It was late. Silvery moonlight poured in through the window above his bed. There had been silence for ten agonising minutes now, and he was sure the time was right. His eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness (he couldn’t risk turning on the bedside lamp) and anyway, the moon was so strong. His parents must have gone to bed. They had shuffled around in the living room forever it seemed, going back and forth to the fridge, laughing at the television. He couldn’t understand how they could even make out what was on the screen, so bad was the signal. Eventually they must have gotten sick of adjusting the aerial. He heard them cross the wooden floor to their room and close the door. Still they chattered and laughed. They were never like this at home, but it was better. Both had been so stressed lately. The boy waited until he could hear nothing, then he slowly unravelled himself from the thin bed sheets, revealing that he was in fact, fully dressed- more than fully; he had a thick coat and a pair of wellington boots on. He pulled a monkey hat from one coat pocket, a torch from the other, and a camera from a breast pocket. His father’s camera. The very same one that they had spent an hour looking for that morning before they left. They boy had had it for weeks.
He stood now, by his low, sparse bed in the little room and considered the night outside his window. The moon loomed large amid a ring of clouds that glowed softly by its luminescence. A few stars dotted the midnight blue sky. Venus shone like a diamond. Or a spaceship. Yes, perhaps a spaceship come to observe the next bold adventure of the boy. He thought it entirely plausible. After two small steps he took off the boots. Too loud. He stuffed the camera into his pocket again and held the two in one hand as he crept, now virtually silent, to the bedroom door. The door creaked, but luckily so did his door at home, and he knew just how to handle it. As he pulled it open he lifted it on its hinges as much as he could. It still creaked, but the sound was less like the evil, unnerving sound it usually was. The boy had a very visual imagination, and associated images with everything. To him the creaking of his bedroom door had always conjured the image of an aged crone, her elbow joints creaking as she raised gnarled hands above him. He shuddered as he passed through the door, for a second seeing the hated image of the crone, standing outside in the moonlight waiting for him. His resolve faltered, but did not break. Forcing the image down as he did when he had to go downstairs at home for a glass of water, he made himself close the door again. He knew his parents would investigate if they got up for a midnight drink and saw his door ajar. With any luck he would be back well before they knew he was gone. Back with the proof. The proof that would see him hailed a hero, that would show his classmates that he wasn’t just some freak who liked to draw instead of play football at break time. Perhaps the papers would call him the next Indiana Jones. His father had taken him to see Raiders of the Lost Ark three years previous, and it had made a lasting impression. The boy wanted to be Indy, no doubt about that. More rugged and likeable than that smarmy James Bond who always came through everything unscathed, the boy liked the way Indy took a beating but always found a way to win. In fact he liked the way Indy didn’t always win. That took the pressure off a kid. In a world of He-man and Thundercats (who always won, and laughed heartily about it at the end of every show) Indy hadn’t gotten the Lost Ark after all. It was taken to be studied instead by ‘top men.’ He had heard someone remark during the final scene, “What’s the big deal, there are plenty of them?!” The boy had tutted rather loudly and his father had given him ‘the glare,’ for doing so.
All these thoughts whirled in his head as he crept through the living room. Mercifully there was no door between that room and the cramped hallway. Also the hallway had a rug. Before he reached the damp rug he slipped on his boots, being careful to set them on the rug and step into them. Pleased with his cleverness, his smile faded when he looked up at the final door. It was bolted. Bolts made noise. For a moment his heart sank like a brick, but then he realised he might as well make a try. He had gotten this far successfully. Steeling himself against the cold outside (or the run back to his room) he reached for the bolt. It was cool to the touch and horribly implacable at first. He wanted to move it slowly, but could hardly budge it unless he pulled with all his might. In one breathtaking moment it gave, making one sharp click that seemed to echo like a gunshot. The boy froze, large blue eyes shifting back and forth. The hall seemed to elongate as he stared back down its expanse, and the distance to his room suddenly morphed into an impossible vista. If his parents awoke now, he would be caught. He waited a whole minute before daring to move again. When he did he did so decisively, opening the door and stepping out all at once, then closing it over as gently as he could. He gasped when the cold hit his face, and realised too how heavily he had been breathing when he seen wisps’ rising rapidly into the chill air. He stood for a second and gathered himself. He was outside. Phase one complete. The crone forgotten for the moment, he stepped out, emboldened. This felt good. Independence felt good.
The journey would take five minutes. Maybe more in the fresh snow. Pulling his coat around his ears, he began to make his way down the short path. He climbed over the gate rather than opening it (having no desire to hear more creaking now that he was outside all alone) and without a backward glance he started away from the wooden chalet. The boy’s teeth chattered together as he walked. ‘Why come here in December?’ he thought bitterly. He already knew the answer of course- they were here to see family, most notably his estranged grandfather. They lived in the little village about a mile back, someplace the boy could not pronounce. Nevermind. He was here now, and his mission was on. Passing the last of the chalets and walking over a slight rise in the land, he looked down to see his destination sprawled out as far as he could see to east and west. The massive body of water that he had only seen before on maps as a long thin scar across the north of Scotland. Loch Ness shimmered. Mists swirled on above its surface, ethereal under the moonlight. To his young eyes it looked like something out of a dream. He scanned the vista for the small boat he had spied from the car earlier that day. He could not see it from where he was, but it would be easy to find; he could see the looming dark silhouette of Urquhart Castle, its towering keep rising out of the mist. The boy felt strangely stirred at the sight of the ancient building. He knew it was five hundred years old from history lessons, but he also knew that there was a burial cairn dating back to two thousand BC in nearby Corrimony. There was evidence of Iron Age and Pictish forts on the promontory aswell. People had been living around this Loch for a long time. Clearly the Castle was in an excellent position to survey the Great Glen. It had had a turbulent past, conquered again and again by many factions, especially the MacDonald’s and the Crown, who fought repeatedly over it. It dated back to the time of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, to a time of heroes and turmoil, conquest and rebellion against tyranny. The boy found it almost as interesting as the Loch. Almost. The truth was that the castle added to the allure of the Loch for most people, rather than distracting from it.
The boy also knew that in 1977 a man called Anthony Shields claimed to have seen the Loch Ness Monster from a place near to the castle. That was what he was really interested in. Passing the castle, he soon found the little boat he had seen nearby. It was tied at a rickety jetty. It had evidently been there for some time, and the boy struggled with the knot for some time before cutting the rope with his pen knife. This operation took ten minutes. The boy was slight and not very strong, at least not physically. Finally the rope fell away into the icy water and the boy climbed in carefully, moving slowly over the slippery jetty. The boat bobbed as he stepped in, bobbed much more than he thought it would. For a moment he panicked, thinking perhaps it would capsize altogether, but it righted itself and he sat down. Two small oars lay in the bottom of the vessel, and he positioned them one at a time into place. He had rowed a boat once in his life- during a holiday to Fermanagh in Northern Ireland they had visited a remote place called Muckrus Quay. His father had hired a row boat and had let his then six year old son try rowing. In truth he had not rowed very far. Nevertheless, he was eight now. He placed the oars into the freezing water and began to row. It was awkward at first. He found it hard to synchronize the movement of both arms, but after a time he found it became more and more natural, and soon the jetty fell away into the mist.
It seemed he rowed for hours. The ragged silhouette of Castle Urquhart was even more impressive from the water, its unmistakeable keep rising from the edge of a jutting peninsula, flanked by its crumbled walls that appeared to the boy like broken teeth. It was shrouded in the same mist that seemed to be closing in on the small boat at an alarming rate. Tired out, the boy let the oars drop into the boat and allowed it to drift. Perhaps he would have been alarmed to see how far he was from the shore, but he could not be- the shore was completely obscured to him. All he could see was a clearing of black water, a wall of white mist and an eerie tunnel of light cutting through the mist from the full moon. It was truly freezing now, but the exertion of rowing had kept him warm so far. Also a mixture of fear, excitement and being eight meant that he did not notice or care. He was on Loch Ness, that mysterious, ancient body of water, impenetrably murky, unfathomably deep. Even without legends of a monster, the Loch had power. There was something striking, almost charismatic, about this place with its seven hundred feet slopes and reams of thick mist. The Loch was as deep as the slopes were high, and it possessed an ancient power over any who set eyes upon it. Like a seductress its beauty haunted those who had been entranced by it, a dark beauty that got inside the soul.
While the boat drifted the boy took out his torch and shone it around the dark water. The night was painfully still. Peering over the edge he thought that the water looked as deep and expansive as the sky above, and capable of hiding as many secrets. He set the camera at the ready beside him. Too many accounts of the beast ended with an admission that no picture had been taken. Either the witness had no camera, they had been too slow to get one, or the device had not been loaded with film. Well, the boy was ready. He had made sure he knew how to use the camera, and had loaded it with a roll of film himself. Then he had kept it hidden for the few weeks leading up to the trip. His father never used it. He had bought it with notions of becoming a great photographer, but had soon forgot about all about it. Flighty, his mother called his father. Imaginative but flighty, barely grasping one idea before moving on to the next.
The boy slept.
He was awoken in the night by frantic screams. Two voices calling out somewhere in the mist, the sound coming to his ears as if through a paper bag. He was freezing cold, colder than he ever thought possible, and as he stood, straining to hear what the voices were saying, he felt the boat shudder beneath him. Not bob, not rock; shudder. He was suddenly taken up with the sickening impression that something had passed under the boat. Close under it. Something that had touched the boat as it had passed. Forgetting the screaming voices, which he knew in some distant part of his mind were calling his name, the boy turned to the other side of the boat and peered into the black water. Seeing nothing, he looked up and around. The mist was patchy now, settling on the water in wispy clumps here and there. In the freezing dark, some patches of mist looked like monsters themselves. Suddenly the water ahead of him was disturbed. It pushed up and towards him, as if a torpedo was approaching. The boys mind flashed to that scene from Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when the Nautilus rams the first ship; how it looked like an approaching sea monster, its eyes glowering bright green as it powered through the sea. Whatever approached him now did not have glowing eyes, but it was big. It moved through the water in a slight side to side motion. As if swimming. And it was not powering towards him, but rather moving very deliberately, too deliberately to be something as boring as a torpedo or submarine. Now that it was approaching he found himself terrified, uncertain, thinking of that movie Jaws he had watched late at night once when he wasn’t supposed to be up.
Suddenly the bulge in the water disappeared in a flurry of bubbles. Silence oiled into the night, except that is for muffled cries somewhere in the stifling mist. A minute passed. The boy began to feel the cold again, to hear more clearly the voices. He was certain now that they were calling his name, the haze of sleep and shock was lifting. He was just about to turn and wave his torch toward the voices when a dark shape rose out of the water right beside the boat. It was so dark it almost appeared to be part of the Loch itself. As it rose two green eyes twinkled in the moonlight and water flowed easily around an aquiline head and a long slender neck. For a long moment he stared into two green orbs that seemed to look right into him, then the boy fell back into the boat and the camera flashed once in his hand. He fainted.
In flashes of consciousness he was aware of being lifted bodily from the boat, of being moved into the warmth and fussed over; of being told that his mother was dead.
