Mystery of the Deep - A Story in Scotland

The water is black as tar... it is over seven hundred and fifty feet deep... it's a mile wide and over nine miles long.
How do they know? There's no conclusive proof that it even exists, so how do they know?

Scores of experts have searched. They've searched using sonar and submarines at least a dozen times. The bottom is as flat as a football field. If there were a corpse there, or anything else for that matter, they would know.

They can't seem to find it either. Only the intermittent accounts and hazy, imperfect photographs show glimpses. Some have said it might have died and rotted. But that's impossible. The water is forty-two degrees Fahrenheit all year and so full of humic acid that the chemistry of putrefaction cannot take place.

So, the one thing they do know is that it's not dead.

But there is something else that they, those high and mighty experts, do not know: Tomorrow, right here where we are standing they will find undeniable proof that the Loch Ness Monster lives!

Come, sit with me by the water and I will tell you all about it.

Are you OK? You look off-kilter, a little dizzy you say? No doubt the steepness of the path after that heavy meal. Good food, though, no? No one makes a good meal like the old hotel, eh? Take a few deep breaths, the night air will no doubt revive you. Well worth the climb down, though. Look up behind you, there's your snapshot for your front page: Urquhart Castle in the moonlight. The ruin that was the rose of the Scots and the thorn of the English. My family's blood has washed it's stones on more than one occasion.

You're not a swimmer are you? Good. I don't recommend this water. No, that's for sure. Sometimes we get waves over six feet tall, murderous like the Atlantic herself. But look at it now, glistening in the moonlight calm without even a ripple. It's so still and black you can make out each star and constellation in her surface.

Oh, my look at you. Your hands are trembling. Here, let me hold your camera for you, wouldn't want you to drop it. It's a nice piece of equipment you've here. It was surely that after-dinner coffee. I'm a Scot, but there are two things about my land I'll not defend: The coffee at the and the poetry of Sir Walter Scott. If the shaking does not soon subside, we'll drive up to my shop in Inverness and I'll fix you a mild sedative.

He came here once, you know, Sir Walter Scot. He scrawled some off tripe about the place, he did. Charles Darwin came, too, to study the strata. And Aleister Crowley, the famous devil worshipper, too. He lived here for eight years. He claimed he loved the gloom of the place. I fancy he sat by his window, leering down through the mountain pines watching for a face among the waves...

But, more to your question, how do they know the monster is not dead? To give you a good solid answer, we must go back a few years. I am, as I think I told you over dinner, a chemist - oh, not you Linus Pauling breed, no - a mere local apothecary. In 1933 I opened my first shop in Inverness, and to help the revenue along, I built myself a darkroom in the cellar and developed holiday pictures for the tourists.

That was the first year we heard of the monster. Read about it in the Courier, first. A local couple reported a great upheaval on the lock, the thrashing of a whale, they thought. Whale, indeed! I knew what they had seen: the splashing of a swirl of sporting salmon, that is all. Later, others said they saw a monster's head protruding from the water. But as a boy I'd spent many afternoons along the loch and was often frightened by the sudden otter or roe deer out for a swim. I know how the smooth, reflective water makes a duck appear to be a dragon. I also know the cold, deep mystery of the loch, how it works the imagination -- the water black with particles of peat and the wild, primeval round about pregnant with malevolent intent. It was a setting waiting for a story.

You are very quiet, but the shaking is gone. Good! Do interrupt if you have any questions.

It was Saturday the second of December. I had just closed up shop and was balancing the week's receipts when I heard a knock on the front door. I raised the shade and saw a small, tweedy looking man with tinted eyeglasses and a red moustache. I opened and he hurried in. He asked me if I could process some film for him with special care? He had, or so he claimed, a snapshot of the monster. I took the film and told him to come round at ten that night and I would have it ready for him. I hurried down to the dark room and began developing it immediately. As the negative developed I felt a growing excitement. I might be the first person in history to see a picture of the beast! I would be famous!

Then I saw it.

It was nothing more than a picture of the water with the shadow of a cloud. My disappointment began to overcome me and my excitement diminished. Just then, my son knocked on the door.

"Father," he said, "one of my goldfish died."

It was such a good joke, I thought. Lay the dead goldfish on the photographic paper as it printed. But when the man came back to pick up his photo it was no joke at all.

"That's it!" he exclaimed, snatching the picture and pressing a five pound note in my hand. "I thank you in the name of science!"

He rushed off before I could say anything and the next day he sold the photo to the Daily Record, our American style newspaper. The paper printed it immediately with big headlines and pages full of pictures. They were so eager to print it, in fact, they printed my monster upside down and no one noticed. And what of the most obvious flaw in the photo of the "thrashing beast" that the water surrounding the monster was unmoved? Now waves... not even a ripple? No matter, a snapshot like this sold newspapers.

They came around looking for the negative of the photo and I told them that, sadly, my son found his way into the darkroom and upset some chemicals that burned it past recovery.

Meanwhile, the picture caused a sensation. Now everyone believed in monsters. The Times in London ran a lead story by a retired naval commander who claimed that sea serpents and all such animals were giant newts. The Daily Mail engaged a big-game hunter to come out to Loch Ness and track the monster.

Unsuspected and invisible, I, a simple Scot trying to play a prank on a tourist had fooled all of Britain. It was art, what you would not call "media art"; then we called it "impudence."

I had only half succeeded. My protagonist needed some work. The outline was too vague - I'd purposely left the enlarger out of focus. The evidence, the scientists claimed, was inconclusive.

So, anticipating the flock of amateur photographers that would be descending on the loch in the spring, I prepared. I carved my son a little wooden model of a long-necked prehistoric-looking animal with flippers, a plesiosaur. Then, one quiet afternoon I took my boy the canal to let him sail his new toy. The pictures I took that day were good. I made sure there were no telltale landmarks to betray scale. I set those negatives aside.

On April Fool's Day in 1934 a doctor from London interrupted my Sunday dinner with an urgent request. Would I develop certain snapshots he had taken at the loch. He thought he had some snapshots of a gigantic, swimming snake.

"Most certainly," I replied.

In the darkroom I saw Wilson's snapshots. Wilson's monster was a perfectly focused photo of a rather ominous looking floating log. But around the log there were no landmarks. Nothing but glorious water! That was all I needed to put my plan into action, I switched my "monster" for his log and Nessie was born.

Oh, you've seen the photo a thousand times. The long neck, the tiny head and hump backed silhouette against the sparking water. You've seen it on postcards, on the covers of books and on souvenirs all over. I'm sure it made the good doctor a pretty amount of money, pity I don't see any of those royalties!

And well, that was pretty much the end of my days of hoaxing and very nearly the end of Nessie as well! Poor girl, she couldn't compete. There were other monsters in the news, in German, Italy and Russia, real monsters worthy of their headlines. Then the war came.

After the was there was a sort of revival thanks to Constance Whyte's book. Explorers came from all-over to look for Nessie. Unfortunately, this time the brought motion picture cameras and I was ill equipped to help. So, when you raised your question, "How do they know the monster is not dead?" you speak for grieving monster-lovers everywhere.

You're so still, quiet, sitting there on your rock. What is troubling you? You have a nervous, scared look in your eyes and yet you do not move of speak?

Could it be that paralyzing drug I put in your coffee while you were in the bathroom? Most likely, wouldn't you say? Oh no, don't answer. I know it's difficult for you now. You see, I'm old and weak. My son has to do the work at the shop. I'd lose in a fair fight, you understand? I have to cheat.

Tomorrow, right here where we are sitting, there will be proof the Loch Ness monster lives.

I'll have to smash your camera lens, too bad. And I am sorry about it, but it's necessary. Oh, but don't you fret about it, you won't need to worry about any of that. This film I am putting in is my best work. The first few are just local sights, of course, touristy type of pictures. Then, abruptly, night flash photography: The Loch. Something shiny breaking the surface. A gorgeous close up of a monstrous serpent head, mouth open, maddened by the flash of the camera. An upraised flipper, some scales, it's beautiful really. I'll set the camera here, as if it fell in a struggle. Knocked from your hands by the angry beast.

This makes you look back, I know: Tourist Angers Gentle Monster Into Deadly Panic and Drowns. But you'll live on! They'll write about your tragic death in books and papers. The monster lovers of the world will envy you and your unique role in bringing Nessie... Sweet Nessie back to life.

Maybe you'll even meet her down below...