I pulled my feet away from both boot controls, allowing the weight of the Newt Suit to sink me—too fast… way too fast!

Sensing the sudden disturbance, the once-sedate eels broke from their ranks. They whirled about in a chaotic frenzy, then swarmed in on me, snapping at my arms and legs from all angles, bashing my face mask and backpack with their powerful bodies. I tried to fend them off, but there were too many of them, and I was moving two speeds too slow. My lights kept most of them from my face, but they attacked my legs without mercy, their sharp needle teeth clawing my metal skin, their muscular torsos whipping at my gear, and I was petrified of losing pressure within the ADS.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the assault ceased.

"Jesus …" I sucked in deep breaths, then retracted my left arm from its sleeve and mopped the sweat from my face.

"Zack? Are ye okay?"

"The eels… they came at me, all of "em at once. Then they just disappeared. Holy shit… and now I know why."

"Why? Whit is it?"

Looking around, I realized I had dropped into the chasm… and I was still falling.

"True, I'm descending within the canyon. Standby."

Pressing down on my right foot, I engaged my thrusters and slowed my descent. Raising my right arm, I aimed the hand-held light and looked around as a blizzard of brown sediment fell into the trench from above, obliterating my view.

And then something immense plowed sideways into me with the force of a locomotive and an immense pressure squeezed my brain, bashing me into unconsciousness.

Well, the day that I saw the monster, it was the end of September and I was driving back from Inverness. I came up the hill where we came in sight of the bay, glanced out across it, and saw this large lump. The nearest I can tell you is it looked like a boat that had turned upside down. It was about ten meters [thirty-three feet] in length, and nearly three meters [ten feet] in height from the water to the top of the back. It was a mixture of browns, greens, sludgy sort of colors. I looked at it on and off for a few seconds, because I was driving. Must have seen it three or four times, and the last time I looked, it was gone! I thought to myself, "Oh, there's Nessie. "Bout time I saw it, I've been living here a year." And then something in the back of my head sort of said, "That's not just Nessie, that's got to be the Loch Ness Monster that everybody has spent thousands of pounds searching for, and you're looking at the darn thing." I nearly drove off the road, but luckily I didn't because we had a fairly new car. Can you imagine what the insurance claim would have been like?