NICK VELVET WAS A thief, a highly paid specialist in a crowded field. Often, between the paid assignments that brought him as much as thirty thousand dollars each, he liked to relax on the front porch with Gloria and think of things as they might have been. He sometimes felt that life would have been just as pleasing and not half so complicated if he worked at the electronics plant down the block and spent his evenings watching television with a beer at his side.
But then men like Earl Crowder came along to change his mind. Crowder was a middle-aged businessman running to overweight, who gazed at Nick through his thick glasses and never smiled.
“You steal things,” he said, but of course he already knew that.
“Some things. Unusual things.” Nick lit a cigarette. “Nothing of great value, like money or jewels.”
“Could you steal a sea serpent?” Crowder asked, still unsmiling.
“I never, tried,” Nick admitted. “I don’t think I could steal it unless it really existed.”
Earl Crowder sighed and settled back in the chair. They were in his hotel room in midtown Manhattan, on a sunny day in early June, and the world of sea serpents seemed far away.
“It exists,” he said, “in some form or another. I own a resort up in northern New England—it’s called Crowder’s Cover—and we’re coming into our busy season now. We’re on Golden Lake, near the Canadian border. A great swimming and boating place during the summer, and good hunting territory in the fall.”
“And you have a sea serpent?”
“No! That’s just the trouble! The serpent or whatever it is resides in Silver Lake, about twenty miles away. And that’s where all the tourists go now! I’m being ruined by that guy and his serpent!”
Nick Velvet frowned through the cigarette smoke, decided the man was serious after all, and asked, “What guy?”
“His name is Larry Pike, and he’s the manager of the Silver Lake Hotel. It started last season, and from the looks of things it’s going to be worse this year. First it was just some fishermen out in a boat one night—or early in the morning. People just thought they had been drinking. But then others saw it too. One lady even got a picture of it, kind of blurred and off in the distance.”
“A sea serpent?”
“Or a damned good imitation! When I first heard about it I was sorta happy. I figured it would hurt Pike’s business—after all, who wants to swim in a lake with a sea serpent? But it didn’t work like that, not at all! Seems it’s just a small serpent, and the people are flocking to Silver Lake in hopes of seeing it.”
Nick vaguely remembered seeing something in the papers about it the previous year, but it had vanished into the depths of his memory along with the reports of flying saucers and poltergeists. As a rule he didn’t believe in things like sea serpents, even small ones, but for thirty thousand dollars he could bring himself to believe in almost anything.
“This was last year?” he asked.
Crowder nodded. “Late in the season. But it’s starting again this year too. I heard last week that a couple saw the thing, swimming across the lake one night when the moon was bright.”
“Perhaps there is no serpent. Perhaps he only pays a few people to see it.”
“There’s something out there, all right. Pike was once an animal trainer with a circus. He …”
“You’re surely not suggesting he has a trained sea serpent!”
“I don’t know what he has! Maybe it’s a submarine of some kind. Whatever it is, I want it.”
“I charge thirty thousand for high-risk assignments.”
“It’s worth it, to be rid of that damned thing. Or to have it in Golden Lake instead.”
“You’ll have it,” Nick promised him. “If it exists.”
The mountains of northern New England were strange to Nick Velvet. The area of Silver and Golden Lakes was completely unknown to him, and somehow unlike his memories of the Catskills. Perhaps it was only that he’d been young in those days.
Driving up along dusty dirt roads, he saw the signs of winter pointing the way to nearby ski resorts, disregarding the high June sun that filtered through the trees to speckle the earth with shadows. He wondered if he should take a look at Earl Crowder’s place on Golden Lake, then decided against it and took the left fork direct to his destination on Silver Lake.
Larry Pike’s resort was low and rambling, a hodgepodge of buildings and random additions that must have collected over the years until now they stretched for nearly a quarter of a mile along the lakefront. Though the season was still young, there were a number of boats already in the water, and everywhere there was the odor of fresh paint and the look of annual rejuvenation.
Nick parked his car near the main building and stopped the first pretty girl he saw. “Could you direct me to Larry Pike’s office?”
She was blonde and tanned, wearing a sleeveless pullover above white shorts. “I’m his secretary,” she answered. “I’ll take you there.” And as he followed her up the steps, she asked, “Could I say who’s calling?”
“My name’s Velvet. I’m a writer.”
“You’ve come about the serpent?”
“That’s right,” he admitted.
“It’s really put us on the map! This should be the biggest summer in our history.”
She ushered him into a little office behind the registration desk, where a youngish man with thinning hair and the beginning of a belly was just putting down the telephone. “A visitor, Miss Martin?” he asked, not looking directly at Nick.
“Another writer, about the serpent.”
“Well. Well, we’re always pleased to show you fellows around. I’m Larry Pike. I gather you’ve met my secretary.” He got up from the desk to shake Nick’s hand. “What magazine are you with? A big one?”
“You might say I’m a freelance,” Nick told him. “But I think your sea serpent is certainly worth a good deal of money. I’d like to hear all about it.”
“Certainly, Mr.—?”
“Velvet.”
“Velvet. Odd.”
“It’s in the nature of a pen name,” Nick said.
Pike smiled. “I understand about you authors. Judy, would you bring us some coffee?”
Nick noticed that the blonde secretary had been returned to a first name basis quite quickly. He decided he’d been accepted by Larry Pike. “Just how many people have seen your serpent, or monster, or whatever you call it, Mr. Pike?” he asked.
The youngish man smiled. “What is it, Judy?” he called to the outer office. “Maybe a dozen or so?”
“About that,” she answered.
“Have either of you ever seen it?” Nick asked.
“No, but there’s a woman here now who was only a few feet away from it last September. She can give you quite a vivid description.”
“Any idea what it might be?” Nick asked.
Larry Pike shrugged. “Who knows? It’s making money for me—that’s all I know.”
“There’s been some hint that the thing is a hoax.”
“Talk to Mrs. Foster and the others who’ve seen it. There’s a man who lives across the lake—he was the first to see it while he was out fishing. Talk to him, too. I think their descriptions will convince you it’s no fake. We even have a few pictures, but they’re not too good because it never comes to the surface in broad daylight.” He reached nervously for a cigarette from the half-empty pack at his elbow. “It’s that Crowder over on Golden Lake! He’s the one who keeps yelling fake, because he’s afraid of losing a little business!”
“I’d like to speak with Mrs. Foster if I could,” Nick said firmly.
The blonde secretary, Judy, offered to take him, and with a few further words to Pike he left the office and followed her to one of the freshly painted cottages down by the water. He had to admit it was a pleasant place, with a gentle breeze just rippling the surface of the lake. He could almost imagine himself settling down here with Gloria.
“This is Mrs. Foster,” Judy said, introducing him to a stout motherly woman who was playing bridge with three other ladies on the porch of her cottage. “Mrs. Foster, Mr. Velvet here wants to hear all about our sea serpent.”
“Indeed I do,” Nick said, smiling to put the woman at ease.
He needn’t have worried. It seemed that the monster was her favorite subject, and she launched into it with gusto, addressing herself as much to her bridge partners as to Nick, though they had obviously heard the story many times before. “Well, it was just at twilight, and I was out there on the dock. It was September, remember, when most of the summer people had gone back home. Mr. Seeley across the lake had already reported seeing the thing while he was fishing one morning, and I had to admit I was sort of looking.”
She paused dramatically and Nick prodded her. “Yes?”
“Well, I saw it! Way out in the middle of the lake, just swimming along. A head and two—well, like coils. You know the way sea serpents always look in pictures! I’m an old lady, but I’ve still some spirit left. I took the little motor boat and went out there after it. I didn’t believe in such things, you see.”
“How near did you get?”
“Oh, maybe twenty or thirty feet. It wasn’t big—I’d say its head was only a few feet long—but it was enough to scare the devil out of me. All green, with seaweed clinging to the head here and there, and these two coils or spines or lumps breaking the water about a foot or two behind the head. It had a fairly long neck, but the water here isn’t clear so I couldn’t see if it had a body or legs or if it was truly a serpent.”
“What happened then?”
“I must admit that good sense got the better of me. It turned in my direction and I high-tailed it for shore. The last I saw of the thing, it was making for the opposite shore, near Mr. Seeley’s cottage.”
“And it was alive? It wasn’t a fake of any sort?”
“Mr. Velvet, believe me—it was alive.”
Strangely enough, Nick did believe her.
He drove around the lake to the little cluster of private cottages where Judy had told him that Mr. Seeley lived. The ruddy-faced man was waiting for him on the porch, and Nick knew that Judy had called to warn of his coming. It might mean something—it probably meant nothing.
“I’ve come about the lake’s serpent,” Nick said after he’d introduced himself. “I understand you were one of the first to see it.”
“I’ve seen it, young man,” he said, stuffing his mouth with a great wad of tobacco. It was the first time in fifteen years that anyone had called Nick young. “Seen it twice, once last Labor Day and again just a few weeks ago. Great thing, with a flapping tail and red eyes. Came up on me while I was fishing, almost overturned the boat.”
“Oh? I just spoke to a woman who was a bit more subdued in her description.”
“People see what they want to. It was all green and slimy, and probably fifty feet long if you stretched it out.”
“You’re a fisherman, Mr. Seeley?”
“Yep, and lots of people say it was just another one of my tall tales. But they’ll sing a different tune when I catch the damned thing and tow it in on the back of my boat!”
“Just how do you propose to do that?”
“Look here.” He led Nick around to the side of the cottage and displayed a large heavy-duty net of the type used by ocean-going trawlers. “This’ll stop anything in Silver Lake. I’ve been taking it out in the boat with me mornings and evenings, when the thing’s most likely to surface.”
Nick nodded in admiration, already thinking that the heavy net might very well fit in with his own plans. He was by nature a makeshift sort of thief, and often the contingencies of the moment contributed to the methods he used. One did not go after a sea serpent with guns or trickery.
He stayed with Seeley for another half-hour, listening to more tales of the lake as it used to be, of the big ones that had just managed to get away, of broken lines and shattered dreams. Perhaps all these little lakes and summer resorts had someone like Seeley to talk of past glories. But they all didn’t have sea serpents, and he was ready to believe Seeley on that one.
Nick had taken a room for a few nights at Larry Pike’s Silver Lake Hotel. He was convinced that at least one look at the monster was essential before he made the final plans for the theft, and he was just as convinced that the monster would turn up during his stay. Pike would see to that.
He was settling down in his room just after ten o’clock when he found he was out of cigarettes. Reluctantly he went downstairs to the desk to purchase some, then decided to phone Gloria at home. She knew nothing of the true nature of his work. For her, he was a consultant on plant sites for new industry, a job that could take him anywhere in the world on short notice. She never questioned the deception, but then Gloria questioned very little of their life together.
He finished the brief phone call and went back up to the room, pausing with his hand on the doorknob as some sixth sense warned him. Someone was inside. He pushed open the door slowly, saw a motion across the room at his suitcase, and flipped on the lights, ready to move quickly.
It was Judy Martin, still in her pullover and white shorts, crouched before his overnight bag. She turned, startled, a frightened gazelle trapped by the lion.
“Good evening,” he said, relaxing a bit. “Find what you’re looking for?”
She stood up straight, with a measure of dignity, brushing the tumbling hair from her eyes. “I want to know who you are, Mr. Velvet,” she admitted frankly. “Who sent you here?”
“I told you I was a writer.”
“But you’re not! We had dozens of writers and reporters here last fall, and all through the winter. You didn’t ask any of the right questions. You never even mentioned the Loch Ness Monster!”
“Silver Lake isn’t Loch Ness.”
“And you’re no writer. You were sent here by that terrible Earl Crowder, weren’t you? He’s been trying to ruin us for years!”
“Miss Martin, I have …”
His sentence was interrupted by a shout from downstairs. “The serpent!” someone was yelling. “It’s out there!”
Nick grabbed for his jacket. “Come on!”
Downstairs, about a dozen people were clustered around the dock, pointing out into the night where a full moon had turned the water’s surface into the shimmering silver that gave the lake its name.
“See it?” Mrs. Foster shouted excitedly. “Out there near the center!”
Nick looked, and saw a head breaking the surface. A head, and something else behind. The thing, whatever it was; seemed to be swimming toward the far shore, toward Seeley’s cottage.
“I’m going after it,” Nick told the girl. He was looking around for Pike, but the owner of the place was nowhere in sight.
It was perhaps a mile from shore to the center of the lake, and Nick steered the outboard carefully, trying for an arc that would intersect the monster’s route somewhere before it reached the shore. Mrs. Foster and Judy had both tried to join him, but he’d kept them out, wanting to make the trip alone. He had to find the place where the serpent slept, its home somewhere along that shore. He didn’t doubt for a moment that the thing lived at least part of its existence on dry land. In this northern climate, a body of water the size of Silver Lake would be frozen during much of the winter. The creature obviously needed air to breathe, and thus could not remain on the bottom of the lake during the long, freezing winter.
No, it had spent the winter somewhere else, which was why Nick had his suspicions of Larry Pike.
He’d closed the gap a bit between himself and the monster, and now at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile he could make out the greenish head and neck of the beast, swimming along on a rigid course. For a moment Nick thought it might be actually pulled along from the shore, but then at the sound of his motor it shifted direction slightly, bearing away from him. He had a glimpse of the stubby snout, the small, gasping mouth, the fins or coils that broke the water behind it. And then for an instant there was something about it that seemed oddly familiar. It was as if he were not on the water at all, but somewhere else, watching—what?
The image, so close to his grasping, vanished with the full moon as night clouds moved quickly across the sky. He cursed his luck and turned the boat in the direction he’d seen the serpent take, but already it was too late. He’d lost sight of the thing. He headed for shore at the nearest point, beaching the boat on a deserted point among half-seen bushes and trees.
It was then that he heard someone scream.
He hurried toward the sound, but it was a full ten minutes before he found old Mr. Seeley, lying in a heap along a rocky stretch of shoreline. The side of his head had been crushed by a blow of some sort. He was dead.
After that, it was as if the plague had descended upon Silver Lake. The sheriff’s deputies came, and the state police, and a grand phalanx of reporters and cameramen. Already one of the Boston newspapers was headlining it the SEA SERPENT MURDER, and anyone in the Northeast who hadn’t yet heard about the monster was finding out quickly enough. Nick had known it would be like this from the moment he stumbled on the body, and he had even considered hiding it, but he knew now that the monster would not appear again immediately, whatever he did.
After the police had questioned him, he checked out of the Silver Lake Hotel and drove the twenty miles to Golden Lake and Crowder’s Cove. The police just might decide to check up on him, and Nick knew better than anyone that his background wouldn’t stand checking. He’d be safe at Crowder’s place for a few days, he hoped, until the storm about the killing blew over.
On the morning after his arrival, Earl Crowder regarded him over breakfast with a mixture of admiration and uncertainty. He waited until Nick had taken a forkful of scrambled eggs and then asked, “Did you kill that guy?”
“Of course not,” Nick replied.
“I’m not paying for no murder!”
“And you didn’t get any murder. Not from me, at least.”
“You’re giving up on the serpent?”
“Of course not. You’ll have it here. If you really want it now.”
It was a bit later in the morning when a dusty station wagon pulled up outside and Judy Martin hopped out, closely followed by Larry Pike himself. Crowder came off the porch to greet them, his expression a bit uncertain.
“How are things with your monster, Larry?” he asked, holding out his hand.
Pike shuffled his feet and glared, but Judy was in no mood to keep silent. “I’m happy to see Mr. Velvet here,” she started. “It just confirms what I’ve thought all along! You couldn’t stand the competition from Larry’s place, so you arranged a murder.”
“Don’t be silly,” Crowder mumbled.
“You figured if it looked like the monster killed somebody, the place wouldn’t be a tourist attraction any more! But you’re wrong—we’ve been busy all day taking reservations. We just wanted you to know we’re wise to your little schemes with Mr. Velvet.”
Nick glanced over at Larry Pike. “Do you have anything to say about all this?”
“I … no.”
“Go on,” Crowder told them. “Get out of here, both of you! You just came over to make trouble.”
Pike hesitated and then turned away, taking Judy by the arm. It seemed obvious that the journey to Golden Lake had been her idea, but now she backed off too, uncertain of how to press the attack.
After they’d gone, Nick followed Crowder into the resort’s little bar. He felt as if he could use a drink. He stared across at the older man and said, “You know, you might have killed Seeley just the way she said, thinking it would ruin his business.”
“Do you think that?”
Nick shook his head. “There’d be no point to it, after you’d hired me—at least, not till you saw what sort of job I did. Besides, I saw the wound on Seeley’s head. It reminded me of a friend of mine who was killed once. He was a jockey, and his mount threw him.”
“What?”
“Just thinking out loud,” Nick said. “Do you have a truck I could borrow? Some sort of closed van, if you have one.”
“I have one. What do you want it for?”
Nick Velvet smiled. “Tonight I’m going to steal the Silver Lake serpent.”
He knew where to look now, because the creature would have come ashore at the point where Seeley’s body was found. It would be a closed cottage or barn of some sort, not far from that point. He found it within twenty minutes—a boarded-up garage next to an empty cottage. The police would never have noticed it. Perhaps he would never have noticed it, either, if he hadn’t seen the tracks in the loose dirt.
Nick used one of his special tools on the lock, and stepped into the garage. Outside it was twilight, and the interior of the building was like pitch. He held his breath, remembering Seeley’s crushed skull. It seemed in that instant he could feel the hot breath of the creature on his face. He knew what the garage would contain—electric heaters for the winter, of course, and a spray gun of some sort for the green paint. He lit his flashlight and let the beam climb along the walls.
“Good evening, Mr. Velvet,” Larry Pike said from the doorway. “I see you’ve stumbled upon our secret.”
“I have a gun, Pike,” Nick warned him.
“What do you want?”
“I’m taking this thing with me. The Silver Lake serpent is all finished.”
“I doubt that. Crowder paid you, didn’t he?”
“What does it matter? You’re hardly in a position to call the police. Not when this thing killed a man.”
“It was an accident,” Larry Pike said.
“I know. What about the girl?”
“She’s out of it. She doesn’t know a thing.” But then, his eyes accustomed to the light, Pike saw the tool and flashlight in Nick’s hands, saw that there was no gun. He leaped forward, knocking Nick to one side, and suddenly there was an unfamiliar noise above them and Nick knew that death was very close—as close as it had been to old Seeley.
He rolled free, his fingers grasping for a weapon, and found the spray gun for the green paint. He squeezed the trigger and saw the spray hit Pike’s jaw and neck. “The next is in the eyes,” he warned. “Move back.”
“All right. You’ve made your point.”
“Now help me get this thing outside,” Nick ordered. “Into the truck.”
Larry Pike nodded.
“All right. I’m better rid of it, I suppose. But tell me how you knew.”
“A lot of things—mostly remembering that you were once an animal trainer with a circus. And seeing Seeley’s head, looking as if it had been trampled by hooves. And of course seeing the thing itself. You should have stuck to animal training, Pike.”
“How do you mean?”
“It must have taken a lot of patience to teach a camel to swim across this lake.”
It was after midnight when he got Earl Crowder out of bed and led him down to the truck.
“It’s inside,” Nick told him. “I’ll take the rest of my thirty thousand now.”
“A camel?” Crowder asked, unbelieving. “Painted green?”
“Painted green. The funny thing was that it looked exactly like a camel, but Pike was relying on the psychology of what people think they see—what they expect or don’t expect to see. Old Seeley exaggerated what he saw, and Mrs. Foster didn’t really realize what she saw. No one expected to see a green camel swimming across a lake, so no one did see that. Instead they saw simply a long neck and a small head and two humps breaking the surface of the water. That was Larry Pike’s sea serpent.”
“Fantastic,” Crowder said, staring up at the placid animal in the van.
“Of course a camel is an ungulate like horses and deer and sheep, so it wasn’t impossible for an animal trainer like Pike to teach it to swim the same route across the lake. In fact, a number of recorded sea serpent sightings have mentioned the fact that sea serpents look something like camels. One in 1934 off Cherbourg, France, was said to have a neck like that of a camel’s. And sightings in 1910, 1925 and 1928 were described as having the head and neck of a camel. One viewer even spoke of the sea serpent’s traditional coils as humps, like a camel’s. I found these things in Heuvelman’s book, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, and I suppose some similar account might have given Pike the whole idea in the first place. It was a great idea until poor Seeley saw the thing coming ashore and tried to grab it. He fell beneath the camel’s hooves and was trampled to death.”
“What am I going to do with a camel?” Earl Crowder asked.
“That’s your problem,” Nick told him. “But I wouldn’t advise another sea serpent. Perhaps you can scrub off the paint and give camel rides to the kids.”
On the way back in the morning, Nick was tempted to swing by Silver Lake and see Judy Martin once more. But he decided against it. He’d had enough excitement for one week, and besides, Gloria would be waiting for him.