Something Fishy

by Derek Hansen

  ‘I’m not sure if you realise it, but it took a lot of courage for Ian to stand up in front of all those people this morning,’ said Peter, getting straight to the point. ‘He’s not the sort to draw attention to himself.’

  ‘And you think I treated him harshly?’

  ‘I think that’s a matter of record,’ said Peter wryly.

  ‘Have you any idea how many people come up to me claiming to have seen everything from yowies to pixies, from winged dragons to spiders the size of Volkswagens?’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Peter.

  ‘And you’re going to tell me your friend is different?’

  ‘Put it this way, I’ve been known to have a go at Ian for his lack of imagination.’ Once again a wry smile flickered across Peter’s face. He leaned back so the waitress could place a cup of coffee in front of him. ‘How’s your coffee? Need refreshing?’

  De Benke nodded and handed his empty cup to the waitress. He never said no to a free coffee. In fact, nobody could remember him saying no to anything that was free.

  ‘Ian’s been looking forward to your visit for weeks, you know. He was hoping you’d be able to explain what he saw.’

  ‘The sea serpent or the ghost ship?’

  ‘The ghost ship was very likely a mirage, albeit a pretty convincing one. His wife and grandkids saw it, too. I spoke to each of them and their stories were fairly consistent. They saw a boat with a high stern. The kids thought they were looking at a large junk. Ian thought it looked more like an old Spanish galleon. Both have high, heavy sterns. They had a camera with them but didn’t think to take a photo. They were coming down the hill to Emily Bay and figured they’d drive over to Kingston pier after their swim to check the boat out. They were sure they’d find it moored there in the lee. When they found nothing at Kingston, they drove up to the top of Headstone, automatically assuming it would have taken refuge there. But it wasn’t there, either. They couldn’t find a trace of the boat whichever way they looked. Nor could they find anyone else who’d seen it. That’s when Ian realised they’d seen a ghost ship. Thing is, we’re talking about a man who spends his life scanning the sea. If he says he saw something, I’m inclined to believe him. He rues the fact that he didn’t take a photo but I’m not sure that would have helped. Mirages don’t photograph, do they?’ Peter paused as the waitress placed de Benke’s second coffee on the table. ‘No, it’s the serpent Ian wants to talk to you about. Will you talk to him?’

  ‘Give me one good reason why I should.’

  ‘I’ve read your books. Ian put me onto them, in fact. We both feel that you set out in good faith to find the creatures you wrote about. I suspect you’d rather have discovered one of these beasts than proved they don’t exist.’

  ‘Of course. What do you think is the more valuable: a good, clear photo of the Loch Ness Monster or no photo of the Loch Ness Monster? True fame awaits the man who finds and can prove the existence of any of these creatures.’

  ‘Perhaps Ian is offering you a chance at true fame.’

  ‘They all do, my friend,’ said de Benke bitterly.‘Believe me, I know from experience. They’re all plausible at the beginning. Tell me, in your heart of hearts, do you think your friend actually saw a sea serpent?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure.’

  ‘Pretty sure?’

  ‘Very sure.’

  ‘Where does he claim to have seen the creature?’

  ‘On the drop-off, on the western edge of the Norfolk Rise.’

  ‘How close was he?’

  ‘Close enough for a good observation. Fifty metres, maybe less.’

  ‘That’s close enough to see that it wasn’t a parade of porpoises but not close enough to be sure that it wasn’t the trailing arm of a giant squid.’

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t a giant squid,’ said Peter.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Ian wasn’t the only one out at the drop-off that day. Howard Christian had his boat out there as well and he was a lot closer to the sea serpent than Ian. Howard actually managed to touch the serpent and he’s positive it had scales.’

  De Benke drove back to his villa, poured himself a beer and sat brooding on his balcony overlooking the beach at Bumboras. Norfolk Island’s economy depended on tourism and the writers’ festival was a promotion designed to attract visitors to the island in the off-season. The organisers had done the right thing by him by putting him up at Shearwater, which many regarded as the finest accommodation on the island. But de Benke was as blind to their consideration as he was to the fact that only one of the remaining four villas was occupied. He was indulging in what had become his favourite pastime — self-pity. He knew that if things had turned out differently he could have been lording it in New York’s finest hotel and being paid handsomely to speak to thousands at the Museum of Natural History, instead of performing for accommodation, coffees and a few hundred book sales at Rawson Hall.

  Could he bear to allow himself to dream once more? To be deceived once more? The disappointments had been so many. He’d lost count of the times he had held fame and glory within his grasp, only to be denied by cruel circumstance and deceit.

  Early on in his career he had taken what he believed was the only genuine photograph of the yeti in existence, a fact he’d deliberately omitted from his debunking book, In the Footsteps of the Yeti. His Sherpa guides had been true to their word and had deserved their exorbitant fee. They’d kept their side of the deal and taken him to a sheer-walled secret valley they called the cradle of Qomolangma, where they insisted the ‘yeh-teh’ lived. They’d told him that getting there would be a difficult climb but he had failed to grasp just how difficult it would prove to be. He’d been on the point of collapse when they’d reached the edge of the valley where his guides had constructed an ice cave with a narrow slit carved into the opening for observation. Sitting over six thousand metres high and set on a ridge where the northerly wind funnelled between two peaks at express-train speed, the ice cave was by far the coldest place on earth that de Benke had ever had the misfortune to experience. The Sherpas had warned him about that too, but again he’d failed to grasp how desperately cold it would be. The chill factor defied measurement and exposed skin was instantly snap-frozen.

  They’d warned him that the cradle of Qomolangma was almost always obscured by cloud whipping across the top of it, but he’d also failed to appreciate how utterly impenetrable the shroud of cloud would be. He was dozing, driven to it by the cold and his exhaustion, when his shoulder was shaken roughly and he heard the excited whispers of the Sherpas. Not only had the clouds lifted, they could see something.

  Why were they whispering, he wondered. Even if they’d shouted their voices would not be heard on the valley floor almost four hundred metres below, not in the face of the ceaseless gale. He stumbled to the observation slot, pressed his binoculars hard against his goggles and gasped. There, unmistakeable against the unblemished white backdrop, was a dark shape that could only be a yeti. Even though scale was hard to estimate at that distance, particularly as there was nothing to judge size against, de Benke knew he was looking at a hominid, at least two point three metres tall, its body covered in a thick dark coat of fur or hair and its feet bare. It was walking across the narrow valley and slightly away from him but he could still assess its build: the legs too long to fit any known species of ape, the body — though heavyset — too slight, and the head lacking the protruding eyebrows and heavy jaw associated with apes.

  ‘My God!’ he said, barely audibly. He understood now why the Sherpas had whispered. The sight of the yeti invoked awe. His mind yielded to its scientific bent as it tried to classify what his eyes beheld. Gigantopithecus, yes! The prehistoric upright ape that had supposedly died out three hundred thousand years earlier, and survived only in rumour and legends of bigfoot, sasquatch, wendigo, yowie, wose, chuchunaa, xueren and other apemen wherever wilderness was still to be found. It was only as the clouds began to tumble back down across the valley,
propelled by the relentless wind, that his mind snapped into commercial mode and he remembered THE WHOLE REASON WHY HE WAS THERE!

  He screamed for his camera box, fumbled as his gloved hands tried and failed to attach his longest lens onto his Nikon, and almost wept with frustration. But the lens finally seated and with a quick twist he was ready for a shot at immortality. His goggles made sighting through the viewfinder and focusing all but impossible. He set the lens on infinity, the exposure on automatic and did his best to point the camera at the retreating yeti. He clicked. Clicked again and again. Clicked even as the swirling clouds closed in and the valley was once more lost from sight. Frustration made him rash. But he was certain of what he’d seen and the fame and glory that beckoned was worth any price.

  ‘I’ll double your fee, triple it!’ he’d cried to the Sherpas. ‘Just get me down there into the valley. Christ! Just name your price!’

  The Sherpas shook their heads sadly.

  ‘There is no way into the valley,’ said the head guide. ‘We have looked. Our fathers have looked. Our fathers’ fathers have looked and their fathers before them.’

  ‘Rock climbers,’ said de Benke.‘Rock climbers!’

  ‘The wind would sweep them off the walls to their death.’

  ‘Helicopters!’ But even as he uttered the word de Benke knew that no helicopter in existence could survive the winds and the narrowness of the cleft. Neither would parachutes. And even if someone managed to parachute in, how would they get out?

  ‘There must be some way,’ he said pleadingly.

  ‘Why?’ said the head guide.‘Why must there be a way?’

  De Benke had pinned all his hopes on his photographs. Maybe he’d pointed the camera in precisely the right direction at precisely the right time. Maybe the yeti had turned just as he’d clicked, showing convincing details of head and jaw and skin covering. Maybe. Such things happened. People got lucky. Fame, glory and the respect of his peers were just one very happy snap away.

  But he hadn’t got lucky. Only one shot had captured the yeti at all and the image was blurred and inconclusive. Obviously the camera had slipped slightly as he’d struggled to take the shots, and the slip had been magnified by the telephoto lens. De Benke had to concede that if he’d wanted to fake a shot of a yeti, the photo in his hand was precisely the sort of result he’d have come up with.

  He returned twice more to the cradle of Qomolangma, braved the cold, wind and exhaustion, but only once, for a period no longer than two minutes, did the clouds clear. The yeti was nowhere to be seen. De Benke wasted thousands of his own and his backers’ dollars on wild-goose chases, prey to every Nepalese shyster looking for a quick buck. He lost the respect of the original guides and everyone else who tried to help him. He risked his life pointlessly on needless ventures, but in doing so also carved out his future career. He was smart enough to realise that one fuzzy photo backed by an unsubstantiated sighting would relegate him to the ranks of over-zealous, crackpot cryptozoologists. His only future lay in playing to the sceptics and debunking everything for which he failed to find indisputable proof of existence. That was what he did in his first book. In the Footsteps of the Yeti became an international best-seller.

  His debunking brought him fame of a kind and sales of his books provided a comfortable living. But it was neither the fame he craved nor the riches. He still clung to the hope that he would one day find gigantopithecus. His hopes took him to Siberia, Mongolia, China, Pakistan and Iran, lured by promises that went unfulfilled. One day he received a letter from North Dakota via his publishers. A schoolteacher claimed to have seen a bigfoot and had managed to take a photograph. The photo was enclosed. De Benke’s hands began shaking and he was powerless to stop them. Clearly the subject had been shot on telephoto. The picture was grainy from enlargement. It was useless as scientific evidence but that didn’t matter. What was obvious — screamingly obvious — was that the bigfoot in the photo was to all intents and purposes the spitting image of the yeti he’d photographed in the cradle of Qomolangma.

  People say Mondays are long but that Thursdays last for ever. In the vast underpopulated expanses of North Dakota, every day is like Thursday, and North Dakota Thursdays last longer than any others. It took de Benke five hours to fly to New York from London, then a day and half to make his way to Dickenson, North Dakota, on the fringe of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. He then had to endure a four-hour drive in a Chevrolet truck along trails that threatened to jar loose the crowns on his teeth. His hosts were friendly, generous and clearly excited. Despite his tiredness and the fact that they were carrying more beer than food, he couldn’t help but be caught up by their optimism and enthusiasm. He let himself believe that this time he’d find the evidence he needed.

  His new comrades had built a hide where they could sit and watch for the bigfoot, and carried enough supplies to last a week. They’d brought walkie-talkies fitted with earphones so they could talk without betraying their presence in case they needed to split up, and enough arms to start a small war. They assured him the weapons were not to shoot any bigfoot but to scare away bears and mountain lions. They were well prepared, whatever happened.

  It was on the fourth day during the early morning watch that they sighted their quarry. De Benke jammed his binoculars hard against his eyes. The bigfoot was at least one and a half kilometres away and in the shadow of woods, but the clear North Dakota air worked in de Benke’s favour. What he saw took his breath away.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ he said, scarcely able to believe his eyes. The bigfoot had breasts! It was female. Female! Yet the photo he’d been sent was definitely of a male. The magnitude of his discovery was almost too much to take in. He hadn’t just found gigantopithecus, he’d found a thriving colony!

  ‘We have to get closer,’ he said, trying hard to suppress his excitement. ‘I want pictures that are beyond question. Pictures of at least two of them. And pictures of whatever it is they call home. I also need some hard evidence. Okay?’

  De Benke believed he was on the threshold of scientific acclaim and popular glory. He was oblivious to the flinty stones that gouged his hands and knees as they crept cautiously and silently towards the spot where they’d sighted the female. He made certain that they stayed downwind and did nothing that might give the show away. Yet when they reached the spot of the sighting, there wasn’t a trace of the bigfoot to be found.

  De Benke wasn’t overly concerned. It had taken them more than two cautious hours to cover the one and a half kilometres, and it was reasonable to assume that the bigfoot had continued about her business. It seemed unlikely that she’d have gone very far.

  They split up into two groups to try to track her down so that she could lead them to her family or colony. They kept in touch by walkie-talkie. De Benke was a practised tracker and he knew how to move silently through bush. He expected to catch sight of the bigfoot at any moment or hear through his earphones that the others had sighted her. But they never saw her again that day.

  Or the next.

  Or the next.

  De Benke couldn’t understand it. They found no footprints, no trails, no evidence of occupation, not even any ape or human-like scat. They found nothing. The following day, an excited voice in his earphones announced that one of his comrades had found tufts of hair snagged on a bush.

  De Benke groaned inwardly. His spirits plummeted. It was the last thing he wanted to hear. In Guatemala, after weeks of fruitless hunting, the positive proof he’d been given of the chupacabras — a spiny-backed, kangaroo-shaped creature that lived on the blood of goats — had been tufts of the creature’s hair snagged on a tree. The hair had proved to be horsehair. The cured scalp of the yeti he’d tracked down to a monastery in Tibet turned out to be from a yak. The piece of skin that was supposed to have come from the Mokele-mbembe turned out to have been cut from the decaying corpse of a hippopotamus. Such were the instruments of deception.

  When de Benke was handed the tuft of bigfoot hair, he pu
lled a couple of strands off it and held a match to them. The tufts shrivelled instantly. They weren’t even from a bear or mountain lion, or in fact any living animal. They were synthetic. From a rental fancy-dress suit. His so-called comrades weren’t even embarrassed. They laughed hysterically, delighted that they’d carried off their hoax for as long as they had.

  On the plane back to London de Benke thought of the similarity between the female bigfoot he’d sighted, the bigfoot in the photo he’d been sent and his only genuine shot of the yeti in existence. The first thing he did when he arrived home was burn his photo of the yeti. It was little consolation that his book Bigfoot, Big Lie was also a best-seller.

  The breeze swung to the south and freshened, awakening de Benke from his reverie. His eyes lifted across the white-topped waves to the ruins of the penal settlement at Kingston. It looked so innocent now, charming even, as though to make a lie of its horrific history. It sat there as a warning not to take things at face value. But that was exactly what de Benke was being asked to do. He was acutely aware that time was no longer on his side. He’d passed the age at which normal people retire. His host, Peter, appeared genuine enough and there was no doubting Ian Kenny’s earnestness. Or was there? He’d been deceived so many times before. Was he being set up for another fall, on this island which had once been the epitome of man’s inhumanity to man?

  De Benke attended a reception at Government House that evening. Peter Clarke approached him just as the first guests were leaving.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Ian Kenny,’ said Peter.‘He’s invited us both over to his house for a beer tomorrow at four. You’re under no obligation and Ian won’t be offended if you have other commitments. If you decide to accept, let me know and I’ll pick you up at three-forty. If nothing else, you might be interested in seeing some of Ian’s knick-knacks. Up to you.’