Sea Serpents Read online

  SEASERPENTS!

  Edited by

  Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-116-0

  Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  First printing: December 1989

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

  "Algy" by L. Sprague de Camp. Copyright © 1976 by Ultimate Publishing Company, Inc. First appeared in Fantastic Stories, August 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Out of Darkness" by Lillian Stewart Carl. Copyright © 1987 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1987. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Leviathan!" by Larry Niven. Copyright © 1970 by Playboy. First appeared in Playboy Magazine, 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Horses of Lir" by Roger Zelazny. Copyright © 1981 by Stuart David Schiff. First appeared in Whispers III, Doubleday & Co., 1981. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Mortal and the Monster" by Gordon R. Dickson. Copyright © 1976 by Random House, Inc. First appeared in Stellar Short Novels, Ballantine Books, 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Man Overboard" by John Collier. Copyright © 1972 by John Collier. First collected in The John Collier Reader, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

  "The Dakwa" by Manly Wade Wellman. Copyright © 1977 by Stuart David Schilf. First appeared in Whispers I, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate.

  "The Kings of the Sea" by Sterling E. Lanier. Copyright © 1968 by Mercury Press, Inc. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1968. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Grumblefritz, a Smell of Sulphur" by Marvin Kaye. Copyright © 1981 by Marvin Kaye. First appeared in Amazing Stories, 1981. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Devil of Malkirk" by Charles Sheffield. Copyright © 1982 by Mercury Press, Inc. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1982. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Susan Casper, Jeanne Van Buren Dann, Patrick Delahunt, Edward Ferman, Virginia Kidd, Trina King, Brian Perry and Tawna Lewis of Fat Cat Books (263 Main St., Johnson City, New York 13790), Stuart Schiff, Jody Scobie, the staffs of the Vestal Public Library and the Binghamton Public Library, Tom Whitehead of the Special Collections Department of the Paley Library at Temple University (and his staff, especially John Betancourt and Connie King), Sheila Williams, and special thanks to our editors, Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan.

  Preface

  by

  Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  Of all the fabulous creatures who populate the worlds of fantasy—dragons, unicorns, griffins, trolls, mermaids—the sea serpent is the only one who may actually exist in the corporeal world as well as in the world of the imagination. At the very least, it is the one fabulous beast whose existence is still widely believed in by a significant percentage of the contemporary population. For instance, there are probably very few (if any) citizens of the modern world who still believe in the actual physical existence of, say, griffins or sphinxes or centaurs—but every year there are dozens of eyewitness reports of sea serpents (or USOs—Unidentified Swimming Objects—as they are sometimes called), as there have been year after year for centuries.

  There have been literally thousands of reports of sea serpents, many of them by trained observers: naturalists, oceanographers, experienced seamen, naval officers, submarine crews. Sometimes they have been seen by hundreds of people at once, as in the nineteenth-century sighting by the crew of HMS Daedalus, or in the sightings of the famous Gloucester Sea Serpent, who for a decade from 1817 on appeared every summer off the New England coast, where it was often observed by crowds of monster-watchers. Nor are sea serpents restricted to the open ocean. Similar creatures known as "lake monsters" have been spotted for hundreds of years in lakes all over the world. The Loch Ness Monster—familiarly known as "Nessie"—is the most famous of these elusive creatures, but there is also "Issie," the monster of Japan's Lake Ikeda, "Champ," the monster of Lake Champlain, "Ogopogo," the monster of western Canada's Lake Okanagan, "Manipogo," the monster of Manitoba's Lake Winnipegosis, Sweden's Storsjön Animal, the Black Beast of Quebec's Lake Ponenegamook, and Iceland's Lágarfljótsormur, among many others.

  Even after hundreds of sightings, though, no irrefutable physical evidence of the existence of sea serpents has ever been found—barring a few blurry and indistinct photographs that are not only inconclusive, but often fiercely contested by people who are convinced that they are the work of hoaxers. None of these creatures have ever been captured or killed, no authenticated remains or carcasses have ever been found; even the fossil record is empty of their traces.

  So then, if we say, for the sake of argument, that sea serpents do not exist—then just what is it that all of these people have been seeing?

  There are as many theories as there are theorists. Discounting deliberate hoaxes, delusions, and hallucinations, the candidates include: illusions caused by winds or currents, floating trees, the wash from passing vessels, sea weed, motorboats, up welling gas bubbles, masses of floating birds, gaseous rubbish floating up from the bottom, whales, schools of porpoises, watersnakes, leaping salmon, sturgeons, elephant seals, walruses, giant sea turtles (which do exist), giant long-necked seals (whose existence is conjectural), giant otters of an unknown species (the largest known otter was eight feet long—but sea serpents are often reported to be forty feet long or more), conger eels, ribbonfish, manta rays, basking sharks, sunfish, sea-going crocodiles, sea slugs (of an unknown giant variety), worms (ditto), alligator gars, giant squids, giant octopuses, the supposedly extinct Steller's Sea Cow (the last living specimen of which was seen in 1768), manatees, zeuglodons (primitive ancestral whales, the skeletons of which do look quite a bit like eyewitness descriptions of sea serpents), and, of course, the ever-popular Plesiosaurs (the image of the sea serpent as a long-necked, flippered, dinosaurlike swimming prehistoric survivor has probably established itself as the most common idea of what sea serpents would look like—if we could ever find one).

  And yet there is some circumstantial physical evidence: a very detailed and sober description in a wartime report of a dead monster that washed ashore in Scotland in 1942; the sonar gear of the USS Stein, which, when hauled out in dry dock for examination, proved to have been gouged and battered by a creature of "a species still unknown to science"—who had left hundreds of pointed teeth embedded in the rubber covering of the sonar dome; inconclusive but suggestive sonar tracings of vast swimming objects of unknown types that have been recorded from time to time; and the aforementioned photographs, some of which, in spite of their blurriness, do seem to show a large physical object of some sort out in the middle of the water where no such object should be.

  So who knows. One thing is sure—if they caught Nessie tomorrow, all the other candidates (however reasonable they might now seem) for what Unidentified Swimming Objects really are would be at once dismissed, and all the reasons why there couldn't be such a creature would be instantly and easily forgotten.

  In the meantime, whether sea serpents exist in fact or not, they have been alive and swimming for years in the imaginations of fantasy writers, and swim there still,
mysterious and huge, elusive and powerful and vast . . . as the stories you are about to read will vividly and evocatively demonstrate.

  Algy

  by

  L. Sprague de Camp

  L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost the entire development of modern fantasy and SF. For the fantasy magazine Unknown in the late 1930s, he helped create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing—funny, whimsical, and irreverent—of which he is still the most prominent practitioner. His most famous books include Lest Darkness Fall, The Incomplete Enchanter (with Fletcher Pratt), and Rogue Queen. His most recent book is Bones of Zora, a novel written in collaboration with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp.

  Here he takes us to the sunny, sylvan, deceptively sleepy shores of peaceful Lake Algonquin for a traditional lake monster sighting that is not quite what it seems—in more ways than one!

  When I parked behind my aunt's camp on Lake Algonquin, the first face I saw was Mike Devlin's wrinkled brown one. Mike said:

  "Hello, Mr. Newbury! Sure, it's good to see you again. Have ye been hearin' about it?"

  "About what?"

  "The monster—the Lake Algonquin monster."

  "Good lord, no! I've been in France, getting married. Darling, this is my old friend Mike Devlin. Mike, my wife Denise."

  "Me, I am enchanted, Monsieur," said Denise, whose English was still a little uncertain.

  "You got yourself a good man, Mrs. Newbury," said Mike. "I'm after knowing him since he was no bigger'n a chipmunk. Gimme them bags."

  "I'll take this one," I said. "Now, what's this about a monster?"

  Mike scratched his crisp gray curls. "They do be saying that, on dark nights, something comes up in the lake and shticks its head out to look around. But nobody's after getting a good look at it. There's newspaper fellies, and a whole gang of Scotchmen are watching for it, out on Indian Point."

  "You mean we have a home-grown version of the Loch Ness monster?"

  "I do that."

  "How come the Scots came over here? I thought they had their own lake monster. Casing the competition, maybe?"

  "It could be that, Mr. Newbury. They're members of some society that tracks down the shtories of sea serpents and all them things."

  "Where's my aunt?"

  "Mrs. Colton and Miss Colton are out in the rowboat, looking for the monster. If they find it, I'm thinking they'll wish they hadn't."

  Mike took us into the camp—a comfortable, three-story house of spruce logs, shaded by huge old pines—and showed us our room. He pointed at the north window. "If you look sharp, you can see the Scotchmen out there on the point."

  I got out the binoculars that I had brought for wild-life watching. Near the end of Indian Point was a cluster of figures around some instruments. I handed the glasses to Denise.

  The year before, Mike had been left without a job when my old schoolmate, Alfred Ten Eyck, had been drowned in the quake that sank Ten Eyck Island. I recommended Mike to my aunt, whose camp on Lake Algonquin was twenty miles from Gahato. Since my aunt was a widow with children grown and flown, she could not keep up the place without a handy man. Mike—an ex-lumberjack, of Canadian birth despite his brogue—filled the bill. My aunt had invited Denise and me to spend our honeymoon at the camp. Her daughter Linda was also vacationing there.

  Settled, we went down to the dock to look for my aunt and my cousin. Several boats were out on the lake, but too far away to recognize. We waved without result.

  "Let's go call on the Scots," I said. "Are you up to a three-quarter-mile hike?"

  "That is about one kilometer, no? Allons!"

  The trail wanders along the shore from the camp to Indian Point. When I was a kid there in summer, I used to clear the brush out of this trail. It had been neglected, so we had to push through in places or climb over deadfalls. At one point, we passed a little shed, almost hidden among the spruces, standing between us and the water.

  "What is that, Willy?" asked Denise.

  "There used to be a little hot-air engine there, to pump water up to the attic tank in the camp. When I was a kid, I collected wood and fired up that engine. It was a marvelous little gadget—not efficient, but simple, and it always worked. Now they have un electric pump."

  Near the end of Indian Point, the timber thins. There were the Scots around their instruments. As we came closer, I saw four men in tweeds and a battery of cameras and telescopes. They looked around as we approached. I said: "Hello!"

  Their first response was reserved. When I identified myself as Mrs. Colton's nephew and guest, however, they became friendly.

  "My name's Kintyre," said one of them, thrusting out a hand. He was a big, powerful-looking, weather-beaten man with graying blond hair, a bushy mustache, a monocle screwed into one eye, and the baggiest tweeds of the lot. The only other genuine monocle-wearer I had ever known was a German colonel, captured in the last month of the war.

  "And I'm Ian Selkirk," said another, with a beautiful red beard. (This was before anybody but artists wore them.) He continued: "Lord Kintyre pays the siller on this safari, so he's the laird. We have to kneel before him and put our hands in his and swear fealty every morning."

  Lord Kintyre guffawed and introduced the remaining two: Wallace Farg and James MacLachlan. Kintyre spoke British public-school English; Farg, such strong "braid Scots" that I could hardly understand him. The speech of the other two lay somewhere in between. At their invitation, we peered through the telescopes.

  "What about this monster?" I said. "I've been out of the country."

  They all started talking at once until Lord Kintyre shouted them down. He told me essentially what Mike Devlin had, adding:

  "The bloody thing only comes up at night. Can't say I blame it, with all those damned motorboats buzzing around. Enough to scare any right-thinking monster. I've been trying to get your town fathers to forbid 'em, but no luck. The younger set dotes on 'em. So we may never get a good look at Algy."

  "Algae?" I said, thinking he meant the seaweed.

  "Surely. You Americans call our monster 'Nessie,' so why shouldn't we call the Lake Algonquin monster 'Algy'? But I'm afraid one of these damned stinkpots will run into the poor creature and injure it. I say, are you and your lovely bride coming to the ball tomorrow at the Lodge?"

  "Why, my lordship—I mean your lord—"

  "Call me Alec," roared his lordship. "Everyone else does. Short for Alexander Mull, second Baron Kintyre. My old man sold so much scotch whiskey abroad, after you chaps got rid of the weird Prohibition law, that Baldwin figgered he had to do something for him. Now, laddie, how about the dance? I'm footing the bill."

  "Sure," I said, "if Denise can put up with my two left feet."

  Back at the camp, we met my aunt and her daughter coming back from their row. The sky was clouding over. Linda Colton was a tall, willowy blonde, highly nubile if you didn't mind her washed-out look. Nice girl, but not exactly brilliant. After the introductions, my Aunt Frances said:

  "George Vreeland's coming over for dinner tonight. Briggs gave him the time off. Do you know him?"

  "I've met him," I said. "He was a cousin of my late friend, Alfred Ten Eyck. I thought Vreeland had gone to California?"

  "He's back and working as a desk clerk for Briggs," said Aunt Frances.

  Joe Briggs was proprietor of the Algonquin Lodge, a couple of miles around the shore from the Colton camp, the other way from Indian Point. Linda Colton said:

  "George says he's going to get one of those frogman's diving suits to go after the monster."

  "I doubt if he'll get very far," I said. "The water's so full of vegetable matter, you can't see your hand before your face when you're more than a couple of feet down. When they put in the dam to raise the lake level, they didn't bother to clear all the timber out of the flooded land first."

  I could have added that what I had heard about George Vreeland was not good. Alfred Ten Eyck claimed that, when Alfred was away, George had rented the cam
p on Ten Eyck Island from him. While there, he had sold most of Alfred's big collection of guns in the camp to various locals. He pocketed the money and skipped out before Alfred returned. I wouldn't call Vreeland wicked or vicious—just one of those old unreliables, unable to resist the least temptation.

  Instead, I told about our meeting the Scots. Linda said: "Didn't you think Ian Selkirk just the handsomest thing you ever saw?"

  "I'm no judge of male beauty," I said. "He looked like a well-set-up-man, with the usual number of everything. I don't know that I'd go for that beard, but that's his business."

  "He grew it in the war, when he was on a submarine," said Linda.

  Denise said: "If you will excuse me, I looked at Mr. Selkirk, too. But yes, he is handsome. And he knows it—maybe a little too well, hein?"

  My cousin Linda changed the subject.

  At dinner time, George Vreeland came roaring over from the Lodge in an outboard. He did not remember me at first, since I had met the little man only casually, and that back in the thirties when we were mere striplings.

  It was plain that Vreeland was sweet on Linda Colton, for all that she was an inch taller than he. He talked in grandiose terms of his plans for diving in pursuit of Algy. I said: