The Sighting Read online

  He took several more shots, he had dozens at this point, but each one seemed worse and less convincing than the last, until finally the thing disappeared entirely beneath the surface. The last photo caught the top of its head; to an objective observer, the picture could have been anything from a stone to the head of a porpoise.

  Danny put his hand to his forehead and stared at the ground, his eyes wide with disbelief. He tossed the phone into his backpack and then stood staring out at the ocean for another ten minutes, waiting and hoping for it to return. But he knew what he had seen was probably a once in a lifetime event. He suddenly had the thought that he’d forever be one of those Bigfoot spotters or UFO abductees that popped up from obscurity to tell their tales on basic cable conspiracy shows. Nobody ever really believed those people, of course, but by the end of those shows, Danny always left a little room for acceptance. Nothing was impossible, even urban legend stories, especially if they were rooted in scientific achievability.

  And now he had a story of his own. His life would be different going forward. No matter how long he lived, nothing would ever be the same after today. I’ll be part of the crazy, conspiracy crowd, he thought, one of the loons that normal people humor in the moment and then laugh about once that person has finally shuffled off, wide-eyed and irritated, mumbling something about the government.

  But Danny could be different. Danny had pictures. Not great ones—he’d comb through them thoroughly once at home—but pictures nevertheless.

  He stuffed his feet into his shoes and tied them tightly before descending the stairs that led to the beach access boardwalk. He left his towel on the sand and his clothes on the bench, and then nearly sprinted the 3.7 miles back to his house.

  Chapter 2

  “Tammy!” Danny began calling his wife’s name before he even opened the door. “Tammy!”

  He detected movement through the hallway, past the kitchen, outside on the back deck. He ran to the door and opened it with ferocity, causing Tammy to scream and nearly drop the bougainvillea she was in the process of hanging.

  “Jesus, Danny! What’s wrong with you?”

  Danny leaned over, hands on his knees, catching his breath for the first time in twenty minutes. The sweat dripping from his head onto the wooden beams of the deck came in sheets.

  “You need to take it easy on these runs, honey. You look like you’re in the midst of a stroke.”

  Danny held up a hand, and pressed it out toward his wife, a motion telling her both to give him a moment to find oxygen, and not to leave his sight.

  “What’s wrong? You’re scaring me. Did something happen? Why are you still wearing your bathing suit?”

  Danny stood tall and took one more huge breath, glancing at his swimming trunks with vague curiosity. “Oh my god, Tammy,” he said breathlessly. “Oh my god.”

  “Danny! What is wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong. I’m fine. But I have to tell you something. Show you something.”

  “Good lord! What? Are there aliens on the roof or something?”

  Danny opened his eyes wide and cocked his head, indicating that Tammy wasn’t as far off as the wildness of her remark implied.

  Tammy furrowed her brow and smiled, giving a nervous giggle at the end.

  Danny stood tall and put his hand on Tammy’s back, ushering her inside to a seat at the breakfast nook table. “Don’t move.”

  Danny ran to the foyer and got his backpack, fishing the phone from the front pocket and opening his photo gallery. For the first time since he made his mad dash from the beach, he looked at the pictures he’d taken and was immediately disappointed at the first of the images that appeared. He knew at the time they weren’t great, and that he’d bungled the opportunity to get more of the ocean creature’s full body, but he was hoping for something a bit better than these first two revealed. He was suddenly dismayed.

  He swiped to the left, bringing up the next picture, which was grainier and worse than the first two. The fourth picture was the best of the four, and the remaining two dozen or so, those that showed only the submerging top of the creatures head, could have been anything: a hat floating on the surface, a dark basketball, even the head of a normal man wearing a swimming cap.

  Danny walked back to the kitchenette and his awaiting wife, swiping and assessing the pictures over and over again en route. He shook his head the whole way, tears of disbelief forming in his eyes.

  “Did you see Elvis?”

  Danny looked up at Tammy, bringing himself back to the moment, suddenly noticing, as if for the first time, how stunningly beautiful his wife was. Danny smiled and calmed his emotions, and then stared down at his phone, swiping to the fourth picture in the series. This was by far the best one, but it was still a completely inadequate depiction of what he’d witnessed less than an hour earlier. “Look at this.”

  Tammy took the phone and stared down at it, and then held it up to eye level, squinting as she did. “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know—not exactly—but what I’m going to tell you is absolutely what I saw.” Danny stared at his wife, waiting for confirmation that she would believe what he was about to tell her.

  “Okay.” Tammy flashed an intrigued grin.

  About halfway through the recounting of events, Danny could tell that his wife, in fact, did not fully believe him. There was a frown at one point. A scrunching of confusion at another, as if the facts weren’t lining up. But he soldiered on, getting every bit of detail out, trying to be as precise as possible.

  “And you’re sure it wasn’t just a man?” Tammy finally asked after the yarn was fully spun. “It was still a little dark right? That time of the morning? And you said your eyes were blurry from the water.”

  “No. I...My eyes were blurry from the water when I first got out and saw the woman standing there. Not at this point. And does this look like a man?”

  The phone was flat on the table now, and Tammy looked at the photo again, leaning in close, hands folded in front of her mouth, the posture of someone prepared to reassess with fresh, objective eyes.

  “No, it doesn’t. In all fairness it doesn’t. But pictures play tricks, Danny.”

  Danny groaned. “I saw it! You’re looking at the picture, but I saw it! That’s what makes this the real thing. And I didn’t see just the head. I saw the whole thing...its body! It was standing on the beach for Christ’s sake!”

  “Okay, I know, I’m sorry.” Tammy paused. “But eyes play tricks too, Danny.”

  Danny scoffed and shook his head, a thick look of disappointment blanketing his face. “Fine,” he said, and then stayed quiet, pouting now at his wife’s resistance.

  “Danny, I believe everything you’ve just told me. But you also want me to believe that what you saw, whatever is in this picture, is...what? A sea monster?”

  Danny tried to keep his tone of voice relaxed. He knew the louder and more animated he got, the more it detracted from his credibility. It shouldn’t be that way with my wife, he thought, but there it was. “I don’t know. But I saw something. Something that doesn’t line up with what I know about the rest of the world. And unless you can come up with something more than a generic explanation for what I saw...” Danny didn’t finish the sentence, but instead frowned and flicked his hands into the air shoulder-high, indicating to Tammy there was nothing left to say.

  Tammy took the cue and stayed quiet for a few beats, and then asked, “This woman that was there. Do you think she saw it?”

  The woman. How had Danny not asked himself this question? Until now, he had thought of this morning as two separate events: the woman on the dunes, and the creature from the ocean. But Tammy was right. Maybe she had seen it. Maybe it had been there earlier and she was looking for it. That would have explained the look of concern or whatever it was. Danny had never seen the woman before, and wouldn’t know how to go about finding her exactly, but she was no day-tripper, about that he was pretty certain. She was a local. Maybe she would be at
the beach again later today. And even if she wasn’t, there were only so many houses around that part of the strip, if he had to, he could knock on doors, canvass the area until he found her.

  “She may have. That’s interesting, I hadn’t really thought about that, but she may have. I need to go back down there today anyway. I left my towel and clothes. Maybe she’ll be there again.”

  “Or maybe...you’ll see it again.”

  Danny shook his head. “If I see it, so will a hundred other people.” Danny knew the beach would have started filling up by this hour, and in a couple more it would be packed.

  “Well, good luck finding your stuff. Do you want me to come?”

  Danny didn’t. His marriage was one of the parts of his life that was fine, he guessed, but maybe wasn’t working out perfectly. At least not in his mind. He wasn’t sure whether Tammy felt the same, at least not in a conscious way that she would have admitted to. “No, it’s fine. I’m just gonna drive, so I should be back in a few minutes.”

  “Okay, honey. Love you.”

  “Love you too,” he said, and then slammed the door.

  THE BEACH HAD INDEED filled up considerably by the time Danny arrived, evidenced by the fact that there were no general parking spaces available. Instead, he parked in one of the four handicap spaces that sat vacant, taunting him. It was an unDanny-like thing to do, but he felt different now, like mundane things such as parking laws were no longer applicable in his life.

  He reached the top of the landing and saw that his clothes had disappeared from their spot on the bench, and didn’t appear to have been scattered about anywhere else on the overlook. Less than ninety minutes since he’d left, and a pair of old shorts and a vintage Oasis tee shirt were now gone, likely stolen by some poorly-raised degenerate. Two minutes later, Danny was down on the beach discovering his towel too was nowhere to be found. That all of his belongings had vanished was certainly unusual; this wasn’t the kind of place where petty crimes like linen burglary happened very often. He’d left all sorts of things at the beach before and almost always found them exactly where he’d left them. This clearly wasn’t his day.

  “Great,” he murmured to himself, staring at the sand as he began to circle a blanket where a young couple had decided to set up camp for the day. They were early twenties, and Danny made the snap criticism that at least one of them should probably be on the way to work at this time of day, if not already there. At the very least they should be at school. It was a Thursday morning, a workday, the time for people under sixty-five to be productive; never mind that Danny, himself was also strolling the beach at this hour, and based on his own logic, at thirty-eight years old, should be at work too.

  “Did you lose something, buddy?”

  The man component of the lounging couple pulled his sunglasses to the end of his nose and squinted up at Danny, a wry smile on his lips indicating he’d had about enough of the middle-aged guy buzzing around his girlfriend, who, herself, lay unaffected by Danny, ostensibly asleep under a pair of Wayfarers.

  “I did, as a matter of fact,” Danny replied. “I was down here earlier today, just before dawn.” This last bit of superfluous information sounded to Danny like some type of jab of superiority, though he wasn’t sure he meant it that way. “I’m pretty sure I dropped my towel somewhere around here. You haven’t seen it have you?”

  The kid scoffed. “Nah, bro. Sorry.” The kid repositioned his sunglasses to their rightful place and reclined back, once again completing the perfect pair of bodies next to his girl on the blanket.

  “How about a sea monster? You seen one of those?” Danny had moved his attention from the couple now, and was lost again in the memory of his morning as he looked out toward the place in the ocean where the black creature had emerged less than two hours ago.

  The kid laughed. “Nope. No monsters either.”

  “You sound like my aunt,” the girl said, not moving a muscle other than those needed to speak.

  Danny felt the sting of a chill on the back of his neck, and a small lump began forming at the bottom of his throat. He stepped around to the girl’s side of the blanket. “Your aunt talks about sea monsters?”

  “It was a joke, buddy,” the guy said. “Come on, that’s enough now. We don’t have your towel. Leave us alone. Please.”

  On any other day it was a joke, Danny thought. But not today. “What did you mean by that?” Danny ignored the guy’s command and moved closer to the girl, now squatting beside her.

  “Hey!” The guy stood up and removed his glasses fully, tossing them to the blanket. He began shaking his hands and shoulders, loosening up, preparing for some type of barefoot beach combat.

  Danny stood tall again and faced the guy, hands open and facing out, showing his lack of malice while simultaneously preparing his defense.

  “Chill, Mark,” the girl said finally, seeming to time her words just at the moment of the tension’s crest. She sat up and pushed her Wayfarers to the top of her head. “It was meant as a kind of a joke, the thing about my aunt, but she is into that type of thing.”

  “‘That type of thing,’ like weird things? Or specifically what I said? About a sea monster?”

  “Dude, what the hell are you talking about?” Mark asked, chuckling with sarcasm. He was now standing stiff, chest out, moving in on Danny, ready to throw down at a moment’s notice.

  “Mark! Enough!” The girl was done with Mark’s macho routine, and shot him a look that made her words redundant, letting it linger on her boyfriend until he dropped his eyes to the sand and shook his head in a movement of both defeat and disgust.

  “I don’t know. She used to tell us stories when we were kids. Crazy stuff about creatures in the ocean, aliens in the sky, stuff like that. They were ghost stories, I know, but she always told them like they were real. Scared the shit out of me and my brothers. And the one about the sea monster—‘The Ocean God’ she called it—she told that one a lot. Always serious about it too. Never softening the details for the sake of sparing us kids. It was kind of bitchy, actually, now that I think about it.”

  “She lives here? Your aunt? This side of the barrier island?”

  “Yep. We’re staying at her place now. Mark and I just got here this morning. Her house is just over there.” The girl pointed to her right, past the dunes where the woman Danny had seen that morning had been standing.

  “Is she there now?”

  The girl shook her head. “She said she’d be gone when we arrived. Which she was. I don’t know if she left this morning or last night. In any case, she wasn’t here when we got here.” She snickered. “I love her and all, but I don’t think I’d last more than a day at her place while she was there. She’s crazier than monkey shit.”

  “She’s got a fat place though!” Mark chimed in, holding a fist out for the girl to bump, which she did gleefully, her tongue out as she laughed at their luck for having a crazy, possibly wealthy aunt to take advantage of.

  Danny stared blankly at the two, waiting for the joke to pass so he could get back to the conversation. The girl noted Danny’s frown and her laughed trailed off. “What’s your interest in my aunt anyway?”

  Danny shook off the question, as if it wasn’t the girl’s right to ask it. “What does she look like?” Danny was pushing it now, but this was likely to be his only chance to speak with the girl, and he didn’t want to leave clues on the table.

  The girl grinned. “She’s actually kind of hot. But isn’t that a wedding ring I see on your finger?”

  Danny looked at his wedding band, confused, and shook his head quickly, again dismissing the question. “Is she about my age, maybe a little older? Brown, shoulder-length hair?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” the girl replied, and now the irritation that Mark had felt earlier seemed to be seeping into his girlfriend. “But that describes, like, every woman I see over thirty.”

  Danny stayed silent for a few beats, processing all of the information he’d just received. There was no re
al evidence so far that the woman he’d seen that morning was this girl’s aunt, and far less evidence that she knew anything about what he’d seen walk out of the ocean. But it wasn’t impossible.

  “Okay, thanks. I mean it. I’ll leave you guys alone now.” Danny nodded and turned away, but looked back suddenly, inquisitively. “One last thing: you wouldn’t mind telling me your aunt’s name, would you? Just in case I have some questions for her?” Danny flashed a coquettish smile, indicating to the girl that he may indeed have a romantic interest in her aunt after all.

  “Questions?” Mark asked, “Who the hell are you? A detective? Can I see your badge, Detective Douchebag?”

  Danny had ‘Sorry, forget it’ on the tip of his tongue when the girl, whom he now realized was also not attached to any name, decided to answer.

  “Sure, why not? Her name is Lynn. Lynn Shields. Like I said, her house is right on the beach. Fifth house to the left after you leave the access.”

  “What the hell?” Mark asked, once again heating up. “Why don’t you just give him a key to the house?”

  “Oh relax. He seems cool. Maybe he can bring a little naughty excitement to Lynn. Lord knows she needs it.” The girl winked at Danny, indicating that if those were Danny’s intentions, his secret would be safe with her. “I don’t think she’s even gone on a date since Lyle died.” The memory of whoever Lyle was seemed to immediately sober the girl. “Anyway, she’s supposed to be back Sunday night, but I wouldn’t chisel that into any stone tablet if I was you. She can be a little...erratic, I guess you’d say.”

  “Thank you, uh...” Danny left the gap purposely, hoping the girl would fill it with her name.

  “Tracy. Tracy Amato”

  “Trace!” Mark scolded.

  “Oh, who cares?” Tracy dropped her glasses into place and lay back down, unconcerned.

  “All right, happy?” Mark asked. “Now leave us the fuck alone. And I hope your fucking towel is half way to Portugal by now.”