Tales from The Lake 5

by Tales from The Lake

  “You’re going to take root if you don’t get up and do something,” Sidney says, closing the door with a casserole dish in his hands. Outside, a neighbor scurries down the sidewalk to her car.

  “Why won’t they leave me alone?” Charlie wants to know.

  “Careful what you wish for,” Sidney says. “As for this old queen, she ain’t leaving until you’re better.”

  He does leave eventually, though, when he gets bored of leftovers, just like Charlie knows he will. “Back in thirty,” Sidney says, jingling his car keys. “You okay?”

  “Go,” Charlie says, ushering him out, locking the door behind him.

  This time, he doesn’t go back to the couch. He makes his way to the bedroom closet, fumbles around for the shoebox he knows is there. It’s not long before he’s on the edge of the bed, the barrel of a pistol lodged firmly against his soft palate. He’s so focused on seeing Mildred again, he doesn’t hear the front door smashing open, doesn’t feel the stomp of Sidney’s feet in the hallway. There’s a brief struggle, but it ends with Sidney bear-hugging Charlie to the ground for the second time in as many weeks.

  ***

  “I could use these, the way I’ve been tackling you lately,” Sidney says. He’s holding up a pair of old shoulder pads, the kind a teenager might wear for football practice. They’re at a garage sale Sidney finds on the way home from therapy. It’s Charlie’s second week with Dr. Holman.

  Charlie shrugs, knows he has it coming.

  This is the last place he wants to be. He’s always thought of garage sales as places where people get rid of the crap they bought at other garage sales. But what can he do? Right now, he’s Sidney’s prisoner.

  Anyway, he owes his brother his life, so he says nothing, watches Sidney rifle through a pile of junk on a foldaway table. Sidney picks up a gaudy sequined top, holds it up to his chest. “Does it bring out my complexion?” he asks. Charlie rolls his eyes. The one drawback to having an openly gay brother is that he’s always trying to embarrass you with it.

  “What it brings out is your despicable taste in clothing,” Charlie says. Not bad, he thinks. Why should Sidney get all the zingers?

  If Sidney hears him, he doesn’t let on. He’s busy sorting, unfolding, exploring. Charlie takes this as a cue to pick through a few piles of his own. He finds an umbrella, remembers his old one is on the fritz. But when he opens this one, one of the metal rods extends out too out far and the nylon shell flops open, a mess. He throws it back on to the table. “Piece of crap,” he says.

  This brings a sneer from the woman running the sale, who’s already been giving him the creeps. She’s dressed head to toe in bright, stretchy fabric that strains over her dark, doughy skin. He’s already noticed she’s missing several teeth. But the worst is the eye that’s covered in a white film, like a cataract.

  “Goodness,” Sidney says. He’s holding something grotesque at arm’s length, something that flips a switch deep inside of Charlie, makes him want to recoil. It’s a hand or something? Something shrunken and brown and hairy around the wrist.

  “What is that?” Charlie says.

  “A paw, maybe?” Sidney says.

  “Is monkey,” Creep-erella says, having moved in close enough for Charlie to smell her rancid breath. Her good eye is locked on him, unwavering. “Is custom in my country. Ten dollars.”

  “What would anyone want a monkey paw for?” Sidney says. He moves behind where she can’t see him, pantomimes the paw scratching his balls.

  “Is for luck,” the woman says. “Five dollars.”

  That’s when Charlie remembers the story from his childhood. The accursed paw. The wishes that end in misfortune.

  “Luck, right,” Charlie says. Bad luck is more like it. “No thanks.” He moves on to the next pile of crap.

  Before they leave, Sidney’s gathered up a sweater, a lamp, and the sequined top, just for giggles. “Maybe one day I’ll have the boobs to pull this off,” he jokes.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Charlie says.

  While his brother is paying, Charlie has just enough time to find the paw once again, to stroke a finger across its leathery flesh. And even though it ends badly in the story, he can’t help it, he’s wishing the wish big and loud inside his head.

  When he sets the paw back down, the woman’s staring at him again. Her mouth is twisted into a toothless grin.

  ***

  In the days that follow, anything is apt to trigger Charlie’s depression: a phrase he hears on television, the random photograph of Mildred he finds tucked away in a book, a whiff of the rose-scented perfume he still hasn’t had the strength to get rid of. When those feelings hit, he can do nothing but be swept along in the powerful undertow, dragged out to the black ocean where he claws like a swimmer for the surface.

  But over time, those moments happen less, and on certain days, he’s able to find the light.

  Just like Dr. Holman tells him, life doesn’t end.

  And on certain days, Charlie even starts to feel human again.

  ***

  The morning it happens, he’s sitting on the couch, thinking about Mildred. Actually, he’s thinking about her garden. He hasn’t been out there since that day. The weeds will be growing like wild, ruining everything she worked so hard for. It seems disrespectful, somehow.

  He trudges in his slippers through the damp grass, stands in the very spot she fell. First thing he notices is, yes, the weeds have taken over. Last spring’s plants are struggling for real estate.

  But there’s something else.

  Some kind of weed he’s never seen before. And it’s borne fruit. A pod. The plant is sagging under its weight.

  He stoops down to get a better look.

  He’s never seen anything like it. The pod’s skin is smooth, with hourglass curves that seem feminine. The triad of green impressions on one end doesn’t help either. They almost look like a face.

  He lifts the pod with a finger, sees something else that’s weird. Deep under the green flesh is a network of bluish squiggles.

  And if he looks close, he swears he sees some kind fluid surging inside of them. Pulsing in rhythm.

  Like a heartbeat.

  He can’t help it; he rises and vomits.

  It takes him a moment to catch his breath. Then he reaches down, connects his fingers around the pod’s dewy plant flesh, and snaps it.

  Something crunches inside, like delicate bones breaking, and the two green spots flutter open. Underneath, the color is shining and black, like the eyes of a spider. And then he hears it, a kind of high-pitched screeching.

  He pulls the plant from the earth, tosses it into an old barrel. His hands tremble while he gathers up some newspaper from inside, and he can’t seem to get the fire started fast enough.

  ***

  The days that follow aren’t easy. He fights his way through sleepless nights and becomes angry when the sun rises too quickly. He’s in the garden before his coffee even, checking for the weed to grow back. It wants to, an eager sprig bursts through the soil every few days. Charlie pulls it up before it has a chance to thrive.

  He doesn’t know what it is, not really, but he knows how it got there.

  The paw.

  In the story, a couple uses the first of the paw’s three wishes on a sum of money, an unfortunate side-effect of which is the accidental death of their only son. Their grieving hearts use the second wish to give him life again, and his mangled body rises from the grave to visit them, to knock on their door. At least that’s what’s implied. There’s no way of knowing who’s knocking that fateful evening, because the father wishes his son dead again before his wife can open the door.

  And now the same paw—or one like it—was working its own brand of horror in Charlie’s life.

  The paw. It never gives you what you wanted, not outright. You had to accept its “gift” on its terms. Something the old couple had been too terrified to do.

  Talk to Sidney about it? Right. His brother w
ould only call Dr. Holman. Or he’d want to see proof. Charlie won’t bring him into this twisted little nightmare. Sidney’s been through enough lately. And Charlie, he brought this on himself.

  For these reasons, he never says anything to anyone.

  But there’s something else.

  Secretly, he wonders what would happen if he let it grow.

  ***

  The ground is soggy from days of rain, so he doesn’t visit the garden. At least, that’s what he tells himself.

  “I’m fine,” he lies to Sidney on the phone. In truth, he’s irritable from lack of sleep. He’s drinking now to cope, something Dr. Holman would definitely not approve of. Three vodkas and he’s out, for a few hours anyway.

  Tonight, it’s the fourth glass that does him in. That, and the pattering of the rain on the lawn. He passes out on the sofa, watching Nightline.

  He’s lost in an unmemorable dream when he wakes up to a harsh sound. It takes him a few seconds to remember where he is, and a few more to realize what’s happening. The sound he hears is the sliding patio door, grating against its frame.

  His heart hammers into his chest, and he squeezes his eyes shut again. Although every instinct tells him to get up, to get out of there, fear keeps him frozen in place.

  He can only listen to what might be footsteps, a kind of sloshing, dragging, sloshing sound on the carpet. Whatever is moving is large, and it’s heavy and it’s wet. The footsteps shuffle close, and he can hear breathing. Short ragged breaths, like an animal. It smells unwholesome and foul, like rotting vegetation.

  But there’s another scent too. A soft, rosy note he recognizes immediately.

  The sofa depresses next to him, and a viscous mouth clasps down over his. He yields with his lips, opens up to the flood of moist humus surging in, warm with the process of decay and twisting with the bodies of earthworms. He opens wider as the avalanche works its way past his tonsils, into his throat, his lungs, and when his eyes flicker open, he understands finally, after all this time, what she loved about the dirt.

  ***

  He lies on the floor in the dim morning light all foggy-headed, wondering where’s she’s gone. He wants to get up, but his body won’t respond. It’s like a wire’s gone loose inside of him. From somewhere in the languid shadows, he hears that breathing again, and for a long moment he listens to its slow, erratic rhythm, feeling strangely at peace.

  Until the itching starts.

  It’s the slightest sensation deep inside his chest. So faint at first, he wonders if he’s imagined it.

  Something has sprouted.

  Whatever she put there has taken root. Somehow he knows this. He feels it worming its way into his body. Burrowing into his soft parts. Growing like a cancer. There’s pain as cells rupture, as whatever it is sinks tiny filaments into his organs. He feels a draining sensation, like he’s being sucked dry from the inside out.

  Or replaced, maybe.

  Then there is agony.

  His dehydrated limbs begin to contort, bending back upon themselves at impossible angles. There’s a popping sensation in his elbows and knees as the cartilage in his joints gives way. Gasping, he struggles for air, but even his lungs seem to be failing him. He tries to clench his hands into fists, out of agony, out of defiance, but it’s more than his breaking body can bear. He can only stare at the useless appendages, watch wide-eyed as tiny green fibers thread their way through his flesh.

  She shuffles out of the shadows.

  Dark eyes stare at him from the leafy folds of her face. The open maw of her mouth crawls with insects: grubs, beetles, mayflies. In the cracks of her vegetal skin, he can see the scaffolding of vines that form her skeleton. From one of these fissures, a pair of mating ladybugs emerges, then plummets to the floor in apparent ecstasy.

  When he hears her croaking voice, it’s with ears that are no longer fully human. “Grow . . . ”

  His body has no choice but to obey.

  A surge of vitality courses through his body, as his broken limbs elongate, his fingers twist into gnarled digits. Dozens of sprigs break through the flesh on his back, enlarging, lengthening until their tips scrape the ceiling. His teeth clatter to the floor in bloody clumps, as new ones emerge, dozens of them, razor-sharp and hard as thorns. Out of his torso, new root-like legs probe downward, push through the crackling floorboard, into the dank air of the crawlspace, settling as if with a sigh into the moist earth below.

  He knows the transformation is over when the last leaves have settled into place, rustling faintly like a tree on a summer morning.

  Strangely, he’s at peace, a feeling which intensifies when the first golden rays peep through the window.

  She joins him at last in the warmth. Her hands rake through his limbs eagerly, searching, until she finds what she is looking for. With clumsy fingers, she seizes the bulb of his sex organ, which grows instantly rigid. She shoves it roughly into the flowering bud between her legs and in moments he’s exploding inside her.

  Spent, his tangled arms hold her. Already the fruit of their love is forming on her body, little buds maturing into pods, so many of them, so quickly. The dutiful mother disengages, lumbers out the back door, into the garden, where she begins placing them one by one into the earth.

  Their children.

  He watches until the hunger starts, bright and intense, unlike any he’s ever known before. He thrusts his roots deeper into the soil, seeking nutrients, finding scant amounts, not enough. It hurts, this hunger. It’s like he’s dying. He wants to call to her, to tell her he doesn’t want this, to beg her to change him back, when he hears a sound, familiar somehow. The jingling of keys in a lock. The creaking of an opening door.

  And then a voice. “Charlie?”

  It’s a voice he knows, maybe? Some distant part of him wants to remember.

  The intruder enters, stops for a moment when he sees the tangle of greenery, and then begins pushing through. Charlie can feel the assault on his limbs, the snapping and cracking of vines. And there’s something else. In the new cells of his body, he can taste a cloud of molecules floating in the air. Fear, he thinks. The stranger’s.

  It’s a suspicion that’s verified when the intruder’s stunned eyes lock onto the thing that used to be his brother.

  Hey Sidney, Charlie tries to say, but his mouth won’t work for all the teeth. His powerful arms constrict, draw his brother toward him. A terrible sound fills the room, (screaming, perhaps?) but it ends with a crunch inside his powerful jaws.

  There is food now. Sticky and warm, dripping like the sweetest juice down his chin. There’s an abundance. Plenty for him, for Mildred, for their babies.

  Food enough for them all.

  The many-limbed thing drags the slumped figure through the house and out to the garden, where his wife awaits, where his children are sprouting, tender green filaments silhouetted against the moist brown earth, reaching like hopeful angels toward the blue ocean sky.

  THE COLOR OF LOSS AND LOVE

  JASON SIZEMORE

  “Please, somebody help us. We’re God-fearing, good people.”

  The short-wave radio had been pleading like that for a good thirty minutes while Francis stared at the ceiling, feeling as if the world had woken up and decided he was the man to save it.

  Martha slipped from behind and wrapped her arms around shoulders. “What’s a-matter?”

  “Nothing a-matter. Trying to remember a name.” He frowned at his lie. “Not so easy anymore.”

  “Maybe, darling, you’re just getting old.”

  Francis shook his head and sighed. He stood, the cotton mat and plywood objecting with a series of pops and cracks. “Not you, Martha. You’re as spry as a spring virgin.”

  Static crackled on the radio, then a pause. “ . . . ain’t never hurt nobody. It’s just me and my wife. Please, anybody.”

  He and Martha exchanged a look.

  “That fool is leading the wolves right to him,” he said.

  “What if the wolf i
s you? You’re not so dangerous.”

  Francis thought of the pair of deer hunters whom he’d killed only three weeks ago, looked at himself in the tiny mirror over the washbasin. Time to shave again, already?

  “The woman is with child,” he said, “Could be a trick. Hell, probably is a trick.”

  “We can’t save everyone, Francis, but maybe we can save these two?”

  Francis waited a beat. “Three.”

  Martha looked up from her hands and smiled. “Right. Three. We can do it. I heard ’em say they’re at Jack’s Creek over in McKee. That’s not too far.”

  Francis raised an eyebrow. “We?”

  “You’re not leaving me here alone. I might wander off and never return.” She kissed him again, now more urgent and heated.

  “All right. We can use a day out of this old tinderbox.”

  He switched the radio off.

  ***

  Even after five months, Francis’s eyes burned fierce those first moments stepping outside into the harsh red of daylight. The brains at the universities and labs, as Francis could best recall, never figured out why no other species were affected or even took notice of the crimson daylight. The animals multiplied as their God-given right. And Old Sol lit the Earth during the day and rested at night. But human optic nerves . . . the “crimson sun” the papers had taken to calling it . . . reacted adversely to the light.

  Francis placed a ragged Sandy Creek Coal trucker hat on his head and slipped on his sunglasses. They were a fancy pair of UV protected polarized Ray-Bans—a gift from his boy a few years back. “Dad,” Joe had said, “you being an old man and all, you’re going t’need to protect your eyes. They’ll help you see better when you hunt. During the day, at least.” At the time, he had played the role of curmudgeon, dismissing them as a worthless luxury item. But privately, he thought he looked cool when he wore them. A well-aged Tom Cruise from the movie Top Gun.

  “All right, son, I’ll take this one modern convenience only because you’re so thoughtful,” he’d replied.