Chapter 7
The ten-o’clock-in-the-morning sunshine pushed aside my bedroom blinds, pried my eyelids open, and slapped me awake. I rolled out of bed and checked my email. I danced a little dance of yippee-yahoo when I saw that someone had replied to one of my sea monster messages. I read it, tossed my laptop into my backpack, and got going.
I hopped downstairs for my second breakfast of the day. I greased toaster waffles in butter, drowned them in syrup, and forked them down fast. I swallowed a bucket and a half of cold, white milk, thinking chocolate thoughts, and even managed a fake, cheery “Hi Mom,” before running out the door. I headed for the harbour.
And so, I guess, had everyone else.
It looked like half of Deeper Harbour was standing on the rickety old wharf staring at the damage we’d done. I expected the other half of Deeper Harbour’s population was checking out Molly’s desecrated pumpkin patch.
I found Dulsie and Granddad Angus standing in the shadow of Warren’s boat shed. Dulsie was wearing a battered straw hat that looked too beat up for any self-respecting scarecrow to be caught dead wearing it. A scrap of fishing net hung off the hat and over her face.
“What’s the net for?” I asked.
“It’s a veil,” Dulsie explained. “I’m in mourning. Don’t you see the tears?”
I looked closer and saw that she had painted big black tears down her cheeks.
“What are you mourning for?” I asked.
“This town,” Dulsie said. “My dad told me what your mom said when he got home from the police station.”
“What about it?” I asked.
“Your mom is right,” Dulsie said. “This town is dying.”
No, it isn’t, I thought. I had the answer to all of our troubles, only I didn’t want to tell her just yet so I bent down and picked up a stone and skipped it across the water.
Skip—skip—skip—sploosh.
Dulsie bent down and picked up a stone of her own—a nice flat spinner. She sidearmed it with just the right amount of flick at the end of her throw. I wouldn’t want to admit it, but she threw a whole better than I did.
Skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—sploosh.
“That’s a pretty good throw,” Granddad Angus said.
“Ha,” somebody said from behind us, “it runs in the family.”
I turned around. It was Warren, with a stone of his own in his hand. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to throw it at me.
“You’re out awfully early,” he said to Dulsie.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Your mom was that way,” Warren said. “You are just the same as she was.”
Dulsie’s mom had died in a car wreck eight years ago, when Dulsie was seven years old. She says it doesn’t bother her anymore, but I kind of wonder about that. There is some paint that will never wash off.
“Am not,” Dulsie said and Warren let the argument lie.
He took two steps forward and skipped his own stone out across the water.
Skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—clunk.
Whoops.
The clunk was the sound of Warren’s stone smacking against the bottom of his caber-impaled dory. I expected him to get angry at the reminder of how Granddad and I had damaged his boat, but Warren just laughed.
“I guess it’s a good thing that dory was wrecked,” he said. “I’ve been hanging on to the hope that our tourism would return, but let’s face it—the mayor is right.”
I was getting sick and tired of hearing how right Mom was. She had taken the wind out of Warren’s sails, just that easily, and that bugged me. It didn’t help that I was afraid that maybe she was right.
“I think I’m just going to leave that dory floating out there,” Warren went on. “Kind of like a tombstone to a town that went and died.”
Enough was enough.
“Want to bet?” I said. “This town isn’t ready to die just yet.”
“I’ve got two words for you,” Warren said. “Im—possible.”
That’s when I told them about my plan. I pulled out my laptop and showed them the email I’d gotten that morning.
To: deeperharbourmonster@gmail.com
From: Dreamchasers
Hi there, anonymous.
I got your email and your story sounds fascinating. As Canada’s premier cryptid hunting society I feel I might have to get involved and investigate this phenomenun. Can you give me any more details than you have offered? Have there been any photographs taken? Is there a history of cryptid sightings in your town? Has anyone else besides you seen this creature? Can you give me your name?
“A sea serpent?” Warren said.
“That email is a start, I guess,” Granddad Angus said. “Even though he did misspell the words ‘premiere’ and ‘phenomenon.’”
“And I’m not that crazy about how he uses the words ‘society’ and ‘I’ in the same sentence,” Warren pointed out. “It sounds to me as if we might be dealing with a society of one person.”
“And where are we going to get photographs?” Dulsie asked.
“All we need to do is spread a few more rumours,” I said. “It’s like spreading a cold. Sneeze on enough people and you create an epidemic. I bet there’ll be television crews and newspaper articles and we’ll have tourists coming out of our ears.”
“Is that what you figure?” Warren asked.
“The boy is on to something,” Granddad Angus said. “Just look at all these people come out to stare at a caber-impaled dory. People always come when there’s something to look at.”
“So?” Warren asked.
“What about the Shag Harbour UFO crash back in 1967? That was in newspapers and books, too. Tourists still go there, hoping for a glimpse of a flying saucer.”
“Shediac has a giant lobster,” Dulsie added. “People go see that.”
“And Sydney has a giant fiddle,” I put in.
“Nackawic in New Brunswick has a giant axe,” Granddad Angus went on, “and Stewiacke has a giant mammoth.”
“A mammoth what?” Warren asked.
“A big elephant that needs a haircut,” Granddad Angus explained. “All Deeper Harbour needs is an attraction, just like that one.”
He pointed out at Warren’s dory.
“We don’t need to build anything at first,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it. We can start with a legend. It’s like all those old ghost stories people keep telling around campfires—if enough people tell a story long enough, it grows its own form of true.”
“Like the Boy Scout ghosts of Muddy Lake,” Dulsie said.
“That’s right,” Granddad Angus said.
“Or like the Loch Ness Monster,” she said.
“That’s right again, girl, like Loch Ness. If we spread the word that there’s a sea monster out there,” Granddad Angus said, pointing out the harbour, “then the tourists will come.”
“Nobody will believe it,” Warren said.
“Like Roland said, do you want to bet?” Granddad Angus asked. “Why don’t you try to out-skip me? If you lose you have to agree to help me and the kids spread a sea monster story.”
“I’m not betting with you,” Warren said.
“Why not?” I asked. “Are you chicken?”
“He is,” Dulsie said. “My dad is a big chicken.”
Granddad Angus poked his fists into his armpits and began scratching the toes of his sneakers in the dirt, bucking his neck back and forth and looking as if someone had wrapped a kilt around the biggest, ugliest Rhode Island Red rooster in the world.
“Buck, buck, buckaw,” Granddad Angus clucked. “Buck, buck, buckaw.”
There is something both irritating and irresistible about the sight of a thousand-year-old man in a kilt making chicken sounds while doing a funky chicken dance. It gets under your skin and worms away at your common sense like a gigantic double-dare.
“That’s a lot to ride on the fling of a stone,” Warren argued.
I started clucking as well. Dulsie joined in too.
“All right,” Warren said. “You’ve got yourself a bet.”
He stooped for another stone and winged it.
Skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip…sploosh.
“Ha!” Warren laughed. “Thirteen skips. I guess you lose.”
Wow.
I had no idea that Warren Boudreau was a world-champion, gold-medal, Olympic-class stone skipper. Granddad Angus didn’t seem to be worried, though. He calmly rooted a stone from out of his magic fishing vest of many pockets.
“Do you see this stone?” he asked, holding up what looked to be a perfectly ordinary, flat, triangular shard of slightly blackened beach stone. “This used to be a Mi’kmaq arrowhead. Long before we started writing history down, an ancient hunter tracked a rare white deer down to the shoreline and sent this arrowhead straight through the deer’s beating heart.”
Warren, Dulsie, and I stood there listening and thinking. It was a gift that Granddad Angus had. When he started spinning those words it was like the world’s largest 3-D television went on somewhere in the back of your brain.
“The hunter sang a song,” Granddad Angus went on, “a song so beautiful that the wind stopped blowing and the tide stopped turning and even the seagulls came down to listen. And then he threw the arrowhead stone into the water. Several centuries later, the stone washed ashore and I picked it up and put it in my pocket.”
“That’s just a story,” Warren said.
“Doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” Granddad Angus argued. “If you tell a story long enough and hard enough it becomes true.”
“So why didn’t he keep the arrowhead?” Warren asked.
“Because the arrowhead had done its job already,” Dulsie said.
“Right you are,” Granddad Angus said. “The arrowhead had made its flight and done its magic and the Mi’kmaq chief knew that he had to return the stone to the sea.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Warren said.
“Says you,” Granddad Angus retorted. “This is the stone of fly-far.”
“Says who?” Warren asked.
“Says me,” Granddad Angus replied. “And who can say any differently?”
When someone makes a claim as bold as that there is only one thing you can do.
“Prove it,” Warren, Dulsie, and I said tri-multaneously.
Granddad Angus just grinned at the three of us.
“Magic grows wild on the beach, here in Nova Scotia,” he told us. “Never doubt it for a heartbeat.”
And then Granddad Angus let the stone fly free.
Skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip—skip…
The stone of fly-far skimmed and skipped off into the distance, further than I could ever hope to see. Part of me wondered if maybe the stone had splashed into the water and I’d blinked and missed it. Another part wondered if the wind hadn’t somehow taken the stone and blown it farther than it should have, but the deepest, quietest, stillest part of me wondered if somehow Granddad Angus hadn’t thrown that stone far beyond the farthest lip of the horizon and deep into the heart of forever.
“So where are we going to come up with a sea monster?” Warren asked.
“Right out there,” Granddad Angus said, pointing at Warren’s dory. “All we need is a good strong rope and enough backbone to drag that dory up to the shed.”