Kendall had his foot propped up on a crate of apples, supporting his clipboard on his knee. He busied himself filling out a ponderous sheath of reports. From where I stood, it looked as though the sergeant had a long way to go before he was done.
To my surprise, B.C. had lingered longer than anyone else in the huge walk-in refrigerator, fascinated by the carcass of the beast. She had already used up one pad and had left the beast just long enough to venture out in the store to find another. In addition to my trusty little Canon AF35, she had relied on Madden's tape measure. She emerged from the cooler the second time just long enough to announce that the film and measurement records were complete.
As for the creature itself, the measurements were, to say the least, surprising — if not a bit of a revelation. It measured 62 inches from the top of its ugly bulbous head to the soles of its claw-like feet. The head alone was 34 inches in circumference, 24 inches at the neck and 47 inches at its girth. Despite all this, there was a general overall impression of shapelessness.
The arms or top appendages were likewise 62 inches in expanse, muscled up close to the shoulder with almost whip-like forearms. The two-thumb, three-finger construction was the same on both its hands and feet.
The most intriguing aspect, however, was what appeared to be the creature's respiratory system. There was no apparent nose, but there was a series of flapped vents at the side of the head which seemed to be some sort of filtering device for the air it breathed. There were eyes (at least that's what they appeared to be) and a slit-like mouth a full 15 inches across. Old man Palmer had pried the beast's mouth open with a wooden block to reveal three rows of razor-sharp incisors, each row progressively more savage looking than the row that preceded them.
The skin was blackish brown in color and incredibly coarse; it had a sandpaper-abrasive quality. B.C. likened it to the skin of a shark. I happily went along with her assessment only because I have never been and never intend to get close enough to a shark to know enough to debate the issue.
Where there was hair, it was more like coarse bristles than what we have come to accept as normal for a wide variety of the species known as Homo sapiens.
It struck me that the creature looked like something caught in some kind of an evolutionary time warp, like something that was still making the transition from its vast watery world to that of the land. I shared that thought with B.C. only to have her inform me that to her way of thinking it looked like something cursed — suspended, if you will — and doomed for all eternity. With that rather morbid description tucked in the back of my mind, I decided her version would do nicely if and when I ever got around to trying to tell the story of the creature.
The decision to bring the remains of the beast back to the village was based on more pragmatic lines of thought. The moment the thing hit the ground there was evidence of some sort of rapid change in cell structure, as though it were still alive. From the outset there was an evident stream of a black, oily substance seeping from the gaping holes created by the bullet wounds.
Kendall had instructed Madden to find a way of keeping the body of the creature intact, and to Jake that meant, if not freezing it, at least keeping it as cold as possible. The cold temperature of the cooler, at least for the time being, seemed to stop the rapid deterioration. B.C. had gone so far as to venture the opinion that there was some indication the wounds appeared less severe than when the creature was first brought in.
Harlan's remains were stored in the same cooler. The fog was now too dense to attempt the journey to Kemper. Kendall had taken a careful head count and confirmed that Harlan had been the only casualty. There was some perversity in the fact that Harlan had been the only one to find what we had all been looking for. His savagely mutilated body was destined to stay with me for a long, long time.
At Madden's insistence, a steely jawed, white-haired man who appeared to be in his sixties had been brought in from Kemper. Hawkins had struggled 60 miles through the fog to get him. His name was Russell Ferris, and he was a doctor — the only doctor, Jake informed me, in the quad village area of Kemper, Waverly, Chambers Bay and Loma. Now he was walking out of the cooler with a pipe firmly clenched between his teeth, a frown on his craggy face. He headed straight for us.
"That's the ugliest damned thing I've ever seen," the old man assessed dryly.
Madden gave him a half-grin. "What's it remind you of, Doc?"
The grizzled old medic rolled his eyes, thought for a moment and extracted the pipe. "Guess it comes closest to resembling some sort of a gorilla or a baboon."
"My associate back there in the cooler says the hide reminds her of a shark."
Russell Ferris shoved the pipe back in his mouth and grunted. "What would a pretty young thing like that know about sharks?"
Caleb Hall drifted over to the conclave just in time to catch Doc's remarks. "Just goes to prove that little filly of yours don't know much about the things that come out of the water," he said sneering. "At least I ain't ever seen one before that had arms and legs and claws like that thing."
Ferris was in total agreement. He reached over, slipped the Moosehead out of Jake's hand, took a swig and handed it back. "Naw," he grunted, "I'd have to go along with Caleb. It looks more like some sort of gorilla than anything else."
Madden glanced at his watch and lowered his frame down from the checkout counter. His face was lined, and he looked exhausted. "What 'ya say we all get a good night's sleep and let Sergeant Kendall figure out what he's gonna do with that damn thing."
"That's pretty much up to his superiors, ain't it?" Caleb asked.
"Yeah, suppose it is," Jake agreed. "The detachment commander over at Waverly wants to get some RCMP specialists in here to assess the situation. Kendall has been instructed to get a veterinarian in here to have a look at the thing. That shouldn't take too long. With any kind of luck at all, by tomorrow afternoon we can have most of this mess cleaned up and start puttin' things back in order around here."
"That'll take a while," Caleb mused solemnly. "Ol' Harlan never had much to say, but he was an important part of this community. Same can be said for Percy Kramer, too, since he did most of the talkin' around these parts. Folks are gonna miss both of them."
Madden nodded his concurrence with Caleb's evaluation and turned to me. "What about you, Researcher?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "It's hard to say. We'll probably stick around another day or two and make certain we've got all our T's crossed and I's dotted. There's a lot about all of this I still don't understand. We all know what happened. I can see your point, though. Now that you've got your critter stretched out back there in the cooler, your job is done. If we do our job right, ours has only begun."
Kendall finished one stack of reports, picked up another and walked toward us. The classic square-cut jaw was covered with a growth of dull brown stubble and the penetrating icy blue eyes were haggard. "I reported in," he said wearily, "and told the dispatcher that it looked like everything was under control. He'll pass along my report to the Detco in the morning. You can figure our lab boys will be crawling all over this place for the next couple of days."
Jake and Caleb heaved a collective sigh. I glanced at my watch again and noted, somewhat ruefully, that it was now going on three o'clock in the morning. Under the standard E.G. Wages sleep plan I was scheduled to be up and at 'em in another hour or so, banging away on the old word processor.