The Mythmakers: An Impulse Power Story Page 4

  She saw exactly what it was. The truth screamed but the words dampened to a disbelieving whisper.

  “A dinosaur.”

  Arne couldn’t hear her through her helmet. But his gleaming eyes and genuine smile answered her with the exact same wonderment that lifted her heart.

  “You have a dinosaur?”

  “Not just a dinosaur.” He sounded on the verge of another song. “The dinosaur. Steffi, I would like to introduce you to the largest member of our ship. Nessie.”

  “Excuse me?” She gawped at the tank, at the smaller fishes returning to their positions in the wake of the leviathan.

  “Surely you have heard of the Loch Ness monster.”

  She looked at him.

  He blinked. “Scotland’s greatest legend. Its existence was disputed for centuries before the earth was destroyed. A plesiosaur of the Cretaceous Period. Alive and well before us.”

  “What the hell is this place? Who are you people?”

  He beckoned her to follow him toward a large white enclosure to their left. “I will attempt to explain. This should illustrate it well enough for you.”

  “You’re damned cryptic, Arne.”

  “Not for much longer. I promise.”

  Overwhelmed, Steffi plodded after him in a breathless daze. The white structure resembled a cigar-shaped tunnel, around thirty feet wide and two hundred long, the floor of which was phosphorescent. The inner walls were pale, smooth and convex.

  “Now you must take off your outer suit, Steffi,” he said. “You need not undress completely, but your helmet and cumbersome attire will diminish the experience.”

  She checked the external gas configuration on her wrist display. High nitrogen, almost a quarter oxygen, low carbon dioxide, and a few harmless trace gases: very close to the makeup of old Earth’s air. Without proof, she would not have taken his word for it, but the science tallied, the hairs on her neck prickled, and Arne seemed to be the key to learning all she could about this bizarre vessel. She unclipped and removed her helmet. The air tasted of cool cucumber and seaweed. He didn’t give her a moment’s privacy while she removed her boots and outer suit, then her sopping thermal suit, finally stripping down to her panties, T-shirt and thermal socks.

  “You really are beautiful, Steffi Savannah. Do I please you too?”

  Oh, brother. He’d just spiked the scenario with erotic cravings. The idea ravaged her conscience. She answered by removing her T-shirt and standing topless for him. It felt chilly at first, but his smouldering stare, unyielding in its focus, ignited a warm, coiling sensation inside her. A quick-fuse to teenage memories, when she’d dreamt of situations like this.

  But she kept her distance. She crouched, unfastened the metal e-band from the wrist of her glove and clipped it around the top of her forearm.

  Arne studied every inch of her while she rose. “Close your eyes,” he said with the clinical tone of an optometrist.

  She obeyed but found herself ready to fend him off should he try anything. Yet there had to be more than that on his mind, after what they’d just seen. The light dimmed. She stirred to the gentle lapping sound of water. Distant birds chirruped amid a light rustling above. The faint chugging of an engine to her right and two voices debating in a lively brogue to her left seemed very—

  “You can open them now.”

  Arne was dressed in a tweed suit and a deerstalker. He pointed his oak walking cane with a tartan glass handle out over a choppy lake. “Loch Ness,” he announced. “The year is two thousand and seven.”

  She had no words.

  Enormous green and brown mountains, sculpted like God’s shoulders on either side of the loch, appeared so permanent, so real, she knew the image would last her a lifetime. She’d heard tales of the wild highlands, the majesty of its topography. How could she have known the cleansing power of untamed Scotland, how soothing the sounds of Earth really were? The lake appeared big enough to be a sea. No wonder they’d never found the monster. At its deepest, the loch would be nigh unfathomable.

  But she’d just seen the beast in all its mythic glory. What was going on?

  Behind Arne, two ageing gents were sitting on a mossy wooden bench, needling each other’s convictions regarding the monster. The well-trampled limestone path leading from the water’s edge to a small guesthouse higher up the hillside was quaint and higgledy and without litter. The still air and cloudy blue sky suggested summer. She’d never seen the sun before. Not that sun anyway. She’d never touched heather or smelled buttercups or let a sugar-stealer tickle her palm. Each one seemed unreal while she experienced it, a stolen treat she would not be allowed to take home.

  Arne watched her with a permanent grin, delighting at her every delight.

  “How are you doing this?” She felt up and down her brand-new denim skirt and purple tank top. “Is it real?”

  “I am afraid not. But it is a perfect facsimile of a real afternoon on the banks of Loch Ness.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “The watchers created it as part of their research. They visited Earth a number of times, recording their experiences for these interactive simulations. There are hundreds on the ship. This is my favourite Loch Ness simulation. I thought you would approve.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. A fishing boat’s outboard motor spluttered then conked out less than thirty yards offshore. “It’s incredible. I’ve seen virtual reality programs before, but this is light-years more advanced. Absolutely perfect in every detail.” She paused. “But who are the watchers?”

  “Mysterious alien beings, Steffi. They built this ship and everything you see in it. We know very little about them, but we do know what they were trying to do.”

  “And what was that?”

  “They were trying to save humanity from itself. They wanted to find the answer to a riddle.”

  “What riddle?”

  “Why are humans so superstitious?”

  She scowled, perplexed. “Huh? Why should that bother anyone? Sounds a daft reason to fly millions of light-years.”

  “Not just millions of light-years, Steffi. Thousands of years into the past. The watchers are beings from the future. They arrived at the banks of Loch Ness and the forests of North America and the slopes of the Himalayas and the streets of Mecca for a very specific reason—to find out what makes humanity tick. To learn how superstition would one day lead it to annihilate half the galaxy.”

  The boat’s engine spluttered into silence. Steffi turned toward it, then gazed beyond to the far shore of the loch to a bulky car she’d never seen before, not even in old pictures, bouncing its way along a dirt road parallel to the water’s edge. What Arne had said sounded too far-fetched to be true. Alien watchers from the future? But who else could have recreated a lost era of a long-gone planet so flawlessly? Who else could have made this ship? Dedicated it to researching humanity? Who would have wanted to?

  She spun again at the sound of squeaking leather. The elder, more gaunt of the two men sitting on the bench at the water’s edge winced and leaned away from his friend as though hiding an arthritic ache. His shoes rubbed together when he shifted position.

  “Is he okay?” asked Steffi. “Who is he?”

  “His name is Leonard Rees, a retired policeman from Dumfries,” Arne explained. “His friend is Jock Wallace, a local schoolteacher. If you pay close attention, you will notice a very faint aura around each man. It is thin, only a few millimetres.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It simply prevents us from interacting with the person inside. All these simulations are alike. You may alter anything else, but the human characters are sacrosanct.”

  “I see. Thanks for the tip.”

  Leonard Rees sank back on the bench, finding a more comfortable position for his sore knees. “You know, my wife and I visited here umpteen times before she died, and neither of us ever saw anything resembling a monster.”

  “Not even a ripple from a flipper?” asked Jock. His questio
n had a condescending tang, as though anyone visiting the loch should at least glimpse the creature or else they weren’t looking hard enough, or they were a bit thick.

  Leonard took the bait. “Not when there’s nothing to see. People convince themselves they’ve seen ghosts and UFOs and Elvis Presley in the supermarket; it doesn’t mean anything. Their brains get carried away, that’s all.”

  “Crap. That’s always the eggheads’ cop-out—they imagined it. Funny how eyewitness testimonies are taken as fact in a court of law, but when it comes to something like this, they’re pooh-poohed.”

  “People are liars,” Leonard announced with a superior chuckle.

  “Whatever. We’re talking highly respected members of society here—priests, councilmen, even police superintendents. They’ve all seen the monster with their own eyes. Do you really think they’re all lying or hallucinating?”

  Fascinated, Steffi knelt on the grassy bank at their feet. She pressed her hand against the invisible shield protecting them. It felt supple but firm, like days-old jelly.

  “I don’t know what they saw,” admitted Leonard, “but I do know that if we just accept what people say they saw, then pretty much everything would have to exist. Angels, ghosts, vampires, the Yeti, every religious vision across the world—they would all be real because so many people have seen them. But you have to use your common sense. If something is so outlandish—supernatural, say—I think you have to wait for at least some empirical evidence, something that can stand up to scientific scrutiny. And what you said about a court of law, that’s only partly true. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. You don’t have to prove that something doesn’t exist, but you do have to prove that it does.”

  “So says Dr. Seuss,” Jock replied with outright disdain. “All I know is I’ve seen the thing, and no one can tell me any different. I’ll trust my own eyes, thank you very much.”

  “Fair enough. And I’ll just say the odds of a few plesiosaurs surviving here for tens of millions of years is about as likely as someone winning the lottery five weeks in a row.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “One…” Leonard checked the points off with his fingers, “…no other large dinosaurs survived the cataclysm. Two, there would have had to be no mishaps with the birthing of baby monsters, no diseases, no accidents, for sixty-five million years. Three, the earth has suffered massive upheavals in that time, including countless ice ages. Scotland and its lochs will have been frozen time and again. Four—”

  Jock interrupted with a scoff. He waved his friend’s cynicism away like it was a feeble glass-is-half-empty argument. “You’re just telling me how unlikely it is. Which is the same as saying it’s possible. No matter how big the odds, one community of dinosaurs could have survived here all this time. See how big the loch is, how deep it is? The fact is you don’t know for certain, and you’re frightened of admitting there could be a monster. End of story.”

  “Yes, there could. But what I’m saying is it’s going to take more than the word of a drunken git to convince me.”

  “Dickhead.”

  A cruel curling of Leonard’s thin mouth made Steffi shudder. “Admit it,” he said, “you’ve seen as much of the Loch Ness monster as I’ll be eating off my plate with chips for dinner.”

  “Bugger off, Leonard. You’re just winding me up.”

  Crack!

  A deafening screech and the clatter of metal spun Steffi toward the water. The loud cyclic buzz-roar of the boat’s propeller spinning in midair made her duck low to the ground. The boat was upended, sinking by the bow at forty-five degrees to port. What the hell had happened? She couldn’t see the fisherman. The engine’s buzz sputtered into a chug-chug then a final shudder as the grey-metal boat sank from under it. A plastic green box holding fishing tackle bobbed beside it. An upended fishing pole whirled in the wake for a moment before the falling vessel dragged it down.

  “You all right, mate?” Leonard yelled at the top of his voice to a man sculling in the water twenty feet behind the spot where the boat had sunk. “Can you make it to shore?” He wriggled out of his jacket and hurried forward a few steps, as if ready to dive in. He glanced down at the water, halted and waved his arms instead.

  The man in the water yelled back, a high edge of terror sharpening his voice. “I’ll be all right. Don’t come in after me, for God’s sake. Did you see it?”

  “I saw it,” whispered Leonard, breathless.

  “You saw what?” asked Jock, questing through the ripples.

  “I don’t know. I saw something flip the boat up from the front.” The old man’s eyes danced while he chewed his thin lip. “Nothing could have done that. It was too powerful.”

  “Make sense, man.”

  Leonard rubbed his knees and sat again, watching the fisherman’s careful, paranoid strokes through the water.

  “So, what was it?” asked Jock.

  Leonard swallowed twice, his face white, his expression one of petrified awe. “I…I don’t know. I think it was…I think it must have been…the monster.”

  Jock stared at him for a moment before blurting out a short, cold laugh. “Ha! Bollocks, man. I saw it too, and it weren’t the monster. That idiot lobbed a hand grenade.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. I watched the whole thing. What an arsehole. Look, he’s got one of those waterproof camcorders, probably filmed the whole thing.”

  “But why?”

  Jock shrugged and lifted his friend to his feet. “My guess is he’ll edit it to hide the explosion, then that footage will show up on YouTube. Voila! A terrifying clip of how the Loch Ness monster sunk his boat.”

  “What a bloody idiot!”

  “Aye.” Jock put his arm around his shell-shocked old friend. “Aye, so what will you be having with those chips again?” His wry smile was contagious, and Steffi grinned at the ironic turn of events.

  She watched the two men walk up the well-worn path to the guesthouse, then she chuckled at the sopping yahoo fisherman staggering out of the water, shivering. He stuffed his little silver camcorder into the pocket of his parka with shaking fingers. The goon. He’d planned the whole crazy stunt but had forgotten to keep himself warm.

  Arne, having sat apart on a verge behind the path, his boots resting on a clump of wild heather while Steffi had listened to the two men talk, now got up and took her hand.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “It’s a showing up for us,” she admitted. “People are nuts. They’ll believe anything at the drop of a hat.”

  “So you agree with Leonard’s cynical view?” He led her up the path after the wet fisherman.

  “Pretty much, yeah. People are liars on the whole. They embellish and they lie to make themselves seem important. They even convince themselves they’ve witnessed amazing things. I see what you mean about superstition. We are a pretty pathetic species.”

  He offered her his arm while they walked uphill. She gladly took it. Being close to him was like wearing an extra warm and soft layer when the Albatross’s heating packed in.

  “Did you believe in the monster, Steffi—before you saw it, I mean?”

  “Um, no, not really,” she replied, a little embarrassed.

  “Why not?”

  “For the reasons Leonard gave. The odds against were too great. It was too far-fetched to believe in just because someone said they’d seen it.”

  “You are correct,” he said with stern authority. “The Loch Ness monster did not exist.”

  Steffi’s brain fudged. Now Arne wasn’t making any sense. “You’d better explain that,” she insisted.

  “I mean the monster was pure myth…until the watchers created it.”

  A delectable roast beef smell spread from the dining area inside the simple Bay Mare Bed and Breakfast. Oak rafters and alcove buttress beams appeared old but very well kept, while the clean, knotted wooden floor was half varnished, half carpeted. A brace of crossed claymores on the wall above the front desk and an anti
que set of bagpipes in a glass cabinet near the open fireplace lent the room an ancient, vaguely threatening vibe. In its medieval heyday, Scotland had been a wild and vicious land. The romantic façade—Robert Burns, kilts, sporrans and Auld Lang Syne—was sustained by the tiptoes of nostalgia. The real legacy of the Highlands was one of clan rivalry, bloody battles and fierce patriotism. Why was it that people sang so sweetly of such cruel times?

  Arne led her up a narrow staircase that creaked. “I love this place,” he said, making way for a lost little girl looking for her mother. “Time seems to stand still here.”

  “Where are we going?” Steffi let go of his hand.

  “Upstairs…to the bedroom.” He hesitated. “I thought that was what…you wanted. If you are worried about what we might find, I can assure you it is the quietest room in the guesthouse. It is my favourite place for—”

  “So you come here a lot?” Steffi tried to hide her brewing jealousy.

  “Yes, frequently.”

  “With other girls?”

  “Always.”

  A bruised feeling gingered her steps. It reminded her of her embarrassing clinch with Chance and McKendrick in the prayer room, a sullied sensation. She’d felt used, debased in the cheapest fashion by a complete stranger. She tautened the bottom of her tank top over the exposed inch of her tummy. Was Arne a cad as well?

  “What do you say we hang out downstairs for a bit, in the pub? Get to know each other a little better?” She watched his beautiful face for signs of deceit. God, he was lovely in the yawning stairs light, a perfect thing in a dream come true. He stared back at her as though she’d impugned his honour.

  “I want to make love to you.” Not a glint of irony escaped his marbled expression. “Is that not your custom? It has been ours for generations. It is the reason we are still here.”

  “I guess.” She wanted to trust him, but the idea of being the latest conquest ticked off on the calendar of a cad made her a little queasy. She grabbed his arm instead and led him down to an empty table across from the staircase. “So you don’t have anyone…you know, special…back at the lake?” Steffi sat and pretended to peruse the menu.