Winchester-Nabu Detective Agency Year Three: Case File No. 25-129
AMBER LOVE 04-NOV-2019 Catch up on Year One and previous Year Two cases at the Winchester-Nabu Detective Agency. We are in YEAR THREE!
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Where We Left Off:
Gus captured Sgt. Burrows twice and was forced to release him. The question remains, why has Sgt. Burrows been outside his usual neighborhood?
Beyond Atlantis:
I try to live by and encourage a basic housekeeping guideline: if you want to bring something in then something else has to go. It’s not perfect. It works maybe 5% of the time and that’s if you’re being kind and accounting for the digested food and used cat litter we dispose of every day. Otherwise, the humans of the Winchester-Nabu Detective Agency tend to “collect” — a more polite way of saying hoard.
We’re not at the level where we need an intervention (yet) except maybe for the cellar and the garage (aka the hangar). I don’t go in the cellar unless it’s an emergency. I’m used to the weekly hauls or vocalized disappointments from the bargain department stores. These stores are “new” to our area comparatively speaking when you think about how long we’ve lived here. There’s novelty to being able to drive five miles and buy shit we don’t desperately need. I’m no angel. I have more clothes than I actually wear (thanks, constantly changing weight!). But I admit to being sentimental about some things. I have bins of clothes that are simply cool so I haven’t donated them regardless of the size Small on the labels.
Why am I explaining about our shopping habits? you ask.
One day a different refrigerator was delivered. Notice I said different, not new. The Grumpy Old Man has an even older friend who is downsizing from his mansion (*insert eyeroll*) now that he’s old-old. He’s generously unloaded a patio table and chairs we don’t need, folding chairs which I can actually use, and apparently this particular grimy refrigerator on a trailer. For some reason, this fridge was considered better than the one that’s inside the hangar. I don’t know why. At least the one inside the hangar doesn’t appear to have had a body inside.
Let that sink in. Look at the photos. See for yourself.
Gus approached the flatbed trailer and began to sniff around as he always does even when it hasn’t been moved in days. The fridge was on top of some plywood which had a variety of stains. It looked like spin-art I used to make at carnivals that had been used as toilet paper by a Vegas junkie. It brought back memories then twisted them into something Hunter S. Thompson might’ve shit out.
“Nope. Not normal.” Gus glided his snout up the edge of the fridge door, also stained. Less variety of colors though.
This fridge had four cargo straps tying it down. I don’t know why it bothered me that they didn’t match. I guess that thought was a momentary distraction from the rest of the scene for my sensitive brain.
Gus wanted me to open the appliance and see what was inside. It’s like he’s never seen a horror movie before — or Se7en. Actually, to my knowledge he hasn’t seen anything like that although he does have his own room with a TV and a Roku. Saying I backed away and refused is putting it mildly. I may have blacked out while running away screaming. Who’s to say? There’s no surveillance footage of it.
At some point, my brain clicked back on to reality and I was calling up to Oliver on the observation deck. He stuck his head through the railing and told me to absolutely not open the mysterious new refrigerator. That is, unless I suited up with proper scene of the crime gear like gloves, coveralls, and a mask knowing something putrefied may ooze out of it. Jeez, I did not want to do the gross work. Why was the butler off during the weekdays?
I guess no one else was going to do it. I’ve watched enough episodes of Bones, Criminal Minds, and Silent Witness to get the general idea of how things are done. Try not to step in any goo or leave your own fingerprints. Don’t bring in contaminates that could be confused for what’s really supposed to be examined. Well, this is not like on TV. I don’t have a special SOCO suit. I don’t even have a gas spectrometer. What I did have was a decomposing corpse tumbling out onto the bed of the trailer.
This was no ordinary corpse. You wouldn’t see such a thing on any of those TV shows. There were no bones. The figure was somehow flayed (is that the proper butcher word?) and stuffed inside. It was also not human. That was easy enough to tell from the skin and meat, but also from the unusual orangish-red color of the blood. Human blood goes through stages. Anyone with a menstrual cycle can confirm that. It can be maraschino cherry red, black cherry red, brownish-red, pink, or mostly thick brown or dark. If it’s blackish, you probably have a sick human on your hands with liver failure.
It is possible that this body was once a human and had been transformed. We’ve shared our stories of the kitsune in the neighborhood. It’s a sign that shapeshifters are among us. Maybe you have to give it some thought: if a werewolf, for example, dies in its wolf form would it stay that way or revert back to its human form?
Whatever this creature was, it was decomposing at a rapid rate. Over a couple of hours, it lost so much cellular stability that it had become gooey. By that evening it was a gelatinous black blob with no semblance of once being a body. It was the consistency of a jellyfish. The smell — let’s just say that was worse than a jellyfish.
Before you think Leviathan! It’s definitely Leviathan! let’s pause and breathe (preferably fresh air). I haven’t done enough research on those to know if they would have a bony skeletal structure or cartilage or invertebrate like a squid. The imagery out there varies making leviathan monsters look like anything from water dragons to whales to tentacled (or sucker-armed) creatures and some even like Godzilla. *Fun fact: an octopus has arms not tentacles.
An easy way to spot the difference is that arms have suckers along their entire length, while tentacles only have suckers at the tip. — National Aquarium aqua.org
I did not see any suckers on this body; we can’t rule out something in the leviathan family/genus/species since there’s hardly any information out there about them. I think Supernatural took a whole lot of license with their leviathan just as did with witches, angels, and other beings. I did find an interesting video about the leviathan history in folklore and there’s tinge about pop culture (a reference to The Phantom Menace? I must have blocked out that whole movie.) I had never heard of the Bloop before watching that video. It’s more about a sound than a monster of origin.
Oliver felt the need to call a meeting as soon as I was done with the necropsy. You can undoubtedly picture in your head the look I gave him. Oh no. I needed a shower. I needed ten showers. I needed a Silkwood shower. That movie traumatized me, by the way, as a child of the 70’s and 80’s terrified of nuclear war and energy. Eventually, I was back in comfortable pajamas with my hair wrapped in a towel.
Gus still managed to eat, his appetite had not waned for a single moment. He always likes to eat when we come back in from patrolling or adventures.
Before jumping squarely on the pre-historic theory of leviathan or sea creatures of the deep, I had to propose the possibility that we were in X-Men territory. The oceans and fresh water are so devastated by our intervention that regions that were supposed to be helped by irrigation ended up creating other problems. The biggies are obviously run-off and pollution but you don’t need me to point that out. Take pollution with the genetic-altering effects of toxicity and next thing you know, you have saltwater sharks swimming up freshwater rivers to survive.
I proposed my theory to Oliver and the rest of the group. I’m strongly outnumbered. They feel that the invertebrate theory is more plausible.
“How the heck did it end up in a refrigerator then?” I asked.
“The elder humans have taken two recent trips to military bases. Haven’t you considered that they were there working on a new investigation outside our property?”
Okay, fine. Oliver had a point, but they simply should have told me so that I didn’t waste any time on finding out the origin of this weird thing. Oliver used to go on those trips with the elder humans, but has been staying home to keep an eye on me and Gus more recently. He’s also very set in his routine of indoor mouse and ghost hunting.
“Then fill me in. Where did this thing come from?”
“It came from the ocean. One of the old man’s contacts reeled it in. But we don’t know what it is. That’s the investigation.”
I shook my head. We reviewed the data I collected and made our best guess. It would be so much better if there had been more time to take samples before the blob deteriorated. Nothing could be done about it now.
Case Findings:
We believe the specimen reeled in by [REDACTED] from the Atlantic Ocean and brought to the [REDACTED] military base was a newly discovered invertebrate sea monster. The base did not provide us with coordinates of the original find. The creature can be compared to the Lagarfljót Worm although the Icelandic monster is based in freshwater and ours came from saltwater. The military would only say that they referred to the catch by the nickname Sandy. They wouldn’t disclose why, but research suggests that it was inspired by the writer George Sand, one of the first to author an article on the Bermuda Triangle.
Case Status: Closed
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.