"It was no longer here, but that didn't mean it had left no trace."
Nothing truly left no trace. Even the North Sea monster that supposedly reached up through ice-fishing holes every winter to grab a meal from the buffet left behind a mountain of terrifying tales for mothers to scare their children with.
As long as you patiently followed a line of inquiry, you would always find clues that seemed to point somewhere.
The problem was that they could all be explained from multiple angles.
The empty bench had simply been forgotten outside, and the strange scratches came from the dorsal fins of certain fish. Even the messy handprints could be explained as the result of someone struggling after accidentally falling into the water.
A sea monster might exist, but it was more reasonable to assume there wasn't one. After looking into it, that was the simplest, most logical conclusion you could reach.
Or, perhaps, the greatest mercy.
If people truly believed a monster with a body longer than a mountain range and more tentacles than trees in a forest lurked along the coastline, the terror would leave them constantly on edge, turning them into hydrophobic lunatics in the eyes of others.
That was more or less what Kraft had read.
Every region had to have its own "monster." On the coast, it was a giant squid with a mass of tentacles; in the countryside, it was the scarecrow in the fields that may or may not be real; and in castles, it was the vampire that prowled by night.
By that logic, it was only natural for the mountains to have predators lurking in the clouds.
For decades, centuries, or even longer, the human imagination had always given fear a concrete form and passed it down.
The tales