The Dunfield Terror

by William Meikle

  This part of the story comes to a halt two days later. Joe and Harris asked me to join them in the boatyard. They had the creel boat out of the water and lifted up high on the trailer. I wondered why, until they showed me the hull—it was buckled and ridged—I know that wood can’t melt, but God help me that’s exactly what it looked like, like plastic that had melted, then hardened. In my mind’s eye I saw the tendrils again, reaching for us from that glowing mass, stroking, almost tenderly, at the bottom of the boat.

  I went straight back to Rick’s Bar and made inroads into a bottle. It was a while before I came out again.

  5

  Present day

  When we got back to the depot, young Jimmy wouldn’t shut up about what we’d seen at old Pat’s boat shed.

  “It was the fucker, wasn’t it?” he said—and kept saying. None of the rest of us paid him any heed. We knew exactly what we’d seen. That didn’t mean we had to acknowledge it—to ourselves or to anyone else. Jimmy paced the floor, buzzing with adrenaline and shock. The rest us of sat huddled round the wood stove, trying to get close enough to force some heat into our bones. George had got the bottle of Scotch out of his locker and we took turns pouring slugs into fresh cups of coffee.

  “It’s real, isn’t it?” the lad said. “It’s really real.”

  Old Pat lit a smoke before finally giving an answer.

  “I’ve never been too sure of that,” he replied. “I’ve seen it three times in the sixty year I’ve been here, and every time it’s just like a wee bit o’ fog, coming and going. It always takes something when it goes—and it sometimes leaves something behind too. All I knows is that I seen it—but I seen other things that’s not real before now, so who knows?”

  After befuddling us with that gem of personal philosophy, Pat went back to sucking smoke, and I sat there warming my hands on the coffee, trying to resist the urge to fill the cup with Scotch. The only thing that stopped me was the wind howling outside. The storm was still ramping up—and there would be more than old Pat needing our services before the night was out. The fog might be out there—but so was a town full of people, many of them elderly, sitting out the weather and hoping not to fall foul of it. It was my duty to keep watch over them, and that thought was enough to stop me taking to the bottle.

  For now, at least.

  I hadn’t always been so strong, especially in those years just after our New Year’s Eve excursion out on Dunfield Bay. I spent more time in Rick’s Bar than was good for me—plenty more than was good for Bettie Walker. My engagement didn’t last long, but I couldn’t find it in myself to care too much—my head was always full of dark water and glowing fog. It haunted my dreams, it was there every time I closed my eyes, and only the oblivion brought on by booze gave me any respite at all.

  And so it went, for three years—I held down my job, but only just, due to the forbearance of a kind supervisor and special dispensation for my encounter with the “fucker.” The Pollock twins never returned from college, and I never heard from them again—nobody in town did. I often wondered if we shared nightmares, and if so, I hoped they were having a better time of it than I was.

  Eventually, the dreams started to fade. I managed to sleep without too much booze, although I had developed a liking for it that proved harder to shift than the nightmare.

  I got it all under control—or rather, I thought I had. But now it was back—and the thirst had come raging back with it.

  “But we saw it,” Jimmy said, bringing me back from my wool gathering. “We need to stop it.”

  “How do you suggest we do that,” George replied. “We can’t shoot it—and it’s not exactly going to respond to harsh language.”

  Pat spoke again.

  “As far as I know, it has never killed anybody,” he said. “It might be best to just stay out of its way and let things take their course.”

  That sounded like a damned fine plan to me.

  Jimmy kept prattling on for a while but I tuned him out. George and Pat made serious inroads on the Scotch—Pat mainly, for which I was thankful, for I might still need George before the night was out.

  I kept checking the storm’s status online. It wasn’t going away anytime soon. The wind was up over a hundred kilometers an hour already, and was only going to strengthen. The snow, which had been heavy enough to start with, had decided to get serious, with accumulations in excess of three centimeters an hour forecast throughout the night. Without the use of the big plow, the town would be cut off from the highway in short order—might even be already for all I knew.

  * * *

  Around midnight the storm really started roaring. The next call came in five minutes into the new day—I recognized the voice, Margaret Brodie, a single pensioner in a big house at the far end of town just off the Bonaventure road.

  “There’s a big tree coming down out front,” she said, as calm as you like. “It’s looking to bring the power line with it too if it falls the wrong way.”

  I told her I’d be right with her.

  Pat looked up, but I didn’t need him—old men should be snug and warm on nights like this. That applied to George too—he was close to a well-earned retirement—but if it was the big tree I thought it was, then I’d need all the help I could get—Pat was going to have to hold the fort in the depot on his own. I told Jimmy to get the small plow ready and phoned Dick Hislett at the hydro depot to give him a heads-up.

  As expected, Dick came on the line at the second ring. I told him what was what.

  “I’ll see you there in five,” he said.

  I remembered how bad the snow had been the last time I looked out.

  “Best make it ten. See you when we see you.”

  I wrapped and zipped my coat and went out into the night again.

  Just opening the door earned me an icy blast full in the face that had me seriously thinking about the pleasures of the Scotch bottle, but Jimmy was already halfway across the parking lot headed for the small plow.

  “What do we need, boss,” George shouted from behind me.

  “I’ll take the big plow—the blade’s no use but we can use its power and bulk if need be. Follow me in your pickup—we might need the winch.”

  He gave me a mock salute and headed for his truck.

  If truth be told, I wasn’t keen to get back in the plow’s cab—not after the night’s experiences—but George had called me “boss”—I’d better start acting like one.

  Jimmy flashed his plow’s lights twice to let me know he was ready and I led the three of us out. My lights only showed me ten yards or so of snow-covered road, but I knew this way well enough. There was a fresh six inches of the white shit on the ground, but, even despite being mangled and warped, the plow made short enough work of it, and Jimmy behind me took care of any that I missed.

  We made good time down as far as the hollow at the campsite where I had to pull over and let Jimmy get the small plow at the drift that stretched the width of the road and some five feet high. I sneaked in a quick smoke while watching him work—it might be my last for a while.

  To his credit, the lad did a fine job of clearing the road, piling the snow into evenly stacked walls on either side. It was only a matter of time before it drifted up again—this spot was notorious for it—but I hoped to be back in the warmth of the depot before then.

  I led our small convoy to the far end of the road and Mrs. Brodie’s house. There was no other traffic—no other sign of life, for the snow was thick enough to obscure my view of most of the houses, although they were only a few yards off the roadside, and I had my hands full keeping the plow on the road. The mangled blade had changed the driving dynamics completely, and now, when the wind caught the blade the wrong way, the whole rig tugged and pulled to the right, needing all my strength on the wheel to keep it straight.

  I was happy to reach the road end with no mishap—but a lot less happy to see the tree ahead, leaning at a thirty-degree angle and looking likely to topple at any time. It was
a big old maple, high, and thick in girth—more than a hundred years old at a guess, but not about to get any older. It had already pulled the earth up on the house side, brown earth showing among the snow. I hoped we weren’t going to lose the water main too, but for then my biggest worry was the electricity.

  I couldn’t see them in the snow, but I knew that the power lines were only just overhead. If the tree came down, so would the line—and all the power in the town with it if we weren’t careful. I didn’t stop to think—I maneuvered the plow to line it up with the tree, raised what was left of the blade and put the rig’s full weight against the leaning trunk. The cab shuddered, we slipped back six inches and I held my breath, expecting to have a face full of tree at any instant. But finally the brake bit and we held position. Jimmy and George knew instinctively what to do. It was tough work with the wind and the horizontal snow, but we eventually managed to get a winch chain fitted around the trunk and had George’s pickup take the strain. We’d ensured that we could control the fall but it looked to be only a matter of time before the tree came down.

  “It’s going to have to be moved,” George shouted. “We can’t leave it like this for long.”

  I agreed.

  “And if it falls where it is, it’ll take all the lines with it. We’ll pull it over and drop it in the road for now,” I shouted back. “We can shift it in the morning—there’s nobody but us going to be coming this way till then anyway.”

  George nodded and got in his pickup. My plow pushed, Jimmy’s smaller one pulled, and the winch chain tightened so much I thought it might start dragging on George’s pickup, but his brakes held and the tree gave way under the strain. It fell slap in the middle of the road. I didn’t even hear a sound above the roar of the storm, although there was a sudden flurry of snow that momentarily filled my view and blinded me. I had to get out of the cab to check, but we’d managed it—the power lines had stayed up.

  * * *

  I caught a glimpse of a light being switched on up the driveway at the house. Maggie Brodie came to her door and waved, beckoning me toward her. I trudged up the slight slope through nearly a foot of snow.

  “I’ve got coffee or soup if you boys need something hot?” she shouted.

  At that moment, coffee sounded exactly what I needed.

  “I’ll get the lads,” I yelled back, and turned, walking away. My shadow, cast by her hall light, danced and flitted in the snow. As I reached the end of the short driveway, the shadow got darker, and the snow around me took on a pale glow. I’d seen that glow already that night—I knew what was behind me. It took all of my willpower to turn back—just in time to see the glowing fog settle over Maggie Brodie’s house.

  6

  From the journal of Duncan Campbell, 15th July 1955

  Well, I’m back—back in the one place in the world I hoped never to set eyes on again.

  It’s not as if I had much of a choice in the matter. Last Wednesday I had a visit from old Muir. He’s not the man he used to be—browbeaten and battered by the military brass in their attempts to get him to divulge the secrets of his “experiment.” He’d stuck to his guns this past year and more now, but when he arrived in my Chelsea flat that night, I saw something new in his eyes—it looked like despair.

  “They won’t let it be, Duncan,” he said as I poured him a stiff drink. “They want a weapon—and they won’t believe me when I tell them that I have no idea how to build it. You saw what happened in Dunfield—it was a bloody accident—a terrible, terrible accident. All I did was put the pieces in the right order, at the right time, in the wrong place.”

  “You’ve tried again, then?”

  He nodded, and gulped at his drink.

  “Several times to no avail. They think I’m swinging the lead—that I’m some kind of conscientious objector. But you know that isn’t me. I just can’t get the bally thing to work. But I have an idea.”

  I had a sinking feeling in my gut—I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I sipped at my Scotch, hoping that he’d take my lack of interest as a sign to keep quiet. But keeping quiet has never been Muir’s way—and he hadn’t changed quite that much.

  “I want to go back, Duncan. It won’t be official, so I can’t force you to come—but I’d like you with me. I want to have a good close look at that wreck.”

  That was possibly the last thing on Earth that I wanted—I was still having nightmares from the last time—but I felt responsible for my own part in last year’s proceedings, and Muir was most insistent. When he mentioned that his intent was only to put things right, and not in fact an attempt to give the military what they wanted, I agreed, reluctantly, to accompany him.

  When I woke in the morning, I realized that the Scotch had been doing my talking for me, but Muir had already accepted the fact that I was on board. As it turned out, he already had all the preparations in place. All I had to do was get on a plane—three planes actually, then a bone-rattling car trip across the island from Deer Lake airstrip to Trinity.

  But all the discomfort of the trip was forgotten as we pulled into the old town. The memories of that fateful night came flooding back. The last year may as well have only been yesterday.

  I’m sitting here now, late on the evening in the Village Inn. I can hear Muir in the bar downstairs, arguing loudly with someone. I can’t say the locals are pleased to see us, for the memory of last year’s disaster is as raw with them as it is in myself. We need a boat—but I am not at all sure that any will be forthcoming.

  * * *

  From the journal of Duncan Campbell, 16th July 1955

  Well, I was wrong about the boat—Muir didn’t exactly win the locals over, but his money proved to be more persuasive than his arguments. We have the use of a creel boat for as long as we need it, but we have not, as yet, managed to retain the services of anyone to pilot it for us. That meant a comical hour after breakfast as Muir and I took turns going around in circles in the harbor to get the feel of the craft while trying to avoid crashing into anything or grounding ourselves on hidden shallows—of which there are many. Such was our ineptitude that local children took to standing on the old harbor wall shouting abuse and laughing at our pitiful attempts at seamanship, and it was almost noon before we got up enough gumption to leave the relative safety of the harbor.

  We headed out, in as straight a line as we could muster, to the lighthouse at the mouth of the bay, then along the coast toward our destination.

  The clear sky and bright sunlight seemed to mock my apprehension. We had a spot of lunch—grudgingly provided by the innkeeper—while moored just off Indian Head Rock. A solitary bald eagle eyed us from the top the whole time, ready to swoop should we discard any morsels of food. After eating, we lit up smokes before continuing.

  Muir seemed almost happy. We had talked several times in the past year, but neither of us had much of an urge to discuss that night out in the dark and fog—the horrors were all too raw, all too real. But now, out in the bright sun and sparkling sea, something impelled him to broach the subject.

  “I have been thinking, Duncan,” he said.

  I laughed.

  “Don’t strain yourself, old man.”

  My attempt at levity wasn’t appreciated. Muir continued without acknowledging it.

  “I am coming round to a theory—if you’d like to hear it?”

  I waved for him to continue. Anything that kept us from approaching Dunfield Bay was fine by me at that moment, and I was rather enjoying the feel of warm sun on my face.

  “We know much about the internal structure of the atom and how to effect changes in it,” he said, lapsing into his professorial voice. “But what if there is more than just fission and fusion for us to play with? What if we could stretch the empty space between the nucleus and the electron shells? We would, in effect, be making the very structure of matter thinner, more diffuse. Think about it, Duncan—is that not what we saw that night?”

  “I try not to think about it,” I replied, but Mu
ir wasn’t to be dissuaded. He continued without waiting for further reply from me.

  “What if what we stumbled on was a new way to manipulate the very basic structure of matter itself—and without any risk of explosion or radioactive fallout? What if—”

  This time I interrupted him.

  “Perhaps we should have talked to that crew about risk before we started.”

  That brought him up short.

  “It is in the nature of the advancement of science that—”

  “Please don’t,” I said. “There is no justification that I will be willing to listen to. Not this close to where it happened. If you are determined to see what a mess you made, then let’s get to it. Perhaps then you will realize the folly of following any further course of action in this direction.”

  I am afraid that things between us were rather strained for the rest of the short journey along the shore to Dunfield Bay.

  * * *

  We arrived at the site in midafternoon. A slight breeze ruffled the bay, reminding us that July in Newfoundland is still perilously close to winter at times, but the bright sun continued to keep much of my lingering gloom at bay.

  Muir stripped down to a pair of trunks, a mask and a snorkel.

  “It’s going to be bloody freezing down there, man,” I said. “This is madness.”

  “Don’t worry, old boy,” he replied. “I’m a bit of a dab hand at this. If I can do Orkney in November, I’ll be fine here. I’ll be back in five minutes, tops.”

  He tipped himself overboard without another word, going in with a splash that was the only sound in a suddenly quiet bay. The small boat rocked gently side to side, then fell still. Even the handful of birds sitting on the Tern Rock went quiet, and the scene, in my mind at least, took on an air of quiet anticipation.