A brief history of the Dottoman Empire (part II)

In the antediluvian era before Dorchester was settled by members of the Massachuset tribe, it was inhabited by legendary faerie folk. According to legend and scanty available evidence a third, distinct animal roamed these shores and they continue to live on in the collective subconscious as well as, more benignly, on the beaches. Their identity is shrouded in folklore and legend but, by triangulating what little remains of their presence, scholars have drawn the following conclusions...

Anyone who has walked the intertidal zones along Malibu Beach or Savin Hill Beach or Tenean Beach or Clam Point or Port Norfolk or along the Neponset estuary knows that periwinkles live in abundance along the shore of what we now call Dorchester. Early English settlers were frightened by indigenous tales of monsters that roamed the landscape. These weren't the wee folk that lived in amiable co-existence with the native human tribes, rather, they were out-sized slimy things that crept through the night, swallowing whole households without regard for propriety or custom. They were the Shug N'uraugunth.

According to contemporary descriptions the Shug N'uraugunth resembled giant periwinkles with legs. They were said to be taller than the old growth trees that Englishmen found when they landed on Dorchester's shores. That's right: giant periwinkles with legs, and with protruding eye stalks too that were as thick as and longer than a tall man's arm. These creatures shambled through idyllic terrain, crushing and absorbing everything in their path. They had eyes, but if something was in their way they continued their momentum without noticing, leaving slimy trails of splintered wood, dead animals, dead people and extinguished fires in their wake. They had legs but they dragged long slime-encrusted tails behind them.

The colonists took these tales to be true. Increase Mather, Cotton's father, believed this was proof that, indeed, the Pilgrims had landed in Satan's garden and their mission was one fraught with peril. There are no eye-witness accounts of the Shug N'uraugunth, only furtive diary entries relating what the colonists had been told by the natives, who had been told that by the wee faeries.

A few puddingstone carvings survive that are preserved by the Dorchester Historical Society in a locked vault at an undisclosed location that is not their headquarters on Boston Street. Few people have been allowed to view these statuettes since spreading folklore and terror isn't part of the Society's mission, but reports state that they resemble periwinkles supported by two, stumpy, ankle-less legs.

Unsurprisingly, the author H.P. Lovecraft was interested in these tales and he paid many visits to Dorchester to investigate their validity. Whether he believed them or not is a matter of speculation, but they seem to have served as inspiration for a number of his stories.

Today, if you walk the shore of Malibu Beach at low tide, you will find the sand spiked with innumerable periwinkles, all of them no longer than the first joint of your finger. The periwinkle is a mollusk with a conical, spiral shell that seals itself into its portable home by use of a bony plate the size and thickness of a baby's fingernail. If you look closely at this plate, you'll see that it bears two parallel ridges. People around Dorchester say these are the vestigial traces of the Shug Nuruagunth's femur and tibia.

Graduate students at MIT are sequencing periwinkle DNA as we write this. This evolutionary mystery may finally be laid to rest.