Chapter 6 Gather Intell

Copyright David A. Kearns


June 1981
That night Ryan read more from his copy of “Bermuda Triangle” under flashlight while he, Russ, and I sat inside a gazebo on a picnic table at Ocean Avenue Park.
We were waiting for Brittany, Trisha and Loni to arrive and I was nervous. Ryan would not shut up about monsters, aliens, lights and so forth. At that point I was looking for any excuse to forget everything.
“I think we should spy on them, man. Try to catch them in the act. Get cameras and stuff, sell it to the newspapers,” Ryan said.
“Maybe it’s the Navy or the Air Force doing some kind of experiment, Ryan. Maybe they’ve found some new sea creature or something, man,” I said.
“No way. You saw that thing, Tim. Smoke, you should have seen it too. It looked like Rosemary’s Baby, dude. It was fucking awful,” he said.
“You guys are way out there,” Smokey said uneasily.
“Ask your old man what it looked like,” Ryan said.
“He said we should forget about it. If we see the lights we should just get off the beach and tell no one about it, man. We’re only going to make ourselves have nightmares,” Smokey said.
“What’s the fun part about that?” Ryan said.
“You’re crazy, Rye,” Smokey said after a pause.
“And you obviously need a tampon, Smoke,” Ryan said.
“Oh, screw you man, I’m not scared of nothing. It’s just that, this is waste of time,” Smokey clarified.
“Yeah, Ryan, what makes you so sure it’s aliens?” I asked.
“Those lights weren’t like anything I have ever seen. That dead baby turtle weren’t no baby turtle. I say we take the scientific approach, just like this guy did in his book here,” he said.
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Gather evidence,” he said. “Now it says here in his book that UFOs do two things when you come in contact with them: they usually throw off your compasses, because they interrupt magnetic flux lines when their engines are running and that also interrupts radio transmissions, as well as electronics.”
“So?” Smokey said.
“We get witnesses, right? A compass, Tim we bring your sister’s boom box, we bring a camera and we take pictures,” Ryan said. “Smoke, your old man has a couple of extra cameras lying around, right?”
“No way, man. Uh-unh. He’ll have a shit-fit if I mess with his cameras,” Russ said.
“Smokey, this is for the defense of earth we’re talking about here. Not only that this is our beach, man. You know: our sand, our turtles….go home!”
“Oh – my - God,” sighed Smokey in exasperation.
“You are such a chicken shit, man,” Ryan shot back. “You were too chicken to go in there in the first place and take a look at what Tim and I saw. A least Timmy had the guts to look at it, even though he couldn’t hold onto his breakfast after.”
“Hey, take it easy, Ryan,” I said.
“No, you guys are acting like a bunch of pussies, man. We have to put a stop to these things,” he said.
“I’ll see y’all later, man,” said Russ getting up.
“Aw, Smokey, c’mon. Say it ain’t so. You’re gonna chicken out on me? I don’t believe this,” Ryan said.
“Whatever dudes,” he said and walked across the street.
Ryan and I sat listening to the waves over the dunes.
“Can’t believe him,” he hissed.
“Well? Maybe he’s right, Rye. Maybe we should just forget this,” I said.
“Whatever,” Ryan said.
Soon a faraway street light was shadow-casting the backs of four figures strolling across the parking lot towards us from the strip-mall plaza.
Their shades faded and melted near the edge of darkness at the jiffy-john, where the reach of the streetlight had dimmed. Those curvaceous, dimming shadows were accompanied by the unmistakable sound of female giggling.
This was what I had been waiting for all month long. But to my unbelieving ears I also could detect a male voice with them, a familiar male voice at that – goddamn Talk Monster!
He had escorted them out to the beach. As he babbled, they giggled and I wanted to punch him right in the nuts to shut him the hell up for once in his fat-mouth life, but it was not to be.
“Hey guys!” he said as all four came up to the gazebo.
“Talk,” said Ryan flatly, impressed with Talk’s apparent savoir fare with the female-select of the community.
One of the girls giggled at Ryan’s designation for the Monster. “He called him ‘Talk’.” I couldn’t tell who had been thus amused, but I suspect it had been Trisha.
Trisha was wearing some sort of white tube top with red stripes and a white tennis skirt. She immediately began twirling around showing off her gorgeous long legs, letting her long brown pony tail fly in the breeze.
Trisha really was pretty. She looked more like a twenty year-old than the thirteen she was. Older guys, and even married men, knowingly, or unknowingly, came on to her all the time.
Loni, the blonde, stood apart from the others watching everyone with careful green eyes. She was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans and a peasant blouse. Her blonde curls were pulled back with two berets. She slurped on a lollipop, not caring how childish this made her look. I smiled at her and she smiled back.
Brittany, with brown hair and with her sad, dark brown eyes, went right up to Ryan and started talking to him. He was gazing uneasily at Trisha who continued to twirl and sing a song to herself; something from Queen’s News of the World if memory serves.
“What are you guys up to?” Brittany asked, curling a strand of brown hair within her tan fingers and pink, acrylic nails.
Looking back on it, I can see now, that Trisha may have seemed the best looking one of the bunch, but she was not the sweetest. That was Brittany who obviously had a major thing for Ryan, and not me.
Back then, Trisha was beauty without mercy. She tortured both Ryan and I and played each of us against the other every chance she could get. She later admitted to me she only did that because she couldn’t decide who she liked more between us, which I suspect now was only half the truth, the other half, as anyone who knows a thirteen-year old girl who is far too sexy and beautiful for her age and maturity, is that pitting teenage boys against each other is something fun to do that easily relieves teenage boredom.
Tom came up to me and said he had been down to the Monster Hole with his brother, Ted, and a friend of the family.
There had been talk out in the line-up of weird lights seen at night by a group of high school kids down camping at the Inlet from North Carolina.
Strangely enough, we usually spoke more to out-of-towners than we did with boys we knew were from Wabasso, so it didn’t surprise me Talk had chatted up the North Carolinians. There was an uneasy peace between Outer Banks surfers and we locals who claimed the Sebastian Inlet and its environs. Call it detente, we never hassled them because Sebastian Inlet and Cape Hatteras Light were nearly considered sister cities.
After all, what good would it do to keep them from surfing our break when they could turn right around and do the same thing to us, if we ever were lucky enough to travel fifteen hours north. We all had our fantasy road trips to Cape Hatteras planned and mapped out, owing to all those photographs of those perfect, chocolate tubes capped with cold, middle-Atlantic spray, and framed on one side by the familiar swirls of black paint over white on the Cape Hatteras light; all courtesy of the surfing magazines. How we longed to go where the waves all seemed cleaner, bigger, colder and meaner: just to say we had done it; that we had braved at least one North Carolina monster.
Likewise, we could relate to them because they had been prodded southward by endless montage shots of surfers, shredding and bashing the lip dressed in nothing but baggies – look, they don’t have to wear wetsuits! – framed in aquamarine hollows of glass, and the familiar rocks of the Sebastian Inlet jetty.
Tom said waves at Monster Hole had been a solid six-foot to overhead all day long and he had gotten “mucho” barrels. There he goes, “Talking the Monster” which is how he got his nickname, Talk Monster Tom.
“What about the lights?” Ryan asked, rolling his eyes at Talk’s inability to stay on task.
“These guys said they were scared out of their minds. They took off down the road and camped out down near Wabasso Beach. They said there was stuff flying around in the air but I think they were smoking too much crippie or something man,” Tom said.
Ryan looked over at me as if to say; see? What did I tell you?
Tom picked up on the look; “What? You don’t believe me? Ask Ted yourself. You know I’m getting sick of you guys not believing me, man.”
“That’s not it, Tom. This time we believe you,” Ryan said. “Don’t we, Timmy?”
Ryan got up and strutted angrily to the beach walkover. Brittany followed him.
“What’s his problem?” Tom asked.
Everyone was looking at me now and it grew very quiet.
“Alright, y’all want to know?”
“Yeah!” they chimed.
“Ryan and I have seen the lights too. This morning, Smoke, Ryan and I went to this old man’s house down the beach to talk to him about what’s been happening with the turtles around here lately, and he had this thing in a jar that…”
“What’s been happening with the turtles?” Tom interjected.
They sat in a semi-circle around me at the table while I laid it all out, start to finish. I guess I was trying to impress the girls more than anything, and don’t you know it worked rather well, for the moment.
I knew they had trouble believing the stuff about the so-called “Rosemary’s Baby” locked away in a jar inside old man Lansing’s shed but, it was such a good story that I hardly had to embellish. When I had finished, Trisha’s eyes were beaming beneath that bright smile of hers that filled my adolescent heart with hope. Loni also seemed fascinated, and she, being plenty cute as well, warmed my heart all the more.
“So what’s the plan?” Tom asked.
“Ryan thinks we should try to gather proof on these things, send it to National Geographic or something. He’s mad at them for doing this to the turtles,” I said.
“Who them?” Loni asked.
“Them them. Whoever they are,” I said cryptically, which sent a little shiver up my spine and from the look on her face, Loni’s as well.
“Let’s do it,” Tom said. The girls nodded. They were in like Flynn. Anything to relieve the boredom, I supposed.
So, I outlined Ryan’s plan in broad strokes, witnesses, which with our little group was amply comprised; a compass, we could get from the Malone brothers off of one of their boats; my sister’s boom box, which I would steal; and well, that was about all we needed, or so I thought.
“We should bring some weed,” Tom said, trying to impress the girls.
Trisha heartily agreed, and now I could see from whence Tom’s sudden interest in marijuana had sprung. All eyes were on me now as apparently I spoke for Ryan; who was our connection to Neiderman, thence to the devil weed, and everyone seemed to know the mechanics of this, somehow. But then, how else?
Damn you, Talk Monster!, I thought to myself, for now I had to brace Ryan to approach Neiderman with whatever we had in our pockets, which might well be nothing.
The odds for any serious face-time with Trisha were quietly dwindling in the summer breeze. If we couldn’t get some semblance of weed, she would be pissed. She might even twirl on her pretty little heels and say “to hell with y’all and your stupid little fantasy.”
She could be like that: capricious like an angry old she-cat. One minute she was raising her tail, rubbing your hand with an arched back, next she was clawing you up and down, and running away. What a handful she was.
I walked over the dune to catch Ryan and Brittany smooching, which was cool, even though I sort of had a thing for her too.
Ryan pretended he hadn’t been participating, but at least the smooch put him in a better mood.
“I think I got everybody convinced to carry out your plan, Rye,” I said.
“What plan?”
“You know, to spy on the aliens or whatever,” I said.
“Are you serious?” he said, brightening.
“Yeah, all we need is a little weed to get our courage up,” I said.
“So that’s it,” he said. “It’s about getting some weed from my neighbor.”
I took him out of earshot from Brittany.
“Look Ryan, Trisha seems like she’s into me, man. If we get a little pot, she might be more relaxed. C’mon, you understand, don’t you, Rye?”
“Fine,” he said. “But you need to get your sister’s boom box.”
Which I did easily enough. My dad was asleep on the couch watching the Gong Show and Katie was God-knew where, so I walked into her room and cold-stole the thing, forgetting to take one of her favorite cassettes Rush’s , “Moving Pictures,” out of it.
By the time that was done, Ryan had gone to the Malone house and, in an effort to get the compass from one of their sailboats, had also gained two more witnesses, Gary and Jay.
“This is turning into a circus,” Ryan said.
Next stop: weed.
With all of us in tow, we walked around the back of the Neiderman home. Towels were hung over his brother, Hank’s window but through a crack in the window you could see the glow from a black light, as well as hear Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child playing from his stereo. It skipped heavily on a scratch and repeated the same chords over and over; that bit right after Jimi first sings, “ Well I’m standing next to a mountain, I chop it down, with the edge of my hand.”
We tapped on Myle’s adjacent window. The room was dark but he was in there lying on his bed doing, precisely what at 9 p.m. on a Friday evening only God knew for sure, but we all had our suspicions. From the guilty look on his acne-covered face when he came to the window, my worst mental imagery was confirmed, regarding his late deeds.
“What the hell do y’all want?” he demanded, but he softened his anger after taking one look at Trisha O’Connell who was standing behind me, pirouetting again, to stave off momentary boredom.
Myles Neiderman cracked a grin of pure lascivious glee. God had apparently just answered his silent prayers.
“We need some weed, Myles. Now, we don’t have too much money,” Ryan said.
But suddenly, money was no object for Myles. And I was very nervous because, this could only mean one thing.
“Where y’all going?” Myles said, still staring at Trisha who stopped and regarded him the way one might a bug.
“We’re going down the beach a ways. To see some lights,” Ryan said.
Shut up, Ryan! Shut up! I thought.
“You heard about them lights down at the inlet?” he asked.
We said nothing.
“Hang on, I’ll come with you. I got my brother’s car,” he said.
“Won’t he get pissed?” I asked, trying desperately to give him an out.
“Little man, he’s totally out of it. I’ll get us some real weed too. He just got some Gainesville,” Myles said getting off his bed and fumbling with his belt.
Trisha was bouncing up and down to this news. Here we had a car and some weed! Her on-going battle with boredom was temporarily stalemated for what could prove to be hours.
Brittany looked terrified. She had never seen Myles before, nor his like, and to be honest, he could be a terrifying sight when it came to first impressions. His wicked, painful acne scars seldom alleviated anyone’s fears about what might be going on inside his head. What came out of his mouth, usually only confirmed the worst.
Trisha, Loni and Ryan mashed into the front of the cab with Myles. Brittany, myself, Tom and the Malone brothers, all hopped in the bed of the El Camino.
“We’ve got to swing by Smokey’s house,” I heard Ryan tell Myles.
“You mean that Russ dude?”
We parked about a hundred yards down from Smokey’s. Ryan, quietly got out of the car, walked down the street and disappeared over the backyard fence.
You could briefly hear Smokey’s dog, Derby, yap but was soon mollified with a few pats on the head and sniffs at Ryan’s hand. Derby knew all of us, very well.
It didn’t take long. The promise of some weed, and a late-night ride, and Russ was out of the house with his father’s Nikonos in hand. He brought a flash as well..
Ryan was pleased to have changed Smokey’s mind.
Myles stopped the El Camino at the Spessard Holland Beach Park. We got out of the car and walked up beneath the gazebo and sat down on two picnic tables.
Myles unfurled a cellophane baggie and shined a flashlight on it.
“Damn, that’s green,” said Smokey.
“This is the real shit, y’all,” Myles said, now acting the perfect host and master of ceremonies, as well as admitting that what he sold us most of the time was sub-par, pure stems and seeds.
Myles extracted the Zig-Zag papers, twisted up a decent joint, sparked it with a lighter, took a hit, and passed it to Trisha.
No veteran at this, Trisha coughed her brains out, and tried again, only gagging slightly on the second puff. Smokey, Tom and Ryan were next and held their breaths in a manly way after coughing on the first go. I did the same. Looking at Brittany’s terrified eyes, I skipped her and proffered it to Loni, who waved me off with disdainful nonchalance. She didn’t want any and wasn’t scared at all to tell me or anyone else.
Likewise, neither of the Malone boys wanted any. They stood by with their arms folded and waited. Jay was feeling uneasy but Gary was both exited at the prospect of seeing something new and growing bored with our antics.
Back it went to Myles who smoked up quiet a bit.
“Can you drive with that stuff in you?” Gary asked.
“Hell yes,” said Myles exhaling a purple cloud.
Gary and Jay disgustedly went out to the parking-lot to throw a Frisbee they had brought with them. Light from the rising moon aided them in the nearly impossible.
Trisha waved off a second hit, as did Tom and I. Smokey raised his hand like a good boy, took another huge lungful, and Ryan took a modest second helping and snubbed out the roach, which Myles saved in the baggie.
“Well, are we going to see this alien shit or aren’t we?” said Gary derisively.
His attitude said it all. Unless there was some sort of show, more than watching a bunch of idiots smoke weed, why, he was out of there any second. It seemed to crystallize the moment. If he were a CEO at a bad meeting he would have just said “Ladies and gentlemen, why are we here?”
“Hang on little man, dang. Where’d you get this kid, Jay?” Myles asked, to which Gary said sotto voce “huh, where’d they get you, Neiderman, the fuckin’ loser farm?” But Myles didn’t hear it.
Just then two figures, one on a ten-speed bicycle meandering back and forth in that time-honored way of childhood, and another boy on foot wandered up.
“What’s up, guys?” said the shaggy-top with a classic pre-pubescent crackle in his voice.
“Nothin’, who the hell are you?” said Gary.
“This is Chuck Naigle and I’m…”
“Kookmeyer Douche-bag?” Gary said for him, completing his sentence.
“Gary, shut the hell up,” Jay said.
“…Nice kid,” Shaggy-top said, “Did mom have more like him, or did she flush twice the next time?”
That split everyone up. Even Jay was laughing. He knew he should be offended but the timing of it put a smile where a frown should have been before he could get mad.
“I’m Dave Finklestein,” Dave said.
“I know you from math class, don’t I?” I said.
“Yeah, I’m new here. So’s Chuck.”
“What’s happenin’?” Chuck said, very hip, southern black. Atlanta accent. Too cool for school.
“Where do you guys live?” asked Gary.
“I’m down here on Allen. Chuck lives on First Avenue. So what’s going on?” Finkles said.
“Chuck don’t say much,” Gary said.
“Chuck don’t have to, small-fry,” Chuck said.
Gary would have swung immediately on any other kid who had addressed the issue of his diminutive stature, but not Chuck. Chuck looked like he had been carved out of a solid piece of mahogany. The kid lifted weights. He could probably bench-press Gary who merely smiled at the jibes.
Loni spoke up; “These geniuses think they know where to see some aliens.”
Finkles smiled at this, “Oh yeah? No shit, huh? That stuff you were smoking, does it help you see them?”
We laughed. Finkles was a New York riot from the get go. Myles bristled at this realizing the attention was off of him now, as the designated dope handler, and onto this new kid who had a very quick wit on him.
“It might, smart-ass,” said Myles. “You want some?”
“No thanks,” said Finkles. “I just got through sniffing glue at home. I’ll be alright for a while.”
“Look kiddies, are we going or what?” Myles said to everyone else.
“Yes, let’s go. You guys want to come?” Ryan asked, somehow deciding in an instant he could tolerate these guys, possibly even like them one day.
The tall black kid held his arms folded, tensing his knotting bicep muscles for the girls.
“Should we?” he asked Finkles.
“C’mon ladies. Jesus, make up your mind,” Gary said.
“Sure, what the hell. Hey, we don’t see any aliens we come back in an hour, right?” Finkles said, wheeling his ten-speed over to the gazebo and locking it to a wooden post. It was the first time I had ever seen someone do that in Melbourne Beach. No one commented on the fact that the big city, and big city values, had just arrived in our little corner of the world.
“Sure whatever man,” said Myles.
We all packed into the El Camino and in a few seconds were headed south down A1A towards the inlet.
Now a victim of marijuana, I began to marvel at the concept a hybrid between a car and a truck. It wasn’t big enough to do any serious hauling and you couldn’t comfortably carry more than three people in the cab. Sure they sort of looked cool but what were they good for?
“You ever notice, these things really aren’t good for a damn thing?” I said.
No one answered this, but Trisha was sitting next to me now, somehow actually leaning on my arm, making it appear as though she and I were boyfriend and girlfriend to the new guys.
I hadn’t noticed that she had decided to climb in the back with me, as had Loni and Brittany. Russ, Ryan and Jay were up front with Myles, who was now visibly pissed at having lost track of Trisha. I caught sight of him pounding the steering wheel with his fist.
Foiled again, I thought, wondering how many times he had been bilked out of beer, weed or a ride, by a pretty face. I think back with sadness on the fact his life had been so short; too short to figure out he needed to negotiate these things before he gave out the goodies. But then, many of us fall short of our expectations when it came to the likes of Trisha and her beauty. She had a way of physically unmanning you, turning you into spineless, smiling glop at the mere thought of time alone with her.
She smiled at me, letting me inhale some of her warm breath along with the smell of her perfume. She leaned over and, to my complete astonishment, began French kissing me right in front of everyone. You never knew what this girl was going to do.
She reached a hand over and placed it on my cheek, demanding another kiss, which I gladly gave her.
I opened my eyes to notice everyone in the back of the El Camino was looking at the two of us as though we were performers in a show.
“What ch’yall gonna do next?” Chuck asked in his best Georgia drawl.
“Shhh, Chuck, don’t go ruining the moment for these love birds. Hey, anyone up there got any popcorn?” Finkles said.
Chuck looked away angrily. Trisha grinned and put her head under my chin, hugging herself closer to me while staring at the other boys.
“Jesus,” sighed Gary “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
Loni and Finkles shared a smiling glance and I thought I detected something in her eye; little did I know it was the spark that would later become their beautiful children, Moira and Evan.
What I also didn’t realize was Ryan’s plan had evolved. The El Camino was slowing down and we still had a couple of miles to go before we were even near the inlet.
I leaned up and tapped on the back of the cab.
“Why are we stopping?”
“Take a look where we are,” Ryan said.
We pulled into Lansing’s long sand path that wound a quarter mile to his house beside the Indian River.
We stopped a hundred yards or so into the property. Ryan, Smokey and Myles got out of the cab.
“We need to be real quiet,” Ryan said. “Smokey needs to get a picture of this thing.”
“Is that a good idea, Ryan? What if the old man wakes up?” I said.
“What’s he gonna do, creak his bones at us? We need evidence man. I don’t care how we get it,” he said.
Myles, Smokey and Ryan then calmly, stealthily walked down the path toward the house in the darkness while the rest of us sat in the back of the car and watched them making their way to the house in the moonlight.
Trisha leaned toward me and whispered into my ear; “I want to see it too.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah, I’ll trade you for it,” she whispered with a grin.
“Trade? Trade what?” I said.
“Oh, my God,” said Naigle. “This boy is plain stupid. He don’t know nothing. What’s wrong with you man? Just say yes.”
“How do you know what we’re talking about?” I asked, delighting in his jealous misery.
“Dummy, it don’t matter what you’re talking about, just say yes,” he said. “Y’all been smoking too much of the whacky weed.”
We all laughed at this.
“Shhhh! Y’all shut the hell up,” said Jay. “You’ll wake up the old man.”
“Just give him a chance,” said Finkles, “He’ll come around.”
I smiled victoriously at Naigles as Trisha and I got out of the car and walked down the lane toward the house.
“Boy’s stupid, man. I’da jumped on that offer in a second,” I heard Chuck say, making a mental note of his declaration of rivalry.
Ryan, Myles and Russ were coming back up the path.
I could hear Myles say ; “I swear to God, I never seen anything like that. That was something else…”
When we met on the pathway they explained that the aluminum siding to the shed peeled away from the frame in back. All you had to do was shimmy through the crack quietly without waking an old black lab on the back porch.
Ryan handed me the flashlight.
“You sure you’re up for it again, Hoss?” he asked me.
“Yep,” I said uneasily.
“He’s up for it,” Trisha said.
“Well then, do it quick,” he said.
Trisha and I walked the path toward the shed.
I was feeling uneasy at the thought of seeing the thing again.
Trisha and I were holding hands. Her other tiny hand clung to the crook of my arm at the elbow. I was learning a great deal about, Trisha O’Connell; for one thing, she was an excitement junky, just like Ryan.
She was giggling unbridled joy and shivering in anticipation at what me might find once inside the little shed.
The boys had left a triangle of upturned aluminum siding peeled back waiting for us. The hole was just big enough for us to shimmy into the shed one at the time.
Once inside the shed I turned around on my knees and held her hand as she crawled inside with me.
As she did she pushed me back down on dusty plywood floor on my back and kissed me, then kissed me again.
I set the flashlight down on its base and it shined a bright orb on the rust ceiling.
Framed shadows from the light shining off the dull grey metal surface of the must room, Trisha pulled her halter top over her head and straddled me as she unbuttoned my flannel shirt, allowing my hands to roam where they would.
Oh my, did she feel heavenly.
“What is up with you?” I asked.
“Shhhh…” she cautioned.
“You’re so cute,” she whispered into my ear mashing herself against me and forcing her tongue inside my mouth. All at once she seemed to have two pairs of hands. They were everywhere.
My eyes bugged wide, because she obviously knew exactly what she was doing. Things were moving along waaaaay faster than I expected. I was on autopilot ready to do something I had never thought myself capable of…
“No, Timmy. Not there. We know what happens there,” she said.
“What happens?” I asked in dreamy agony.
“Babies happen, Timmy. We don’t want those do we? At least not yet anyway,” she asked.
I leaned back and let her continue, moaning in ecstatic pain.
Babies, I thought for a moment. Yes, babies. We wouldn’t want that especially ROSEMARY’S BABY looking at us…somewhere in this very room…!
An alarm went off in my head. I opened my eyes, looked just behind her left ear and there it was. I could swear the thing was staring at me with a smile on its face like a demon through the shiny curved glass.
I then noticed that we had crawled through a hole in the shed, entering just beneath the dusty old table upon which sat the jar and my little nightmare friend. It was a miracle we hadn’t knocked Rosemary’s Baby onto the floor with all our wild thrashing.
“Stop! Just stop!” I said.
“Shhhh…Just let me help you,” she said.
I pulled my pants up and hitched them tight and back up into a rusted old lawn mower.
“No, no….Look! Turn around. Not with that thing staring at us,” I said, picking up the flashlight and shining it on the grotesque thing simmering for years inside a jar filled with formaldehyde.
Trisha glanced behind her, squealed, banged her head on the corner of the table, grabbed her ear then started laughing. In a flash she had her halter over her head again, preparing to put it on as if we indeed had been watched by someone.
“Oh, my God! What the hell is that thing?!” she said amid peels of laughter and startled giggles.
“It was staring at me, Trish. I swear to God, the damned thing was looking at me,” I said.
“Nonsense, Timmy,” she said.
“Honestly, Trish…”
“Ewww, what’s that smell?” she said with a smile, covering her nose with her hand. “Tim, did you….?”
“No, that’s exactly what I smelled the first time I saw it,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever. Shine the light on it, Tim. I want to look at it,” Trisha said standing up.
As I did, the body of the hunchbacked little lizard man inside the glass jar picked up the beam. The bristly little scales reflected tiny heliographs from a dusty covering of peach fuzz. You could see its little ribs through its nearly translucent skin.
“That thing is sooo fake. I swear, you guys set this up, didn’t you?” she said.
“No Trish, we didn’t, honest. The old guy who lives here found this gushing out of a cracked turtle egg thirty years ago. He put it in this jar and even dead it just kept growing,” I said.
“You are so full of it, Tim. I swear to God you and Ryan are so damned sick. How long did it take you to set this up?” she said with a smile.
“Honestly Trish. We didn’t set anything up,” I said.
She brushed the table with her hip as she expertly adjusted her halter top. The little being floating in the jar, rotated a few degrees until its half-shut eyes were staring directly at her.
“That thing is so damned gross,” she said dismissively. “What is it, rubber?”
“I swear it’s real. I lost my breakfast, first time I saw it,” I admitted.
“Figures,” she said.
“Hey at least we warned you what you were going to see. Old man Lansing didn’t warn me at all. All at once it was just like boom, there it is,” I said.
“I don’t know about you, Tim, but I wouldn’t have thrown up,” she said.
“Oh, you’re so tough,” I said.
“Tougher than you,” she said, pulling her hair back and knotting it in a ponytail again with an elastic band.
“Are not,” I said.
“You think you’re tougher?” she asked, and before I knew it she had maneuvered me into check mate.
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
“I want you to prove to me how tough you are then,” she said.
“What? How?” I asked, completely blind now to what she was about to ask me. I was as helpless as a kitten trapped on a four-lane interstate and I didn’t even know it. She had me cold.
“I want you to open up that jar and touch it,” she said.
“No way, Trish. I like you and everything but…”
“What, are you chicken? I’ll do it,” she said,
“No you won’t,” I said.
“I will but if you go first, Tim, I’ll let you go all the way with me,” she said flatly. I looked into those deep blue eyes of hers. She was being serious.
“When?” I asked.
“Sometime this week after you get us some condoms,” she said, leaning in to kiss me once for good measure.
“But…”
“What are you, Timmy? Are you a virgin?” she teased.
“No, I mean, are you?” I asked. All she did was smile. She was committing to nothing. She leaned in and French kissed me.
“And if I do it, you’ll believe me? That we didn’t set this up, that this is real?” I asked ridiculously.
“Sure whatever,” she said smiling at me.
“You know, going all the way is one thing,” I said.
“but…?”
“Boyfriend and girlfriend, the whole summer,” I bargained.
“The whole summer?” she mocked.
Looking back at this night - the last night I would ever, ever again touch marijuana - I realize now that the drug has the definite impact of blurring the lines between reality, and a sort of soft, fuzzy dream world, something akin to sleepwalking with only slightly more conscious awareness, because under normal, non-stoned conditions, I would have already vomited and passed out even being near this thing. Yet, here I was actually considering opening up the jar and touching this damned reptilian corpse of a being with my hand; setting my thirteen-year-old fingers on something that looked like an aborted lizard-astronaut baby from hell.
Oh, I was stoned alright, for the first, and last time, in my young life. I must have been to push my luck envelope any further.
I mean there I was: I had nearly crossed the finish line in receiving end of my first orgasm at the hands of an actual female of my species; I had, in the parlance, also “touched-titty” which, back in the day, would have been more than an excellent capper to a banner evening. I had French-kissed this beautiful girl.
Some would even say we had “made out!” I already was Superman, in the eyes of my buddies who would assume, after all this time in the shed together, that Trish and I, had not just made out, but “made it! as in, done it, you know, sex, the thing that everyone wanted to do but no one in my age group had any expertise in yet.
Now the object of my affection was willing me onward. I had only to open this jar and place a finger on this thing, and she would arrange to actually “go all the way” with me at a later time. How could I refuse and would I have the sense to, being stoned as I was, looking into those eyes of hers that seemed like sweet blueberries in milk?
Well, why not? The thing is dead, anyway, I thought. What harm could it do me?
I carefully set my hands on the cap. She stood behind me and wrapped her arm around my chest and kept the light pointed forward with the other hand, peeking at the jar over my shoulder. She nibbled on my ear, pressed her chest against my back, reached her hand down my stomach and began rubbing lower still where…
“Trish, cut it out,” I whispered. “I can’t concentrate.”
“Sorry,” she whispered back, then asked “Why are we whispering?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
She kissed my cheek and held onto my stomach tightly, and I continued with sweaty hands.
“The whole summer,” she mocked me again, letting me know how much she appreciated our little deal. How cute she thought it was that I liked her, really liked her in that way.
At first the lid didn’t budge at all. A thin layer of rust obviously kept the threads from separating. I looked around and spied an old pair of garden gloves I could use to get a better grip on the jar. I put them on hastily.
“You have to touch it with you hand, Tim. Or it’s no deal,” she said.
“Damn, girl, the lid is slippery and the seal is rusted. Let me get the lid off at least using these,” I said.
“Okay you big stud,” she said, kissing my cheek.
After a little effort, the lid screeked then began to slide with a dusty, scraping sound that only metal lids make when the seal on a glass jar has finally been compromised after many years.
Satisfied when the threads were entirely apart, I set the jar down very carefully lifted the lid completely off, took off the gloves then slowly began to bring my hand down toward the surface of the amber liquid contained within. I stopped inches from the surface of the water, noticing for the first time, horned little knots of flesh dotting the surface of the creature’s head like the texture of a puffer fish’s skin.
“All the way down,” she whispered. “Touch it with your hand, and I’m yours for the whole summer.”
“And the other thing,” I said.
“I said so, didn’t I?” she asked, growing impatient.
I took my right hand an immersed it in the liquid, which was warmer than I imagined it would be. I braved the inch or so between my outstretched finger and the surface of its head.
The surface was hard, knobby like bone but it was obviously covered in a layer of slime, separating itself from the liquid around it. I moved my finger along the bony head until…









June 2011 Titusville, Florida–
I pulled the Ford Explorer off the southbound lane into the grass and ran for the woods, doubling over in pain and nausea. An eighteen-wheel tractor trailer nearly clipped me as I exited the car. The driver hit his horn and geared down sending up a roar as I stumbled through the high grass into the scrub beside the pines.
Remember it now, said a calm voice somewhere in my mind. It’s alright. You’re through the worst of it, remember it!

June 1981 –
The scream from Trish erupted just as a bolt of electricity surged up my arm into my head sending me into a paralyzed seizure of some sort. In an instant the thing crawled out of the jar and ran up my arm with all of its spindly little limbs tensed with the strength of three grown men. I was in deep shock and pain staring at this thing from hell which was not only alive but tensing up and preparing to gnaw on my arm. It had a set of choppers on it like a turtle and crushing jaws to go with it.
I saw its intent in its huge eyes and in an instant, it knew, that I knew. What’s worse, for a second there, the creature and I were linked, mind-to-mind. For an instant it was looking at me, and I was seeing myself through its eyes. The image was horrifying; that of a clothed, immature, hairless primate with rage and terror in its trapped mind.
Screaming in white panic, every muscle in my body went into convulsive motion as I felt myself go into blinded motion. Fortunately Trish ducked as I swung around, flailing to remove the thing with a heart-stopping terror that set me to flailing, spinning and whirling like a top, with one blazing thought in my mind, to get this thing off of me before it infected my brain with itself, or it bit down on me injecting me with space bacteria that rotted the flesh off my bones from the inside out. But the thing wouldn’t release its grip. As I flailed, I imaged the sharp stinging pain of its parrotfish-bite sinking down past my flesh into my bones, but the bite never came.
Finally, I swung my arm with all my strength toward the edge of the table as the flash-light flew toward the back of the shed and the glass jar shattered on the floor.
A luminescence surrounded the thing in a sphere that stopped my hand from hitting the table; the best way to describe it as an electrical or pressure field of some sort. But thankfully, the creature bounced free of my arm. Encased in its sphere of light, it changed color three or four times in mid air, hit the wall then scurried into a corner of the little shed.
Trish was already out of the hole in the wall, running and screaming up the trail. I could hear her fall. She began vomiting with force.
I turned back to look at the creature but it was lost amid a hundred different tools and garden implements. It hissed and growled low, making the sounds of three wounded cats during a break in an all-out brawl. Light was coming from a corner of the little room where the thing had obviously tucked itself beside bags of chemical fertilizer. I was curious, but now fully awake, charged with electricity and terrified, I knew survival meant getting the hell out of there.
Suddenly, the odor of rotten eggs and filth began to overpower me. I nearly lost consciousness as I threw myself on the floor and clawed my way toward the hole in the wall. More yowls and growls erupted from the being. I pulled myself through that hole as fast as I could, dreading bites to my legs that never came.
Outside the shed, I choked back the sickness and willed myself to my feet. How I did that is still a mystery. In four, unsteady strides I caught up with Trish who was doubled over, and vomiting on the trail.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you, Timmy. I’m so sorry,” she cried as I pulled her up by her underarm.
“Don’t worry just get moving, Trish. C’mon, move your feet!”
By now the thing inside the shed was thrashing around with all that anger that thirty years spent cooped up in a jar could render. The shed began to come apart.
Lady, the lab was barking and growling from her back porch and the lights in the house came on.
I could see sharp, blue lights and sparks flashing from the shed as we ran. In a moment or two walls of the shed were falling off and everything was engulfed in flames.
The El Camino was right where we left it but its tail lights were on as it prepared to depart.
“Where the hell y’all been,” screamed Myles as I helped Trish aboard and hopped into the flat bed with her. Brittany and Loni begged her to tell them what happened but she just shook her head.
I leaned around into the window and yelled to Ryan.
“Get us the hell out of here, man! That thing was alive,” I said.
“No way,” he shouted over the gunned engine.
“Way, dude. Way way!”
Dust, gravel and sand flew from the tires as the lights and flames from the property vanished behind us.
I huddled down next to Trish and held her shoulders and she cried and shuddered. Loni and Brittany looked at me with accusing eyes as though I had done something to her.
“Shh….” I whispered to Trish. “Shhhh. It’s okay now.”
She turned and hugged me and started to cry into my shoulder. She didn’t stop crying until we were nearly home.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Tim,” she sobbed. “I’m really sorry.”

June, 2011 Titusville Florida
I wandered back to the Ford Explorer silently calculating how much weight I might lose in a week if I kept remembering these details so vividly. I hoped the nausea would stop. If not, I was certainly in for a rough time at the funeral. I hadn’t even seen the old gang yet.
I checked my watch as the cell rang. It was Sheila.
“Honey?” she said.
“Hey…” I answered, relieved to hear her voice.
“I just heard about Ryan, are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said as the cars and trucks continued to fly by on the interstate.
“Where are you? It sounds like you’re standing in the middle of a race track,” she said.
“I’m feeling nauseous for some reason, hon. I pulled over. Nothing to worry about,” I said.
After a brief pause she said again, “Are you okay? I can tell something’s wrong in your voice.”
“…No, I’m fine. Just remembering a few things is all,” I said.
She sighed. She hated it when I remembered stuff from my childhood, things that gave me nightmares.
“Try not to think about it, Tim. You’re all grown up now. The past is behind you. A lot of that stuff, and I’m not saying all of it, but a lot of it, you only remember because you and Ryan shared a very vivid imaginary world, Tim. And you guys were smoking pot, honey. Remember?” she said, always perfectly logical and reasonable. Obviously she was right.
“Okay, honey. I will,” I said. “How are you and the kids? How’s your mom?”
Sheila said everyone was fine. I heard something in her voice that seemed like worry but I knew that she knew I had detected it. That being the case, she would not risk asking me again if I was okay, as she was perfectly aware she would only receive a pat answer.
“Sheila?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen when you wanted to go to the Outer Banks this year, honey. I’m sorry. I should have,” I said.
“That’s okay, sweetheart. Just be careful,” she said and we hung up after our “I love you’s”.
I only had about sixty miles to go until the turn-off. I got in the car tried to put the distance and the time, to good use.

June 1981
“So then what happened?” Ryan asked again, and once again I told him.
We sat on the railing of the Surf Road walkover, Smokey, Ryan and I going over the events of the previous evening, trying to get a grasp on what precisely happened. Already memories of the event were diverging, far quicker than I could have imagined. No one seemed to remember the fire but me.
Russ had his own cynical spin on things.
“Man, you two were stoned and you got freaked out because you were actually about to get some off her, and you didn’t know how to deal with it,” Russ said. “Then you probably came in your shorts, you knocked something over, you got scared then ran out like a little baby.”
“Alright, Smoke. Then why don’t you explain what it is that you saw and took pictures of in that glass jar last night?” I shot back.
“How do I know that you and Ryan didn’t set that whole thing up, man? How do I know that thing inside that jar….” but then he stopped.
“What, Smoke? Keep going. You were going to say that that thing inside that jar was a rubber toy or something we bought at the Ben Franklin, then we, what, planned it out as a prank with old man Lansing?”
Russ just sat for a moment shaking his head. Nope, that didn’t work either.
“Yeah, he was in on the joke the whole time,” I said. “We sat around with a perfect stranger, and your dad, Russ, and said ‘wouldn’t it be neat if we drove Russ down here with a dead turtle in the back of his old man’s pick up truck, just to show him a plastic toy in a jar?’ Is that about the size of it, Russ? Does that make any sense to you man?”
Ryan sat on the railing of the dune walkover picking his nails. He said nothing but his face said plenty. Eyes downcast with disdain, as if to say Yeah, Smoke, explain it to us so it makes sense because we’d love to hear your logical explanation, too.
“Well, whatever you guys have been up to, you’ve got Neiderman all worked up now. He’s digging around his house for guns, and you know that bunch, he’ll find them, man. Then, look out! Duck and cover time,” Smokey said.
“Good,” Ryan fired back. “It’s about time we did something about all this.”
“Hey, I’ve done enough. I took the film to the photo-mat. After that, I’m out.”
“Yeah, well, Tom’s brother is going to drive us down to the inlet today and we’re going to poke around, ask a few questions. See if we can’t find those North Carolina guys who saw the lights. You’re welcome to come too, Smoke, if you got the guts.
“But first, I wanted to show you guys some other stuff I found in my father’s stuff in the garage,” Ryan said.
“Hey, speak of the devil!” Smokey said as Tom approached.
“Don’t say that. I didn’t sleep a wink, guys,” I said.
“Why? Thinking about Trisha all night, were you?” Ryan jibed.
“Hey dudes. Did you hear? Old man Lansing is missing and half his house burned down,” Tom said.
“Jesus,” Smokey said. “This is like a nightmare or something.”
“I told you it happened,” I said. “I told you guys something caught fire.”
“What’s the word?” Ryan said.
“What?” asked Tom.
“What do they think happened?” Ryan clarified.
“They’re saying at the fire department, that they think he got that old-timer’s disease and set fire to something in his shed before wandering off.”
“What a bunch of bullshit,” Ryan said to this.
“Well we’ve got to tell somebody,” I said. “We have to tell people what we know.”
“Yeah, Tim,” Ryan said. “That’s a great idea. You go right home and tell your old man what happened. I’ll see you in about a year after they let you out of the nut house….tell somebody. Jesus.”
“So what’s the plan, then, genius?” I asked Ryan.
“I tell you what we need to do. We need to gather intel on these creatures, we need to go back out there and get some proof, just like we talked about,” he said.
“Intel? What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s what the Air Force people call intelligence, you know, facts on the enemy. Information,” he said.
“Wait how do we know these things are enemies?” Russ asked.
We just looked at him. Ryan took him to the woodshed, verbally…again. Smokey could be so thick sometimes.
“Okay, let me clue you in, Smoke. They burned down old man Lansing’s house; they’re raping turtles, making little monsters with their eggs and whatever. One of the little bastards crawled up Timmy’s arm and hit him with some sort of knock-out ray after it crawled inside his head with its mind-control shit and scrambled his brains. Timmy still doesn’t look right. Look at him! He’s all green around the gills and grey around the eyes!
“If all that wasn’t bad enough, they’re buzzing all around our breaks, scaring the shit out of surfers. I mean, let’s keep score, Smoke, get in the game for Christ sakes. Does that sound friendly to you?”
“Okay, okay,” Russ said.
“Knock-out ray?” I asked.
“You don’t remember passing out, do you?” Ryan said.
“No…”
“You started babbling, man, like in some insane foreign language or something then you passed out. We practically had to carry to your door,” Ryan said.
“Probably the weed that did it,” Tom said.
“Yeah, well, that’s it for me with the weed,” I said. “No more.”
“Hey why not quit surfing too, Tim?” Ryan said.
“No, man. Think about it. None of us can clearly remember what happened last night, why? Because of the weed. Two: if anyone were to ask us to give proof or like, speak at a trial, or in front of congress about these things, everyone would say, just like you did Tom, that we were all a bunch of stoners who had no clue what we were talking about,” I said.
“Whatever man, I’m not giving up weed just now for anyone or any thing,” Russ said.
“Good for you, Smokey. Timmy, listen to Smokey on this one. You’re missing the point, these things are trying to make slaves of us, man. They’re trying to control us. I say smoke dope, and then smoke more of it. Prevent them from doing their mind-control bullshit on us,” Ryan said.
“How do we know dope doesn’t make it easier for them to do that on us, Rye?” I asked.
“Now who’s talking crazy? You make it seem like they’re growing the shit on a farm somewhere just to keep us stupid,” Ryan said.
“How do we know they’re not?” I asked.
“I don’t know about you guys,” Tom said. “But I would like to get laid sometime before I die, and that means smoking pot, and having it around so, you know where I stand.”
“Yeah, I know where you stand, Talk,” I said now, really pissed at him for some reason of which I had only the shadiest recollection.
Ryan laughed.
“What do you mean about the mind-control stuff, Rye?” I asked him.
“Gentlemen, come along with me, to the abode of Cogswell and I shall answer all your questions, forthwith.”
“Get a load of Einstein here,” I said.