McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [3]
Tedford had come across teeth like it before, in Miocene limestone beds. They belonged, Tate had assured him, to a creature science had identified as Carcharodon Megalodon, or Great Tooth, a recent ancestor of the Great White Shark, but nearly three times as large: a monster shark, with jaws within which a tall man could stand without stooping, and a stout, oversized head. But the tooth that Tedford held in his hand was white, which meant it came from an animal either quite recently extinct, or not extinct at all.
He’d written up the find in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science. The editor had accepted the piece but refused its inflammatory title.
A year later nearly to the day, his eye had been caught by a newspaper account of the Warrnambool Sea Monster, christened for the home port of eleven fishermen and a boy, in three tuna boats, who had refused to go to sea for several days. They’d been at work at certain far-off fishing grounds that only they had discovered, which lay beside a shelf plunging down into very deep water, when an immense shark, of unbelievable proportions, had surfaced among them, taking nets, one of the boats, and a ship’s dog back down with it. The boy in the boat that had capsized had called out, “Is that the fin of a great fish?” and then everything had gone topsy-turvy. Everyone had been saved from the vortex except the dog. They’d been unanimous that the beast had been something the like of which they’d never seen. In interviews conducted in the presence of both the local Fisheries Inspector and one B. Heuvelmans, dentist and naturalist, the men had been questioned very closely, and had all agreed upon the details, even down to the creature’s length, which seemed absurd: at least sixty-five feet. They’d agreed that it was at least the length of the wharf shed back at their bay. The account made clear that these were men used to the sea and to all sorts of weather, and to all sorts of sharks, besides. They had seen whale sharks and basking sharks. They recounted the way the sea had boiled over from the thing’s surfacing and its subsequent submersion. This was no whale, they’d insisted; they’d seen its terrible head. They’d agreed on everything: the size of its dorsal, the creature’s staggering width, its ghostly whitish color. What seemed most to their credit, in terms of their credibility, was their flat refusal to return to the sea for nearly a week, despite the loss of wages involved: a loss they could ill afford, as their wives, also present for the interviews, pointed out.
It had taken him a week to get away, and when he’d finally gotten to Warrnambool no one would speak to him. The fishermen had tired of being the local sport, and had told him only that they wished that anyone else had seen the thing rather than them.
He’d no sooner been back at his desk when other stories had appeared. For a week, there’d been a story every morning, the relevance of which only he apprehended. A small boat had been swamped south of Tasmania, in calm seas, its crew missing. A ninety-foot trawler had struck a reef in what was charted as deep water. A whale carcass, headless and bearing trenchlike gashes, had washed ashore near Hibbs Bay.
As soon as he could get away, he took the early coach back to Warrnambool and looked up B. Heuvelmans, the dentist, who turned out to be an untidy cockatoo of a man holed up in a sanctuary at the rear of his house, where he’d built himself a laboratory. As he explained impatiently to Tedford, in the afternoons he retired there, unavailable to his patients’ pain and devoted to his entomological and zoological studies, many of which lined the walls. The room was oppressively dark and close. Dr. Heuvelmans was secretary to the local Scientific Society. Until recently