Wild Thing: A Novel Read online

  “Which is what?”

  “It’s where you heat the Earth to the point where the Arctic methane hydrate shelf starts to melt. Methane’s twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Fifty million years ago it turned the sky green. This time it’ll do it a lot faster.” She looks at me again. “You know, you seem to be strangely enjoying this.”

  I am. I’m not sure why. The complete destruction of the human race is fairly amusing, obviously—particularly if it happens through overpopulation and technology, the only goals humanity has ever taken seriously. But it’s just as likely that this woman’s suspicions are accurate, and what’s making me happy is being near her. With Violet Hurst, what message isn’t the medium going to kick the shit out of?

  Must get lonely, as well as frustrating.

  “So when was the point of no return?” I say.

  “Forget it. I’m cutting you off.”

  “But that’s what catastrophic paleontologists do? Study the end of the world?”

  “The various ends of the world. The specific extinction event that’s about to happen is a subspecialty.”

  “And that’s what you do for Rec Bill?”

  “What I do for Rec Bill is confidential. And no.”

  “Can you at least tell me what he wants to talk to me about?”

  “Not really.”

  “Off the record?”

  “Sorry,” she says. “He wants to tell you himself. With Rec Bill, it’s all about trust.”

  She signals toward an exit. “Speaking of which, he wants me to wait around and drive you to your hotel when you guys get done, but I think I’m going to put my foot down on this one. I clearly love catastrophic paleontology enough to bore the hell out of strange men with it, but even I have to go get drunk afterward and pretend I’ve never heard of it. Just tell Rec Bill to call you a cab. And keep the receipt.”

  3

  Portland, Oregon

  Still Monday, 13 August

  The twelfth floor of the main building of Rec Bill’s office park seems to be one enormous room, dark except for a spotlight over the receptionist’s desk and another one over the waiting area. The waiting area’s floor-to-ceiling windows have channels cut into them that guide the rainwater into tree shapes. The noise from them is making it hard for me to pick out sounds from the dark rest of the floor.

  About twenty yards in, an entire office in a glass cube lights up. It looks like a diorama in a natural history museum. There’s even a man getting up from the desk.

  For a moment I think he’s been sitting in the dark, waiting for the light to go on, but then I realize that’s too stupid: it’s just that the cube has gone from opaque to transparent. Liquid crystal in the glass or something.

  As the man comes out of the office and walks toward me, more spotlights come on to light his path. He’s late forties, with a gym body and a ponytail. Blazer, untucked shirt, designer jeans, wedge-toe loafers: the full douchebag tuxedo, though I decide to suspend judgment when I see his face. It’s been lined by something that looks a lot like pain. Incised by it, more like.

  At the moment, though, he’s smiling. “What do you think?” he says to me. “Real or fake?”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about. Between the light-up office and Calamity Jane back in the car, I wonder if he’s trying to hypnotize me with weirdness, like Milton Erickson was supposedly able to do. Then I notice he’s looking at an oil painting on a freestanding white wall beside me.

  It’s a city-under-starry-night kind of thing in the style of van Gogh. In fact it’s signed “Vincent.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Guess.”

  “Can I touch it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I put my palm on the chunky paint. “It’s fake.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You let me touch it.”

  “Fair point,” he says. “Although it cost almost as much as the original.”

  He keeps frowning at it, so eventually I say “Why?”

  “It was done by a computer. The idea was to use MRI to figure out the order and content of the brushstrokes. But next to the original it looks like shit. One of my materials guys thinks it’s because the original has too many false starts and corrections.”

  “Next time you should copy someone who could paint.”

  “Ha,” the man says. “I’m Rec Bill.”*

  “Lionel Azimuth.”

  “I know. Come into my office.”

  “I think I’m going to show you the DVD first,” he says. He’s behind his glass desk. The only things on it are a small pink-and-gold ashtray with a facedown business card in it and a white padded envelope that’s been cut open rather than torn.

  “Get you something to drink?” he says.

  “No, thanks.” If Rec Bill wants my fingerprints, he can send someone to the fucking ship.

  If he does.

  I don’t know what he wants, because I don’t know who he thinks I am. Professor Marmoset would never have told him the truth about me, but I assume anyone this rich would have run a background check.* And Lionel Azimuth barely has a background.

  “What has Dr. Hurst told you?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  “Good. I want to see how you react to this.”

  Rec Bill swipes and taps some not-obviously-marked spots on his desk, and a part of one wall lights up as a monitor.

  Something else he does dims the lights.

  The video starts silently. For a while it’s just photographs, mostly sepia and black-and-white, run together with the “Ken Burns” feature of somebody’s editing software. Woods and lakes. Native Americans posing in suede. Some bearded men in flannel outside a mine entrance. In sudden Kodachrome, so that it looks like the 1970s, a family in a canoe. Then back to black-and-white for more woods and lakes.

  Eventually something artful happens: there’s a color shot of a rock wall at the edge of a lake, apparently taken from the water. Then a closer shot from the same perspective, and an even closer one. At which point you can see that the rock has a primitive-looking drawing on it.

  It’s a moose face-to-face with a much larger animal that’s curving up from below it, like a serpent or a giant seahorse. The creature has horns and a snout. The moose’s lower jaw hangs open in comical surprise. A bunch of smaller animals lie around looking dead, on their backs with their feet in the air.

  The image freezes. An amateurishly boomy male announcer voice with a hiss behind it says “The knowledge that a mysterious creature exists in the waters of White Lake has been known for centuries. Numerous Native American tribes, including the Chippewa and others of the Anishinaabe peoples, tell legends of the Creature that recede to the depths of time. Mysterious disappearances of dogs, livestock, and other animals have been recorded for four hundred years or more.

  “And what of the present? Many residents of the modern-day town of Ford, the nearest town to White Lake, say they have actually seen the monster. Several say they have observed it on multiple occasions.”

  There’s some handheld modern video of a bunch of people with their backs to the outside of a convenience store. A voice, maybe the announcer’s but weak in the open air, says “Who here has seen the monster?”

  Everybody in the group raises their hands. “Twice,” one woman says.

  The video abruptly switches to a teenage girl in a hiking outfit and wraparound sunglasses, walking away as the camera pursues her along the front of some woods. It’s a bit like a slasher movie.

  The voice says “Young lady, have you seen a monster in White Lake?”

  “Please don’t videotape me,” she says.

  “Just yes or no.”

  “Yes, okay?”

  The screen goes black as the voice returns to announcer-style. “Some have managed to photograph it.”

  There’s a multicolor jag, and the image turns into what seems to be handheld video of an old television playing a videotape. The
television’s screen bulges outward, so a lot of what’s going on is obscured by glare. You can barely read the pixelated text along the bottom: “THE DR. McQUILLEN TAPE.” Whoever’s doing the filming zooms in on the upper-right corner of the television screen, and the image turns into almost pure grain. But just as you’re starting to wonder whether there’s a store out there that exists only to rent shitty, ancient video equipment to people making hoax movies, you realize you’re watching a duck floating on some water.

  Then the water explodes, and the duck is gone.

  It gives me a hitch in my chest. The ferocity and speed of the attack, along with the thrash out of calm water, remind me of a shark.

  I don’t like sharks. I haven’t since I spent a bad night in an aquarium eleven years ago.

  A voice on the video says “Hold on a sec,” and the image on the television freezes, then rewinds in fast motion, then stops and starts to play again frame by frame.

  Now I’m sweating.

  The duck. The water. Something rising out of the water, dark but hidden by the splashing, then blotting out the duck entirely. The something gone, and the duck with it, no way to tell what it was.

  There’s a flash, and suddenly Rec Bill and I are watching relatively high-quality modern video again, this time of a bleak-faced old man standing in front of a pier.

  The announcer voice, with its hiss, comes back long enough to say “Some even say they have tangled with it.”

  “Happened some years ago,” the old man says.

  Then he just stands there looking forlorn.

  Someone off camera asks him a question you can’t quite hear.

  “Oh, I can remember it,” he says. “I can remember it like it was yesterday.”

  “Okay,” Rec Bill says to me. “Check it out. This is where it gets interesting.”

  EXHIBIT B

  Lake Garner, Minnesota

  19 Years Ago*

  It’s nine a.m.—late to get a line down, like Charlie Brisson gives a fuck. He’s not out on this bullshit lake in the middle of the fucking woods to fish. He’s here to get shitfaced and forget that his wife is fucking his fucking shift manager.

  The shitfaced part is working, at least. Brisson woke up half out of his tent, frozen, his face bit to shit by mosquitoes. But what he woke up picturing was Lisa getting cornholed by Robin.

  He’s still picturing it. There aren’t exactly a lot of distractions around here. Maybe Brisson should have thought about that before he came out to the woods. Maybe he shouldn’t be such a fucking, fucking idiot.

  He just can’t accept it. It’s like some new Lisa has taken the place of the one Brisson loved. Good Lisa would never have done this to him.

  Brisson knows that’s bullshit, and Good Lisa never existed in the first place, but fuck—he just misses her so much.

  The sobs break out of him in a Heh-heh-heh pattern.

  He leans forward so the sun will stop fucking him in the eyes, his legs out in front of him on the bottom of the canoe. Drooping farther and farther forward until suddenly it feels like he’s spinning and he jerks upright, almost tipping the boat.

  After that he tries to pay attention to the line. Like that helps. The line just sits there. The whole lake’s laughing at him. It’s as empty as Brisson’s motherfucking life.

  Heh-heh-heh.

  Fuck crappie. Fuck fucking walleye. After Brisson found out Lisa was fucking Robin, Lisa swore to him they never fucked in the section office of the mine while Brisson was down-shaft.

  Of course they fucked in the section office of the mine while Brisson was down-shaft. Why not? No safer place. Brisson stuck twenty-eight stories underground, no way back to the surface except by calling the fucking section office for the elevator.

  Sorry to fucking interrupt you!

  Brisson cries away. Covers his itching, spasming face with his hands.

  Which after a while strikes him as interesting, because it means he’s no longer holding his fishing rod.

  He looks around for it. Scorch scorch scorch from the reflected sunlight, and another hit of vertigo.

  The rod’s not in the boat. It’s not floating, either, at least not nearby. Brisson can’t remember whether it’s the kind that’s meant to float. Or whether he’s got a spare back at the campsite.

  He has a panicked moment where he thinks he might have lost the oar, too, but then he finds it by his feet, thank you, Jesus. Yanks it loose to row for shore, where fuck it—fuck all of it—he can start drinking again.

  Back at the campsite, though, Brisson is confused.

  No fucking way did he drink all that beer. Brisson only drinks beer as a chaser. Other than when his wife turns out to be an evil lying whore, he’s not that much of a drinker in the first place. And he’s still got plenty of Jim Beam.

  There are a few surprise empties lying around—he’s not claiming to remember last night, just to be able to reconstruct it from available evidence—but nowhere near so many cans as to indicate that he drank all the beer. And no way bears took it. Brisson has personally seen a bear drink beer from a bottle two-handed, but he knows they don’t like aluminum.

  Brisson kicks through his tent and the rest of his shit, then goes back to check the canoe. Like there’s going to be a couple of six-packs in it that he somehow didn’t notice while he was fishing.

  There aren’t, but the view from there reminds him of what he did with the rest of the beer.

  He put it in White Lake.

  Not like White Lake is really its own lake. It’s a dogleg off Lake Garner, separated by a spit of land that doesn’t even reach all the way across.

  But neither is it the same lake. Brisson’s never seen fog on Lake Garner, for example, whereas White Lake seems to have it more often than not.* And though Brisson’s never heard of a kid or even a dog drowning in Lake Garner, White Lake is some kind of death trap. White Lake is where Jim Lascadis’s six-year-old died, that poor motherfucker. Meaning Lascadis. Poor motherfucker of a kid, though, also. Jesus.

  Lake Garner’s nice and White Lake’s a hellhole.

  Except to store beer.

  Brisson slip-slides down the White Lake side of the spit of land. The spit’s made mostly of roots, as if the scraggly-ass birch trees along its spine have eaten away all the dirt. The roots are slimy—cold, sharp, and rotten smelling.

  But Brisson’s got to do it. It looks like he tied a bungee cord to the trunk of one of the trees and then tied the beer to the other end of the cord. But for some reason the bungee now runs taut from the tree trunk to the water—something’s snagged down there. He should be careful the six-pack or whatever it is doesn’t get shot at his face like a rubber band as it comes free.

  Fuck, though, the water is cold when his feet reach it. Brisson’s in his tighty-whiteys, which are now soaked and muddy, and probably torn, but he has no interest in taking them off. The idea of being entirely naked on this wall of thorny roots is frightening.

  He sits and plunges his legs in up to the knees, then pulls them out again. The water’s so cold that he can feel the individual rivulets of it heading toward his groin.

  Fuck that. He stands back up. Turns to face the wall and takes hold of the bungee cord like a rappelling line. So what if he gets clobbered by beer in the back of the head? Maybe it’ll kill him. Won’t be the worst thing that’s happened to him this week.

  Brisson backs slowly into the water. The roots above the waterline were slimy, but the ones underneath are mossy and slimy. Standing on them is like balancing on rolling pins, particularly now that his feet are numb. In fact, before he’s taken half a dozen steps, Brisson’s feet fly out behind him and he flops, face-first, onto the spiny wall.

  He bounces off from the pain. Retracts into a sideways fetal position, which feels like it does some more damage but at least gets his legs out of the freezing water.

  His teeth are chattering. He looks down at his chest and stomach, expecting to see them gushing blood in a dozen places. But all he sees is m
ud and a few bright and leaky spots of opaque red. He tries to wipe away the mud to look at them, but this just ends up making a kind of blood/dirt paste. He gets a horrified premonition that he’s punctured his balls, and checks.

  Intact. Like that matters.

  But he’s alive, and now he has an idea. He climbs back up the roots like a ladder. Tries to untie the bungee, and when he can’t, goes back to his campsite and finds his Gerber knife. Cuts the bungee at the tree trunk and walks it halfway back down the slope to give it slack.

  It works. Three six-packs, the bungee woven through the plastic rings that hold them together, bob to the surface. Hauling them up causes three or four cans to flip loose and either fall back into the lake or slip down between the roots, but there’s not much Brisson’s willing to do about that except say “fuck” a bunch of times. As soon as he’s got the survivors in hand he pops one open and drinks from it. Figures this time he can use the Jim Beam for a chaser.

  Then he’s sitting on the spine of the spit of land, leaning back against the tree, left leg on the White Lake side, right leg—significantly warmer, since it’s in the sun—on the Lake Garner side. Wishing he’d thought to get the Jim Beam before he sat down. Or brought it when he got the knife.

  Where is the knife? He doesn’t really know or care. He wants to nap.

  He

  Brisson wakes up with a strong urge to twitch his left leg. Breathes in air that’s pure hot rotten fish, and chokes. Looks down.

  His left leg, to mid-thigh, is in the mouth of a gigantic black snake stretching out of White Lake.