“Hurry, we have to go, Mau,” he told her, as he zipped up his life jacket.
“Dugal McAdams just reported that the Heather went under!” she gasped, her eyes stretched in disbelief at the horrid news. They both knew the men who worked for McAdams on the Heather and for a moment Peter was stunned. Maureen’s eyes were wet and red before she even ended communication with Dugal.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
She hesitated at first, but then she stammered, “The supposed creature they reported is to blame, so Dugal said.”
“What manner of creature could sink that entire trawler within less than five minutes?” Peter shrieked, his hand firmly on his head at the ludicrous claim. Not even a whale could do that, not all at once!”
“Aye, I know,” she sighed through her handkerchief on her mouth. She shook her head hopelessly and her eyes sought the floor.
“Well, if there is any such farfetched shite going on I want to see it for m’self,” Peter announced, and with a soft hand on her arm as a parting gift, he flew out the door and down the stairs to the dock area. Maureen went to the large clear window that framed the ocean outside like an animated painting. She looked across the gray foaming waves, wondering about the creature Dugal rambled about. Then Maureen started crying uncontrollably.
The ice cold saline spray stung Peter’s face as he and three colleagues sped toward where the fishing trawlers had sighted the anomaly that caused the Heather’s demise.
“Almost there!” one of the rescuers shouted over the motor. “We should start seeing the Talisman on the other side of those swells there!” He pointed to the enormous white wave crests a short distance away. Still Peter could not believe that the Heather’s crew had all perished. It was surreal.
His colleague stood next to him. “The weather office checked the satellites and they say they detected what looks like an old submarine flash on the screens, eh? Imagine that. A submarine mistaken for a sea monster!”
Peter studied his colleague’s expression, seeking a sign of jest, but found that he was perfectly sincere. He remembered that there were Allied submarines stationed in Oban during the Second World War, but that there was one traversing the local waters now was just preposterous.
“Then again, that would be a more plausible explanation. A submarine could sink a boat, even just by crashing into its hull from below, which would explain how the Heather went down so rapidly, probably dragged under by slipstream maelstroms,” he speculated. “It would be far more believable than Dugal’s Loch Ness monster theory.”
“There! Dead ahead!” another voice cried from behind him on the heaving rescue boat.
Peter looked in front of them, and every now and then the red and green trawler would peek fleetingly before falling back under the walls of water that seemed to reach up and join the gray skies above.
“Can’t see anyone!” he shouted.
“I know! No-one on deck. They are probably below!” the other reckoned.
But as they approached, calling out to the Talisman over the loudspeakers while periodically sounding the sirens, the rescue team realized that the vessel was deserted. No flares had gone up, no reply on the radio, and certainly no waving of arms or usage of flags to indicate a crisis. There was just… nothing.
After boarding the Talisman, the four rescuers combed the interior of the fishing trawler.
“Nothing!”
“Aye, nobody here either!” They called out to one another, confirming the absence of the crew with voices of deep concern. Shaking their heads, the rescuers converged at the controls where the pilot’s seat was swaying violently without the weight of its pilot.
The men looked spooked at the ghost boat they had boarded. How would they report this one?
“I see none of you are admitting anything weird, so I’ll just be the first,” Peter said. “Did anyone else notice that the Talisman’s deck is covered with slimy residue? And the doors of every single compartment, from the galley to the head, have been smashed?”
They all nodded silently. There was no denying the chilling remnants of what looked like an attack.
“Submarines don’t do that, lads. I don’t give a shite how wet it is,” another rescuer admitted.
“So… what do we tell the authorities? I can’t even make out what the fuck happened here,” the third sighed.
Peter gave it some thought, and the results of his deduction left his blood cold. “I might be exaggerating a bit here, but this looks alarmingly like the doings of an octopus, enveloping a boat to get to the prey inside.”
“Oh, Jesus, really?” the EMT exclaimed with mockery. “Peter, you sound as daft as Dugal McAdams!”
“Maybe so, but have you noticed that Dugal McAdams is missing? Probably fish fodder by now!” Peter retorted. “Daft or no, we all know what we see here, don’t we?”
Confounded and slightly unnerved by the whole experience, the sea rescue team returned to Oban with heavy hearts. Not just one, but two vessels had been compromised; and the eighteen crewmen and skippers were lost to the frigid depths of the North Sea.
It was a devastating shock to the townspeople, especially to the immediate families of the crew. There was something wicked loose in Oban, not just in the ocean, but in the house on Dunuaran Road. Once more, as a few decades earlier, the town was rife with over-exaggerated rumors and lofty tales, this time relating to the missing historian and the giant octopus haunting the fishing waters just a stone’s throw from the coastline.
Alerts were put out to seafarers along the entire stretch from Inverness to the Firth of Lorne and the Inner Hebrides in general.
Below the tumultuous water of the rabid ocean, a submarine was gliding along at a gentle pace, bearing northward, unaware of the recent catastrophes above and on the land past the shoreline. It was quiet and dreamlike in the blue submerged universe where it slid through the currents, oblivious to the storm on the surface. Inside, the missing historian of Oban and her companions were blissfully ignorant of the hell they had unleashed in their wake.
They had no idea that tossing those two bodies in the mouth had activated an ancient and menacing scientific principle, to date dismissed as myth and folly. It had pierced the veil dividing dimensions by the employment of human sacrifice, even inadvertently. Ancient cultures said to have learned this method to “appease the gods” would appear to have been less absurd than civilized theorists would ever know. Neither Nina, Sam, or Gretchen knew that there was much truth to those unorthodox laws of quantum physics that predicted the exodus of inter-dimensional entities to their earthly plane. The insanity of the SS had proved to hold quite some weight after all.
Only those familiar with the origin of the Nazi ideologies would understand the possibilities, and purpose, of seemingly outlandish practices such as those of human sacrifices and crossing of “gods” by means of intricate and arcane science. It ran in the Schaub family, seeping through several generations, almost diluted before the latest generation venerated its German and American ancestors so that the dogma was resurrected to its full glory.
With static eyes staring into space somewhere between the floor and the bunk chains, Dr. Richard Philips sat contemplating the success of the experiment he conducted while being left in solitude in the basement. McLaughlin’s offensive secretary had served well as bait for what was birthed by the blinding clap of the portal just hours before when the house on Dunuaran Road lit up like the sun. He wondered what would have become of Sam Cleave and his bloody leg had he, Philips, not fed the thing under the submarine with the woman’s limp, living body while the others were up in the kitchen.