Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

BY THE SILVER WATER OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN Joe Hill

The robot shuffled clank-clank into the pitch dark of the bedroom, then stood staring down at the humans.

The female human groaned and rolled away and folded a pillow over her head.

“Gail, honey,” said the male, licking dry lips. “Mother has a headache. Can you take that noise out of here?”

“I CAN PROVIDE A STIMULATING CUP OF COFFEE,” boomed the robot in an emotionless voice.

“Tell her to get out, Raymond,” said the female. “My head is exploding.”

“Go on, Gail. You can hear mother isn’t herself,” said the male.

“YOU ARE INCORRECT. I HAVE SCANNED HER VITALS,” said the robot. “I HAVE IDENTIFIED HER AS SYLVIA LONDON. SHE IS HERSELF.”

The robot tilted her head to one side, inquisitively, waiting for more data. The pot on her head fell off and hit the floor with a great steely crash.

Mother sat up screaming. It was a wretched, anguished, inhuman sound, with no words in it, and it frightened the robot so much, for a moment she forgot she was a robot and she was just Gail again. She snatched her pot off the floor and hurried clangedy-clang-clang to the relative safety of the hall.

She peeked back into the room. Mother was already lying down, holding the pillow over her head again.

Raymond smiled across the darkness at his daughter. “Maybe the robot can formulate an antidote for martini poisoning,” he whispered, and winked.

The robot winked back.

For a while the robot worked on her prime directive, formulating the antidote that would drive the poison out of Sylvia London’s system. The robot stirred orange juice and lemon juice and ice cubes and butter and sugar and dish soap in a coffee mug. The resulting solution foamed and turned a lurid sci-fi green, suggestive of Venutian slime and radiation.

Gail thought the antidote might go down better with some toast and marmalade. Only there was a programming error; the toast burnt. Or maybe it was her own crossed wires beginning to smoke, shorting out the subroutines that required her to follow Asimov’s laws. With her circuit boards sizzling inside her, Gail began to malfunction. She tipped over chairs with great crashes and pushed books off the kitchen counter onto the floor. It was a terrible thing but she couldn’t help herself.

Gail didn’t hear her mother rushing across the room behind her, didn’t know she was there until Sylvia jerked the pot off her head and flung it into the enamel sink.

“What are you doing?” Sylvia screamed. “What in the name of sweet Mary God? If I hear one more thing crash over, I’ll take a hatchet to someone. My own self maybe.”

Gail said nothing, felt silence was safest.

“Get out of here before you burn the house down. My God, the whole kitchen stinks. This toast is ruined. And what did you pour in this Goddam mug?”

“It will cure you,” Gail said.

“There isn’t no cure for me,” her mother said, which was a double negative, but Gail didn’t think it wise to correct her. “I wish I had one boy. Boys are quiet. You four girls are like a tree full of sparrows, the shrill way you carry on.”

“Ben Quarrel isn’t quiet. He never stops talking.”

“You ought to go outside. All of you ought to go outside. I don’t want to hear any of you again until I have breakfast made.”

Gail shuffled toward the living room.

“Take those pots off your feet,” her mother said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the windowsill.

Gail daintily removed one foot, then the other, from the pots she had been using for robot boots.

Heather sat at the dining room table, bent over her drawing pad. The twins, Miriam and Mindy, were playing wheelbarrow. Mindy would hoist Miriam up by the ankles and walk her across the room, Miriam clambering along on her hands.

Gail stared over Heather’s shoulder at what her older sister was drawing. Then Gail got her kaleidoscope and peered at the drawing through that. It didn’t look any better.

She lowered her kaleidoscope and said, “Do you want me to help you with your drawing? I can show you how to draw a cat’s nose.”

“It isn’t a cat.”

“Oh. What is it?”

“It’s a pony.”

“Why is it pink?”

“I like them pink. There should be some that are pink. That’s a better color than most of the regular horse colors.”

“I’ve never seen a horse with ears like that. It would be better if you drew whiskers on it and let it be a cat.”

Heather crushed her drawing in one hand and stood up so quickly she knocked over her chair.

In the exact same moment, Mindy wheelbarrowed Miriam into the edge of the coffee table with a great bang. Miriam shrieked and grabbed her head and Mindy dropped her ankles and Miriam hit the floor so hard the whole house shook.

“GODDAM IT WILL YOU STOP THROWING THE GODDAM CHAIRS AROUND?” screamed their mother, reeling in from the kitchen. “WHY DO YOU ALL HAVE TO THROW THE GODDAM CHAIRS? WHAT DO I HAVE TO SAY TO MAKE YOU STOP?”

“Heather did it,” Gail said.

“I did not!” Heather said. “It was Gail!” She did not view this as a lie. It seemed to her that somehow Gail had done it, just by standing there and being ignorant.

Miriam sobbed, clutching her head. Mindy picked up the book about Peter Rabbit and stood there staring into it, idly turning the pages, the young scholar bent to her studies.

Their mother grabbed Heather by the shoulders, squeezing them until her knuckles went white.

“I want you to go outside. All of you. Take your sisters and go away. Go far away. Go down to the lake. Don’t come back until you hear me calling.”

They spilled into the yard, Heather and Gail and Mindy and Miriam. Miriam wasn’t crying anymore. She had stopped crying the moment their mother went back into the kitchen.

Big sister Heather told Miriam and Mindy to sit in the sandbox and play.

“What should I do?” Gail asked.

“You could go drown yourself in the lake.”

“That sounds fun,” Gail said, and skipped away down the hill.

Miriam stood in the sandbox with a little tin shovel and watched her go. Mindy was already burying her own legs in the sand.

It was early and cool. The mist was over the water and the lake was like battered steel. Gail stood on her father’s dock, next to her father’s boat, watching the way the pale vapor churned and changed in the dimness. Like being inside a kaleidoscope filled with foggy gray beach glass. She still had her kaleidoscope, patted it in the pocket of her dress. On a sunny day, Gail could see the green slopes on the other side of the water, and she could look up the stony beach, to the north, all the way to Canada, but now she could not see ten feet in front of her.

She followed the narrow ribbon of beach toward the Quarrels’ summer place. There was only a yard of rocks and sand between the water and the embankment, less in some places.

Something caught the light, and Gail bent to find a piece of dark green glass that had been rubbed soft by the lake. It was either green glass or an emerald. She discovered a dented silver spoon, not two feet away.

Gail turned her head and stared out again at the silvered surface of the lake.

She had an idea a ship had gone down, someone’s schooner, not far offshore, and she was discovering the treasure washed in by the tide. A spoon and an emerald couldn’t be a coincidence.

She lowered her head and walked along, slower now, on the lookout for more salvage. Soon enough she found a tin cowboy with a tin lasso. She felt a shiver of pleasure, but also sorrow. There had been a child on the boat.

“He’s probably dead now,” she said to herself, and looked sadly out at the water once more.

“Drowned,” she decided.

She wished she had a yellow rose to throw into the water.

Gail went on but had hardly trudged three paces when she heard a sound from across the lake, a long, mournful lowing, like a foghorn, but also not like one.

She stopped for another look.

The mist smelt of rotting smelt.

The foghorn did not sound again.

An enormous gray boulder rose out of the shallows here, rising right up onto the sand. Some net was snarled around it. After a moment of hesitation, Gail grabbed the net and climbed to the top.

It was a really large boulder, higher than her head. It was curious she had never noticed it before, but then, things looked different in the mist.

Gail stood on the boulder, which was high but also long, sloping away to her right, and curling in a crescent out into the water on her left. It was a low ridge of stone marking the line between land and water.

She peered out into the cool, blowing smoke, looking for the rescue ship that had to be out there somewhere, trolling for survivors of the wreck. Maybe it wasn’t too late for the little boy. She lifted her kaleidoscope to her eye, counting on its special powers to penetrate the mist and show her where the schooner had gone down.

“What are you doing?” said someone behind her.

Gail looked over her shoulder. It was Joel and Ben Quarrel, both of them barefoot. Ben Quarrel looked just like a little version of his older brother. Both of them were dark-haired and dark-eyed and had surly, almost petulant faces. She liked them both, though. Ben would sometimes spontaneously pretend he was on fire, and throw himself down and roll around screaming and someone would have to put him out. He needed to be put out about once an hour. Joel liked dares, but he would never dare anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He had dared Gail to let a spider crawl on her face, a daddy longlegs, and then when she wouldn’t, he did it. He stuck his tongue out and let the daddy longlegs crawl right over it. She was afraid he would eat it, but he didn’t. Joel didn’t say much and he didn’t boast, even when he had done something amazing, like get five skips on a stone.

She assumed they would be married someday. Gail had asked Joel if he thought he’d like that, and he had shrugged and said it suited him fine. That was in June, though, and they hadn’t talked about their engagement since. Sometimes she thought he had forgotten.

“What happened to your eye?” she asked.

Joel touched his left eye, which was surrounded by a painful looking red-and-brown mottling. “I was playing Daredevils of the Sky and fell out of my bunk bed.” He nodded toward the lake. “What’s out there?”

“There’s a ship sank. They’re looking for survivors now.”

Joel took off his shoes and put them up on the rock. Then he grabbed the netting tangled on the boulder, climbed to the top, and stood next to her, staring out into the mist.

“What was the name?” he asked.

“The name of what?”

“The ship that sank.”

“The Mary Celeste.”

“How far out?”

“A half a mile,” Gail said, and lifted her kaleidoscope to her eye for another look around.

Through the lens, the dim water was shattered, again and again, into a hundred scales of ruby and chrome.

“How do you know?” Joel asked after a bit.

She shrugged. “I found some things that washed up.”

“Can I see?” Ben Quarrel asked. He was having trouble climbing the net to the top of the boulder. He kept getting halfway, then jumping back down.

She turned to face him and took the soft green glass out of her pocket.

“This is an emerald,” she said. She took out the tin cowboy. “This is a tin cowboy. The boy this belonged to probably drowned.”

“That’s my tin cowboy,” Ben said. “I left it yesterday.”

“It isn’t. It just looks like yours.”

Joel glanced over at it. “No. That’s his. He’s always leaving them on the beach. He hardly has any left.”

Gail surrendered the point and tossed the tin cowboy down to Ben, who caught it, and lost interest in the sunk schooner. He turned his back to the great boulder and sat in the sand and got his cowboy into a fight with some pebbles. The pebbles kept hitting him and knocking him over. Gail didn’t think it was an even match.

“What else do you have?” Joel asked.

“This spoon,” Gail said. “It might be silver.”

Joel squinted at it, then looked back at the lake.

“Better let me have the telescope,” he said. “If there are people out there, we have as good a chance of spotting them as anyone searching for them on a boat.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” She gave him the kaleidoscope.

Joel turned it this way and that, scanning the murk for survivors, his face tense with concentration.

He lowered it at last and opened his mouth to say something. Before he could, the mournful foghorn sounded again. The water quivered. The foghorn sound went on for a long time before trailing sadly away.

“I wonder what that is,” Gail said.

“They fire cannons to bring dead bodies to the surface of the water,” Joel told her.

“That wasn’t a cannon.”

“It’s loud enough.”

He lifted the kaleidoscope to his eye again and looked for a while more. Then he lowered it and pointed at a floating board.

“Look. Part of the boat.”

“Maybe it has the name of the boat on it.”

Joel sat and rolled his jeans up to his knees. He dropped off the boulder into the water.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

“I’ll help,” Gail said, even though he didn’t need help. She took off her black shoes and put her socks inside them, then slid down the cold, rough stone into the water after him.

The water was up over her knees in two steps and she didn’t go any farther because she was soaking her dress. Joel had the board anyway. He was up to his waist, peering down at it.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“Like you thought. It’s the Mary Celeste,” he said, and held up the board so she could see. There was nothing written on it.

She bit her lip and stared out over the water. “If anyone rescues them, it’s going to have to be us. We should make a fire on the beach, so they know which way to swim. What do you think?”

He didn’t answer.

“I said, ‘What do you think?’” she asked again, but then she saw the look on his face and knew he wasn’t going to answer, wasn’t even listening. “What’s wrong?”

She looked back over her shoulder to see what he was staring at, his face rigid and his eyes wide.

The boulder they had been standing on wasn’t a boulder. It was a dead animal. It was long, almost as long as two canoes lined end-to-end. The tail curled out into the water toward them, bobbing on the surface, thick as a fire hose. The head stretched out on the pebbly beach, even thicker, spade-shaped. Between the head and the tail, its body bulked up, thick around as a hippo. It wasn’t the mist that stank of rotting fish. It was the animal. Now that she was staring right at the thing, she didn’t know how she had ever stood on top of it, imagining it was a rock.

Her chest tingled and crawled, like she had ants under her dress. The ant feeling was in her hair, too. She could see where the animal was torn open, in the place where its throat widened into its torso. Its insides were red and white, like the insides of any fish. There wasn’t a lot of blood for such a big hole.

Joel gripped her hand. They stood up to their thighs in the water, staring at the dinosaur, which was as dead now as all the other dinosaurs that had ever walked the earth.

“It’s the monster,” Joel said, not that it needed to be said.

They had all heard about the monster that lived in the lake. There was always a float in the Fourth of July parade, made up to look like a plesiosaur, a papier-mâché creature rising out of papier-mâché waters. In June there had been an article about the lake creature in the newspaper and Heather had started to read it aloud at the table, but their father made her stop.

“There isn’t anything in the lake. That’s for tourists,” he had said then.

“It says a dozen people saw it. It says they hit it with the ferry.”

“A dozen people saw a log and got themselves all worked up. There’s nothing in this lake but the same fish that are in every other American lake.”

“There could be a dinosaur,” Heather had insisted.

“No. There couldn’t. Do you know how many of them there would have to be for a breeding population? People would be seeing them all the time. Now hush up. You’ll scare your sisters. I didn’t buy this cottage so the four of you can sit inside and fight all day. If you girls won’t go in the lake because you’re scared of some dumbass American Nessie, I’ll throw you in.”

Now Joel said, “Don’t scream.”

It had never crossed Gail’s mind to scream, but she nodded to show she was listening.

“I don’t want to frighten Ben,” Joel told her in a low voice. Joel was shaking so hard his knees almost knocked. But then the water was very cold.

“What do you think happened to it?” she asked.

“There was that article in the paper about it getting hit by the ferry. Do you remember that article? A while back?”

“Yes. But don’t you think it would’ve washed up months ago?”

“I don’t think the ferry killed it. But maybe another ship hit it. Maybe it got chewed up in someone’s propeller. It obviously doesn’t know enough to stay out of the way of boats. It’s like when turtles try and cross the highway to lay eggs.”

Holding hands, they waded closer to it.

“It smells,” Gail said, and lifted the collar of her dress to cover her mouth and nose.

He turned and looked at her, his eyes bright and feverish. “Gail London, we are going to be famous. They will put us in the newspaper. I bet on the front page, with a picture of us sitting on it.”

A shiver of excitement coursed through her, and she squeezed his hand. “Do you think they will let us name it?”

“It already has a name. Everyone will call it Champ.”

“But maybe they will name the species after us. The Gaila-saurus.”

“That would be naming it after you.”

“They could call it a DinoGail Joelasaurus. Do you think they will ask us questions about our discovery?”

“Everyone will interview us. Come on. Let’s get out of the water.”

They sloshed to the right, toward the tail, bobbing on the surface of the water. Gail had to wade back up to her waist to go around it, then started ashore. When she looked back, she saw Joel standing on the other side of the tail, looking down at it.

“What?” she said.

He reached out gently and put his hand on the tail. He jerked his hand back almost immediately.

“What’s it feel like?” she asked.

Even though she had climbed the net snarled around it, and had stood on top of it, she felt in some way that she had not touched it yet.

“It’s cold” was all he said.

She put her hand on its side. It was as rough as sandpaper and felt like it had just come out of the icebox.

“Poor thing,” she said.

“I wonder how old it is,” he said.

“Millions of years. It’s been alone in this lake for millions of years.”

Joel said, “It was safe until people put their damn motorboats on the lake. How can it know about motorboats?”

“I bet it had a good life.”

“Millions of years alone? That doesn’t sound good.”

“It had a lake full of fish to eat and miles to swim in and nothing to be afraid of. It saw the dawning of a great nation,” Gail told him. “It did the backstroke under the moonlight.”

Joel looked at her in surprise. “You’re the smartest little girl on this side of the lake. You talk just like you’re reading from a book.”

“I’m the smartest little girl on either side of the lake.”

He pushed the tail aside and sloshed past it, and they walked dripping onto the shore. They came around the hind end and found Ben playing with his tin cowpoke, just as they had left him.

“I’ll tell him,” Joel said. He crouched and ruffled his little brother’s hair. “Do you see that rock behind you?”

Ben didn’t look up from his cowboy. “Uh-huh.”

“That rock is a dinosaur. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s dead. It won’t hurt anyone.”

“Uh-huh,” Ben said. He had buried his cowboy up to his tin waist. In a small, shrill voice, he shouted, “Help! I’m ah-drownin’ in this heah quicksand!”

Joel said, “Ben. I’m not playing pretend. It’s a real dinosaur.”

Ben stopped and looked back at it without much interest. “Okay.”

He wiggled his figure in the sand and went back to his shrill cowboy voice. “Someone throw me a rope before ah’m buried alive!”

Joel made a face and stood up.

“He’s just useless. The discover of the century right behind him, and all he wants to do is play with that stupid cowboy.”

Then Joel crouched again and said, “Ben. It’s worth a pile of money. We’re all going to be rich. You and me and Gail.”

Ben hunched his shoulders and put on a pouty face of his own. He could feel he wasn’t going to be allowed to play cowboy anymore. Joel was going to make him think about his dinosaur, whether he liked it or not.

“That’s all right. You can have my share of the money.”

“I won’t hold you to that later,” Joel said. “I’m not greedy.”

“What’s important,” Gail said, “is the advancement of scientific progress. That’s all we care about.”

“All we care about, little guy,” Joel said.

Ben thought of something that might save him and end the discussion. He made a sound in his throat, a great roar to indicate a jolting explosion. “The dynamite went off! I’m burnin’!” He flopped onto his back and began to roll desperately around. “Put me out! Put me out!”

No one put him out. Joel stood. “You need to go get a grown-up and tell them we found a dinosaur. Gail and me will stay here and guard it.”

Ben stopped moving. He let his mouth loll open. He rolled his eyes up in his head. “I can’t. I’m burnt to death.”

“You’re an idiot,” Joel said, tired of trying to sound like an adult. He kicked sand onto Ben’s stomach.

Ben flinched and his face darkened and he said, “You’re the one who is stupid. I hate dinosaurs.”

Joel looked like he was getting ready to kick sand in Ben’s face, but Gail intervened. She couldn’t bear to see Joel lose his dignity and had liked his serious, grown-up voice, and the way he had offered Ben a share of the reward money, without hesitation. Gail dropped to her knees next to the little boy and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Ben? Would you like a brand-new box of those cowboys? Joel says you’ve lost most of them.”

Ben sat up, brushing himself off. “I was going to save up for them. I’ve got a dime so far.”

“If you go and get your dad for us, I’ll buy you a whole box of them. Joel and I will buy you a box together.”

Ben said, “They’ve got them for a dollar at Fletcher’s. Do you have a dollar?”

“I will after I get the reward.”

“What if there isn’t no reward?”

“You mean to say what if there isn’t any reward,” Gail told him. “What you just said is a double negative. It means the opposite of what you want things to mean. Now, if there isn’t any reward, I’ll save up until I have a dollar and buy you a box of tin cowboys. I promise.”

“You promise.”

“That’s what I just said. Joel will save with me. Won’t you, Joel?”

“I don’t want to do anything for this idiot.”

“Joel.”

“I guess okay,” Joel said.

Ben tugged his cowpoke out of the sand and jumped to his feet.

“I’ll get Dad.”

Joel said, “Wait.”

He touched his black eye, then dropped his hand.

“Mom and Dad are sleeping. Dad said don’t wake them up until eight-thirty. That’s why we came outside. They were up late at the party at Millers’.”

“My parents were too,” Gail said. “My mother has a beastly headache.”

“At least your mom is awake,” Joel said. “Get Mrs. London, Ben.”

“Okay,” Ben said, and began walking.

“Run,” Joel said.

“Okay,” Ben said, but he didn’t change his pace.

Joel and Gail watched him until he vanished into the streaming mist.

“My dad would just say he found it,” Joel said, and Gail almost flinched at the ugliness in his voice. “If we show it to my dad first, we won’t even get our pictures in the paper.”

“We should let him sleep if he’s asleep,” Gail said.

“That’s what I think,” Joel said, lowering his head, his voice softening and going awkward. He had shown more emotion than he liked and was embarrassed now.

Gail took his hand, impulsively, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

He looked at their fingers, laced together, and frowned in thought, as if she had asked him a question he felt he should know the answer to. He looked up at her.

“I’m glad I found the creature with you. We will probably be doing interviews about this our whole lives. When we are in our nineties people will still be asking us about the day we found the monster. I’m sure we’ll still like each other even then.”

She said, “The first thing we’ll say is that it wasn’t a monster. It was just a poor thing that was run down by a boat. It’s not like it ever ate anyone.”

“We don’t know what he eats. Lots of people have drowned in this lake. Maybe some of them who drowned didn’t really. Maybe he picked his teeth with them.”

“We don’t even know it’s a he.”

They let go of each other’s hands and turned to look at it, sprawled on the brown, hard beach. From this angle it looked like a boulder again, with some netting across it. Its skin did not glisten like whale blubber but was dark and dull, a chunk of granite with lichen on it.

She had a thought, looked back at Joel. “Do you think we should get ready to be interviewed?”

“You mean like comb our hair? You don’t need to comb your hair. Your hair is beautiful.”

His face darkened and he couldn’t hold her gaze.

“No,” she said. “I mean we don’t have anything to say. We don’t know anything about it. I wish we knew how long it is, at least.”

“We should count its teeth.”

She shivered. The ants-on-skin sensation returned.

“I wouldn’t like to put my hand in its mouth.”

“It’s dead. I’m not scared. The scientists are going to count its teeth. They’ll probably do that first thing.”

Joel’s eyes widened.

“A tooth,” he said.

“A tooth,” she said back, feeling his excitement.

“One for you and one for me. We ought to take a tooth for each of us, to remember it by.”

“I won’t need a tooth to remember it,” she said. “But it’s a good idea. I’m going to have mine made into a necklace.”

“Me too. Only a necklace for a boy. Not a pretty one, like for a girl.”

Its neck was long and thick and stretched out straight on the sand. If she had come at the animal from this direction, she would’ve known it wasn’t a rock. It had a shovel-shaped head. Its visible eye was filmed over with some kind of membrane, so it was the color of very cold, very fresh milk. Its mouth was underslung, like a sturgeon’s, and hung open. It had very small teeth, lots of them, in slanting double rows.

“Look at ’em,” he said, grinning, but with a kind of nervous tremor in his voice. “They’d cut through your arm like a buzz saw.”

“Think how many fish they’ve chopped in two. He probably has to eat twenty fish a day just to keep from starving.”

“I don’t have a pocketknife,” he said. “Do you have anything we can use to pull out a couple teeth?”

She gave him the silver spoon she had found farther down the beach. He splashed into the water, up to his ankles, then crouched by its head and reached into its mouth with the spoon.

Gail waited, her stomach roiling strangely.

After a moment, Joel removed his hand. He still crouched beside it, staring into its face. He put a hand on the creature’s neck. He didn’t say anything. That filmed-over eye stared up into nothing.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“I thought it would be easy to do, but it doesn’t feel like I should do it.”

“It’s all right. I don’t even want one. Not really.”

“The roof of his mouth,” he said.

“What?”

“The roof of his mouth is just like mine. Ruffled like mine. Or like yours.”

He got up and stood for a bit. Joel glanced down at the spoon in his hand and frowned at it, as if he didn’t know what it was. He put it into his pocket.

“Maybe they’ll give us a tooth,” he said. “As part of our reward. It will be better if we don’t have to pull it out ourselves.”

“Not so sad.”

“Yes.”

He splashed out of the lake and they stood looking at the carcass.

“Where is Ben?” Joel asked, glancing off in the direction Ben had run.

“We should at least find out how long it is.”

“We’d have to go get measuring tape, and someone might come along and say they found it instead of us.”

“I’m four feet exactly. To the inch. I was last July when my daddy measured me in the doorway. We could measure how many Gails it is.”

“Okay.”

She lowered herself to her butt and stretched out on the sand, arms squeezed to her sides, ankles together. Joel found a stick and drew a line in the sand, to mark the crown of her skull.

Gail rose, brushed the sand off, and stepped over the line. She lay down flat again, so her heels were touching the mark in the dirt. They went this way down the length of the beach. He had to wade into the lake to pull the tail up onto shore.

“It’s a little over four Gails,” he said.

“That’s sixteen feet.”

“Most of it was tail.”

“That’s some tail. Where is Ben?”

They heard high-pitched voices piping through the blowing vapor. Small figures skipped along the beach, coming toward them. Miriam and Mindy sprang through the fog, Ben wandering behind them with no particular urgency. He was eating a piece of toast with jam on it. Strawberry jam was smeared around his lips, on his chin. He always wound up with as much on his face as went into his mouth.

Mindy held Miriam’s hand, while Miriam jumped in a strange, lunging sort of way.

“Higher!” Mindy commanded. “Higher!”

“What is this?” Joel asked.

“I have a pet balloon. I named her Miriam,” Mindy said. “Float, Miriam!”

Miriam threw herself straight up off the ground and came down so heavily her legs gave way and she sat hard on the beach. She still had Mindy’s hand and yanked her down beside her. The two girls sprawled on the damp pebbles, laughing.

Joel looked past them to Ben. “Where is Mrs. London?”

Ben chewed a mouthful of toast. He was chewing it a long time. Finally he swallowed. “She said she’d come see the dinosaur when it isn’t so cold out.”

“Float, Miriam!” Mindy screamed.

Miriam flopped onto her back with a sigh. “I’m deflating. I’m deflat.”

Joel looked at Gail in disgust.

Mindy said, “It stinks here.”

“Do you believe this?” Joel asked. “She’s not coming.”

Ben said, “She told me to tell Gail if she wants breakfast to come home. Can we buy my cowboys today?”

“You didn’t do what we asked, so you aren’t getting anything,” Joel told him.

“You didn’t say I had to get a grown-up. You just said I had to tell a grown-up,” Ben said, in a tone of voice that made even Gail want to hit him. “I want my cowboys.”

Joel walked past the little girls on the ground and grabbed Ben’s shoulder, turned him around. “Bring back a grown-up or I’ll drown you.”

“You said I could have cowboys.”

“Yes. I’ll make sure you’re buried with them.”

He kicked Ben in the ass to get him going. Ben cried out and stumbled and glanced back with a hurt look.

“Bring an adult,” Joel said. “Or you’ll see how mean I can get.”

Ben walked off in a hurry, head down, legs stiff and unbending.

“You know what the problem is?” Joel said.

“Yes.”

“No one is going to believe him. Would you believe him if he said we were guarding a dinosaur?”

The two little girls were speaking in hushed voices. Gail was about to offer to go to the house and get her mother when their secretive whispering caught her notice. She looked down to find them sitting cross-legged next to the creature’s back. Mindy had chalk and was drawing tic-tac-toe on its side.

“What are you doing?” Gail cried, and grabbed the chalk. “Have some respect for the dead.”

Mindy said, “Give me my chalk.”

“You can’t draw on this. It’s a dinosaur.”

Mindy said, “I want my chalk back or I’m telling Mommy.”

“They don’t even believe us,” Joel said. “And they’re sitting right next to it. If it was alive, it would’ve eaten them by now.”

Miriam said, “You have to give it back. That’s the chalk Daddy bought her. We each got something for a penny. You wanted gum. You could’ve had chalk. You have to give it back.”

“Well, don’t draw on the dinosaur.”

“I can draw on the dinosaur if I want to. It’s everybody’s dinosaur,” Mindy said.

“It is not. It’s ours,” Joel said. “We’re the ones who discovered it.”

Gail said, “You have to draw somewhere else, or I won’t give you back your chalk.”

“I’m telling Mommy. If she has to come down here to make you give it back, she’ll scald your heinie,” Mindy said.

Gail started to reach out, to hand back the chalk, but Joel caught her arm.

“We’re not giving it,” he said.

“I’m telling Mother,” Mindy said, and got up.

“I’m telling with her,” Miriam said. “Mother is going to come and give you heck.”

They stomped away into the mist, discussing this latest outrage in chirping tones of disbelief.

“You’re the smartest boy on this side of the lake,” Gail said.

“Either side of the lake,” he said.

The mist streamed in off the surface of the water. By some trick of the light, their shadows telescoped, so each girl appeared as a shadow within a larger shadow within a larger shadow. They made long, girl-shaped tunnels in the vapor, extending away, those multiple shadows lined up like a series of dark, featureless matryoshka dolls. Finally they dwindled in on themselves and were claimed by the fishy-smelling fog.

Gail and Joel did not turn back to the dinosaur until Gail’s little sisters had vanished entirely. A gull sat on the dead creature, staring at them with beady, avid eyes.

“Get off!” Joel shouted, and flapped his hands.

The gull hopped to the sand and crept away in a disgruntled hunch.

“When the sun comes out, it’s going to be ripe,” Joel said.

“After they take pictures of it, they’ll have to refrigerate it.”

“Pictures of it with us.”

“Yes,” she said, and wanted to take his hand again but didn’t.

“Do you think they’ll bring it to the city?” Gail asked. She meant New York, which was the only city she had ever been to.

“It depends who buys it from us.”

Gail wanted to ask him if he thought his father would let him keep the money but worried that the question might put unhappy ideas into his head. Instead she asked, “How much do you think we might get paid?”

“When the ferry hit this thing back in the summer, P. T. Barnum announced he’d pay fifty thousand dollars for it.”

“I’d like to sell it to the Museum of Natural History in New York City.”

“I think people give things to museums for free. We’d do better with Barnum. I bet he’d throw in lifetime passes to the circus.”

Gail didn’t reply, because she didn’t want to say something that might disappoint him.

He shot her a look. “You don’t think it’s right.”

She said, “We can do what you want.”

“We could each buy a house with our half of Barnum’s money. You could fill a bathtub with hundred-dollar bills and swim around in it.”

Gail didn’t say anything.

“It’s half yours, you know. Whatever we make!”

She looked at the creature. “Do you really think it might be a million years old? Can you imagine all those years of swimming? Can you imagine swimming under the full moon? I wonder if it missed other dinosaurs. Do you think it wondered what happened to all the others?”

Joel looked at it for a while. He said, “My mom took me to the natural history museum. They had a little castle there with a hundred knights, in a glass case.”

“A diorama.”

“That’s right. That was swell. It looked just like a little world in there. Maybe they’d give us lifetime passes.”

Her heart lightened. She said, “And then scientists could study it whenever they wanted to.”

“Yeah. P. T. Barnum would probably make scientists buy a ticket. He’d show it next to a two-headed goat and a fat woman with a beard, and it wouldn’t be special anymore. You ever notice that? Because everything at the circus is special, nothing is special? If I could walk on a tightrope, even a little, you’d think I was the most amazing boy you knew. Even if I was only two feet off the ground. But if I walked on a tightrope in the circus, and I was only two feet off the ground, people would shout for their money back.”

It was the most she had ever heard him say at one go. She wanted to tell him he was already the most amazing boy she knew but felt it might embarrass him.

He reached for her hand and her heart quickened, but he only wanted the chalk.

He took it from her and began to write on the side of the poor thing. She opened her mouth to say they shouldn’t but then closed her mouth when she saw he was writing her name on the pebbly turtle skin. He wrote his name beneath hers.

“In case anyone else tries to say they found it,” he told her. Then he said, “Your name ought to be on a plaque here. Our names ought to be together forever. I’m glad I found him with you. There isn’t no one I’d rather have been with.”

“That’s a double negative,” she said.

He kissed her. Just on the cheek.

“Yes, dear,” he said, like he was forty years old and not ten. He gave her back the chalk.

Joel looked past her, down the beach, into the mist. Gail turned her head to see what he was staring at.

She saw a series of those Russian-doll shadows, collapsing toward them, just like someone folding a telescope shut. They were mother-shaped, flanked by Miriam and Mindy shapes, and Gail opened her mouth to call out, but then that large central shadow suddenly shrank and became Heather. Ben Quarrel was right behind her, looking smug.

Heather stalked out of the mist, her drawing pad under one arm. Coils of blond hair hung in her face. She pursed her lips and blew at them to get them out of her eyes, something she only ever did when she was mad.

“Mother wants to see you. She said right now.”

Gail said, “Isn’t she coming?”

“She has egg pancake in the oven.”

“Go and tell her—”

“Go and tell her yourself. You can give Mindy her chalk before you go.”

Mindy held out one hand, palm up.

Miriam sang, “Gail, Gail, bosses everyone around. Gail, Gail, is really stupid.” The melody was just as good as the lyrics.

Gail said to Heather, “We found a dinosaur. You have to run and get Mom. We’re going to give it to a museum and be in the paper. Joel and I are going to be in a photo together.”

Heather took Gail’s ear and twisted it, and Gail screamed. Mindy lunged and grabbed the chalk out of Gail’s hand. Miriam wailed in a long, girlish pretend scream, mocking her.

Heather dropped her hand, grabbed the back of Gail’s arm between thumb and index finger, and twisted. Gail cried out again and struggled to get free. Her hand flailed and swatted Heather’s drawing pad into the sand. Heather didn’t give it any mind, her bloodlust up. She began to march her little sister away into the mist.

“I was drawing my best pony,” Heather said. “I worked on it really hard. And Mom wouldn’t even look at it because Mindy and Miriam and Ben kept bothering her about your stupid dinosaur. She yelled at me to get you, and I didn’t even do anything. I just wanted to draw, and she said if I didn’t go get you, she’d take my colored pencils away. The colored pencils! I got! For my birthday!” She twisted the back of Gail’s arm for emphasis, until Gail’s eyes stung with tears.

Ben Quarrel hurried to keep alongside her. “You better still buy me my cowboys. You promised.”

“Mom says you aren’t getting any egg pancake,” Miriam said. “Because of all the trouble you’ve caused this morning.”

Mindy said, “Gail? Do you mind if I eat the piece of egg pancake that would’ve been yours?”

Gail looked over her shoulder at Joel. He was already a ghost, twenty feet back in the mist. He had climbed up to sit on the carcass.

“I’ll stay right here, Gail!” he shouted. “Don’t worry! You’ve got your name on it! Your name and mine, right together! Everyone is going to know we found it! Just come back as soon as you can! I’ll be waiting!”

“All right,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion. “I’ll be right back, Joel.”

“No you won’t,” Heather said.

Gail stumbled over the rocks, looking back at Joel for as long as she could. Soon he and the animal he sat on were just dim shapes in the fog, which drifted in damp sheets, so white it made Gail think of the veils that brides wore. When he disappeared, she turned away, blinking at tears, her throat tight.

It was farther back to the house than she remembered. The pack of them—four small children and one twelve-year-old— followed the meandering course of the narrow beach, by the silver water of Lake Champlain. Gail looked at her feet, watched the water slop gently over the pebbles.

They continued along the embankment until they reached the dock, their father’s motorboat tied up to it. Heather let go of Gail then, and each of them climbed up onto the pine boards. Gail did not try to run back. It was important to bring their mother, and she thought if she cried hard enough, she could manage it.

The children were halfway across the yard when they heard the foghorn sound again. Only it wasn’t a foghorn and it was close, somewhere just out of sight in the mist on the lake. It was a long, anguished, bovine sound, a sort of thunderous lowing, loud enough to make the individual droplets of mist quiver in the air. The sound of it brought back the crawling-ants feeling on Gail’s scalp and chest. When she looked back at the dock, she saw her father’s motorboat galumphing heavily up and down in the water and banging against the wood, rocking in a sudden wake.

“What was that?” Heather cried out.

Mindy and Miriam held each other, staring with fright at the lake. Ben Quarrel’s eyes were wide and his head cocked to one side, listening with a nervous intensity.

Back down the beach, Gail heard Joel shout something. She thought—but she was never sure—that he shouted, “Gail! Come see!” In later years, though, she sometimes had the wretched idea that it had been “God! Help me!”

The mist distorted sound, much as it distorted the light. So when there came a great splash, it was hard to judge the size of the thing making the splashing sound. It was like a bathtub dropped from a great height into the lake. Or a car. It was, anyway, a great splash.

“What was that?” Heather screamed again, holding her stomach as if she had a bellyache.

Gail began to run. She leapt the embankment and hit the beach and fell to her knees. Only the beach was gone. Waves splashed in, foot-high waves like you would see at the ocean, not on Lake Champlain. They drowned the narrow strip of pebbles and sand, running right up to the embankment. She remembered how on the walk back, the water had been lapping gently at the shore, leaving room for Heather and Gail to walk side by side without getting their feet wet.

She ran into the cold blowing vapor, shouting Joel’s name. As hard as she ran, she felt she was not going nearly fast enough. She almost ran past the spot where the carcass had been. It wasn’t there anymore, and in the mist, with the water surging up around her bare feet, it was hard to tell one stretch of beach from another.

But she spotted Heather’s drawing pad, sloshing in on the combers, soaked through, pages tumbling. One of Joel’s sneakers tumbled with it, full of the cold, green water. She bent for it automatically—he would want it back—and poured it out and clutched it to her chest.

Gail looked out at the plunging waves, the tormented water. She had a stitch in her side. Her lungs struggled for air. When the waves drew back she could see where the carcass had been dragged through the hard dirt, pulled into the water, going home. It looked as if someone had plowed a tractor blade across the beach and into the lake.

“Joel!”

She shouted at the water. She turned and shouted up the embankment, into the trees, toward Joel’s house.

“Joel!”

She spun in a circle, shouting his name. She didn’t want to look at the lake but wound up turned to face it again anyway. Her throat burned from yelling, and she was beginning to cry again.

“Gail!” Heather called to her. Her voice was shrill with fright. “Come home, Gail! Come home, right now!”

“Gail!” yelled Gail’s mother.

“Joel!” Gail shouted, thinking this was ridiculous, everyone shouting for everyone else.

The lowing sound came from a long way off. It was mournful and soft.

“Give him back,” Gail whispered. “Please give him back.”

Heather ran through the mist. She was up on the embankment, not down on the sand, where the water was still piling in, one heavy, cold wave after another. Then Gail’s mother was there too, looking down at her.

“Sweetie,” Gail’s mother said, her face pale and drawn with alarm. “Come up here, sweetie. Come up here to Mother.”

Gail heard her but didn’t climb the embankment. Something washed in on the water and caught on her foot. It was Heather’s drawing pad, open to one of her ponies. It was a green pony, with a rainbow stripe across it and red hoofs. It was as green as a Christmas tree. Gail didn’t know why Heather was always drawing horses that looked so unhorselike, horses that couldn’t be. They were like double negatives, those horses, like dinosaurs, a possibility that canceled itself out in the moment it was expressed.

She fetched the drawing pad out of the water and looked at the green pony with a kind of ringing sickness in her, a feeling like she wanted to throw up. She ripped the pony out and crushed it and threw it into the water. She ripped some other ponies out and threw them too, and the crushed balls of paper bobbed and floated around her ankles. No one told her to stop, and Heather did not complain when Gail let the pad fall out of her hands and back into the lake.

Gail looked out at the water, wanting to hear it again, that soft foghorn sound, and she did, but it was inside her this time, the sound was down deep inside her, a long wordless cry for things that weren’t never going to happen.