#charton

Haunted #21 - Charlton, April 1975.

relationship aesthetic: charton // @vcnatorr

He had also gone down that route originally thinking that maybe Henry was softer than he thought he was. They would catch the beast and he would decide that he couldn’t kill it and they would have to find something else to do with it. He had simply thought of Henry as a bit of a soft-touch. A kid with lofty ideals of ridding the town of a monster that had hurt his friends, but without much of a backbone. Hunting required a certain… detachment. One he had thought that Henry maybe didn’t actually have.

But Clayton looked at him now and saw the resolve in his eyes. Perhaps Henry had been a soft touch, but not anymore. Clayton thought he meant business this time.

@charmed-henry

They had found the sodding trap.

Just days before the team who had put it there were going to come back to dredge it up, too. Which was extremely annoying, given that he had had to spend a lot of time, effort and money organising that retrieval just to a) have to send them all home and b) have someone else do it free of cost.

But, whatever. It didn’t matter. The trap needed shifted, now it was shifted. There was no reason why the new team couldn’t come in to place the new trap as he had planned for, and this would all be excellent canon fodder for his campaign as Doting Local Sheriff Who Cares About This Town. He was already drafting the statement he was going to make, which was taking a while because it had to be spot on and he absolutely hated having to do actual work, at a desk.

So, to break up the boredom, he had told Henry to come over to The Lodge so they could discuss things. He hadn’t said what things, just that he wanted to chat. He told him to let himself in, and come through to the office; he trusted him to do that much, at least.

@charmed-henry

The thing about setting a trap big enough to ensnare a merman was that it was difficult to remain inconspicuous. Out in the middle of nowhere, they might have managed a bit better. Clayton could’ve had permits faked for them, pretended that they were contractors or researchers or something to that effect, but the lake was in the middle of town, which meant that the only thing for it was to operate in the dead of night, and hope that no one spotted them.

The setting of the trap had gone off without a hitch, but it had taken Clayton a little while to get around to checking it. He had told young Henry that these things took time, which was true. The lake was of a decent size and any self-respecting monster wouldn’t go right for the bait. It would be lured in by curiosity, worn down over time. And even if it had swam right on in, a little time in the trap wouldn’t hurt it, would it?

It was difficult to check the trap physically without donning a wetsuit and jumping over the side of a boat into the inky blackness of the lake, and Clayton wasn’t one for getting his hair wet, so he had made sure that the trap could be checked remotely. There was a camera - it recorded constantly, and all of the footage was sent directly to the computer in Clayton’s office. He didn’t tend to use his office, so he hadn’t really been keeping an eye on it, but they could go through the footage now and see if they needed to bring up the trap. 

He had thus invited Henry to The Lodge, and when he arrived he led him through the house to the office, drawing the curtains closed. Not that it mattered; the house was set far enough away from the road that anyone trying to look in wouldn’t have seen anything at all.