Monster in the Mountains

by Peacock, Shane;

  “In that thing?” Dad pointed at the Hummer. “Dylan, young lady, you’re coming with us. Walter, you’ll be driving that tank alone. And…” He paused and gave Walter a long look. “We’ve seen the last of each other.”

  “Of course,” replied Walter weakly. “Goodbye, Dylan. Alice.”

  I felt a pang of sadness as I watched Walter’s shoulders sag. He turned his back and walked away.

  Was he just giving up? Why didn’t he fight for himself? All that amazing spirit he’d had as a kid was gone. I wanted to scream at my parents that it wasn’t his fault. But I didn’t. I joined them and started trudging out of the forest. Maybe I’d lost my spirit, too, for good.

  On our way out we saw someone Alice thought we’d been seeing entirely too much of: Lance Bennett. He was standing at the edge of the forest where we’d entered, holding a shotgun, still in its case.

  Lance? Was he the guy who saw the Hummer leaving this morning?

  “Thanks,” said Dad as he walked past him.

  “No problem. I’m always an early riser. Just happened to be looking out the window.”

  Alice glared at him.

  “What’s the gun for?” I asked.

  “Never know what you might find out here, Dylan,” he intoned. “Might bag me a sasquatch.”

  8

  Somebody to Love

  They didn’t start yelling until after we dropped Alice off at Carol’s rooms and made our way up to our own suite.

  “Get in here!” shouted Dad.

  They very rarely yell at me. They claim not to believe in it. But I didn’t mind. It really made me feel like they cared. I guess they were pretty worried about me. They didn’t even give me much chance to explain. That was unusual too. The Reptile, and now this: they were pretty freaked out.

  But after about a ten-minute lecture, things started to get calmer. Mom was leading the way in the calming-down department.

  “Honey, we don’t think you should see Uncle Walter again.”

  “You make it sound like we’re dating or something.”

  “Don’t hang out with him then, smart guy!” snapped Dad.

  “Why?”

  “Why? How can you ask me that? You could have been killed by a grizzly, or God knows what. Thank goodness for this Lance Bennett chap.”

  “Uncle Walter wouldn’t have put us in any danger. It was our fault anyway, like I told you. He took us back just after he found us.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You should see what he has out there.”

  “I don’t want to know,” said Mom, her voice rising a little. “He’s been crazy and irresponsible since the day he was born.”

  “But maybe you’ve never really tried to get to know him.”

  “Oh, I know him, young man.”

  “He wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

  “Ask his dead wife!” Dad snapped.

  There was silence for a second. It seemed as though the air had just been sucked out of the room. I looked at both of them and they looked back. What were they talking about?

  Mom put her arm around me. “Someday I’ll tell you all about it. But not now. You had a horrible time last week. You need to take it easy. It was a mistake to make up with Uncle Walter. A leopard never changes its spots.”

  “Mom, I don’t want to…retreat…anymore. I know that now. I want to have fun again. Don’t you see? That’s what I really need. I think that’s what Uncle Walter needs, too.”

  Mom sighed. Then she spoke quietly. “If you want to have fun, Dylan, go swimming, relax in the hot springs. Don’t go out alone into a BC rainforest filled with who knows what!’’ Then she paused and tried to lighten things up. “Don’t you know that’s sasquatch country?”

  I didn’t laugh, so there was silence for a few seconds. Then they both turned away to get changed. Their clothes were pretty muddy.

  “Do you think there’s any chance it exists?” I asked them.

  They stopped at exactly the same time, and sighed together. Mom turned around.

  “Come on, Dylan, we’ve been through this. I was making a joke.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible? Hundreds of people say they’ve seen it. And they’ve found lots of footprints. Are all those people lying; are all those footprints fake?”

  “Almost anything’s possible,” said Dad curtly, “but not that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Why are you bringing this up again?”

  “Do you really believe that almost anything’s possible, Dad?”

  He never answered that one. By then he was shaking his head in Mom’s direction. They didn’t know what the heck to do with me. Ground me? While I was supposed to be on vacation recovering from what I’d been through in Alberta? I don’t think so.

  “Are you okay?” asked Mom very quietly a few minutes later, looking deeply into my face. I didn’t answer that one.

  I had the weirdest dream that night. It felt like I had been dreaming in my dream and then woke up. All I saw was blue sky out a car window.

  The next few days were much quieter. Mom and Dad kept me away from Uncle Walter’s condo and we did some family things. We went water skiing, did lots of swimming, hung out in the hot springs and even tried golfing, which is a bit of a doofus sport as far as I’m concerned.

  I saw Alice a few times, and even introduced Mom and Dad to Carol. Alice and I tried out the Blaster Bumper Boat rides: you bomb around smashing into other boats and firing off big water rifles. We formed a pretty good team. She loved to get her hands on the gun and really got into trying to win. Any time we got shot, she was pretty upset. We also tried these amazing ten-person banana tube rides where you get towed across the lake at mega-speed by a powerboat. You get totally soaked and sometimes bounced right into Harrison Lake. Alice always wanted us to sit close together, to help us stay on, she said. She kind of leaned on me when we went around corners, and fell on top of me quite a few times.

  She often asked about Uncle Walter. What was there to say? I told her I wasn’t allowed to see him. She didn’t understand. “Allowed?” she asked, as if that were a Martian word. But Walter had vanished from the beaches anyway, like a magician.

  Mom said Alice seemed “like a nice girl, despite that thing in her belly button.” She and Dad were invited to spend a day on the Tweedledum and Tweedledee yacht. They got along okay with Lance and Carol, though I could tell they really weren’t my parents’ type. Alice rolled her eyes when Carol appeared on deck in a new, sparkling gold bikini. She could hardly wait to get me away from them all. Late in the afternoon, she grabbed my hand and whipped me around to the back of the boat. Then she shoved me into the water. We swam back to the beach together and lay down on the sand.

  “I hate her.”

  “You hate your mom?”

  “Like, totally.”

  “My mom and dad are kind of goofy, I guess, sometimes, but—”

  “Your parents aren’t so bad.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “No. At least your dad’s around. I see mine about once a month. He and Carol split up when I was six. He’s very busy, too. Places to go and people to meet, you know. I can still remember playing with them, both of them…when I was a little kid. Now he’s never around, and she’s always out, working for some company or another. All that matters to her is money. She’s a fake.”

  Alice Carr was a bit like someone in the novels that my buds and I were forced to read at school, where the characters always come from dysfunctional families, or have some horrible problem the authors have drummed up. Not that Alice was a moaner. She just genuinely didn’t seem happy.

  “I want something, Dylan.”

  Uh-oh. I didn’t like that comment. Then she reached out and held my hand.

  For some stupid reason, I pulled awa
y.

  “Hand it over, goof,” she laughed, and grabbed my hand again. “I was just going to look at your life line!”

  She took my hand and turned it palm-up. Her hands were awfully soft and my heart started beating faster. What a doink!

  “This line,” she said, tracing her finger along the curving mark bordering my thumb, “is wild!” Her finger made my hand ticklish. “What an imagination you’ve got, Dylan! No wonder you’re interested in the sasquatch!”

  It looked like a normal line to me.

  “Look at mine,” she said. “Let’s compare.”

  She held her hand, a bit smaller than mine and tipped with bright red polish on her nails and a couple of rings on her fingers, so that her palm pressed against my palm. Then she pulled it back.

  “See, I have a really curvy line of imagination too. But check this one out.”

  She pointed to a crease going straight across her hand. It looked deeply cut.

  “This is the desire line. That means I have lots of desire about everything.”

  Uh-oh again. I wanted to be somewhere else. I started looking out to the water to see if our parents were floating back in. And actually, they were. The yacht was easing towards the dock.

  “I want people to have time for each other and be interested in each other,” continued Alice. “I like that song that your uncle plays, that old one about needing somebody to love.”

  I was hoping she wasn’t going to quote it to me.

  “I’m so sick of adult problems. I just want to be a kid again. I really do. Don’t you?”

  “Uh, yeah. Look, the yacht is docking.”

  “I just want to have fun.”

  I stood up. Alice sat there for a few seconds then she stood too, laughed, and gave me a shove.

  “You’re such a suck, Maples.”

  “What?”

  When I turned and looked at her, her bright blue eyes were smiling at me and her black hair was hanging down, wet and sandy around her tanned face. She had this look like a real friend would have, like somebody who’s really interested in you, and in what makes you tick. I kind of liked that look and found it sort of creepy at the same time.

  “I’d like to know what you’re thinking sometimes.” She laughed, and shoved me again.

  “Not much,” I offered. “Let’s go see the units.”

  I walked towards the yacht and she didn’t follow for a while. But by the time I got to the dock she was there, right beside me, like I guess I’d hoped.

  “Dylan Maples and Alice Carr! What a pleasure to be met here at the edge of the Riviera by such a worldly couple!”

  It was Lance Bennett. What a doorknob. He actually had a captain’s hat on. He leapt out of the boat onto the dock and began tying things up. Mom and Dad came down, too, not looking too comfortable around their new friends, but smiling at me. Then Lance helped Carol off, like she was a princess or something. He also helped her into this pink, silky-looking robe thing that she wrapped around herself. The letters “T & T” were emblazoned on it, and the whole thing looked like an expensive dress.

  “How embarrassing,” whispered Alice. We started to walk away.

  “Stay. Stay!” cried Lance. “I have something I want you to see.”

  In minutes he had marched us all to a place near the boardwalk off the esplanade. The beach was on one side, the town on the other. A big truck was sitting there with a wrecking ball hanging down from a crane. It loomed over about ten old houses. Reporters, cameras, and microphones were formed into a little semicircle in front of a podium. A crowd was gathering, looking curious, and some munchies had been laid out on tables nearby.

  What was this all about? What was going on?

  As we approached, Lance swept off his hat and his sailor’s jacket, revealing just a T-shirt that was supposed to look ordinary, but was one of those designer shirts that cost the big bucks. I noticed he was wearing jeans, blue ones that were faded just perfectly. Carol was slipping on a pair of high heels to wear under that robe-turned-dress thing she had on. She was also checking her face in a make-up mirror and putting on some bright red lipstick. Then she started nodding to the reporters, shaking people’s hands, thanking them for coming.

  “Here she goes,” said Alice with a sigh, “Ms. PR, on the job.”

  Lance stepped up to the microphone. A silver shovel leaned against his podium.

  “Welcome,” he said with a huge smile on his face, “to the newest phase of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee healthy candy empire: the stores that feed the imagination. We have arrived in Harrison Hot Springs at stunning Harrison Lake, home of Canada’s most beautiful resort and—” he winked at me, “—the sasquatch monster.”

  There was scattered laughter from the crowd. Mom and Dad grinned with the others.

  Then Lance went on to describe this huge new store and spa that he was going to build on the spot where they were about to wreck these old houses. Carol slowly moved up towards the podium until she was standing almost beside him, smiling at everyone. Before long he reached for the silver shovel. This was the sort of goofy thing that adults do when they’re about to put up a new building. The mayor of the town and the owner and other dignitaries pretend they’re about to begin building the place right there all by themselves by putting a shovel into the ground and posing for pictures. Of course, people like that wouldn’t know how to build an outhouse. But this time, Lance stopped just before they snapped the shots.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, before we do the requisite posing in this fabulous town of the wilderness legend, may I introduce…Tweedledum and Tweedledee!”

  With that, a long limousine pulled up and the doors swung open. Out of each side came the two largest human beings I had ever seen. They looked like they were well over six feet tall and weighed a thousand pounds between them. And they were almost naked—big, fat, muscular…sumo wrestlers—dressed in the little diaper-type things those guys wear.

  “3-D,” said Alice into my ear.

  The crowd oohed and aahed a bit, some even giggled. The sumo wrestlers seemed to understand. They even hammed it up a bit. They posed for pictures, then Lance directed the crowd to the food and the interviews began. Things were about to get boring. There was no way Alice and I were hanging around for this part.

  So, we snuck away and went looking for Uncle Walter. We knew we weren’t supposed to, but it was a perfect opportunity. The adults were so into what they were doing, they didn’t even notice. It seemed to me there’d be no harm in just talking to him for a while.

  We slipped into his condominium building when someone else opened the front entrance. We even got by the second set of doors and up the elevator to his apartment. Standing there, knocking, was Cosmos Greene.

  “Oh,” he said, turning to us, “how are you youngsters?” He seemed a bit distracted.

  “I don’t think he’s there,” I said.

  “Yes,” replied Greene, “I think you’re right.” He paused. “Well, I must be going.”

  “Just dropping by to say hello?” asked Alice.

  “Well, yes. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” I asked.

  Cosmos hesitated. “I’ll tell you why I’m here, if you promise not to tell anyone else.”

  We nodded.

  “There’s been a sighting.”

  “A sighting?”

  “A sasquatch sighting.”

  He could see the excitement come into our faces. “Now, don’t get all fired up, youngsters. We have many reports. Hundreds. Most of them are hoaxes. Though this one sounds pretty good. From a couple of hunters.”

  “But why are you here? What does this have to do with my uncle Walter?”

  “Well,” said Cosmos, hesitating again. “He…usually comes with me.”

  “He does?” asked Alice.

  Images of those muddy boots re-entered
my mind.

  “He knows more about the sasquatch than anyone other than myself,” laughed Cosmos. We didn’t laugh. We were just staring at him. “He learned a great deal about it when he was in showbiz and he’s just fascinated by it. Started coming here long ago looking for one. Mysteries and adventures, you know, that’s circus stuff. And I told you...I think he saw one. But for some reason, he won’t say anything about it. I just have this feeling though….”

  He seemed lost in thought for a few seconds.

  “Are you investigating it now?” asked Alice.

  “Yes.” He moved off down the hallway.

  “Can we come?”

  “No, no. That wouldn’t be right.”

  He could see our disappointment. But Alice wasn’t giving up so easily. “Where was the sighting?” she blurted out.

  “Just off the main park road into the woods past the boundary, where hunting is allowed.” He was near the end of the hall. “I have to be going. Nice to see you again.”

  We stood still outside Walter’s door and watched Cosmos disappear around the corner. Then we looked at each other.

  “Let’s go,” we said at the same time.

  There’s a shuttle bus that takes campers up to Sasquatch Provincial Park. It goes every hour during the day. We were in luck. When we got there it was ten minutes from takeoff. Soon we were winding our way back up the main park road. The bus kept stopping at various campsites, letting off people who carried grocery bags towards trailers. There was no sign of Greene. Then, deep into the park, before the bus turned around to head back to town, we saw a car pulled off to the side. We checked out the licence plate, cosmos, it read. Moments later we were standing on the road, eyeing a fresh path that led into the woods.

  9

  On the Trail

  As we entered the forest I glanced over at Alice. She had this look on her face like she was ready to fly to the moon. She caught my eye and gave me a smile that I’d never seen before. She was incredibly happy. We raced into the woods, the ferns whipping against our pant legs.

  Before long we heard voices. We froze. Then we began moving much slower and quieter. It was hard not to make the leaves crunch under our feet. With every step we were afraid we’d be heard.