Loch

by Paul Zindel

  Loch felt an ache in his stomach. He took the skull from Erdon. “This is a plaster head of a Tzuchinoko, a monster lots of people say they’ve seen around lakes,” he said, wanting to move away from remembering how much he missed his own mother. If she were still alive, Loch knew, she would make certain Zaidee, Dr. Sam, and he lived in a much neater home too. “People claim it’s a thick-bodied snake with twisted horns above its eyes.”

  “But it’s all really a big crock,” Erdon said, loud enough for Dr. Sam to hear him.

  “Sure, it’s probably a catfish brought to the top by a drought,” Loch agreed, “but last year the town of Chigusa, Japan, believed in it enough to offer a two-million-yen reward for a living specimen. Cavenger had us off and running on that one too.”

  Erdon smirked. “You guys always find diddly, right?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Cavenger hypes it up into grist for his weird magazines, like News of the Strange and Phenomena Monthly. He had us search a year for a Waheela, this white wolf beast sighted in Canada.”

  Erdon shuffled through a stack of sketches of ferocious flying creatures and sea monsters, photographing everything that caught his eye. He knew he could easily freelance a couple of photo layouts to Cavenger’s competitors. “Who did the drawings?”

  “I do a lot of them,” Loch said proudly.

  “They’re not bad.” Erdon leaned across a cluttered table to get a closer look at a set of dark, shadowy photo enlargements thumb-tacked to the wall. “These are supposed to be of the Loch Ness monster, right?”

  “The shot showing the big fin is the best,” Loch said. “They call it the Ledniz shot.”

  Erdon knew that photo alone had been bought and reprinted so many times it had been an annuity for the photographer. “Lots of the photos have been shown to be phony. That one guy on his deathbed admitted his photo was a toy submarine, right?”

  “All the photos can’t be fakes,” Loch said.

  “Something like Nessie is what Cavenger thinks is in Lake Alban?”

  “A few locals think so too.”

  From what Erdon had seen of the citizens of Lake Alban, he’d decided they’d invent anything to bring a few tourist bucks into the area. “What do they say?”

  “Let me tell him!” Zaidee barged in, carrying the laptop and cornering Erdon. “Mrs. Mitchell who runs the grocery store said she saw a big black thing down near the fish grid. And Jesse Sanderson, who’s the caretaker at the logging mill, said he saw something off his dock that had a head the size of a barrel, but everyone says he’s a nasty, no-good pain-in-the-neck who drinks all the time. And a schoolteacher down the street said she saw two sets of fins twenty feet apart, and she thinks there’s something in this lake that could hurt somebody a lot, a real lot. …”

  The phone rang and Dr. Sam grabbed it. A moment later he called in to them. “There’s a storm heading down from Canada. Cavenger wants the search under way immediately. Everybody to the dock. On the double!”

  2

  SOUNDS

  Loch drove Dr. Sam and Zaidee in the Volvo. He’d already driven lots of times on expeditions, and now that he had turned fifteen, it was actually legal in Vermont for him to be behind the wheel. Erdon followed alone in his Pathfinder. “Can I turn on the radio?” Zaidee asked, reaching out for the shortwave.

  “Sure,” Dr. Sam said. “Just don’t broadcast.”

  Zaidee hit a lot of static but finally tuned in a couple of boaters talking about fuel. She switched channels and picked up somebody giving a weather update to a guy with a French accent. Within minutes they had reached the main encampment and pulled into a parking area near Cavenger’s Sea-B, which had been brought ashore and tethered.

  The base was swarming with workers, boat crews, and research personnel rushing toward the army-style pontoon dock. Inflated rubber boats with outboards were taxiing the teams out to the lineup of motley skiffs anchored offshore.

  “What a mob scene,” Erdon called to Dr. Sam as he got out of the Pathfinder. The Nikons around his neck clanked together, popping one of the lens caps onto the ground.

  Sure, because Cavenger hires too many butt-heads like you, Dr. Sam felt like shouting back, though he knew that wouldn’t say much for himself, either. He had learned long ago that Cavenger’s M.O. was to hire cheap, not good. Besides, when anyone finished negotiating a deal with Cavenger, he was lucky if he still had a nose left on his face.

  “I can carry something else,” Zaidee said, clutching the laptop.

  “We got it,” Dr. Sam said, taking the heaviest box of equipment. Loch grabbed another container and they walked by Erdon, who was struggling to lift a commercial Panasonic video camera with a massive battery pack out of the back of the Pathfinder.

  Loch took pity. “You need help?”

  “No,” Erdon said, stumbling.

  “I still want to show you our Crashers game,” Zaidee shouted to Erdon over the din of the crowd.

  Erdon laughed. “I won’t forget.” He got a grip on the equipment and ran to catch up with the Perkins family.

  When they reached the dock, Erdon stopped to roll up the sleeves of his shirt to better show off his build, then lugged the video camera and battery pack aboard his assigned boat—a powered catamaran specially designed for photography. The cat, which had first been rigged for one of Cavenger’s Congo expeditions, was fitted with dual 190-horsepower Mercury outboards and an equalizing platform that minimized motor and wave interference to the cameras. The only other boat docked took up the lion’s share of space: Cavenger’s yacht, The Revelation.

  Loch broke into a wide smile when he saw Sarah waiting for him at the gangplank. “Hi, Sarah,” he said.

  “Hi.” Sarah anxiously pulled at her curly, long brown hair so it fell forward down the sides of her face.

  “Did you see me doing stalls on the glider?”

  “Of course I saw you,” Sarah said. Her platform shoes made clopping sounds when she shifted from one foot to the other.

  Zaidee spoke up, staring at Sarah’s feet like they were gremlins. “Nice footwear for boating.”

  “Oh, hi, Zaidee,” Sarah said. She tried to sound enthusiastic about seeing her again, but she found Zaidee getting more and more on her nerves the older she got. “All my friends in London are wearing platforms. They’re really more comfortable than they look.”

  Zaidee looked straight into Sarah’s eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’ll catch up with you,” Loch told Zaidee.

  “I get the point. I’m being banished. Big deal,” Zaidee said, continuing up the gangplank.

  Loch set the box down and smiled at Sarah. “Did your mom come with you?”

  “No. You know she hates Dad’s expeditions. Why didn’t you answer my last letter?” she asked. “I wrote you seven months ago!” She didn’t mean to sound so whiny, but she needed words to hide her nervousness. She was thrown to see he had the start of a mustache and even a shadow of a beard. “You’ve gotten bigger.”

  “So have you,” Loch said without thinking. He didn’t mean to be looking at her body when the words came out, and he knew she had caught him. “I was going to write,” Loch went on, “but then I kept thinking I was going to see you.” He meant it, but there was something about putting a pen to paper that was really painful. The pen could never keep up with his thoughts.

  “All I know is I’m sure the questions were urgent for me when I wrote them, and now I suppose it doesn’t matter at all,” Sarah said. She could tell from the look in his eyes that he’d had enough of her bellyaching.

  “Well, I guess I’d better get this on your dad’s boat,” Loch said, picking up the container again.

  “Yes, I guess you’d better. See you around,” Sarah said, clopping away from The Revelation, heading across the dock.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Loch asked, puzzled.

  “Dad said I can drive the catamaran today,” she called over her shoulder. Erdon was waiting for her on the cat. All smiles, h
e reached out to help her aboard.

  Loch watched her get behind the controls. He knew she was just pulling rank as the boss’s daughter, but that wasn’t anything new. He took his shirt off, then set the container on his left knee to get a better grip. He caught Sarah staring at him from the cat, gave her a wave, then boarded the yacht. A deckhand helped him store the gear, and he caught up to Zaidee sitting on the rear lounge deck. She had the laptop open and was mesmerized by Crashers.

  “Sarah looks different, don’t you think?” Loch asked.

  “She wants to jump your bones,” Zaidee said without looking up.

  Loch laughed. “I wish,” he said, tousling her hair and swinging up into his favorite hiding spot, the yacht’s rubber raft, the one used to get to shore in shallow bays. The one thing Zaidee and he had learned a long time ago was to keep out of sight until a search got under way.

  “You’re late again!” Cavenger glared from the control console. “We’ve started the sonar check.”

  “Sorry,” Dr. Sam said, sliding into his seat at the recorders.

  “Are the trawler nets ready?” Cavenger demanded to know.

  “Yes sir,” Randolph, a radio specialist, said quickly.

  “Tell the fleet to start engines!” Cavenger shot the order out as he stood up to check the port and starboard flanks.

  “Start engines!” Emilio, Cavenger’s head trouble-shooter, passed the command.

  The simultaneous roar from the engines of the yacht and fourteen skiffs echoed off the mountainsides. Cavenger yanked the microphone out of Emilio’s hand. “Low idle!” he yelled. The tumult from the engines dropped quickly.

  He handed the mike back to Emilio. “I want to go in sixty seconds,” Cavenger said as he sat his thin, frail body back down in the black-leather swivel chair. With bald head and sunken eyes, he looked ghostly in the flickering of the sonar screens. Emilio, short, stocky, in his forties, sat on Cavenger’s right. On his left was John Randolph, a retired Air Force pilot and radioman. Haskell, the ship’s captain, was at the wheel. Behind them all, out of the power loop, was Dr. Sam, adjusting the styluses on the sonar graphic recorders.

  The clanking sounds from the pair of shabby old brown fishing trawlers stabbed through the air as they flanked the fleet. Both trawlers were already in motion as planned, with a dozen Portuguese fishermen feeding out hemp netting from huge, rusted spindles.

  “Are you ready, Sam?” Cavenger demanded to know.

  “Ready,” Dr. Sam said.

  Emilio looked at Cavenger.

  “Go!” Cavenger ordered.

  The water in the bay churned as the engines kicked their strength into the string of propellers. The boats lunged forward, shooting back trails of the peat-black deeper waters toward the shore.

  “The line’s scraggly!” Cavenger complained. Randolph snapped to and took to the open deck with a power megaphone.

  “Stay back of our bow!” he called off the port, then starboard, reinforcing the command with arm signals. The experienced skippers quickly firmed the lines until the boats looked like a wedge of flying geese, with The Revelation in the lead.

  “Stay under seven knots if you want maximum sonar density,” Dr. Sam reminded.

  The only boat to break the line was the catamaran. Loch swung down from the raft to watch Sarah circling The Revelation. She throttled the dual giant outboards of the cat, forcing Erdon to hold on to the video mount for support. Emilio moved out onto the open deck of the yacht to glare at her. She slowed down fast, allowing Erdon to get on with his shoot. Sarah saw Loch watching, let out a yelp, and gave him a big wave.

  Zaidee looked up from Crashers and saw Sarah showing off. “Puberty must really suck,” she muttered.

  Ten minutes into the search, Loch and Zaidee knew it was safe to make the transition from the rear deck to the control room, where they could watch Dr. Sam work. Once a search was under way, Cavenger and his crew were always much too busy even to notice them. As they entered the control room, the ocean of lighted dials and the BLIP … BLIP … BLIP of the monitor screens were hypnotic. Zaidee gave a thumbs-up to her dad and snuggled into a chair by the door. Loch moved farther into the room and slipped onto the seat next to his dad.

  “Hi,” Loch whispered.

  Dr. Sam gave them both a wink, then dropped his stare back onto the graphic recorders. The dozen styluses scratched ink zigzags on the rolls of graph paper marching forward beneath them, a permanent record of the lake floor and everything in between.

  “I want the nets full out.” Cavenger snapped his fingers. Randolph broadcast the order to both trawlers.

  “I told you to use steel netting,” Dr. Sam reminded Cavenger.

  “Too expensive,” Cavenger shot back.

  “Not if we find what you’re looking for.”

  “Suppose I worry about that, Sam,” Cavenger said coldly, reaching his skinny hand to his neck, checking his shirt collar.

  “If it’s any type of plesiosaur, it’s going to have teeth,” Dr. Sam said.

  “You underestimate what fifteen million years of evolution, trapped in a lake like this, can do to an animal,” Cavenger said. “The same goes for whatever’s in Loch Ness, and that cousin of Nessie’s they’ve been spotting in British Columbia. Somebody’s going to catch one soon, and you’ll see what happens when you cramp any kind of beast long enough. It’s not going to evolve. A trapped beast devolves, it goes down the ladder of evolution. Like you, Sam,” Cavenger said, laughing.

  Loch’s fingers tightened into a fist. He hated it when Cavenger put his father down in front of everyone, and he did that a lot. Maybe what Loch hated most was the way his father just took the abuse.

  “You’re right about that, Mr. Cavenger.” Randolph backed Cavenger up as usual. By now he knew Cavenger’s every pet theory like a catechism. “It’s what happened to the sturgeon, right?”

  “You bet it is.” Cavenger nodded. “Sturgeons were killers of the seas. A few million years trapped in glacial freshwater, and what do they end up as—pole fish with a suctorial, toothless mouth. Anything we find in this lake will be lucky if it doesn’t have to drink its food through a straw!”

  Loch wasn’t going to sit still and let that one go by. “My dad and I catch a lot of northern pike with teeth as big as a barracuda’s.” Dr. Sam knocked his son with his knee as Cavenger swiveled in his chair. His nasty little eyes glared at Loch; then he chuckled, saying to the others, “Like father, like son.”

  “And like father, like daughter,” Zaidee spoke up from the back, as ticked off as Loch. She threw open the laptop and started playing Crashers again.

  “We’ve got something,” Cavenger cut in, his eyes back on the master screen in front of him.

  Emilio squirmed in his seat. “Something large, submerged, at two o’clock.”

  “It’s alive,” Cavenger said.

  Dr. Sam checked the zigzags, then glanced over to the sonar screens to confirm his reading. “No, it’s not. It’s a log.”

  “How do you know?” Cavenger asked condescendingly.

  “Because I’m trained to read sonar, and because the old logging mill’s dead off Boat Fourteen’s starboard,” Dr. Sam replied.

  Randolph turned from the radio board. “Boat Fourteen reports eye contact. Confirms it’s a log.” Loch smiled and hit his father a silent high five as Cavenger stood and looked out toward the shore. “What’s a goddam logging mill doing on this lake anyway?”

  “There used to be a water flow out the west end, a river that flowed down to Lake Champlain,” Randolph said.

  “A deep river?” Cavenger wanted to know.

  “Yes, pretty deep.” Emilio spoke up. “But they’ve installed a salmon grid on it now. Works like a dam.”

  “They built the grid last year,” Dr. Sam offered.

  “That’s why the thing is here then,” Cavenger said, excited.

  At the wheel, Captain Haskell looked puzzled. He had learned over the years that as far as Anthony Cavenger was concern
ed, it was better not to draw him out on much. But his curiosity got the better of him. “What thing? Why is what here?”

  Cavenger smiled. “It’s trapped. Our little creature is trapped.”

  3

  AT THE TIME HORIZON

  The north sky filled with dark clouds as the storm front marched over the mountain ridge. Just past the midpoint of the lake, the sonar picked up a surface disturbance in front of Boat One. The signal indicated something large and moving. As the boat closed, a cluster of swimming beavers was sighted. The beavers smacked the surface of the water with their tails and dove beneath the surface, splintering the signal.

  The west end of the lake came into sight, and Loch went out on deck for a breath of fresh air. He didn’t like to be around Cavenger when one of his elaborate electronic searches ended in abject failure, as, of course, they usually did. At those times, Cavenger became even more despotic and cruel. He’d slowly coil like a rattlesnake, his eyes growing dead as if he were looking inward at his own pathetic soul. Then, without warning, he’d strike out at anyone, and he usually picked Dr. Sam.

  Loch waved again to Sarah on the catamaran. He didn’t like the way Erdon kept flashing his big smile at her and showing off his build. The wind had picked up and the surface of the lake began to ripple with small, white-capped waves. Sarah smiled, waved back, and throttled the engines like she was having the time of her life with Erdon. Loch found himself wishing he was the one on the cat with her, not some show-off with a couple of Nikons. Sarah and he had grown up together on Cavenger’s expeditions. They saw each other no more than a couple of months out of every year, but they had parasailed, swum with manta rays.

  “Loch!” Zaidee called from the control-room doorway. “There’s something wrong with Crashers!”

  Loch went back inside and sat down with Zaidee. The picture on the laptop screen was of an iridescent forest and a frozen crystal river with a path leading across it. The cartoon figure of a young boy was being stalked by a hideous witch with a knife.