Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  “I’ll be keeping you at a ceiling of three hundred meters. Controls are disabled but try not to touch anything, even so.” Noakes scowled at me. “Just leave it to the computer and me if you know what’s good for you. Radio’s here, and you’ll want this headset on. I’ll call in just before descent. Make sure to pick up when I do.”

  The flight was uneventful. Tubes of grey water going beige with silt and sand rolled eastward ahead of me. The sky was a mobile slab of burnished slate, marbled with sunlight and shadow like a cut of old meat gone off. Sickly small birds kept pace with the drone, wailing over the magnetic hum of the engines. The low light, the dull sound, the weak waves of heat from the sea grappling with the coolants in my clothes; all combined to put me in a semi-conscious state. I almost decided on accessing the noönet to share the experience but after a moment thought better of it. I was carrying too much to make a good impression on anyone, let alone Inga and Sam. Duhren. I knew they’d check in if I shared my flight, because like the crèche brochure says, sharing is caring. I wasn’t worried too much about Ceri, but still, with two nights in Charlie’s bed still fresh in my mind, it wasn’t worth the risk. Losing the edge off the little pangs of guilt would take time, I determined. Time to pin myself back, get presentable for the troops in the morning.

  I was making an internal list of other metaphors for sorting oneself properly when the radio squawked and Noakes’ voice came floating out of my headset.

  “Hey there, Mr Secord. We’ll be touching down in a couple of few, so, y’know, seat belts, tray table, thanks for flying and so on.” The dark bulk of the coastline had only just come into view, I noted. I checked the GPS.

  “Bill. I’m going to the facility. The one on the map? We’re nowhere near there yet.”

  “Near enough. Didn’t you say you wanted to be dropped off where he was dropped off.”

  “No, I wanted the facility. I thought I made that clear.”

  Noakes coughed. The pickup was decent enough I could hear soft masses vying for new positions in his throat, and the grinding of his teeth. “Yeah, you probably did. Nevertheless, at this juncture, I will have to disappoint the client, as there’s some weather coming in and I want my unit back here and under a roof before it does.”

  “Come on, Bill.”

  “Nope. Sorry not sorry. Happy trails.”

  “Noakes!”

  I tried to pull him up again, toggled uselessly at switches near and around the radio unit. Nothing. The asshole had signed off with smug finality, and the drone began its descent. Ten minutes later I was entering a long fjord of black rock and blacker water, and ten minutes after that saw me hovering a metre above a slime-soaked beach at the head of the fjord, blue shelves of quake-busted shale rock and driftwood below me. The reek of creosote, evaporating salt water, seaweed, gull shit, and freshly-dead baked crustacean made an almost visible stain on the air. The storage carriage in the back of the drone pinged a warning and seconds later my pack and gear were unceremoniously dumped to the slick ground. I winced at the thud.

  “Might wanna disembark,” came Noakes’s voice from the radio again. “Otherwise...” There was another warning ping, this time from the console in front of me. I yelled at him to wait, but he was either ignoring me or more likely had switched the channel to one-way. Hustling and cursing the guy, I unbuckled from the sling and let myself down to the earth.

  Hauling my gear up the shale to the trees took a few minutes. The drone lifted off, then hovered at thirty metres for an irritating period of time. I felt mocked, and would have shaken my fist at the machine if I thought Noakes was watching. Finally, the thing shimmied on the spot and then sped away, gaining altitude.

  I checked my pack over, pulling some contents to inspect for damage; there was none. Most importantly, the wayfinder and GPS were functioning. Wondering briefly what sort of weather was coming, I shouldered the pack and moved into the trees.

  ***

  If there had been a trail in the past, it had long since grown over. I kept to the soft, decaying banks of the stream, and was forever checking against my GPS for where to place my next steps. There was some wisdom in this, as I had enabled the topological overlay, but the constant chipmunking I was forced to do made for a fragmented experience of my surroundings. The coastal forest became layer upon layer of impressions. At times a damp cathedral, the furred and knotted bark of yellow cedars and spruce, red alder and black cottonwoods, all transformed by the fog into dark pillars of rot. The rare spear of sunlight above illuminating a network of dimly glowing black webs surrounded by rotating pinwheel auras of deep green and sickly amber. At others, a cavern, roofed over in a thick thatch of black boughs and creeping mats of needles like mangy fur. Bright circular blades of fungi exited the bark of each tree, fallen or not. They glowed a sickle white and dripped amber fluids onto fiddleheads and ailing cattails.

  I knew this was the rainforest in decline. I’d been told as much by decades of environmental reporting. The idea that this trip, this plunge into the consuming green border of the continent, would not have been nearly as simple even twenty years ago, was hard to parse. This trail, such as it was, would not have existed. I had an actual view as I walked, for one thing; I could haul myself atop a rock outcropping or perch at the end of a fallen giant, supporting myself with a hand on a root like rusted undersea cable, and actually see where I was going, so long as the mist was thin. When I dropped to the dirt, my boots would vanish in a soft cloud of agitated particulate. The earth here was desiccate, losing coherence, held together by desperate root systems and networks of industrious moss, insect corpses, abandoned spider silk. When the wind picked up now and then, I could stand still and feel the floor of the forest beneath me breathe; the swaying of the trees above translated into the motion of their roots below the surface.

  The sun got low behind me and Noakes’s foretold weather had yet to arrive. Night fell slowly here. Full dark came heralded by long hours of gloom and a thickening of the ever-present mist. My long view grew short and I finally stopped to make camp in the hollow space between two fallen cedars. During my time in the woods, and at Stonefish House, I would often find myself in this space. Burrowing like some parasite into the cleft between two rotting thighs of cedar or Douglas fir, breathing in the damp, pungent aroma of rot. The first time seemed novel, though, and I felt a kind of thrill at the thought of sleeping outside again. That gap year had been a long while back, after all. Who did this anymore? Certainly no one I knew back home. Only the displaced. Refugees. The mad. Though I wasn’t exactly doing this for fun, nevertheless I took a moment to feel my cultural privilege.

  “What a time to be alive,” I may have mumbled.

  My one-person tent was pneumatic, so I cleared the ground between the trees as best I could with boots and hands, then placed it in the gap, and pressed on the activator flange. The thing farted and flapped for five seconds, a ridiculous sight that I couldn’t help but laugh at, but at the end of the performance I had shelter. Exhausted, I crawled inside and made myself as comfortable as possible. It was a relief to get out of the clothes. Thermokinetics and coolant gels tend to get funky after a few hours’ use, and I was no better in the odour department. Good, too, to pull off the respirator and let the tent fabric do the air scrubbing. Dinner was an afterthought; a protein bar and water that failed to rid me of dry mouth. Lithium in the tent pneumatics, probably. Sleep came quickly.

  I woke to birdsong and steaming vegetation. An uncharacteristic bright morning with barely a shred of mist. A baleful red sun shone low through the trees. I drank more water and scarfed a handful of nuts and supplements before collapsing the tent. The thing sucked and wheezed obscenely, folding in on itself; I didn’t find it nearly as funny this time. The daylight seemed to move through the forest like a living thing, simultaneously sinuous and brash. My feet had swollen in the night and getting into the boots proved difficult. Everything else had cooled though, and I sighed with relief as I slipped on my jacket and sealed it
at the neck, activating the coolant gels. With the sun already in the sky, I knew it was going to be a hot one, so I set off immediately in hopes of getting some distance logged before the real discomfort began.

  I found the tracks about three hours later.

  I had crossed a small streambed of black sand and water turned ochre from the leaf litter runoff when they appeared. I say appeared because that was my first experience of them, of the tracks. I half-turned to look at the trail behind me, to see my impressions in the sand where I’d walked and there they were. A set of footprints, pacing mine, splayed broad, and so deep they seemed to suck in the light. The initial sight was shocking enough that I gasped audibly and half stumbled, half fell to the ground. How had I missed them? That was my first thought. Perhaps the light was at such an angle that the black depths of the tracks, in the black sand as they were, simply merged, becoming undetectable. Then again, I had been concentrating on crossing running water, my attention on my own steps. When I had sufficiently recovered, I slipped off my pack and, shaking with excitement, moved into the streambed for a closer look.

  What a strange, fearful thing. An incredible thing. Giants in the earth, walking, walking. Maddening, in a way I had not anticipated during the research. A person can’t know, ahead of the actual moment, how they will react when confronted with something like that. Yes, maddening. I found myself fighting against a dizzy feeling of surrender, of giving in to astonishment. Small wonder, I thought, that the idea of these things caught and held the imagination so well and for so long, if this was its presentation. Many minutes passed before I felt brave enough to actually press a finger into one of the tracks. Doing so sent a shock of weird energy through me, and the feeling of being dislocated, loose in my own skin, abducted outside of myself by my own perceptions, became very strong.

  The tracks themselves. Those damned things. Nine of them, starting with a left foot in the red detritus exiting the brush at the other side of the stream and continuing across. Left, right, left, right, left, right, and so on. Bipedalism at its finest. I estimated the tracks at eighteen inches long, five to six wide, and uniformly broad. The thing had no instep to speak of, no pronounced curve descending from the ball of the foot to the heel. The toes, five of them, were similarly broad and flat, squared off and mostly equal in size, with the big toe only slightly larger than the rest, and the pinky toe only slightly smaller. A child’s drawing of a footprint. I thought of the ancient half-tone photo of Gregor holding up a plaster cast, his eyes gleaming.

  The foot that had made this print had to be more a paddle than anything else. A board, pressed deeply into the fine, black sand. I could put a fist into the deepest part of the impression, right up to the wrist. How had I missed these? I ran a finger above the place where a heel had come down into the sand. There were relief marks there, clearly delineated, as of cracked and callused skin.

  I stepped back, and, working from a memory of the cryptozoology sites I’d skimmed during the early days of hunting for Makarios, I gauged the distance between each print. That was a thing you were supposed to do upon finding these things. Take measurements. That, and plant little brightly colored flags at the heel of each print. I had no flags, but I estimated the space between each of the prints to be four feet, at the least. Stride length I figured at six to seven feet, more than double my own. I noticed, too, that some of the tracks had been left in the streambed, below the running water, and these retained their shape somehow. As I wondered how that could be, the realization hit, and hit hard.

  These tracks were fresh. Very fresh.

  It was at this point that I began to feel more than unsteady. My feet were pins beneath me and I hurriedly sat myself down on a boulder at the edge of the stream but the solid rock did little to ground me. I felt unmoored. My mind pulled at its tethers, my heart bucked and skipped. Where was the thing? I thought, and a panic began to rise in my chest. It was only by a supreme effort that I kept myself from leaping up and spinning, scanning the brush. Had it moved on? The stride length indicated purpose and speed. There was no way it had made these tracks behind me, I reasoned. I had heard nothing, no disturbance in the brush, no splash of water. So, it had been ahead of me, and likely even further ahead by now. It had moved on, surely. It had moved on.

  Relaxing by degrees, I flashed on my camera, extracted it from a front panel of my jacket. Pictures, of course. Of course I would need to document this. At some point during my travels, I’d somehow cracked the casing, but the camera, once spooled from the tube, seemed undamaged. I held the thin sheet in front of me and began recording, tentatively stepping into the streambed again.

  I can’t say when they began to change. The moment doesn’t show in the video, or the pictures, and what does show makes no sense. So intent was I on keeping my footing while recording, I’m not sure even I saw the subtle alterations when they began. They did, though. Technically, it happened right before my eyes. The outlines of the prints became fluid, grains of sand dancing around each other in a kind of Brownian motion, like creamer in coffee. In the dry prints and the ones under the surface, the same protean shifting. The prints filled themselves in, spread themselves wide in places, narrowed in others. My mouth grew suddenly dry as I watched. They were vanishing into another shape, hiding themselves in plain sight. Over the course of three, maybe five minutes, I watched as the evidence (for I had begun to think of the tracks as such, as The Proof!, that same proof imagined by every unlucky soul to come across them for decades) slipped away into the mundane, becoming what might have been the tracks of a bear making its sloppy way across the stream, or, at one moment, even the boot prints of a late Anthropocene human being. Soon, though, even that momentary resemblance faded, and the tracks filled in completely with welling moisture from below, frantic sand, and dead leaf matter, leaving nothing.

  There are bear tracks in the film. For a few moments, only. Photos of bear tracks, and then photos of odd linear gouges in the streambed. There are noises, too. My voice, random exclamations and a kind of ecstatic sighing that I have trouble believing came from me. But there it is, or isn’t.

  After the streambed, I moved in a kind of daze. Excited, anxious, paranoid, and oddly gleeful. I had seen a remarkable thing! This was the revolving statement in my mind. That, and the words Gregor Makarios was right! Him and every whackjob cryptozoologist before him, by extension. Neither statement makes sense now but at the time they comprised a kind of mental engine that drove me through the bush. I stumbled and tripped and took a thorough thrashing from the forest but noticed none of it. I’m sure if I’d seen myself in a mirror I would have been unrecognisable to myself. I mean that I could feel the brightness behind my eyes. And I made nothing like the distance I had the day before; when I finally collapsed at the spot where I made camp, the GPS showed barely three kilometres from the streambed. It was as if I’d been high, on an infusion of Sky or even one of the older classics, full of wonder and wandering, a floating point of awareness and not much more. The next day, the final push to the facility, would be a brutal one, the device indicated. At least nine kilometres, over much rougher terrain. I tried not to beat myself up too much over it, tried to enjoy the flatulent tent again, and failed at both.

  I decided to eat decently that evening, if only to reduce the weight of my pack. I managed to choke down two of the freeze-dried meals. The first played at being some kind of beef protein in a brown sauce with rice, the second was loosely themed on curry and possibly chicken with a root vegetable base. I tried not to think about it too much as they boiled away in their little silver bags atop the camp stove. To distract myself from the grim task of feeding, I made an inventory of my pack and discovered that Charlie Mack had secreted a gift in an interior pocket I’d missed earlier: a fifth of whiskey, maybe three quarters full. There was a note. All I had in the cupboard, enjoy. The Canadian stuff. The nation itself may have dissolved years back, crumbling in the face of the economic firestorm to the south, but they still managed to keep the disti
llery industry afloat. Priorities.

  “God bless the true north, Charlie,” I toasted. “Strong and free.” The booze certainly took care of the gathering migraine that the industrial curry seemed to be trying to introduce. As darkness fell, I realized I had perhaps taken too much of the drink, though, and compensated with extra gulps of water and a few handfuls of nuts. There was ibuprofen in the pack as well, but I decided to wait things out, see how I was after a night of sleep before going there. Given what was to come in the night, I wish I’d made better choices.

  I lay still in the tent, spinning a little from the whiskey, thinking about the tracks. Thinking about Charlie and her grandmothers. What had they seen around me? In me. What had I seen in that streambed earlier. I sat up, too quickly, spots of color speckling the darkness before me. Fishing around in the pack, I laid hands on the camera, then lay back down, unspooling the device from its tube again. The tent glowed in the soft grey light from the screen. I cued up the footage I’d recorded and watched, again and again, as the light faded outside the tent walls. Soon the only illumination was the screen in my hands.

  Sleep claimed me then, but didn’t bother to get a decent grip. I was held on the edge of slumber, passing in and out of consciousness. My body was exhausted, relaxed finally and still, but a combination of rough forest floor litter beneath me and mental agitation around me created an almost hypnagogic state. My psyche seemed on the run, moving through a densely packed colonnade of dark and light shapes. If there was a narration to these visions, it consisted mostly of wordless hissing and bass thumps that would sometimes coalesce into words released from sense. Now and there and quickly, quickly among others, all possessed of a breathless, panicked quality. Asleep, but only just, and prone to fits and starts, I would sit up suddenly, aware but without focus.

  It was on maybe the third or fourth of these semi-awakenings that I realized a truth: there was a source for the pseudo-sounds I had been dreaming, and they came from outside the tent. With that thought came an instant clarity and wakefulness.