Just as well it was gone. I didn’t want to go down in history as the man who killed the famous Loch Ness monster.
I turned my back on the loch. Honey was sifting through the scattered remains of her communications console. Walker was looking at the oversized gun in his hand as though he wasn’t accustomed to using such things, and for all I knew, he wasn’t. He made the gun disappear with a casual, elegant gesture and moved over to where Peter was looking intently at his camera phone. The Blue Fairy was looking at the silver arm of Nuada, covering his arm from shoulder to fingertips. He pulled a face and sent the ancient weapon back where it came from. He looked at me, and I smiled as kindly as I could.
“It takes more than just armour, Blue. Why call on Airgedlamh? Why didn’t you use your torc?”
“Because it scares me,” said the Blue Fairy. “I don’t think I can use it and still be me.”
He marched over to join Peter and Walker. “Tell me you got the bloody thing on film!” he said loudly. “Don’t you dare say you screwed up, Peter King, or I will throw you into the loch to drag the monster back up here again!”
“I got it! I got the whole fight on film!” said Peter, grinning from ear to ear. “Proof; proof positive!”
Honey and I joined the group, and we all studied the film on the phone’s tiny screen. It looked good. It would probably look a whole lot better blown up on a decent-sized screen, but like the man said: proof positive.
“Where’s Katt?” Walker said abruptly. We all looked around, but there was no sign of her.
We found her body eventually, under the main wreckage of the communications console. She’d avoided the main impact of the monster’s head, but her neck was broken. With all her marvellous vitality gone, she looked very small and delicate. Like a thrown-away flower, or a broken doll. Peter knelt down beside her and closed her staring eyes.
“Probably never even knew what hit her,” said Walker. “Poor little thing.”
“Wish now I’d taken the time to get to know her better,” said Peter. “I think she would have been . . . fun.”
“Oh, please!” said the Blue Fairy. “She would have killed you first chance she got.”
“Like I said, fun.” Peter rose to his feet and looked away.
“That’s the spying game for you,” said Honey. “Here today; gone tomorrow. I was going to blame her for sabotaging my submersible. No real proof; just a feeling. Now . . . I don’t suppose it matters. We have the proof of the monster’s existence; time to move on to the next part of the game.”
“Just like that?” said Peter.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the spying game for you.”
In the end, we dropped Lethal Harmony of Kathmandu’s body into the loch. As good a resting place as any. Honey watched the ripples slowly settle on the dark surface.
“Scratch one submersible,” she said finally. “And several billion dollars, probably. I just know they’ll find a way to stick me with the bill.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Hide and Seek
I
n the forests of the night, there are many worse things than tygers.
The teleport bracelets dropped us right into the heart of dense forest, with night falling fast. Trees stood tall and slender all around us, draped with patchy greenery and hanging vines. The ground beneath my feet was hard and dry; rough brown dirt, cracked and broken. The vegetation grew thicker off to one side, leading down to a slow-moving river with tree trunks rising right out of the muddy waters. The air was blisteringly hot and humid, harsh and heavy in my lungs after the bitter chill of Loch Ness. Sweat sprang out all over me. Off in the distance, beyond the tree line, the sun was going down in shades of orange and crimson. In less than an hour it would be dark, and this far from civilisation it would be very dark indeed. From all around came the sounds of bird and beast and the persistent buzz of insects.
“Wonderful,” the Blue Fairy said bitterly. “An environment even more unpleasant than the last one, though I would have sworn on a stack of grimoires such a thing was impossible. Bloody place is like a blast furnace . . . I can actually feel myself tanning. Are those mosquitoes?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Shit.” The Blue Fairy looked up at the darkening sky. “Why me, Lord; why me? Was I really so bad in my last incarnation? What did I do; stamp on puppies?”
“You’d find something to complain about in Paradise,” I said, amused.
He sniffed loudly. “They wouldn’t let me into that place on a bet.” He looked accusingly around him. “Well, joy; another location I am not equipped to deal with. I am not an outdoors person; if I’d wanted to rough it, I’d have paid someone else to do it for me. Does anyone have any idea where the hell we are now?”
“While you’ve been whining, I’ve been talking to Langley,” said Honey. “They tasked a spy satellite to zero in on my implant, and apparently we’re somewhere in the wilds of Arkansas, not far from the border with Texas. Miles and miles from anywhere civilised, and so far off the beaten track you can’t even see the track from here.”
“Shoot me now and get it over with,” said the Blue Fairy.
“Don’t tempt me,” I said.
“How many miles, exactly, to civilisation?” said Walker, practical as ever.
“Thirty, forty miles to the nearest small town,” said Honey. “Hard to be sure; there aren’t any accurate maps of this region.”
“Let me guess,” said Peter. “Because no one ever comes here, right?”
“Maybe a few trappers, hunters,” said Honey. “Backwoods hermits who like to keep themselves to themselves.”
“Can you hear banjo music?” said the Blue Fairy.
“Shut up,” I said.
Honey set off through the trees, and since she looked like she knew where she was going, the rest of us trailed after her, for want of anything better to do. She stripped off her heavy fur coat, dropped it carelessly on the ground, and walked away from it. The rest of us stepped carefully over and around it. Honey was an agent; there was no telling what kind of dirty tricks she might have left behind with her coat. The Blue Fairy sighed appreciatively.
“Now that’s style, that is. Just drop off a few hundred thousand dollars of coat and keep on walking.” He ripped off his wilting ruff and threw it into the trees with a dramatic gesture.
“I should lose the breastplate while you’re at it,” I said. “It must weigh half a ton, and it’ll only get worse in this heat. You don’t need it now you’ve got a torc to protect you.”
He looked down at the brass and silver breastplate scored with protective runes and shook his head stiffly. “No. I don’t think so. In the things that matter, it’s always best to stick with things you can trust.”
I glanced back to see how the others were doing. Peter King was wandering along, stumbling over the occasional raised root in the ground because his attention was clearly elsewhere. If anything, he looked more out of place in the woods of the American South than he had in the Scottish Highlands. He’d taken off his expensive jacket and slung it over one shoulder and rolled up his sleeves, and his pale bare arms had excited the surrounding insects into a feeding frenzy. Walker hadn’t even made that much of a concession to the heat; he still wore his smart city suit like a knight’s armour. Though he had loosened his old-school tie, just a little. He strolled along amiably, smiling about him and enjoying the scenery as though taking a tour of someone’s private estate.
The vegetation and the trees fell suddenly away as we came to the riverbank. Almost wide enough to qualify as a lake, the muddy waters ran calmly past us, swirling around the mottled trunks of gnarled and knotted trees. Small dark shadows shot this way and that through the waters; beavers, maybe? I’m not really up on wildlife. And I can’t think of beavers without remembering the talking ones in Narnia. I’d make a lousy trapper. We all stood close together on the riverbank for mutual comfort and support in such alien surroundings, and we looked up and down the river. Just more of the same, from one horizon to the next. It was getting darker. The Blue Fairy studied the crap brown waters with a sort of disgusted fascination.
“Do you suppose they have alligators here?”
“Almost certainly,” I said.
“Oh, God . . .”
“I can deal with alligators,” Honey said cheerfully. “I could use a new pair of shoes. Or even luggage.”
Shadows were lengthening, filling the gaps between the trees. The light was going out of the day, and the sky was the dull red of drying blood. Cries from surrounding wildlife were becoming louder, more urgent. Already the gloom was creeping in around us, and I couldn’t see nearly as far as I could when we arrived. I had a strong feeling . . . of being watched.
“Did anyone else see that film
The Blair Witch Project
?” said Peter.
“I liked it,” said Walker unexpectedly.
“I saw it in the cinema,” said Honey. “All those jerky camera movements made me seasick.”
“I always thought they should have given James Cameron the sequel,” said the Blue Fairy. “Let him do another
Aliens.
Send a whole company of heavily armed marines into the Blair woods and have them blow away everything that moved. Like to see the Blair Witch deal with that . . .”
“Oh, tell me we’re not here looking for the Blair Witch,” I said. “That was fiction from beginning to end, and to hell with what it said on the Net.”
“No,” said Peter. “Sasquatch, maybe. You know: Bigfoot? Half man, half ape, maybe even the missing link. Often glimpsed, never properly identified.”
“Actually,” Walker murmured, “Sasquatch was a Native American name for a particularly reclusive tribe called the Shy People. The name Bigfoot is more recent, from tracks found in various locations.”
“I’ve seen some photos and a couple of amateur films,” I said. “But nothing even remotely convincing. And there’s hardly anything at all about Bigfoot in the Drood library. Mostly because we were never that interested in them. If they wanted to stay hidden and keep themselves to themselves, that was fine with us.”
“I saw a film on television, when I was just a kid,” Honey said slowly. “About a creature in Arkansas . . . Spooked the hell out of me. The creature lurked around this small town and even terrorised some people, but it was never identified . . . Maybe that’s what we’re here for.”
“Could be,” said Peter. “Maybe Grandfather saw that film too.”
The insects were swarming around us now, clouds of them sweeping in from off the river. We all flapped our hands, trying to swat the damned things, but we might as well have been holding up signs saying,
Fresh meat! All the blood you can drink!
Since mosquitoes are known to breed around rivers for the express purpose of passing on malaria to people, I was actually considering armouring up in self-protection, when the Blue Fairy spat out half a dozen words in Old Elvish, and every single insect dropped out of the air, stone cold dead. The world seemed to pause, considering, and then all the other insects boiling up off the river decided to go somewhere else. We looked at the Blue Fairy with new respect. He smiled happily.
“Works even better with pests at parties. Look, it’s going to be night very soon now, and not even a Bates Motel to take us in. What was Alexander King thinking of, dropping us in the middle of nowhere? I mean, how are we supposed to find one bloody Sasquatch in God knows how many square miles of wild forest? It could be anywhere, and you can bet good money that if it wants to avoid us, it’s perfectly capable of hiding itself so completely we could walk right past it and not even know it was there! I am not tramping through this godforsaken wilderness dressed like an extra from
Shakespeare in Love
just in the hope we bump into the damned thing!”
“Easy, Blue,” I said. “You’re hyperventilating.”
“I’m entitled! Do any of us even look like hearty outdoors tracker types?”
“I hate to break this to you,” said Honey, “but our situation is even worse than that. According to Langley, these woods cover hundreds if not thousands of square miles, most of them completely unmapped, except for a single notation:
Here Be Deadly Wildlife That Will Bite Your Ass off if You Don’t Pay Attention.”
“I want to go home,” Blue said miserably.
“What . . . kind of deadly wildlife?” said Peter, looking quickly around him.
“Alligators, bears, wolves, wild pig, snakes, you name it,” Honey said cheerfully. “Great hunting grounds. My uncles used to take me hunting when I was younger. Though that seemed to consist mainly of drinking beer, wandering in circles, and telling stories that were entirely unsuitable for my young ears. Either way, I could bring down a full-grown buck with one shot, skin it, and dress it out before I was twelve.”
“How wonderfully primitive,” said the Blue Fairy.
“At least in Scotland we had a loch to look in,” said Walker, sensing things were about to get nasty. “Where are we supposed to start here?”
Everyone looked at me.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “There’s lots of stories about the Sasquatch, mostly of personal one-on-one encounters, but it’s all very vague. There have been some edgy confrontations, but there’s no recorded incident of a Sasquatch ever killing or even attacking a man. Mostly they’re supposed to be . . . shy and diffident creatures.”
“Shy and diffident; great,” said the Blue Fairy. “Shy and diffident I can live with.”
“And no Drood has ever bothered to track down the truth?” said Walker.
I gave him a hard look. “We have a whole world to watch over and protect, often from the likes of you.”
If Walker was bothered by my hard look, he hid it well. “I’m surprised no one’s ever tried to catch or trap a Sasquatch,” he said thoughtfully. “Especially given the locals are undoubtedly all experienced hunting and trapping types. Why would they allow a dangerous and potentially exploitable creature to just roam around their backyard, unchecked?”
“If I’m remembering what I saw on the television right,” said Honey, “they tried tracking it with dogs once. Pedigreed hunting hounds from all over the county. But the moment the dogs got a scent of what they were after, they tucked their tails between their legs, backed away, and tried to hide behind each other. They didn’t want anything to do with what they were smelling. Their owners took a lesson from that, and maybe we should too.”