McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [4]
He wanted no help and he was perfectly content to be considered a lunatic. His colleagues only confirmed his suspicion that one of the marvels of Nature was the resistance that the average human brain offered to the introduction of knowledge. When it came to ideas, his associates stuck to their ruts until forcibly ejected from them. Very well. That ejection would come about soon enough.
Had he information beyond that reported in the newspapers? Tedford wanted to know.
That information alone would have sufficed for him, Heuvelmans retorted; his interviews at least had demonstrated to his satisfaction that if he believed in the beast’s existence he did so in good company. But in fact, he did have more. At first he would proceed no further upon that point, refusing all direct inquiry. The insect he’d been studying was apparently not eaten by birds because of a spectacularly malodorous or distasteful secretion, which began to rise faintly from the man’s clothing the longer Tedford sat in the stuffy little room.
But the longer Tedford did sit, mildly refusing to stir, the more information the excitable Belgian brought forth. He talked of a fellow tooth-puller who’d befriended some aborigines up near Coward Springs and Bopeechee and who’d reported that they spoke of hidden islands to the southeast infused with the spirit of the deep upwellings, something terrible, something malevolent, something to be avoided. He’d reported that they had a word for “shark that devours the sea.” He displayed a piece of fisherman’s slate—from a boat he said had gone entirely missing—on which was written “Please help us. Find us soon before we die.”
Finally, when Tedford apparently seemed insufficiently impressed, he’d gone into a locked cabinet with a great flourish and had produced a tooth—white—identical to the tooth Tedford had been shown. The Warrnambool fishermen had pulled it from the tatters of their net-line, he said.
Moreover, the dentist said, working the dentifricial root around his back molars, he’d found the fishing grounds. And with them, the islands.
Tedford had been unsuccessful at concealing his shock and excitement.
The job had taken him a couple of weeks, Heuvelmans had gone on, but on the whole he was quite set up by his overall ingenuity and success. He was traveling there in a matter of days, to positively identify the thing, if not catch it. Could Tedford accompany him? Not by a long chalk.
What they were talking about, Heuvelmans mused, after they’d both had sufficient time to ponder the brutality of his refusal, would be second only to the Sperm Whale as the largest predator the planet had ever produced. He then lapsed into silence with the look of a man peering into deep space.
When Tedford finally asked what sort of weapons he intended to bring, the man quoted Job: “He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.” And when his guest responded, “Am I to understand that you’re proceeding unarmed?” Heuvelmans said only merrily, “He maketh the deep to boil like a pot.”
Tedford had taken his leave intending to return the next day, and the next, and the next, but had come back the following morning to discover Heuvelmans already gone, on, as his housekeeper put it, “a sea-voyage.” He never returned.
Tedford finally asked the housekeeper to notify him if there was any news, and two weeks after that the good woman wrote to say that part of the stern of the ship her master had contracted, the Tonny, had floated ashore on the Tasmanian coast.