The Researchers

Had a grand day yesterday driving around, hitting yard sales, picnicking at a spot we went to last summer on our second or third date and watched a teeny tiny inchworm living up to its name in terms of movement, but was really "shorter than a centimeter" worm. It was cute. Probably devours entire forests and leaves the world stripped, but so do human beings, so who am I to judge? 

Anyhow…let’s meet some new folks.

***

"Found another one!" Eva Stern skimmed the news report on her computer monitor as she called out the find to her mentor, Liam Devereux.

Liam replied without taking his eyes from the database he was compiling. "Where this time?"

"Toronto, in High Park in the middle of the day. No witnesses, but friends say the couple involved were planning a romantic afternoon, so presumably they were in a secluded spot. The bodies, or what was left of them, were found by a group of teenagers after school." She grimaced. "Nice end to your day. Yack." Eva hadn’t actually seen any bodies or even any pictures of the bodies in all the articles she and Liam had gathered, but he had read her parts of the autopsy reports he had been able to wangle from his sources. Her imagination filled in the rest and she found it all to easy to picture what it would be like to come across such horror.

"The daytime attack fits the pattern," said Liam. "But this is the first one in a city, or even in any really large population. You’d think if they were moving in from the country, there’d be reports from Oshawa or Mississauga or Thornhill first. Look for anything from the suburbs–try Ajax and Oshawa, out that way first. It’s hard to imagine they’d have gone from Nova Scotia to Toronto without turning up somewhere in between on the way." He added information to the database. "Two victims this time?"

"Yes. That’s new, too, isn’t it? The only other one that mentioned more than one victim was that school in Nova Scotia where they got one of the kids that found the first body." She bookmarked the page and added it to her folder of "attacks by species unknown", which was part of the research project. "What do you think it means?"

Liam saved the new data. "It could mean they’re getting bolder, or maybe there are more of them. Whatever they are."

They were still no closer to knowing what the creatures were which wreaked such havoc in such random locales. So far, there were only single reports from any particular area, which might mean the animals were moving away from the initial sites, but there was no clear pattern to say which direction they were heading.

From one of the stories they had gathered so far, the oldest report came from an obscure village on the coast of Massachusetts. An old man, living in a former lighthouse on a rock in the ocean, hadn’t come to the mainland for more than two weeks. Finally, a fisherman from the village had gone across to the tiny island and had made the grisly discovery. The villagers agreed he must have died and his body eaten by rats, or crabs or seagulls, or a combination of all three. It was sad, but not entirely unprecedented.

Liam had happened on the story by chance, and found enough in it to warrant further digging. He had added it to stories from Nova Scotia, a farm in Pennsylvania, an orange grove in Florida, and campers near Banff, Alberta. Now Toronto. No pattern. No obvious connection. No rhyme or reason and no trace of the creatures behind the attacks.  Liam’s goal was to find out what was behind the savage maulings and how to stop them. No one else seemed to have noticed the similarities, which he found odd. None of the news reports suggested a link, and he had been reluctant to point it out, in case he was wildly wrong. But now that they had turned up in a big city, perhaps he should speak up.

***

There we are for today. And it’s pouring down rain out there. Well, we sure need it, and with luck, it’ll be the kind that sinks into the ground instead of running off. The ground is getting very dry since we had so little snow this year to melt into the ground in the spring. People don’t realize how much the melting snow replenishes the ground water and aquifers. And the rain should help the golf greens!