Encounters

by Mike Resnick

  “Are you sure you want to get involved in this, Reverend?” asked one of the men.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Isn't it against your religion?”

  “Show me in the Good Book where it says you can't poach salmon in Inverness,” I replied.

  “Reverend Jones,” said one of the men, getting up and putting an arm around my shoulders, “I like your brand of Christianity. You build your tabernacle, and you've got your first customer in Angus McNair.”

  We had a couple of more drinks, and then Angus McNair decided it was time to go poach the salmon, and we wandered out of the tavern and walked through town, and then we started going across some bog outside of town, and just as I was wondering why we couldn't have used a kitchen that was a little closer, we came to this great big lake.

  “Here we are, Reverend,” said McNair.

  “You're gonna poach the salmon right here?” I asked.

  “Couldn't very well poach it back in town, could we?” he said, and everyone laughed, so just to be polite I laughed too, though for the life of me I couldn't figure out why not, unless they figured it tasted better over an open fire.

  “Let's get the boats out,” said McNair, and suddenly they pushed back a bunch of dead branches and brought out three boats. “You can come with me, Reverend Jones.”

  “We're going out on the lake?” I said.

  “Unless you feel like rowing on dry land,” he replied.

  Well, I didn't have no answer to that, so I just climbed in alongside of him, and we rowed out to where the current was mighty swift, and then he tossed a net over the side, and rowed back to shore hell-for-leather, and once we got there he climbed out and started gathering in the net, and there were four or five big salmon in it, and I noticed both of the other boats had done the same and were gathering in their own salmon.

  By this time I was hungry enough to eat one raw, but I decided that I might as well be polite and wait til they got around to poaching ’em.

  “Ain't you gonna build no fire?” I asked.

  “And alert the constable and the gameskeeper?” said McNair. “The whole reason we come here after midnight is to avoid them.”

  “What are you going to do, then?” I asked.

  “We'll chop off their heads and gut them, and then bring them back to the village.”

  “I don't want to appear unduly forward,” I said, “but does anyone ever get around to actually eating ’em?”

  “Certainly,” said McNair. “We'll feast tomorrow, eh, men?”

  The others all chuckled and nodded, which left me to wondering what we were doing there tonight, but I didn't want to say nothing that would make me appear ignorant, so I just kept my mouth shut and watched while they went to work on the salmon. They tossed all the heads and guts into a big metal pail, and then McNair handed it to me.

  “Here,” he said. “Toss this into the loch, and be careful.”

  I walked to the edge of the water, and suddenly I heard a bunch of birds screeching and squawking and looked to see what the commotion was all about, but there wasn't nothing happening, so I turned back to the water, all prepared to dump the pail, when I found myself face-to-face with something that was awfully green and mighty wet and plenty big and mostly scarey.

  “Give it to her quick, Reverend,” said McNair, “before she decides to take it right out of your hand.”

  This here creature was maybe a couple of hundred feet long, and covered with scales, and it kind of reached out this enormous neck until its head was hovering right over me, and if its face was nothing to write home about, let me tell you that its breath was even worse.

  I tossed what I was holding, pail and all, at the creature's face, and it just opened up its mouth and swallowed, and after I finished counting its teeth I looked down its throat and decided there was plenty of room for a man of the cloth to slide right down without causing no serious problems at all, so I did what any reasonable man would do and raced back to the boats like unto an Olympic sprinter.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  “Ah, that was only Nessie,” said McNair with a shrug.

  “There wasn't nothing only about it!” I said. “If I didn't know better, I'd swear I just saw a sea serpent!”

  “You did,” answered McNair. “You've heard of the Loch Ness Monster?”

  “As has been writ up in song and story?” I asked.

  He nodded. “This is Loch Ness, and that was the monster.” He paused and looked at the ripples in the water, which were the only sign that a monster has recently come around begging for table scraps. “We get dozens of scientists out here every year, looking for her, but old Nessie, she's got an aversion to people. Only time she ever breaks the surface is when she knows we're going to throw her the leftovers from our salmon poaching.”

  Which was precisely the moment that my hunger for a little poached salmon got itself overtook by my hunger for a little easy money.

  “You mean all you got to do is come to the lake here, and go out on your boats, and she knows you're going to toss her some fish guts?” I asked.

  “That's pretty much the way it works,” agreed McNair.

  “And as long as you feed her, she don't never molest you, or breathe smoke and fire, or gobble up your boats, or nothing anti-social like that?” I continued.

  “She's a nice old girl, Nessie is,” said McNair. “We don't bother her, she don't bother us. The way we see it, the salmon innerds and heads are her commission for letting us fish in her loch.”

  “Well, that's right interesting, Brother McNair,” I said. “And you say she don't never show herself to the august members of the scientific community?”

  “Nope,” he said. “She's got no more use for ’em than we have.”

  “There wouldn't be any such members around here, would there?” I asked.

  “I hear tell there's an American staying over at Glen Mohr,” he said with a chuckle. “Been on the loch for two weeks now. I believe he's due to stay here for another week before he goes home and tells all his peers that the monster is just a myth.”

  Just about that time one of McNair's colleagues pulled out a hip flask, and we all had a little nip to keep the cold night air at bay, and then we went back across the bog to Inverness, and while they all went to sleep, I lay on my bed in Culloden House and tried to see where the most likely profit was to be had from the monster's existence.

  I figured that no scientist, no matter how gullible, would pay me good coin of the realm to lead them to Nessie until they knew beyond a doubt that she existed, but if they saw her, then they didn't need me to prove it to them. I mulled on it til daybreak, and as I was having breakfast the solution finally dawned on me: I would buy a camera and take some pictures of Nessie, and once I showed them to the scientist, he'd be more than willing to pay me a finder's fee for leading him to her.

  I hadn't never taken a picture in my life, but as soon as the stores opened I picked me up a camera and half a dozen rolls of film. Anna was feeling a little less angry in the light of day, so I had her show me how to work the shutter and apertures and such, and just to make sure I had the hang of it, I took a practice roll of her standing on the front porch of the hotel.

  Then I stopped by a fish market, of which there were an awful lot in Inverness, bought a bunch of heads and guts that the owner was going to throw out, stuck ’em in a pail, tried not to notice the smell as I carted it off to Loch Ness, and went out in Angus McNair's boat. I spent a few minutes on the lake, then rowed to shore and waited—and sure enough, Nessie showed up a minute later, all two hundred hungry feet of her, and I took a whole roll of film of her gobbling up the fish heads and innerds I had laid out all nice and neat on a log between me and her. Then she belched once, and disappeared beneath the surface of the water.

  I stopped by the camera store, gave him all my exposed film to develop, and went back to Culloden House, where I tried to catch up on my sleep and Anna tried to catch up on her romanc
ing, and though it was a near thing, I got ’em both done in the proper order.

  I just kind of loafed around the next day, and in midafternoon I stopped by and picked up my pictures. Everything had come out clear as you like, and I decided that if I ever gave up preaching, I could probably make a living taking artistic photographs of ladies in their unmentionables for use in calendars and other such vital publications.

  First thing the next morning, I left a package of Anna's photos with her and told her to send ’em to her father with my compliments, just so he'd know a new and thoughtful preacher had set up shop in town. I passed Angus McNair and his cronies coming back from a hard night's fishing as I moseyed over to Glen Mohr, which was an old Tudor house that had been turned into a hotel, and I sat myself down in the lobby and waited until the guests started moving around. Finally a young feller with thick glasses and bushy hair walked down the stairs, said good morning to the desk clerk in perfect American, and headed off for the dining room, and I got up and followed him.

  “Excuse me,” I said, walking up to him once he'd been seated. “But I'm the Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones, out of Moline, Illinois. I been preaching my way across the world for close to a dozen years now, and hearing your accent made me realize just how much I miss the green hills of home.”

  “There aren't any hills in Illinois,” he said.

  “But if there were, they'd sure be green, wouldn't they?” I said. “Anyway, I'd be happy to buy you breakfast in exchange for the pleasure of talking to a fellow Yank after all this time.”

  “Well, that's a different matter,” said the man. “Pull up a chair and join me, Reverend Jones.”

  “Glad to,” I said, sitting down opposite him. “You up here to do a little fishing?”

  “No,” said the man. “My name is Norbert Nelson. I'm a scientist, here to collect data on the Loch Ness Monster.”

  “No kidding?” I said. “What have you collected so far?”

  “About three hundred mosquito bites and a bad cold,” said Nelson. “But at least I'm on the verge of proving conclusively that the monster doesn't exist.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “I'm due to stay another five days, but as far as I'm concerned, I might as well pack up and go home now. I can't imagine where this monster myth got started, but there isn't any basis for it.”

  “What a shame,” I said, shaking my head. “I suppose finding the monster could have made you rich and famous?”

  “Well, let's put it this way, Reverend Jones,” said Nelson with a smile. “I'll never get rich and famous proving that there isn't a monster.”

  “Right,” I said. “You could have proved that about Lake Michigan and saved a bundle in travel expenses.”

  “Well,” he said with a shrug, “at least science will soon be able to state conclusively that it's just another legend with no basis in fact.”

  “Seems a pity, though,” I said, “after all that effort.”

  “I agree,” he said. “Finding the monster would have been the biggest news since Stanley found Livingstone.”

  “Bigger,” I said. “Doctor Livingstone was merely misplaced, but everybody knew he existed.”

  “All right, bigger,” agreed Nelson. “But it doesn't exist, and that's that.”

  “Brother Nelson,” I said, “my heart goes out to you, as one Christian to another. I appreciate all the hard work you've gone to trying to scare up the monster, all the expense and privation you put up with, and I have it within my power to do you a favor for which I think you'll be everlastingly grateful.”

  “Oh?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling the packet of photos out of my pocket and shoving them across the table to him. “I got something here that just might interest you.”

  “You do?” he said, picking up the packet and opening it.

  “Well?” I said, as he thumbed through the photos. “What do you think?”

  He stared at me for a long minute and then said, “All right. I'm interested.”

  “I kind of thought you might be,” I said, shooting him a great big Sunday go-to-meeting grin. “What would it be worth if I was to put you right next to her?”

  “I've never indulged in this kind of transaction before,” he said. “What do you think it's worth?”

  “I know scientists ain't exactly loaded down with cash,” I said sympathetically. “I think five hundred dollars would do for now. We can renegotiate after you're rich and famous.”

  He looked at a couple of the photos again. “Five hundred seems a little steep,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “Because I got nothing but trust in my fellow man, three hundred.”

  He considered it for a moment, then dug into his wallet and pulled out six fifty-dollar bills.

  “Brother Nelson,” I said, “you ain't gonna regret this.”

  “I'd better not,” he said. “Shall we go right now?”

  “She's just finished eating,” I said. “Let's give her a few hours to digest her meal, and then we'll go get her. Why don't I meet you at your boat at, say, two this afternoon?”

  “I don't feel like waiting,” he said.

  “I'm telling you, she's been eating all night,” I said. “She's gonna be all sluggish right now.”

  “I don't care,” said Nelson stubbornly. “A deal is a deal.”

  “I'll tell you what,” I said. “I can understand you being so anxious to get a look at her, after being up here alone on the lake all this time. Since you're so allfired eager, why don't you go looking for her now, and if you ain't found her by two o'clock, come on back to your boat.”

  “She'd better be there,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “You got my word on it, Brother Nelson,” I told him as he walked out of the dining room.

  I spent most of the morning walking around town, looking for the best place to build my tabernacle, and finally hit on a spot right between two taverns, which seemed a likely place to attract sinners as they staggered from one bar to the other, and then I had lunch and went on down to Loch Ness. I found Nelson's boat, and waited next to it until sunset. I couldn't figure out what was keeping him, since I knew he didn't know how to attract Nessie but finally I went back to Glen Mohr and asked if he'd returned there.

  “Actually, he checked out at noon, sir,” said the clerk.

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “And the young lady was with him.”

  “What young lady?”

  “Anna, the gamekeeper's daughter. I believe they were going off to Glasgow to get married.”

  “Well, if that don't beat all,” I said. “I wonder how in tunket he managed to run into her?”

  “I believe you can claim the credit for that, sir,” said the clerk with a smile.

  “Me?”

  He pulled out a few of the photos I had taken of Anna. “Mr. Nelson showed these to me on his way out, and asked me to identify the building in the background. Well, as anyone could have told him, it's Culloden House. He left in rather a hurry, and returned a few hours later with Anna on his arm.”

  Just then a kind of pudgy gentleman in a constable's uniform burst into Glen Mohr and walked up to me.

  “Are you Lucifer Jones?” he demanded.

  “The Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones, at your service,” I said.

  “Doctor Jones, you're under arrest!”

  “What the hell for?” I demanded.

  He handed me a batch of photos of Nessie eating the fish guts.

  “Did you take these?”

  “Ain't nothing illegal about taking pictures, is there?” I said.

  “But it is illegal to fish in the laird's loch,” said the constable. He sighed and shook his head. “What I can't understand is why, if you had to break the law, you added insult to injury by sending the photographic proof of it to his gameskeeper.”

  Well, we argued back and forth for about five more minutes, but in the end I was carted off to the local hoosegow, where I la
nguished alone until dinnertime, when Angus McNair and his buddies heard about what had happened and snuck me in some poached salmon, which truth to tell wasn't worth all the buildup they had given it.

  Then, just before midnight, the constable unlocked my cell and escorted me out to the front door of the jailhouse.

  “Doctor Jones, you're free to go,” he said.

  “You finally figured out that you got no legal right to hold me, huh?” I said, brushing myself off.

  “I have every legal right to hold you,” he said, “but the laird's gameskeeper, in celebration of his daughter's pending marriage, has declared an amnesty for all the local poachers.” He lowered his voice. “I've done a little bit of digging around, and if I were you, I'd get out of town before her father, who's about the best shot in the county, finds out exactly how and why his daughter met her future husband, and what her relationship was to the matchmaker.”

  It struck me as right good advice, and truth to tell, I'd had my fill of rainy weather and fish guts, and me and the Lord decided it was time to set off once again to find the perfect location for our tabernacle.

  10. A Tabernacle is Not a Home

  After my little misadventures with the Clubfoot of Notre Dame and the Crown Jewels of England and the Loch Ness Monster, I was fast running out of European countries in which to establish my tabernacle—and even before that, I was in serious danger of running out of continents on which my presence was allowed. I'd heard tell that Germany had a steady supply of good beer, and since preaching can be mighty thirsty work, I made up my mind that no matter what happened, I was setting up shop there.

  The newspapers were full of the antics of some little housepainter who had already corralled most of the sinners in Berlin, so I decided to head over to Hamburg, where I was assured I'd find a passel of souls in serious need of salvation.