Loch tzu-1

  Loch

  ( The Zone unknown - 1 )

  Paul Zindel

  Paul Zindel

  Loch

  PROLOGUE:

  LOCH NESS, TEN YEARS AGO …

  Luke Perkins watched his father light the campfire as his mother cleaned and prepared the trout, brushing each speckled fish with herbs and butter and securing it fast between the jaws of a metal rack. The boy had been told to stay near the Coleman lantern by the tent and to play with his pocket video game until dinner was ready, but he had long ago lost interest in the tiny electronic blips. The restless bleating of a herd of sheep nearing the edge of the loch was much more to his liking.

  He was thankful his parents didn’t see him as he wandered into the night, down the steep slope to the water. He knew they would have stopped him, shouting NO NO NO. His eyes widened with excitement when he saw the first of the sheep reach the deep, black waters to drink. Perhaps in moonlight the animals wouldn’t run from him, he thought, not the way they had on sunny afternoons when he had tried to feed them M amp;Ms and chocolate-chip cookies from his lunches.

  Tonight the sheep were busy drinking and struggling to keep their footing on the slippery slab of shore rock. The boy knew a great deal about these sheep and most of the living creatures of the loch, things he hadn’t learned enough words to be able to tell anyone. He knew the sheep were afraid of the loch-in the same way that his mother and some of the other grown-ups were. He knew they believed there was something scary and not nice hiding in the water, something that was the stuff of bad dreams. But he didn’t feel their fear. Instead, he felt as he knew his father felt-excited by the smell of the night wind and the flash of a carp rolling near a log.

  He reached the edge of the lake and froze like a bird dog next to the drinking herd. Finally, when he moved again toward the sheep, he was barely breathing, a trick he had learned when trying to surprise a rabbit or a quail. As more sheep arrived, they overflowed the first flank of animals. Several impatient ones darted behind the boy, and before he knew it, he was surrounded by the shifting animals.

  He reached out to touch one, then another. At first he was thrilled by the feel and sharp smell of their damp, oily wool. The animals, driven by thirst, pressed closer, and the little boy became worried when one nudged him, causing his left sneaker to slip into the cold brim of the lake. He thought he had better call out to his mother and father, but quickly there was a splash to his right. He looked and saw that the herd had crowded two of the drinking sheep so badly, they had fallen, baaaaing, into the water. The two animals struggled to get back onto the steep, slippery shore, but neither could get a footing against the moonlit wall of the herd.

  Suddenly there was a whooshing sound, and he watched, astonished to see one of the paddling sheep disappear from sight, yanked under the water like a fishing bob when a great bass has struck. The boy slipped farther. He struggled to push back against the herd, to get away from the edge. The second sheep bleated wildly now, confused, circling out into the deeper water as if hoping to find an unseen ledge. This time the child noticed the great wake, a profound undulation of the water heading for the desperate animal. Something dark and huge was coming, and when it struck, the white body of the sheep burst above the water. The eerie carcass shook and was propelled a dozen feet to the left, then back at a sharp angle. The boy heard the snapping and cracking. He glimpsed what he knew so many had been afraid of when they spoke of Loch Ness.

  “Help! Help!” he screamed, fighting to break loose from the panicking herd. He kicked, slipped and fell, then managed to grab onto the branches of a thorny bush. Finally, he was on his feet again and clear of the animals. He saw his mother and father racing down the slope from the campfire. Soon they would reach him. He would tell them everything he had seen, though he knew they wouldn’t believe him. But all that didn’t matter, now that he was safe for tonight.

  1

  THE HOUR OF THE BEAST

  Loch turned away from the plunging mountainside until he floated hundreds of feet above Lake Alban. He shifted his weight below the aluminum-and-canvas wings, turning the hang glider more sharply, circling. Even as the morning sun rose clear of the high ridges to the east, the lake below remained peat-laden black and grasped by the final, thin fingers of the dawn fog.

  Lake Alban was profoundly cold, a sixteen-mile-long, narrow, and unspoiled lake in the rugged and sparsely populated highlands of Vermont. It had once been an arm of massive Lake Champlain to the west, carved to depths of over nine hundred feet by a mighty glacier knife. Lake Alban, like Loch Ness in Scotland, was abundant in salmon, eel, and other bottom feeders, food favorable in the eyes of a few scientists to the breeding of massive aquatic animals. But despite recent emotional TV interviews with eyewitnesses, other, more traditional scientists were only amused by tales of terrifying creatures imagined to live in remote waters.

  Loch soared in his winged harness. He loved to lift the tip of the glider high above the horizon, let the glider stall, then free-fall until the wind rushed back under the wings to give him control again. He was fifteen now, a handsome, strong boy with shaggy, light-brown hair and deep-green eyes. He had changed a great deal in the years since Loch Ness, when he was the child who cried that he had seen a great water beast. Of course, his parents had smiled-somewhat nervously-and humored him about seeing the monster. It was the children from the town of Inverness who had giggled most and were the first to call him Loch.

  The years had so clouded the memory of what had happened on that moonlit night that Loch himself spoke of it only as a childhood imagining. But there were two other events that made Loch’s childhood seem many millions of light-years away. The first was the happy birth of his sister, Zaidee, who was now a handful and more than ready for the fifth grade. The second event was the sad and unthinkable death of his mother from leukemia only a year ago.

  “She won’t die,” his father had assured him and Zaidee over and over again. “The chemotherapy is working, the marrow transplant is taking. No, your mother won’t die.”

  But she did. On a snowy, chilling winter’s day they had buried her in the family plot near a strip mine outside Star Lake, New York. Finally, now, they all accepted that she was gone forever.

  The sky wind whipped Loch’s shirt as he straightened out the flight of the glider high over the eastern tip of the lake. He started to raise the tip of the glider again but leveled out when he heard a plane approaching. The droning sound grew loud, then louder still, until it was earsplitting. Loch banked his glider in time to see the familiar Sea-B Amphibian burst from the towering white cloud above him. The sun exploded off the plane’s fat, stainless-steel body and rear-drive propeller, blinding Loch for a moment. When he looked again, he saw his father’s boss, Cavenger, at the controls. Cavenger’s daughter, Sarah, was next to him, waving at Loch from the plane’s outsized custom windows.

  Loch had planned it like this, to be in the sky when Sarah arrived. He wanted her to see him soaring high, to show his pal how well he had learned to fly, and he was thrilled to see her smiling at him as the Sea-B circled. He quickly put his glider into a stall, then let it fall longer and faster than he had any right to.

  The wind finally caught under Loch’s wings again, as Cavenger dropped the Sea-B for an approach to the lake. The Amphibian came in low above the project’s encampment, lording its roar over the heads of the hired crews readying the boats for the day’s search. Loch knew the raucous maneuver was one more inspired gesture by Anthony Cavenger to remind all who worked for him: I pay you, I control you, I own you.

  Gliding toward home base, Loch had judged the wind currents well. He scanned the desolate north shore of the lake, with its single dirt road to the old logging mill. He gave a last glance toward the massive blue basin
to the west that was Lake Champlain, then glided down over the forest and smoking chimneys of the few homes that dotted the paved road south of Lake Alban. Several times in the past he had misjudged the morning convection drafts. He had fallen short and had to set his glider down on the little-traveled roadway. Today he knew he could easily make it to the field near his father’s trailer. As he cleared the last patch of mist and a knoll of tall pines, he saw his sister waiting by the duck pond, waving him in.

  Loch set the glider down and was out of its harness in time to catch Zaidee when she reached him. “You looked like a chicken hawk up there,” she said, the strands of her bobbed hair bouncing up to her ears as she jumped. She locked her arms and swung from his neck. “When are you going to teach me to hang glide?” she asked, so wanting to be just like her big brother. “When?”

  “How long have you worked for Cavenger?” the young man wanted to know as he helped move boxes of research equipment from the back of the U-Haul truck into Sam Perkins’s 1978 Volvo.

  “About seven years,” Sam answered, just to be polite about it. Small talk with college graduates just starting to claw their way up the corporate ladder had never been his strong point.

  Erdon checked deeper inside the U-Haul truck. Most of the boxes were brimming with Sam’s measurement gauges, core samplers, and other marine research equipment. “What’s under the canvas?”

  “An old Jet Ski.” Sam grabbed the last box. “It huffs and puffs, but it still kicks water.”

  “Great.” If there was one thing Erdon knew he’d need on this hick assignment, it would be some quality playtime. “Mind if I take it out on the lake sometime?” he asked. “I sort of grew up on one.”

  “No problem,” Sam said, having no intention of ever really letting him borrow anything. He had met dozens of self-conscious, muscled young men like Erdon, yuppies just out of school, thinking the world owed them a living. “You went to U.C.L.A.?”

  “Does it show?” Erdon asked defensively.

  “Well, that’s what it says on the decal you’ve got plastered on your Pathfinder.”

  “Oh.”

  Sam struggled to open the rear loading door of the Volvo station wagon. He was proud of the 193,000 miles he’d put on it, even as he used his old screwdriver trick to spring the broken hatch lock. Dr. Sam, as everyone called him, had become a highly respected marine biologist during the first dozen years he’d been out of Boston University. That all seemed very long ago to him now, long before he had married the bright and loving Joan Meisner and she had given him two wonderful children-and long before he’d gone to work for Cavenger. He didn’t care that he looked shopworn in his dusty brown cap and big-pocketed fatigues, well frayed from the strong detergents of Laundromats.

  “I was wondering how you made the transition from marine research to working for Cavenger,” Erdon said, putting his pair of Nikon cameras back around his neck. “I mean, my textbooks had half a dozen species of marine life carrying your name.”

  “It’s called following the money,” Sam said bluntly, surprised Erdon had done his homework. “Exactly what you’re doing.” He turned and headed for the trailer, with Erdon after him.

  “Cavenger says you have photos, sketches of what we’re looking for in the lake,” Erdon pressed. “I mean, I’ll be doing the stills and video, but if I could see what you’ve got, it might help me know what to expect. Was it Darwin or Pasteur who said chance favors the mind that’s prepared?”

  Dr. Sam was thankful to see Loch and Zaidee running up the knoll.

  “It was great up there this morning, Dad,” Loch said, breaking into a wide grin. “Saw clear across Lake Champlain.”

  “Good, son,” Dr. Sam said. “Loch, this is Mr. Erdon. He’s doing the documentary camera work on today’s search. Give him the special Cook’s tour, okay?”

  “Sure,” Loch agreed, smiling devilishly.

  “My brother and I have a laptop we play Crashers on,” Zaidee bragged, as she pushed by everyone to be the first inside the trailer. “I’ll show you after I go to the bathroom.”

  “Watch your head,” Loch warned Erdon as they followed her inside. “Try not to step on the scuba masks.”

  Zaidee went into the John as Dr. Sam gave his son a wink and dropped into the dining nook to finish his long-cold morning coffee. “The main event’s in my room,” Loch told Erdon. He led him through the maze of furniture and lab equipment to the back of the trailer. “In there,” Loch said, pointing to a door. Erdon reached out, opened the door, and started in. Suddenly, from out of the shadows, the head of a hideous beast, its mouth gaping, lunged down for Erdon’s face.

  “Ahhhhh!” Erdon screamed, his Nikons clanking as he threw up his arms. The head, its ferocious eyes glaring from a mass of matted hair, bounced off his elbow, snapped back, and came forward again and again in decreasing arcs.

  “Sorry,” Loch apologized, lighting up with a grin. He reached past Erdon and grabbed the fake monster head, which hung from a fishing string. Loch set the head back on top of a shelf. “It’s just a little joke we play on visitors to our humble hall of cryptids.”

  Erdon’s face was flushed, adrenaline pulsing through him as he heard Dr. Sam laughing in the dining nook. “It wouldn’t be so funny if I had a heart condition,” he called out angrily, trying to hide his embarrassment. Finally, he walked into the bedroom. Loch flicked on the light. Erdon’s face moved slowly into a glow of astonishment. “Oh, my God,” he said, his eyes scanning the blitz of shocking drawings, eerie photos, and models of dozens of grotesque creatures. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” He took one of the Nikons and started shooting away. “What are they?”

  Loch brushed a pile of science books and computer magazines from his bed onto the floor and sat down. “Just your average devil pig, water dragon, and Sasquatch,” Loch said, ticked off that Erdon hadn’t asked if he could take pictures. “Haven’t you seen all the cryptozoo junk Cavenger stores at his London publishing offices?”

  “I’m just playing catch-up. You know, my folks would never have let me keep my room like this,” Erdon said enviously. “This is terrific.” He reached out to touch the head of a tremendous, toothed skull. “My mom made me keep everything out of sight. She wrapped half our house in plastic.”

  Loch felt an ache in his stomach. He took the skull from Erdon. “This is a plaster head of a Tzuchinoko, a monster lots of people say they’ve seen around lakes,” he said, wanting to move away from remembering how much he missed his own mother. If she were still alive, Loch knew, she would make certain Zaidee, Dr. Sam, and he lived in a much neater home too. “People claim it’s a thick-bodied snake with twisted horns above its eyes.”

  “But it’s all really a big crock,” Erdon said, loud enough for Dr. Sam to hear him.

  “Sure, it’s probably a catfish brought to the top by a drought,” Loch agreed, “but last year the town of Chigusa, Japan, believed in it enough to offer a two-million-yen reward for a living specimen. Cavenger had us off and running on that one too.”

  Erdon smirked. “You guys always find diddly, right?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Cavenger hypes it up into grist for his weird magazines, like News of the Strange and Phenomena Monthly. He had us search a year for a Waheela, this white wolf beast sighted in Canada.”

  Erdon shuffled through a stack of sketches of ferocious flying creatures and sea monsters, photographing everything that caught his eye. He knew he could easily freelance a couple of photo layouts to Cavenger’s competitors. “Who did the drawings?”

  “I do a lot of them,” Loch said proudly.

  “They’re not bad.” Erdon leaned across a cluttered table to get a closer look at a set of dark, shadowy photo enlargements thumb-tacked to the wall. “These are supposed to be of the Loch Ness monster, right?”

  “The shot showing the big fin is the best,” Loch said. “They call it the Ledniz shot.”

  Erdon knew that photo alone had been bought and reprinted so many times it had bee
n an annuity for the photographer. “Lots of the photos have been shown to be phony. That one guy on his deathbed admitted his photo was a toy submarine, right?”

  “All the photos can’t be fakes,” Loch said.

  “Something like Nessie is what Cavenger thinks is in Lake Alban?”

  “A few locals think so too.”

  From what Erdon had seen of the citizens of Lake Alban, he’d decided they’d invent anything to bring a few tourist bucks into the area. “What do they say?”

  “Let me tell him!” Zaidee barged in, carrying the laptop and cornering Erdon. “Mrs. Mitchell who runs the grocery store said she saw a big black thing down near the fish grid. And Jesse Sanderson, who’s the caretaker at the logging mill, said he saw something off his dock that had a head the size of a barrel, but everyone says he’s a nasty, no-good pain-in-the-neck who drinks all the time. And a schoolteacher down the street said she saw two sets of fins twenty feet apart, and she thinks there’s something in this lake that could hurt somebody a lot, a real lot. …”

  The phone rang and Dr. Sam grabbed it. A moment later he called in to them. “There’s a storm heading down from Canada. Cavenger wants the search under way immediately. Everybody to the dock. On the double!”

  2

  SOUNDS

  Loch drove Dr. Sam and Zaidee in the Volvo. He’d already driven lots of times on expeditions, and now that he had turned fifteen, it was actually legal in Vermont for him to be behind the wheel. Erdon followed alone in his Pathfinder. “Can I turn on the radio?” Zaidee asked, reaching out for the shortwave.

  “Sure,” Dr. Sam said. “Just don’t broadcast.”

  Zaidee hit a lot of static but finally tuned in a couple of boaters talking about fuel. She switched channels and picked up somebody giving a weather update to a guy with a French accent. Within minutes they had reached the main encampment and pulled into a parking area near Cavenger’s Sea-B, which had been brought ashore and tethered.