Chessie At Bay

By John L. French and Jason Whitley

There are creatures lurking in our world. Obscure creatures long relegated to myth and legend. They have been sighted by a lucky-or unlucky-few, some have even been photographed, but their existence remains unproven and unrecognized by the scientific community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NeoParadoxa
• Release date: Apr 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781949691887

John L. French

JOHN L. FRENCH is a retired crime scene supervisor with forty years' experience. He has seen more than his share of murders, shootings, and serious assaults. As a break from the realities of his job, he started writing science fiction, pulp, horror, fantasy, and, of course, crime fiction. John's first story "Past Sins" was published in Hardboiled Magazine and was cited as one of the best Hardboiled stories of 1993. More crime fiction followed, appearing in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, the Fading Shadows magazines and in collections by Barnes and Noble. Association with writers like James Chambers and the late, great C.J. Henderson led him to try horror fiction and to a still growing fascination with zombies and other undead things. His first horror story "The Right Solution" appeared in Marietta Publishing's Lin Carter's Anton Zarnak. Other horror stories followed in anthologies such as The Dead Walk and Dark Furies, both published by Die Monster Die books. It was in Dark Furies that his character Bianca Jones made her literary debut in "21 Doors," a story based on an old Baltimore legend and a creepy game his daughter used to play with her friends. John's first book was The Devil of Harbor City, a novel done in the old pulp style. Past Sins and Here There Be Monsters followed. John was also consulting editor for Chelsea House's Criminal Investigation series. His other books include The Assassins' Ball (written with Patrick Thomas), Souls on Fire, The Nightmare Strikes, Monsters Among Us, The Last Redhead, the Magic of Simon Tombs, and The Santa Heist (written with Patrick Thomas). John is the editor of To Hell in a Fast Car, Mermaids 13, C. J. Henderson's Challenge of the Unknown, Camelot 13 (with Patrick Thomas), and (with Greg Schauer) With Great Power ... You can find John on Facebook or you can email him at him at [e-mail].

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Prologue

65 million years ago

The great beasts, those with the awareness of themselves and others, knew that something was coming, that a great event was about to occur. The titans, the ones that roamed the land, had seen the strange light in the sky, the one that grew larger every night. The ones that had enough intelligence, the ones who had finally formed the concepts of tomorrow and what if worried that it might grow so big as to fall on where they lived and hunted. Their minds reached out to that power some had begun to suspect ruled their lives. If fall it must, let it fall elsewhere, they thought in what was almost a prayer. That such a fall would affect them as well was not within their limited imagination. They knew of here and they knew of there and what was there was not their concern. But even if they sensed that the growing light was their doom, there was nothing they could do to stop it. They were trapped by the land.

The leviathan, those that swam the sea, knew of the sky lights. Many of them had broached the ocean surface and looked at the heavens above. Some saw the growing light. Others did not. None of them worried.

In the end, it was the tides that told them. The waters in which they lived had begun to shift strangely, as if no longer ruled by the light that often shone at night. Those that conceived of something beyond today began to plan.

There were those whose genetic memory allowed them to dimly recall the time when the oceans of the world were one, before the slow drifting of land, tide, and time had broken the ocean. These creatures wondered if the shifting of the tides presaged another such event. Like the land beasts, they did not worry. For, like the land beasts, there was nothing they could do. However, the oceans were deep and were a refuge rather than a trap.

When the great rock hit, the earth and the sea were cast up. The earth shook, the winds swirled and blew, rains came down and the water flooded the land. There were places where the earth cracked and brought forth its molten rock. The sun disappeared, night covered the land, and the sea grew dark. Winter ruled and life froze.

On the land, the great beasts died. What culture there was, what beliefs had been formed, what concepts had been imagined, died with them. Lesser beasts, ones with little thought beyond that of today survived and, along with the beasts of the air, adapted and thrived.

As the oceans and seas boiled, those creatures that remained close to the surface also perished. There were those, however, who dove deep, to the colder depths where safety lay. They sought out the trenches and learned to live there. Or else they swan the underocean, those rifts and passages through the land that had occurred long ago when the single continent had become many. The leviathan and lesser sea creatures survived longer than did those on the land, but change is inevitable and soon they too gave way to other life.

35 million years ago

Ages passed. Creatures died and others lived. The latter changed. The great event that killed so many species continued in the form of radiation that changed those creatures that persisted. In the ocean, apex predators arose. Giant squids and octopods, megasharks, and serpents. Great beasts all, who were aware of each other but mostly avoided each other’s hunting grounds.

Awareness grew. Although the megasharks’ interest remained limited to themselves and the simple urges of eating and reproducing, the cephalopods and the cetaceans reacquired the notions of today, tomorrow, and what-if.

The cetaceans especially. Some were true ocean dwellers. Others had changed enough to need to rise to the surface to breathe the air. They also birthed their young, and so acquired the instincts to keep them safe.

And still, time passed, the age of the giant sea creatures came to its end and the giant octopods, squids, sharks, and serpents gave way to lesser creatures and were no more.

Or so it is believed.

Chapter One

I tell ya something’s down there.

The past several nights Harry Rose had been coming into the Blue Crab Inn to complain about his catch, such as it was. Harry worked the Chesapeake Bay as a fisherman. He put out from the west side of Kent Island early in the morning and worked all day, rain or shine, unless he sensed a bad storm coming in, and every evening he returned to shore. Usually, he came back with a good catch, or at least, a fair catch, but never, to hear him tell it, a poor catch. Lately, though, that’s all he’d been bringing in.

Never seen it that bad, he said to his friends over a pint. There were three men drinking with him—Manny Fisher, Moses Price, and George Church. Moses and George were watermen like Harry. Oddly enough for his name, Manny ran a general store. They nodded in sympathy and agreement. It was all they could do. Moses’s and George’s catches had been barely fair themselves.

Grant you, Harry, Moses said, things haven’t been good. But there are good times and bad. Things’ll pick up.

I’d like to know when. I tell you, I’ve been doing this forty years…

Man and boy, his friends said in chorus. They’d heard this before, last night and two nights ago. And in times past whenever Harry complained about how bad things were compared to how they used to be. As usual, he made a less than friendly gesture and continued on.

Forty years, and before me, my father and his father. It’s never been this bad. I bet you if Christ’s Apostles were out on the bay and He walked out to join them, they wouldn’t come back with enough for Peter’s mother-in-law to cook them a decent meal.

Harry lifted and drained his mug, then let it fall hard on the table. It was Manny’s round, he got the hint. He waved his hand and Ollie came over with three fresh mugs and another bottle of Dr. Pepper for him. These days Manny wasn’t one for the grain or grape, having had too much of both in his younger days.

So, what do you think’s out there? Manny asked after his friends had taken their first sips of the new brew and smacked their approval.

Don’t know. But it’s eating the fish, and the blues too, from what I hear the crabbers tell.

Maybe it’s that thing Captain Lawson saw back in ’46, Moses suggested. The one in the book.

What thing, what book? Harry asked. He wasn’t much for reading, except the Bible, the sports and funny pages, and certain magazines in the barber shop.

Book by a guy named Lake. Said that this Lawson saw some kind of creature in the waters between Cape Charles and Cape Henry. Said it looked like some kind of monster.

And whatever he was drinking, have Ollie bring some to me on the next go round.

Now, George, Manny said. Who knows what’s under the bay? Those tales of sea serpents and monsters have to come from somewhere.

Hearing his name, not his real name but his bar name, Ollie had come over to the table to see if the gang was ready for round three. They weren’t but before he could walk away, Manny said, Ollie, ask Stan what he was saying about those guys from Baltimore.

Stan was the bartender and, along with Ollie, the owner of The Blue Crab. He was a sizable man. His partner was very thin. Stan and Ollie were not their real names. One night just after they had taken over from the previous owners, someone compared them to Laurel and Hardy. The nicknames stuck but in reverse.

That was some years back. By now, no one remembered Stan and Ollie’s real names, if anyone ever knew them. There was a rumor that if anyone ever called them by their real names they’d get free beer for life. Another rumor was that if they were wrong, they’d be banned from the only bar for miles around. No one had yet tested either rumor.

Don’t have to, Ollie said. Heard him tell it a few times. Back in ’34, two fishermen going for perch near Baltimore saw something come out of the water. Said it was black with a horse’s head and a long neck.

There you go, Harry said firmly, as if two sightings decades apart were proof positive. Then added, Someone’s got to do something. He didn’t say what this someone should do, and his friends didn’t ask for fear he’d tell them.

They were on their third, and last round, when Moses said, "Ya know, I don’t know about this monster stuff. Could be it could be those snakes that escaped from those ships where they were used to catch and eat rats, but something might be out there. And if it ain’t stopped, there go the fish and crabs. I got this friend over in Aberdeen. Works with helicopters. With all this talk of war and with what’s been going on in Europe, they’ve been doing training runs