"No," Stan admitted. "She's heading back to Seattle to see her folks for the weekend, but I managed to keep a set of diving gear from our last practice session. The tank's filled with air." He looked up from the table, straight at me. "But I still need someone to come with me, just in case."
I raised an eyebrow. "Just in case what?"
"Just in case anything happens." Stan kept looking at me. "If the tank goes bad, or if I get stuck down there, or if ... if anything else happens."
I couldn't say no. I wanted to, but this was the guy who, despite his diminutive size, knocked out a drunken jock from one of Miskatonic's fraternities when he and his buddies jumped me in the middle of the night. Even more, I probably owed Stan just for all the money he'd loaned me since we met. So I agreed. I'd drive him out to the reservoir that weekend and help him conduct this investigation.
#
The weather for that weekend couldn't have been better. Sparse clouds were scattered in a rich blue sky, and the sun was rising as I drove Stan up into the hills where the Arkham Reservoir lay. It was in that time right between spring and summer, right before New England became hot but after it had thrown off winter's embrace. We drove with the windows down, taking in the sights, smells, and sounds of that beautiful morning.
"So," I started after an hour's drive in silence, "do you really want to go through with this?"
Stan stopped going over the air tank he had been cradling for the ride. "We have to, right? Who else is going to go down there?"
"The cops, or the EPA? Someone whose job it is to worry about this?"
"No one's looked into this for nearly a hundred years, James. All this time and no one's noticed a thing."
I waited at an intersection for another car that had the right of way to move. "Ok, alright, then maybe nothing's wrong with the water. If it's been this long, and no one's said anything, or there's been no, I don't know, outbreaks or something, maybe it isn't bad?"
"Or maybe it just hasn't been long enough," Stan said, hugging the air tank close to his chest. Our conversation lapsed into an awkward silence that lasted until we reached our destination.
The reservoir was just as picturesque as the drive had been, the spring sun causing the dark water to sparkle and dazzle our eyes. I parked the car and helped Stan lug the diving equipment over to the small pier from which we could rent a boat. The man operating the pier wasn't trusting at first, but a quick flash of our school ID's turned him around--apparently he was an alumnus of the school's folklore track.
We picked one of the small tin boats, dumped the diving gear into it, and roared off into the middle of the reservoir, the little engine sputtering and spitting out smoke. Stan had figured out the location of this "heath" from the surveyor's report, somewhere out in the middle of the water. The bottom of the reservoir quickly dropped off, the clear water becoming a dark blue that eventually sunk down to a pitch black. When the little GPS beeped, signaling that we had reached our destination, I stopped the motor and we drifted for a little while. I helped Stan get the diving gear on, hooking up the various gauges that would feed him the compressed oxygen and allow him to see how much air he had left.
As Stan was testing out the light on his mask, I asked, "How are you going to talk to me up here? In case anything happens."
He pointed to a small box that resembled an old radio. "I've got a setup in this mask that'll allow me to speak to you with that radio transmitter. Just flip the button on when you want to talk."
"Oh, like one of those walkie-talkies I had when I was a kid." I bent down to the box and flipped the switch. "Testing, testing." I could hear my voice coming from Stan's mask, tinny and fuzzy sounding. "Looks like it works."
"Let me get in the water first. Don't want you jinxing me," Stan said as he placed the mask over his head. He saddled up to the side of the boat, gave me a thumbs up, and went over the side, splashing me in the process. I looked down to see Stan floating about a meter below the surface. "How do I look?" his voice asked from the radio.
I flipped the switch and replied, "Like something out of the black lagoon."
I could hear him laugh, and saw him flip the mask's headlight on before he turned over and started descending. In few moments he was gone, swallowed up by the dark depths. I checked my phone. Mercifully dry, but this far into the hills it wasn't getting any signal whatsoever. The lack of connection to the internet made me wish I had brought a paperback with me, or something to waste time with.
There was another problem--Stan's, really. His rough entry into the water had soaked the GPS, which had shut off. I spent a few minutes trying to shake the water out of it. Maybe it would dry out in the sun?
I nearly jumped out of the boat when the radio crackled into life with something that sounded like Stan's voice. I grabbed at the receiver and asked if everything was alright. Stan must have started saying something, since he came on mid-sentence when I took my finger off the button. "-king fish! Goddammit! Scared me all to hell and back. Did you know that there were fish in here?"
"I didn't, no. How far down are you?"
"I just reached the bottom. I'm going to look around for a bit."
He was silent for a little while longer. I started to regret not bringing sunscreen when I heard Stan's voice again. It was strange--he sounded ... shaky? Nervous? "You can still hear me, right?"
"Yeah," I replied. "Something wrong down there?"
"I don't really know. Maybe? Does grass normally grow underwater?"
I thought for a moment. "No? Is it actual grass?"
There was a pause. "It's ... gray. And brittle. It's coming apart as I touch it."
I wondered if that could be what Stan saw in the sample--flakes of gray grass. But would that explain the colors? Stan cut back in as I was thinking.
"And there are bushes and, and trees down here. I don't get it. My depth gauge is going crazy here. Oh, no."
I clicked the radio on. "You should come up, Stan. If your gear isn't working right, get back up."
He must have been talking. "-ving, James, they're moving, the trees. Going back and forth and back an--is there a current here? I can't feel anything, and the grass isn't moving but the trees are, and--"
His voice cut out in a squeal of static. I sat there, staring at the radio. It must have been some sort of stupid joke. Except Stan wasn't the kind of guy to do that sort of stuff.
The radio clicked again. "Bones. Bones, so many bones down here. Fish, I think? They're so small. And others--not dogs. Raccoons? Possums? That's a dog skull, they're all around this, is it a well? It looks like, like, a ring of stones, waist high. There are more bones around it, and, and that's," he laughed--laughed. It was high and cracking. "Human, there are human bones down here, James, how many people go swimming here?"
Not two years back, a couple of kids from Dunwich had come down with their families to the reservoir for a day. They went missing, never found. Had they gone out into the water?
"It's dark down here," Stan continued. "Like my light's failing, it's so dark. But there's light? Light. Down in the well, the deep, down there. Colors. Colors, I've seen them before! The same, it's the same! Colors that aren't colors, bleeding out, from the sky! They're beautiful, James, you should see this, you should come down here."
I looked down into the water and saw--what did I see? Something was flashing down there, like a strobe light. But it made me feel sick to look at it, like my stomach and heart were trying to claw past each other as one tried to rise as the other fell. I jerked back from the side of the boat, listening to the radio squeal with static and what sounded like laughter. Stan's laughter. Then he spoke again.
"It's weak, so weak. It can't do anything from down here in the dark with the water crushing it down, down, down. It can't feed, can't get out, can't go like it did so long ago, back to where it came from. It's been sitting, waiting, spreading. It's in the water, James, it's here and it's in the water." More laughter.
And then silence. For what seeme
d like hours, Stan stayed silent. There was only the sound of the wind-pushed waves of the reservoir gently lapping at the metal side of the boat, and the cries of some far off birds. I checked my phone--still no signal--and saw he had only been down there for thirty minutes. Had something gone wrong with the air in the tank? Was Stan down there, hallucinating all of this? Was he remembering the details of that surveyor's story?
"I'm going into the well."
The statement came with such clarity. No touch of madness, no static, even--it sounded like Stan was beside me in the boat. I turned the radio on, yelling at him, telling, ordering Stan to come back up, that something was wrong, that he was in danger if he didn't come up now. I don't think he ever heard me.
I waited. What else could I have done? Stan had taken all the diving equipment with him--there wasn't even a snorkel for me to use. He had never told me how far down he was. Even if I could have gone down there, would I have had enough air to bring us both back up? And what if he was right, if he wasn't seeing things, and something was down there waiting in the dark at the bottom of an old, forgotten well?
I waited another half hour. Stan's tank had only been filled with enough air to last an hour--if he didn't come up soon, he wouldn't be coming up at all. I stood up in the boat, hands cupped against my face to cut down on the blinding glare of the sun against the reservoir's water. I had nearly given up when I saw something, bright yellow and reflecting in the sunlight, bob to the surface some distance away. Keeping my bearings, I turned the little engine on and moved to where I had seen the object come up. When I reached it, I bent down into the water and scooped it up. I stared at it for a long, long time.
It was Stan's diving mask. The light had gone out.
#
The police were on the case, for a little while at least. I told the police that Stan had wanted to test out his diving skills in the reservoir and hadn't come back up. They suspected that I had done something to him, something to his equipment, but nothing stuck, of course. There was no motive, no reason.
I still felt guilty for not telling Stan to come up earlier, or for not dismissing the whole idea of diving in the reservoir in the first place. Maybe my inaction had killed him, in a sense.
They searched the reservoir, and found nothing. Nothing but mud and stone and fish. No gray grass, or moving trees, or bones. Not even a little mound of stones that could have once been a well on a farmer's blighted land.
I sent the surveyor's story back to Boston, and brought the files Stan had stolen back to Arkham's archives. I moved out of the apartment Stan and I had shared--without his wealth, I had no chance of making rent. I saw Clara once, at the funeral. She stood over Stan's closed casket, tears on her face. I didn't say anything to her.
What else could I have done? I wasn't going to go down there, in the darkness, where that thing might be. Where the not-colors flashed in lightless depths. Where I might find the bones of Stan Rawlings at the bottom of a well.
I don't drink the water in Arkham anymore.
* * *
James Davenport is a resident of Arkham, Massachusetts, and is currently employed in the city's historic archives. He would prefer not to be contacted about recent discoveries in the Miskatonic Valley's water supply.
* * *
Brian Hamilton is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is a recent college graduate, freelance writer, and fan of horror literature--especially anything Lovecraftian. "The Reservoir" is one of his first published short stories. His other works have been published in ebooks and emagazines, including The Asylum Within (Miskatonic Press, 2014).
* * *
Hostel Night
A memoir by James Calloway, as told by Brandon Barrows
* * *
The near-freezing rain of a late-October storm had already soaked through both the wool of my coat and the cotton of my shirt and was working its way through my very skin when the thin light from my buggy-lanterns momentarily won the battle against night and storm to catch the edge of a road sign half-obscured by sticker-bushes. I called Nelly--the finest equine companion for which any mortal soul could ask--to a halt in order to get a better view of the thing, warmed by a spark of hope that I might not have to spend the entire night out in the nor'easter. The words I read, however, extinguished that spark and filled my heart with a chill colder than any downpour ever could.
Arkham 2 Miles-->
I sat in the buggy, pounded by rain and chilled to the bone, and stared at the sign in disbelief. How had I gotten so turned around? I'd left Bolton around 4 p.m. headed east for Essex--a journey of two hours, at most--intending to spend the night, then continue on to Gloucester in the morning for a heavily-discounted shipment of fine cutlery fresh off the boat and waiting for my pick up. I checked my watch and found that it was nearly 9 p.m.! I couldn't explain how I'd ended up nearly twenty miles south of where I'd aimed for or what had happened to the previous five hours and, as a seasoned traveler, that bothered me a great deal.
Traveling, as much as anything, is my business, if I haven't already mentioned. James Calloway, at your service--seller of cutlery, combs, and all your assorted household needs, the right wares at the right price, brought straight to your door with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
Now, I'm a civilized man, but I am also a New Englander, born and bred, and my grandmother, Rebecca--a hard-handed, mean-spirited old Yankee who took great pride in the fact that her family had called New England home for six generations--made sure that my sisters, cousins, and I knew exactly what that meant. To grandmother, that meant going through life with eyes wide open to what the world truly was--what it was by her estimation, at any rate. Beneath the gambrel roof of her tumbledown old house, sitting in front of the hearth on more nights than I can count, she told us children of the strange and fearsome things that share this world with us, lurking just out of sight: the fish-men of Innsmouth; the ghouls that roam beneath the streets of Boston; the north-woods cults that dance to insane piping and sacrifice themselves to their awful and indifferent god; Keziah Mason, the witch of Arkham and her devilish familiar who went by many names; the invisible beast that made Dunwich its home; and many, many more horrors and mysteries besides. How she knew all of these things was a mystery in and of itself, explained by our superstitious neighbors and schoolmates with the obvious answer that she must be a witch. I asked her once, when I was old enough to be aware of such things, if what folks said was true. She laughed and gave me a mischievous smile, which I took to mean that she was just my strange old granny.
Regardless of how she came by her information, however, if grandmother had told it true--and those soberly-repeated stories held details even the most imaginative would be hard-pressed to fabricate so convincingly--there was no corner of this fair land that didn't hold some hidden monstrosity or horror. And there was no place as dark or foreboding as Arkham; even grandmother's voice once or twice held a tremor during the telling of its tales.
Had I been alone, I might have indulged in a little superstition and just crawled under the wagon to "rough it" for a night--as I've done before on less-inclement occasions--but even in the dim light, I could see poor Nelly shaking and shivering at the rapidly falling temperature. I could never ignore an animal's suffering, especially one so dear to me, and I wasn't about to let some silly children's stories frighten me away from safety in that storm.
I sighed, leaned forward to give Nelly's rump a pat, and asked her, "What are a man and his lady supposed to do when hopelessly lost in the most fearsome squall of the season, old girl?"
Her snickering snort told me what I already knew and a couple of tugs on the reins turned us towards the direction indicated by the sign.
#
It was dark as pitch in Arkham, the blackness only minimally pierced by my buggy lanterns and the flickering gas lamps placed at irregular intervals along the crazily winding streets. And it was quiet; not simply the after-dark quiet of a small town, but a nearly oppressive lack of sound t
hat forced everything else into submission. The narrow streets were devoid of inhabitants, but even so, the clip-clop of Nelly's iron-shod hooves and the patter of the driving rain were noises barely loud enough to register in my ears. The darkness and the near silence made it seem as if the entire world had been smothered by a huge, sodden blanket. I shivered fiercely and began to wonder if perhaps I'd been wrong to dismiss grandmother's tales. Something was surely off about this place. Too late to turn back, though, I decided, and tried to convince myself that cold and weariness were simply gnawing at my rationality.
Nelly and I continued along the streets, past darkened homes and businesses, searching for some shelter from the storm and growing--at least on my part--more hopeless by the moment. There appeared to be no life--not a lit window to be seen nor even a stray dog, as is found in almost every city on Earth--in this creepy old town, and the weather was quickly sapping what life remained within my frame.
It wasn't my first visit to Arkham--an itinerant businessman such as myself cannot afford the leisure of being picky about whose money he takes--but my first past dark. On previous stopovers, I made sure that all transactions occurred in the wholesome light of day and that I was well on my way before noon. The legacy of grandmother's tales was that I've always felt were I somehow caught after sunset in Arkham, I'd live to regret it. Foolishness, of course, but best not to take chances, all the same.
On those other trips, I'd seen Arkham as nothing more than a broken-down old New England town--one without visible industry other than the university, and supported minimally by even that. It had given some credence to my dismissal of an old New Englander's dark fables. Without the warming sunshine to dispel the shadows that lurked at every turn and could seemingly hold just about anything one might imagine, though, I was ready to believe every odd or horrific thing I'd ever heard about this lonesome place and my irrational fear of Arkham grew stronger still.
That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1) Page 21