ALEX IRVINE by Vandoise & the Bone Monster

Author:Vandoise & the Bone Monster [Vandoise & Monster, the Bone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5.

Well, I couldn't believe that story, and I was still half-convinced that this old man was just a pervert come sniffing after the girls that was swimming down in the cave. And I didn't much like the way he'd said redskin. There's Indians in my family on my mother's side.

So I said, "You get out of here, old-timer, or you're going to find more trouble than some bone monster. Go on. Get."

He looked at me and I realized how I was talking to him. I wasn't no angel when I was a boy, but my parents still brought me up right, and here I was shaming this old man like he was a stray dog. "You can't just blow up the cave," I said, trying to make amends a bit. "You just can't."

"I wouldn't have blown it up with you or the girls in it," he said. "I wouldn't."

"I know," I said. He sighed, long and kind of shuddery, like he was trying not to cry. "It's a long time before I can come back here," he said. "It takes Mister Drypto a long time to forget a place, and I can't bring him back here until he has forgotten. What if it takes another twenty years? What if he kills me before then?"

There wasn't much I could say to that. "I'm real sorry."

The sun touched the mountains right then and I heard a whirring, rattling kind of noise that had my balls creeping right up into my collar. Over on the wall of the old fort, the one that faces out toward the mountains, I saw something silhouetted against the setting sun. The light was too bright for me to get a good look at it.

"Don't move," old Vandoise said. "Don't even breathe if you can help it."

I didn't. I shut my eyes and held my breath and waited.

When I couldn't hold my breath any longer, I opened my eyes. The sun was nearly gone and I couldn't see no bone monster. Vandoise was gone too.

Now I'm a bit of an amateur historian and I did some checking over the years, but I never found anyone named Vandoise in any records. So I figured this old boy was just pulling my leg. The thing wouldn't let go of me, though, and a few years ago, 1950 I think it was, I heard of an old collection of newspapers at an estate sale up in Edgemont, South Dakota. I went up to check it out. And I'll be damned if I didn't find an article clipped out of the Black Hills Prospector talking about a man named Farley Sheets who was found dead on the banks of a creek out in Buffalo Gap. The article decided wolves or mountain lions must have done it even though it was 1919 and there weren't many of either left in those parts anymore. My eye was caught by a particular detail: wedged behind the hinge of Farley Sheets's jaw was a fossilized brontosaurus tooth.

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