legend has it. Purchased by private collector James Fitzroy.

The museum closed from lack of funding, that’s what they said. In specific, there were troubles with the building itself: structural damage is expensive to repair, and the lottery grants have many causes pleading for their help. Once the pipes burst and the floor flooded, too much of the collection was damaged to be replaceable: the stuffed wallabies and emus decayed at last; the Japanese prints washed off their pages; the ceremonial costumes swam a final dance in the swirling tides. Something might have been said about the shrunken heads James Fitzroy believed had been captured by warriors from hostile tribes, but as they were nothing more than leathered monkeys they weren’t a human loss. Just more taxidermy melting as the pipes buckled and sprayed a seashore into the Fitzroy collection.

Under the earth, diggers had jostled her bones. There had been no headstone for the girl who found the fossil; she’d died in the poorhouse and nobody had more than a short prayer for her. And after a while, a mass grave for the uncounted is just wasted land, and it was time to put it to better use.

Her name was Elizabeth West, if you want to know it. Her mother called her Bessy.

It was the pride of the Fitzroy collection, the fossilized head she found. And while she’d slept in the soil, why bother to haunt the place that paid her only a month’s rent for a fortune in stone? Bessy had worked from dawn to drop-down-tired every day of her life, and once she lost the energy of youth, a quiet sleep was as much as she’d dreamed of.

But the diggers stirred her bones. Bessy’s emptied eyes looked out on a world where after all, it seemed she’d done something marvellous and a man who’d haggled her price down got to put his name on it.

Ichyosaur fossils have extraordinary eyes. Big as bowls, so round they can look nothing but shocked. Disproportionate for their size, is what the placard said, perhaps so that once upon a time, deep under the old seas, they could see in the dark.

It was dark inside the pipes. At night the museum had no lights. There was only the screech of metal as something swam down it, lashing a whip-tail of bone. Only an undersea scream as the flood broke down upon a collection of treasures where only stone wouldn’t spoil.

She sold a sea creature by the sea shore. Then a digger showed her that sleep can be broken. The floods set free the creatures in their glass cages and their bones swam in a roomful of sea.

The money was no good to her any more – but the next time they sold her sea creature, someone had to pay what it was worth.

For now the new museum remains unflooded. For now.