Free Nocturnal Emissions by Jeffrey Thomas Page A

touched by this affection, but shivered for a second as she felt a slithering damp caress along her elbow.
    “Sit up now, honey, we’re almost home,” she told him.
    Endure, she thought, smiling tightly into the night. Endure.
     

 
    Channel 3:
     
    the pool
    of tears
     
    8/3/02
    Hello, daughter of mine.
    I like to remind you of the fact, from time to time, as I’ve heard wild and I hope unfounded rumors that you suspect I’ve forgotten I have a daughter. I have not, nor could I forget. I don’t want to say anything negative about your mother, but I can only pray — I fear, in vain—that she doesn’t speak only with negativity about me. Not to absolve myself of all the sins of the father—and husband. Sometimes, however, I think your mother might have preferred that I had spent my time not hunting beasties that may not exist, but stalking lovely creatures of an all too tangible nature…spending money on drinks and hotel rooms rather than flights to Mexico and Vietnam’s “Lost World”. I think your mother began to see the Chupacabra as the “other woman”, and though I am a bit of an old goat these days, I am not consorting with any “goat suckers.”
    A father can make rude jokes like that to a daughter who will soon turn eighteen, too soon metamorphose into a woman.
    Enough. I fear I might alienate you. Besides, there is the thrilling matter of the monster I must relate. I know that you once shared my enthusiasm for monsters. I would dedicate ALL my books to you, as Nabokov did to his Vera…if I could ever sell even a second beasties book. Maybe the first will have to suffice. I hope that despite the sad times that have yawned like a terrible chasm between us over the past few years, that you can still share some measure of my excitement. That you haven’t come to disdain my Quixotic adventures as your mother has. Sometimes, Maria, the windmills really ARE giants.
    I’m not sure if you heard I had gone to Maine , or if you’ve heard of the monster on the news at all. There was a small bit on CNN last night. Even with physical evidence, astounding evidence, the press has made light of the matter thus far. In any case, it’s ironic after my travels all about this great rock that a beastie should wash up on Sand Beach , of all places, in our lovely, lovely Acadia National Park that you so loved as a girl.
    Mike Finney—do you remember him? marine biologist? invited me with him to Newfoundland when an architeuthis washed up?—is the one who gave me the call, after he’d gotten the summons to come look at this carcass that some tourists found on Sand Beach after a storm. I drove right up to Maine that night and got there at eight in the morning, went straight to the College of the Atlantic , where they’d moved the mass the day before.
    Before he unveiled the thing to me, Mike showed me digital photos and a video he took of the carcass in situ. It was an indistinct blob, to put it simply, coiled up in wrack and beginning to decompose. He told me the stink was terrible. There were no gulls, no crabs going at its flesh, which strikes me as odd.
    The photos reminded me superficially of those taken in 1896 of that colossal octopus beached in St. Augustine , Florida —a vague, but undoubtedly organic “globster”.
    Mike told me that the theories were flying thick and furious when he got there from Woods Hole. Giant sea cucumber (some can grow to nearly seven feet, you know!). Giant octopus. Giant squid. Giant conga eel. Rotting whale.
    Rotting shark. But Mike knows his rotting flotsam and jetsam, and he told me with a very unscientific grin, like a little boy on Christmas morning, that this blob was nothing like any of those things.
    And then he showed it to me.
    It stank. The locals had that much right. And it was indeed about seven feet in length, with a rather segmented body, giving the general appearance of a huge, fat worm or slug. My mind went racing, along with my heart. You can imagine how I