“Tell that to Erdon,” Sarah said.
Loch stopped at the railing. He stared down at the construction in progress at the front of
“Dad told me he doesn’t need to take a creature alive,” Sarah said. “He says even a fin or a tail, any piece of one of them, would prove they exist.”
7
Jesse Sanderson stood up, went to the refrigerator in the kitchen of his cozy apartment above the boathouse, and took out another beer. He had just finished watching the last of three laser discs on his new Sony entertainment system. The realism of the bullet sounds and throbbing music made the ruddy-faced old-timer marvel at the advances of technology.
From the picture window in the living room he could see the sunset and the first fingers of night fog crawling in from the water. It was on a night like this that he had sighted the creature far out in the lake, the creature with “a head the size of a big barrel,” as he liked to tell the story at the local bars. The night of the sighting he’d had a great deal more to drink than usual, but he was certain he had seen it anyway and swore by it. Whether it was really some appalling prehistoric creature of the lake or a swimming moose did not matter to him at all. The only thing that concerned him was that nothing happen around Lake Alban that would make him lose his job and comfortable apartment.
Jesse’s employment as caretaker of the logging mill earned him twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, enough to keep him in good beer and gold teeth, he always joked. His job, paradoxically, was to make sure work was not done. In the age of political correctness and environmental awareness, the owner of the mill was being given a lot of money every year to ensure the propagation of certain fish and eels by keeping the logging mill closed. The salmon grid was one of the governor’s little babies, and as long as the mill was kept in working order, but not used, the government would continue to pay.
Jesse liked living alone. He had grown up on his own. He hated pets. It probably went back to his childhood, when he had been bitten by a stray Doberman and had had to have two weeks of rabies shots. His dislike of animals had made him a good trapper and put a few extra dollars in his pocket every month. The log pond and feeder stream were alive with beavers. He would set several traps at once, close to each other, so when one animal got caught, another would try to eat it and get caught, and so on. Whenever he made the rounds of the local taverns, he enjoyed telling everybody the only really good pet he had was his shotgun.
He opened the beer, his sixth since late afternoon, took his dinner out of the microwave, and went back to his favorite chair in front of the picture window. He put on the television to watch the evening news when he heard the sounds again. He had long ago learned to discount the regular noises from below, the slap of waves or the knock of the outboard and canoe hitting the cushion tires of the boathouse slips. The sounds this evening were the same, but louder than those he’d heard over the last few weeks-more like a kind of singing.
Kids with a radio was what he had thought it was on the other nights, and it drove him crazy. Tonight the sounds were louder, closer, and he felt it was definitely kids who were trespassing and were going to make his dinner get cold.
Jesse had seen his share of town kids using the mill road as a lovers’ lane. Why was it that people, especially young people, had to be so damn annoying! Jesse looked out the side windows. He didn’t see any cars parked or campfires. He took his shotgun, checked to make sure it was loaded, and started down the boathouse stairs.
The fog rushed at him as he checked the motorboat and canoe tied up in the double slip of the boathouse. Once he had caught a couple of kids rowing from the lake into the slips. They got as far as untying the canoe before they were looking down the barrel of his gun. He had to laugh remembering the look on their faces. They knew it wouldn’t have bothered him very much to have pulled that trigger, but that night he gave the boys a break.
Jesse took a few deep breaths of the moist, crisp air. He could really feel the beers now. The only thing he could smell was the thick scent of pine and sweet bass. The singing seemed to come from the pier. He opened the door of the boathouse and started out toward the sounds.
BAM.
He fired his shotgun into the air. “You lousy kids and your radios keep out of here!” he brayed out at the lake. “I can see your boat!” he lied. “I’m coming out there and I’m gonna blast it!”
Jesse reloaded his gun. A single shot usually got any kids to take off, but there were still sounds. Now that he was out on the pier, the sounds changed. They became something different. Now they were some sort of low hum he had never heard before. It was a little confusing at first, what with the racket of the crickets in the bulrushes and cicadas in the trees.
He stopped, took a good listen. He decided whatever it was, it wasn’t human-maybe some kind of water insect or small mammal. That made him relax. One thing he didn’t need tonight after those beers was a lot of legal paperwork and hassle for blowing some trespassing kid’s head off.
He pulled back both hammers on the gun and moved farther along on the pier. The weather-beaten boards had grown creaky and slippery with age. A wall of fog marched on him, cutting his visibility down to about twenty feet. The humming was growing louder now. He heard a large bass jump about sixty yards to the left, making a loud splash. When he glimpsed the end of the pier, the humming suddenly stopped. There was some kind of movement in the water below. Whatever the thing was, it had gone under. He looked over the sides of the pier but saw nothing.
“Hello out here,” he said to the fog, as he knelt down on one knee, his shotgun ready. “Hey, little hummers, where are you?”
The humming sounds started again. This time they sounded like they were coming from right under him.
“Nice, little hummers, let me see you,” he said. He got down on his hands and knees, slid his feet back, and lay on his stomach. He one-handed the gun now, as he peered over the edge and inched his head out over the water. The humming stopped. He looked back under the pier, ready to thrust the shotgun forward and fire beneath him. There were only the shadows of mold and algae growing up the sides of the pilings. Instinct told him to lift his head and check behind him, but there was nothing. He stayed lying flat on his stomach until the humming began again. Now he was certain the sound came from the water directly off the front of the pier.
“Where are you?” he asked. “You’re like some kind of garfish, shy of the hook, some kind of bullfrog. Maybe a turtle?” Jesse started to laugh at himself as he lifted his gun into position. “Come on, let’s see you guys so I can give you a nice, little surprise…. ”
Jesse felt a breeze. The fog bank split open to reveal a pair of eyes set behind a snout. To Jesse, it looked like the head of a small alligator, some kind of reptile not much longer than six or seven feet. He knew the size of alligators pretty well because when he was younger he had spent some time hunting them in Florida. At the time, six feet was the minimum legal size for harvesting and skinning a gator.
“There you are, nice, little, ugly fellah,” Jesse crooned. The creature was small, whatever it was, and Jesse wanted to nail it with a single shot. He kept talking to it, letting it hum and hum, as he sat up and swung his legs around and out over the pier. He raised his left hand to support the shotgun, as the index finger of his right hand crawled around the trigger. The distance was comfortable. In a moment it would have been over, but the fog closed again. Damn! He would have to wait for the next breeze.
The humming continued, and Jesse started humming along with it, his eyes glued down the double barrels. After a few minutes another breeze came, slowly pushing away the fog until he could see a good thirty feet beyond the end of the dock. The gator head was gone. The humming was coming from both sides of him now. He turned to look to the left when suddenly a head on a long, black, shiny neck snapped forward from the right. It sank its teeth into Jesse’s right foot. The motion and the pain cut through the alcohol in his brain, making him turn his head to the right, but a second head and neck lurched in from the left, its mouth and teeth locking onto his other foot.
