In doing so, I turned a thriving cottage industry into a bunch of vacant bed-and-breakfasts, rendered two local museums obsolete, and brought ruin to a brand-new family-owned five-star resort. If you’re curious, the whole story is there in my tell-all biographical thriller, aptly titled The Loch.

This is the story of what followed, a tale I had intended to leave by audio diary to my wife, Brandy, and our young son, William. As usual, it began when I was manipulated into accepting a mission by the most diabolical creature ever known to inhabit the Great Glen—my father.

In his youth, Angus Wallace was a brute of a man who possessed the piercing blue eyes of the Gael, the wile of a Scot, the temperament of a Viking, and the drinking habits of the Irish. Now in his seventies, he’s less temperamental but just as wily, and abuses Viagra and women along with his whiskey.

In his younger days, it was yours truly that he abused, mentally, not physically.

Angus met my mother, the former Andrea McKnown, when she was on holiday. It didn’t take long for the older, dark-haired rogue to sweep the naive American beauty off her feet. I was born a year later, heir to the Wallace heritage. I was small compared to my big-boned Highlander peers, leaving my father to right his namesake’s “bad genes” the only way he knew how—by intimidating the runt out of me.

I won’t bore you with the details, other than to mention one pivotal event that transpired on my ninth birthday. Angus had promised to take me fishing on Loch Ness so I could try out an acoustic fishing lure, my new invention. Those plans changed, however, when I caught my inebriated sperm donor naked in a tent with a local waitress.

Allowing a childhood’s worth of anger to get the better of me, I returned to the loch and launched the boat myself. As fog and night rolled in, my reverberating acoustic device attracted a school of fish and with it a very real creature that rarely left its bottom dwelling. Without warning my boat flipped over, and I found myself treading in forty-two degree water. Then something closed around my lower body and dragged me with it into the depths.

Terrifying darkness surrounded me; the growling gurgles of the creature accompanied me into the abyss, my lower body held within its jaws. I saw a flash of white light, which caused the demon to release me, and then those tea-colored waters quenched the fire in my aching lungs… and I drowned.