Monster Lake: A Thriller

by J. D. Crayne

  "And I'll give Crosseyed Benny over at the trailer park a nudge," Ernie assured him. "He'll swear to it. He's seen stranger things than that after a fifth of Old Coltsfoot."

  Uncle Hank held up a hand. "Wait! One more thing. We've forgotten the sacrificial treasure!"

  "Never mind," Steve said firmly. "I'll take care of the sacrificial treasure myself."

  * * *

  It was dark by the time that Steve got home. The book shop in the front of the house was locked up for the night, and he went through the side gate and around to the back entrance. There was a muffled thudding sound that became noticeably louder when he opened the back door, and he could hear someone chanting. He cherished the forlorn hope that his mother had some sort of ethnic CD playing, but that hope was dashed when he found her sitting on the floor of the small parlor that they used as a living room, wrapped in a sheep skin, with a pair of elk antlers tied to her head and a small drum between her knees.

  "Hello, Nuupalokka," Steve said, with a feeling of resignation.

  His mother's Finnish control, Nuupalokka Susiluola, nodded affably and went on drumming.

  Steve sighed, went into the kitchen, closed the door behind him, and heated up a can of soup. When he was done eating he went back into the parlor, where his mother showed no signs of running down.

  "Look, Nuupalokka," he said, raising his voice over the monotonous sounds coming from the tenth-century shaman, "I hate to interrupt, but could I have a few words with my mother?"

  The drumming and chanting continued.

  "Dammit, Mom! Cut out that noise and listen to me!"

  The woman on the floor flinched with shock. Her hands hovered over the drum. There was blessed silence for a moment.

  "Steve," she said sadly, looking up at him, "you know you shouldn't interrupt dear Nuupalokka. His drums and chants are the only pleasure the poor soul has, and it's hard enough for him to come through to this plane of existence."

  Steve ran a hand through his hair in frustration and squatted down in front of her. "Look, Mom, we need to talk."

  He took the drum away from her and set it gently to one side.

  "I really think we have to discuss Nuupalokka. And Aleister, and Neferthothis, and Dancing Elk, and the rest of the crew. The fact is, Mom, I can't take much more of this."

  "Why, whatever do you mean, dear?"

  "When I got out of the service," he said calmly, reaching out to untie the antlers from her head, "all I wanted was peace and quiet. I thought it was a great idea to buy this little book and map shop out in the boondocks and spend my life getting away from it all. You'd bake brownies, and I'd sell postcards to the tourists."

  "And so we have, dear! Whatever is wrong with that?"

  "What's wrong," he said through gritted teeth, "is that your psychic friends are interfering with my love life. You know Sancy Pitt? Well, I have been hoping to marry Sancy Pitt and I don't feel like carrying her into a house that's full of a bunch of gibbering astral idiots!"

  "Steve," his mother said sadly, "your aura is a very poor color this evening. Why don't you meditate on the Miwok ley lines of Mendocino County? I just got a lovely new book about them, and I'm sure that you'd find it very soothing."

  "Oh, to hell with it!" Steve said, getting to his feet and stomping off to his bedroom, where he slammed the door behind him.

  Presently he heard the renewed tap of the drum, and after a while he fell asleep to the muffled chanting of the Finnish shaman.

  * * *

  The next morning Steve found his mother much more herself. She was in the kitchen, blamelessly frying pancakes, scrambling eggs, and looking like a retro ad for Betty Crocker. He ate breakfast, kissed her on the cheek in a much happier frame of mind, and set off to find a sacrificial treasure for the lake monster.

  His quest took him, inevitably, to Hetty's Antiques, three blocks down the road from the bookstore; owned and managed by Henrietta "Hetty" Herkimer.

  The term "antiques" was very elastic when it came to Hetty's shop, since most of her merchandise was simply "used" and would be considered collectible only by the terminally optimistic. Steve stopped just inside the door, to let his nerves get used to the sight of plastic dolls in crocheted ball gowns, souvenir ashtrays, and gold-sprayed pasta-work pictures.

  "Why, Mr. Mayor! What a lovely surprise!" Mrs. Herkimer shrieked.

  A widow of many years standing, Hetty was a stout woman who used henna and rouge with equal abandon, and had never gotten over the 1950s thrill of back-combing her hair. At the best of times she looked like she was wandering around under a small red sheep, and she had a positive genius for picking out clothes that did nothing for either her complexion or her shape. Today's effort was a purple lame jumpsuit held in by a chartreuse alligator belt.

  "Hello, Hetty," Steve said, in what he hoped was a friendly, and not merely stunned, tone of voice.

  "Whatever can I do for you today?" she said, batting mascared lashes.

  "I need a few things that are cheap, bright, gaudy, and won't float."

  She blinked.

  "Well, that's certainly straight forward," she said in a different tone of voice. "A present for some relative, is it?"

  Steve put a friendly arm around her shoulders. "Hetty, my love, you know what business is like around here from September through April?"

  "Dismal."

  "Right! Now, just think what it would be like, Hetty, if we could lure some nice, friendly, winter tourists up here to eat, drink, buy souvenirs, and generally fling a little cash around?"

  Her avaricious little eyes brightened. "Whatever it is, I want in on it!"

  "Good girl!"

  Once he explained, and Hetty grasped the concept, she turned out drawers and boxes with frenzied enthusiasm. Not only that, she donated the booty.

  "I haven't been able to unload this junk for the past five years," she said, holding up a double handful of pot-metal link bracelets, and tossing them into a box that already held one gold-spattered glass candlestick, a gilt statue of Madonna, a brass badge marked "World's Best Teacher", and a hoard of unmatched earrings with large gaudy glass jewels.

  "Oh yeah, and you might as well take this too," she said, scowling at a rhinestone-studded profile of Liberace, hanging from a thick brass chain, before dropping it in on top of the rest and dusting off her hands.

  "Hetty, you're a woman in a million!" Steve said enthusiastically.

  "Just send me a donation slip from the City Council," she said. "Oh, and leave the value line blank, will you?"

  As he was walking down Hetty's front walk carrying the box, a familiar dark, stocky man in a sports jacket and checked pants, with an orange ascot tied at the neck of his brown silk shirt, turned in from the sidewalk and grinned at him.

  "Picking up some spare change making deliveries now, Mr. Mayor?" Hubert Pigott asked. "Or are these new decorations for the bookshop?" He hooked a finger in the Liberace pendant, lifted it, guffawed, and dropped it back into the box.

  "What are you doing around here?" Steve asked suspiciously.

  Pigott shrugged. "It's a free country and a nice little town. I just thought I'd stop by and talk to Mrs. Herkimer about a little business proposition I've got for her."

  "Dammit, you're trying to buy her out too!"

  "Business is business," Pigott said with a smirk.

  Steve brushed past him, swearing, and stomped off down the street.

  After he carted the sacrificial treasure back to his house, Steve phoned the other City Council members to set up an emergency meeting. As he was going back out the front way, through the bookstore, he saw his mother accepting a large number of boxes from a brown delivery van.

  "What's all this stuff?" he demanded.

  "Nothing, dear," she said placidly. "Just some books and things that I got from a specialty store that was going out of business. I thought they'd make some nice artistic accents around the shop."

  Steve was in too much of a hurry to investigate further. He left hi
s mother to her boxes, told her he'd be out for lunch, and headed for the Florentine Palace.

  * * *

  "Well, that's where we are," Steve told the Solitaire City Council, as he finished up his report. "I've got the ceremony all set to go, and a bunch of junk, donated by Hetty's Antiques, to toss into the lake. I figure we can do it next Saturday. That gives us a little over a week to get out press releases, fix up a...Tlac...Clat... dammit! T-L-A-K-L-O-T! I wish old Hank had come up with a different name for the damned thing."

  "Why?" asked Carlson Hope, looking surprised. "I think Tlaklot has a nice traditional sound to it. Real ethnic."

  Steve glowered at him.

  "We just have a week to set up the lake monster museum in town, put up posters, and handle all the details," Paul said, shaking his head. "It's going to be a very, very, busy week!"

  "Great work so far!" George Regent said. "I vote a commendation to our Mayor for his fine efforts on our behalf!"

  "Thanks, but don't put it in the official record," Steve cautioned, glancing at Sancy, who had her steno pad in front of her. "This is a traditional Huchnom indian ceremony, remember?"

  Paul Berquem sucked his teeth for a moment and then said, "I really like the idea, but I think we need a monster."

  "Don't get too damned hokey about this," Janey Reitz cautioned, rolling a panatela between her fingers. "Gotta leave something to their imaginations, right?"

  "Yeah...," Paul said, "but wouldn't it have more pizazz if the tourists could just see something sort of poking through the water? Just kind of a glimpse, of what might be out there? Like that picture of the bumps in the water at Loch Ness. Nobody knows what it is, but everybody's got some kind of idea."

  "Great idea!" George said, bouncing up and down in his chair. "We could snap pictures of it and sell postcards and stuff!"

  Steve took off his reading glasses and scratched his nose. "How do you make a monster?"

  "Fiberglas?" Carlson suggested, smoothing down his blond hair.

  "Couldn't we just tie some old tires together?" George asked.

  "They'd sink," Steve said. "We need something that will stay on the surface until we pull it under the water."

  "With what?" Janey asked, chewing on the end of her cigar.

  Carlson shrugged. "Ropes, I guess."

  Paul Berquem cleared his throat. "Styrofoam. We could get Marlow White to carve something up for us. He's always patching boogie boards for people. Put some lead weights in it to pull it down into the water."

  Steve nodded. "Sounds good, but it's got to move. We can't just leave it out there wallowing around in the water."

  "How about a remote control, like in model airplanes?" Carlson asked.

  Paul shook his head. "Wouldn't work underwater." He cleared his throat again. "I've been messing around with some sonar equipment I got from a surplus store in Sacramento. I think I could rig a receiver and a motor with a small propeller. If you get the weight balance right, I should to be able to make it move around and dive. That sort of thing."

  "It ought to make noises," George said, his blue eyes shining like a kid's at Christmas. "Whoops and wails or something."

  "Jeezus, George!" Janey said. "This isn't for a damned haunted mansion at Epcot, you know! This is god damned serious." She chewed fiercely on her panatela.

  "Well, I still think it ought to make sounds," George said sullenly.

  "I guess I could put some kind of little CD player in it," Paul told him, soothingly, "but I don't think whoops and wails are quite..."

  "I've got a record of humpback whale songs," Sancy offered.

  "Perfect!" Steve said, beaming at her. "That's our monster–the last of the freshwater whales of Mendocino County!"

  "I didn't know there was ever a first one," Carlson murmured.

  "There was, and the indians knew all about it!" Janey snapped.

  "Okay, okay." He lifted his hands in surrender.

  "We all agree then?" Steve put in hastily. "We get Marlow to make us a monster..."

  "Sort of a whaley-porpoisey thing but with humps," George said.

  "... and Paul will rig up the sound and motor power for it. Janey, you and Carlson are setting up the museum. Sancy, draft a press release for me to look at. And, George, you're in charge of fuzzy snapshots and suspicious footprints."

  They all nodded.

  Project Tlaklot was underway.

  * * *

  As Steve was on his way out of the door he accidentally bumped into a couple coming in, apologized, and found, when he looked around, that it was Martha Regent and Carolyn Brunswick.

  "Oh! Hi, Martha, hello, Carolyn. I guess I wasn't paying attention to where I was going."

  "Sounds like a typical man," Carolyn commented, sounding amused. She was tall and statuesque with an easy-going manner.

  Martha, shorter and darker with a round figure and smooth olive skin, nodded. "They can't help it, poor things. Even with the best of intentions, they're just men."

  "If you're through cutting me down to size," Steve began...

  "Nothing personal, Steve," Martha said. "but we just saw that worm George Regent a moment ago, and he brings out the worst in me."

  "He's very devoted to you," Steve said. "He was telling me just the other day how much he misses you.

  "We were married for five years. Do you know what he gave me on our very first anniversary? My own fishing license!"

  "I'm sure he meant well."

  Carolyn tittered. "Go on, Martha, tell him the rest."

  Martha folded her arms and tapped her foot on the concrete. "Every anniversary after that, he renewed it. For Christmas it was a neatly boxed set of trout lures, or a tasteful collection of lead sinkers! On my last birthday, before I left him, he gave me a big can of fishing worms with a red bow on top!"

  Steve sighed. "I guess you two did have a compatibility problem."

  "That's putting it mildly," Martha said, still fuming. "And that house! Stuffed fish, wherever you look. You just try eating breakfast for five years with a lacquered trout glaring at you. I couldn't wait to get out of that house. Although, I have to admit," she continued, turning to Carolyn, "that Ted Probert wasn't much better. When he wasn't talking about propane, he was talking about diesel."

  Steve cleared his throat. "George is a nice guy at heart. I think he'd like to try for a reconciliation."

  "Hah! When Lake Tahoe freezes solid!"

  "Now, if you'll excuse us," Carolyn said, "we want to grab a bite of lunch before we head south. We're catching a plane to Paris for a few days of relaxation and sightseeing."

  "I should be so lucky!" Steve said. "So long; have a good time."

  They walked past him, and then Martha looked back. "You can tell George two things for me," she said. "One, I'm filing for divorce, and two, if he ever turns up under my window again, the water is going to be hot, not cold!"

  Steve walked back home, opened the front door of the bookshop, started in, and almost beaned himself on a glittering sphere, hanging from a piece of plastic fishing line in the middle of the room. The ceiling was engulfed in a cloud of scented fumes, and he noticed that the smoke detector had been disconnected. There were crystal gewgaws and psychic doodads on every flat surface.

  "Mom!"

  A female figure, rotund in several layers of long and short skirts, at least two blouses and three sweaters, and with a long-fringed yellow shawl draped over her shoulders, peered around from the far side of a tall bookcase and beamed at him. She was holding a good-sized stone mortar in the crook in her left arm, and energetically grinding away at something inside of it with a pestle held in her right hand.

  "Ah! Back so soon, dearie?"

  "Mom, what the hell is all this junk!" he demanded, waving an arm at the room in general and cracking his knuckles on a bronze statue of a many-armed goddess, draped with sun catchers, that was sitting on the corner of the counter.

  "Baubles to catch the fancy, dearie. Pretties to please the precious poppets."

>   "And what are you grinding up in that thing?"

  "Wormseed, asa's foot, bisom, and swine's snout," she said complacently, checking to see how the mixture looked. "A sovereign remedy for possession by demons."

  Steve groaned with exasperation, and leaned on the front counter, head in his hands and fingers clutching at his dark hair.

  "Mom... oh, all right. Just who are you this afternoon?"

  "Ursula Sontheil, dearie. Call me Mother Shipton. Witch and soothsayer to the court of the Tudors and King Henry, bless 'im."

  She set the mortar on the counter with a clunk that made the glass shudder, and dropped the pestle into it with a resounding thud.

  Steve winced and looked up. "Don't DO that. That counter cost an arm and a leg."

  She dusted off her hands and eyed him with interest. "Oh? Whose were they then? Did you get them from Tyburn?"

  "Never mind," he muttered. "It's just a figure of speech."

  "Ah. Well then, no need to worry about it." She leaned forward and peered closely into his face, exuding a smell of licorice. "You are seemingly peaked, for so young and well favored a man. Perhaps I should brew you a posset."

  "NO! No... I don't need anything. "

  "A love charm, then? Just the thing to ensnare a lovely maid, fairest of the fair."

  "I don't..."

  Steve broke off as the front door opened, and they both looked around.

  Sancy Pitt walked delicately into the room, dainty nose wrinkling at the scent of incense, and delicate lips pursed as she surveyed the various occult trinkets. She was carrying a sheet of paper and held it out to Steve.

  "Here's the press release," she said shortly.

  Mother Shipton looked at her with interest and smiled broadly. "This'll be the fair maid, then?"

  "Ah, yeah," Steve said, waving a careless hand at them; his eyes fixed on the paper. "Sancy Pitt, Mother Shipton."

  Sancy looked Steve's over-dressed mother up and down. "The Yorkshire Sibyl?"

  Mother Shipton beamed. "Fancy you knowing that, and you such a young slip of a thing! Not to say I haven't had me share of fame," she added complacently.

  Sancy nodded. "You foretold Henry's defeat of the French in 1513, the end of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the Great Fire of London in 1666..."