The town had blamed the thing in the quarry for as long as anyone remembered. Children were warned about its many eyes and hooked limbs. Teenagers dared one another to swim after sunset. Whenever someone drowned, the story acquired another detail: a hand around an ankle, a shape beneath the surface, a face glimpsed where no human face should have been.
I accepted the legend as camouflage for ordinary danger. The quarry was deep, cold, and full of submerged machinery. People did not need monsters to die there.
Then a teenager drowned two summers ago.
During the search, several older residents said something curious. They remembered the creature being present during previous drownings, yet none had actually seen it attack anyone. One man recalled it pushing a swimmer toward shore. A woman remembered something lifting her brother high enough for rescuers to grab him. Those parts had vanished from the stories over time because rescue makes poor folklore when the rescuer is unpleasant to look at.
I went to the quarry the following spring.
At dusk, something surfaced twenty yards from shore. It possessed too many eyes and a body that seemed assembled for another kind of water. It remained at a distance, watching me with the exhausted caution of an animal accustomed to stones.
Its voice reached me through the water.
It said it had lived there since before the quarry was dug. When the pit filled, people came swimming. Some needed help. It helped when it could.
It had failed seventeen times. The town remembered all seventeen.
It had succeeded eighty-three.
Nobody remembered those.
I asked why it continued.
The creature seemed confused by the question.
Since then I visit often. We rarely speak. Sometimes it tells me about swimmers it remembers, including people now old enough to have forgotten they nearly drowned as children.
Last week I found flowers arranged along the shoreline. The creature said someone had finally come back to thank it.
Yesterday those same flowers appeared in town beneath a hand-painted sign warning that the quarry monster had begun accepting offerings.
I considered correcting the story. Instead I carried the sign down to the water and showed it to the creature.
For a long time, all those eyes studied the words.
Then it asked me whether humans ever became tired of needing monsters more than they needed the truth.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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