“Alice, dear, you have a friend,” said Carol Lewis after she and her own friend jumped with a laugh over the low stone wall that separated the Esplanade from the beach. They smelled of suntan oil and perfume.
“So do you, Carol,” said Alice.
I have a few friends who call their parents by their first names. It seems kind of stupid to me, like the parental units are trying to be kids and suck up to them. My mom’s my mom, and my dad’s my dad. They aren’t anything else, for better or worse. I’d rather be real with them. Alice Carr, who must have her dad’s last name, said “Carol” as if it were the name of the most boring person on earth.
“Yes I do, dear, I do,” smiled Carol, gritting her teeth. You could tell she wasn’t Alice’s biggest fan at this moment either. “This is Lance Bennett, proprietor of Tweedledum and Tweedledee Candies.” She said this as if it was supposed to impress Alice, raising her eyebrows as she spoke. Alice didn’t seem to care. But I did. Tweedledum and Tweedledee! That was the amazing chain of BC stores with candies that were healthy and sweet. Maybe we could score some!
“The organic candy emporium,” Lance offered, extending a hand to Alice, which she wouldn’t take. I stuck out my hand immediately. Lance grabbed it with relief and nearly busted my fingers with his grip.
“Dylan Maples,” I said in the deepest voice I could find.
“Lance Bennett, Mr. Maples,” he announced. I almost looked around to see if Dad was standing behind me.
He and Carol stood there looking at me for a few seconds with big grins. She was the kind of woman who really stood out on a beach, with her trendy bathing suit and glowing blonde hair. I glanced over at Alice. You couldn’t find two hair colours more different—and it wasn’t hard to guess who the fake was.
Lance looked rich. He just had that way about him. He was smooth as cream about everything, right from the way he talked and the knee-length swimsuit he had on to his pitch-black shades and blonde hair and moustache. I could see that Alice hated him, right off.
“I’ve just met your mother here, Alice, and she’s been telling me all about you.”
“How lovely.”
“Uh…yes it is, actually. What are you two up to?”
That reminded me. I supposed it was my job to introduce Uncle Walter. “Mind your manners,” Mom would say. I wondered why Lance had said “you two.”
“Oh, this is my Uncle Wal—”
As I turned I realized he wasn’t there. I glanced around. No Walter. Then I looked across the road towards his condo and up and down the street. No Walter.
“He’s—he’s gone!” said Alice, just as stunned as me. “Well, maybe he’s shy,” laughed Lance.
“He’s not shy,” snapped Alice, “he’s amazing. You should hear all the things he’s done! He used to be a high-wire walker!”
Amazing? I doubted it was a word that most people would use about my uncle Walter these days. It sounded funny when she said it, but I agreed.
“Well,” purred Carol, “Lance here is pretty amazing himself. He’s about to open a brand-new Tweedledum and Tweedledee right in Harrison Hot Springs. The biggest store outside of Vancouver, with a café attached and maybe even a spa for rich Americans. ‘Health and Pleasure,’ right, Lance? And get this, Alice, he’d like me to do the PR.”
I knew what that meant: public relations—doing advertising and that sort of stuff for a company.
“That’s nice, Carol, but Dylan’s uncle is a bit beyond candy stores in terms of amazing.”
“Yes, dear, I know, you told us. He’s an old circus star.”
“He’s a lot more than that,” she shot back. Alice seemed desperate to come up with something else. She turned to me. “Isn’t he, Dylan?”
“Sure, uh…he knows things about the sasquatch.” It was all I could think of.
“The what?” asked Carol blankly.
“Really?” inquired Lance abruptly, looking genuinely interested. “That’s quite a feature in these parts, isn’t it, that tall tale?”
“He says it’s real.” Alice countered.
I wished she wouldn’t have said that. First of all, Uncle Walter had never said it himself. And secondly, he was strange enough without it being broadcast to a PR person and her rich boyfriend.
“Well, good for him.” Carol smiled. “What’s a sasquatch?”
“Oh, Carol, you bozo.”
I couldn’t believe Alice had actually said that to her mother. If I’d done it I’d have been grounded for seventy-five years, give or take a decade. It kind of made me cringe.
“On that note,” snapped Carol, “Lance and I will vamoose. I will see you, young lady, at the hotel restaurant at six.”
“Maybe,” said Alice under her breath as her mother clutched Lance’s hand and steered them away. But Lance broke loose for a second and hurried back to us.
“Been reading about the monster thing in the flyers they give out around here. Uh, sounds fascinating, really does.” Then he rushed off to join Carol, waving back at us a few times.
The way he’d said that was a bit strange. It was like a mixture of someone lying and telling you the absolute truth.
“I didn’t say that about the sasquatch,” said a stern voice.
It was Uncle Walter. Alice and I just about jumped out of our sandals. He was standing right beside us.
“But…but you believe in it, don’t you?” Alice stammered.
“Best to leave that legend alone. I’ll let the experts decide. And there are lots of them around here.”
He didn’t seem to be too pleased that Alice was making things up about him, and in another few minutes he was gone. As he moved away, I noticed that he’d changed into his hiking boots. There were pine needles under the laces.
Alice and I walked along the boardwalk. We didn’t say anything for a while. We were both thinking.
“What do you figure he meant by there being lots of experts around here?” she finally asked.
“I guess there must be people in Harrison Hot Springs who know a lot about the sasquatch. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Let’s find one!”
“One what? A sasquatch?” I felt a little twinge of fear.
“No, goof, an expert.”
“Why?”
“Did someone hit you on the head or something? We’re in a place that holds the answer to the world’s greatest monster mystery, and there are people here who know all about it and you want to know why we’d talk to them? Let’s check them out. It could be amazing!”
“I’m not really that interested in the sasquatch.”
“Yeah right, and I’m the Queen of England.”
How could a guy who was scared of everything just days ago, who had spent his whole life dreaming bad dreams about monsters, be interested in the sasquatch? But Alice was right. I was. Something was telling me that it was time, right here in Harrison Hot Springs, to face my fears or spend my whole life being afraid. I didn’t want to end up like Uncle Walter, turned into a shell of myself. And I knew, deep down, that the sasquatch was one of the coolest things on earth. I’d known it as a kid, and knew it again the second I’d seen its face in that guidebook.
Ten minutes later we were at the Harrison Lake Library. There, sitting on a shelf right at the entrance, was a whole row of books about the sasquatch, all with pictures of horrific-looking monster-apes on their covers. We began flipping to the back of each one, examining the information about the writers. Finally, we found what we were looking for. “The author,” the cover read, “lives in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia.” Soon we discovered three other books by the same guy. We dashed over to the local phone book.
Within a half hour we were walking up to the front door of an ordinary-looking house belonging to one Cosmos Greene.
6
The Sasquatch Man
&nbs
p; It wasn’t so ordinary inside. And neither was Greene, the sasquatch man. He answered the door and we looked way up. That’s because he was about half a foot taller than even Uncle Walter, who’s no slouch in the height department. He had this deep voice that seemed to rise out of his chest, and was very hairy. Hair was coming out of his ears, his nose, busting out from under his shirt both back and front, and growing out of the top of his head like a jungle, despite the fact that he was an older guy and grey. He had quite a schnozzola on him too, a big bulbous nose that looked like it should have belonged to a bloodhound, and ears like an elephant’s.
He was a little scary at first. We kind of stuttered out why we were there and it seemed like he was scowling at us. But then, for some reason, I brought up Uncle Walter’s name. Cosmos Greene grinned, opened the door wide, and invited us in.
Indoors, he gave us a warm smile and shook our hands. Mine just disappeared into his when we gripped. I couldn’t believe the size of the mitts on the guy. Then, when he ushered us into his living room, he took these long loping strides. I bet he got to his spot on his big chair in about three steps, and it was on the other side of the room.
There were pictures of the sasquatch all over the place: drawings, photographs, all sorts of things. But the biggest one was a huge framed poster that hung over his fireplace. It was a blow-up of the shot I’d seen in the guidebook: that still from the film of the sasquatch, with the monster looking over his shoulder, back at the cameraman. It was kind of blurry at that size, and very spooky looking. I stared at it.
“So,” said Cosmos with a deep smile, bringing me out of my trance, “you know Walter Middy?”
“I’m…I’m his great-nephew.”
“Well, you’re a lucky man.”
Huh?
“When old Walter first moved to these parts last year he came to us on the town council with an idea for bringing homeless Vancouver kids out here for a day at the beach. We thought it was a great idea, but too expensive. That was when he took out his chequebook. He paid every dime.”
Alice and I looked at each other.
“You young folks are interested in the great ape, eh?”
It was almost shocking to hear him say that. It made me realize what I was doing. Me, once freaked out about the Reptile and monsters under my bed, and now I was sitting here with a real live sasquatch expert, interested.
“Do you really think it exists?” asked Alice.
“Yes! And I’ll show you why,” cried Cosmos as he leapt to his feet like a giant roused to action. He loped about two steps down his hallway to a closet, dug around inside for a while, and then came back. He was holding two huge chunks of plaster in his hands.
“This is why.”
He set the plaster casts down, one on my lap, the other on Alice’s. They were big feet.
“These are footprints, one made deep in the woods of the park, the other northeast of here near a place called Hell’s Gate in the Fraser Canyon Valley. I made one pair, the renowned Professor Binderbugle the other.”
“Footprints of what?” I asked.
“A sasquatch!”
They were massive. They covered both of my legs and then some. I could see each of the toes, almost humanlike. The big one stuck out a bit to the side. Could these be real? This thing would be a giant! A hairy giant really living in the woods of British Columbia?
Cosmos Greene started talking very fast.
“There are hundreds of footprint casts like these of sasquatches! And there have been thousands of sightings! Are all those witnesses simply hoax creators? Are they all liars? Gosh, the sightings go back to pre-colonial days. Indigenous people have talked about it for centuries. Did you know that when the Hudson’s Bay Company established a post here in 1846, the inspector saw many of them? And they’ve been spotted right up to this decade. Science needs to deal with this subject seriously. If not with the existence of the sasquatch, then with the fact that so many people claim to have seen it. Are they delusional? And if they are, what does that mean? Why do people see monsters in the BC woods all the time? Why do they see them in the Himalayas of Asia?”
“Have you ever seen one, Mr. Greene?” inquired Alice.
“No,” he said, almost sadly, slowing down for a breath. “I never have. But I’ve spoken to many witnesses and I’ve seen many, many actual footprints on the ground. Something is making those tracks and something is either causing people to say they’ve seen sasquatches...or they are seeing them!”
The scary thing about what he was saying was that it made some sense.
“It’s an ape! A gigantic ape!” he bellowed.
“Pardon me?”
“Every sighting confirms it. Read descriptions of apes in the wild and then examine sasquatch sightings, and you’ll see what I mean. Apes have an awful smell, you know. Many folks who have seen sasquatches report an overpowering odour in the air. They have a hard time describing it, but nine out of ten of them talk about it. There are places where they call it the skunk ape. Folks who have never seen an ape in their lives report all sorts of apelike characteristics, like chest thumping, rock throwing, and displaying and grimacing. It’s very curious.”
He started thumping himself on the chest.
“Where do people see them nowadays?”
He stopped.
“Everywhere, really. But mostly in the west: in California, Oregon, Alberta, and British Columbia. And around here, of course!”
“Where here?”
“Why, are you planning a hunt?” He laughed long and loud, like a donkey braying.
“Of course not,” I said, trying to be heard between the brays.
“Oh, they’ve been seen all around Harrison Lake,” replied Cosmos, coming down to earth, “near the water, north, south, east, and west.”
“In the park?” wondered Alice.
“Sure.”
“Close by?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
It turned out to be an amazing visit. It lasted for more than an hour. At one point Cosmos’s wife came out to say hello. She had a tray of cookies and some big tumblers of fruit juice. She sat still and listened, as if she deeply believed everything her husband was saying. It was kind of freaky. Alice and I kept glancing over at each other, raising our eyebrows. When we left, they saw us out at the door.
“You should ask your uncle about this.”
“Why?”
“I have the feeling…he’s seen one.”
We walked along the beach, talking. What Cosmos Greene had said about my uncle was weird enough. But he had filled our heads with some other pretty bizarre ideas too. He had actually started laying out ways to get close to a sasquatch. He said maybe some raw meat, like dead rats, left in a well-hidden place in the woods, visible from a hiding spot, might do the trick. He told us that searchers have to treat it like an animal, get upwind from it, be absolutely quiet, track it if they find footprints, that sort of thing. And, of course, he said they have to be alert for smells. Close up, he claimed, the odour is like rotting meat. I couldn’t believe he was serious. Check out the sasquatch? Maybe people should try for the Easter Bunny while they’re at it.
But the way Alice was talking, it didn’t sound like she thought any of this was even remotely like a fantasy egg hunt. She said she was “blown away” by Uncle Walter and Cosmos Greene, that they were the only adults she’d ever met who weren’t boring. And she was fired up with everything we had heard about the sasquatch. She was almost jumping up and down like a little kid.
“What if we saw one? Can you imagine?” she asked.
“Come on, Alice,” I sneered, but I was wondering the same thing.
“Cosmos thinks your uncle’s seen it!”
“He’s just guessing.”
“What if Walter is holding something back? What if he really did see something? Could he just let it go? A
man like him? I mean, why’s he here?” she said.
“He just wants to live a quiet life.”
“Oh, yes, in sleepy Harrison Hot Springs, the home of the sasquatch.”
“I don’t know, Alice.”
But at that instant, an image came into my mind that really made me wonder. I could see the boot tray on Uncle Walter’s balcony...and I remembered him walking away from us on the boardwalk. He was always wearing hiking boots. Why? Were they good golf wear, or perfect for the beach? And why were they so often muddy? Was he doing something out in the forest?
“His boots. Right?” said Alice, smiling at me. It was like she’d been inside my head. It startled me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“He’s holding something back, Dylan, and you know it.”
“Maybe,” I replied. But I was sure now that deep inside my uncle a whole world was waiting for me, a world of excitement…if I could only lose my fear.
“There’s one way to find out,” said Alice firmly.
“How’s that?”
“Follow him.”
“Follow him?”
“Yeah…stake him out.”
And that was how I came to be out of bed by five o’clock in the morning the following day, and then outside under the moonlit sky before the sun rose over the mountains of Sasquatch Provincial Park. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. It seemed like a dream.
7
The Secret Hideout
Five o’clock in the morning isn’t my time of day. But there I was, walking along the boardwalk, rubbing my eyes, the skies dark above me. My body was still asleep but my brain was wide awake. I kept looking behind me and around each corner. The whole place was spooky. The mountains seemed to move, like huge faces looming over the water. And the lake itself was a big, black piece of glass just sitting there in silence. Everything was too dark and too quiet. I almost ran towards Walter’s condo.
I could see Alice in the distance. You could have fired a cannonball down the Esplanade and not touched a living soul: except her.
Monster in the Mountains Page 4