The Sighting

by Christopher Coleman

  Danny smiled and nodded politely. “Thanks Mark. You have a nice rest of your day. Though shouldn’t you be at work or something?” Danny didn’t want to fight, but he couldn’t help tossing in a light jab.

  “I work in a hotel. Nights. What’s your excuse, asshole?”

  Danny looked off into the distance, sincerely pondering the question. “Before today I didn’t have one. But I think I do now, Mark. I think I do now.”

  Chapter 3

  “Why do we have to leave so early, Lynn? Since when are you such a morning person?” Lyle Bradford ruffled his hair and slipped on his flip-flops, yawning with half-open eyes.

  “Just come on, whiney.” Lynn Shields was frantic inside, but she was using every grain of concentration to stay composed and casual.

  She grabbed her boyfriend’s hand and led him out the door, striding into a fluttering jog, him flailing behind her as they made their way through the backyard to the overgrown path that led to the dunes.

  By her estimation, she still had two weeks left—even now, after ten years, it wasn’t an exact science—but after last cycle’s failure, and the ensuing worst year of her life, she wasn’t taking any chances.

  Still, she’d fallen in love with Lyle, and had prayed all year that it would never come to this. She had even considered telling him about the God, considered bringing him into the fold, perhaps convincing him to help her secure the victims.

  But Lynn always knew that Lyle Bradford was too kind to be a merchant of death. He didn’t have those same qualities that she had. Was she a monster? Probably. At least, she understood, that most objective people would deem her as such, and she accepted that assessment as a real possibility. But this ability to lure and murder existed inside her nevertheless, monstrous or not, and she decided the inheritance of the ability contained its own value, and it was not for her to judge.

  But Lyle was different. Lyle wouldn’t have offered up a squirrel for sacrifice, let alone his fellow man. He was sweet, and his sweetness made him vulnerable, a perfect replacement plan for the one that collapsed only weeks ago.

  It was a sound plan, the original, and one she’d worked on all year. Rove Beach was more upscale than most beach towns, but it had its share of homeless. Seven of her first nine victims, in fact, had been vagrants, men Lynn had befriended in secrecy on the streets in town and then lured to the beach in the middle of the night, rewarding them with cash and full bottles of whiskey. The rapport with the men wasn’t easy, however, and always took months to build, so when her intended victim for this cycle was found dead on the beach from an overdose—at the very spot where the God would be arriving in less than six weeks—she was thrust into a full-fledged panic.

  But this year she’d made a back-up plan. She didn’t always have one, but after last year’s heartbreak, she wasn’t taking any chances. But that plan, too, became a pile of ashes when Lynn’s sister—who was scheduled to visit with her kids and perpetually-cheating husband, the man Lynn had targeted for the sacrifice—had canceled her trip at the last minute.

  At that point, she was left with few choices. One choice really. There had been no time to devise anything else, at least not one that was certain not to miss.

  “I didn’t bring a towel,” Lyle pled, a last-ditch effort to forego this pre-dawn outing.

  “It’s fine. We’re just gonna take a walk. Besides, we’re a hundred yards from the house. If we get back and want to stay down here for a while, you can run back and get a couple of towels.”

  Lyle yawned. “Fine, but you’re running back. I’m too tired.”

  “You won’t be after the walk. Just stop talking for a second.”

  Lynn stood atop the dunes and stared off to the Atlantic, she far more fascinated by the water below than her lover of a little over a year. He appeared to be sleeping on his feet, wavering in the breeze.

  Lynn was breathing heavily in anticipation, her heart pounding beneath her hooded windbreaker.

  She had sent out the signal a little over an hour ago, only minutes after rising from bed like an assassin and walking to this very spot. Here she had lain the compact boombox in the tall grass and pressed the play button on the CD player.

  The high-pitched siren had blared out toward the sea, the sound mixing seamlessly with the mating calls of the insects. Other than the awakening of a few dogs in the vicinity—at every other time of the year, Lynn saw dogs only occasionally, even on the beach—the siren song went undetected, even in the quiet of the predawn morning.

  She had made the decision to let the recording play longer than usual this time, though being that this morning’s try was would be the first of the new cycle, her expectations weren’t particularly high. But even if she was too early, she wanted to get Lyle in the habit of these morning walks.

  They would be taking them every morning until she saw it.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered, and stepped slowly down the dunes, Lyle wiping the sleep from his eyes as he trailed behind her.

  Chapter 4

  Lynn Shields was not a name Danny recognized, but, in all honesty, there was no reason he would have. Rove Beach wasn’t that kind of place, one where everyone knew everyone else. For being adjacent to the ocean, it certainly didn’t have that beach town charm one normally expects from a city as small and quaintly located as the one in which they’d chosen to live. At least for a while. Tammy had once suggested the motto of the place should be “The small town with the assholeness of a big city.” Danny didn’t go quite that far, but her point was taken. People kept to themselves here. There weren’t a lot of ‘Good mornings’ or tips of the cap when you passed people on the sidewalk or on your way out of a store. To this point, almost ten months since Danny and Tammy had moved in, they had made no real friends. They’d never gone to lunch with another couple or even been invited to dinner. Of course, he and Tammy had made no bona fide attempts to fit in either, which, Danny concluded, was probably why they picked Rove Beach in the first place. They were the same type of people.

  Danny sat tall in his office chair, tickling the keyboard as he thought how best to query. Just start, he thought, and then he typed the woman’s name into the long, thin search engine box, along with the name of the town. No reason to over think it.

  He scanned the first page of results and saw one that looked promising. It was an online article from the Beach Rover, the local paper, the one he’d been toying with the idea of subscribing to, but that he’d ultimately decided to pass on, fearing that reading the paper every day would turn him into an old fuddy-duddy.

  But there it was, the good old internet, presenting the name Lynn Shields, bolded in black in the midst of a paragraph which, based on the truncated text of the search engine copy, indicated it was part of an article about some type of tragedy of which she was a part.

  He clicked the link and an article appeared titled “Search Continues for Man Missing from Rove Beach.” The article was dated October 22, 2007.

  The search continues for Lyle Bradford, a local chemist who is thought to have been swept from a sandbar along the 700 block of Atlantic Drive. Police arrived at the scene at approximately 6:20 am, Sunday morning, after responding to a call of a possible drowning. Bradford’s girlfriend Lynn Shields called police after losing...

  “Danny?” It was Tammy.

  “Hey.”

  “Watcha doing?”

  “Just uh...a little research.” Danny continued staring at the screen without reading, hoping to send the message that he was busy.

  “Did you find it?”

  Danny turned to Tammy. “It?”

  “Your towel, right? Isn’t that what you went back to look for.” Tammy rolled her eyes and snorted a laugh. “Did you think I meant the Creature from the Rove Beach Lagoon?”

  The thought of striking his wife had never crossed Danny’s mind, but at that moment, just for a beat, he felt a real desire to stand up and slap her. Instead he held his tongue and emptied his thoughts, focusing on the moment
and not his mind. “I didn’t find the towel, no. Anything else?”

  Tammy cocked her head and frowned apologetically. “Oh stop it, I’m just kidding. I told you I’m open to believing what you saw. Let me see the pictures again.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Come on.”

  Danny started to feel like a child, like a little boy being picked on by his bully big sister. He decided not to respond.

  “Did you find the woman at the beach?”

  Maybe, Danny thought. “No.”

  Tammy lingered behind him for a few moments—Danny could feel her thinking of something to say, something that would give her reason to stay—and then the sound of footsteps clicked back to the kitchen.

  As was often the case around this time of day—with the morning routine over but before the lunch hour had arrived—Tammy was bored. It was one of the unintended consequences of their windfall. She had quit her job as an elementary school vice principle when they moved, and, since she and Danny had no kids of their own, she hadn’t yet found that thing to occupy her newfound free time. At least once a month, Danny would encourage her to go get a job, anything, even if it was as a substitute teacher or office assistant, something that would get her out of the house and engaged in the world. It wasn’t that Danny was sick of his wife—not really—he just knew that in the long run, Tammy being busy and stimulated would make for a much happier household.

  But she always stalled, telling him at first that she just wanted to take three months, then six, and then it was a year. Danny was going to hold her to this latest time line, since a year seemed like a real benchmark. In another five or six weeks, he was going to insist she start looking for something to do.

  Danny was often bored too, of course, but he technically had a job. Songwriter. It was a bit preposterous, he thought, seeing as he hadn’t written a single lyric in over eighteen months, but he was just taking some time. Just another six months, and then he’d start working. Ha!

  Bradford’s girlfriend, Lynn Shields, called police after losing sight of Bradford early yesterday morning. The report stated Bradford had swum on his own to a sandbar of the coast, and that Shields saw several waves sweep over the sandbar just before he went missing.

  It is not clear why Bradford swam to the sandbar. Foul play is not suspected.

  This last line struck Danny as odd. Foul play? Of course foul play wouldn’t be suspected. Why would this question even have been asked of investigators to begin with?

  Danny checked the byline at the top of the page. Sarah Needler. He wrote the name on the first buck slip in a thick pad of buck slips he kept on his desk—ostensibly for that occasion when the muse arrived and he was struck by a verse of pure genius—and underlined the name twice. The search to uncover his mystery sighting had begun.

  THE WOMAN CHECKED HER watch and then looked back to the path that led to the beach access. He was a few minutes late today, but if her timings were accurate, he should be coming any time now, turning the corner with that quick sprinter’s burst, straight down the path that leads to the access and then up the stairs to the overlook. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before that. It was the same routine, six days a week for the last three months, when she first began the search for her newest offering in a long line of sacrifices.

  The woman checked her watch again and then the skies above, as if her assessment of the creeping sunlight was a more reliable device than her timepiece. He was late today, the runner, at this point just a little, only a few minutes, but in this practice, a few minutes was everything.

  The timing had to be perfect.

  Yesterday it wasn’t. The God hadn’t come when it was summoned. That wasn’t altogether unusual, not on the first attempt—in fact, the first few tries almost always failed—but next week would be different. She always made adjustments, just as she would this time. There were still almost two weeks left in the cycle, plenty of time. But none of it was available to waste. She had to get it just right.

  What she couldn’t do was miss it. She couldn’t wait another fourteen months. That was simply impossible.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  She had missed the feeding once before—only once—and that year had been, without a close second, the most tortuous of her life. The pain had been crushing, almost completely debilitating, and as she thought of it now, her eyes watered with fear at the possibility. She pressed her lids with the tips of her fingers, and the fear slowly dissolved, seeming to chemically change within her, now forming a light film of regret.

  Regret about the year that followed.

  She had killed the only man she ever loved, had sent him to his death, as surely as any judge who had ever sent a convicted man to the gallows. She’d never made any attempts to rationalize her actions, nor did she try to diminish the anguish he no doubt suffered. As it did for all of them, Lyle’s death appeared to be excruciating.

  She held the shame and guilt in her mind for several moments, focusing on it, living it over now as she sat alone on a wooden bench just outside Rove Beach Park. She never pretended to be justified in what she had done, and the pain she experienced that morning, all those years ago, still lingered today. But that was a pain she could live with.

  The other type, the one that had enveloped her when she’d missed the sighting—the feeding—she could not.

  And here she was again, engrossed in another cycle, each of which became more difficult than the last. The offerings went quickly once the God took them, but keeping the feedings secret, and for her eyes alone, was a task that required meticulousness. As was true of most of the towns in this part of the country, particularly those on the coast, Rove Beach grew in population ever year. And the diversity of the immigrants that flocked here made the feeding schedule that much more complex. Retirees and students, bums and exercise nuts, early risers and nightgoers, all combined to make the whole affair increasingly problematic.

  But she’d been watching for months now, measuring, timing, and she had found one day, one spell during the week along the precise stretch of beach where the God emerged, when there was never a soul. Except for one.

  The runner.

  Yesterday was the first try and she’d failed. Miserably. Not only did the God not arrive to her summons—which was, again, not all that unusual—but the man had seen her! So lost was she in concentration, staring with concern at the place where the God emerged every year and two months, awakening for a few weeks to find its food before submerging again to its chamber of water and muck, that she never noticed the runner’s arrival. He must have been camouflaged by the darkness of the water when she’d arrived, beneath the waves, or perhaps had slipped back onto the beach under the cape of night. How could she have been so careless as to not do a proper surveillance, particularly on the first attempt?

  But in truth, that the runner had seen her was unimportant. He knew far less about her than she did him. She didn’t know his name, but she knew he was new to Rove, and that he had no real acquaintances to speak of, at least as far as she could tell.

  Besides, what was notable about her standing on the dunes that would make him remember her, even if they crossed paths again? A woman such as herself staring at the ocean on a seasonally warm morning was as common as the waves themselves.

  Still, she had to do better. It was her first call of the season, yes, but she’d still executed it very poorly. She should have been hidden near the beach, watching him as he finished his morning swim, weapon in hand, waiting until the creature either emerged at dawn or not.

  But she’d gotten lost again in the anticipation, so obsessed was she with the ocean beast.

  Thankfully, the God hadn’t answered her. The calculations she had made over the last two decades had narrowed the window for her slightly, and she’d become more precise with the arrival, but there was work to do still.

  Two decades. She was only in her forties. Almost half of her life had been devoted to these few weeks, every fourteen months, duri
ng which only a few moments of those weeks were filled with the spectacle on which she subsisted.

  The devouring was a miracle.

  The woman closed her eyes and groaned at the feeling the memories of the feeding produced. The power of the creature, so docile-looking and benign just before the event, and then terrible and primal when the instinct finally arrived.

  What if it had come after she fled?

  The thought shot into her mind as if sent from somewhere deep in the earth, and terror suddenly flooded her brain. What if she had made a grave miscalculation? Waited long enough that the signal was received, but not long enough to see it emerge? Perhaps it had fed already! This last thought brought tears to the woman’s eyes, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. The man wasn’t arriving today because he was already dead! The event had occurred! Had she checked the paper today? One day probably wasn’t soon enough for a drowning or missing person to have made it into the paper, not without a witness seeing him go in. Still, there had to be another way to find out.

  Lynn Shields thought back to the day Lyle died, and could recount virtually every word she’d told to the police. And to the reporter after.

  As she drifted unwillingly into this memory, she heard the huffing of a man, mouth open and working. It was the runner. He was later than he’d been the day before. She looked at her watch again and added it to the calculus. She’d made no calling to the God today, and she prayed it wouldn’t come anyway.

  Today was for surveillance. She had to get better.

  Chapter 5

  Even after the events of yesterday, Danny kept his morning routine as usual, just as he’d done for over nine months now. He finished off his stair climb atop the overlook and checked his watch, noting that he’d arrived a few minutes later than normal. It’s a miracle I’m here at all, he thought. Nobody would have blamed him for taking a day off.