4/27 00:01

A massacre was already underway in the darkness. The thing had surged up onto the bank, gliding freely between two camping tents on its smooth belly across the soft river mud. It opened its jaws wide on four men and women, jolted awake from sleep with no way to fight back, and carried out a one-sided slaughter. A camcorder, knocked over on the ground and left running on an automatic setting, was recording this scene of unspeakable carnage — but after only a little while its storage filled up, and it looped automatically back to the beginning, playing what had been recorded first.

"Well, this is happy news," said the bearded young man of Indian descent on camera. "I'm Acha, I'm a paleontology student. We — we originally came out here to dig for fossils, our professor recommended the site. Sure, there's a whole crowd of alligators not far off, and all we've got is tents, but the reserve warden swore up and down this place is completely safe. Charged us a hundred bucks each for the insurance fee." The young man slapped the fence behind him — a line of wire mesh running along the riverbank.

"Anyway, forget all that — check this out." He swung the camera toward a cave. The white balance hadn't adjusted yet, so all that showed was something like a small lake inside, and some dark shape within it.

"This is unbelievable."

The footage cut here, then jumped ahead to evening. The camera showed the little lake inside the cave, a large black shape in the water. After a long while, the thing let out a deep, rumbling snore.

"You hear that?" The camera swung to the young man of Indian descent doing the filming, and for a moment it also caught a stocky guy and a girl in a skimpy outfit. "I don't know the details, but assuming this thing's actually alive, its heart's probably only beating once every few hours, and that's the sound it makes. This is incredible." The camera turned back to the little lake in the cave.

The stocky guy from before pulled the camera toward himself. "This is probably a state of suspended animation — the temperature in the cave's below freezing, and with this thing sitting in the mud and water, it makes for a hibernation-like environment."

"Total coincidence, all of it. Maybe we'll get closer and film it later." Acha stepped back in front of the lens. "This is, uh, some kind of Meuse River lizard. We've found something incredible."

The footage cut again, and started once more after a stretch of splashing footsteps in the water, then that same rumbling snore, followed by a patch of yellow lit up under a flashlight beam — an earthy, tawny yellow, with a broad band of dark blue spotted markings running across the middle of the light. Then a hand reached in and touched the yellow gently, sliding softly across the broad expanse of it. Suddenly the yellow thing gave a shudder, and the laughter and startled shouts of two young men rang through the cave.

"Scared the hell out of me, seriously scared the hell out of me, but that was so cool."

Then came another rumbling snore, and the footage cut off.

"We surveyed the cave a bit — basically, it was probably underwater at some point in the past, but now it sits a fair way back from the river. A branch of the river's current still flows in through the limestone structure of the cave and then flows back out, so there's a muddy patch outside. It's very possible this thing swam in at some point and got trapped here. But going by the size of the mouth of the cave, we should still be able to get it out — the ground's just a little slick." The camera turned to the young man filming. "Anyway, we've been at this for two days now. Tomorrow we'll notify the university and the society, leave Jackson to watch the campsite, and head back — I'm exhausted." With that, he set the camera down, walked off among the tents, and started drinking and singing, completely forgetting the camera was still running. A good while later, he went into a tent with another girl, and the lights went out.

A long while later, under the dim starlight, a sound rose up — the sound of something wet slapping against the muddy ground, accompanied by a low animal groan — and a huge, dark shape passed across the front of the lens, moving slowly toward the tents.