The Dunfield Terror

by William Meikle

  “There’s no bodies if that’s what you mean,” Muir said, as if guessing my thoughts. “There are a lot of those deformed fish—and more of the wee crabby octopus things feeding on them—but everything seems to stay close to the wreck, as if there is indeed some kind of boundary field that they have to remain inside to be viable life forms.”

  He looked up with a thin smile on his face.

  “That is only a theory, of course—but one which we may now have the ability to test.”

  My mind was full of random images—red wet suckers, clacking claws and slithering tentacles, but most of all the dry gray ash and dust that swirled and danced behind the glass in Muir’s forearm. I had a bad feeling in my gut. I was nowhere near as confident of a positive outcome as Muir seemed to be.

  The pod of porpoises were still far offshore to starboard as we neared the entrance to Trinity harbor, tracking north and east at the same speed as us. They kept their distance, and when we turned to port to enter the sheltered waters around town, the porpoises turned east, heading out to sea. It might only have been my imagination, but they seemed somewhat sluggish, somehow lacking in the exuberance and joy they normally displayed.

  My mood was somber as we tied up at the short wooden dock below the old church. I had expected Muir to insist we lug the retrieved kit back to the inn, but he showed no signs of asking me. Instead he fetched a canvas sheet from the hold and covered up what we’d brought up from the wreck.

  “We’ll leave this here. I don’t think the locals are too keen on me at the moment,” Muir said.

  “That’s an understatement,” I replied, and got a rare smile.

  “Perhaps it’s best if we do this away from prying eyes?” he continued. “There’s a few bits and bobs I’ll need—that shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll meet you back in the inn for a spot of lunch, then we can get to it this afternoon?”

  He must have seen my hesitation.

  “Please, Duncan,” he said, and the tremor was back in his voice. “I have no one else to turn to—and I fear my time is short.”

  He showed me his arm again—the ash-like material inside seethed and roiled against the glass. It looked thinner now.

  It looked like fog.

  * * *

  I resisted the temptation to accompany my lunch of bread, ham and cheese with a decent snifter of rum, but I did allow myself a cold beer, the taste of which did much to ameliorate my growing gloom.

  The innkeeper asked if we’d had a good trip. I could not tell him the true purpose of it, and I could not bring myself to lie to him. He had shown me not just hospitality, but also a degree of friendship that had done much to ensure my memories of this stay would not all consist of strangeness and bad science. I grunted something that I hoped sounded positive, and that seemed to satisfy him.

  Muir joined me several minutes later, and our host pointedly stayed away from the table after taking his order. If Muir felt slighted, he showed no sign of it. He had regained a modicum of his old swagger.

  “I’ve got everything we’ll need,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, then we kept the conversation light and inconsequential through the rest of our admittedly excellent luncheon.

  It was only when we were left alone in the small dining room that Muir started to speak about his plans for the rest of the day, but once again they were wreathed in so much science and esoteric theories that I had great difficulty following his train of thought. I will not even attempt to transcribe it here—he was thinking and speaking at the same time, sparking off new ideas and discarding them almost as quickly as they came. I do believe that if we’d had a blackboard available, he would have been scribbling notes and formulae, only to wipe them off and start again every few minutes. It was all rather exhilarating in a way—until he pushed back his shirt from his forearm, and I got another look at what was happening to him.

  The glass had turned opaque, obscuring the view of the internal structure of the arm—but the melted and fused area seemed to be spreading. It covered most of the lower arm, as far up as I could see—for all I knew his whole arm was now in the same condition. That wasn’t the worst thing though—when I looked down, I saw his shirt move at the belly, as if something was squirming underneath—the suckers were hungry again.

  * * *

  By all rights I should have trusted my instincts and fled right there and then—but Muir needed me—and he also needed someone to temper his excesses should he come to be on the verge of doing something even more monumentally stupid. After we both had another smoke, I followed him outside and down to the small jetty.

  There was more stuff littering the deck of our boat now—tent poles, rigging, a toolbox and more crystal valves. I did not ask where he had procured the items in such a small town—I was past the need for explanations and just wanted to get the day over with so that I could return to the comfort of my room and lose myself in liquor.

  “Well we can’t do anything here in plain sight of town,” Muir said. “And I’m not ready yet to go back to the wreck. What say you to mooring off Indian Head Rock? He can watch over us and keep us on the straight and narrow.”

  I could have made a quip about us needing all the help we could get, but held my tongue. I’d decided on my role for the rest of the day—I was going to watch Muir and make sure he didn’t get anybody—including me—killed. That, and giving my attention to piloting the boat, was just about all the thinking I intended to do.

  Muir busied himself in continuing to clean up the mess we had brought up from the wreck. I had my back to him for a good while as I concentrated firstly on getting the creel boat out of the harbor, then steering it across a rather stiff tide to moor off the tall Indian Head Rock. A bald eagle—possibly even the same one I’d spotted on a previous trip—sat on top of it, eyeing us warily.

  I turned back to see that Muir had erected a makeshift rain cover tent across the rear deck, and had one of his contraptions assembled underneath it. The coils and wire looked rusty, and green with algae in many places, with shiny new crystal valves only making the other parts look less than capable of the job they were going to be asked to perform.

  “Almost ready,” Muir said. “Cut the engine, there’s a good chap. I’m going to need the battery.”

  I was starting to see a possible flaw in Muir’s planning, but I did as he asked. I cut the engine and between us we managed to wriggle and squirm in the tight hold to get a cable attached to the battery terminals, which was then to be connected to Muir’s contraption.

  “Are you ready?” Muir asked.

  I was about as far from ready as a man could be, but I gritted my teeth, nodded, and Muir connected the cable from the battery to a terminal on his machine.

  A hum started up immediately—and the bald eagle had already seen enough. It took off from the top of the rock, leaving a squirt of guano for us to show its disdain. The hum got louder—the air tingled, like frost on the face on winter mornings, and I felt light, as if a stiff breeze might lift me up and carry me away.

  “It’s working,” Muir shouted, but he sounded faint and distant although he stood only three feet away. A sudden swell lifted the boat and plunged us, headlong toward Indian Head Rock—and, of course, we had no engine power available to do anything about it. I braced myself for impact as we looked to be smashed against the stone—I even put out a hand in the vain hope I might steady myself. Impact was imminent.

  My hand met only cold air. There was a sudden feeling of heaviness—extreme weight as if stone had been laid on my chest and was pressing me inside it, like meat in a rock sandwich. For several seconds I struggled for breath, but it lifted as quickly as it had come, and the light, tingling feeling returned.

  We had open water around us—and Indian Head Rock was at our backs.

  The only way that was possible—an almost impossible thought in itself—was if we had just passed right through the bally thing.

  Muir was beaming from ear to ear.

  “It works,” he s
houted. “It bloody well works.”

  * * *

  The remainder of the afternoon was taken up with a series of experiments in the waters around Indian Head Rock. The most disconcerting of them involved us taking the boat as close to the rock as we could manage, and Muir seemingly pushing his hand—and eventually his whole body—into the stone as if it were no more than some kind of projected image he could walk through.

  When I asked for an explanation, his reply left me none the wiser, full as it was of talk of harmonics and magnetic resonance, words that meant little to me.

  All I know is that Muir now believes we have a chance to both reverse the changes that are happening in his body and to put a stop to any lingering aftereffects of last year’s experiment on the wrecked navy boat beneath the waters of Dunfield Bay.

  I do hope he is right, for as we were heading back to Trinity, Muir bent over his mechanism to fiddle with a valve and I caught a glimpse of the side of his neck. Three red gouges in his skin opened and closed in time with his breathing.

  If I did not know any better, I’d have said they were gill slits.

  15

  Present day

  The fact that dawn was coming did not improve my situation any—in fact, it made things worse, for at least I could see the glowing fog coming in the dark. Now it would just be a slightly grayer patch amid a white hell of snow, wind and more snow. The storm wasn’t showing any signs of abating—if anything, the snow was still getting heavier, and much of the stuff that had already fallen was getting blown around in the wind in a blinding whiteout blizzard.

  I stood outside the Malloy house for several seconds, trying to decide on a course of action, and coming up with nothing. I felt powerless in the face of the thing that had gripped the town. I needed something to fight, something tangible, something real, and I was starting to fear for my sanity.

  I got on the Skidoo, intending to complete my circuit of the town, but I couldn’t get any farther along the peninsula—the wind was just too strong, and even with the goggles on I couldn’t see beyond the front of the sled. I gave in to the inevitable and turned around, almost getting tumbled over in the process as a gust hit me sideward and reminded me just how tired I was getting as I struggled to keep the sled upright. Finally I had her pointing in the right direction and kicked her into gear, half driving, half getting blown back down the slope to the oldest part of town.

  I meant to head back to the depot, but as I was passing the Village Inn, something seemed to shift off to my left, behind the inn itself, a darker shadow in the swirling white. I pulled the Skidoo over against the north wall where I could be sheltered slightly from the main blow of the wind, and peered into the garden area.

  There was definitely something in there, although I couldn’t make out any detail at this distance. Blue light flashed twice.

  An electrical short?

  If a line was down, I had to go and check—Dick from the hydro board wasn’t going to be along to fix it. I switched off the Skidoo, made sure I was still wrapped up well against the elements, put my shoulder to the wind and headed into the Village Inn’s back garden.

  There were more blue flashes as I got to the corner of the house—to get any closer would mean exposing myself to the full brunt of the wind, and I wasn’t about to do that unless absolutely necessary. I took a step forward.

  My flesh tingled, felt almost warm.

  It’s the fog.

  The wind dropped completely, and suddenly I was too hot, standing in a green garden under a blue sky with sunlight blazing. Another blue bolt, like a camera’s flash, hit me. It came from a ramshackle shed in the center of the garden, one that seemed to be bathed in a dancing rainbow shimmer of color. Before I even had time to wonder if I had indeed lost my sanity, there was another flash. Cold wind hit me, snow spattering against my goggles. I stumbled, almost fell, and stepped back into the shelter of the old inn’s north wall.

  I stood there, leaning on the side of the house, breathing heavily, and waiting to see what happened next.

  Nothing did, apart from more snow and more wind.

  That was it for me—I’d had as much high strangeness as one man could take. I got back on the Skidoo, kicked her into life, and headed for the depot as fast as I could. I almost didn’t make it up the incline to the main road, having to go full throttle to get over a huge drift, and I had a bad moment when the wind almost caught me again—but two minutes later I walked into the main room. Pat and George turned from where they sat around the stove, eyes wide as if they’d seen a ghost.

  * * *

  “We thought we’d lost you, boy,” George said as I went to sit near the stove. “You’ve been gone for hours.”

  I brought them up to speed on what I’d seen on my trip around town. They went quiet when I told them about the theater, and even quieter when I detailed the last minutes of Mrs. Malloy’s life. She’d been well-liked, especially among the older generation, and her passing was going to leave a big hole in the life of the town—if there was to be any life left in it after this storm.

  I debated whether to tell them about the Village Inn garden—in a night of weirdness, it had been perhaps the weirdest thing of all, and I still wasn’t too sure that I hadn’t imagined it all due to stress. Pat looked about to speak, but just then the radio beeped for an incoming call. George took it—I was too tired to do much beyond sit still and soak up heat.

  George nodded his head a lot and looked solemn as he answered the call.

  “We’ll be waiting, I hope,” he said. “Over.” He turned away from the radio, and kept us in suspense by lighting a smoke before telling us. “That was the government boys we’ve been expecting. They’re at Irving Station—they say half an hour—I said two. Somewhere in between is probably a good enough guess. Chin up, Frank—we’ll get through this.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about,” I replied.

  Pat passed me a smoke.

  “There’s little more you can do, lad,” he said. “You’ve done more than anyone would have asked of you on a night like this. Besides—I’ve got a story you might need to hear—if you’ve got that itch out of your hind end and can sit still for its telling?”

  I took the smoke and sucked gratefully.

  “I’m going nowhere until the cavalry gets here,” I replied. “Just let George fetch us some coffee and the floor is yours.”

  We finished the smokes while George fetched the coffee. With the wind still raging outside, Pat took us back to a summer’s night, some years before I was born.

  16

  1969

  “It weren’t long after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon,” Pat started. “And I’ll tell you how I was reminded of that later—but best if I start at the beginning. It’ll make more sense that way.

  “I wasn’t in town for the kerfuffle in the fifties—I was away in the navy, seeing the world and having a rare old time. But by the late sixties I’d got all that out of my system and had settled down in a house along the shore—just past the Malloy place. It was a lovely spot in the summer, but a bitch to heat in the winter.

  “Anyway, to cut to the chase, I did most of my drinking in the Village Inn—it wasn’t exactly Bali or Cairo, but any port in a storm as they say. That July night we had a few tourists sitting in a corner, but it was mainly local lads at the bar. George’s dad was sitting next to me, and your grandfather, Frank, was farther along the bar. Alan, the innkeeper, was there too. He was the only one who’d seen what happened in the fifties, but he’d told the story often enough that when young Eddie Todd came running in saying there was a weird color in the garden—well, we all had to go out and see what was what.

  “I’d heard Alan’s story many times—we all had—but I thought he’d added a few touches over the years to make it a better tale—that was something an old sailor knew plenty about, for I’ve done the same myself. But as it turned out, he had never done justice to the color at all—I certainly didn’t expect it to be so beautifu
l.

  “I’ve seen the aurora borealis, several times. This was like seeing it right up close—as if it were dancing, just for me, some three feet above my head. My skin was all a tingle, and the air blazed in blues and greens and gold, swathes of it, like surging waves after a storm. There was music to it too, a vibration that thrummed in my gut like a tight guitar string being continually plucked.

  “The colors themselves seemed to be rising from the big bare patch in the lawn—ash and dust where the shed had been back in the day—the spot where Alan said nothing ever grew. A fine mist—not quite fog, not quite smoke, but something in between, rose up from the ground like a fountain, opening out into the spray of dancing light and music above us.

  “I could have stood there watching it all night—I might well have. But the aurora hadn’t been the only thing that young Eddie Todd noticed. He tugged hard at my arm, trying to get me to look at something besides the dancing lights.

  “‘It went under the porch,’ he said. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was scared—scared and excited at the same time, almost fit to burst with it all. I managed to tear my gaze from the lights above me and turned my attention downward.

  “‘What did, boy?’

  “‘A dog—I think,’ Eddie replied. ‘But not exactly, if you catch my drift.’

  “I didn’t, but I bent to look anyway. As I hunkered down to ground level, something shifted in the crawl space under my foot, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea. I was thinking coyote—hungry and rabid and as likely to tear my face off as to lick my hand.

  “I heard a noise, a loud snap—it was a sound I thought I recognized. At the same moment, there was another shifting below us, the whole porch moving slightly underfoot.