"Ye're jist tryin' tae scare me. I'm no' feart o' a myth."
"Tough words. Very well, runt, show me how brave ye are. Dive in. Go on, laddie, go for a swim and let her get a good whiff o' ye."
He pushed me toward the edge and I gagged at his breath, but held tight to his belt buckle.
"Jist as I thought."
Frightened, I pried myself loose and ran from the pier, the tears streaming down my cheeks.
"Ye think I'm hard on ye, laddie? Well, life's hard, an' I'm nothin' compared tae that monster. Ye best pay attention, for the curse skips every other generation, which means ye're marked. That dragon lurks in the shadow o' yer soul, and one day ye'll cross paths. Then what will ye dae? Will ye stand and fight like a warrior, like brave Sir William an' his kin, or will ye cower an' run, lettin' the dragon haunt ye for the rest o' yer days?"
Leaning out over the starboard rail, I searched for my reflection in the Sargasso's glassy surface.
Seventeen years had passed since my father's "dragon" lecture, seventeen long years since my mother had divorced him and moved us to New York. In that time I had lost my accent and learned that my father was right, that I was indeed haunted by a dragon, only his name was Angus Wallace.
Arriving in a foreign land is never easy for a boy, and the physical and psychological baggage I carried from my childhood left me fodder for the bullies of my new school. At least in Drumnadrochit I had allies like my pal, True MacDonald, but here I was all alone, a fish out of water, and there were many a dark day that I seriously considered ending my life.
And then I met Mr. Tkalec.
Joe Tkalec was our middle school's science teacher, a kind Croatian man with rectangular glasses, a quick wit, and a love for poetry. Seeing that the "Scottish weirdo" was being picked on unmercifully, Mr. Tkalec took me under his wing, allowing me special classroom privileges like caring for his lab animals, small deeds that helped nurture my self-image. After school, I'd ride my bike over to Mr. Tkalec's home, which contained a vast collection of books.
"Zachary, the human mind is the instrument that determines how far we'll go in life. There's only one way to develop the mind and that's to read. My library's yours, select any book and take it home, but return only after you've finished it."
The first volume I chose was the oldest book in his collection, The Origins of an Evolutionist, my eyes drawn by the author's name, Alfred Russel Wallace.
Born in 1823, Alfred Wallace was a brilliant British evolutionist, geographer, anthropologist, and theorist, often referred to as Charles Darwin's right-hand man, though their ideas were not always in step. In his biography, Alfred mentioned that he too was a direct descendant of William Wallace, making us kin, and that he also suffered childhood scars brought about by an overbearing father.
The thought of being related to Alfred Wallace instantly changed the way I perceived myself, and his words regarding adaptation and survival put wind in my fallen sails.
"…we have here an acting cause to account for that balance so often observed in Nature — a deficiency in one set of organs always being compensated by an increased development of some others…"
My own obstinate father, a man who had never finished grammar school, had labeled me weak, his incessant badgering (I need tae make ye a man, Zachary) fostering a negative self-image. Yet here was my great-uncle Alfred, a brilliant man of science, telling me that if my physique made me vulnerable, then another attribute could be trained to compensate.
That attribute would be my intellect.
My appetite for academics and the sciences became voracious. Within months I established myself as the top student in my class, by the end of the school year, I was offered the chance to skip the next grade. Mr. Tkalec continued feeding me information, while his roommate, a retired semipro football player named Troy, taught me to hone my body into something more formidable to my growing list of oppressors.
For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of pride. At Troy's urging, I tried out for freshman football. Aided by my tutor's coaching and a talent for alluding defenders (acquired, no doubt, on the pitch back in Drumnadrochit) I rose quickly through the ranks, and by the end of my sophomore year, I found myself the starting tailback for our varsity football team.
Born under the shadow of a Neanderthal, I had evolved into Homo sapiens, and I refused to look back.
Mr. Tkalec remained my mentor until I graduated, helping me secure an academic scholarship at Princeton. Respecting my privacy, he seldom broached subjects concerning my father, though he once told me that Angus's dragon story was simply a metaphor for the challenges that each of us must face in life. "Let your anger go, Zack, you're not hurting anyone but yourself."
Gradually I did release my contempt for Angus, but unbeknownst to both Mr. Tkalec and myself, there was still a part of my childhood that remained buried in the shadows of my soul, something my subconscious mind refused to acknowledge.
Angus had labeled it a dragon.
If so, the Sargasso was about to set it free.
The afternoon haze seemed endless, the air lifeless, the Sargasso as calm as the Dead Sea. It was my third day aboard the Manhattanville, a 162-foot research vessel designed for deep-sea diving operations. The forward half of the boat, four decks high, held working laboratories and accommodations for a dozen crew members, six technicians, and twenty-four scientists. The aft deck, flat and open, was equipped with a twenty-one-ton A-frame PVS crane system, capable of launching and retrieving the boat's small fleet of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and its primary piece of exploration equipment, the Massett-6, a vessel designed specifically for bathymetric and bottom profiling.
It was aboard the Massett-6 in this dreadful sea that I hoped to set my own reputation beside that of my great Uncle Alfred.
Our three-day voyage had delivered us to the approximate center of the Sargasso. Clumps of golden brown seaweed mixed with black tar balls washed gently against our boat, staining its gleaming white hull a chewing tobacco brown as we waited for sunset, our first scheduled dive.
Were there dragons waiting for me in the depths? Ancient mariners once swore as much. The Sargasso was considered treacherous, filled with sea serpents and killer weeds that could entwine a ship's keel and drag it under. Superstition? No doubt, but as in all legend, there runs a vein of truth. Embellishments of eye-witnessed accounts become lore over time, and the myth surrounding the Sargasso was no different.
The real danger lies in the sea's unusual weather. The area is almost devoid of wind, and many a sailor who once entered these waters in tall sailing ships never found their way out.
As our vessel was steel, powered by twin diesel engines and a 465- horsepower bow thruster, I had little reason to worry.
Ah, how the seeds of cockiness blossom when soiled in ignorance.
While fate's clouds gathered ominously on my horizon, all my metallic-blue eyes perceived were fair skies. Still young at twenty-five, I had already earned a bachelor's and master's degree from Princeton and a doctorate from the University of California at San Deigo, and three of my papers on cetacean communication had recently been published in Nature and Science. I had been invited to sit on the boards of several prominent oceanographic councils, and, while teaching at Florida Atlantic University, I had invented an underwater acoustics device — a device responsible for this very voyage of discovery, accompanied by a film crew shooting a documentary sponsored by none other than National Geographic Explorer.