Wild Thing: A Novel Read Free Page B

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 peoplewith 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.”

EXHIBIT B
     
    Lake Garner, Minnesota
    19 Years Ago
*
     
    It’s nine a.m.—late to get a line down, like Charlie Brisson gives a fuck. He’s not out on this bullshit lake in the middle of the fucking woods to fish. He’s here to get shitfaced and forget that his wife is fucking his fucking shift manager.
    The shitfaced part is working, at least. Brisson woke up half out of his tent, frozen, his face bit to shit by mosquitoes. But what he woke up picturing was Lisa getting cornholed by Robin.
    He’s
still
picturing it. There aren’t exactly a lot of distractions around here. Maybe Brisson should have thought about thatbefore he came out to the woods. Maybe he shouldn’t be such a fucking, fucking idiot.
    He just can’t accept it. It’s like some new Lisa has taken the place of the one Brisson loved. Good Lisa would never have done this to him.
    Brisson knows that’s bullshit, and Good Lisa never existed in the first place, but
fuck
—he