Jim Baen's Universe

Serials - parts and parts.

Fish Story, Episode 3

Written by Dave Freer, Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

Illustrated by Barb Jernigan

The Flashing of the Loch Ness Monster

This episode of the fishy tale borders on the hallucinatory. I'm not too sure if I should be telling you. Assassins from MA-6, the militant arm of the ancient pagan Brotherhood of the Angle, might come and dose my angling permit with a mixture of anthrax and mackerel oil. I've seen them stalking through the rain in their hooded ponchos armed with the folding chair of extreme prejudice. Still, the tale should be told and told to as many people as possible, so if I'm found clubbed to death by folding chair, showing signs of disgorger torture, and suspended from the ceiling by a Boca grip, everyone will know who killed me.

It all happened because, having listened in to the story of the Wandle Pike and the Tinta Catfish, the pub owner had invited a few foolish drinkers to stay on after closing time. That included myself, whom we can keep calling Ishmael for the moment, along with Sheila Rowen—she of the tattoos—MacParrot, Steven Speairs, Kevin Bagust and Dexter Guptill.

A lock-in, where, as guests in theory, we could avoid the evil that is closing time. A scanty half hour before and we'd all been part of that great mass of humanity engaged in the important activity of purifying the water by extracting the alcohol out of beer, using our own livers. It's a public duty, because alcohol can be toxic. It is one of the redeeming features of my fellow men that so many are willing, nay eager, to bravely perform this service to mankind.

The pub was empty now, except for us. I didn't think I'd ever seen the place with quite that few people in it. It echoed oddly, but we did our best to make up for it with vocal volume and the sounds of liquid moving.

"Well, then," said our host, whose name turned out to be James Watters. He was in possession of a very large glass, with a generous amount of golden liquor on the iceblocks in that glass. He subscribed to the glacial theory of inherited racial memory, to wit:

Iceblocks need lubrication, otherwise the sounds of the grinding of ice can cause subharmonics which instantly transport us to an ancient Europe covered in glaciers, and to the hunting of mastodons, and the harpooning of seals and walrus. It is therefore vital to your survival—and for the furniture—to keep the ice lubricated at all times. Being as Watters was of Congolese descent via the West Indies proves either that we know zip about the ice-age or that racial theories are a crock.

Watters must have had iceblocks in his throat too, judging by the way he was putting the scotch back. "I've heard tell of your little Wandle Pike."

Sheila bristled. "'Little!' I'll have you know—"

"But I think it might be that it has grown somewhat since then," he said smoothly. "It must be at least one and a half times that size now. An angler down Merton way hooked it last year."

The pride and, of course, the probity of Sarf Lunnon revivified, Sheila sat down again. "And?"

"Ah, it is a very sad story," said Watters, with a suitable expression of gleeful tragedy. "The angler slipped on the top of the embankment, just as he brought it to bank. Straight down the slope he went. A brave man and a fine angler. He kept the tension on the line somehow as he slid, raising his rod, with his badly mauled Rapala still in the pike's upper lip."

"Good fisherman that," said Steven approvingly. "Nearly as important as not dropping your beer."

"Normally yes," agreed James. "But not when you are falling onto that open mouth."

He paused, to save the iceblocks from friction again with another application of scotch, then tugged at his little goatee, shook his head, and said with an unholy sadness: "And never with your legs apart."

Glasses were arrested halfway to lips, as we all winced in unison.

"Still, it was his own Rapala that did the worst damage. The pike got away in the chaos. And it has a taste for man-flesh now," he said with ghoulish delight.

Steven snorted. "Man-flesh. Bloody hell. All we need is a dildo with hooks and we're in."

That was said with the sort of jeering bravado that I knew could only lead to one thing—us prowling sleazy sex shops at 2:00 AM in search of a large pink appliance, before heading, with a horrible déjàvu for the Wandle in a minicab driven by a khat-chewing illegal immigrant. It was the time of morning when ideas like that take root and flourish like weed at any new-clone Glastonbury concert.

"The vibration would give it a good movement in the water . . ." said Kevin thoughtfully.

"Which end do you attach a treble hook to?" I asked, in spite of myself.

Dexter shook his head. "Trebles are no good. You've got to put on short shank 2/0 for that sort of fish."

"Ach, those circle hooks maybe?" suggested MacParrot. "Ah saw thim on a programme about Ta-teatty."

"Tah-teatty?"

"Aye, named after the wimmen. Topless," he said nostalgically. "Ah think ut's somewhere near Majorca. I went there once. You have to wear dark glasses tae look at the view."

"Ah. Tahiti. Very close to Majorca," I said. MacParrot had an almost American knowledge of geography.

"Tahiti, yeah, they do use circle hooks there," said Kevin, displaying his ichthyological knowledge, "but that's only for deep water, where you get a lot of drag on the line and you can't strike. No, what you need is short-shank hooks. I have to agree with Dexter, even though that goes against my principles. You get better leverage on short-shanks. But I'd use something bigger than a 2/0."

"At least 5/0," said Steven, with all the confidence of the instant expert. "And you attach one fore and aft, I reckon."

"And how are you going to keep the water out, is what I want to know?" I was starting, belatedly, to think of excuses.

That silenced the eager chorus.

"A knotted-off rubber raincoat," suggested Dexter.

"They're built waterproof . . ." said Sheila and dived into her beer.

Alas, for the birth of a lure that could have changed the way the fishing tackle business was perceived forever, to say nothing of what it would have done to the term 'bloodworm' bait. . . .

"You've got it wrong," observed the barmaid, who had now joined the drinking crew and had her feet up on the table. Vicki Keith, her name was. "It was his thigh. I've seen the scars."

"You have?" asked Steven.

"Yes, and trust me, it wasn't worth it. There was someone who would claim a tadpole was the Loch Ness Monster."

MacParrot beamed and stood up, fumbling in his trousers as he swayed. "Ach! The Loch Ness Monster. Ah've got priff."

Dexter looked at the fumbling. "You filthy beggar. A course of antibiotics will sort that out."

MacParrot blinked. "Ma wallet. Ma wallet's missing!" he yelled.

"It's in your other hand, you drunken Scots blart," said Steven.

MacParrot stared at the tatty wallet as if it was a holy apparition. Shook his head in amazement. "Ach. I ha' sworn ah lost it. That someone ha' stolen the priff that'll mak ma fortune." He sat down again, a process mildly improved by his missing the chair. He retrieved himself from the floor and gained the comparative sanctuary of his seat. He put the wallet down, with exquisite care, into a pool of beer. Opened it, to reveal the usual joys of a bachelor male existence: very little money, a pack of that everlasting chewing gum you buy from coin-operated dispensers in the gents, a large number of receipts . . . and some battered Polaroid photographs.

In this day of digital cameras, you could somehow rely on MacParrot to have the last surviving Polaroid. Most of the pictures were pink and quite ingenious. Even as totally bladdered as he was, MacParrot had the grace to hastily shuffle them.

"Ach. Just some holiday snaps," he said airily.

"Of the spine by the looks of it," I jeered.

Mc Parrot ignored me. "Ut's the Loch Ness Monster ahm looking for. Ah've got priff. Photographic priff." He leafed through more principally pink and ample pictures. "There really is a monster."

"I think she found it," said Sheila.

"How many humps did it have?" asked Kevin.

Steven began to sing in a fine tuneless baritone the nursery rhyme: "Sally the camel's got . . ."

MacParrot looked darkly at him. "How did ye know her naem wus Sally? Eh? She's no' been seein' a great southern Jessie like you. . . ."

It took the combined efforts of more beer, and our magnificent singing in chorus, to convince MacParrot that if Speairs was sleeping with his bit of fluff, we all were. The fact that this seemed, in his mind, to be a distinct possibility complicated matters a bit. It might have been easier just to let them fight it out, but Watters had indicated that he'd take this unkindly and might just respond by kicking us out. That was a mighty big lever. According to Archimedes, with a big enough lever you could move the earth—and with one that size even have a fair chance at budging a Scots drunk, although it is asking a lot of the lever.

At least a temporary cessation of hostilities was achieved with the barmaid calling for the intervention of the blue helmets—a concoction of Parfait d'Amour, Baileys Irish Cream and cognac. This is a drink which is not surprisingly vastly unpopular in every civilized country, and most uncivilized ones. It had a remarkable pacifying effect, though, as all the combatants united in demanding beer and agreeing that it was possibly the vilest drink of their experience.

"It compares favorably with chili beer," said Steven, sticking his tongue out.

"British beer is always too bloody warm," grumbled Kevin, doing the oral temperature test. "Back in South Africa they damn near freeze the stuff, because otherwise you might taste it. Chemical-flavor lager."

"Not cold beer. Mexican stuff. It has a chili in it," explained Speairs.

"That's an abomination," I said, speaking as the resident Vindaloo connoisseur. "Chili and beer should only be simultaneous coming up, not going down. And I bet it was lager."

"Yeah." Steven nodded, his face set in a real-ale grimace. "Kind of fitting really."

"I had a cousin in the merchant marine who brought me some Japanese saki once," admitted Sheila.

"And what was it like?" asked Dexter.

Sheila grimaced. "You understand why the beggars committed suicide, but become mystified as to how the hell they ever hit something the size of an aircraft carrier when they did it. It still wasn't as bad as that concoction." She pointed accusingly at the empty glasses scattered among the other debris on the table.

This is the stage of the evening when mixing drinks is even more unwise than usual, because it made me say "Well, let us see the picture of Nessie then?"

So MacParrot did his famous wallet hunt and the "it's been stolen!" performance again. We gave a standing ovation and then Sheila went and ruined it by pointing out that his wallet was still sitting on the table in its puddle of beer.

MacParrot leafed through the entertaining pink pictures of Sally-the-camel and hauled out the second last picture in the pile out for us to all stare at.

His pictures of Sally were taken with a less shaky hand, and in much better light. Even the moon was blurred. That could have been something with three humps sticking up out of the water. It could have been hay bales covered with tarpaulin, sunk in shallow water. It could also have been the pyramids at Giza.

I said so.

"No, Nessie wus definitely a lass," said our Scots instant cryptozoology expert. "No' a geezer."

"He means one of those fountains of steam associated with geothermal activity," explained Dexter.

"Whut?"

I intervened. "I mean that picture is too shaky to be used as evidence of anything except delirium tremens."

"Whut? Weel, there's this one." He produced another picture without the slightest hint of camera shake.

It was also without the slightest hint of a Loch Ness Monster. It did show a series of neat splash rings on the moonlit water, and the back of a boat. For a picture taken using a cheap Polaroid at night, it was a great photograph. For proof of a monstrous dweller in the chilly waters of a Scots loch, it was rubbish.

"She wus startled by the flash. No' me. The camera," he said, forestalling us.

"You mean you flashed her as well?" Steven asked with a grin.

He blushed. He really blushed. You wouldn't have thought it possible but plainly a streak of deep prudery lurked in the Calvinist soul of MacParrot. "In a manner o' speakin', I did," he admitted.

"No wonder she left in such a hurry. The poor beast's probably having therapy." Sheila grinned and appropriated one of my smokes.

Steven reached his large mitt across the beery table and the debris of dead soldiers. "I'm honored to shake the hand of the man who flashed the Loch Ness Monster. I mean plenty of people have seen her, but just how many do you think have flashed her?"

MacParrot's first brush with fame, if not fortune, seemed to embarrass the Scot further. "Ah wus answering nature's call," he explained. "Ye see . . . Ach. we'd just gone for a wee romantic sail in moonlight."

It appeared that MacParrot had, in a fit of drunken gallantry, "borrowed" a rowboat to take his light-of-love for a bit of passion on the ocean . . . well, loch.

"Wuch, is where things went just a wee bit wrong," he explained, while proving that a man can set fire to the filter end of cigarette if he tries long and hard enough. "As ma experience on the water was a wee bit limited. And I might just have been a bit fu'."

"How unlike you!" Sheila's sarcasm can crack rocks, whereas her biceps and forearms are merely limited to walnuts. "Quite out of national character."

MacParrot took the coffin nail out of his face. Squinted at it. Broke the filter off and lit it again. Coughed spectacularly, and continued, oblivious. "Aye. Otherwise I might have taken oars."

George blinked away from the difficult problem of getting his eyes to focus. "How did you get away from the shore?"

MacParrot shrugged. "Ach., it wus tied tae a wee pier. We just pished her off. And then we got a little distracted like."

"The famous Sally?" I asked. It would appear that she was an enterprising lass.

"Aye," MacParrot nodded. "And a bottle of scotch. Ut might have helped if we'd discovered the lack of oars a wee bit earlier." He grimaced. "Ye might say we were adrifting up Loch Ness without a paddle. And out of drink." He looked tragically at his glass. "An' there wasn't any bathroom facilities on board. I had just liberated mesel' from my trouser-buttons at the stern, when I found that I was lookin' down at the monster."

Steven sniggered. "MacParrot's so modest, isn't he?"

So did Sheila. The rest of us of course kept dead straight faces. "So she came for a closer look? And didn't swim off into the night, shrieking?" asked the barmaid Vicki.

MacParrot nodded. "Ah've nivver seen anything like it. It must ha' been forty foot long."

Vicki took a long look at the squat young Scotsman. "That's what I call a grew-some monster."

MacParrot nodded. "Aye. A great long snaky neck and a wide body—wi' those finnys things instead o' legs. I just stood there wi' my fly down. And she just floated there and stared at me. I just had tae get a picture—and when the flash went off she dived."

"So all we have to do is go and expose ourselves on Loch Ness, in the middle of the night, and we're bound to get a glimpse of the holy grail of cryptozoology, the legendary Loch Ness Monster. A plesiosaur that has somehow taken a perverse interest in the undercarriage of small Scotsmen. It's another griffin I tell you, " I said.

"Makes sense to me," said Dexter, grinning. "That's why they wear kilts."

"It's too cold up there to flash, or they'd have a petting zoo for Nessies by now," said George. "We should go and try it out!"

"To flash Nessie. Sounds like a project to me. Shall we go tonight?" said I, happy and secure in the knowledge that Scotland was probably not within reach, even by transdimensional minicab, at one in the morning. The blue helmet was having its legendary pacifying effect and I was thinking about that Zen state where you become one with the top of table.

"It can be arranged," said Watters.

When someone says that, in that tone—especially a pub owner—you should find your feet, stagger to the john and lock yourself in.

Really. It's the wisest course. Do not say "and the fucking pudding. It's five hundred miles! You got a Lear jet out the back?"

Whatever you do, do not say this.

As it happens, I faithfully followed my own advice and said nothing.

But bloody Steven, the UK's gift to determined foot in mouth disease, said "and the fucking pudding. It's five hundred miles! You got a Lear jet out the back?"

Watters smiled. "No, something much faster. Something known only to the inner circle of the Brotherhood of the Angle. I see recruits among you. Believers in fish. Come with me."

I should have followed Speairs into the john instead, where I believe he went to bark at the porcelain. I could have quietly fallen asleep there. Instead I joined the rest of the drunken cavalcade into the nether parts of the pub.

****

There should have been, at the very least, pentacles. Sigils scrawled in blood, guttering candles, that sort of thing. Alternatively, high voltage blue arcs of sparks dancing in jagged lines between the insulators, great monstrous switches to be pulled, the air heavy with the reek of ozone.

It was totally out of the best tradition. There weren't even instrument panels full of flashing lights. How were we to know what we were in for?

It was simply a cupboard under the stairs smelling of brass polish, with maybe a hint of ammonia-based floor cleaner. There was a bucket and a mop in it.

James Watters waved us forward with a showmanlike air.

"Wow . . . it's amazing," said Dexter.

"I've never seen anything quite like it," I agreed.

"No you haven't, and yes it is amazing," said Watters. "The churnel tunnel doesn't look like much. But if you just let me adjust the settings before you step through, I can have you in Scotland and on the banks of Loch Ness in the twinkling of an eye. The churnel penetrates the very fabric of reality. Reality doesn't want us there, so it spits us out. We've learned to control where it spits us to."

He seemed to be offended that we found it funny. People are like that. When they own the pub, you stop laughing quickly. He moved and twisted the mop. Nodded. And said: "Well, who is first?"

"First for what?" I asked.

"A trip through the churnel," said James. "Don't all shout at once. Just step into the cupboard."

Now we were all in a fine and plummy state. Even Sheila, and she has a head like cast iron. We'd have probably been good for a session of fishing on the Wandle with vibrating lures. Or climbing Nelson's Column to go and put a copy of the Daily Worker under the statue's right arm. Or harpooning swine in the fleet ditch . . .

But being asked to step into a cupboard under the stairs was a bit of a let down. Had the man no sense of drama? Besides, even if only dimly, we got the feeling that we were going to be the butt of some complex and horrible joke, a feeling reinforced by Vicki saying "Not me. Not again."

"How many of us do wish tae put into the broom cupboard?" asked MacParrot, doubtfully.

"All of you, if you like," said Watters. "Or one at a time, if you prefer."

"And how long before you let us out?"

For an answer James took the key and held it out. "Here. Take it with you. Give it back on the other side."

So in a fit of foolishness MacParrot did. He stepped into the cupboard. Watters swung the door closed.

I expected a bolt.

He opened it again.

The cupboard was exactly as it had been. Only it was empty of a short-arsed swaying little Scot.

"This has immense possibilities!" I said eagerly. "How do you get bank managers to step into it?"

"Clever!" agreed Kevin. "There must be bloody panel at the back!" He marched into the cupboard to look for it, closely followed by the rest of us.

It was very dark and somehow there was enough room for all.

Now, according to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, going through hyperspace is unpleasantly like being drunk, and therefore Arthur Dent will never be cruel to a gin and tonic again. Going through the churnel tunnel was actually more like being eaten. Or rather, more like being digested. And the black tunnel treated us as if we were a bad curry. It didn't help that the process left me feeling like I'd had one too, complete with all the light and sound effects that would go with stomach cramps, if Andrew Lloyd Webber put them into a stage show.

Then the churnel spat us out into darkness, and in a confused mass we pushed our way toward the only crack of light. The door opened and we fell out, en masse. We lay there groaning in a small, somewhat used pile, next to a rubber plant, in an almost generic 1970 lounge-bar.

I say "almost" because there were signs that some confused designer in the process of making the typical chain Irish pub (a concept which is in itself an abomination and a sin against nature) had got hooked up on bad-taste tartan and thistles, instead of green and shamrocks. Possibly the only other evidence we had that we had traveled the severe digestive problems of time and space were the other occupants of the bar. Such sights can only be the result of the distortion of space time and causality.

Staring amiably at us was a man in a blue turban and a kilt. From his appearance, a south Asian of some sort. It is possible that he may have been wearing other garments too, but those were the bits that will remain etched forever in my memory. He also had a long curled moustache that would have made your average walrus die of envy.

"Greetings," he said, bowing. "What can I be getting you to drink, guests? Och of the noo'," he added as an afterthought. "I am sorry. It is being very late. I am forgetting the traditional accent."

"Who the hell are you?" demanded Sheila, finding her way to her feet first.

"And where are we?" I asked, taking in the scene. There were three people playing "fuzzy