Monster in the Mountains

by Peacock, Shane;

  “It was great to have seen you. Goodbye,” said my uncle in a near-whisper.

  “Oh, jabberwocky, Walter, I’m sure we’ll be getting together again,” grinned Dad, looking at Mom and me.

  “Absolutely,” said Mom, patting Walter on the hand. “We’ll be here for about a week. We’re giving Dylan some time off from school.”

  Then they got all kissy-kissy as we stood up to go. But I had something else on my mind.

  “I need to take a leak.”

  “Pardon me?” asked Mom, looking at me in horror.

  “May I please be excused to use the washroom?”

  “Yes you may.”

  When I returned, my parents were already outside waiting for me. Uncle Walter was still at his table, just kind of staring off towards the beach. I walked over to him.

  “Uncle Walter?”

  He turned and looked into my eyes.

  “How you feeling, White Knight?” he asked suddenly, looking concerned.

  He’d caught me off guard.

  “Uh…okay.”

  “Really? You don’t look so good.”

  I could have said the same thing about him.

  “I’m all right. Had a rough time last week.”

  “Well, that was last week, wasn’t it? This week is full of new and better possibilities.” He said it as if he didn’t quite believe it.

  “Sure.”

  There was a pause as we looked at each other.

  “Uh, when Dad asked you about seeing the sasquatch, you didn’t say anything.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like to lie.”

  As mom and dad and I headed back up the boardwalk towards the resort in the warm evening air, they were both going on and on about the changes in Uncle Walter, and how wonderful it all was. I could tell they were feeling a little guilty about how they’d described him to me. I figured it was a good time to ask a particular question.

  “Can I go visit him?”

  Mom paused for only a second.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Sure,” agreed Dad. “We’ll go tomorrow”

  I didn’t like that “we” stuff. I wanted some time alone to talk with Walter. I had some questions for him. I’d been awfully scared about a lot of things the past week, but the fear was beginning to slip away. Was it the magical waters of Harrison Hot Springs? Or was it something else? When I looked into my uncle Walter’s eyes, I had the strange feeling I was looking into my own. He was a shell of what he’d been…and so was I. I felt like I was learning a lesson the second I laid eyes on him. Mom said he’d never grown up, but to me it seemed more like he was old before his time. Something had scared him too, scared him so much that he was afraid of life, afraid of being himself…and so was I.

  4

  The Dragon

  Uncle Walter lived in a condominium complex well down Esplanade Avenue, a wide street that borders the beach. When Mom and Dad and I arrived at his door the following morning, he greeted us in his slippers and led us into the living room. The view out his big picture window was amazing, looking over the boardwalk, the sand, and blue water. The mountainous forests of Sasquatch Provincial Park rose in the distance.

  Mom and Dad were more interested in the indoor decorations. His rooms were straight out of the 1960s, the walls painted all the colours of the rainbow, lots of psychedelic posters of long-gone bands with long hair. It made the parental units feel right at home, even though that was just before their time. Some old tunes were playing softly, perfect for them. Soon we were all sitting down on Walter’s leather couches and the three of them were having a boring talk about songs from long ago. In minutes they’d turned them up. “I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles and “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane blared out of the CD player. The music filled the rooms and spilled out through the open windows.

  I started glancing around. Down a hallway I caught sight of two old photographs, almost hidden from view. One was of a beautiful woman, dressed up in a glittering circus costume. She stared out from the picture with a strange look in her eyes, like she was almost alive, like she was ready for anything. The other photograph showed a man standing on a high wire at an awesome height above a city street. It looked scary, but amazing. He had dark hair, a goatee, and a moustache that twirled out to two sharp points. The photo had some fancy lettering on it. the magnificent mid—was all I could read. There’s no circus in my life any more. That’s what he’d said.

  He caught my eyes wandering towards the photos. I looked away. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad were having a whale of a time listening to the music and talking about it. Much better than Walter, who seemed sad no matter what was going on. After a while, Mom smiled at him and then at me.

  “Dylan,” said Mom, “how would you like to spend a little time with your great-uncle while we grab some fresh fruit at the market downstairs? In fact, why don’t you just meet us back at the hotel? In twenty minutes?”

  “Sure,” I said, more pleased than I sounded.

  Moments later, the two of us were sitting on the balcony watching people walk by, not saying anything. I noticed his hiking boots sitting on a tray nearby, muddy again.

  “Don’t you NEED somebody to LOVE?” shouted the female lead singer’s voice back in the living room. It really was a rockin’ tune. Not bad. Uncle Walter didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it, though I noticed his foot silently tapping to the beat. After a while he pulled the sliding glass door closed, muffling the sound. He looked up into the green mass of Sasquatch Provincial Park on the horizon.

  “Do you believe in impossibilities, Dylan?”

  “Uh…what?”

  He paused. Then he looked at me. For a second, I thought he was going to really tell me something. Reveal something.

  “Never mind,” he finally said.

  I was going to have to coax him.

  “What did you do, Uncle Walter, when you were younger?”

  “A lot of stupid things. It really isn’t of much interest.”

  “It is to me.”

  He turned and looked at me again. He almost smiled.

  “When I was a young boy about your age, I ran away from home. I did something that usually only happens in books, or at least happened in books when I was a boy. I ran away with a circus. It made my parents very unhappy. But I learned how to do a lot of things. I walked the high wire, did the flying trapeze, even the mighty sway pole.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You get in this little perch, like a basket on a lookout, about thirty metres in the air at the top of a pole that seems like it’s made out of rubber. Then you start to make it sway. It will sway all the way to the ground and take you with it, holding on for dear life. Then it snaps you back up.”

  Wow.

  “Mom and Dad wanted to take me to Cirque du Soleil once.”

  “That’s not a real circus. That’s a Las Vegas show made up to look artsy. There aren’t many real ones any more, shows with imagination that take chances. The circus is supposed to exist at the edges of our minds.”

  He had been getting a little excited, but made an effort to calm himself.

  “That’s why they’re dangerous…that’s why there are accidents, and people die.” He paused, looking very sad. “I’m glad I’ve left that all in the past.”

  “Did something happen that made you stop?”

  For a second he cast his eyes down the hallway towards that picture of the beautiful circus woman.

  “It was a lot of things.” It was obvious he didn’t want to say anything else about it.

  I looked down towards the beach and saw the girl I’d noticed at the café last night. She was sitting on the sand, wearing a black bikini, looking rather grown up, staring at me. I stepped back from the edge of the balcony.

>   “I didn’t have a proper life. We travelled from town to town, so I never settled down. My family didn’t know where I was for years. I got married a few times, left people behind. I was just after thrills. Your mom will tell you about me. I missed her grandmother’s funeral…my own mother.” He paused. Then he lowered his eyes, as if he was thinking back into the past. “I remember I used to read minds on one show.” He almost smiled again. “And I drove nails into my brain by hammering them up my nostrils—they call it ‘the human blockhead’ act. Really disgusting.”

  That sounded wild. “How do you do that?”

  He looked at me kind of funny and kept talking.

  “I once displayed the world’s largest rat.”

  “Really?”

  “Size of a Newfoundland dog.”

  “What?”

  Uncle Walter leaned down close to me and whispered. “It’s really an animal from South America. A capybara, but don’t tell anyone.” He actually did smile that time.

  “I exhibited a dragon, too,” he said.

  “A dragon?”

  “Impossible, isn’t it? But there are huge lizards that live in the East Indies that fit the bill. Even scientists call them dragons: Komodo dragons. They might as well be living dinosaurs and are as frightening as a T. rex, believe me. They weigh more than I do. They eat people, in fact have been known to kill human beings, bury them, and dig them up and eat more. We had to be a little careful with that specimen.”

  I peeked over the edge of the balcony and looked down. She was still there, glancing upward, searching for where I’d gone.

  “I made a whole pack of money and saw some remarkable things. I owned some circuses by the time I got out of it. But I was irresponsible and reckless about others. I know that now.”

  “Mom and Dad thought you were weird.”

  “They’re smart people, good people. I had a well-deserved reputation in the family, Dylan. I thought I was living by my heart and my wits, and I suppose I was, but there’s more to life than that. At some point you have to grow up. The family thought I was a particularly nasty little boy, and they were right.” He paused. “Your parents are from the world of the possible, Dylan. So am I, now. I don’t live in a dream any more.”

  He turned and looked out into the wilderness again.

  I wanted to get back to stories about high wires and sway poles and the world’s largest rat. But he didn’t seem to be interested.

  “They say there’s something out there, you know.” He motioned towards the miles of trees that lined the mountains and went off into the distance of the park.

  “What?”

  “They have a two-million-dollar reward for anyone who can find it. It’s been a standing offer of this community for many years. They think the whole thing’s a joke: a publicity ploy to draw tourists. It makes them money.”

  “It?”

  “The sasquatch.”

  I felt goosebumps rise on my skin.

  “But it doesn’t exist. That’s just a story,” I sputtered.

  “Lots of stories are true,” he said quietly and looked into his apartment. His gaze rested on one of his old posters. “I, uh, used to be interested in it. In my business, the business of wonder, it was a very big prize. The biggest. I came here long ago to look for it. I even exhibited something we called a sasquatch, but it was really just a big hairy man. I wouldn’t do that now: I wouldn’t even cage a bird.”

  “You really believe in it?”

  He looked into the mountains again. His eyes grew large and the colour drained from his face. An image in his mind was electrifying him.

  “No,” he whispered.

  I looked down at the girl on the beach. She was staring back up.

  “I don’t believe in dragons any more,” said Uncle Walter.

  The glass door behind us slid open on its own. The music came surging out. It was that same sixties band again, Jefferson Airplane, but doing a different song, the woman’s voice soaring and intense. The bass line was thumping. It was a loud and crackling tune called “White Rabbit,” about a weird world where things shrank and expanded, animals spoke, and people talked backwards.

  I looked down. Walter Middy’s foot was tapping to the beat.

  5

  Alice

  “He’s a druggie.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That old guy you were with. Why were you with him?”

  “He’s my great-uncle.”

  I hadn’t even gotten all the way out the door of Uncle Walter’s condo and she was right there, a beach towel wrapped around her and wet. Now I noticed her blue eyes. They were incredibly blue, like the water of Lake Louise. They almost seemed lit from the inside. There was some sort of makeup, in a bunch of colours like a rainbow, painted on her lids. Her black hair was slicked back from swimming. She had a little tattoo of a unicorn on her hip and a ring in her belly button. Her skin sparkled like she’d thrown gold dust on it. There were freckles on her face.

  “Is he as interesting as…you?”

  Wow. I’d never met a girl like this. Back home in Toronto the girls have a reputation for being kind of bold, compared with the ones you meet in other towns anyway. But this one was something else. Maybe she was an American.

  “You don’t even know me. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back to the hotel. Mom and Dad wanted me back an hour ago.”

  “Mommy and Daddy?” she said mockingly. “Why don’t you be a big boy and hang out with me for a while…uh….”

  She paused and stared at me.

  “What?”

  “This is when you tell me your name.”

  “Oh! It’s, uh…it’s…Dylan. Dylan Maples.”

  “Hi there. I’m Alice. Alice Emily Carr.”

  She stuck out her hand, took mine in hers, and then squeezed it gently. For a minute, I thought she wasn’t going to let go. Finally, I pulled away.

  “I really do have to get back…and he’s not a druggie.”

  Mom and Dad had talked to me about drugs a lot. I had this sneaking suspicion that they had done some when they were young. But they said I should never even experiment. And I agreed. I had no desire. Drugs were trouble. They turn you into an idiot. I was going to have to ask Uncle Walter about his views on the subject, though, straight out.

  “Yeah, you’d better get home. You look a little wiped out to me. Hard week?”

  I didn’t respond. I just started walking away, towards the hotel.

  “If he isn’t a druggie,” Alice yelled, “then he’s a wizard or something! He’s weird enough to be one!”

  Yeah, I thought, and you’re following us around.

  I saw the “wizard” again the next day. Mom and Dad and I were strolling down Esplanade Avenue along the beach, heading for a swim, when we caught sight of him coming out of his condominium in the distance.

  “Why don’t you say hello,” suggested Mom as she watched Walter walking with his head down, his shoulders hunched, carrying something under his arm. She and Dad veered off in the direction of the water. I strode quickly towards Walter.

  But someone intercepted him before I got there, and started talking to him. It was Alice Carr. She was wearing pants that had about a million coloured stripes on them and a short top that showed off her belly-button ring and tattoo. She’d painted on some makeup again, and those sparkles glowed on her skin. I could see what Walter had tucked under his arm now: a skateboard. Alice was doing most of the talking.

  “Hi, Dylan,” said Walter quietly.

  “He isn’t a druggie,” said Alice out loud, smiling at him.

  “Never touched a drug in my life,” he responded. “At least I had sense about that. You didn’t need them in my line of work. Get on a high wire on drugs and you’re a dead man. Get on clean, on a thin lin
e between two skyscrapers, and it will thrill you out of your mind.”

  Skyscrapers.

  “I had natural highs like you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

  I believed.

  “I like weird,” whispered Alice into my ear, smiling at Walter, standing uncomfortably close to me, her breath tickling my lobe. Walter moved back a little.

  We started to talk, and drew some more circus stories out of him. As Walter quietly spoke, he absent-mindedly dropped his skateboard down and did some tricks. He was amazingly good at it.

  At first Alice was really into what he was telling us, but then she seemed to lose interest. She started looking away from us, towards the beach. I figured that if she could be bold with me, I could be the same with her.

  “What are you looking at?” I finally blurted out.

  “Nothing,” she said abruptly and stopped looking away. She tried to smile but seemed kind of guilty about something.

  Walter snapped his skateboard up into the air with his feet and caught it with his hands. “Nothing is a pretty boring thing to spend your time looking at.”

  Alice sighed. “It’s my parent. Over there.” She nodded towards the beach.

  “Parent?”

  “The one and only Carol Lewis. Voilà.” She pointed out a woman lying in a lounge chair about a hundred metres away. She had blonde hair and was wearing a skimpy bikini. A man, blonde too and younger than her, was applying suntan lotion to her back. She was giggling.

  “Just parent? As in, one parent? That guy’s not your dad?”

  “No no, that’s not my dad. He’s with someone else somewhere in Vancouver. I have no idea who that is, as usual. My mother likes to exchange one typical adult for another.” For a second I thought she was going to cry. But then her eyes widened.

  “Uh oh!”

  Her mother had spotted her. She was rising and coming towards us. She had taken the man’s hand and was pulling him along.

  “I’m sorry about this. She’ll make me introduce you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, wondering why her mother upset her so much.

  They were near us in seconds it seemed.