Mystery of the Deep - A Story in Scotland

The water is black as tar... it is over seven hundred and fifty feet deep... it's a mile wide and over nine miles long.
How do they know? There's no conclusive proof that it even exists, so how do they know?

Scores of experts have searched. They've searched using sonar and submarines at least a dozen times. The bottom is as flat as a football field. If there were a corpse there, or anything else for that matter, they would know.

They can't seem to find it either. Only the intermittent accounts and hazy, imperfect photographs show glimpses. Some have said it might have died and rotted. But that's impossible. The water is forty-two degrees Fahrenheit all year and so full of humic acid that the chemistry of putrefaction cannot take place.

So, the one thing they do know is that it's not dead.

But there is something else that they, those high and mighty experts, do not know: Tomorrow, right here where we are standing they will find undeniable proof that the Loch Ness Monster lives!

Come, sit with me by the water and I will tell you all about it.

Are you OK? You look off-kilter, a little dizzy you say? No doubt the steepness of the path after that heavy meal. Good food, though, no? No one makes a good meal like the old hotel, eh? Take a few deep breaths, the night air will no doubt revive you. Well worth the climb down, though. Look up behind you, there's your snapshot for your front page: Urquhart Castle in the moonlight. The ruin that was the rose of the Scots and the thorn of the English. My family's blood has washed it's stones on more than one occasion.

You're not a swimmer are you? Good. I don't recommend this water. No, that's for sure. Sometimes we get waves over six feet tall, murderous like the Atlantic herself. But look at it now, glistening in the moonlight calm without even a ripple. It's so still and black you can make out each star and constellation in her surface.