Miles Underbeck
Chief Miles Underbeck was the chief of police in the town of Clinton Center. One day after a particularly violent storm hit the coast, local farmer Old Man Gowse came to him with a complaint about his cow, Sarey, having gone missing. Underbeck was unable to do much for him, convinced Sarey had simply gotten loose and wandered away, while Gowse was insistent to Underbeck and anyone else who'd listen that the supposedly cursed Wharton's Swamp had something to do with the cow's disappearance. As Gowse was known as something of an eccentric, neither Underbeck nor any of Clinton Center's other residents gave the old farmer's fears much credence - until his neighbor Rupert Barnaby also went missing in the swamp that night.
Underbeck sent Sergeant Grimes to the Barnaby farm to search for the missing man, but Grimes could only locate Barnaby's hunting dog Jibbe. That night, a motorist drove into town with local woman Dolores Rell, with a wild story about how a black creature made of slime had taken her fiancé Jason Bukmeist while the two were on a moonlit walk through Wharton's Swamp. Although Chief Underbeck was unwilling to believe in Dolores' story about a blob monster, he could no longer ignore that something was behind the recent disappearances in the swamp. His initial theory that a missing drifter, Henry Hossing, had killed Barnaby and Bukmeist while drunk, and that the shock of seeing her fiancé murdered by the drifter in a fit of drunken rage had caused by Dolores to go insane and imagine a black slime monster.
However, the night after Jason Bukmeist's disappearance, two of Underbeck's officers, Luke Matson and Fred Storr, were attacked by the very creature Dolores had witnessed kill Jason, and only Storr survived to tell the tale. Matson was killed the creature. Finally unable to deny that some kind of creature was behind the disappearances, Underbeck summoned help in the form of US Army reservists from the nearby Camp Evans military base. Using flashlights to flush the light-hating slime creature out of the swamp, the soldiers were able to killed the amorphous black horror on the beach with flamethrowers after barricades erected at Underbeck's insistence prevented it from escaping into the sea from whence it'd come.
