After the ridiculous debacle at the Nazi house the night before, the whole town was buzzing in uproar about the shootings of officers and, of course, the unexplained phenomenon which took place there. More than ever, Oban was now thrown back into the burning times with townsfolk demanding the house on Dunuaran Road be demolished once and for all. News teams from all over the world swooped down on the small coastal town to probe into the “alien phenomenon” of the house’s sordid history, not to mention its affiliation with Nazism and occult practices. All these subjects only reiterated the mayor’s concern for his town when he called a meeting to ascertain the extent of the facts revealed recently.
Dugal was thankful for being out on the salty waters, peacefully far from the insanity surrounding the house of missing owner, Dr. Nina Gould. His wife had told him about the fiery tempered historian, apparently a native of Oban, who had moved in recently. Hearing that she was missing only reinforced Dugal’s loathing of that house that used to terrify him as a child when that Nazi soldier lived there with his son, George, and his Scottish wife, Angie.
It was one of those small-town horror stories in the early 1970s. While George and the boy were out with the local hunting club for four days, Angie was found in their basement one morning, her hair gone white overnight. She had died of a heart attack at age 31 and the morgue assistant told everyone that by Angie Philips’ expression, that heart attack was caused as a result of fear. Dugal recalled all the underlying stories whispered among his aunts and parents, shop owners, and parents of his schoolmates, the entire town, practically. There was talk of monsters and demons that scared him to a petrified state at his tender age back then. Tales of human experiments conducted by Angie’s husband, that she was too afraid to say anything about his nefarious practices, made their rounds throughout Oban, changing every week.
Now he was wondering what really happened to Angie, because the new owner of the house disappeared just like Herr Schaub did when he occupied the damned place. Although the local estate agent denied rumors that the place was built over an inter-dimensional portal, Dugal’s son and the young man’s girlfriend disagreed. The young lady worked for the city planner’s office and claimed to have once come upon old blueprints of the Nazi house, as it had come to be known. She told Dugal’s son that the sub-level showed a large circle drawn in red, the meaning for which did not appear on the legend of reference. The day after she had discovered it, the blueprints came up missing and she was dismissed on some unfounded grounds.
“Captain! Captain!” he heard the crewmen howling from starboard, leaning over the rail and looking into the proximity of the rising ridge of gray foam between their vessel and the other that sailed by its side. Dugal carefully made his way to where the ashen-faced men stood wailing in excitement and terror, some pointing anxiously and others grabbing for their cell phones. The latter was a reluctant effort what with the heaving and crushing waves that had developed since the thing made its appearance, threatening to destroy their technology with its sea spray.
“What is it?” Dugal asked, searching where they were pointing, but he saw nothing.
“Jeeesusss,” one of the fishermen screamed with eyes wide and a mouth that folded downward in disbelief. “It’s bigger than Nessie!”
“Aye!” said another. “I reckon it is the very thing! This is what they have been seeing all along!”
“For Christ’s sake,” Dugal ranted, “what is it that you all see?”
He was desperate to see what manner of sea creature could have seasoned salty dogs in such a frenzy. They were downright hysterical. Under the onslaught of the tide, the wet, shouting men pointed to exactly the same spot, but a few yards farther on than last time.
“It’s probably a whale, dammit!” Dugal said annoyingly, and gestured his dismissal with a wave of his hand. One last time he looked back nonetheless.
This time the captain discerned a slight elevation under the surface of the water, prompting his heart to jolt. His cigarette dropped limply from his mouth and disappeared in the shallow wash that came over the deck.
“Holy mother… ” he muttered at the vision before him. “That is not a whale.”
He raced to the cockpit while the crew tried in vain to get a good shot of the creature that remained, almost intelligently, just beneath the furious waves to keep itself hidden.
“HM Coastguard! This is the Talisman, come in!” Dugal shouted into the communication device that he gripped with shaking hands.
“Talisman, this is HM Coastguard, over,” the scratchy reply came from the speaker. Dugal was relieved to hear a response so swiftly. He explained briefly that there was a sighting of a grossly unusual nature in the strait past Ganavan, where his trawlers sailed.
“56.424906, -5.488932, logged at 6:48am,” he urged his information and location.
“Sending a unit out to you, Talisman,” the Coastguard informed the captain.
“Thank you! Thank you! I believe we have stumbled across the very thing people have been reporting at Loch Ness for decades!” he added inadvertently. Met by momentary silence on the radio, he winced at his blurt.
“Right….Talisman, we will investigate the matter. Sending out a boat to you, Dugal,” the mature feminine voice crackled, somewhat less professionally this time. The only things that convinced the operator that it was a legitimate Mayday distress call was the fact that another yacht nearby had logged a report not ten minutes earlier. The yacht had reported a large gray smooth object on its sonar and radar screens, traveling slowly along the current below them at an estimated depth of fifty meters.
Dugal shook his head. He knew how that must have sounded to any rational mind, but he could not refute what his own eyes had seen. It was most certainly not a vessel, because it bent as it maneuvered through the water. Other than that it resembled a human shape, with an unknown amount of appendages sprouting from it.
“Captain!” the mechanic summoned him from the doorway through the hissing din of the maniacal waves. “We will have to send out a Mayday. That thing just trashed the Heather!”
A bolt of panic ripped through Dugal’s body at the mention of his other trawler. He raced out to deck just in time to watch his other vessel sink beneath the waves as the screams of the Heather’s crew became gradually muted under the vile groan of bending steel and exploding engines that roared one last time in the deafening roar of the wild ocean.
Without a word, nor a breath to exhale, the crew of the Talisman stood in silent shock and reverence for their fallen colleagues as the water engulfed the last yardarm. They did not want to look at their captain, and so they all just waited for the first brave soul to speak. Dugal felt his throat close up. The sorrow of his loss did not lie with his trawler, but with his men. He knew them all; knew their wives and children, their families, and their toils. Good, hard-working men were now at the bottom of the ocean because of his business, so Dugal saw the matter. He could not help but weep bitterly, uncaring of those who heard and saw, because he knew they were as distraught as he. On the Heather they had lifelong friends. On the Heather they had brothers.
“I’ll call it in,” Dugal forced calmly, his voice fraught with despair. He went to the controls to radio in the incident, while the crew stayed behind, dumbfounded, their eyes scanning the surface of the raging waters for any signs of life. But there was nothing left of the Heather, as if she never existed, her crew silent and absent from the world.
Chapter 31
“Peter, before you go, there’s more,” Maureen called out to Peter Wells, a rescue officer with the Coastguard Rescue Service team. Maureen was a fifty-eight-year-old veteran of the rescue service and lifelong operator. The plump redhead grandmother of two knew what a prank sounded like, and what she had heard, twice, from Captain Dugal McAdams, was genuine.