Chapter 5 Tin Foil

Copyright David A. Kearns

June 2011 Daytona Beach - I sat down to lunch despite the blazing headache and tried to calm my nerves. I could tell this would be a whopper. I hadn’t had one for a long time. They came on like seismic waves. When they hit, I tended to get aggressive; hence, the display of fanged hatred for the Yankee fan out on the interstate exit. I tried to convince myself I was being paranoid thinking the man was following me. When these waves of pain swept through my head, I would usually get this feeling, as if the room was swirling and everyone was talking at once. Blackouts were not common with them, but were a sometime-thing I had to deal with.
Over the years I’ve tried everything to get rid of these attacks. A golfing buddy of mine suggested hypnotherapy, but something about that whole scene smacks of New Age horseshit. I just can’t see myself taking it seriously. The one thing that does work is being dipped in the cool waters of the Atlantic Ocean, which also is one of the reasons our yearly trip to the Outer Banks is a necessary diversion in June.
That early-June water is still nice and cool, anywhere between 55 and 70 degrees during that first week. But the air temp can get up to toasty 90 degrees by ten a.m. One of my favorite things to do is jog about five miles on State Road 12 as the sun is coming up and fog still covers the beach. I work up a good lather then finish off the run by sprinting over the dunes, down the beach and diving right into the Atlantic.
That cool water just takes all the heat and stress away. It pulses out of my head and leaches into that deep, cool water. Sometimes it’s as though I can feel all my problems, all my stress diffusing out into the echoing depths of the Atlantic.
At night, when the cool mist returns with sunset, we leave the windows open and listen to the wind and the waves. Sheila and I make love and then I usually sleep like a baby.
Next thing I know, Sheila’s up making me eggs and toast, the kids are rubbing sleep from their eyes and we start the day all over again.
The thought of that beach house in Avon, and the morning dips in the Atlantic calmed me, slowed my heart rate, and as a result the headache abated, slowly but surely. I breathed a sigh of relief. That could have been a hell of a lot worse.
As I ate my lunch I thought with regret that if I had only agreed to go to the beach house again this year, none of this would have happened. Somehow, Ryan would still be alive. I continued eating in silence, trying to clearly recall the events of that summer.




June 1981
The next day we had a huge upwelling of cold, dark water.
This would happen from time to time. We’d have days and days of westerly air flow pushing the surface water off shore then, bam, like a switch it would be gone, replaced by cool water that obviously came from below the mixing layer, as in, more than one hundred feet deep.
The air would still be blistering hot but the water would snap down to the high fifties, only climbing up to the mid-sixties by the afternoon. It would take your breath away to get into it but the mists in the morning and the evening produced some neat atmospheric effects.
Everyone wore wet suits and surfed all day long.
Russ, Ryan, Gary, Jay and I hung around Surf Road, our home break. Now Russ was added to our list of confidantes; those who knew about what was happening at the beach. Those who did not, included Jay and Gary who seemed a little miffed at our silence this perfect morning for surf.
Smokey did not take the news well the previous day that Ryan and I had seen strange lights, and this turtle mystery certainly was a puzzle he wanted no part of solving.
The old man, Lansing, said indeed he had seen these lights before, nearly thirty years ago, and thirty years before that.
The lights were something that did not surprise him either, coupled with the turtle mauling.
“They say when that blue light comes, you don’t want to be anywhere near it,” Lansing had said. Russ’s dad looked on uneasily as he explained.
“There was a fella, thirty years ago who got his Jeep truck stuck in the sand down to the inlet. He had been down there, showing off in the sand for his girlfriend.
“Well, sir, that Jeep buggy was stuck but good at the low tide line. Long comes dark he ties his front-end winch to one them big ole Australian Pines. Now it’s a full moon and so the tide’s coming in fast. But he still can’t get that buggy out of the water no matter what he does.
“As it gets dark, there’s this blue light that comes up yonder from out in the ocean, they say deep blue, bluer than blue, by about a thousand times. And he and his girlfriend are mighty spooked by that light, but he don’t want to leave his truck.
“Before long, someone comes by in a boat who knows his girlfriend, so she hops a ride back to the town Sebastian across the Indian River and says she’ll send help.
“Now that lil’ole Jeep truck was tied with steel wire to that Australian pine, secured with ah – ah- stainless-steel hook. Sure the tide came in and probably ruined his engine but, the point is, that truck weren’t goin’ nowhere, see?”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Sure enough she comes back with her parents, and he’s gone. Not only that his truck is gone too. Vanished, never to be seen again,” summed the old man.
“That wasn’t the first time either,” he said.
“Other people have vanished around this light?” Ray asked.
“Lots of folks. Nobody talks about it because nobody wants to be thought of as fit for the booby-hatch,” he said with a laugh.
“And you think that has something to do with our turtle situation?” Ray asked.
The old man leaned forward and rubbed his chin, obviously considering whether he should complete part of the puzzle for the boys and the young wildlife photographer.
“The years when the lights are seen is when we also see them turtles washing up with the eggs gone and the insides burned out of ‘em,” he said.
“What do you suppose those lights want with the turtles?” I asked.
“Y’all come on back to my shed, I got something else to show you,” he said. “Mr. Bridges, you might want to look at it first, then you decide if you should let these boys here, see it.”
Ray Bridges went into the shed and came out again. His skin was three tones whiter than the moment he entered. His hand was over his mouth.
“You can go in if you want boys, but I warn you, it’s not pretty,” Ray said.
We decided to go in one-at-the-time since space was limited inside the shed. I went in first.
Mr. Lansing had collected God knew how many skeletons and fossils, shells, and even skulls and bones of deceased shipwrecked Spaniards in his shed. There they all were amid his gardening tools, bags of plant fertilizer, gasoline cans, oily rags and so on.
“Nobody knows about this now, except you boys. I figured it was about time I showed somebody,” he said.
There in the corner, beneath a lamp was a jar apparently filled with formaldehyde, but what was seen floating in that liquid frightened me to the depth of my thirteen year-old soul, and formed a memory locked in a vault within my subconscious mind for years to come.
“I seen them lights one night in 1951 and I follered them down to the inlet in my truck. Some funny looking fellas were down there messing with a turtle nest, but, they weren’t taking eggs out, they was putting eggs in! They didn’t know it but they had dropped one of these little ole eggs on the sand and it cracked open and I picked up what had been inside,” he said. “And there it is.”
“Funny thing was, it just kept growing and changing for a few weeks even though it was dead,” he said. “All I had to do was keep a warm light on it. It stopped after about a month and this here is what we ended up with.”
“I’ve had this here for going-on thirty years,” he said. “What do you think, boy? Is he pretty as a picture?”
The creature looked like a human fetus crossed with a reptile. At about a foot long, it had two arms, and two legs with vaguely human webbed feet, and no discernable reproductive organs. Its skin was milky white yet covered in tiny, flakey, reptilian scales, as well as a barely-visible layer of peach fuzz. The creature’s hands had three fingers. The eyes were black and catlike without pupils and were nearly one third the size of the head. The brain case was as large as that of a cat, if not a little larger.
Bird, human, lizard? What the hell was it? Was it all of them combined?
There was something so hideous, yet vaguely evil about this thing, as though it represented an ancient enemy of some sort.
The smell of formaldehyde had me at that moment, but looking back on it, I am positive now the odor was tinged with the scent of rotten eggs; hydrogen sulfide. I suppose that could have been due to some anaerobic bacterial decomposition but at the time, all it did was make me more physically ill looking at the thing than I would have been without it.
I leaned over sick to my stomach. Russ’s father was called inside and he quickly escorted me out by my shoulders. I hunched over the palmettos and heaved into them, over and over again. Ray squatted down beside me told me to take deep breaths.
“No one else go in,” he said holding his son back from entering the shed.
But Ryan had brushed past me. By the time Ray went back in to get him, Ryan was standing transfixed at the thing for a full minute or longer.
When he came out he merely kept mumbling; “I knew it. I just knew it.”
“Timmy!” Ryan screamed as I replayed the entire memory in my head.
“Stop thinking about it, man. You’ll get sick again.”
“I can’t help it, Rye. Its eyes just keep looking at me in my head: those freaky eyes. I can’t stop,” I said.
“Geez, am I glad my dad didn’t let me see that thing, man. Whatever it was,” Russ said.
“I’m going to be sick again, dudes. I got a wicked-bad headache,” I said paddling back to shore. I dropped the board in the sand and bent down.
And sure enough I began to throw up. And as I did I heard a high-pitched buzz going off inside my head and I….






June 2011 Daytona Beach –
…I got up from the table and stumbled to the rest room and found a stall just in time. A crippling pain in my temples was accompanied by a ringing in my ears. A vice had my guts and was twisting them while someone drove a spike through my skull.
For a second there, I was reliving all three moments in time, the first time I laid eyes on the thing, the day after when I got sick thinking about it, and the present. It was a reverberating, excruciating déjà vu, as if I was transported back to those moments in time with every gut-wrenching convulsion. And in each moment, I could see and feel the pains and pangs from the other moments, simultaneously. I was in a hall of mirrors with the memory of that thing, feeling times in the future when I would recall it again, reverberating from past to present, to future and back again, as though my soul were a piece of elastic being pulled apart by all three, bounded by the nexus of one event, and another moment when it….it…?
Soon it was over and I breathed a sigh.
Well I remembered some of it, finally, and I survived, I thought with relief. I also felt better, stronger.
All my life I have been running from this thing, whatever it was. I had compartmentalized the image, shut it away.
I thought, now maybe I should confront it head on. Maybe I can dredge it up and deal with it, and finally move forward with my life without this crippling fear I have been carrying around inside me. Without having to read something on the internet that was falsely stated by someone who didn’t even know us.
As I leaned on the toilet seat and wiped my chin, I just knew I had been followed into that restaurant by someone who was now at a quiet booth near my own, pretending to look at the menu. I knew also, that this someone had also called me several times on the cell phone and had hung up when I answered.
But by the time I stood up, I chased the paranoid fantasy back into the subconscious realm.
I surmised that I had been thinking about Ryan far too much today. I didn’t want to start thinking about him so much that I actually started to think like him, the way he thought about everything. That path invited madness.
I paid my check and left the restaurant, not bothering to look for phantom spies. As I got back on the road, I decided to take on the project of uncovering a new memory; namely, what ever became of Mr. Lansing? For some reason there was a big roadblock to that one as well.