Chapter 20
So far, the whole plan was working.
Everything was happening just exactly as I’d dreamed it would. Every time we took Fogopogo out into the harbour the story grew a little more. People began to spread rumours of their own. Even the people who hadn’t seen Fogopogo yet had begun to talk about the monster as if they’d actually seen it firsthand.
“Fogopogo is bigger than Loch Ness.”
“Fogopogo is bigger than Bigfoot.”
“Fogopogo is bigger than King Kong standing on top of Godzilla’s grass-green eyebrows.”
When we didn’t have fog, we still did our best to kept the pot stirred up.
Granddad Angus made a recording of his best moose call, and I used my computer to make the noise sound like an entire flotilla of sea monsters. Dulsie started hiding in the woods around the town, playing Fogopogo’s roar through Dad’s electronic bullhorn, which he thought was still locked in the supply closet at the police station.
“If we can keep people on their toes and guessing,” Granddad Angus said, “we can keep Fogopogo alive between sightings.”
Warren was more than a little worried about somebody taking a shot in the general direction of Dulsie.
“One shotgun blast in a lifetime is plenty for me,” Warren said.
I guess I couldn’t really blame Warren for worrying like he did. I suppose that after having Dulsie’s mother die, Warren was bound to be worried about losing his daughter too.
Dulsie thought the whole thing was a great big adventure. She began a series of today tattoos in the pattern of killer commando camouflage, only instead of the traditional green, yellow, and brown, Dulsie used nearly every colour imaginable and a few that hadn’t even been thought up yet.
“Who do you think you are?” Warren asked her. “Rambo?”
“She looks more like a rainbow to me,” Granddad Angus said.
Rainbow or Rambo, we were all working hard to spread the word about Fogopogo.
After our third sailing, Fogopogo and Deeper Harbour were mentioned in most of the larger newspapers in the country. Talk-show hosts and newscasters were arguing back and forth about whether the sea monster was real or a hoax.
Molly decided that the news articles should be preserved in the town archives, which, so far, consisted of a closet full of shoeboxes crammed full of clippings and old photos. She gave Fogopogo his very own shoebox and photocopied every article about him and posted it up on a bulletin board that Warren nailed to the side of his boat shed for just that purpose.
Every morning that I wasn’t out in the monster I checked on the latest news clippings.
SEA MONSTER SPOTTED OUTSIDE OF SLEEPY FISHING VILLAGE
That paper had a fuzzy picture of Fogopogo in it that showed just enough monster to get people to read the story.
IS FOGOPOGO REAL?
That story was written by someone who wanted very badly to prove that there are no sea monsters, and he compared Fogopogo to a UFO. The writer had decided that the entire phenomenon was nothing more than a case of shared delusions.
Personally, I think he just wanted to use the word “phenomenon.”
My favourite article had to be the clipping from a British paranormal magazine with a headline that read “fogopogo—fiend of the atlantic.” It described Fogopogo as blood-curdling and dangerous.
Wow.
I felt like a mad scientist.
I had helped build a monster.
A fiend.
Cool.