“Got it now!” Pete exclaimed. “Whitey told me last night. Julia got herself engaged with a guy in the city-place she’s working at. Getting married next month.”
Hogan bent over the side of his boat and began to unknot the fish stringer. He hadn’t seen Julia since the night he last met Greenface. A week or so later he heard she’d left town and taken a job in the city.
“Seemed to me I ought to tell you,” Pete continued with remorseless neighborliness. “Didn’t you and she used to go around some?”
“Yeah, some,” Hogan agreed. He held up the walleyes. “Want to take these home for the missis, Pete? I was just fishing for the fun of it.”
“Sure will!” Pete was delighted. “Nothing beats walleyes for eating, ‘less it’s whitefish. But I’m going to smoke these. Say, how about me bringing you a ham of buck, smoked, for the walleyes? Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” Hogan smiled.
“Can’t be immediate. I went shooting the north side of the lake three nights back, and there wasn’t a deer around. Something’s scared ’em all out over there.”
“Okay,” Hogan said, not listening at all. He got the motor going, and cut away from Pete with a wave of his hand. “Be seeing you, Pete!”
Two miles down the lake, he got his mind off Julia long enough to find a possible significance in Pete’s last words.
He cut the motor to idling speed, and then shut it off entirely, trying to get his thoughts into some kind of order. Since that chunk of pine slugged him in the head and robbed him of his chance of finishing off Greenface, he’d seen no more of the thing and heard nothing to justify his suspicion that it was still alive somewhere, perhaps still growing. But from Thursday Lake northward to the border of Canada stretched two hundred miles of bush-trees and water, with only the barest scattering of farms and tiny towns. Hogan sometimes pictured Greenface prowling about back there, safe from human detection, and a ghastly new enemy for the harried small life of the bush, while it nourished its hatred for the man who had so nearly killed it.
It wasn’t a pretty picture. It made him take the signs indicating Masters Fishing Camp from the roads, and made him turn away the occasional would-be guest who still found his way to the camp in spite of Whitey Allison’s unrelenting vigilance in town. It also made it impossible for him even to try to get in touch with Julia and explain what couldn’t have been explained, anyway.
A rumbling of thunder broke through his thoughts. The sky in the east hung black with clouds now; and the boat was drifting in steadily toward shore with the wind and waves behind it. Hogan started the motor and came around in a curve to take a direct line toward camp. As he did so, a pale object rose sluggishly on the waves not a hundred yards ahead of him. With a start, he realized it was the upturned bottom of a small boat, and remembered the two fishermen he’d intended warning against the approach of the storm.
The little bay Pete Jeffries had mentioned lay half a mile behind; in his preoccupation he’d passed it without becoming conscious of the fact. There was no immediate reason to assume the drunks had met with an accident; more likely they’d landed and neglected to draw the boat high enough out of the water, so that it drifted off into the lake again on the first eddy of wind. Circling the derelict to make sure it was what it appeared to be, Hogan turned back to pick up the stranded sportsmen and take them to his camp until the storm was over.
When he reached the relatively smooth water of the tree-ringed bay, he throttled the motor and moved in slowly because the bay was shallow and choked with pickerel grass and reeds. There was surprisingly little breeze here; the air seemed almost oppressively hot and still after the free race of wind across the lake. Hogan realized it was darkening rapidly.
He stood up in the boat and stared along the shoreline over the tops of the reeds, wondering where the two had gone—and whether they mightn’t have been in their boat anyway when it overturned.
“Anyone around?” he yelled uncertainly.
His voice echoed back out of the creaking shore pines. From somewhere near the end of the bay sounded a series of splashes—probably a big fish flopping about in the reeds. When that stopped, the stillness turned almost tangible; and Hogan drew a quick, deep breath, as if he found breathing difficult here.
Again the splashing in the shallows—closer now. Hogan faced the sound, frowning. The frown became a puzzled stare. That certainly was no fish, but some large animal—a deer, a bear, possibly a moose. The odd thing was that it should be coming toward him. . . . Craning his neck, he saw the reed tops bend and shake about a hundred yards away, as if a slow, heavy wave of air were passing through them in his direction. There was nothing else to be seen.
Then the truth flashed on him—a rush of horrified comprehension.
Hogan tumbled back into the stern and threw the motor on, full power. As the boat surged forwards, he swung it around to avoid an impenetrable wall of reeds ahead, and straightened out toward the mouth of the bay. Over the roar of the motor and the rush and hissing of water, he was aware of one other sensation: that shrilling vibration of the nerves, too high to be a sound, which had haunted him in memory all summer. Then there was a great splash behind the boat, shockingly close; another, a third. How near the thing actually came to catching him as he raced through the weedy traps of the bay, he never knew. Only after he was past the first broad patch of open water, did he risk darting a glance back over his shoulder—
He heard someone screaming. Raw, hoarse yells of animal terror. Abruptly, he realized it was himself.
He was in no immediate danger at the time. Greenface had given up the pursuit. It stood, fully visible among the reeds, a hundred yards or so back. The smiling jade-green face was turned toward Hogan, lit up by strange reflections from the stormy sky, and mottled with red streaks and patches he didn’t remember seeing there before. The glistening, flowing mass beneath it writhed like a cloak of translucent pythons. It towered in the bay, dwarfing even the trees behind it in its unearthly menace.
It had grown again. It stood all of thirty feet tall. . . .
* * *
The storm broke before Hogan reached camp and raged on through the night and throughout the next day. Since he would never be able to find the thing in that torrential downpour, he didn’t have to decide whether he must try to hunt Greenface down or not. In any case, he told himself, staring out of the lodge windows at the tormented chaos of water and wind, he wouldn’t have to go looking for it. It had come back for him, and presently it was going to find its way to the familiar neighborhood of the camp.
There seemed to be a certain justice in that. He’d been the nemesis of the monster as much as it had been his. It had become time finally for the matter to end in one way or another.
Someone had told him—now he thought of it, it must have been Pete Jeffries, plodding up faithfully through the continuing storm one morning with supplies for Hogan—that the two lost sportsmen were considered drowned. Their boat had been discovered; and as soon as the weather made it possible, a search would be made for their bodies. Hogan nodded, saying nothing. Pete studied him as he talked, his broad face growing increasingly worried.
“You shouldn’t drink so much, Hogan!” he blurted out suddenly. “It ain’t doing you no good! The missis told me you were really keen on Julia. I should’ve kept my trap shut . . . but you’d have found out, anyhow.”
“Sure I would,” Hogan said promptly. It hadn’t occurred to him that Pete believed he’d shut himself up here to mourn for his lost Julia.
“Me, I didn’t marry the girl I was after, neither,” Pete told him confidentially. “Course the missis don’t know that. Hit me just about like it’s hit you. You just gotta snap outta it, see?”
Something moved, off in the grass back of the machine shed. Hogan watched it from the corner of his eye through the window until he was sure it was only a big bush shaking itself in the sleety wind.
“Eh?” he said. “Oh, sure! I’ll snap out of it, Pete. Don’t you worry.”