by P. W. Child
“What is it?” Dugal asked, searching where they were pointing, but he saw nothing.
“Jeeesusss,” one of the fishermen screamed with eyes wide and a mouth that folded downward in disbelief. “It’s bigger than Nessie!”
“Aye!” said another. “I reckon it is the very thing! This is what they have been seeing all along!”
“For Christ’s sake,” Dugal ranted, “what is it that you all see?”
He was desperate to see what manner of sea creature could have seasoned salty dogs in such a frenzy. They were downright hysterical. Under the onslaught of the tide, the wet, shouting men pointed to exactly the same spot, but a few yards farther on than last time.
“It’s probably a whale, dammit!” Dugal said annoyingly, and gestured his dismissal with a wave of his hand. One last time he looked back nonetheless.
This time the captain discerned a slight elevation under the surface of the water, prompting his heart to jolt. His cigarette dropped limply from his mouth and disappeared in the shallow wash that came over the deck.
“Holy mother . . . ” he muttered at the vision before him. “That is not a whale.”
He raced to the cockpit while the crew tried in vain to get a good shot of the creature that remained, almost intelligently, just beneath the furious waves to keep itself hidden.
“HM Coastguard! This is the Talisman, come in!” Dugal shouted into the communication device that he gripped with shaking hands.
“Talisman, this is HM Coastguard, over,” the scratchy reply came from the speaker. Dugal was relieved to hear a response so swiftly. He explained briefly that there was a sighting of a grossly unusual nature in the strait past Ganavan, where his trawlers sailed.
“56.424906, -5.488932, logged at 6:48am,” he urged his information and location.
“Sending a unit out to you, Talisman,” the Coastguard informed the captain.
“Thank you! Thank you! I believe we have stumbled across the very thing people have been reporting at Loch Ness for decades!” he added inadvertently. Met by momentary silence on the radio, he winced at his blurt.
“Right . . . .Talisman, we will investigate the matter. Sending out a boat to you, Dugal,” the mature feminine voice crackled, somewhat less professionally this time. The only things that convinced the operator that it was a legitimate Mayday distress call was the fact that another yacht nearby had logged a report not ten minutes earlier. The yacht had reported a large gray smooth object on its sonar and radar screens, traveling slowly along the current below them at an estimated depth of fifty meters.
Dugal shook his head. He knew how that must have sounded to any rational mind, but he could not refute what his own eyes had seen. It was most certainly not a vessel, because it bent as it maneuvered through the water. Other than that it resembled a human shape, with an unknown amount of appendages sprouting from it.
“Captain!” the mechanic summoned him from the doorway through the hissing din of the maniacal waves. “We will have to send out a Mayday. That thing just trashed the Heather!”
A bolt of panic ripped through Dugal’s body at the mention of his other trawler. He raced out to deck just in time to watch his other vessel sink beneath the waves as the screams of the Heather’s crew became gradually muted under the vile groan of bending steel and exploding engines that roared one last time in the deafening roar of the wild ocean.
Without a word, nor a breath to exhale, the crew of the Talisman stood in silent shock and reverence for their fallen colleagues as the water engulfed the last yardarm. They did not want to look at their captain, and so they all just waited for the first brave soul to speak. Dugal felt his throat close up. The sorrow of his loss did not lie with his trawler, but with his men. He knew them all; knew their wives and children, their families, and their toils. Good, hard-working men were now at the bottom of the ocean because of his business, so Dugal saw the matter. He could not help but weep bitterly, uncaring of those who heard and saw, because he knew they were as distraught as he. On the Heather they had lifelong friends. On the Heather they had brothers.
“I’ll call it in,” Dugal forced calmly, his voice fraught with despair. He went to the controls to radio in the incident, while the crew stayed behind, dumbfounded, their eyes scanning the surface of the raging waters for any signs of life. But there was nothing left of the Heather, as if she never existed, her crew silent and absent from the world.
Chapter 31
“Peter, before you go, there’s more,” Maureen called out to Peter Wells, a rescue officer with the Coastguard Rescue Service team. Maureen was a fifty-eight-year-old veteran of the rescue service and lifelong operator. The plump redhead grandmother of two knew what a prank sounded like, and what she had heard, twice, from Captain Dugal McAdams, was genuine.
“Hurry, we have to go, Mau,” he told her, as he zipped up his life jacket.
“Dugal McAdams just reported that the Heather went under!” she gasped, her eyes stretched in disbelief at the horrid news. They both knew the men who worked for McAdams on the Heather and for a moment Peter was stunned. Maureen’s eyes were wet and red before she even ended communication with Dugal.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
She hesitated at first, but then she stammered, “The supposed creature they reported is to blame, so Dugal said.”
“What manner of creature could sink that entire trawler within less than five minutes?” Peter shrieked, his hand firmly on his head at the ludicrous claim. Not even a whale could do that, not all at once!”
“Aye, I know,” she sighed through her handkerchief on her mouth. She shook her head hopelessly and her eyes sought the floor.
“Well, if there is any such farfetched shite going on I want to see it for m’self,” Peter announced, and with a soft hand on her arm as a parting gift, he flew out the door and down the stairs to the dock area. Maureen went to the large clear window that framed the ocean outside like an animated painting. She looked across the gray foaming waves, wondering about the creature Dugal rambled about. Then Maureen started crying uncontrollably.
~~~~~
The ice cold saline spray stung Peter’s face as he and three colleagues sped toward where the fishing trawlers had sighted the anomaly that caused the Heather’s demise.
“Almost there!” one of the rescuers shouted over the motor. “We should start seeing the Talisman on the other side of those swells there!” He pointed to the enormous white wave crests a short distance away. Still Peter could not believe that the Heather’s crew had all perished. It was surreal.
His colleague stood next to him. “The weather office checked the satellites and they say they detected what looks like an old submarine flash on the screens, eh? Imagine that. A submarine mistaken for a sea monster!”
Peter studied his colleague’s expression, seeking a sign of jest, but found that he was perfectly sincere. He remembered that there were Allied submarines stationed in Oban during the Second World War, but that there was one traversing the local waters now was just preposterous.
“Then again, that would be a more plausible explanation. A submarine could sink a boat, even just by crashing into its hull from below, which would explain how the Heather went down so rapidly, probably dragged under by slipstream maelstroms,” he speculated. “It would be far more believable than Dugal’s Loch Ness monster theory.”
“There! Dead ahead!” another voice cried from behind him on the heaving rescue boat.
Peter looked in front of them, and every now and then the red and green trawler would peek fleetingly before falling back under the walls of water that seemed to reach up and join the gray skies above.
“Can’t see anyone!” he shouted.
“I know! No-one on deck. They are probably below!” the other reckoned.
But as they approached, calling out to the Talisman over the loudspeakers while periodically sounding the sirens, the rescue team realized that the vessel was deserted. No flares had gone up, no reply on t
he radio, and certainly no waving of arms or usage of flags to indicate a crisis. There was just . . . nothing.
After boarding the Talisman, the four rescuers combed the interior of the fishing trawler.
“Nothing!”
“Aye, nobody here either!” They called out to one another, confirming the absence of the crew with voices of deep concern. Shaking their heads, the rescuers converged at the controls where the pilot’s seat was swaying violently without the weight of its pilot.
The men looked spooked at the ghost boat they had boarded. How would they report this one?
“I see none of you are admitting anything weird, so I’ll just be the first,” Peter said. “Did anyone else notice that the Talisman’s deck is covered with slimy residue? And the doors of every single compartment, from the galley to the head, have been smashed?”
They all nodded silently. There was no denying the chilling remnants of what looked like an attack.
“Submarines don’t do that, lads. I don’t give a shite how wet it is,” another rescuer admitted.
“So . . . what do we tell the authorities? I can’t even make out what the fuck happened here,” the third sighed.
Peter gave it some thought, and the results of his deduction left his blood cold. “I might be exaggerating a bit here, but this looks alarmingly like the doings of an octopus, enveloping a boat to get to the prey inside.”
“Oh, Jesus, really?” the EMT exclaimed with mockery. “Peter, you sound as daft as Dugal McAdams!”
“Maybe so, but have you noticed that Dugal McAdams is missing? Probably fish fodder by now!” Peter retorted. “Daft or no, we all know what we see here, don’t we?”
Confounded and slightly unnerved by the whole experience, the sea rescue team returned to Oban with heavy hearts. Not just one, but two vessels had been compromised; and the eighteen crewmen and skippers were lost to the frigid depths of the North Sea.
It was a devastating shock to the townspeople, especially to the immediate families of the crew. There was something wicked loose in Oban, not just in the ocean, but in the house on Dunuaran Road. Once more, as a few decades earlier, the town was rife with over-exaggerated rumors and lofty tales, this time relating to the missing historian and the giant octopus haunting the fishing waters just a stone’s throw from the coastline.
Alerts were put out to seafarers along the entire stretch from Inverness to the Firth of Lorne and the Inner Hebrides in general.
Below the tumultuous water of the rabid ocean, a submarine was gliding along at a gentle pace, bearing northward, unaware of the recent catastrophes above and on the land past the shoreline. It was quiet and dreamlike in the blue submerged universe where it slid through the currents, oblivious to the storm on the surface. Inside, the missing historian of Oban and her companions were blissfully ignorant of the hell they had unleashed in their wake.
They had no idea that tossing those two bodies in the mouth had activated an ancient and menacing scientific principle, to date dismissed as myth and folly. It had pierced the veil dividing dimensions by the employment of human sacrifice, even inadvertently. Ancient cultures said to have learned this method to “appease the gods” would appear to have been less absurd than civilized theorists would ever know. Neither Nina, Sam, or Gretchen knew that there was much truth to those unorthodox laws of quantum physics that predicted the exodus of inter-dimensional entities to their earthly plane. The insanity of the SS had proved to hold quite some weight after all.
Only those familiar with the origin of the Nazi ideologies would understand the possibilities, and purpose, of seemingly outlandish practices such as those of human sacrifices and crossing of “gods” by means of intricate and arcane science. It ran in the Schaub family, seeping through several generations, almost diluted before the latest generation venerated its German and American ancestors so that the dogma was resurrected to its full glory.
With static eyes staring into space somewhere between the floor and the bunk chains, Dr. Richard Philips sat contemplating the success of the experiment he conducted while being left in solitude in the basement. McLaughlin’s offensive secretary had served well as bait for what was birthed by the blinding clap of the portal just hours before when the house on Dunuaran Road lit up like the sun. He wondered what would have become of Sam Cleave and his bloody leg had he, Philips, not fed the thing under the submarine with the woman’s limp, living body while the others were up in the kitchen.
Then he looked at the other three, discussing their destination and tending to Sam’s injury. Dr. Philips lamented his actions now, but he was too close now to abort his mission. Like most people he had befriended before, he would have to avoid getting attached to them to spare him the moral conundrum that would no doubt ride his back when the time came.
He caught his breath loudly suddenly, as if his inner thoughts manifested physically. Richard Philips knew that he had to set his work above his need for friendship. Not only would he do it for his own reputation, but for his great forefathers. Richard would do it to restore the work of SS High Officer Heinrich Manfred Schaub, and Schaub’s father, the American Howard Philips Lovecraft, who had unwittingly fathered Heinrich with Sabine Schaub, a fellow writer on a book tour in Rhode Island in the early 1930s.
Richard Philips was adamant to glorify the so-called fallacies of his two ancestors and prove to the world, with no small amount of personal satisfaction, that their words and practices were not insane or grotesque at all. He wished to show the world that these men, like him, were innovative thinkers ahead of their time. His own experiments had now proved successful and he could not wait to join his grandfather’s mentor, Alfred Meiner, in Venice for the unveiling of the ultimate crossing.
But for now he was just an academic with some interesting lectures, fleeing from authorities with the sacrificial lambs of the Black Sun’s end game. They needed to silence Cleave in order to prevent a possible book that exposed another criminal organization. They needed to exterminate Gould to keep Renatus from straying in his loyalties. As for the wife of the slain ARK architect, Mueller . . . well, she was just unfortunate by association.
At least he had successfully retrieved the books that were missing from the Library of Forbidden Books and was transporting them back to complete the codes he and Meiner needed to facilitate their grotesque design. One thing that did not sit well with him though, was that the aquatic denizen of some hellish out-world he had unintentionally summoned was loose in the North Sea, possibly following the very vessel it was nesting with in the mouth.
Chapter 32
For once the rain had subsided a bit. It had been four days since Purdue and Agatha had assimilated the astronomical pointers with the spires of Venice’s ancient stone and brick treasures. They had, between them, utilized the locations of certain pinnacles aligned with constellations to draw a map that would take them to the supposed grave of the antique library. After all, it was a stroke of genius for the keepers of the literary mausoleum in the Middle Ages to hide it in the stars. Perpetually existent, it was the one map that could not be stolen or corrupted by any human.
Agatha and her brother arranged their diving gear and readied their waterproof flash lights for the journey into the submerged world under Venice. Another brilliant, although unintentional, security measure for the forbidden library was most certainly the condition of the water in the canals. It was extremely hazardous to be underwater for anyone who was not covered from head to toe in protective gear, due to the pollution and toxicity of the water. Purdue had assured that their diving gear was made of the sturdiest insulation material that would prevent any of Venice’s soiled substances from reaching their bodies.
One more step closer to the end of the world, but with a great weight off his shoulders, Purdue silently celebrated the technological aspects of the Longinus he had finally completed the night before. The stress of getting it done was interfering greatly with his focus on locating the hidden library to obtain, and ultimately alter
, the information Meiner sought, thus warping his molecular terrorism so that it would never see any accomplishment.
Purdue could see his sister’s apprehension, but short of spiking her cookies, he did not know how to calm her. The thought of swimming under the dark and unfamiliar water where broken statues, debris, and, in some places, entire foundations rested was too much for her.
“Agatha,” he started to attempt an encouraging speech, but she closed her eyes, lolled her head, and held up her hand at him. Her gesture for him not to bother was typical. Agatha Purdue was not one for coaxing or swaying. She was the kind of woman who bit her lip and suffered inside and no amount of sweet talk was going to change her mind that her phobia was unavoidable. She was way too intelligent to allow even the emotional aspect of his efforts to penetrate her cynicism.
“Do you have the laser?” she asked plainly, effectively hiding her mounting anxiety.
“Yes, here,” he said gently and passed his sister his pen-sized laser cutter that converted into a thermo detector and radar device. She slipped it into the inlaid zipper pocket on her thigh, stretching tautly over her thermal suit. She had not gone on an illegal adventure with her brother since they scaled the fortress walls of the Brigade Apostate’s headquarters to steal the Longinus. And that risk of danger, armed men with precision marksmanship, was by far preferable to the silent darkness of the underwater populated channels.
They set off just short of midnight. Purdue still had not slept since he had to preside over the interment of Izaak Geldenhuys, the latest victim of a torrent of serial murders committed on members of the council. Purdue found the whole thing remarkably expedient. He was not amused by the manner in which the council dictated his existence now, how the members had cunningly made him the leader of the Black Sun to keep him from doing the organization harm under the protective eyes of his appointed counselors and staff. To him the deaths of the nefarious old bastards was quite expedient, actually, and he almost wished he was the one who thought up the splendid idea.