Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (33 page)

If there was really a monster here.
The thought caught him like a shock.
If.
And there it was. What if Linda was right? he asked himself. What if there’s nothing here, and I’m just treading dirty water? What if everything I’ve thought is wrong—and I’m losing my mind? No, no, I’m right. I know I am. Dear God. I
have
to be right.

He took a deep breath, exhaled it. The collapsed green seahorse seemed to be drifting toward him again. Was its grin wider? Did it show a glint of teeth? Glenn watched the rubber ring move through the light’s beam, and then he took another breath and slid downward to find the spear gun.

His thrashing had stirred up more debris. The water seemed alive with reaching, darting shadows as he kicked to the bottom and skimmed along it, his belly brushing the tiles. The light gleamed off another beer can, off a scatter of pennies left by children who’d been diving for them. Something bony lay on the bottom, and Glenn decided it was a chicken drumstick somebody had tossed over the fence. He kept going, slowly swinging his light in an arc before him.

The dirty clouds opened under his waving hand, and more metal glinted. Another crushed beer can—no, no, it wasn’t. His heart kicked. He fanned the murk away, and caught sight of the spear gun’s handle. Gripped it in his right hand with a flood of relief. Thank God! he thought. Now he felt powerful again, and the shadows seemed to flee before him. He turned in a circle, illuminating the darkness at his back. Nothing there. Nothing. To his right the newspaper page flapped like a manta ray, and to his left the clouds parted for a second to show him a glimpse of the drain. He was in the twelve-foot depth. The deep end, that place where parents warned their kids not to go.

And about three feet from the drain lay something else. Something that made Glenn’s throat catch and bubbles spill from his nostrils.

And that was when the thing that had taken the shape of a spear gun in his hand burst into its true form, all camouflage done. Ice-white tentacles tightened around Glenn’s wrist as his fingers spasmed open.

The bubbles of a scream exploded from Glenn’s mouth, but his jaws clamped shut before all his air was lost. As he tried to lunge upward, a third and fourth tentacle—pale, almost translucent and as tough as piano-wire—shot out, squeezing into the drain’s grate and locked there.

Glenn fought furiously, saw the monster’s head taking shape from its gossamer ghost of a body; the head was triangular, like a cobra’s, and from it emerged a single scarlet, blazing eye with a golden pupil. Below the eye was a small round mouth full of suction pads like the underside of a starfish. The mouth was pulsating rapidly, and began to turn from white to crimson.

The single eye stared into Glenn’s face with clinical interest. And suddenly the thing’s neck elongated and the mouth streaked around for the back of Glenn’s neck.

He’d known that’s where it was going to strike, and he’d flung his left arm up to ward off the blow an instant before it came. The mouth sealed to his shoulder like a hot kiss, hung there for a second and withdrew with a
sputt
of distaste. The monster’s head weaved back and forth as Glenn hunched his shoulders up to protect the back of his neck and spinal cord. His lungs heaved; his mouth was full of water, the snorkel spun away in the turbulence. Water was streaming into his mask, and the light had dropped from the fingers of his left hand and lay on the bottom, sending rays through the roiling clouds like a weird sunset through an alien atmosphere.

The thing’s head jerked forward, its mouth aiming at Glenn’s forehead; he jerked aside as much as he could, and the mouth hit the facemask glass. Glenn felt tentacles slithering around his body, drawing him closer, trying to crack his ribs and squeeze the last of his air out. He pressed his left hand to the back of his neck. The monster’s eye moved in the socket, seeking a way to the juices it craved. The mouth was bright red now, and deep in the folds of its white body, Glenn saw a crimson mass that pulsated at the same rhythm as its mouth.

Its heart, he realized. Its heart.

The blood thundered in his head. His lungs were seizing, about to grab for water. He looked down, saw the real spear gun a few feet away. He had no time for even a second’s hesitation, and he knew that if he failed he was dead.

He took his hand away from the back of his neck and reached for the gun, his own heartbeat about to blow the top of his skull off.

The creature’s head came around like a whip. The suckers fixed to the base of Glenn’s brain, and for an instant there was an agony that he thought would end only when his head split open; but then there was a numbing, floating, novocained sensation, and Glenn felt himself drifting toward death.

But he had the spear gun in his hand.

The monster shivered with hungry delight. From between the suction cups tiny needle-like teeth began to drill through the pores of its prey’s flesh, toward the spinal cord at the base of the brain.

One part of Glenn wanted to give up. Wanted to drift and sleep. Wanted to join Neil and the others who had gone to sleep in this pool. It would be so easy . . . so easy . . . But the part of him that clung to life and Linda and the world beyond this pool made him lift the gun, press the barbed spear against the monster’s pulsing heart and squeeze the trigger.

Sharp, head-clearing pain ripped through him. A black cloud of blood spilled into the water. The spear had pierced the creature’s body and gone into his own forearm. The monster released his neck, its head whipping and the eye wide and stunned. Glenn saw that the spear had gone right through the thing’s heart—if that’s indeed what the organ was—and then he wrenched at his arm with all his remaining strength. The spear and the heart tore out of the monster’s writhing body. The pupil of its eye had turned from gold to black, and its tattered body began to ooze through the drain’s grate like strands of opaque jelly.

Glenn’s lungs lurched. Pulled in water. He clawed toward the surface, his arm puffing blood. The surface was so far, so terribly far. The deep end had him, was not going to let him go. He strained upward, as dark gnawed at him and his lungs hitched and the water began to gurgle in his throat.

And then his head emerged into night air, and as he drew a long, shuddering breath he heard himself cry out like a victorious beast.

He didn’t remember reaching the pool’s side. Still would not trust the ladder. He tried to climb out and fell back several times. There seemed to be a lot of blood, and water still rattled in his lungs. He didn’t know how long it was, but finally he pulled himself out and fell on his back on the wet concrete.

Sometime later, he heard a hissing sound.

He wearily lifted his head, and coughed more water out. At the end of the spear, the lump of alien flesh was sizzling. The heart shriveled until it resembled a piece of coal—and then it fell apart like black ash, and there was nothing left.

“Got you,” Glenn whispered. “Got you . . . didn’t I?”

He lay on his back for a long time, as the blood continued to stream from the wound in his arm, and when he opened his eyes again he could see the stars.

“Crazy fella busted in here last night,” one of the overall-clad workmen said to the other as he lit a cigarette. “Heard it on the news this mornin’. Radio said a fella broke in here and went swimmin’. That’s why the chain’s cut off the gate.”

“Is that right? Lord, Jimmy, this is some crazy world!” The second workman, whose name was Leon, sat on the concrete beside the little brick enclosure housing an iron wheel that opened the drain and a switch that operated the electric pump. They’d spent an hour cleaning the pool out before they’d turned the wheel, and this was the first chance to sit down and rest. They’d filled a garbage bag with beer cans, dead bugs, and other debris that had collected at the bottom. Now the water was draining out, the electric pump making a steady thumping sound. It was the first morning of September, and the sun was shining through the trees in Parnell Park.

“Some folks are just born fools,” Jimmy offered, nodding sagely. “Radio said that fella shot himself with a
spear.
Said he was ravin’ and crazy and the policeman who found him couldn’t make heads or butts outta anythin’ he was sayin’.”

“Musta wanted to go swimmin’ awful bad. Hope they put him in a nice asylum with a swimmin’ pool.”

Both men thought that was very funny, and they laughed. They were still laughing when the electric pump made a harsh gasping moan and died.

“Oh, my achin’ ass!” Jimmy stood up, flicked his cigarette to the concrete. “We musta missed somethin’! Drain’s done clogged for sure!” He went over to the brick enclosure and picked up a long-handled, telescoping tool with a hooked metal tip on the end. “Let’s see if we can dig whatever it is out. If we can’t, then somebody named Leon is goin’ swimmin’.”

“Uh uh, not me! I don’t swim in nothin’ but a bathtub!”

Jimmy walked to the edge of the low diving board and reached into the water with his probe. He telescoped the handle out and began to dig down at the drain’s grate, felt the hook slide into something that seemed . . . rubbery. He brought the hook up and stood gawking at what dangled from it.

Whatever it was, it had an eye.

“Go . . . call somebody,” he managed to tell Leon. “Go call somebody right
quick!
”

Leon started running for the pay phone at the shuttered concessions stand.

“Hey, Leon!” Jimmy called, and the other man stopped. “Tell ’em I don’t know what it is . . . but tell ’em I think it’s dead! And tell ’em we found it in the deep end!”

Leon ran on to make the phone call.

The electric pump suddenly kicked on again, and with a noise like a heartbeat began to return water to the lake.

The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang
F. Brett Cox

The serpent in the sea was nothing compared to the serpent in the hearts of men. The serpent in the sea may or may not find you, Esther Lane said, may or may not be there at all. But the corruption in a man’s heart, the malicious weakness that disguises itself as passion and autonomy, then drowns itself and all around it in liquor and violence and failure—that is inescapable. Its effects can be lessened, its power can be curbed, but it can never be banished entirely. Put the men in chains and pour their liquor out on the ground, she continued, and they will still find a way to do you harm. The serpent in their hearts will not be defeated. Better to take your chances with the monster offshore.

Julia Brooks listened attentively. The others, though steadfast in their commitment, were long used to Esther’s grand pronouncements and greeted them placidly, nodding in agreement as they waited for the old woman’s rhetoric to run its course. But to Julia, the youngest among them, Esther’s words flowed like the tide into Sandy Bay, and as they all sat—in three cases, stood—crammed liked netted mackerel into Rachel and Stephen Perkins’ parlor, the temperate July night turned sweltering in such close quarters, she waited eagerly for Esther to continue.

Instead, there was the sound of an elderly throat clearing, and Julia turned with the rest of them to see Hannah Jumper look up from her knitting. “Don’t say that, Esther. The whole point is to pour the liquor out. Ain’t that why we’re here?”

Esther looked momentarily annoyed, but quickly composed herself and said, “Of course, Hannah. I do get carried away sometimes. Of course we remain united in our purpose. Don’t we, everyone?”

They all voiced their agreement. Tonight, only the leaders gathered for one last coordinated review of their plan. But come tomorrow, fully sixty of the women of Rockport, Massachusetts, would bring moral and economic sense back to the community. The half-hearted attempts of the town’s agents to regulate liquor sales had been a miserable failure, and it was now up to the women who bore the worst of the burden, and the handful of men who understood what was at stake, to deal themselves with this public nuisance. No more men lying about in drunken indolence when the winter storms and summer doldrums kept the fishing boats docked; no more backbreaking grocery bills whose main item was rum. No more bruises to hide, Julia thought. No more knowing the back of your husband’s hand better than his heart.

They had been meeting for weeks, in secret. And while Esther’s eloquence kept them inspired, Hannah kept them going. She was not well-spoken, and seventy-five years old in the bargain. But it was she who had called the first meeting, she who had kept record as the conspirators discovered, and chalked, with white X’s that would not be seen by those not looking for them, every spot in Rockport where liquor would be found. It was Hannah who had invoked their Revolutionary ancestors, the twenty women who had banded together some eighty years back and raided Colonel Foster’s supply store in Gloucester after their men marched off to Bunker Hill promising to bring back liberty but leaving their fishing boats idle and their families improvident and shivering. And it was Hannah who convinced them that hatchets were the only sufficient instrument for dispatching, if not the men who defied decency and the law, at least the wretched barrels of rum.

Mary Hale, at thirty-seven the next youngest after Julia, had objected. “Is there not too great a risk of injury? We don’t want anyone to get hurt, do we?”

“Desperate cases need desperate remedies,” replied Hannah, and continued with her knitting.

Now, on the eve of their action, the old woman sat calmly, the motion of her needles and yarn so smooth and continuous it scarcely seemed motion at all. Although she sat to the side, against the wall, the room seemed centered around her.

“But why all this talk of sea serpents?” asked Stephen Perkins, leaning forward from his perch on the edge of the room’s only sofa. “Haven’t we enough to do without digging up all that nonsense?”

“I agree,” said Mary Knowlton. Her husband had enjoyed great success transporting stone south to Boston, prosperity that set her apart from the fishermen’s wives and daughters who filled the room; some were surprised that she had joined enthusiastically in their conspiracy. But when Mrs. Knowlton was Mary Clarkson she had been a schoolteacher, and Julia, one of her students, still remembered the impromptu temperance lectures with which the young teacher would punctuate even a math lesson. “Do we want to be laughed at again? To the rest of the world we might as well have been Indians chasing spirits in the woods, and the nineteenth century might as well never have arrived. What we’re doing is too important—”

“I was scarcely speaking publicly for the Boston papers,” said Esther. “I merely invoked the serpent as a figure to dramatize my point. We’re gathered here, after all, because of the depravity of men—”

“We’re gathered here because of rum,” Hannah said without looking up from her work. “Rum is real. So’s our hatchets. Let’s stick to them.”

“Please, friends,” said Mary Hale, “Hannah, Esther—we’re all here for the same reason. Let us not divide ourselves from ourselves.” She stood and brushed straight the skirt of her grey dress. There were some of the younger matrons in town who had left their Puritan ancestors firmly behind. Betsey Andrews, the current schoolteacher, periodically took the steamboat down to Boston to inspect the latest fashions, while Judy MacQuestion was rumored to own at least one hat imported from Paris. Mary was not among their number: the neatness of her clothing was matched only by its plainness. “Mrs. Knowlton is right. The task before us is too important. Esther, we all admire your eloquence, and are grateful for it. Who of us could have framed the issues so compellingly? How many will there be on the streets tomorrow because of your persuasion?” Esther smiled and nodded her head every so slightly.

“And if Esther’s silver tongue has put people in the streets, it is Hannah’s courage and strength that has put us all in this room. Please don’t worry, Hannah. We know what needs to be done, and we shall do it.”

Hannah did not reply. They all knew by now that, in a group at least, Hannah would speak only to prod forward or to object; her silence testified that the disagreement was settled. Mary sat and smoothed her skirts again.

“Well, then,” said Mr. Perkins. “Are we concluded, then?”

They agreed that, barring unforeseen circumstances, this would be their last meeting; the plan was set and would be implemented tomorrow.

As they adjourned, James Babson, who had kept silent throughout, offered to escort Julia home. As an agent of the Granite Company, Mr. Babson had access to all manner of tools and an income not dependent on the vagaries of the ocean; both made him an invaluable ally. He was also corpulent and ill-kept, and the breath that whistled through two missing teeth was foul. Julia had had to accustom herself to such attentions in the two years since her husband’s ship had returned to port with its flag at half-staff, and she had no real reason to consider Mr. Babson’s offer as anything other than honorable.

Still. “Many’s the time, ma’am, when I saw your late husband, God rest him, with his hand so reverently on your arm as you walked home of an evening. I would be honored to assume that duty—even if only momentarily, this evening,” he added hastily.

Julia instinctively leaned away from him, then steadied herself, sighed, and was about to agree when Hannah stepped in. “Walk home with me, child. I reckon I could use the company.”

Hannah had no more need of company, Julia believed, than did Squam Lighthouse. But she quickly accepted the old woman’s offer and left Mr. Babson standing in the middle of the parlor, Esther heading casually but directly toward him, already talking.

The night felt almost chilly after the warmth of the overcrowded parlor, and Julia pulled her shawl close about her shoulders. Inside, Hannah’s presence had filled the room; outside, her great height remained—Julia came barely to the old woman’s shoulder—but, free of the press of walls and bodies, Hannah seemed reduced, distant. It was like walking with a scarecrow, Julia thought, although a most strong and determined one.

As they made their way down High Street, Julia, still full of the meeting and the righteousness of their cause, reiterated much of the evening’s discussion. Hannah remained silent, her heavy shoes clopping on the cobblestones. When they reached the Inner Harbor, rather than turning right to continue to their respective homes, Hannah stopped, facing the water. Julia followed the old woman’s gaze into the harbor. The fishing boats rested at their moorings, looking like charcoal drawings beneath the dim light of the half moon. They had not been out to sea for over a month. On one of the larger boats, at the outer edge of the harbor, several figures moved around the deck. Julia could not make them out individually, but she heard rough laughter, the shattering of glass, a bellowing voice: “She was mine, damn ya! Who said you could get under her skirts afore me?” More laughter, and the sawing of a fiddle. Although she knew it was impossible at such a distance, she could almost swear she smelled their liquor across the brine.

Julia shuddered. “After tomorrow perhaps we’ll have less of that.”

Hannah stared out past the boats and the profanity. Julia looked up at her. For a moment, the old woman’s face was obliterated by the darkness, and she looked like her bonnet and her dress and nothing else. “They should stay on the boats,” Hannah said. “They should stay on the ocean. They can’t harm the ocean.”

“Maybe the serpent will get them,” Julia said, and then instantly remembered Hannah’s harsh dismissal of Esther at the meeting. “Oh, I know, Hannah, it’s just nonsense, forgive me.”

Hannah said nothing in response. Then she turned sharply away and said, “Long past time we were home, child.”

They proceeded down Mt. Pleasant Street, past Hannah’s house. Julia tried to get Hannah to stop and let her make the remaining short walk on her own, but the old woman refused. As they turned down Long Cove Lane, Hannah asked, somewhat to Julia’s surprise, if the chamomile she had sent to Julia’s Aunt Martha had helped with her digestive difficulties. The women of Rockport paid Hannah to mend their dresses, but far more valuable, and free in the bargain, was the harvest of Hannah’s herb garden. Horseradish for a sore throat, catnip to sleep, pennyroyal for a chill, pipsissewa leaves for the heart.

Julia replied that her aunt was much better and expressed her admiration for Hannah’s skills. “I wish I could cultivate herbs as well as you. I tried planting some rosemary last season and it just didn’t take.”

“Put rosemary close to the high-water mark. It gets its strength from the sea.”

At Julia’s doorstep, Hannah bade the young woman good night. “Rest well, child. You’ll need all your wits about you tomorrow.” Julia promised that she would and watched the old woman retrace her path down the street and disappear around the corner.

Later, with the lamps an hour dark and sleep nowhere close, Julia stood before her open bedroom window. The moon was gone, and the land and the ocean and the horizon were a dark unbroken carpet over the world. But she heard the ocean, and felt it in the breeze that chilled her through her nightclothes, and smelled it. If she opened her mouth, she knew she could taste it.

There was nothing to see, but much to remember. Two years ago next month.

She had heard the stories; everyone had. The summer of 1817, fourteen years before her own birth. Hundreds down in Gloucester, most more reliable than not, had seen it. From Ten Pound Island to Western Harbor they had shielded their children and grabbed their telescopes, or set out in their boats. The reports were almost all the same: fifty to one hundred feet long, thick as a barrel, dark on top, lighter on what of its belly could be seen when it raised itself from the water. A head the size of a horse’s. Some claimed it was segmented; others noted its vertical undulations. It could turn on a dime and raced away when approached. Several had tried to kill it, of course, even as one newspaper suggested they should be grateful to it for driving herring into the harbor.

The Linnaean Society of New England had formed a committee—Harvard men, of course—to investigate, but, being too busy living inside their own heads to come and see for themselves, the committee members had sent a list of questions to the Justice of the Peace with a request for him to interview the witnesses and send them the results.

Things might have held steady at that point, or even faded away, but a couple of months later the Colbeys found a humpbacked snake, over a yard long, on the ground near Loblolly Cove. They killed and examined it, and they remembered one or two people claimed to have seen two serpents in the harbor. Could this be offspring? The Linnaeans got hold of it, dissected it, gave it a Latin name, and declared that, well, yes, it might be kin to the creature in the harbor. But then another Harvard man came along and proved that it was just a deformed black snake.

The next summer there were more sightings in the harbor, and things looked as if they were getting heated up again. But when the creature came up to Squam Bar, near the lighthouse, and a Boston captain chased it down in a whaleboat, only to discover that he had harpooned a horse mackerel, most of Cape Ann was ready to forget anything ever happened. The following year, dozens more saw the same thing just off the shore down at Nahant, but by then the Linaaeans had given up, the Boston captain had disappeared, and people were making fun of the gullible Yankees all the way down to Charleston.

They were all just stories Julia had grown up with, and she didn’t regard them as anything more, or less. And then she saw it herself.

Her husband Joshua had been out with the boats, and she had not been sorry to see him go. The summer doldrums had lasted longer than usual, giving him more time to drink, and curse the fish because they weren’t there, and her because she was. It could have been worse. Abigail Hancock’s husband used her so badly that both the town constables had intervened, and Mr. Hancock, after he sobered up, left abruptly for a rumored family in the Maine woods. But the memories of the young man of promise and passion she had married, against the sullen wreck who stared emptily out at the waves as he swigged his rum, were almost as bad as the bruises she managed most of the time to hide.