by J. D. Crayne
There didn't appear to be a dog, which surprised him. He was expecting a couple of those lean black beasts with the snarls and growls.
Steve got out of his car, closed the door gently, and walked over to the gate, where he held his arms straight out from his sides and smiled reassuringly as the camera panned in his direction.
"Hiya, Marlow!" he yelled. "It's Steve Cullinan. I just came out for a little chat, okay?"
The camera stopped, it's faceless black lens staring at him.
"I... uh, wanted to talk to you about what happened at the dock today."
The door of the mini quonset hut opened about six inches, and what looked like the barrel of an assault rifle poked out. A strained voice said, "That really you?"
"Oh yeah, it's me all right," Steve said tightly, wondering if he hadn't made a big mistake in coming out there.
There was a long silence, and then the same strained voice asked, "What did the front of the first lake monster look like?"
"The one without the Halloween mask, you mean?" Steve said, experimenting with a hollow laugh.
The rifle barrel didn't waver. "Well?"
"A Flying Tiger!" Steve said hastily. "Great job too!"
To his relief, the rifle barrel was lowered an inch or two.
"Okay," the voice said. "I guess you can come in, but first you gotta strip down, so I can be sure no one planted anything on you."
Resigned, Steve began peeling off his clothes, stacking them neatly on the ground and hoping there weren't too many scorpions, ticks, and centipedes around. The relentless eye of the camera watched his every move.
"Turn around. Slowly." the voice said. "Keep your hands away from your sides."
Steve turned, arms out, feeling like an aged and war-weary ballet dancer.
"Okay, I guess that'll do," the voice said. "Get your clothes; you can dress in here. Don't want to take any chance of someone doing something with them while you're in here." The gate slid slowly open.
Clothes draped across his arm, Steve walked slowly through the gate and up a graveled path to the quonset hut. A pair of large WW II mortar shells stood one on each side of the door. The door opened just slightly more, and Steve edged inside.
Much to his relief, Marlow set his AK-47 aside, leaning it against the wall with a careful hand. Then he said, "I forgot. Didn't check your shoes. We better check your shoes."
With a muffled sigh, Steve sat down on a folding camp stool by the door and pulled off his shoes and socks. Marlow inspected them systematically.
"They look clean," he said, after ripping out the inner soles to check underneath. "Can't be too careful, you know. They're everywhere."
"Yeah, they sure are!" Steve said, as he put his clothes back on.
"You want a beer?"
"I could use one!"
Marlow's refuge was as neat and tidy as any Army camp. There were marks of military efficiency everywhere, from the crisp corners of the blankets on the bunk at the back, to the carefully arrayed lines of military models on the shelves along the walls.
Marlow himself was casually dressed in baggy khaki pants and boots, with a chain and dog tags hanging in the graying hair on his sweaty chest. He peered at Steve thoughtfully, eyes narrowed.
"Why are you here? Somebody send you?"
"No, no! It's just that you took off so fast that I didn't get a chance to get the full story about what happened when those two lushes fell off the dock."
Marlow gnawed his graying moustache. "They didn't fall," he said tersely, voice lowered to a mere whisper. "Something got them."
"Came up out of the water, whoosh!" Steve said, knowingly.
"The way I figure it," Marlow went on, "it musta been some kind of experimental government thing."
"What kind of thing?" Steve asked, puzzled.
"One of those things they're always covering up. You know, like the flying saucers in Roswell, and that HAARP stuff they're using to control people's minds."
"I thought you said it had teeth."
Marlow nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's what put me onto it. That thing had teeth painted on it, that's what. You know what that means?"
"It was an underwater Flying Tiger?"
The survivalist pointed a finger at him and said softly, "Bang! You got it in one."
"So, the government is using Lake Mendocino for some sort of secret experiments?" Steve said weakly.
"That's it," Marlow said, tilting back his head to finish off the beer. "Top secret miniature submarines. Probably equipped with long-range nuclear devices. That's where all those pieces of Styrofoam under the dock came from. Packing material from their underwater headquarters."
"But isn't Lake Mendocino just a little bit small to use for that sort of thing? You'd think maybe, Lake Tahoe, or the Great Salt Lake, or maybe Lake Michigan... "
"Too big and too obvious," Marlow said succinctly, walking across the room and getting himself another beer. "I figure that's why they dammed the river in the first place, to make a lake where they could get down to their dirty work without anyone suspecting them." His eyes narrowed. "It's the Russian River. That mean anything to you?"
"Must be code," Steve managed to say.
"Yep, that's what it is alright. I give them three years, four tops. Then, ka-boom!"
"Disaster, you mean?"
"Yeah. There's gonna be one hell of a big ka-boom and a disaster like you can't believe." He nodded sagely. "You better get ready for it. That's what I'm doing. Getting ready for them when they come over the hills, driving those big sixteen wheelers with the guns mounted on the front."
Steve thanked Marlow for the beer, the information, and the warning, and got out of the area as fast as rubber tires would take him.
* * *
After listening to Marlow, Steve almost felt like accepting Pigott's methane gas theory. Whatever happened out there on the boat rental dock, the survivalist was obviously in no condition to talk about it rationally. Steve decided to look in on the Big Dipper Trailer Park, to see if, by any wild chance, the two dead drunks were actually alive and well and cheerfully sopping up more alcohol somewhere.
If they were, it wasn't at the trailer park.
The park held eleven residential trailers, all of the old and scuzzy sort. A sign in front advertised one vacancy, but to Steve's certain knowledge the sign had been there for over five years, so either no one had tried to rent a space, or the park had a very rapid and consistent turn-over.
He parked across the street, walked over to the red and rusty-silver unit with the sign that said "Manager" and rang the bell. The owner-manager, a frowsy blonde around fifty with her hair up in curlers and her wide expanse reined in not too securely by a hot pink halter and a pair of hibiscus-print shorts, agreed that two of her tenants had gone off somewhere, but put that down to their regular, shared, bi-monthly binge.
"When did you see them last?" Steve asked.
"Last night. They must of took off some time this morning. Probably got a couple of bottles and went off up in the hills. They'll be back when they run dry." She blew a stray wisp of hair out of their eyes. "They better be. Rent's due tomorrow."
"They ain't coming back," said a wheezy voice. "I seen 'em go, and I tell you, they ain't coming back." The speaker laughed.
Steve turned around to see Crosseyed Benny standing at the bottom of the steps. This didn't surprise him, because he'd already caught Benny's unique scent of mingled stale sweat, gin, and other things that didn't bear thinking about.
The manager hurriedly said goodbye and shut the door. She too was downwind of Benny.
Steve considered Benny. True, the man had pretty well ruined any credibility he had with the Sheriff's Department, but on the other hand he did seem to be an eyewitness when the other two trailer park residents went missing.
"Suppose you tell me what happened, Benny," he said, leading the way to two aluminum beach chairs that were set out under the manager's awning, and carefully arranging them so he'd be up-wind.
He took the price of a bottle of cheap gin out of his pocket and idly fanned the bills.
Benny opened his mouth, and Steve held up a hand. "I don't want to hear anything about Tal... Takl... dammit! ... whatever Ernie told you to say. I know all about that. I just want to hear what you saw, okay?"
Crosseyed Benny scratched his chin. "It just sorta come up out of the water. That's what happened. Mac and Jerry are sitting close together, see at the end of the dock, because they're passing a bottle back and forth. Damned cheapskates wouldn't even give me a swig," he added, lower lip turned out in a pout.
"Go on," Steve said, pointedly rustling the bills in his hand.
"It come right up out of the water, like one of them killer whales at the ocean parks, jumping for fish. It grabs Mac and Jerry by the legs and hauls 'em right off the dock. I see it, but it don't bother me none. Hell, I've seen a lot worse than that after a weekend drinking. After you see a couple of three foot purple cockroaches crawling over your walls, a big black fish is sorta second rate. Besides, Ernie told me all about it a couple of weeks ago, so I knowed what it was right off, as soon I seen it."
That was a bit of logic Steve hadn't thought of, but it seemed to work for Benny.
"That's what it was," he asked. "A big fish?"
"Looked like a fish to me. Sure had a hell of a lot of teeth though. Could be it was one of them big things they got swimming around the Delta, out by Sacramento. My dad had a beer bar up there, in Rio Vista, and I used to fish for them things, when I was a boy. Mean damned things. Big, too. Get to be seven foot long, some of 'em."
That seemed to be all Crosseyed Benny had to say, and the wind appeared to be shifting, so Steve handed over the cash and left.
The idea of a garpike migrating up to Lake Mendocino from the Sacramento Delta river system seemed a little far-fetched, but stranger things have happened, and if he could push the idea, it might get the City Council off the legal hook.
* * *
Solitaire was full of speculation about the tragedy that killed Zedidiah Cross–"beloved of our community"– and TV personality Dubery Percale, who was replaced by his network after a thirty second memorial. There were rumors of more people who were missing, and an increasing number of fishermen and campers claimed to have seen strange things around the lake at night.
The Ukiah newspaper ran an editorial about causes of lake pollution, a psychiatrist was interviewed on public radio about mass hallucinations caused by stress and a desire for publicity, and a local doctor advised the missing spectators from the boat rental dock–who preferred to remain anonymous–to take a few tranquilizers and lie down for a while.
Reverend Peter Finsch organized special prayers for the dead and for the deliverance of the town, and delivered a sermon that seemed to equate the lake monster with modern political and corporate financial abuses. The church choir sang some particularly awful hymns written by the town's local poet in honor of the occasion.
On the plus side, returning tourists from most of the West Coast were taking side trips to see the scene of the disaster, and Hetty's Antiques reported a 300% increase in souvenir sales. The drug store was doing a brisk business in postcards, and the shore was lined with family groups taking pictures of the lake. The Florentine Palace had so much business that Eugenie Briolette had to hire a hostess and start taking reservations.
Mercifully, the media vans had gone, leaving behind only a tenacious and whiskey-soaked tabloid columnist from Oakland, who went around interviewing people for the "human side of this tragedy."
The humming sound of the humpback whale songs still drifted across the water. No one had located the floating CD player yet, and apparently its batteries were still going strong.
Three days later a trio of amateur naturalists, who planned to write an article on the Tlaklot phenomenon for a British tabloid, took a canoe out into the lake on a fine misty morning and vanished without a trace.
When one of the men was found wandering and semi-incoherent along the east shore of the lake, with a story of having seen his friends gulped down by something black and silver, with a mouthful of impressively large teeth, town opinion was divided. The cynics pointed out that he was a married man with three kids who was known to have a girlfriend in Lakeport, and that anyone can pretend to be half balmy – especially with the help of a fifth of Jim Beam.
The dissenters pointed to some tell-tale scrapes and scratches on his legs, and demanded to know what had happened to his friends. General opinion had it that the two missing men were whooping it up over in Reno with the help of a couple of bar hostesses.
* * *
There was an emergency meeting of the Solitaire City Council on Monday. Unfortunately they had to hold it in George Regent's bait shop, because business at the Florentine Palace was so good that they couldn't get a reservation.
The Council members were a somber lot, sitting around on mismatched chairs and stools, with their secretary perched on an upended packing crate.
"It's no good," Paul said, leaning back against the front counter. "We're ruined. No one wants to go out on the lake, because they say there's something wrong with the water."
"But the town is full of people!" George said.
"Yeah," Steve said, " and they're all standing around on shore, talking about methane gas and asking when the town is going to get an expert in to test the water quality, and wondering whether the contamination has spread out under the shoreline."
"I was talking to one of the Florentine Palace waitresses," Sancy put in. "She says no one has ordered trout since the disaster and if she brings anyone a glass of water they want to know where it came from."
Janey nodded glumly, chewing on the end of her panatela. "It's those stories Pigott is spreading around about underwater pollution and gas plumes."
"Yeah," George said, "and the towns on the other side of the lake are really pissed off. We'll be lucky if they don't sue us for driving away the tourists."
"What about the towns who get their drinking water from the lake?" Carlson asked. "Talk about pissed! Whew!"
"But what is in the lake?" Sancy asked. "If it's not pollution, what killed those people?"
"Didn't you see it?" Paul asked.
Sancy shook her head. "Not really. Something black came up from underneath, the raft tipped over, and I slid off into the water. I started swimming for shore as fast as I could. What about the others–Ernie Shah and the two drummers–what did they see?"
Steve shrugged. "Who knows? I tried to talk to Ernie, but he and the drummers have gone on some kind of retreat at a Huchnom sweat lodge up in the hills and won't be back until they've sweated the evil out of their spirits. At least, that's what his uncle told me. I did talk to Crosseyed Benny from the trailer park. He was over by White's when those two guys disappeared off the dock. He thinks it was a big garpike."
"How reliable is he?" Carlson asked.
"He's usually drunk and has DTs about giant purple cockroaches."
"This whole plan has turned into one hell of a fiasco!" Janey said, chomping her cigar. "I'm sorry I ever got involved in it."
"You shouldn't have done it, Steve," Paul said sadly.
"I shouldn't have done it?" Steve said, staring at him in disbelief. "Dammit, you all agreed that it was a great idea! You were with me one hundred percent."
"Well, yeah," Janey said, "but we never expected it to work out this way. Everyone blames us for it, and when Pigott gets those lawsuits underway, we'll be lucky if we still have the shirts on our backs."
Carlson rubbed a hand over his face, slicked back his thinning blond hair wearily, and said, "Julie locked me out of the house last night and I had to sleep in the winery. It's because Bernadette left home. Julie says its all your fault, and I shouldn't have gone along with your crazy ideas."
"It's my fault that your daughter moved out?" Steve asked helplessly.
"Well, yeah. Julie figures that if you hadn't come up with this crazy scheme no one would ever have known about t
he lake pollution, and Reverend Finsch wouldn't have preached that heated sermon about corporate greed and decided to dedicate his life to Higher Purposes, and Bernadette wouldn't have gotten any crazy idea about Moral Duty and gone with him."
"You mean your daughter actually ran off with that scrawny little preacher man?" Janey said incredulously.
Carlson yawned tiredly and then nodded. "They're going to South America to join the Jivaro indians in their fight against logging in the rain forest."
"Well," Paul said dryly, "at least you don't have to worry about picking out a college for her."
George tittered, and then dove behind the counter and hauled out a packet of loose wires and foam, which he handed to Paul.
"I almost forgot to give you this! A kid found it down by the picnic grounds this morning, floating in a patch of reeds. It's the sound thingy out of Tlaklot Two, isn't it?"
Paul turned it over in his hands. "Yeah, but this is busted all to hell and gone, and the batteries are missing." He looked at the others, puzzled. "So, what's making that sound that's coming off of the lake?"
No one had an answer.
They adjourned the meeting and shuffled out of the bait shop. Steve, the last one out of the door, found himself face to face with a chunky female who exuded whiskey fumes, had a recorder slung over one shoulder, and was waving a microphone in his face.
"You're Steven Cullinan, Mayor of this lovely little town, right?"
"Yes," Steve said tiredly. "That's me. Mayor of Solitaire."
She smiled toothily. "I'm Ruth Snetzle, Mr. Cullinan, roving reporter for the Weekly Observer. The readers of my column, The Truth From Ruth, want to know how you feel about having this town listed as a Superfund pollution site!"