Duncan turned the old Chevy pickup off Route 28, the two-lane rural highway, onto the local road. Off in the west the last faint vestiges of the solstice sunset still clung stubbornly to the horizon.
He turned on the high beams. Deer were a constant concern in the thick woods and fields of northern Michigan and without the high beams it could be a bad night for him and some poor deer.
The road would take him through Brimley and Bay Hills to the Point Iroquois lighthouse, the arranged rendezvous point.
The corn fields on either side gradually gave way to the quiet, lonely lights of Brimley, a little town just off Lake Michigan. Duncan turned off the high beams as he came into town and slowed to the town’s strictly enforced 25 mph speed limit.
One ticket from the hungry cops in Brimley had been enough for him to get the message.
Duncan stopped at the one light in the center of town. There was a hardware store on the near side of the intersection. On the far side, a church faced a liquor store on the opposite side of the street. The church was dark but the liquor store was brightly lit, its windows papered over with signs for American and Canadian macro beers, cheap liquor, and cigarettes.
He marveled at the price of cigarettes. It was a lot of money to pay for a smelly addiction that didn’t provide any appreciable effects. His indulgence of choice was cheap beer, the colder the better, when he could get it and the signs in the window made him thirsty but when the light turned green he kept going straight without stopping.
He was lean, of average height, with a hungry face. He wore jeans and an ancient army surplus jacket.
High beams on. Beech and elm and oak and cedar and pine towering overhead crowded the road and blurred into one mass of green foliage and bare brown trunks. Duncan kept his eyes shifting from left to right and back, looking out for deer.
The old truck rumbled along slowly, smelling vaguely of motor oil and gasoline inside. Duncan cracked the window and breathed the warm fresh June air.
He took the road along the lake, the aptly named Lakeshore Drive, and passed through the town of Bay Mills which sat in a horseshoe shape along the shoreline and the peninsula that stabbed out into the lake to the east.
Lakeshore Drive cut along to the west and Duncan left Bay Mills and its odd little subdivisions perched on the edge of the lake.
The Point Iroquois lighthouse lay just ahead right at the point where north-bound Lakeshore Drive turned hard to the west, a quiet lookout among the trees and no one and no houses close by.
Duncan turned into the lighthouse parking lot. The lighthouse, which was no longer used, was dark. The museum staff had long since gone home for the night.
He parked and closed the car door quietly. Nearby an owl hooted. His watch read 11:30 PM.
He headed off down the trail that led through the sparse lakeside trees and down to the beach. Gravel and sand crunched underfoot. The pines were fragrant in the summer air and the wind brought the tang of the lake in from the water.
He walked right down to the water’s edge where the waves lapped gently on the shore and he waited.
Out in the lake, the light from the lighthouse at Gros Cap Reefs whirled slowly round and round, mesmerizing him as he watched.
He wondered who was out there on that little concrete box perched on the reef that required either a helicopter or a boat with a very skilled pilot to come and go.
Away to the east came the glow from Sault Ste. Marie. It was mostly a Canadian city but the southern bit lay on the US side of the border, the city cut in half by the St. Marys River.
Duncan watched the dark patch of lake to the north east, right between the reef lighthouse to the north and Sault Ste. Marie to the east.
He checked his watch again.
12:03 AM.
They were late. It wasn’t entirely out of character for his Canadian contacts but he preferred they be on time. As quiet as Point Iroquois was, its bare beach had no cover and left Duncan feeling exposed and vulnerable.
The spinning light of the lighthouse seemed to synchronize with the gently lapping waves lulling Duncan into a state like the twilight just before sleep took over.
Duncan wondered if he was dreaming when there appeared on the dark horizon a pinprick light, steady at the water line. He watched for a minute unsure, as you often are at great distance, whether it was coming or going. A few minutes more and the light had definitely gotten larger and was now rising and dipping in the water.
Another minute and he could hear the engine chugging along, going putt-putt-putt.
In the dim light the slivered moon offered he could see two figures in the little motor boat, one sitting at the prow and the other piloting from the stern. Ten feet from shore the man at the stern cut the engine and the boat floated in, grinding on the sand as the bow struck home. The man at the front turned off the light and leaped out, a thick line tied to the bow in one hand.
The man at the back splashed into the surf with a duffel bag in his hand. They both approached Duncan.
“You’re late,” Duncan said.
“We were held up,” the man who had been at the bow said. He had a thick French accent.
“You shouldn’t use the light, Alain.”
Alain, the bow man, shrugged. “We like the light. Right, Greg?” He wore a flat cap and a heavy coat despite the summer warmth. The moonlight struck his long nose.
“We like the light,” Greg, the stern man, said. He wore a sweatshirt and jeans and a round winter hat. His eyes shined brightly through his thick beard. He had a faint Canadian accent.
“There aren’t any patrols out here,” Alain said.
“There’s gotta be someone watching the border,” Duncan said.
“We know our business,” Greg said. “Besides, it’s not the patrols I worry about. It’s the weather. The lake can get pretty rough.”
“Ah, it is calm tonight,” Alain said. “It’s no problem.”
“Some aren’t so lucky,” Greg said. “Lots of shipwrecks in these lakes though. Alain can tell you.”
The Quebecois nodded sagely. “I saw one.”
“He saw one,” Greg said, grinning.
“I swear to God, I did. It was the Bannockburn. Everyone know the Bannockburn on Lake Superieur. A steel-hulled freighter with a single smokestack. It sank over a hundred years ago. They don’t make ships like it anymore but there it was. I was fishing at Pointe Des Chenes in the early morning. I cast my line out and there it was running absolutely silent and no whitewater at the bow. I saw the crew and one looked at me. I waved but it just kept going west out into the deep lake. And it disappeared before it reached the horizon.”
Greg shook his head. “He was drunk.”
“I was not drunk. I don’t fish drunk.”
“Everyone fishes drunk.”
Duncan wondered how much longer this would go on. He nodded at the bag. “You got the usual?”
Greg held out the bag. “Five kilos.”
Duncan took the bag. It felt like five kilos.
“Finnegan will handle payment as always,” Gred said.
“You should come visit some time,” Alain said.
“Are we friends?”
“Ma oui, why not? We show you the operation. Show you a good time in the city.”
“Lonely, Alain?” Duncan said.
He grinned. “Never. But, you come visit and you talk to Finnegan about doing more for us.”
“I’d rather not cross the border if I don’t have to. I prefer staying on my home territory. I know the area. Plus, I don’t have to deal with customs, Canadian or American, asking questions, getting my license plate crossing the border all the time. You tell Finnegan I’m happy to help but I’m also happy with the arrangement as it is. It works well for me and for you.”
“I told you he wouldn’t,” Greg said to Alain. “Good for you. Don’t get in too deep. Get out whenever you want. You’ve got all of Lake Superior between you and him. You could disappear if you wanted to and he wouldn’t be able to find you.”
Was Greg trying to tell him something? Why give such clear instructions to be ready and able to flake on Finnegan’s operation? Maybe he just wanted to talk.
“Alain and me and Finnegan, we’re like this.” He held up his middle finger wrapped around his index finger. “There’s no out for us even though we’re getting old.”
“Why not just talk to Finnegan?”
“You don’t know him,” Alain said.
Duncan was losing interest. He felt like he had stumbled into the middle of a conversation these two had been having the whole way over in the boat and years before that. He checked his watch. 2:37AM.
“I should get going.” Duncan looked around. “I don’t like standing out on the beach like this for too long.”
“Yes, we go too,” Alain said.
Duncan shook hands with both of them and Alain followed Greg to the boat.
Greg climbed in while Alain pushed the boat off the sand. He waded out into the water, turning the boat to face away from shore, and then climbed in as well. The light at the front went on.
Greg pulled the motor cord. The engine sputtered then roared and kicked up foam in the shallows.
Alain waved to Duncan with his cap then turned to face forward.
Duncan watched the light bobbing in the water and the two figures growing smaller, twenty, thirty, fifty feet from shore.
There was a rushing sound, like a waterfall, and the light went out.
Something was blocking the light. Something long, nearly straight, wide as a canoe, glistened in the silver moonlight. At its edges, the boat light was just visible.
The lantern from the reef lighthouse strobed around and around putting it in high relief.
The thing arced and splashed down. Greg and Alain screamed and the light bobbed violently.
The thing came up again and Duncan recognized it. A giant tentacle. He followed its progress out of the water twenty, fifty, a hundred feet.
It was hard to tell because there was no reference, nothing to indicate the true scale of it.
You don’t really ever see something impossible; something you thought to be impossible. Something that shouldn’t exist. But Duncan found it hard to argue with what his eyes were telling him.
He rubbed his eyes. It was late. He was tired. Maybe it was his imagination, that old defense of the mind.
He opened his eyes. It was still there.
Then a second tentacle joined the first. And a third. The whoosh of a waterfall. The glistening slick skin towering in the air. Screams from Alain and Greg muffled by the distance. The light visible then blocked as the tentacles waved back and forth, back and forth.
They descended with an almighty crash. The boat splintered, the sound of shattering wood piercing the confused sounds. The light went out.
Duncan thought he heard a voice, possibly with a French accent, shouting, screaming, choking.
Then all went silent.
All Duncan could do was stand and stare.
He had never quite understood the meaning of being rooted to the spot but, subconsciously, he understood it now.
His breathing came quick in his throat, his chest heaving as he watched the spot in the water where the light had disappeared.
He waited.
The foaming whitewater settled and the waves resumed their customary lazy course toward the shore.
Duncan was standing in the same spot, unsure of what to do. The bag lay forgotten on the ground.
He couldn’t do anything if he stayed. Alain and Greg were almost certainly dead. There was no rescuing them. He couldn’t go to the police without admitting why he was there, why Alain and Greg were meeting him, why he was meeting a boat illicitly crossing the Canadian border. Possession with intent to distribute would put him in prison for years.
Duncan chuckled but the laugh died in his throat and he choked on it. The police. What would they do? Pepper that thing with their tiny handguns. You’d need an army, an attack helicopter with missiles attached.
No one would ever believe him anyways. There was no point in trying to convince anyone that he had seen the Loch Ness monster of Lake Superior, or part of it anyway.
There was no telling how big it was or what it was. A giant squid or octopus whose ancestors wandered into the Great Lakes a million years ago and never left.
Why here and now? What had Alain and Greg done to attract it? Maybe it always lurked in the waters off Point Iroquois.
Duncan’s breathing slowed. An owl hooted in a nearby tree. He came back to his body as if removed at a long distance, as if watching himself standing there on the beach. He could feel his hands again and they ached from clenching them. His legs and feet had life in them yet. He turned away from the lake and willed his body to stoop and pick up the duffel bag.
He stared at the bag, black nylon smooth to the touch, the moonlight glinting off the hooks and zippers.
Duncan curled his lip in disgust, acted on impulse, swung around, and hurled the bag in the water.
He regretted it immediately.
Not only was the contents of the bag worth a lot of money, money he needed badly, he had also somehow forgotten about the creature in the water.
The bag splashed down twenty feet from shore.
Duncan held his breath.
It floated there for a moment then slowly sank below the surface.
He exhaled and backed away from the water.
Then there came the rushing waterfall sound, loud, roaring, splashing.
The water rose up white with foam far out in the water as if a mountain were rising from the bottom of the lake. It blocked out the strobing lantern from the lighthouse. Higher and higher it went. Impossibly high.
Through the cascading water and mud appeared a nightmarish tentacled thing. Not a giant squid or octopus but a whirling mass of tentacles leading up to a pointed squid-like head. The moonlight glinted from a single massive eye in the middle of the head two hundred feet in the air.
In his small clawing desperate world of cheap beer, cheap apartments, and cheap women, Duncan had never encountered anything that shook him or challenged him or made him think he was small.
He was no big fish in his world. But that thing towering over him reminded him of when he was very young and his Grandma Ruth had taken him to church every Sunday before he ran away. He had still believed back then and he would sit in the pews in awe and terror of the fire and sulphur and ash that waited if God deemed you unworthy or immoral or insufficiently penitent or insufficiently faithful.
He had stopped imagining God up there in the clouds looking down in judgment soon after he had run away from Grandma Ruth.
But now, it was as if God had manifested himself from the bottom of the lake. There he stood in all his terrible black tentacled splendor, an impossible thing that emerged from a thousand fiery sermons, looking down on him and judging him.
And Duncan felt so small, so insignificant. In one moment, a small fish in a small pond. In the next, a tiny mote in the whirling cosmic storm full of tentacled gods.
The mass of tentacles squatted down and the head seemed to float forward, smoothly descending. The water parted at the sudden descent of its mass and the displaced waves spread along the shoreline. Where there had been water was a mass of tentacles, huge and black and covered in suckers.
Closer and closer they crept, smooth and quick and all the time the great head with its giant eye lowering and growing larger and larger.
A single tentacle shot out and wrapped itself around Duncan, pinning his arms to his sides and raising him into the air.
The air was pressed from his lungs but its grip was not absolutely crushing and he found he could still breathe, but breathing let in the old swamp and fish smell that emanated from every inch of the tentacle.
The creature leaned its head forward and brought Duncan up to meet it.
He could see now that it was closer that it wasn’t smooth like an octopus but rather covered in scales the size of dinner plates. The eye, a giant white orb the size of a car with a massive black pupil, was positioned above the center of what might be called the face of the creature.
What do you say to a massive tentacled titan the likes of which no one had ever seen before?
Duncan wanted to say something, to shout that he wasn’t afraid and that he would eat it raw like the sushi he had seen on TV and tear its heart out.
But he was afraid and his mind was blank.
What do you say to a god?
The great eye stared at him unblinking. He felt its gaze bore through him. In his vision there was nothing left. No lake, no lighthouse, no moon, no glow from Sault Ste. Marie. Just the white orb and its infinite black center.
“What do you want?”
Duncan felt that he screamed more than he heard it. Somewhere deep in his chest, the impossible primal scream. Prey confronting predator.
The eye retreated a few feet. The pupil opened then narrowed.
“I didn’t do anything to you. Let me go.”
The head tilted to one side.
Maybe it was actually listening to him and could even understand him. There was hope in that, not much, but some.
From somewhere deep in the mass of tentacles, deep beneath the eye there came a rumbling like a dozen boulders rolling down a grassy hill. It started low, sub-acoustic. Duncan felt it in his chest. It rose, higher and higher until he could actually hear it until it crested and ended in a short bark.
“I don’t understand. How can I understand? What do you want?”
Spit rolled down Duncan’s chin. His voice was hoarse.
The thought occurred to him that perhaps he was as new to the creature as it was to him.
It seemed impossible that he was the first but there were no stories of such creatures in the Great Lakes, no local myths, no alleged sightings. Nothing.
Maybe it had lain there for thousands of years swatting at the occasional passing boat, sinking ships left and right, ships by the hundreds, but never rising from the depths, never coming up to look around. Until now.
Maybe no one survived. Alain and Greg hadn’t. Why should he?
What, after all, was the harm in that? To be killed by a god. No, consumed by a god, like in those fiery sermons.
There was Grandma Ruth urging him on and the pastor screaming, striking the Bible over and over.
Penitence and humility before God. Submission to God.
The blood pounded in Duncan’s ears.
The creature rumbled again, ending in almost a whine. A question maybe? A short rumbled croak. A statement.
He was so tired. Tired of running, tired of clawing a disappointing existence.
To make such an end, a petty drug runner, here before a god.
He had borne witness and that was the first step to transcendence.
Now just to take the second.
“Take me! Go on, take me! Destroy me, eat me!”
And God obliged.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, strictly a product of the author’s imagination. Any perceived resemblance or similarity to any other fictional works, to actual events or persons, living or dead, and any perceived slights of people, places, or organizations are products of the reader’s imagination. This fiction is the result of a partnership between a human writer and the character(s) he accessed with his creative subconscious as he raced through the story with them. No generative AI was used in any way to write this story.