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.”^[7]

“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.^[8] 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.”