'It's last call.' 'Hey, like in that poem you know? 'Hurry up please, it's time!' ...sorry, I've had a lot to drink.' 'We all have. And I, for one, don't really feel safe going home after everything we've heard tonight.' 'But all those stories can't be true. Even if you believe in that kind of thing, there can't be one city with so many secrets.' 'Maybe it's not the city that's really the problem. Listen closely: What do you hear?' 'My pounding head.' 'The bartender throwing us out.' 'My boyfriend leaving impatient text messages wondering where I am.' 'Underneath all of that, I mean. Do you hear it? The ocean.' 'But that's miles away?' 'Doesn't matter. We've got the ocean on one side, the bay on the other, and the straits connecting them. We're surrounded by the sea; you can't get away.' 'So what?' 'Maybe the ocean is the reason so many strange things happen here. Maybe there's something in the water. Here, we have a little more time before this place is really closed; let me tell you about it...' *** 'My mother told me he went off to become a frogman.' The stringer stopped writing, certain that she had misheard the old woman. They sat in a small, pretty house just a few blocks from the Ruins, a house that smelled persistently of cat despite no cat being evident. The old woman (her name was Marie Wayland; she was in her sixties but looked much, much older) had a voice only slightly more pronounced than silence and the stringer could never be completely sure that what she had written down was anything close to what the old woman had actually said. 'A frogman?' the stringer asked. 'That's what they used to call a deep-sea diver in the old days, on account of the flippers and the wetsuit. And the goggles.' She mimed goggles over her eyes. 'He always said that's what he'd wanted to be when he grew up, so when he ran off that's what mother told me he was doing.' The stringer nodded and continued writing, without comment. The conversation was going on forty-five minutes and the frogman thing was the most coherent comment she'd gotten so far. She checked the time and found that the light would waning outside. She would have to hurry if she wanted to shoot the Ruins today. She skipped to her last question: 'I understand that he was an artist, but no one ever exhibited his work?' 'That's right,' Marie said. 'In fact, here.' The old woman stood; she was not a little old woman, despite her tiny voice. She was tall and thick-limbed. She reminded the stringer of a huge bird, a crane or a stork. The old woman brought out a flat package a little over a foot on each side, wrapped in brown paper. 'You mentioned that on the phone and I thought your magazine might like to use this in the article. It's a charcoal sketch he did. Go ahead and keep it, I've got plenty more just like it. Hundreds, maybe. Mother kept them all, after he left.' The stringer accepted the package, feeling as if she were receiving an unwanted Christmas gift from a relative she barely knew. She left with the package under her arm and her camera around her neck, glad to be free of that clinging cat odor. Forty plus minutes of conversation had yielded less than a page of notes, but with the sun at just the right angle on the horizon it was not too late to get some good shots of the Ruins; the day needn't be completely wasted. The smell of the salt breeze coming from the beach stung her nostrils. The stringer had never particularly liked the ocean. She'd rather have lived anywhere but a coastal city, but the city was where the work was. She'd had a regular position as a staff photographer at a decent magazine for a while, but now she was back to being a stringer, living off of freelance work and making it by job to job. The assignment about the Ruins had been a lucky break, but breaks were fewer and further between all the time. She crested the hill and started down the hiking trail, toward her destination. The beach that served as the fringe to the city's westernmost side terminated on the north in a series of rocky pools particularly hazardous to anyone traversing the coast, by land or by sea. But the spectacular views of the waves crashing against the shore had always encouraged developers to build on the bluffs overlooking the area, which is why, a hundred years ago, the old mayor built his theater palace here. People in the city would come all the way out to the beach complex for circus acts and dancing shows and the indoor pool and whatever else the wizards who owned the place cooked up. They'd even had a museum of ancient Egyptian artifacts. But in the '50s it fell on hard times and the family sold it to an outsider, George Wayland, who closed it ten years later and then skipped town. No sooner was he gone than the whole thing burnt to the ground. Wayland himself disappeared, apparently never disembarking from the ship that carried him away from the city. He left behind a wife, a daughter (now an old woman who lived just a few blocks away in her cat-smelling ho use), and a legacy of unanswered questions. And the place where the pool and circus and the museum once was sat untouched for decades, slowly falling apart, filling in with water and silt and wild plants until it resembled an ancient ruin. And that was what people called it: the Ruins. It was never fully torn down; folks decided they liked the look of it. The crumbling stone walls and enormous, water-filled pits alongside the beach and the coastline looked more like the remains of a Roman village than anything a turn of the century showman built. The city decided they were beautiful. Although, the stringer reflected, as she set her tripod on a hill, to her the place had always looked creepy as hell. Even when she and Randy played down here as kids, she'd never liked it. But she couldn't afford to only take the jobs she liked. It was fifty years since the fire and since George Wayland disappeared, and his legend had only grown, so the magazine editors decided to run a big piece: 'George Wayland, Man and Myth.' It didn't matter that there was nothing new to write about it or that the stringer's photos would be just like any others that anyone had taken in five decades; people liked the mystery, and the mystery would sell magazines, which meant the stringer could sell photos. She spent an hour shooting. She caught the Ruins at sunset and the Ruins at twilight and even the Ruins at night, when it was really too dark to still be shooting but she kept shooting anyway. By the time she put her camera away the only light, besides the moon, came from the hotel on the cliffs to the south. It was just enough light to see Seal Rock by, although the stringer decided that at this time of night it didn't really look like a rock at all. It looked like some giant whale just offshore was sticking its head up to get a good look at the city. A whale, or something else. She went home. There was a note on the door; Sam had stopped by. She'd forgotten they had plans. That explained the flashing voice mail indicator on her phone as well. She ignored both, going inside and uploading the new photos. She missed the days of her old film camera; digital just wasn't the same, but it was cheaper and faster. Another compromise she'd made with the world. She studied the twilight photos most closely, scanning every square inch of the image. Nothing unusual was there, but she kept looking anyway. After two hours, she gave up. Another wasted day. She flopped onto the couch, picking up the magazine off the table. She turned to the most well-worn page, and there was a smiling picture of George Wayland and the headline: 'George Wayland, Man or Myth?' The magazine had gone to stands two weeks ago. She'd turned in the photos for it a week before that. The money from it had already been spent. She should have been chasing other leads, should have been getting after editors for more assignments, should have been paying her bills, but instead she kept going back to the Ruins day after day, taking more worthless photos. Hitting up the old woman had been a desperation move, and she'd felt bad about lying and saying she was there on assignment (the old bat was so senile she didn't even remember reading the finished article when it came out), but it was the only lead she'd had. Now it was a dud too. She should give up on it. But she couldn't. There was something about the Ruins only she knew. Something she couldn't let go of. Thinking about the old woman reminded her of the sketch. She'd left it by the door, still wrapped in brown paper. She retrieved it. When the package was open she flinched; it was, as promised, a charcoal sketch. It depicted a mirror-flat expanse of ocean disturbed by an anomalous sea creature breaching the surface, foam spraying from its jaws and water streaming down its huge body. It was impossible to tell what the animal was actually supposed to be, but it made her think of some kind of dragon, bristling with flippers and fins. It was impossibly ugly. A few human swimmers were added for scale; they were tiny next to the monster, so small they were practically stick figures. The stringer frowned; why the hell would Marie Wayland give her this? Then she chided herself; the old bird was nuts, what did she expect? And what had she said? That her father had done hundreds like this? She suddenly wished she'd had it before the story went to print. The editor probably would have loved it. It would have gone great with that one 'graph toward the end, how did it go? She picked the magazine up and read: 'Urban legend persists that Wayland himself set the fire that destroyed the pool complex. Not as an insurance scam, but to destroy the evidence of the secret, ritual murders he supposedly committed there. No serious historical evidence suggests any truth to these rumors, but local kids still sneak down to the Ruins late at night in hopes of hearing the ghostly screams of those said to have died there.' The stringer snorted. All bullshit, of course. But people in this city loved their ghost stories. Randy had, too. She went back to the sketch. Something about it was bothering her. On a hunch, she opened the back of the frame and removed the delicate paper. In the lower right hand corner something was written. She thought at first it was Wayland's name or initials, but now she saw it was a word she didn't recognize. The closest she could decipher it was: 'Aspidochelone.' Curious, she went the computer to look it up: 'Aspidochelone is a fabled sea monster, variously described as a large whale or vast sea turtle. It was supposedly so large as to be mistaken for an island, its great shell appearing like a rocky outcropping. In some traditions, Aspidochelone is believed to be the Bible's 'great fish' that swallowed the prophet Jonah. Other myth cycles persist that it was an avatar of the devil.' The stringer frowned. She held the sketch up to one of her photos of seal rock by night: the sea monster's humped back was in the exact shape of the stony island. Then she looked more closely at the swimming figures Wayland drew; at first she'd thought they must be fleeing the creature, but now it seemed they were actually swimming toward it. And they did not appear entirely human; they were bulky and shapeless things, though the tiny scale made it hard to determine their exact form. Even so, a little thrill went through her. She turned to the computer and clicked the file right in the middle of her desktop. A picture of the Ruins popped up; not any of the pictures she'd taken today and not any of the pictures she'd sold to the magazine. This was a picture only she had seen, a picture taken three weeks ago, just at dusk. Everything was there as it should be: the crumbling walls, the deep pools, the shore, the surf, the rocks. Nothing seemed out of place at first glance; she'd almost missed it herself the when she'd uploaded the photos. But there, in the deepest pool right in the center of the Ruins, just beneath the surface, there was a shape. The water was dark and the light was poor, so it was hard to tell, but it looked remarkably like a person swimming to the surface. No, not a person; not quite. Just something a little like a person. Something that might live in the water and stay out of sight of normal people, until night came, when it could come to the surface without anyone seeing... This picture was the reason she kept coming to the Ruins. This picture was the reason she'd interviewed the old woman, and the reason she kept reading and researching about George Wayland. This was the reason she hadn't worked or seen Sam or any of her friends in weeks. This picture, and the memory of something splashing in the water behind her as she folded up her tripod and left that day, and an older memory, one of Randy, and his frightened voice in the dark. She held the Wayland sketch next to her monitor. The shape in the photo was ill-defined, and the figures in the sketch were tiny, but they looked alike. Didn't they? She flipped back and forth between her photos: The rock, and the back of Aspidochelone; the swimmers, and the shape in the pool. Yes, they all matched. And that meant... What did it mean? The stringer wasn't sure. She rubbed her forehead; it was late, and she hadn't slept enough all week. She turned the computer off and flopped into bed, not even bothering to take off her shoes. Outside, the wind was blowing. The branches of the trees scraped her windows. Her water bill was due tomorrow. Her rent was due a week later. She didn't know where the money would come from. She told herself she should not spend tomorrow afternoon at the Ruins again and should not spend tomorrow morning at the library or the historical society, looking for any new information about George Wayland. She should look for work instead. But she knew that she wouldn't. She couldn't let this thing go. She felt like she owed it to Randy. Poor Randy. After all these years... As she slept, she thought she heard rain splashing on her window. But she couldn't be sure. *** In her dream, she was six years old again. In her dream, her older brother was waking her up in the middle of the night. In her dream, she rolled over and said, 'What is it, Randy?' And her brother sounded frightened as he said: 'It's the man. The man from the beach.' She sat up under the covers. She could not see Randy in the dark, but she knew he was right by her bedside. 'What man?' 'The one from last night, when we snuck down to the Ruins. Remember, I told you I saw him in the water?' In her dream she was frightened, but she didn't show it. She knew Randy was only trying to scare her. 'I remember calling you a liar. You didn't see any man in the water.' 'I did. But he wasn't really a man; he was all scaly, like a fish, and he had a horrible face.' 'You didn't see any man,' she said. But her voice cracked. 'Go back to bed.' Randy was quiet for a second. She said again, a little louder: 'Randy? What's the matter?' In the dark, Randy shivered. 'What's the matter is...he's outside our window...' The stringer was screaming. No, someone else was screaming. No, that wasn't a scream, it was...the phone? She sat up in bed (her feet ached; really should have taken off her shoes before she fell asleep...) and groped for her cell phone on the bedside table. The tiny, shrieking ring cut off as she pushed the button. 'Hello?' she said. 'He came and talked to me,' said a tiny voice on the other end. The stringer blinked and sat up. She checked the clock: four in the morning. Then she looked at the call number: it was Marie, George Wayland's crazy old daughter. Never should have given the old bat my phone number, the stringer thought. 'Who talked to you?' she said. 'My father.' The stringer jolted awake. She almost dropped the phone, but stopped herself. After swallowing the lump in her throat she said: 'Your father?' 'Yes,' said Marie. Her voice was even softer than usual, but it was brimming with enthusiasm. 'We had such a nice talk. And he gave me a message for you. He told me to call you right away.' 'Marie, your father would be...' She did the math. 'A hundred and four years old, and missing since 1966?' 'I know. He looked really good for his age.' The stringer laughed; she couldn't help it. Kicking her shoes off, she rubbed her sore feet. 'So what did he tell you that couldn't wait until morning?' 'He said to tell you that the fire was the important thing.' 'What does that mean?' Marie sounded confused. 'He said you would know.' 'Not a clue.' Now that she was fully awake and the residue of her dream was fading the conversation seemed a bit more real. She wondered if Marie had been dreaming too; or maybe there wasn't much difference between waking and dreaming once you went that nuts? Then Marie said: 'Randy was here too.' The stringer almost dropped the phone. 'Oh, he had a message for you also,' Marie said. 'He said for you to remember what he told you about Obie.' This time the stringer did drop the phone. When she picked it up again Marie was saying goodbye. 'Wait!' the stringer said, but the call ended. She considered calling back, but instead she set the phone aside and stared at the window, stunned. 'Remember what he told you about Obie?' Impossible. The old woman couldn't possibly know about that. The stringer racked her brain trying to remember if she had ever mentioned her brother's name during the interview. Of course, she hadn't; why the hell would she? She wanted to call back right that second and demand an explanation. It took her a moment to realize why she wasn't: She was afraid. She went to her computer. The fire was the important thing, huh? She pulled up all the notes she'd gathered about the fire at the Ruins. She read it all again. She even watched the old newsreel footage of it the fire as it happened. She gathered no particular insights from it. She sat at her desk for another hour, lost in thought. When it was late enough in the morning, she picked up the phone and dialed a number she knew by heart by now. A voice on the other end said: 'Western Neighborhoods Project.' She asked for the director by name. They were one of the oldest and busybodiest historical groups in the city. If they couldn't tell her what she wanted to know, nobody could. She was afraid she might go to voicemail, but eventually the woman she wanted answered. 'Hello Dr. Olmstead,' the stringer said. 'I had another research question for you.' 'About the Ruins?' Olmstead said. 'I thought your magazine already ran that story?' 'They did, but I'm doing a little follow up.' She paged through her email as she talked; no paying offers, although there were plenty of blogs who wanted permission to run her photos. None were offering any money. 'I was just wondering, about the fire...' She hesitated. 'Yes?' Olmstead said. Not entirely sure why she was asking, the stringer said, 'I was wondering...is there any truth to the rumors that human remains were found in the wreckage?' 'None at all,' Olmstead said. But she said it too fast. As if she'd been expecting it and had that answer prepared. 'I see,' the stringer said. 'I thought that...well, it's just, I have a lead that there was something unusual or...important about the fire itself, and I was just wondering if there was anything that wasn't already common knowledge?' 'I don't think so. I'm afraid I really have to go, Miss-' 'What about the name Aspidochelone, do you know anything about that?' It was a shot in the dark, but as soon as she said it the stringer knew she'd hit the mark: Olmstead gasped. She covered the phone so that the stringer wouldn't hear, but she was too slow. The stringer's scalp tingled with the excitement of a new lead. 'Doctor?' she said. 'Are you still there?' 'Yes, but I...let me call you back.' Before the stringer could say anything the line went dead. She set the phone down, deciding to give it twenty minutes before she called back. After eighteen, the phone ra