“That’s cute,” said the woman, blowing out the inaugural puff of smoke. She dragged a table resembling a slice of sequoia and a brass ashtray near her, and crossed her maroon-leather-boot-clad legs. “What can I do for you?”
Andy looked away from the underside of her thighs and queried Nate. He seemed to relinquish the lead.
“Mrs. Debo?n—”
“Morris. Or just call me Dunia.”
“Dunia. You must be familiar with the Sleepy Lake area.”
“Not really, I’m not very outdoorsy.”
“But you used to live in Debo?n Mansion once.”
“Only my first five years. You know, a house on top of a mine, and a lake ten yards off the door: not a very child-friendly place.”
“Not to mention your father’s experiments,” Nate inserted, trying to throw her off.
“No, I’d rather not,” she deflected gracefully. “He sent me to boarding school as soon as he could and then bought this place for my mother. I think he was happy to get rid of us.”
“Why?” Andy followed up.
“Well, according to popular belief, my father only married my mother and had me to avoid being tagged as a hermit, like his father was,” she explained matter-of-factly. “It was what you’d call a PR matter.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Maybe. I myself married a man I didn’t really love just to borrow his name, so I guess it’s possible.” As if in confidence to Andy, she added, “It never works out.”
“Why didn’t you just leave town?” Nate pursued.
“All I own is this house. And I can’t find a buyer. I guess I should’ve left anyway and hit the road when I was still young and careless. Only I was never careless. I am now, but too old to be a stripper.”
The words “Never too late!” were blocked and severely frowned upon by a head-shaking bouncer right before leaving Andy’s mouth. Instead, she asked, “What do you do?”
“I write erotica,” she answered, pointing at a little workplace set near a window, computer included. Then she added through an impish smile: “Yes, it’s people like me.”
Tim sneezed as a reaction to all the fluttering hormones.
“But your family must have had tons of money,” Nate complained. “They owned a gold mine; it was a big company once; they must have made a fortune.”
“I saw nothing after my parents died. I mean after my father died in the fire; I wasn’t expecting anything when my mother decided to pass out in the car with the engine running. That was…three years after my father?”
“?’Fifty-two?” Nate offered. “The mansion caught fire in ’forty-nine.”
“Yes, about that. I was seven when he died. Anyway, the lawyers who handled his legacy took a bad offer for the mine and used the money to keep me in a school in Eugene. So after I graduated I had this house in this beautiful neighborhood that loves me so much, and nothing else.” She paused, scratched the Weimaraner’s head en passant, then continued. “If I know my father, I think he kept his fortune hidden in the house; he wasn’t the investing type. It probably burned in the fire. There was some searching, back in the day.”
“Of course. That’s the gold Wickley hoped to find.”
“Who?”
“Uh, Thomas X. Wickley,” Andy repeated. “The Sleepy Lake creature.”
“Oh, yeah.” The woman sighed, as if recalling a minor character from a TV series.
“Apropos of which,” Nate detoured, searching his coat pockets, “you may be aware of rumors that lake creatures have been sighted again.”
“No, but that was to be expected,” Dunia said. “Rumors about lake creatures had been going on for decades; the arrest of a guy in costume had no right to spoil the fun.”
“Well, we went creature hunting last night, and we came across this,” he said, pulling out a Polaroid and sliding it across the table to Dunia. “We’re…ninety percent sure it was not a guy in a costume.”
—
The pulpy underheaded, overlimbed corpse lay oxidizing on a thickening film of its own juices, its chest sliced open. Kerri tried not to glance at it as she scribbled on an official Pennaquick County Police notepad. A fetid odor assailed the walls of the dust masks she and Deputy Copperseed were wearing.
“Respiration is most likely carried out through the orifices on each side, though the function of the cilia inside them is unclear,” she dictated to herself as she wrote in her nervous, spiky handwriting that had forgone any attempt at legibility pages ago. “What I once called lungs more likely serve as swim bladders. However, it did roar through its mouth.” She clarified for the deputy: “Amphibians are born with gills and later develop lungs. This thing seems to have both, and still it breathed with great difficulty when it faced us. Maybe the bladders act as air reserves when it crawls out of the water.”
Copperseed stayed vigilant, the mask allowing him to grimace freely at the stench without denting his poise.
“There’s no chance these things are the product of toxic dump, is there?” he inserted with a pinch of resentment.
“It’s not a mutation, if that’s what you’re asking,” Kerri answered, taking a knife and rasping softly one of the open ribs protruding out of the chest. She could easily peel some bone off it; the skeleton was melting. “This is different at every level. The chemical composition…Nothing carbon based could possibly oxidize this fast.”
She stepped back a little, trying to zoom out for the whole picture. The stench was insulting. The sight of it, even as a still life, challenged reason.
Pen and paper waited self-consciously on the side table, wondering if they should be doing something for themselves.
After a couple of deep breaths, Kerri pulled off one kitchen glove and neared her bare index finger half an inch above the shoulder of the upper limb. Her finger hovered along the arm dangling off the slab, down to the wrist and the webbed hand and the long, black-caked claws. And then she touched it.
That was the final insult: the solid, cold touch; the alien organic chemistry; the microscopic complexity of it, impossible to fake. Her nightmare, smuggled into the real world.
The deputy grabbed her by the shoulders, signaling time for a recess, while she continued to speak into a nonexisting dictaphone: “It is not supposed to exist. The body is decomposing at an alarming rate; it cannot live for long in air. By tomorrow, there will be nothing solid left!”
By the end of that sentence Copperseed had dragged her into the courtyard. Sunlight and bird language washed on her face.
She snatched her mask off, quenching on pure air.
“It makes some sense,” she droned on. “The accelerated decay would explain why we never saw these things before. Otherwise, even if they avoided humans, we were bound to come across a carcass. And yet, some of its features are stuff I only read about in paleobiology. These things must have existed for…longer than us, longer than chordates!”
She peered out of her ramblings for a second and found herself sitting on a curb, leaning back on an iron fence. The sky above was a solid blue. Her defiled fingers rejoiced in the cozy caress of the pavement and the interstitial grass. The rumor of Blyton Hills traffic hardly bothered the pigeons fighting over some crumbs by the dumpster.