“No,” replied Mel.   He looked perplexed as he reached the point where from the bank it had looked as though something white lay.   Turning back in frustration, he started back to the shore, then stopped and began to scream shrilly.

Bear Ross started to rush forward to his friend’s aid, but was held back by Paul Bell and Terry Blewitt.

The surface of the lake began to ripple strangely.   Then slowly the water transformed, solidified and took on the shape of a giant mouth.

A mouth which slowly devoured Mel Forbes from the feet up!

Finally Mel’s screams ceased as he was completely consumed.   Then the watery mouth pursed its lips and spat, sending the mangled bones up onto the bank, at the feet of the search party who ran screaming from terror into the nearby forest, narrowly avoiding high-speed collisions with conifers and ghost gums as they headed for either Harpertown or Perry, depending upon which town each man thought was closer.

*      *      *

After the gruesome death of Mel Forbes, things quietened down around Lake Cooper.   With almost a dozen witnesses to Mel’s bizarre death, Bear Ross managed to convince the local coroner (a long-time friend of Bear) Jerry Green, to write bogus death certificates for the five men and five teenagers killed.

Then the lake was declared quarantined.   A three-metre high chain-link fence ,was erected at great cost around the full two-kilometre length of the lake, to prevent anyone else falling prey to the flesh-eating “water”.

It was left up to Jerry Green (as resident scientist) to attempt to explain what had happened.   “Suppose,” he said to Bear one day, “that the crystal from out of space was a living thing.   All life on the planet Earth is based on carbon, but for decades scientists have theorised that life in other galaxies might be based on other chemical elements such as silicon.

“Suppose the crystal was a non-carbon based life form, and when it landed in Lake Cooper, because of its crystalline structure it dissolved in the water.   But instead of dying, it took over the water in the lake, united with it, and formed a brand new life form.   In effect carnivorous water!”

After the deaths of Jim Kane and Mel Forbes, Paul Bell and Andrew Braidwood were promoted to sergeant in their respective towns.

August 2001:

Andrew Braidwood stood in the front office of the Merridale Police Station.   Looking down at the sergeant stripes on his left shoulder he remebered how he had got them, the horror of Mel Forbes; gruesome death.

Then hearing the ratta-tat-tat, machine-gun-like fire of the pelting rain he wondered if the horror was truly over yet?

Lake Cooper had been ringed with a six-metre high concrete fence to try to contain the hideous new life-form.

But fears had mounted in the winter of 2000, when the long-time drought had finally broken and reservoirs in Victoria had reached near record levels.   The waters of Lake Cooper had swollen to record levels and would have flooded over, if not for the concrete retaining wall.

“But how long can it contain the water … the creature, thought Andrew, “if last years record rains are repeated this year?”

As the rains had poured since late May, Andrew had taken to going down to the retaining wall every day to check the levels.   Yesterday’s level had been barely half-a-metre below the top of the concrete dike.

Otherwise nothing much happened in the area after the lake was fenced in, until a few years later when in the winter of the year 2001, the Yannan River overflowed, flooding the area around Harpertown and meeting up with Lake Cooper.   Then the essence of the living crystal was finally able to move on to seek out new feeding grounds.   First around Harpertown, Perry, Glen Hartwell and Merridale as it took over the Yannan.   Then further afield, first in Australia, then the rest of the world, as it followed the course of the Yannan River out into the Tasman Sea, then into the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, until it possessed all the oceans of the world.   A gigantic, carnivorous organism that surrounded all the Earth’s land masses, devoured all of the fish and marine life across the globe, then waited for the greenhouse effect to melt the polar caps, giving it new body and allowing it access to increasingly greater parts of the land, where the human race cowered in terror from this horrible new life form: The new dominant species on the planet Earth.

THE END