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Sean
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I wait until I’m on a deserted stretch of Highway 60, halfway to the Algonquin Park entrance, before I pull over to contact the emissary. Telepathy is the language of the Pleiadians, and mine has gotten rusty since moving out of the lab over eleven years ago. Communications would be easier for me to do inside the park, where I’m closer to the emissary and the range isn’t as far, but search teams are crawling all over Algonquin and they would be really interested to find a hippy communing with nature in the midst of a missing person investigation.
Leaving my rented, black, nondescript, run-of-the-mill Ford Escape parked on the gravel shoulder, I hike into the woods for about thirty minutes and find a quiet place to sit and relax. The ground is still cold and wet, and I’m wishing I had my sweatshirt on under my jacket... although the thought of Geri wearing it gets me hot.
Focus, Eastman.
I take a deep breath, hold it for one second, then let it back out, repeating over and over again. The soothing, dizzying effect of increased oxygen eases my tension. But thoughts of being back at the McKennas’ and seeing everyone, especially Geri, stubbornly refuse to leave, so I have to dig into my backpack for my oxygen enhancer. Within five minutes, the high hits me, and I feel as if I’m floating, bobbing along a virtual river running through a dark corridor. The Pleiadians are good at hiding, so I wait for the emissary to pick up my signal and accept my call. It doesn’t take long. He’s probably been looking for me.
Emissary: Peace to you, Sean.
Me: Peace to you, Emissary.
Emissary: We’ve been waiting to hear from you.
Me: I’m as surprised as you must be that Moulton’s memory is still intact. As per standard procedure, I buffered her memories and introduced new ones.
Emissary: Is it possible the device malfunctioned?
Me: I assure you, it did not.
Emissary: We have informed the Migoi of the imminent threat of hunters, and they will take the appropriate precautions. Your presence in the area would be most welcome.
Me: I’m en route now. And you should know that Commandant Hendersen wants Hornsby’s phone. He fears that she may have taken pictures.
Emissary: As the commandant knows, she came to us without a phone.
Me: Moulton has reported to police that Hornsby had her phone with her. It’s most likely in the lake.
Emissary: I will leave it to your discretion.
Me: Finding it is a small thing that will do much to calm the EUC ambassadress.
Emissary: Keeping the ambassadress happy has become a challenge. We are grateful for your assistance. However, I am troubled by the discontent that returning here is causing you.
Me: My apologies, Emissary. I wish I could hide it and not trouble you.
Emissary: You are thinking about a woman... black hair, green eyes, likes to play hockey... She’s familiar to me...
Me: Yes, Emissary. You remember the McKennas?
Emissary: Ah, yes, the family who became your human cultural guides. You were very attached to them.
Me: This mission has given me an opportunity to see them again and reminisce. I will miss them when I leave.
Emissary: Particularly the woman.
Me: Yes, especially the woman.
Emissary: Why do you not pursue her? You should be living a normal human life, Sean. We encourage it.
Me: With all due respect, Emissary, I cannot in good conscience make a commitment to someone when they do not know who or what I am or what dangers their association with me may bring.
Emissary: The others have done it with no ill effects.
Me: I guess I’m not like the others.
Emissary: No. He laughs. You are not. Peace to you, Sean.
Me: Peace to you, Emissary.
With a heavily relaxed hand, I pull the oxygen enhancer out of my nostrils and sit for five minutes, letting the high wear off before I hike back to my vehicle. Traffic is light—tourist season won’t start for another month—and the trip goes by quickly.
I drive through the main gates of Algonquin Park and get a park pass, keeping my visit legitimate this time. I need to go to the site where Hornsby disappeared and find her phone. Now that Moulton has disclosed that location, there are bound to be investigators combing the area. I figure the best cover for me is to play the Good Samaritan. There’s always at least one overbearing pain-in-the-ass know-it-all who shows up at every crime scene, eager to help, seeking hero status.
I reach the old logging road where Hornsby and Moulton parked their rental before they headed out on their ill-fated hike. The rental is gone and in its place is a white police cruiser emblazoned with Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the silhouette of a Mountie riding a horse. Judging by the number of tire tracks gutted into the dirt road, there’s been a lot of traffic in and out of here. So I turn down a side road—or should I say path—park out of sight of the main logging road, and hike into the area on foot.
When I reach the bluff where Hornsby fell, I keep to the heavily wooded area and take in the scene. Two RCMP officers are surveying an area along the cliff’s edge that has been roped off with bright yellow caution tape. They either found something or the tape is a precaution to keep anyone else from falling down the same crevice that almost cost Hornsby her life. I’m hoping it’s for the latter and that they haven’t found her phone. The EUC would have a conniption.
Time to put the Good Samaritan act on and find out.
Staying low and out of sight, I hustle back to the trail so I can approach the officers as an unassuming outdoorsman just out for a hike. But on the way there, a horrible stench hits me full in the face, alerting me that a Migoi is nearby. I let my nose guide me until I see a big, dark, hairy hand waving at me from behind a dense copse of tall evergreens. Kasnid.
I make my way to him. “What are you doing here, buddy?” I ask. Well, I don’t use those words. I ask in the Migoi language, which is guttural and uses a lot of sounds made deep in the throat. I admit, my syntax of the language could use some work, but it’s still better than Kasnid’s English.
“Sean,” he grunts, smiling. He’s happy to see me and reaches out a long meaty arm to hook me in for a hug.
“Hey, buddy, remember I said that guys don’t—” He gives me a bone crusher, pressing my face into his stinky, hairy chest. “Hug,” I finish lamely. I pat his arm, pushing away. “Good to see you too, man.” I’m six foot four, and I still have to crane my neck to look him in the eye. “What are you, seven and a half feet now?”
Kasnid and I are the same age and once upon a time I was taller than him. But Migoi’s don’t reach full height until around the age of thirty.
He smiles and grunts back, “Yeah. Almost as tall as Dad now.”
“How is your dad?”
He turns his beady, round, brown eyes to the ground. “Still mad at me about the women.”
“Hey, it’s not your fault.” I chuck him in the arm and get him to look at me again. “You were trying to save them. Lisa would be dead right now if you hadn’t fished her out of the lake.”
Kasnid nods, but his solemn expression tells me he’s still upset. “Her friend is saying that I hurt them, and the emissary told us we need to hide because there are hunters coming for us.”
I don’t know what to say to that, I really don’t, because the look on Kasnid’s face hits me square in the chest. Wiping Moulton’s memory was my responsibility, and I failed.
Kasnid and I have been friends since birth. We’ve been hiking these woods and mountains together since we were nine. He showed me how to get water from a tree using a spigot, and I gave him his first beer. He taught me how to catch fish with my bare hands, and I taught him how to drive. We have history, Kasnid and I. We have a bond.
“I don’t know what went wrong, my friend, but I’ll make it right somehow,” I say. “I promise I won’t let those hunters hurt you or your kin.”
His small brown eyes harden to flint. “I’m not afraid that they will hurt me. I’m afraid I will have to hurt them.”
“And nobody wants that either. Just stay out of sight while they’re here and let me take care of them.”
He pats my back, and if I weren’t as strong as I am, I would be face first on the ground ten feet from here, which makes me wonder if those Sasquatch hunters have actually met a Bigfoot. They’re in for one hell of a shock if they haven’t. The Migoi—a.k.a. Bigfoot or Sasquatch—are a small, tight-knit community, fiercely loyal and protective of their own, which they often extend to the Pleiadians, with whom they have a symbiotic relationship. And God help anyone who tries to hurt one of their own.
I look in the direction of the RCMP officers, who appear to be getting ready to leave. What luck. “Have you been watching them?”
Kasnid nods. “They’ve been here all day.”
“Do you know what’s up with the caution tape?”
“As a warning about the erosion. Two men have almost fallen down it.”
“That make sense,” I say. “Do you know if they found anything?”
“No. Nothing.” A smile is back on his face. “You did a good job cleaning up, Sean.”
“Thanks,” I say, a little abashedly. It’s small compensation for my screw-up with Bethany Moulton’s memory. “But apparently, I overlooked a phone. It might be in the lake.”
The RCMP officers are stepping over the tape now, starting to walk back down the trail.
“I heard them say they’re going to start dragging the lake for a body tomorrow,” Kasnid says.
“Probably useless considering how deep the lake is, but it’s police procedure,” I say. “The good news is they might not be back until tomorrow, so I guess I’ll go for a swim now.”
“I’ll come with you,” he says.
I shake my head. “There’s still too much risk of someone seeing you.”
“They’ll see you,” he says.
“No offense, buddy, but I look more human than you.”
He grunts. “Humans don’t swim in freezing water.”
“Still easier to explain myself as a nutjob than to explain... well, you.”
He laughs, a snorty wet sound. “I can be a bear again.”
I start chuckling because that was quite a night ten years ago when we “borrowed” some of Joe’s beer, got drunk in the woods, and Kasnid peed on someone’s tent. He didn’t even see it. The guy in it was hollering, trying to get the zipper of the tent open, cursing us “damn kids,” and we were trying to get out of there before he saw us. But we were drunk and tripping over everything, so I told Kasnid to drop on all fours and pretend he was a bear. Then I told the guy, who was halfway out of his tent, staring at us with his mouth gaping open, that I was just out walking my bear. He immediately went back inside his tent and zipped it up. Good times.
“It’s broad daylight, and we haven’t had anything to drink,” I say. “How about you keep a look out while I go swimming, and if you see anyone coming, yell.”
“Okay, Sean. Maybe we’ll have a beer later.”
“Sounds good. Let’s meet at the lodge.”
The officers disappeared around the bend five minutes ago, so I head out onto the trail. I’m not afraid of being seen because I can come up with a reason—good or lame, it doesn’t matter—for why I’m here.
I walk up to the cliff’s edge, take a look around to make sure I’m alone, and drop over it, landing on the rocky beach twenty feet down at the base. The ice has all but melted, with some puck-sized floaters still hanging around. It’s going to be a frigid swim, and since I don’t relish the idea of hiking back to the truck wet and cold, I strip off my clothes to keep them dry. Even though I can withstand extreme temperatures, it doesn’t mean I find them comfortable.
The lake is deep here, and the rocky “beach” is in reality a ledge covered in scree and other debris. This is where Lisa Hornsby hit when she fell then bounced into the lake.
I dive in. The freezing cold sends a shock through my system that gets my heart pumping, and I curse the EUC for being so damned concerned about the phone. No one’s going to find it. Not only is the dark, iron-laden water close to freezing, but it’s also a good fifteen feet to the talus that forms the lake bottom along the cliff base. I kick my way down there and start sifting through silt, rock, and rubble. My head aches from the cold, and I’m thinking it would’ve been easier for the Pleiadians to send a drone to look for the phone. But the risk of exposing themselves or their technology far outweighs any threat the phone poses.
Almost an hour later, I finally find the phone buried under a few inches of silt. It’s conceivable that the police might have hooked it when they drag the lake tomorrow, but it’s still a long shot. Anyway, I can give it to the EUC now and tell them to chill out. I even take an extra look around in case Moulton dropped anything else.
I cruise back to the surface, thinking about that beer with Kasnid.