Having a mentor like Cosmo Leach is never easy, but then, we don't always have the luxury of selecting our mentors; sometimes it just happens. You wake up one morning and there they are, warts on their nose and all. Such was the case with me, Elliott Grant Wages, and one Doctor Cosmo Lorimar Leach. The world famous anthropologist and social psychologist was nothing more than a "required attendance" date on my lecture series calendar during my senior year in college, and since that was the year of Gibby Marshall and lots of all night parties, I was sweating out a passing grade in Cultural Anthropology. At any rate, I went — and I was fascinated by the old fart. Maybe enchanted is a better word. At any rate, I hung around the podium until the lecture hall had cleared and did something I had never done before. I informed the grizzled old codger that I enjoyed what he had to say.
In what I've come to learn as the typical Cosmo Leach acerbic manner of fielding compliments, he informed me that he appreciated my kind remarks but that he was equally convinced that a good 80 percent of what he had to say went over my head.
Surprisingly enough, that was the beginning of our relationship.
Cosmo is somewhere in his seventies and does not fall into the category of lovable old man. His red and wrinkled face emerges above a fleecy white beard like a cloudy sunrise. He has a bulbous nose and mean little green-blue eyes which are hard to read. That's because they are usually hidden behind quarter-inch-thick, tinted lenses encased in an outlandish pair of black and blue striped plastic frames. His mouth is hidden by the aforementioned beard, and long strands of stringy white hair flare out from his partially bald head to conceal too large ears. He is ornery, chauvinistic, vitriolic, brilliant and bullheaded. And, as you can plainly see, I treasure the old fart. No man studies another unless there is something there that he admires, and I've been studying Cosmo Leach for a long, long time.
"So, where did the other two events come from?" he harumphed.
"I stumbled across them."
"That's the kind of research I'd expect out of you," he bristled. "What makes you think they're related?"
"What would you think?" Answer a question with a question; it's an irritating little trick I learned from Gibby Marshall, and professors hate it.
"I think you're beginning to believe this dark fantasy crap you write about, Elliott."
"I hate to be obvious, Cosmo, but all you have to do is look at the evidence. Each time the focus of the incident is on children. Can't you see the pattern?"
"Pattern?"
"Sure." I hastily sketched out a map loosely resembling the cluttered mass of islands and waterways that represented the vast Northwest Territories. "Now, trace it — from Devon Island, down and over to Baffin Island. Then you go down the coast to Newfoundland and finally over to Quebec. If a person were following the coastline, they re damn near equidistant from each other. And surely you can't help but notice that these events have all happened exactly eleven years apart."
Cosmo was back to sucking on his pipe, but this time it was different. Now he was listening, and despite the glower, I could tell he was intrigued. "I suppose you've already developed some half-ass theory to support your pathetic little fistful of what you call research?"
"I have," I admitted, "and if I'm right, we're about to get another visit from these whatever they are. In fact, the way I have it figured, it could happen any day now. All four of the previous attacks happened in the summer, and that, my crusty old friend, is exactly what we're smack dab in the middle of the summer of '87."
Cosmo harumphed. "Could be," he acknowledged.
Despite the somewhat questionable nature of my literary efforts, I have been the "writer-in-residence" at good old Saint Francis for over four years now. There is little doubt that the august little institution would prefer to have someone of more significant literary fame, but it is a small Catholic college, and we all know that small Catholic colleges can't afford to pay much.
Still, the affiliation has its advantages. The campus is a delight with lovely jewel-like little lakes, tall stately trees and the true aura of academia. It is endowed with a magnificent library which rivals that of some of our larger state institutions, and the environment is conducive to writing. Lastly, the good order of Sisters is both lenient and flexible when it comes to my lecture schedule.
So, after leaving Cosmo in his upstate New York retreat, I hustled back to Saint Francis and began systematically plugging all my facts, assumptions and out-and-out wild-ass guesses into my hypothesis. The once laborious chore was made a whole lot easier by virtue of the fact that most of the data could be formatted and plugged into my computer. It's an Apple and, as the high tech world of electronics goes, a somewhat outdated piece of gear. Nevertheless, it has become such an integral part of my life that I consider it, in order of importance, right along with the other items in the E.G. Wages never-go-anywhere-without-it survival kit.
It's virtually impossible to read every item about every bizarre incident that goes on in our old world on any given day. So, pushing my theory a little, I confined myself to two geographical areas. I did this on the assumption that the "things" (because I don't know what to call them at this point in time) would pop up somewhere similar to the areas in which the previous events had been recorded. I plotted two possible locations, equidistant from the site of the incident at the Coalition commune.
Admittedly, these were arbitrary locations at best, but they seemed logical to me. One of the locations would be Camp-town, Maine — but that would require the "things" to cross water. So far there wasn't any evidence to support the fact that they could accomplish such a feat unless, of course, the waterway was frozen. The other point dovetailed even better into my theory and was even closer to my profile of the first foursome — where in the vicinity of Chambers Bay, a relatively remote section of Ontario on Lake Superior.
For the next several days, I relegated myself to a steady diet of satellite news transmissions from television stations emanating from the Detroit-Toronto-Thunder Bay triangle. Under most circumstances, this would have been an awesome assignment, but it's not too bad when you can hire two destitute and money-grubbing graduate students to assist in the project. When they weren't watching television and taking notes, I had them monitoring the wire services. My premise was simple — if a bunch of "things" started eating people, the press services would hop on the story like a free lunch.
On day five, I struck pay dirt. Lucy, one of my graduate groupies, was pounding on the door of my condo at a little past seven in the morning. I didn't even have an opportunity to offer her coffee before she blurted out her news. She had located the Reverend Myron Bell, former Associate Pastor of the Battle Harbor Sanctuary Church. He was, she reported, institutionalized more or less in a church-sponsored nursing home in Saint Anthony in Newfoundland. And there, she informed me with a grin, the housekeeper reported he had long periods of lucidity.
I knew that any investigation of any event, especially one that occurred more than 20 years ago, hinges in large part on the integrity of the records that were kept on that event. The best we can hope for when we're searching back through the records is that someone took the time to thoroughly document the component parts of that incident without bias. By the same token, an investigation is equally dependent on the determination of the individual. He has to dig and dig and dig, be willing to play a hunch or two, and now and then follow a long shot. Tenacity is the key. And as any researcher knows, be resilient. There are a helluva lot of dead-end roads out there. The discovery of the whereabouts of Myron Bell was a real plus. Now I wasn't totally dependent on records. I was going to be able to talk to someone who had actually lived through one of these incidents. I didn't know which I could put the most faith in — the records, or the often fallible human memory.