Unknown to Science

The sea was a suggestion, shallow shadows of what had once been great depth. If the vision was real, Janice would have drowned in blood as much as water.

A Dunkleosteus terrelli, 15 feet long with a bony mask for a face, sank the points of its jagged jaw into the gills of a smaller fish—another Dunkleosteus. In the late Devonian age, the mighty armored fish had no predators except its own kind.

The smaller Dunkleosteus writhed. Janice crouched, looking from below, focused on the greasy gleam of the internal organs as they were exposed to the sea. The liver would not fossilize, nor the dark-light sweep of skin, the fins like swords. Only the face plating and fanged jaw. No one knew what the rest of the fish looked like. No one except Janice and Brooke.

As the smaller Dunky died, the vision flickered, fading in favor of Iowa fields with cornstalks broken and dead, left to hold soil over the winter. This place had not been a sea for 375 million years.

Janice looked down at her sketches, boxy shapes with tiny eyes. The tail of the smaller one wasn’t quite right. She should watch from a different angle this time.

Janice turned to the petite woman standing next to her. “Play it again?”

Brooke stomped her feet on frozen ground. “Janice, it’s cold.”

“Bracing,” Janice corrected. “And I’m almost done. Just one more? If that journal is finally going to publish the revised size estimates, I want to step in with proper organ placement.”

Janice had been a proponent of the “Chunky Dunky” theory long before it was fashionable, arguing for a fish the size of an SUV, not a school bus. But people liked their monsters monstrous.

(A real Megalodon was 60 feet at most; in the movies, she was 75. Janice had seen a Megalodon once, when Brooke called one forth on a vacation to South Carolina. It had been fighting to the death with a prehistoric sperm whale.)

Brooke didn’t answer, but a moment later, the air began to flow like water, and the smaller Dunkleosteus began, once again, to die.

It had died in terror. If not, they wouldn’t be able to see it. Deep emotions etched themselves into the universe, the agony of attack and death staining time like blood. Brooke, with her strange talent, was like a telepathic luminol, revealing what passion had passed here years before.

As Janice ducked beneath the sea again, she was aware of Brooke shivering. “I’ll take you somewhere warm,” Janice promised. “Maybe South Dakota this summer.”

“Right. Where the mosasaurs are.” Brooke’s voice was pinched. “You only take me places you want to use me.”

The smaller Dunky’s tail stirred eddies in the ocean with its frantic movements. Janice wished, not for the first time, that hauntings had pause buttons. “There are fossils everywhere.”

“Don’t be disingenuous.” Janice could hear Brooke blowing on her hands, could see the white puffs of her breath through the phantom sea. “You wouldn’t have a career without me. You wouldn’t have a career without cheating.”

Janice stood up abruptly. Part of her mind rebelled, making her want to duck out of the way of struggling monsters. Her head would fit neatly inside the devouring jaws of the larger Dunkleosteus. “This isn’t cheating.”

“If you won’t tell your colleagues about it, then that’s exactly what it is.”

“Brooke, I can’t be associated with pseudoscience.”

Brooke waved a hand at the phantom ocean. “Does that look like pseudoscience to you?”

“Look, we’ve been over this.” Janice returned to her sketching. “You’ve probably contributed more to paleontology than anyone in history.”

“But nobody knows that. You’re so ashamed of me. Afraid I’ll visit your lab and somebody will ask me to read their palm.”

The vision of the ocean flickered over the barren field. Janice’s pencil went astray on the paper. “Brooke, no. Don’t turn it off. Hey!” She tried to make her voice gentle rather than frightened. “What do you want?”

Brooke had her arms wrapped tight around her belly. “I want you to want me, not need me.”

“Of course I want you.”

“No. You want that.” Brooke nodded at the Dunky, whose own belly was being torn open.

Janice opened her mouth, but her reply was forestalled. There was a strangeness to the air, and it came to her that it was silence. The crows had stopped calling.

“Wait, what’s that?” Janice asked. “That wasn’t there before.” She ducked around the struggling fish, chasing a glimpse of—something.

“We’re having a serious talk!” Brooke said.

“We can have it in a minute. What was that? Bring it back.” Janice started sketching madly on a new page. Four legs, a tail. A flash of teeth, yellowed.

Brooke’s voice was hesitant now. “Janice, there was something different about that one.”

“Just name your fucking price!” How many claws were on the back feet? And were those feathers? The creature dashed away from Janice, darting between the bodies of monstrous fish. She couldn’t tell if it was swimming or—or somehow climbing.

“I don’t know if I can bring it back, is what I’m saying.”

“What do you want?”

Brooke made some aggravated noise. “I want you to look beyond all this death for once. I’m alive, Janice. I want to be appreciated while I’m still here.”

Janice turned the page on her sketchbook. Was it four legs, or were two of them flippers? “Look, fine. I’ll take you to a faculty party, all right? Say we’re—we’re dating.”

The Dunkies flickered again and went out, the smaller fish having died, half-eaten.

Janice, panting, looked at Brooke, shivering amid trampled corn stalks. Brooke seemed to wince—probably the headache she got from producing too many replays. But the ocean immediately reappeared, with the smaller Dunky whole again. And nothing else. The sea was otherwise empty.

“What did you do?” Janice asked.

Brooke had grown as pale as the winter sky. She spoke with the sort of flat affect that presaged panic. “It’s—there are two kinds of hauntings. What I show you are residual hauntings, recordings. There’s no fish there anymore. It’s like—like watching a movie. Those actors aren’t in your living room, they’re just images. But there are also active hauntings. Intelligent. They’re attracted to emotion. Fear, anger. Our fear and anger.”

“Serendipity, I guess,” Janice said, almost giddy. “Blind luck we were having an argument!”

“Janice, you don’t understand. That—whatever it was—could have been from anywhere, anytime. Ocean, land, the top of Mount Everest, for all I know. I have no idea where the fossils would be, or if it’s even old enough to fossilize.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s novel! Unknown to science. Do you know how rare that is?” Janice began walking boldly through the phantom sea in a grid pattern, watching amid the torn flesh for a glimpse of claws. Janice laughed. “Brooke, you know me, now that I know it exists, I have to find it!”

Brooke looked wary. “Yeah, well, now it knows you exist. Something’s finally watching you back.”

#

To Janice’s great disappointment, they had to call off the search when Brooke’s headache overwhelmed her. In the warmth of her office, Janice made sketches until the side of her finger was flat and stained with graphite. The sun sank behind campus buildings until her office was shades of gray, like the maddeningly unfinishable drawings.

As a little girl, Janice had made up monsters with pink crayon wings, massive jaws, as many legs as she liked. But whatever this creature had been, it had to follow natural rules. So if she’d really seen feathers, could she also have seen flippers? And surely not so many teeth?

There was a thud from beyond Janice’s closed office door. She didn’t normally keep herself shut away from the rest of her lab, in case her graduate students needed her to explain something. But she couldn’t let anyone see what she was working on. Not yet.

Another thud came, closer this time. It didn’t sound like a dropped object—more like someone had run into a piece of furniture and made it jump along the floor.

Janice nudged her computer mouse, and the time came up on the screen: nearly 8:00. Normally, there weren’t any students left by this point on a Sunday night. Monday morning would come soon enough.

A thump right against Janice’s door made her jump. Her pencil rolled off the desk and into the shadows below.

“Hello?” Janice called.

There was no answer, but somehow the lab didn’t feel quite empty. Someone should do a study on that, Janice thought as she switched on the overhead light, blinking as gray turned to crisp colors. Could a subject tell if there was an unseen person in the next room? Probably no self-respecting journal would publish it.

Janice opened her office door to find the lab deserted, lights on but lamps off, empty chairs pushed under long tables, fossils carefully stowed. All the screens in the room were dark except one. A log-in box glowed on a corner computer, as if someone had recently bumped the mouse.

Janice could hear a faint conversation in the next lab over, but otherwise everything was quiet. There was no sign of anything having fallen on the floor.

A slight skittering noise caught Janice’s attention, the sound of something moving in an imperfect rhythm, a swish against the wall that sounded like—feathers.

Of course, it couldn’t be. Brooke was five miles away in her apartment. A milkshake and a movie were her Sunday night routine, which meant whatever was in Janice’s lab could not be one of Brooke’s creatures, could not be the thing Janice had glimpsed this afternoon in the snow.

Except Brooke had said this ghost was different.

Janice darted back into her office for her sketchbook, and knocked into her rolling chair, sending it spinning into the wall. It dawned on her, as she rubbed her leg where she would likely bruise, that if this thing was making noise, it had to be real. Material. Maybe even photographable. Janice abandoned her sketchbook for her phone, only then realizing how badly her hands were shaking.

The lab had fallen silent again. Janice anxiously watched through her phone screen as she swept the camera around the room in a grid pattern. Nothing moved, and she was struck by the thought of someone walking in and finding her taping an empty lab. She’d have to say there was a mouse.

Maybe there was a mouse. Maybe—

A tearing pain erupted on Janice’s calf and an arc of blood spattered across the floor. Janice dropped her phone as she collided with one of the chairs. Something darted across a table and disappeared again. Not a mouse.

Janice staggered toward the sink and grabbed a wad of paper towels to press against her leg. A shallow gash had ripped her open from knee to ankle. Blood was collecting in her shoe.

Hesitantly, Janice inched forward until she could snatch her phone from the floor. She switched off the video and dialed as she backed toward the door.

“It’s here at the lab,” Janice said, as soon as Brooke answered.

“What is?” Brooke sounded miffed about her movie and milkshake being interrupted.

“The thing, the thing you said was watching me. Unknown to science, that thing. And it got me, I think with its claws. You didn’t tell me it could do that!”

“What?”

“Brooke, just get here. I need you.” Blood had soaked through the paper towels now, staining Janice’s hand.

“What building is your lab in?”

“Mason, on Grant Road. You’re five minutes away. Park anywhere, it’s Sunday. Just hurry.”

Janice was leaving a trail of blood along the floor, bright red across the graying linoleum. She wondered if the creature could smell it, taste it.

Did it know it didn’t need to eat anymore?

Janice could still hear voices in the next lab, and occasional laughter. In the corner, the login box vanished, the screen going dark. The door to the hall was near. Janice could dash for it, and probably make it. But as real as this thing was, it was also unreal. What if there was no way to trap it behind a closed door?

Janice imagined herself limping down the hall, bloody and scared, raving about a ghost monster in her lab, warning everyone to flee the building. It would be the end of the reputation she’d worked so hard for. And besides—someone else might get a good look at this thing.

Janice raised her phone with her less bloody hand, switching the camera back on. She started on her grid-pattern scanning again, above and below the tables. There was no sign of anything, living or dead. Then Janice’s office door slowly swung open, and she heard a click of claws on the floor.

Janice crept forward as quietly as she could, coming around a table where she could see into her office. The overhead light was still shining. Her chair was not where she’d left it, resting now against the window.

Still, the camera showed nothing. Janice looked above it—nothing. A thump came from behind her, and Janice whirled around.

A wet sound followed, not like the splash of water, but the squelch of something solid becoming liquid. Then there came a low, mournful moaning, the sort of sound Janice had imagined Brooke’s dying animals might make if the hauntings had sound.

As Janice crept closer to the hall door, she could see blood on the floor. Only Janice hadn’t made it over this far after she’d been injured. And this was so much blood, a small lake flowing under the door, pulsing in a slowing rhythm.

Janice shoved the door open, falling to her knees beside a body, and it wasn’t a student, it wasn’t a colleague, it was Brooke, on her back, her belly open. Her exposed liver looked garish in the hallway lights.

“No,” Janice gasped. “No, no, no.” She brought her phone up, clicking out of the camera app to dial 911.

Brooke was looking up at the ceiling. Her eyes blinked twice, but nothing came from her mouth except that moaning noise. There were bloody footprints on the floor beside her: three-toed, two-clawed.

Another professor ran up to them, dropping to his knees, smearing some of the footprints.

“Back up!” Janice hissed, over the sound of the phone ringing in her ear.

The professor looked at her with wide, staring eyes. “What did this?”

“I don’t know,” Janice said. “Oh, god, I’ll never—” She stared down at Brooke’s now sightless eyes and realized she too had been blinded.

Janice’s fingers twitched and she cut off the call. From her lab came a crashing sound and Janice staggered toward it.

Inside the lab, chairs were spinning and log-in boxes blinking. Lamps had fallen to the floor. Janice raised her hands, scanning with her phone camera. “You can make it up to me,” she pleaded. “One shot, that’s all I need. Don’t you want to be famous?”

A creeping feeling descended down Janice’s spine, some old instinct maybe, something humans had never evolved out of. It made her want to run, or at least find some protection for her soft abdomen, unshielded by ribs, a weakness traded millions of years ago for the blessing of bipedalism.

There was a flash of something—feathers and feet. It wasn’t enough. Janice moved forward, camera first.

The door to the lab burst open behind her, admitting police officers with guns drawn. Someone took Janice’s arm and she was pulled away. The still-rolling camera recorded strangely angled shots: Brooke’s shoulder and her cheek with a spot of blood on it. The wheels of the ambulance gurney. Pale circles on the walls made by cops’ flashlights. It taped the sound of boots on Janice’s office floor, the frantic voices of her colleagues, the unhurried cadence of paramedics with no one to save.

There were no skittering noises. No three-toed feet. Not a flash of feathers. When the police assured Janice that whatever animal had gotten into the building must have found its way out again, she sobbed.