My hands were shaking as I lit a smoke, but the simple act that I repeated many times a day did much to anchor me back in reality. Muir bobbed to the surface twice over the next few minutes, just long enough to get a snorkel of air before descending again into the black depths. I tried looking over the side, but the water was too turbid, only allowing me a view of the top three feet or so.
My imagination went into overdrive, providing me with images of ghostly rotting hulks where reality was not all that it seemed, of spectral arms reaching for Muir as he swam through murky water, of a glowing fog that ate all in its path. I almost screamed when Muir bobbed up at the side of the boat without a warning and dragged himself aboard.
When I saw what he had brought up with him, that scream came even closer.
It had been a fish—once upon a time. Or at least I think so—the tail end sported a definite fin, and there was another along the length of its back, although that was more wispy and webbed than any I’d seen before. It was the head end that was going to give me nightmares for many nights to come though. It looked as it if had been melted, then stretched and pulled, teased out into a fringe of almost snake-like appendages, before being hardened back in place. Everywhere you looked there was something not quite right—a piece of eye too near a jagged bony area that might once have been jaw, scales on what had been a tongue, and tiny suckers that looked more octopus than fish that ran along the whole length of the body. The colors were all wrong too—an oily sheen that was almost iridescent, blue and green and yellow all at once, the whole effect being one of an unnatural sickness. At the end of each…tentacle, for want of a better word…a tiny mouth opened and shut, gasping for respite from the air, eager to be sucking water.
“Throw it back, Muir, for pity’s sake, throw it back.”
Far from being repulsed, Muir seemed fascinated.
“She’s still down there, Duncan,” he whispered. “Mostly in one piece too. And there’s fish all over her.”
“That’s a fish?”
“What else could it be?” Muir said, bending over the thing. “It’s what I was talking about earlier—the stretching of reality at a base level—creation at its most primal.”
“It’s an abomination,” I replied.
“No,” Muir said, wrapping the thing up in a wet towel. “It is evidence. And I intend to delve deep into its secrets.”
* * *
We barely spoke on the way back to Trinity. I did most of the steering—he could scarcely take his eyes off the wrapped bundle on the deck at our feet.
He’s out there now, in the shed behind the inn—delving.
I want no part of it. There’s more going on here than I feared, and meddling with it is not going to improve matters. Our course of action cannot lead us anywhere I want to be, but for tonight, I intend to stay far away from that thing in the shed. I shall drink Scotch, smoke cigarettes—and pray to God that I am wrong.
7
Present day
Maggie Brodie was little more than a shadowy figure in her hallway, lost somewhere inside a sheath of glowing fog that enveloped the whole house. I took a step back up the drive, intending to go to her aid, but was stopped by a hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t, lad. Just don’t.”
George had a firm hold of me, and didn’t intend to let go.
Maggie—already noticeably dimmer, and somehow unnaturally thin, screamed, the sound barely reaching us through the wind. I tried to shuck George off me but he belied his age and held on tight, even as Maggie clearly tried to force her way toward us through the increasingly thickening fog.
“Let me go!” I shouted.
“She’s gone, lad,” George shouted in my ear. “Look at it. Just look.”
Maggie had stretched—thin to the point of emaciation, her left arm little more than a wisp of shadow, her head long and oval, like a squashed egg. Her mouth opened, a black hole containing only darkness—and then she was gone, lost inside the shifting glow.
Even then I fought against George’s grip. I’d known Maggie all my life—from church on Sundays as a lad to her damned fine cakes and pastries, from her numerous letters to the town council in her neat, tight hand to her too-careful driving in the town’s streets that infuriated the younger lads in their flash pickups. She couldn’t be gone this easily. She just couldn’t.
“Come back, lad,” George shouted again. “It’s looking to take us too.”
The fog swirled, drifting, against the wind down the driveway toward where we still stood. I finally allowed George to drag me away, back to the road, then right up against the side of the big plow. Jimmy was off beside the smaller vehicle somewhere to our left by the fallen tree, but I couldn’t look in that direction—I only had eyes for the fog, inexorably coming forward, an inch at a time, as if feeling its way by touch.
Despite the wind and the snow, I felt a hot tingle across my face like sunburn that was gone as quickly as it came. The wind dropped suddenly, as if a switch had been pulled, and the fog lifted up and away from us before coming loose and diffused. I blinked, looked again, and saw only the flat gray of low clouds above us.
I turned to check on young Jimmy. He was staring, openmouthed up the driveway. I followed his gaze—it wasn’t just Maggie Brodie that was gone. There had been a solid, two-story house on the spot a minute before, but now there was just an empty lot. Where the building had been was a flat sheet of thick ice, as if a large amount of snow had melted, then frozen immediately.
* * *
Dick Hislett arrived in the hydro truck just as the wind and snow ramped up again. The big man squeezed himself out of the tight fit in the cab and waddled toward us. Swaddled up in a thick parka and weatherproof trousers, he looked like a small bear coming at us through the storm.
His first thought was for the tree.
“You can’t leave that there,” he said, then saw where we were all looking and did the best double take I’ve ever seen outside the movies. “What the hell happened?”
“It’s back, Dick,” George said. That was all he had to say. Dick Hislett’s face went as white as the snow around us.
“Oh, shit. We need to get out of here. We need to evacuate.”
“Tell me about it,” I replied. “How’s the road to the highway?”
Hislett couldn’t take his eyes from the frozen lot that was all that was left of Maggie Brodie’s house, and I had to give him a nudge to get a reply. He turned to me and I saw fear dancing in his eyes.
“Damn near impassable,” he said finally. “We’ll need the big plow.”
“We’ll have to do without,” I said. I turned him round to point him at the rig. “I met the fucker earlier. It was out on the highway—so I’m thinking—where the hell are we going to evacuate to?”
Dick looked from the mangled blade, to me, then back to the blade again.
“We can’t just do nothing,” he started, then stopped, thinking.
“You see the problem?” I replied. “We’re in the middle of a fucking storm, almost everybody is in bed—and if we try to move out, we’re likely to get ourselves—and anyone who comes with us—killed anyway.”
“But we can’t…” Dick said again.
“Yes, we can. We just need to keep an eye out, be ready to move fast and react—it’s not as if that isn’t what we do anyway.”
There was fear in Dick’s eyes again as he looked over to the vacant lot where the Brodie house had been.
“You mean to keep people on the move—out of its reach?”
“It’s the only thing I can think of—until the cavalry get here. But in this weather, I don’t think we should rely on any rescue. We’re on our own.”
* * *
The four of us got into Dick’s pickup for a confab. They all looked at me—it seemed I was the designated boss for the night. I knew I was going to have to get the council involved before I went much further, but for now, these guys needed something immediate, something to stop them from thinking too much
about the Brodie house and what might happen again at any moment.
I kept my gaze on the road ahead as I laid out what was going to have to do as a plan.
“We take a quarter of the town each,” I said. “Keep the main road through open as much as we can, and stay in constant communication. If we see anything—if that fucker comes back—we get the nearest householders out of its reach, and keep moving on.”
“That’s it?” Dick said. “That’s your plan?”
“You got a better one?”
He went quiet, but I saw he wasn’t happy. George and Jimmy seemed to accept my idea though, which was enough to be going on with. I assigned them each a patch of road. I knew full well that in a couple of hours my plan would be overtaken by conditions in any case.
But I had to do something.
“Call in every ten minutes. And we meet at the depot,” I continued. “Every hour, on the hour. Let’s try to keep everybody safe and get through the night.”
Dick grabbed for his radio even before the rest of us left the vehicle. George and Jimmy headed out into the storm but I stayed where I was in the passenger seat. I knew Dick well enough to know that he wouldn’t scratch his ass without permission—he was going to try to get his office to bail him out.
The radio crackled and hummed, but he got no reply from the other end. He tried his cell phone, but the signal out here is ropy at the best of times, and he had no more luck than he’d had with the handset.
“Looks like you’re stuck with us, Dick,” I said. “You take this end, from here to as close to the highway as you can get. That way you’ll be first to see the cavalry if they turn up, and first to make an escape if the weather lifts.”
If he heard any slight to his bravery in my voice, I was long past caring. I left him in the pickup and headed for the big plow.
* * *
I put Dick to the back of my mind—either he did his job, or he didn’t. I couldn’t take the time to worry about him when I had a town to look after.
I’d given myself the peninsula—the oldest part of town nearest the water. I figured the “fog” was most likely to come off the sea—I based that conclusion on a hunch more than anything else, but I was running on nervous energy and intuition anyway, so another guess wasn’t going to matter much.
The road was mostly clear on the way over, Jimmy and George having gone ahead of me, but fresh drifts were already beginning to build mere minutes after their passing.
This is going to be a losing battle.
The big rig rocked and bucked below me as a gust of wind took us side-on and threatened to topple me over into the draining ditch. It took all my strength to hold a straight line. I drove down through town to the bank, parked up and tried to contact a councilman—any councilman.
The only one I could get was Wayne Robertson. He sounded groggy at first, just barely awake, but got his head on fast when I brought him up to speed.
“I’ll head out and rally the troops. We’ll get the Anglican church hall open,” he said. “Bring anybody there that wants to come.”
I felt slightly happier with the situation, knowing that somebody else had taken up some of the heavy lifting. I put the rig in gear and headed out to see what else the night might throw at me.
* * *
The streetlights were still on. That was about the only good thing about my drive along and over the peninsula. It was only a couple of hundred yards, but the wind and the rig both fought me every inch of the way, and my arms ached from having to maintain a rigid grip on the wheel. The warped blade threw nearly as much snow back on the road as it cleared—but at least I was able to make progress, albeit slowly.
The radio crackled as I passed Rick’s Bar, mercifully saving me any lapse into memory and sentimentality. It was Jimmy, checking in.
“Nothing to report down at the theater end, boss. She’s piling up fast though—don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay out in this.”
“Just keep at it, boy,” I replied. “And keep your eyes open for…you know what.”
“Ten four, boss. Heading up to the bank and over to see if George is okay. Speak to you in ten.”
George was very much alive, though not particularly happy. He checked in just after Jimmy signed off.
“I’m just outside the funeral home,” he said. “Damn near got stuck in the Giffords’ driveway, and Woods Lane has an eight-foot drift across the entrance, so there’s nobody going that way for a while. No sign of the fucker though, so that’s something.”
“Yep—that’s something all right. Any word from Dick?”
“Nope. I went down toward the turnoff a couple of minutes ago, but it’s drifting up right bad in the dip at the campsite again—it’ll be impassable in half an hour.”
“Do what you can,” I said, realizing just how futile our puny attempts seemed against the force of nature raging around us. I wondered if the glowing fog had any sense of our presence at all? Did it even register us—or were we no more than snowflakes, dashing ourselves to oblivion against it without even being noticed?
I was woolgathering. George had spoken again, and I’d missed it.
“Say again,” I said.
“Do you want me to try for the gas station? See if Dick’s down that way?”
“No—leave him. He’ll shout loud enough if he sees trouble—at least we can be sure of that.”
The radio fell quiet and I was left alone again in the wind-rocked cab.
I tried Dick on both radio and cell phone, but got only static on the first and no signal on the other.
He’s a big boy—he can take care of himself.
I went up the small hill at the west end of the peninsula doing no more than four miles an hour, almost driven backward by the wind before I pushed the pedal and put the full weight of the rig into it in an attempt to get over the top. Snow spattered the glass in front of me and once again the wheel kicked and bucked, as if trying to throw me out of the cab.
I wrestled control just as we topped the hill and started down—too fast now, sliding and slipping with no traction beneath us. I grounded the blade and put pressure on the brakes at the same time—not too fast, else I’d have toppled right over. Something screeched below me and we slowed—but not enough. The bottom of the hill was coming up fast where the road turned and headed back round the point to town.
I wasn’t going to make it.
The plow headed straight for the ten-foot drop-off into the bay below.
I put caution to the wind and slammed on the brake, hard. The rig turned sideways and slowed down, but not nearly enough to stop the inevitable. I banged the blade hard into the bank at the side of the road and scraped snow in a long furrow, slowing us even further. The blade dug in, turning and pulling the plow around so that we were now going almost backward.
We were still heading for the drop, which was coming up fast.
I’m not going to be able to stop her. We’re going over.
I kicked open the door and threw myself out into the storm, rolling and tumbling in fresh snow as the rig fell away and disappeared from my view.
8
From the journal of Duncan Campbell, 17th July 1955
I woke at six a.m. with an epic hangover and a thumping that wasn’t all in my head. Muir stood outside my bedroom door, hammering loud enough to wake everyone at the inn.
“Get some clothes on and get out here, Duncan. Quickly, I need a witness.”
By the time I got partly dressed he was already bouncing up and down with excitement at the top of the stairs. His hair was tousled, as if static electricity had run through him, and his eyes were wide with excitement as he tugged at my arm, almost dragging me along the corridor.
“Where’s the fire?” I asked.
He kept tugging.
“Hurry, man. It’s going fast, and I need someone else to see it.”
My heart sank as he led me down through the inn and into the old shed in the small garden at the back. He had a shelf under
the main window set up as a makeshift laboratory. His traveling case lay open at one side—small microscope, slides and a selection of scalpels, scissors and tweezers. The “fish” from the day before lay sliced open on a slab of slate. I didn’t want to take a closer look, and I tried for flippancy in the hope that Muir might let me go.
“It’s a fish,” I said. “I’ve seen one before.”
Muir pulled me closer to the shelf.
“Look at it, Duncan. Just look.”
Every fiber of my being wanted to turn away, but I forced myself to step closer, enough that I could look down at the thing.
It wasn’t quite dead, despite having been splayed open from chin to tail fin. The fringe of tentacles wafted slowly above the slate, as if tasting the air.
“I know it’s only a fish,” I said, half turning back to Muir. “But you could have had the decency to kill it first.”
Muir pushed me over until I was inches away from the thing.
“Do you think I did not try? The guts, Duncan. Look at the guts.”
I looked for the guts, but saw nothing resembling a digestive system. There was a mass of amorphous tissue, blue and green and silver all at once, writhing and squirming—almost worm-like. A cloud drifted off, allowing a shaft of direct sunlight to come in through the window—and that’s when I saw it. An aurora of dancing color—like a rainbow of vaporizing oils—hung over the dissected thing, drifting slowly in a slight breeze.
I backed away fast and covered my mouth.
Muir stood at the door, smiling.
The Dunfield Terror Page 6