The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3)
Page 31
31
On the drive back to May they stopped at a payphone, which Calvin used to anonymously inform the police that there were a couple of bodies in the Mad Hatter warehouse.
“What if they still manage to trace stuff back to us?” Brandon asked as he pulled the van back onto Miller Road. He looked over his shoulder at the others, who, with the leucrota occupying the bulk of the floor space, were crowded against the walls in the back of the van. “I mean, there might be surveillance cameras that saw us coming or going, or we might’ve missed some fingerprints, or something.”
“If anyone asks,” Calvin said, “we’ll tell them we went out there because our history-geek friend Lauren told us the tale of Gideon Squash, and we wanted to check out the key sites involved, especially since there was a rumor that some or all of them are haunted, and we’re kind of interested in all that crazy paranormal stuff. And while we were looking around, we noticed the warehouse’s door was open, so we foolishly decided to investigate, and the horrifying stuff we stumbled across was traumatizing enough to convince us never to trespass again. The end.”
“Not bad,” Violet said. “A nice convincing blend of fact and fiction. There’s hope for you yet.”
“Hey, breaking-and-entering isn’t our only sin, you know,” Cynthia said. “We stole that curtain thing, too. We’re thieves now. We’re racking up bad karma right out of the gate.”
Calvin pshawed. “Once they see what’s in the warehouse, I bet all the merchandise just gets burned. They’ll probably strip that place right down to the I-beams.”
“So you’re just going to stick this thing in the Collection?” Lauren asked, motioning at the shrouded shape of the leucrota.
“Yep,” Calvin said.
“But…shouldn’t the world know about this? Shouldn’t we, like, let some scientists study it?”
“No,” he said simply. Seeing from her expression that she wasn’t going to be satisfied with that, he elaborated: “It would be pointless. No one would believe it’s what we say it is. Most would say it’s just some genetic freak. A mutated hyena, or something.”
“But we heard it mimicking us! We…” She trailed off, realizing the problem with that. “Oh.”
“Yeah. They’ll only have our word for that. It won’t be mimicking anything else ever again.”
“But it’ll have unique vocal cords.”
“More meaningless mutation. Look, if you hadn’t seen it and heard it for yourself—if you only had a secondhand report to go on—would you believe it was an honest-to-God monster straight out of a credulous, scientifically slipshod bestiary?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“Simply put, no one’s going to believe it. Even with proof right in front of them, they’ll find ways to explain it away so that it fits with what’s already known. Science is largely about averages. It’s about aggregates of data and repeatability. This is a singularity. As such, it’ll be seen as nothing more than a very peculiar outlier of established data sets.”
“But what if more monsters start coming out of that thing in the woods? Shouldn’t we let people know what they’re up against?”
“If more stuff starts coming through, then yeah. That’s why I’m going to preserve the leucrota in a way that’ll keep all its organs intact: so if one day people are willing to accept it for what it is, it can be studied.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Cynthia asked. “Get it stuffed and mounted like some grotesque hunting trophy?”
He shook his head. “Taxidermy won’t preserve it well enough. I think it involves cutting out a lot of the animal’s insides to make room for the stuffing.”
“If not taxidermy, then what?”
“Ever hear of Freez-a-Pet?”