Chapter 4. Photographic Evidence
If Lori Bradshaw hadn’t been on the scene, no one would have known that something strange was happening. Lori was the photographer for the Gazelles Gazette, the weekly newspaper of Lone Tree High School. As the photographer, it was Lori’s mission to capture some event—any event—happening at the school that might look educational.
That afternoon, she had been outside with Mrs. Nielsbohr’s science class. The students were collecting various plant and insect life from Lake Maebiewahnapoopie. Lori snapped pictures of scientists at work: Michael Dewey holding a dragonfly in a threatening way in front of Jennifer Thompson’s nose, Jennifer Thompson wrapping seaweed around Michael Dewey’s head, and Mrs. Nielsbohr standing at the lakeside with a look of cool scientific rationality upon her face, as if she had just eaten a lemon.
This was Lori’s usual fare as the photographer for the school paper. She often felt like an anthropologist, studying another culture. The students that surrounded her didn’t have animal bones pierced through their noses, like some ancient tribe in the National Geographic magazine, but in every other way they seemed like people who might have evolved on a different continent. Lori was a teenager herself, of course, but she must have been missing some basic teenager gene. The students at Lone Tree High would do whatever they would do, little of it seeming to befit something called “public education,” and Lori would record it for posterity.
Her photographs were the hit of the paper, usually, perhaps because the students didn’t like to read.
Lori had no idea, of course, how much of a splash her current photographs would make. It wasn’t Michael Dewey or Jennifer Thompson that people would be looking at, though: it would be the objects in the background that caught people’s attention. The faces rising up out of the lake.
Lori didn’t notice anything unusual about the photographs until she got back to her empty journalism classroom and started processing them at the computer. But she noticed something odd about them as soon as she saw the first one on her screen.
The first photograph was the one that featured the dragonfly. There was Michael Dewey, with his fingers in Jennifer Thompson’s face. That wasn’t new. But what Lori hadn’t noticed before was the lake behind them. She could see something breaking the surface of the water, right there between Michael’s big head and Jennifer’s carefully hair sprayed bangs. It looked for all the world like stones rising up out of shallow water, but Lori knew that wasn’t possible: the lake was terribly deep. Deep enough that when the mayor had sunk his boat last month during his Labor Day outing, it had never been recovered. They had called in National Guard divers to go down and get a rope on it and winch it to the surface, but they hadn’t been able to reach the bottom of the lake and had given up. Lori herself had covered the story.
She clicked on the next photograph. It was the one with the seaweed forming a slimy halo on Michael Dewey’s head. The two high school students were in somewhat different poses, but this photograph, too, featured the stones—or whatever they were— rising up from the lake. In this shot, however, something seemed different. She clicked on the first photo again and arranged the two side-by-side on the screen to compare them. Yes, something was different. In the first photo, there were five of the stones. In the second photo, there were six.
Lori enlarged the second photo, until it took up the entire screen. The stones appeared larger, of course, but what struck Lori was how regularly shaped they were. Surely logs, or garbage bags, or whatever else might be floating in the lake, would look more…random…than these looked. She selected just the area of the photograph that held the lake-borne objects, and stretched it to fill the screen.
When she did, Lori sat back in awe. The image was a little blurry at this level of enlargement. No fine detail was present. But she didn’t need any fine detail to see that the objects weren’t rocks, and they weren’t some debris that happened to be floating along as she snapped the picture. These were faces looking back at her. Broad-nosed faces with wide eyes, much bigger than human faces. Most of the faces rose above the water at about chin level, though the one in front revealed a thick neck and just a hint of broad, broad shoulders. One face on the left revealed just the top of the head down to the eyes looking out over the water. And look! Behind that one was a seventh object, surely another head, just breaking the surface.
It was the eyes, though, that got her. The eyes of that first creature, especially. Where some of the creatures were looking slightly away, that one in front seemed to be staring right at her. For a moment, as she looked back at him, she felt pinned to her chair.
Lori jumped an inch out of her seat when the bell rang, releasing the creature’s hold on her. She shuddered a bit, then quickly clicked the photographs off the screen. In a few seconds, a group of students would be wading into the room, followed by Mr. Thorndyke, her journalism teacher. She didn’t want to share her find with them. Not yet. They would see it soon enough, when it appeared in the paper.