“You said you wanted to talk to me?”
O’Shea picked up on the hint easily enough and let the subject drop. “Ah, yes. I’ve been doing some research on your little beastie.”
“First of all, it wasn’t little. Second, how can you do research on something no one has ever seen before?”
“That’s where you’re wrong. There have, in fact, been more than two hundred sightings of the creature since the United States was first colonized in the 1600s.” O’Shea sat in a black-leather, swiveling, computer chair and rolled a second one toward Atticus. He used the touch pads on all three laptops to, bring their screens to life. On each was displayed several Firefox Internet browser windows containing various articles.
Atticus caught one of the headlines, obviously from an old newspaper.
A Monstrous Sea Serpent
The largest seen in America
Has just made its appearance in Gloucester Harbor,
Cape Ann, on August 14, 1817, and has been seen by hundreds of Respectable Citizens.
The next one that caught his eye was much the same.
The Real Sea Serpent
That came ashore at Old Orchard, Maine, in June 1905
~ The Most Marvelous Mammal in Creation.
In fact, all of the articles were very similar, each telling of a massive creature spotted in the waters of the Gulf of Maine. Atticus went numb as his mind soaked up the possibilities. The creature had been around for untold generations. It had been seen by hundreds of witnesses, yet had never been confirmed to exist by science-let alone discussed by anyone in his profession. He’d spent his life at sea, primarily in the Gulf of Maine, and he had never even heard of it.
He spotted a book on the desk next to one of the laptops. Its cover featured a picture of a sea serpent, obviously an old print. It was eerily familiar in some ways, but so wrong in others. He picked it up and read the title: The Great New England Sea Serpent, by J.P. O’Neill.
Atticus must not have heard O’Shea talking because he was repeating his name over and over. “Atticus. Hello. Atticus?” “Yeah, sorry,” Atticus said. “This is just a little unexpected.”
“You’re telling me.” O’Shea took the book from him and flipped through the pages. “Look at this,” he said, holding the open book up for Atticus to see. “This thing, which can only be your creature, has been spotted hundreds of times all over the Gulf of Maine.” The pages O’Shea flipped through contained dates, places, and names for all of the sightings. “And these are just the reported sightings!”
Atticus recognized most of the hundred-odd cities named: Gloucester, Lynn, Penobscot Bay, Nahant, Salem, Portland, Kennebunk, Boston Harbor, Rockport, and Portsmouth. All were cities strung along the coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine that gilded the entire Gulf of Maine. Next, the numbers and professions of the witnesses struck him. In some instances the creature had been seen by more than two hundred people at a time. Other sightings had been reported by fishermen, lobstermen, ship captains-even the Coast Guard. All were people accustomed to life at sea. If the creature struck them as unusual, as it had Atticus, who better to judge between shark, whale, or something else entirely?
“Why don’t more people know about this? Why didn’t I?” Atticus asked, his voice nearly a whisper.
O’Shea shrugged. “The Loch Ness Monster became a tourist attraction. It was good for the community. But this just didn’t catch on. Perhaps the no-nonsense New England atmosphere was simply too much for the creature to pierce? The world knows how strong-willed and stuck in your ways you New Englanders can be.”
Atticus smiled. He knew O’Shea was trying to lighten the mood. He flipped through the pages of the book one more time, stopping at drawings of the serpent and descriptions given by witnesses. As before, he noted that several details were accurate, while others fell short. It was at least 150 feet long and showed a black coloration on top and white beneath. Its double-decker-bus-sized head looked like a horse’s. It undulated up and down as it swam, like a mythical marine serpent, but it had large fins like a whale’s, two in front and two in back. And its eyes were lemon yellow and split by dark serpentine pupils. Atticus jolted from the memory. He suddenly recalled more details, and it jarred him to the core. For a moment he felt terrified of the water, thinking twice about facing that thing again.
Then the door burst open.
“Don’t you ever knock?” O’Shea blurted out at the brightly Hawaiian-clad Remus.
“Trevor wanted me to get you,” Remus said to Atticus, totally ignoring O’Shea. “We’re tracking the creature and will be on top of it within the hour.”
As Remus delivered his last bit of shocking news, Atticus felt the Titan lurch into motion, making his feet unsteady and his stomach constrict uncomfortably. But rather than give in to his fear and misstep, he righted himself, followed Remus, and set his mind to the task; it was time to face his fears.
Time to kill the beast.
21
The Titan -Gulf of Maine
“How are you tracking it?” Atticus sounded unbelieving and indignant as he entered the bridge of the Titan, followed closely by Remus and O’Shea.
Trevor turned to him with a gleaming smile. “Good morning, Atticus. I trust you slept well?”
Oblivious to Trevor’s polite conversation, Atticus took in the bridge. A technological wonder, the bridge had more screens and buttons than the space shuttle. In fact, it looked like something straight out of a science-fiction film. A crew of five, including a captain, who never spoke, sat around the oval room, working at computer consoles and wearing headsets. At the center of the oval bridge, which had a 360-degree view of the ocean, sat an oval table that displayed maps and charts digitally, a massive touch screen.
Trevor’s words intruded again, but this time captured his attention. “The beast hasn’t traveled far since your initial encounter.”
“Where are we?”
“Where we have been since you boarded…Jeffery’s Ledge.”
Atticus met his eyes. “How are you tracking it?” he asked a second time, adding resolve to his voice.
“Ahh, yes,” Trevor said. “While you slept I had crews deploying sonar buoys throughout the Gulf of Maine.”
Atticus squinted. It was a ridiculous notion. The Gulf of Maine was simply too big to cover with radar buoys.
Trevor picked up on Atticus’s disbelief and added, “Not the entire gulf, mind you, just the spots that most resembled the location in which we knew it had been sighted. We knew from your account that it had been pursuing a school of herring, so we buoyed all known herring hot spots, which was no small task, mind you.
“But it seems the creature is in no hurry to leave. It has been slowly following a school of herring, I assume keeping its prey close by.”
Atticus nodded. That was certainly an odd behavior, but the creature was completely unknown and unrelated to anything Atticus had ever studied. Predicting its hunting habits would be impossible. But if it shadowed a school of herring, he had no doubt it would eventually feed on them. “It will surface when it feeds on the herring.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Trevor added with a glimmer of excitement. “And we’ll be waiting for it when it does. But I must ask a favor of you before such an encounter occurs.”
Atticus waited, neither nodding nor speaking.
“I need to know everything you do about this creature. Anything you can recall about the beast will help us immeasurably. To kill it, we must first know it.”
Atticus pictured the attack-his memory still fractured. He thought about drawing the beast, but he was no artist and didn’t want to misrepresent its size, abilities, or speed. “I’m not sure how much help I could be…I don’t
