A little background material to The Big Mosquito.
A Jason Midnight and His Cousin Caroline short mystery
from Slow Left Turn At Midnight.
Copyright 2006 by John H. Baillie
The Lost Lagoon of Dr. Hota
Part Two
We thrash around in the bush for half an hour or so, but it’s hopeless. It’s blacker than a B-movie villain’s heart out here. So we go back to the cabins finally, and try to regroup.
“I rather regret to admit this, given the circumstances, but I suspect I may have an explanation for our so-called ‘monster’,” Prufrock confesses.
“It’s a man in a rubber suit, isn’t it?” Henry Henry asks, confused again.
“No, Henry. That other item I mentioned to you.”
“Oh. Ohhh-hh …" Henry gets it. But we don’t. Yet.
“Spill, Doc,” I say.
“Yeah,” Gary says with a huge grin. “What’s up, Doc?” He laughs like hell. “Get it? Get it?” Rodan and Mothra scream. Kent whaps Gary across the back of the head.
“Get serious! That weirdo carried off one of my customers.”
“Ow! No, he didn’t! Annabeth owns her own place!”
“That’s right! I’m not liable!” Wesley is overjoyed. Caroline whaps him across the back of the head. “What was that for!”
“Annabeth’s our friend! We still have to find and rescue her.”
“All right, all right. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help ... geez.”
“Doctor?” I try to bring us back to the point here.
Prufrock finishes re-lighting his pipe, then starts on his story. “A colleague of mine runs a lunatic asylum not very far from here. He recently contacted me to let me know that one of the male inmates had escaped.”
Wesley is flabbergasted. “And you didn’t think to mention this till now!”
Prufrock is unflappable. “Up until now, we’ve been operating under the assumption that we’ve been dealing with some strange, aquatic hybrid monster, not a mad human being. There was no reason to make the connection.”
“Maybe not in your mind. But —”
“Uh, excuse me?” Patrick politely interrupts.
“What!” Wesley is not so gracious.
“That escaped madman? Uh ... that would be me, then.”
“Oh, good,” Prufrock declares. “Clears that up …"
“You’re an escaped madman?” Caroline asks Patrick cautiously, as Wesley is too stunned to speak. I knew there was something about this guy I liked.
“I prefer the term ‘lunatic’,” Patrick replies genially. “I like to check meself into an institution whenever there’s a full moon. Just to be sure. It’s in the blood, y’know? Normally, I’m pretty good about checking meself out again as well, but it must have slipped my mind this time. I just dodged out the window, when I had the chance. Sorry to cause any alarm,” he apologizes to Dr. Prufrock.
Prufrock waves him off. “Nonsense. No harm done.”
Wesley looks like he’s ready to erupt again, but Gary cuts him off with a surprisingly pertinent remark. “So if this guy is the escaped madman ... then who was the guy in the rubber suit who carried off Annabeth?”
“Good question,” I agree. “And what are we going to do about it?”
“Not to worry.” Patrick gives us a particularly charming smile. “I’ve got us a plan.”
***
By midmorning the next day, I realize what we’re up to is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever been involved with, and that’s saying a lot. Patrick, Kent and I are out God knows where someplace in the bush, with Humphrey the giant toad on his leash trying to track down Annabeth and the Monster-guy, Trent. “I’m starting to think this is a really bad idea,” I declare.
And it’s getting hotter, and stickier, and stupid Wesley walking in front of me keeps letting go of branches so they whap me in the face.
“Now, now, Jason,” Patrick reprimands me, in the lead with Humphrey. “That’s what everyone else said. Have some faith.” Patrick’s proudly wearing a huge floppy straw sombrero that belongs to Annabeth, decorated with big blue fake flowers. Brought it along so Humphrey could follow the scent, so he claims.
“You know, all this reminds me of my three all-time favourite movies,” Wesley announces out of the blue, like we care. “The utter surreality of it all.”
“Surrealism,” I correct.
“That too. Maybe this is good for me. I have to build on this, become a better person for it. Use it in my work. My calling.” Whap! Another tree branch in the face.
“There are easier ways to self-improvement,” I mutter darkly.
“One day, I can make a movie out of this. A tour de force possibly even to rival The Creature From the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space, and The Thing From Another World. The original, of course. The black and white one.”
“I thought they were all black and white to you. And I also note, none of those movies were directed by Roger Corman,” I point out, gasping. I can’t take this heat! Did we think to pack water? No-o-o. Real toad-stalkers don’t pack water.
I reluctantly gave up my trenchcoat for a short sleeved shirt and no tie, but this is still too much. Those nudists have got the right idea.
“Oho! I think Humphrey’s onto something,” Patrick asserts.
“That’s the seventeenth time you’ve said that,” I remind him. And I have been keeping count.
This is ridiculous. We’re miles from civilization, getting farther away every step. Gallows Falls is north of the Whiteshell Provincial Park, on the eastern border of Manitoba abutting Ontario. Another reason it draws such lousy resort business, all the action is south and east of here, along Highways Number One and Two. There’s probably one park ranger for the surrounding three hundred miles. By the time they muster a search party to find us and the stupid toad, we’ll starve to death. If the toad doesn’t eat us first. And then the search party will get lost, and there’ll be nobody left in Gallows Falls to go out looking for them, and that’ll be the end of the entire settlement —
“Aye up! Humph’s on the trail now! He’s after something!” Patrick shouts. And sure enough, the damn amphibian’s making some kind of grunting noise and showing more animation than I’ve seen him demonstrate yet — most of the time I feel like we’re just following a damn ugly lawn ornament.
“Patrick, you idiot!” I yell after him as he disappears, crashing through the undergrowth. “Be careful! We don’t know the terrain around here, we can’t go running off blindly, we might — AARRGHH!”
Oh, lay off with the frigging cosmic irony, whoever’s in charge here! Sure, I’m the one giving the warning, so I’m the one who falls off the fifteen foot high rock outcropping. I crumple into a heap of brambles at the bottom — particularly scratchy brambles. “Hey! Help! Assistance, please, some assistance down here, please! ... At least send down the friggin’ rescue toad with a keg of draft, willya!” Oh brother. Got myself into this, I guess I’ll just have to get myself out.
I painfully detach myself from bramble after bramble after bramble, noting how many burrs I’m picking up in the process, then start clambering up the rocks back to where I was. God, this is puffing me out! Don’t mess with Nature in Canada, Nature always wins, it’s part of our national consciousness for Christ’s sake. I’m not built for this, I’m from the city, dammit.
I haul one arm and then my head up and over the top and pause, completely out of breath. Whoa! What’s happening here?
Patrick and Humphrey are nowhere to be seen, but Kent is standing five feet away with a wild, exotic female, dressed in some kind of skimpy jungle two piece, leaning up against his chest on both arms and staring appealingly up into his terror-filled eyes, her mouth sensuously open. She has a mane of wild black hair, and strange, almond shaped eyes. I bet she’d look really hot even in black and white. Oh wait a sec. This must be the Pillsbury Doe Girl.
“You not like Hota,” she says in this husky, sex-filled voice. Caroline did mention something about her awkward speech pattern. “Hota not let Vixeena be as she likes. Hota makes Vixeena wear these.” She tugs at her halter top. Wesley lets out a little squeak. “Vixeena needs to be free, but Hota not allow. You — you can stop Hota. You are strong.” She runs her fingers up and down his chest. Wesley shivers as if it’s forty below, not forty above. “You — come with Vixeena! Stop Hota! Then Vixeena can be free, like the others, but not head-washed like them too. Not zombies. Naked, but dead in head.”
Sounds like one of my many bad dates. What’s she referring to? Now we’ve got naked zombies to cope with too?
“You — come now. Come with Vixeena. Stop Hota! Stop Hota forever. Then — Vixeena can be naked too. And — perhaps you can be naked with Vixeena!”
I’ve heard enough. “Ahem!”
Wesley screams, which surprises me so much, I lose my grip and go tumbling back down into the brambles — double frigging AARGHH. By the time I can haul myself up again, twice as exhausted, scratched and dented, Vixeena is gone, and Patrick and Humphrey are back. Wesley sits on a log, hyperventilating and saying “Omigod! Omigod! Omigod!” over and over again.
“Jason, lad! I thought you’d had an accident. Where’ve you been? What’s wrong with Kent?”
“Give me a hand,” I gasp. I’d hate to experience what Patrick considers to be a genuine accident. Patrick ties Humphrey to a tree and rushes over. He helps me up. “Now,” I pant, “give me that fallen branch there — the thick one.” Patrick gets me the branch. I prop myself up with it, until I get enough breath back. Then I break the branch over Kent’s head. That gets his attention. He jumps off the log. I push him backwards over the edge of the outcropping I just clambered up, down into the brambles. Kent yells blue murder. “That’ll wake him up,” I tell Patrick. “Now — that’s enough, I think. No more toad stalking. How do we get out of here?”
“Depends. Where are we?”
***
Hours later, the three of us crawl gasping, scratched and torn out of the bushes. Everyone rushes to help. Rodan and Mothra scream.
“My God, guys!” Henry Henry is appalled. “What happened? Did you have to fight the Monster? I mean, Trent? Where’s Annabeth? What happened!”
I lean against a tree. “No, we didn’t fight the stupid monster, we got lost! We did fight each other a few times though, trying to decide which direction to go.”
“Thankfully, the sun finally started to set, so we all agreed that must be west. Which was very helpful. Until we realized none of us knew which compass point the cabins were in.” Patrick said.
“Smart ass,” Kent grumbles, lying flat on his back in the grass. Summer is dangerous, in this climate.
“We fluked it off eventually, by process of elimination.”
“But did you save Annabeth?” Mothra wants to know. “Did Uncle Humph — I mean, the toad, lead you straight to her, like you thought he would?”
I shake my head. “Not a glimpse,” I admit wearily.
“That’s all right,” Prufrock mutters, around the pipe in his mouth he’s busy lighting again. “Here she comes now.” He nods towards the lake.
“What!”
“Hurray!”
Even Patrick, Kent and I manage to scramble up to run down to the water’s edge to greet her — to greet them, actually. It’s Annabeth and Gary in a canoe, with Annabeth doing all the paddling. She looks a little disheveled, but none the worse for wear, unlike the toad-stalking party. Gary, though, he looks like he’s seen a ghost or something. He sits ramrod straight in the front of the canoe, totally frozen, gibbering something inarticulate over and over, a glazed look in his eyes.
“My goodness. The boy appears to be in shock,” Prufrock remarks.
“How did Gary end up with Annabeth?” I want to know. “And when did a canoe enter the picture?”
“Gary went out in it shortly after you three left on that ridiculous hunt of yours,” Caroline tells me. “He decided he was going to search some of the streams and inlets into the forest that he knew. He must have found Annabeth.”
The prow of the canoe grinds onto the sand. Moose and Lucky haul it up. Henry tries to get Gary out, while Rodan and Mothra rush to help Annabeth.
“I’m okay! I’m okay! You can leave me alone!” Annabeth protests. But she doesn’t object when Patrick takes her hand and leads her carefully onto the beach. “God, what a night. What a day!” She looks totally exasperated.
“What happened?” Caroline wants to know. “What’s wrong with Gary?”
“Ohh, brother …" Annabeth can’t face us. She has to look away for a moment. When she turns back, she’s bright pink, and it isn’t from sunburn. “This is all so embarrassing. Last night, when that guy — Trent? Carried me off? He made it about fifty yards into the bush before his adrenalin ran out and he collapsed beneath me. I jumped up, and tried to find my way back here, but I got turned around in the dark and I ended up getting lost in the forest. Finally I just gave up. I sat down beside this stream and cried, and then I must have fallen asleep. I slept and I slept. The next thing I knew, there was Gary coming up the stream in a canoe, yelling at me. Great! I thought. Rescue! But then we got lost again, this time on the water. Everything connects to everything else around here on the Shield you know, and we ended up going deeper and deeper into the forest …"
She pauses for breath. Gary is sitting on a stump now, staring into space, his eyes bulging wide open, going “Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh” over and over. Dr. Prufrock checks his pulse, with a critical eye.
“And then,” Annabeth continues, “we found it.” She stops. We wait. Nothing. Caroline snaps.
“Found what!”
Annabeth looks around at us, her gaze intense. “The Lost Lagoon ... of Dr. Hota. It does exist. And …"
“And what?”
“Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-”
Annabeth blushes bright red. “They are nudists. It was too much for Gary. There they all were, standing motionless on the shore, staring at us silently, like zombies. Every one of them stark naked. Girls, and …" Her eyes drop again. If possible, she blushes even more deeply. “Boys,” she finishes, her voice cracking.
Rodan and Mothra scream.
“Will you quit that!” Annabeth snaps, embarrassed. “It’s really annoying. It was just too freaky. Gary went all horny and whacked out like this, so I had to paddle us away. I found my way back in about forty minutes. Somebody get a pail of cold water and dump it over him.”
***
Annabeth doesn’t think she can find her way back to the lagoon. It’s an absolute maze of streams and bogs and marshy acres out in that bush.
“That’s bad,” I say.
“How come? Do we really want to find them again?” Kent demands.
“I’m not certain. But they saw Annabeth and Gary, seeing them. And they don’t know Annabeth can’t find her way back. It they’re really intent on secrecy, they might want to find us again.”
Patrick, Kent, Annabeth and I have a quick dip in the lake to cool off, then something to eat. The bucket of water over Gary’s head did the trick for him. He’s still yelling and over-excited, but that’s practically normal behaviour. Nobody can settle in after the excitement, but we do get the toad back in his usual glassed-in enclosure at least. Prufrock, Kent, Gary, Annabeth and I somehow end up together just after dark in the common grassy yard behind the cabins Wesley rents, just up from the beach and where we fought Trent last night.
“Do you really think those weirdos will come after Gary and Annabeth?” Kent demands. The cool swim didn’t calm the guy down at all.
I take a seat on the flat top part of a wooden picnic table and light a cigarette. “I don’t know for sure. I suspect you could tell me more about that than I can tell you, Kent. How many times have you met with Vixeena?” We didn’t really talk about Kent’s “brief encounter” while we were lost in the woods, because we were all too mad at each other already.
“I’ve never seen that woman before in my life! ... Not more than once or twice.”
“How many times?”
“Okay, six times altogether, but this is only the third time she talked to me.”
“When was the first time she talked to you? Just before the Monster appeared?”
“Yes! How did you know that?” Kent is amazed.
“It makes sense in a bad horror movie sort of way. You talk to Vixeena, wild girl daughter of Dr. Hota. Vixeena obviously has plans for you, to help her against Hota somehow. A Monster appears, and starts trying to carry off your guests. Someone’s trying to warn you off, Wesley.”
“Ah! But Annabeth isn’t one of my guests!” Kent declares in triumph.
I shrug. “Half the time you can’t remember that. How’s the poor Monster supposed to know the difference? She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Okay! I admit it all! Vixeena is in love with me! Today isn’t the first time I’ve got lost in the forest. I do it practically weekly, actually, I’ve got no sense of direction —”
“I noticed.”
“She told me her father won’t let her be free, that he imposes all kinds of unnatural restrictions on her! Like making her wear clothes.”
“The beast.”
“Vixeena wants the freedom the other members of Hota’s weird colony enjoy, except she says they’re not really free. She says Hota controls their minds somehow, so they can’t feel or think for themselves!”
“Zombie nudists. It does get better and better.”
“I don’t want anything to do with her! She scares the hell out of me! And she wants me to kill Hota or something — she keeps on telling me I could take Hota’s place and run the colony myself!”
“She obviously isn’t familiar with your vacation resort management skills.”
“I just want her to stay away from me!”
“Extraordinary,” Prufrock remarks. “But how does this explain the Monster? Trent, from the Lost Lagoon.”
“Obviously a lagoon inhabitant who’s jealous of Vixeena’s attentions towards Kent,” I surmise.
“But why the masquerade as a Monster? Assuming it was a masquerade.”
“Are you kidding? Mad Doctor? Lost Lagoon? Exotic Wild Girl? Zombie Nudists? Why not a Monster?” I protest.
“Hey!” Gary interrupts, grabbing Kent’s arm. “This sounds like one of those movies you’re always going on about. You know. The Creature From Outer Space, The Thing From the Lost Lagoon, It Came From Another World, those ones.”
“No, no, no!” Kent yells. “You always get them wrong! Have some respect for the metier I’ve devoted my life and all my aspirations toward! The Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Thing From Another World, and It Came From Outer Space!”
“So the thing is, it’s not from the Lost Lagoon?”
“Thing From Another World, It’s from Outer Space, and the Creature’s from the Black Lagoon!”
“It’s from the Black Lagoon?”
“The Creature is from the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space!”
“So what’s From Another World?”
“The Thing! The Thing!”
“But the thing is, it’s the Black Lagoon, and the Creature’s from where again?”
“The Thing is From — ANOTHER WORLD! The Creature’s from the Black Lagoon! And It Came From Outer Space!”
Kent’s shrieking now. He looks like he’s about to burst a blood vessel or two in his brain. Rodan walks onto the scene just at that moment. Bad timing.
“What’s from another world? The Creature? I thought his name was Trent, and he came from the Lost Lagoon.”
“NOT WHAT!” Kent’s lost it. “THE THING! THE THING IS FROM ANOTHER WORLD!”
“What thing?”
“I think he means It,” Gary says to her.
“What?”
“No, not what, It. That’s the thing.”
Kent screams, grabs Gary around the throat and chokes him with both hands. “I don’t care if the Zombies are trying to kill you! I’m going to kill you myself!”
Rodan screams. I jump off the picnic table and try to haul Wesley off Gary. I’m dimly aware of a familiar “RRRRRAGHHH!” behind me, and a shriek from Annabeth I barely hear over Rodan screaming in my ear. I finally pry Kent loose and throw him sprawling onto the grass. Gary falls into Rodan’s arms, gasping and clutching his neck.
“Geez, what a grouch!” he rasps.
I look around. No Annabeth. “What happened!” I demand from Prufrock, who has continued to stand there calmly smoking his pipe throughout all this.
“It was the most amazing thing. Trent, wearing only his swim trunks, came stalking out of the undergrowth as soon as he saw we were distracted. He still acted precisely like the Monster, even though he wasn’t wearing the rubber suit. He has obviously been completely engulfed in his Bestial Persona. Fascinating. He used this opportunity to abduct Annabeth once more. You know, I really think we must acknowledge that he has a far keener intelligence than we’ve given him credit for to date.”
I’m aghast. “And you just stood there watching?”
“It was an admirable opportunity to make accurate observations of the Beast in action. I owe it to Science not to interfere.”
I barely restrain from interfering with Prufrock’s nose with my right fist.
Everyone else charges in at that moment, having been drawn to the scene by Rodan’s racket. Kent gets back on his feet. Moose, Lucky, Mothra, Caroline, Patrick, Henry Henry Henry, everybody wants to know what’s going on.
So, naturally, now that we’re all together in one big group, the Zombies choose that moment to attack.
They come shambling up out of the lake itself, from the forest on either side of us, and from every direction but the cabins themselves. At first they’re silent, but then we hear it, an ominous chant starting quietly then growing louder, louder, louder.
“ho-ta ... ho-ta ... ho-ta ... Ho-ta ... Ho-ta ... HO-ta ... HO-ta ... HO-TA! HO-TA! HO-TA!”
They stare at us with empty, malevolent, vacant eyes. And every single one of them is buck naked.
We all scream.
Then they’re among us, trying to overcome us, trying to carry us off. We fight back desperately, but it looks like there’s too many of them.
“Flee! Flee for your lives!” Prufrock yells. Finally got his attention, I see.
“Fight!” I yell. “They’re naked! Aim for the obvious!”
“The obvious what?”
“Caroline, this is one time you should be able to figure it out for yourself!”
Good thing it’s really, really dark out here. These Zombies all seem to be of the well-buffed teenage variety — that might really be distracting in better light. I kick out, lash out, hit out, the Zombies go rolling off me. All right! “WOOOO!” Who’s the man? I do a little quick step, stylin’ and profilin’, and some smartass Zombie clobbers me over the back of the head with a tree branch. I have time to think “ouch,” before oblivion sets in yet again …
(to be continued …)
*****
Photography by Renee Beaubien, at Beyond the Prism
on Flickr, at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/128997372@N08/
*****
REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!
The Big Mosquito continues, with postings number 2 and 3 of 49, Monday August 10th and Friday, August 14th. As always, at:
http://realficone.blogspot.ca/
A dinner party, and a visit to the offices of Sturgeon’s Eyeblink Studios. Plus I told you Victor Coffin was going to be in it, didn’t I?
Featuring:
2. six is a good number
3. senseless diary
4. unfinished press release, from the desk of Victor Coffin
5. on the set
Sink Decomposition Series
by Fandango Moberly
#4 of 50
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