Chapter 2: What We Try Not to Think About

I: In the news. My birthday request.

By the time I was fifteen, I had seen two more cryptids. The first was unavoidable—snipes are like rats in that they can be found nearly everywhere you go and, though they don’t carry any particular diseases, they are just as annoying for other reasons. In time, I discovered they are merciless beggars and have no shame when it comes to groveling and, in many cases, outright thievery. I saw them in my parents’ fields on our farm and at the greengrocer’s in town. In the 1950s, when the completist in me pushed me to finally map one, it not only posed but demanded payment afterward.

But the second cryptid was in 1937, my birthday weekend in the spring. My sister, the oldest, had gone over to the continent some years earlier and was living in France. My two older brothers, Isaac and Elijah, were both grown and away as well; they’d bought oat plots on either side of my da’s, and they all worked together. But Isaac was married, and Elijah refused to be away from the girl he was courting for so long, so neither of them joined us as we headed up north on a trip I’d been hinting at for four years by then.

Beginning in the spring of 1933 in the Inverness Courier, which my da’ put more faith in than Scripture,  and into the mid-months of 1934, I’d read a number of articles about a strange, alarming phenomenon that a number of different people had encountered. One of those witnesses was even a doctor from London, no less, and this gave him credence even though it was a time of deep skepticism surrounding medicine and its adverse effects.

But I read those articles with focused interest because I had a sense that this was important, maybe more to me than to anyone else I’d ever known. The more time that passed, the more I knew I could not wait much longer. It felt urgent, even desperate in time. I even considered running away from home, if they said no when I asked my parents to take me on a trip for my birthday. Thankfully, they said yes.

So, that spring of 1937, we drove up to the Highlands. We drove up to Loch Ness.

II: A trip north. My mother’s secret.

As far as farmers went, we were well off—my da’ was frugal to a fault. We owned a Ford Model Y—my da’ called it a Ford Eight—that he loved more than at least two of his children. No one else ever drove it, though each of us asked or begged at one time or another. It was a black two-door with a deep red interior, as manly a model as he could find, and it could do 80 kilometers/hour if pressed. It had brakes that wouldn’t stop a cow, so he’d mastered the slow coast and, thankfully, never had to stop all of a sudden. For most of the trip to Loch Ness—roughly 500 kilometers, or 300 miles—he kept it at maximum speed, and I sat in the back feeling claustrophobic and vaguely ill. The Ford Eight was a hard top; I was still a horse and buggy boy. It felt like riding in a picnic basket.

We parked at the Kilcumein Lodge in Fort Augustus, where we rented bicycles and pedaled off toward the loch.

 
The shores of Loch Ness back then were not as convenient for sightseers as they are today, over eighty years later. Foliage grew right up to the waterline; in many places, a steep incline could easily tumble you into the water if you lost your footing. And a number of spots were so rocky as to be inaccessible.

None of this stopped the tourists who descended upon the loch, their telescopes and binoculars in hand, drawn by the newspaper and radio reports of a mysterious, dinosaur-like monster that lived in the water. My da’ avoided them with extreme prejudice. He’d come to fish the loch, and the reporters and gawkers traipsing up and down the shoreline were not part of his optimal fishing vision. So, by the time we stopped and settled down to unpack the picnic basket my mother had brought, we were quite isolated from others.

My da’ headed down the hill through the trees toward the water, pole in hand, whistling “Pennies from Heaven” without a care in the world. When he was out of sight, my mother turned to me.

“Leave the dinner,” she said. “We have something a fair bit more important to tend to.”

She’d brought a large canvas bag, and from it, she removed a book. It was impressive—leatherbound with a gold clasp—but it wasn’t its appearance that hitched my breath.

When she opened it, the first thing I saw was a horrible remembrance: the fanged and clawed demonic creature that was my first memory, the thing that had served as midwife for my birth. The thing I had tried not to think about for many years. Its image was emblazoned on a card of some sort, one that was attached as if magnetically to the page. The horror’s eyes seemed alive to me. On the same page next to it was a second card with a different image—the ducklike creatures I saw frequently around the farm and would come to know as snipes. Below these were two blank cards. My mother took one of the blanks from the book and closed its cover, mercifully blocking the midwife monster.

“I know you have questions,” she said, “and I want to answer them for you. But we don’t have much time before your da’ comes back. When he does, there’ll be no more chance for you to map this beast in the loch.”

She handed me the blank card. It had weight I didn’t expect, and something about it felt unnatural, magical. On its back was an unusual pattern I’d not seen before. “What’s this for, Mam? And what do you mean ‘map?’ I’m sure I don’t understand.”

“I’m gonna show you,” she said. “I know you see things that others say aren’t there. But they’re wrong; you know that. I see them, too. Have my whole life. Mapping them means you catch a little spark of their mystery. You keep it in one of these cards, and then you can call it up and use it just as if the creature you mapped came around to serve you.”

I began to ask about the midwife, but my mother shushed me. As she reached into her bag and produced a second, smaller book, she said, “Trust your mam on this. You’re like me, Abrams. You’re a caster.”

III: The beast. An unkind word.

The strange creatures I could see that no one else seemed to were called cryptids. Because I could see them, I was a caster. And the rare card my mother had gifted me was a means by which I “mapped” a cryptid, making a bit of its essence to mix with mine and make the result my own.

This was what I kept explaining to myself over and over again as I headed down to the loch on my own, at an angle that would keep me some distance from where my da’ was catching brown trout for tea in a few hours. My mother had pointed the way and told me what I needed to do.

A caster.

I had no idea what that would mean for my future. I tried not to think too hard about it.

When I reached the water, I did as my mother had instructed me: I took the blank card, propped it up in a low-hanging branch on a tree at the waterline, and moved farther down along the shore, keeping a direct line of sight between it and me. Once I found the right spot to hide, I took out the book she had given me—my “spellbook,” she’d called it—and waited.

“When the beast passes between you and your card,” she had said, “you will have the opportunity to map its essence.”

When I had asked, more than a little bewildered, how she knew this exact spot was where the monster would emerge along all 37 kilometers—23 miles—of Loch Ness’s shore, she’d smiled and said, “As a caster, you’ll figure these things out.”

I knelt down in the afternoon weeds, the sun pleasant enough above, and kept both eyes on my card, now a tiny little spot up along the edge of the water. Periodically, the loch’s surface rippled, and each time it did, I froze, hefting my book and placing my hand on a card inside the first page in preparation to “map” the way she’d shown me. But nothing emerged, and soon I was sweating, either from anticipation or just the being overdressed for the day, I didn’t know.

Near to me, the water rippled and then went still again. Bubbles trailed along the shoreline for a short distance. I felt lightheaded, only to realize I was holding my breath. When I let it out again, I felt a cold terror blind me as the sky went dark and an enormous form rose from the water into the sky.

Even though I knew it was there, when the beast suddenly burst toward the sky and crashed onto the shore, it so took me by surprise that I cried out.

It was long, easily twenty feet from head to tail, with a skinny neck and a snake-like head. Its body was thick with four fins, brownish-black on top and silver on its underside. Its head bobbed as it pulled itself out of the loch, reaching up to snag leaves from a low-hanging branch overhead. I could plainly see the eye on one side of its head; that eye closed as it pulled the leaves from the branch and chewed on them slowly. I put my hand over the card in my spellbook. I could feel the distant presence of the mapping card, and it expanded as I rose from the weeds. My own eyes lost focus as I sensed the enlargement of a rectangle of energy from that card in the tree, something akin to a gate opening up and beginning to move toward the monster.

I was mapping, I told myself. I could hardly wait to tell Mam what I’d accomplished.

But we were not alone.

To my right, a second gate seemed to be forming, and a figure who had been squatting in the water closer to where the beast emerged stood up abruptly, raising a book of his own. He shouted something in a foreign tongue, and the beast’s head whipped around to face the stranger. I could see that a second card, at a right angle to my own in the trees yards away from me, had begun to glow with an undefined energy.

Just like that, everything went wrong. The beast shot backward into the water, as silent as a blimp but with a splash that cascaded in ripples across the loch’s surface. The two cards, mine and the stranger’s, both shattered with a crackling noise like glass, shards falling to the earth and jolting each of us. I lost my footing and fell; when I found my feet again, the beast was gone, and the stranger was coming my way.

“You idiot,” he shouted as he closed on me. “You owe me a card. And I want it right damned now.”

I was the youngest of three boys—with older brothers, you learn never to back down. I tramped through the weeds to meet him. “I owe you nothing, lad. It’s you who be owing me.”

He was perhaps a few years older than me with dark curly hair that was too long to be the fashion. He needed a shave. He was soaked up to his waist from standing in the loch, and his face was flush with anger.

“Nein,” he said. “I come a thousand miles to have a stupid cow ruin my mapping.”

I looked around for a moment before I realized that the stupid cow he was referring to was me. So, I carefully put my book down before I barreled toward him.

To his credit, he was very fast. He didn’t have much of a lead on me, but the distance between us grew very quickly as he raced back up from the shore and into the wooded areas along the shore. When I stopped and put my hands on my knees to catch my breath, he turned back toward me.

“You! You are my erzfeind now,” he shouted and jabbed a finger at me. Even from where I stood hunched over, I could see him trembling. I hoped it was with fear; I suspected it was with rage.

“Keep running, ya diddy,” I shouted back. He went so far as to stereotypically shake a fist at me—I thought maybe he’d learned to be a bad guy by watching the talkies I’d heard about from my siblings.  Then he was gone into the bushes, and I had to collect the broken pieces of my card so I could take it back to my mother. Maybe she could fix it, I told myself. For the record, she could not.

Erzfeind, he had called me. A few weeks later, I had to ask one of our distant neighbors, Mr. Vogt, what the word meant. I could tell it was German, yet that was all.

Nemesis, he told me, but when I looked confused, he added, Arch-enemy.

An unkind word.

I would not hear it again until the War was on in Europe, when the young German caster and I would meet a second time.