"Hey, Captain." Lucas deepened his voice, mimicking the plastic T-Rex in his right hand. "Do you think we're in trouble?"
"I don't know..." He pitched his voice higher, wiggling a chunky plastic robot in his left hand. "The look on that man's face said it all."
The boy sighed, letting his hands drop into his lap.
Real worry was starting to creep into his chest.
Everything is going to be fine. He thought to himself.
But just as he reached to grab another toy from his pile, something caught his eye.
A faint, glowing cyan-blue light washed across the thick pilothouse windows.
It rippled, reflecting eerily inside a half-empty glass of water resting on the navigation desk. It grabbed his attention immediately.
What…. is….that? the boy wondered, his eyes going wide.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the dark companionway hatch where his dad had just jumped down.
His dad was below deck. So was Mia. He was completely alone up here.
It wouldn't hurt to just go take a quick look, right?
Slowly, Lucas pushed himself up from the floor rug.
He tiptoed toward the heavy exit, wrapping his small hands around the handle. He pushed it open, shivering instantly as a blast of freezing fog rolled into the cabin.
Outside was a completely different world. His vision was immediately swallowed by the thick fog, and somehow, the eerie way the boat's dim lights reflected off the mist made it scarier than ever.
It looked terrifying, but… being just a kid, his curiosity won out and he didn't overthink the danger.
The heavy hinges slowly creaked into the quiet air as he stepped out onto the slick, wet fiberglass deck.
He sniffed the damp air. Nothing but the cold, salty smell of the ocean.
Thick mist swirled all around him. A few yards away, he could make out the silhouette of the crewmate wrestling with the heavy canvas sail.
But that wasn't Lucas's focus.
Where is that light?
His eyes darted left and right through the fog.
There.
Curiosity fully getting the better of him, he marched his little legs to the edge of the deck and peeked over the side.
The cyan-blue glow was radiating from deep underwater. It wasn't blindingly bright, but it was definitely there, shifting beneath the surface.
Unfortunately, through the dark, churning waves, he couldn't tell what was making it. He could only stare and wonder.
What ….could… it be?
Suddenly, the light vanished.
It blinked out, plunging the ocean back into pitch blackness as if there had never been a light down there at all.
Lucas knitted his eyebrows together in confusion. He stood completely still.
For a long, heavy second, there was no sound at all except the wind howling and the freezing waves slapping against the hull.
He slowly scratched his head.
"Ugh," the crewmate grunted, his breath pluming in the freezing air. "There we go."
Lucas turned back. The crewmate had nearly finished hoisting the sail.
He was leaning back with all his weight, yanking hard on a thick, salt-crusted rope and wrapping it tightly around a winch at the base of the mast to lock the heavy canvas into place.
But out of the corner of his eye, Lucas saw something else.
Something…. moving… just outside the boat.
The boy froze. He noticed the thick wall of fog shifting and swirling, peeling apart as if a massive physical presence was displacing it.
It wasn't the wind. But it was too far away to actually see.
Lucas stared harder, squinting into the pitch-black night.
No matter how much he tried, he couldn't see through the heavy darkness and the fog.
He scratched his head twice, thinking, before he remembered something.
There was a pair of binoculars resting on his dad's navigation table.
The boy didn't wait any longer. He rushed back into the quiet pilothouse, grabbed the heavy binoculars off the desk, and hurried back outside.
He pressed the lenses tightly against his eyes, tilting his head a little to the left, and then to the right.
Where is it?
For a second, he couldn't see it anywhere.
Huh? There?
By the heavy, unnatural way the mist rolled off a solid shape in the air, he knew this was wrong. Something was definitely there.
Slowly, the horrifying silhouette became clearer and clearer, as if whatever it was was creeping closer to the boat.
What had seemed like nothing suddenly materialized into an impossibly long, serpentine shadow stretching straight up out of the black ocean, towering silently over the deck.
Through the magnified glass, he could see its wet skin—a dark, bruised mix of gray and deep blue, glistening with seawater.
It looked slick and rubbery, like the slippery skin of a giant fish or a tadpole.
It wasn't long before he realized he didn't need the binoculars to see it anymore. It was already right in front of them.
He slowly lowered the binoculars from his face.
His eyes went incredibly wide. His brain screamed at him to run, but his legs suddenly failed to move. He was utterly paralyzed.
It was right there, looming close enough and dense enough that no one could ever just brush it off as the wind.
It was a neck. An impossibly long, thick neck. The way it moved, bending and swaying gracefully in the dark, reminded him of a plastic toy he used to play with.
It reminded him of a story he had once heard about a beast in a Scottish lake.
The Loch Ness Monster.
Goosebumps erupted across his arms, a wave of freezing chills spiking down his spine. There was no mistaking the shape.
A monster? A dinosaur? A giant snake?
His terrified young brain couldn't process anything else.
As the massive silhouette slowly arched over the deck of the sailboat, descending silently through the fog right behind the crewmate, Lucas managed to lift a trembling arm.
He pointed a single, shaking finger straight at the towering shadow. His entire body shivered violently, his limbs refusing to stay still.
The crewmate, finishing with the heavy sail rope, finally glanced up and saw him standing by the pilothouse.
From his point of view, it just looked like the boy was pointing directly at him.
"What is it, kid?" he shouted over the howling wind.
Lucas couldn't speak. His jaw hung open in pure, paralyzing terror.
Through the dark mist, the crewmate couldn't clearly see the absolute panic etched into the boy's face.
Annoyed, the man let go of the winch and took a step forward.
"I said, what, kid?"
Then, the crewmate felt it.
A heavy, foul gust of warm air blew down the back of his neck, parting the freezing fog directly behind him as something massive shifted its weight.
Shoosh.
For a split second, the freezing air around him suddenly felt hot and damp.
He had no idea it was the heavy, wet breathing of something hovering just inches above him.
Instinctively, the crewmate slowly turned around.
Chills instantly erupted across his entire body.
The towering shape of the creature, looming above him in the dark lighting and the swirling fog, was more terrifying than the scariest movie scene he could have ever imagined.
"AGHH!"
There was no time to react. Before the scream even finished tearing from his throat, massive jaws snapped out of the fog, clamping around his torso and ripping him instantly into the air.
"Ah! Ah!" the crewmate shrieked as he was hoisted backward.
In a desperate, blind panic, his hands scrambled for anything to hold onto and caught the edge of the heavy canvas sail.
He gripped it with all his strength, his knuckles turning stark white as he fought against the monster's agonizing pull.
"Lucas! Lucas!" the man screamed, his voice pitching completely high, his legs kicking wildly in the air. "David, tell—Agh!—"
He didn't even get to finish. Frustrated by the resistance, the creature violently whipped its muscular neck, tearing him from the canvas and slamming him brutally against the fiberglass deck.
The jaws never let go.
"AGHHHH!"
The scream was deafening, filled with unimaginable, bone-shattering pain.
The sickening thud of the impact echoed across the boat, hitting the deck so hard that Lucas felt the heavy vibration travel all the way through the floorboards to his shoes.
Blood splattered across the white fiberglass as the crewmate choked on his own cries.
No more words came out—only breathless, tearful sobs of pure agony.
In the blink of an eye, the towering creature hoisted his broken body back up into the mist and swung him out over the railing.
With a violent splash, both the monster and the man disappeared into the freezing black ocean, leaving the little boy standing completely speechless in the sudden, dead silence.