The Catch: A Tale of the Life Sciences Department

THE FOLLOWING IS A CONDENSATION OF A FORTHCOMING NOVELETTE

“And just what the fuck is this?” Will yelped, nearly crashing back into Life Science’s new DecoRad Systems BV Electrical Penetration Graph (EPG) system.

“I know, right?” Brock Heckersley breathed. “I never knew Grandpa to fish -- he was more like a big brain guy -- but the freezer was just full of these little frozen fuckers. Sorry, man.”

“I think we just established that isn’t necessary,” Associate Professor Kalish murmured. The entomologist glanced apprehensively at the scuffed Igloo cooler the burly man had deposited on the dissection table. “How many more you got there?”

“Well, five or six. Thought we oughtta find out just what we’re talking about before we tried to eat ‘em. I’m thinking deep fryer, maybe some Shore Lunch?”

“I’m thinking probably no. By the way, why me?”

“Actually,” Heckersley admitted, “the lady said I ought to talk to Dr. Castro.”

“Yeah, that’s our chief invertebrate zoologist. Professor Castro had to, ah, go home to attend to family business.” ICE’d yanked Javier’s visa two weeks ago in a fit of White House pique. “Assistant Professor Turner is our riparian specialist…” Who, Will now recalled, had turned in his papers after the portrait of pioneering black marine biologist Ernest Everett Just in the department lecture hall transformed into a not-so-flattering study of the longnose gar, again at federal behest.

“You know what?” Will shrugged. “I guess I am the guy. I mean, it looks like it could be almost anything.” He leaned in to peer at the rapidly thawing, vacuum-sealed anomaly on the steel table, then withdrew as it flopped like an undercooked Mrs. Paul’s single-serve.

“Damn,” Heckersley commented.

**

“Tullimonstrum,” Kristakos pronounced blandly, snapping off the tip of his half-wrapped Italian beef. The Shedd Aquarium’s premiere invertebrate specialist flicked a shred of pepper from his lab coat. “Tullimonstrum gregarium, more precisely.”

“Mm,” Associate Professor Kalish nodded, jotting the Latin on a legal pad for later spellcheck. “Classification? Phylum…?

“Incertae sedis.” Kristakos resumed masticating, seemingly bored.

“Problematica? I admit, it looks like something God threw together out of the spare parts bin. You got like a ballpark or anything?”

“Wrigley, though the old Commiskey had a certain nostalgic charm for me.”

“Taxonomically,” Will frowned. Seth Kristakos now appeared vaguely amused.

“Where’d you get this, anyway?” he inquired.

“Garage freezer.”

Kristakos straightened, scowling as if the exertion were a grave imposition.

“Is this AI?” the biologist demanded. “I mean, it’s an astonishing job -- far more detailed and organic than the Field Museum model. If this is some kind of YouTube prank…”

“Wait up. I’m an entomologist, and this doesn’t look like any arthropod I’ve ever seen.”

“Well, you certainly don’t look 310 million years old. You really have never heard of the Tully monster? Moscovian stage of the Pennsylvanian Era, only specimens ever found in the Mazon Creek fossil beds in, I believe, Grundy County. I’m no paleobiologist, but it’s zoologically like nothing else unearthed anywhere on Earth. No one yet has been able to pinpoint any concrete link to other marine organisms. So I repeat, what’s your game?”

“No game, no game,” Will piped. “One of the locals brought me like six or seven specimens.”

Kristakos’ face filled the monitor. “Specimens? Live specimens?”

“Well, this one, anyway. The one in the photo. I can send you some video.”

The scientist fell back in his leather chair. “Lemme process this. These came from where?”

“Garage freezer,” the man across the desk called. “Brock Heckersley here. Found ‘em in Grandpa’s garage freezer. Under a stack of Butch’s Pizzas and a side of beef from the Wapella locker plant…”

Associate Professor Kalish glared over the laptop, and when he returned to his screen, Will found only himself staring back along with the missive “MolluskKing has left the meeting.”

**

“I thought we’d settled on hot honey chicken from the new pop-up on Williams.” Will looked up from his Dell to find Wei in the kitchen doorway, still in her hoodie, displaying a ziplock bag of Tullimonstra. “Because I’m as adventurous as the next Gen-Z…”

“Yeah, just put that back in the freezer, OK?” the bug doctor instructed Professor Zhao. “I didn’t want the guys asking questions. What guys are left.”

Wei’s deadpan expression broke, and she disappeared. When she reemerged, the University’s youngest tenured professor flopped barefoot onto the couch.

“Didn’t know those were actually real,” she commented, foraging for the remote.

**

“Well,” Professor Thomas Skillruud stated. “To what do I owe this pleasure?” His tone indicated that it was anything but. On the Skillruud scale, the now-tieless dress shirt, regulation academic wool slacks, and fleece-lined Dearfoams were the equivalent of Walmart sweats and a wife-beater.

To Will’s astonishment, Ryan Secrest was peddling vowels in the study beyond. Wouldn’t have figured the self-proclaimed premiere Midwest authority on modern American realism for a Wheel Watcher.

“Well, uh, please, come on in,” Skillruud breathed. “I’ve opened a merlot, and I’m fairly sure I have some Milanos somewhere.”

“We don’t want to keep you, Thomas,” Wei assured her senior colleague brightly. Skillruud’s smile widened slightly.

“Nonsense,” he insisted reluctantly. “Please do have at least a glass of wine.”

“We’re heading out to dinner after this, and I’m designated,” Associate Professor Kalish shrugged mightily.

“Thomas,” Wei interrupted, dizzying from the pre-dinner theater. “I was wondering about a work that intrigued me at your New Year’s party. I think it’s in your dining room. Surreal primitivist piece, with a few fantastic creatures thrown in?”

“The Bohrod,” the tidy professor preened. “Well, the faux-Bohrod, I should say. Remarkable forgery, one of my undergrads found it at an estate sale and thought he’d latched onto the find of the century. I call it The River Guardian -- prosaic but fitting.”

“We’ve come across a bit of a puzzle,” Professor Zhao smiled. “I wonder if I might have another peek.”

Skillruud’s curiosity seldom exceeded his pride. “One problem. We had a small mishap last spring. I was entertaining my sister from Connecticut, who imagines herself quite the gourmand, and we had what I can only describe as a flambe-ing incident. My fault, I suppose, for allowing her to stage the presentation on the buffet near the curtains. At any rate, the damages were minor, but the Bohrod -- the fake Bohrod -- sustained significant enough soot damage. Been meaning to have it restored -- Malik offered, but then left on sabbatical, and it wound up orphaned in the basement. You’re welcome, of course…”

“Thanks,” Wei sang as she breezed toward a discreet door off the foyer.

The Bohrod was propped twixt a guest daybed and the knotty pine east wall. Wei plucked the bogus Bohrod from its niche.

As advertised, the landscape was layered and, in a few spots, redacted with soot. Wei handled the framed canvas delicately so as not to further embed smoke particles into the thickly applied green and gold and burnt oranges oils. She mentally reconstructed -- an autumnal study of a reed-lined prairie marsh through which meandered a waning tributary.

She recalled the grey heron and the dragonflies and the groundhog scampering across the painting’s center. Wei tracked to the thankfully clean lower lefthand corner, and located the small, green, incongruous, and blandly but wholly alien creature poised by the grass-filtered stream.

Wei felt a towering presence behind her shoulder, and confirmed Associate Professor Kalish had grabbed chicken tikka masala somewhere between his 10 a.m. survey and 1 p.m. workshop classes.

“Jesus,” Will whispered. “That’s it.”

Thomas’ shadow fell over the pair and the grimy piece. “If you read my Cornfields and Chimeras: The Surreal and Psychosocial in American Regionalist Art, then you might recall that Aaron Bohrod, while a modern realist, delved into symbolic, often eerie elements, similar to Charles Burchfield’s psychological landscapes.”

“Bohrod was an Illinois artist?” she prodded.

“Born in Chicago -- one of his more popular works was Fishing from the Pier, Lincoln Park, Chicago, 1935. Oh, and of course, Bohrod contributed art to Farrar and Rinehart’s Rivers of America book series, specifically illustrating The Illinois in 1940s. His work took a more surreal turn after his wartime stint sketching soldiers in the South Pacific.

“It might not have been unusual for Bohrod to have returned to the Illinois River region after the war, out of a desire for retrosensus or revernost.” Will’s stomach rumbled plaintively, but Thomas was too deep into italicized neologisms to notice. “But as I said, this is merely a clever pastiche of Bohrod’s work. Professor Zhao, what is it that intrigues you so?”

Wei prepared to dissemble, but Will excitedly briefed his partner’s colleague.

“Mmm,” Thomas finally concluded, perched on the carpeted bottom step directly in their path of escape. “I was in the draft stage of Cornfields and Chimeras when I came across this piece, and before I discredited it, I’d constructed an allegoral context for Bohrod’s inclusion of what I deemed ‘The Guardian.’ This serpentine, stalk-eyed, finned chimera lurking in the marshy periphery was a manifestation of regional mythopoeia -- a sort of agrarian demon conjured from the collective unconscious of Midwest labor culture. A psychosocial metaphor for the unseen forces that shape rural identity.” Professor Skillruud sighed, then glanced up hopefully. “You know, our artist could well have read about this Scully Monster--”

“Tully Monster,” Will offered.

“I suppose not,” Thomas said. I’ll admit, I so wanted this to be a genuine Bohrod more than my excitable undergrad. To be young again.”

“I feel you,” Will muttered.

**

“I got to thinking about our discussion this afternoon,” Kristakos rumbled through the Prius’ speakers as Will squinted at and then dismissed another county crossroads. “Your friend’s name rang a bell after I rung off, and I went back to the archives. Owen Heckersley? That the deceased?”

Wei straightened in her seat. “You knew him?”

“Only by reputation. You familiar with the Marshall Plan?”

“The U.S. program to rebuild Europe after World War II,” Will supplied. “History Channel,” he informed Wei, who’d pulled the trigger on second-tier cable following the latest pay freeze.

“What you may not know is, funds from the Marshall Plan were used to finance research at the Naples Zoological Station into the brain of the octopus, in the late ‘40s. The world was merely beginning to plumb the potential of computer science, and a group of Italians, Brits, and Americans, including Owen Heckersley, hoped the complex nervous system and reputed intelligence of the octopus would point the way to processing and storing data. And, it’s rumored, to additional military applications.”

“Heckersley?”

“Dr. Heckersely was a virtual polyglot -- had his toes in marine zoology, information technology, and the burgeoning field of genetic science years before the discovery of DNA double-helix in 1953. He was also highly erratic, and, it’s rumored, was quietly retired from the team after suggesting ways to weaponize cephalopod intelligence.”

Will dodged something low and furry scuttling past his headlights. “Is that what this is? The Tully Monster? Some kind of genetically engineered octopus-fish-worm hybrid?”

The dashboard fell silent, and Associate Professor Kalish feared he’d been shunned by the Shedd for the second time that day.

“Let’s just look rationally at what we have,” Kristakos resumed patiently, and Will felt, a bit hurtfully. “You claim to have several live specimens of a Pennsylvanian Era organism found to date only in North Central Illinois. Now, the Mazon Creek region theoretically is connected to yours by underground aquifers, potentially even subterranean rivers. Lake Vostok in Antarctica is a subglacial lake that was sealed off for millions of years, fed by ancient groundwater and ice melt. Deep aquifers in Alberta, Canada, have shown microbial communities and water chemistry shaped by ancient conditions.

“Now, what if a population of Tullimonstra were somehow sequestered in such an ecosystem, surviving the disappearance of global oceans and extinction events? The Illinois Basin has several notable fault systems, including the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Low-magnitude earthquakes have occurred sporadically in Central Illinois in recent years, some linked to deep subsurface adjustments possibly caused by glacial rebound, fluid migration, or even mining or fracking. Let’s say we have a fracture in the sedimentary layers separating our theoretical underground sea from Dr. Heckersley’s pond. Are you following me? At all?”

Will accelerated just a tad too forcefully as he spotted the turnoff.

**

“Little surprised you called,” Brock Heckersley confessed as Will locked the Prius with a loud beep that pierced the inky rural night. Brock eyed Wei warily. “Hi.”

“This is Dr. Zhao -- she’s with the University’s art department.”

The heir nodded slowly. “Uh, okay. Well, let’s go.”

**

“Pardon the clutter,” Brock muttered as he flipped the lights. Will had not seen such “clutter” since Wei had redlined their second-tier cable. Stacks of scientific journals, banded mail separated by debtor and collector, and a couch-side cache of other periodicals that signaled just how lonely it could get for a widowed polyglot out on the rural route.

“He had some kind of federal government pension and taught a few courses at the junior college in the ‘60s,” Owen Heckersley’s grandson explained as he subtly kicked the OG porn under the sofa. “Grandpa kind of isolated himself after Grams died in 2015, but we tried to check in whenever we could. The last 10 years, you couldn’t really talk to Grandpa much. Plus, the fridge was filled, he kept up the front lawn, and you can see, he had Roku.”

Wei edged around a stack of TV Guides and Smithsonians and inspected the dusty Roku stick wired into a bulky once-bleeding edge widescreen set. “The remote over there? The TV and the Roku?”

Brock rummaged through an eclectic morass on a lamp table and emerged with a remote roughly the size of a brick and its Butterfinger-sized companion. Juggling the two, he activated first the set and then the streaming portal.

“YouTube,” the arts professor directed. Within fumbling minutes, Brock brought up a string of videos with titles such as “Ten Monsters of the Deep You WISH Didn’t Exist,” and “Did Alien Visitors Plant the Seeds of Terrestrial Life?”

“YouTube uses individual watch history to curate content across devices and platforms,” Wei explained. “It’s algorithms consider what type of content you prefer.” She smiled up at Will. “Am I right, Professor Kalish?”

Associate Professor Kalish engaged himself momentarily with a dogeared issue of the Swiss Journal of Paleontology.

“The usual click-bait cryptozoology and pop biology,” Professor Zhao continued, scrolling right. “Plus a lot more esoteric, technical stuff. Zoological biochemistry focusing on marine species, morphological and genetic development, the life stages of insects, fish, and amphibians.”

Will’s head emerged sharply from the scintillating prehistorical journal. Then he displayed the magazine to Wei, who merely nodded.

“Mr. Heckersley. That door over there lead to the basement?”

“No basement. Too much flooding, plus the original owner apparently didn’t want to fork out the cost.”

“Why is there a padlock?”

Brock shrugged. “I dunno. Like I said -- Grandpa was a few flakes short of breakfast the last few years, and its pretty isolated out here especially at night. Paranoia, I guess.”

“Any idea where the key might be?”

Heckersley’s brow wrinkled, and he disappeared into the next room. Another switch clicked, and Will spotted a Nixon-era avocado fridge. Brock was back in a few moments. Car key on the hook by the door, along with a couple Brinks keys which by process of no shed or cellar…”

Wei rejoined Will as Brock made short work of the padlock and pulled the door open. A cautious reach-around later, and the room was flooded in blue light.

“Grow lights,” Brock moaned. “Looks like I know how he kept the fridge full… Holy fuck.”

Will pushed past and pulled up short. A steel rack on the furthest wall of the former bedroom was lined with aquariums in which finned creatures coasted and flitted and raked the sediments at the bottom of each tank with a seemingly toothed “trunk.” Wei moved forward and stared at the tank. Will jumped as a pair of stalked eyes met hers. Professor Zhao grinned back and moved on to a larger, possibly 10-by-5-foot tank on the adjacent wall.

The academic awe was gone as she turned back to her partner. The Swiss Journal hung butterflied from his fingers. “The article. What is it?”

“’The Primordial Soup: The Chemical Formulae of Permian and Devonian Oceans.’” Will looked to Brock, who might well have just heard the perfect meatloaf recipe to keep your man happy. His eyes strayed toward the shelves of canisters and tubes and beakers and familiar instruments behind the younger Heckersley.

Then Brock’s eyes trained on the giant padlocked tank and the long black shape rustling in the slightly hazy waters beneath a school of what looked to be koi. A pair of emotionless eyes turned toward the man, and its proboscis withdrew from the presumably nutrient-rich sand. Brock’s own wide blue eyes locked, and he knelt shakily. He raised a trembling hand to the mineral-crusted glass.

The stalks swayed slightly as the proboscis snatched a plump carp and shoved it writhing into a fold at the base of the appendage.

An in what seemed an almost genial gesture, a leathery-slick palm met Brock’s across the half-inch pane. The human fell back on his ass, where he remained pale and silent for several minutes. Then, the scientist’s grandson rose, grunting.

“You folks excuse me, I gotta get something outta the truck,” he announced, almost inaudibly, and vanished heavily up the steps.

It being downstate Illinois, there was but one thing Brock Heckersley might be retrieving from the truck. Will and Wei nonetheless followed Brock outside and pointed the Prius back toward Millington. There were, at some point, some things best left in the Carboniferous Era.