Tales from The Lake 5

by Tales from The Lake

  “Francis!” A familiar voice cried out.

  He turned and peered through the gloom. The windows had been boarded with plywood, rendering the interior dark and protected from the crimson. A dim Coleman lantern burned on the floor next to a ragged orange sofa.

  On the sofa lay a young woman. Her legs were splayed open and a dirty cotton dress draped her knees. One leg had been set poorly by a thin clothesline rope to the lower half of an oak walking stick that had been broken in half. Mottled bruises decorated her face, arms, and legs. Blood pooled on the cushion, and to Francis’s horror, he could see the crown of a baby coming out from between her legs.

  “Baby’s coming . . . ” Gasp. “Early. What took . . . ” Gasp. “So long?”

  Francis blanched. This woman was about to give birth. His breath caught in his throat. He took a step toward her, then stopped. He didn’t know what to do, how to help her.

  “Francis!” she cried out again.

  How did she know his name? He certainly hadn’t shared that information over the radio.

  The beast outside rammed the trailer again. A wall imploded inward, cracking the stained paneling. Dust erupted from above and coated everything with a maroon pallor. Francis fell to his knees, but quickly regained his footing, grimacing as he made his way around the debris to the young woman. She had miraculously clung to the couch, her breathing heavy. The baby’s head was fully out and moving around.

  “My god,” he said.

  Francis drew closer for a better look at the woman. It was her. His Martha. Thirty years younger, but her all the same.

  Martha’s face, free of wrinkles and lines etched by years of smiling, worrying, laughing, and living. Red dust covered her hair, but it was brown and thick, not gray and flat. Rivulets of sweat traced paths down her smooth forehead. The remaining half of her walking stick, the same she’d taken with her on this trek, lay next to her.

  She was beautiful. Francis’s heart ached.

  “Where have you been?” Martha yelled. Before the question registered in his mind, Martha howled and pain wrenched her body. “You.” Gasp. “Said.” Gasp. “Two.” More screams. “Days!”

  He stared dumbly at her. “Two days of what?”

  An idea came to him. Looking around the floor, Francis bent over and picked up a shard from a shattered mirror nearby where he stood. He looked at his reflection.

  “It can’t be.” Staring back at Francis was him of thirty years ago, bruised and battered as if he’d recently gotten the shit kicked out him.

  “Francis, please, the baby. Help me,” Martha begged. She contorted in pain and the baby slid out in a gush of blood and viscera.

  The beast outside slammed the trailer once more, separating the wall from the aluminum ceiling. The trailer rocked from the impact. More furniture upended, and the boarded windows split. Francis shielded Martha’s body and the baby from falling debris. Something fell hard on his back, knocking the wind from him. He struggled to stay upright and fell to one knee as his sprained ankle gave out.

  Rays of crimson shone through the ceiling, illuminating the living room.

  “Francis,” Martha whispered, pulling him close until his face was only inches from hers, “The baby. Did you get the supplies?”

  Too much. There was too much to deal with. The beast outside. His and Martha’s transformation. The baby who should be crying.

  Something was wrong with the baby. He remembered Joe had cried bloody murder when he had been born.

  Francis stood up, legs trembling, ankle surely broken, lungs hurting. He placed a reassuring hand on Martha’s shoulder. “Let me check.”

  Francis lifted the . . . creature that wasn’t a human child. It squirmed. Veins all over its gray body pulsed. Like the monster outside.

  A large, singular eye darted around until it found Francis’s face.

  “No . . . ” he said.

  He still clutched the shard from the fractured mirror.

  Martha reached out for him. “What’s wrong, Francis?”

  His grip around the mirror glass tightened. Blood gushed from his palm.

  “Baby’s not mine, Martha.”

  “Francis, no!” She grabbed at his arm, yanking him off-balance.

  The creature slammed the trailer hard once more, the baby slipped out of his grasp and a bookshelf toppled over on Francis, pinning the lower half of his body into glass and floor.

  The pain was debilitating but freeing. He lay on his back, blood pooling around him from his hand and many punctures from broken glass. He looked to his right arm where it stretched out nearly to the couch. The baby, coated with white dust and blood, stared at him with his horrific cyclopean eye.

  It looked monstrous.

  But it was his child.

  He had wanted to kill his baby.

  “It’s a boy, Francis.”

  A boy. Francis had always wanted a boy. His head ached. He felt the world growing oddly distant.

  “Joe,” he said.

  Martha had picked the baby off the floor, grunting from the exertion. “Yes, I like that name. Hello, Joe.” She cradled the baby and smiled.

  Like a passing storm, the creature’s assault from outside had ceased, and now a heavy quiet filled the trailer and Jacks Creek.

  And Francis lay there like that, on his back, listening to Martha and Joe and staring at the cracked ceiling until the crimson gave way to black.

  MAGGIE

  ANDI RAWSON

  “I meant to kill her.” It wasn’t supposed to be a confession, but there it was. No taking it back now. Sweet, sweet prison should have been the ending to my story, but unfortunately, it was only the beginning.

  A year ago, I lost everything. When that son of a bitch with the fake southern accent and the skunky body odor questioned me as though we were on a blind date. Detective was a generous title for a man with no balls. A worthless title for a man who couldn’t close a case, even after I told him every detail—the way I drove the knife into her throat, the way her mouth gaped in shock—with the blood on my shirt.

  That was nine months before she came back—still wearing the sapphire necklace I gave her for our anniversary, the jeans I loved with the hole in the back pocket. Her dark hair dripping streams of blood down her back, tears of betrayal smeared across her cheeks. Rain pattered the window to the cadence of her heartbeat, which I could hear through the hole in her throat, accusing me in bursts of thunder.

  I sit here staring at the blank-screened television in my one-room flat, listening to the floorboards creak. The wind screams my name as it prowls through the gap in my windowsill, widening as if to match the hole in my soul, filling the space with startled anticipation. I wonder how long it will take her tonight, repeating the words that would become my mantra: There was no body. These four words are my salvation and my curse.

  The police held me as long as they could without evidence of a crime. Despite a full confession, even the floundering of Detective Skunk died down when nothing turned up. Not a single hair from the head of which I had ripped out so many. A single drop of blood that didn’t correlate with the cut on my hand. My grief-shattered mind could not have conjured the dying light in her sea blue eyes that haunt my nightmares still, my every waking hour. The sobs that wrack my body do little to jolt me out of my trance, only strengthening the memory of her hands grasping at mine, pleading for release. These same hands that ended and began our misery, lay longingly in my lap while I wait.

  She comes every night—my beautiful soul mate. My greatest mistake. Though, even now, I’m not sure how long this spell will last, what more I’ll have to pay. A Louisiana shaman on a Seattle sidewalk, saying he found her light, that he could bring her back. I would have paid anything

  I should have kept walking.

  We play the same game we were always meant to play: a ritual, a mating dance, a death. It’s not so different from when she was alive really, at least not the first two parts—the flowers by the door, the steps I’ve yet to l
earn. The quietus has come to define me, and I’m not sure anymore whether I pray for rapture or release. For someone who dies every night in more than a proverbial sense—cold fingers dragging me down to Hades, bringing me back against my will—I’m still not sure of an afterlife. There may be only death, eternal and never enough.

  How did Maggie come to hate me so?

  I’m not sure anymore who fell first—her cheating, or my infatuation of her, spun out of control. I’m not certain this obsession was ever truly love. I’m pretty sure the absence of love is the only fuel left on this fire. It’s hard to know. Like an addict, I’ve never been away from her long enough for her return not to quench my withdrawal. Like an addict, she makes me sick, and I wish I were dead—dead for good. I should be so lucky.

  Tonight there is no luck. Only her at my window. I won’t open it, and she won’t ask. Ghosts—if that’s what she is—don’t need an invitation. It always starts out like a first date. This dead woman who still takes my breath away, makes my blood run cold. I’m lost in her eyes even before I feel it. Her hot mouth on mine. Cold steel through my ribs. She should be cold. I should be smarter. She’s not and I’m not and I mouth the same words to her every night like a prayer: Why?

  She laughs, her beautiful laugh. I’m not sure whether it’s the laugh or the blade that pierces my heart first. I can’t breathe. And she’s smiling. The only tears are mine, running down my face. Even they desert me. In a dark I can only pray is lasting, she whispers her assurance that it isn’t: “Tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow my torment will continue. Maggie, my love—my blight—shall return.

  A DREAM MOST ANCIENT AND ALONE

  ALLISON PANG

  She dreams of bull dancers.

  Lithe bodies and half-naked torsos, somersaulting in the sunlight and coated in sweat and dust. Hooves and horns and bellowed snorts muffled beneath the trampling of sand-coated arenas.

  It is her favorite dream on days like this, when the water filters the harshness of the blue sky into a golden hue, piercing the depths of the murky lake like sparkling lances. The light dances over her scales, burnished copper and bronze speckled with orange and white.

  With an exhalation of bubbles, she burrows in the warmth of soft mud and decaying leaves, wrapped in the comfort of the shadows and a blanket of slime and algae. Mottled tendrils of hair float away from her head to play in the current as she dozes, her belly full of fish eggs and tadpoles.

  It is only the high-pitched sound of a child’s laughter that draws her from slumber, tugging her awake. Her tail flicks once, lazy and silent, propelling her to the splashing at the edge of the lake.

  Her face breaks the surface of the water, nictitating membranes sliding over her eyes. The rushes hide her well, and she glides closer to the shore.

  Flat feet stir up the sand, perfect little toes squirming like pale worms.

  Her mouth opens to reveal a toothy grin, pointed and serrated weapons meant for rending and tearing, stripping flesh from bone, swallowing screams and whimpers.

  It’s over quickly.

  Crimson stains her mouth, but it washes away in moments, the flavor of it heady upon her tongue.

  The mudmaid makes off with her prize, dragging him below to her hidden chamber at the bottom of the lake. A secret within a secret. The entrance nests behind a wall of lilies, a curtain of long tubular roots drifting gently away as she pushes past them.

  His body an afterthought, the drag of the child’s limbs is no match for the propulsion of her tail. She weighs him down with rocks to keep him in place, empty eyes staring up at nothing until she covers his face with sunken leaves. Favoring him with a last lingering look, she heaves herself out of the water to the hollowed-out space where she keeps her collection.

  Humidity clings to the walls, and she does not remain long, pausing only to study the shelves carved into the stone, lined with row upon row of tiny skulls. Each one is filled with succulent dreams and tart nightmares.

  The skull of the girl who danced with bulls lies closest, the bones a sallow ivory. The mudmaid’s brown fingers caress the fissured curve, worn smooth with age, and she smiles.

  ***

  She is asleep when the police arrive, big men with big badges and fingers that scratch puzzled heads. The dogs whimper at the shoreline, baying cries going silent when they catch her scent. Still, her slumber remains undisturbed, even when the signs go up to warn campers of hidden currents, forbidding them to swim.

  Unconcerned with such mundanities, she is studying the skull of this new boy with great interest when the dredging of the lake begins. He was a soft child, full of warmth and a passion for insects and toy soldiers. His dreams are not quite ripe enough for eating, and so she places it on her shelf for some other day. Later, perhaps, when it’s quiet, she will take it to the lakeside to bleach.

  But not for too long, else the dreams will wilt under the harshness of the sun.

  When the noise of the men with their great machines becomes too terrible to bear, she retreats as deep as she can into her cave, shaking in terror as metal teeth scrape over the bedrock, knocking her skulls from their shelves.

  She cries out as some of them shatter, curling her serpentine form around the bull dancer until the trembling stops.

  Memories dissipate into dust as the most ancient skulls crumble.

  ***

  The rains have come and gone, and the lake is full of fish and frogs once more, cicadas singing their hymns to high summer.

  The mudmaid is restless, darting to and fro in confused irritation.

  Long ago, the mother of her mother’s mother came here, finding passage along a river that slowly disappeared over the years, leaving her trapped within the depths of this lake to spawn where she could. With such limited resources, her own children were forced to consume their siblings, until only one remained.

  And so it went, again and again.

  Hovering just below the surface, she watches the sun dance upon her scales. Her cold-blooded cousins give her a wide berth, wary of her temper.

  She hardly has time to react when a pair of hands snatches at her from above. Something splashes clumsily beside her as she’s dragged to the water’s edge by her shoulders and pulled onto the beach.

  “Hey, you all right? The way you were floating I thought maybe you were hur— Oh, shit.”

  The owner of the voice recoils, the mudmaid left gasping as she tries to wriggle back into the water. She catches a glimpse of a girl, dark-skinned and dark-haired, with bright cinnamon eyes and a blue shirt. Dreams sift beneath her skin, mocking and brilliant.

  A familiar hunger fills the mudmaid, but this girl is too old and too large to drown from here. Instead, she bares her teeth at the interloper and slithers back into the lake, the cool waters enveloping her sides in relief as she sucks in one breath after another.

  “Don’t go.” The girl’s voice wavers, but she thrusts her chin out, fists clenched to hide shaking hands. “Are you the monster?”

  The mudmaid eyes her balefully, stomach twisting. Her mouth opens, straining to use a voice rusty with decades of silence. “Yes,” she huffs finally and slips into the depths of the lake.

  ***

  A few days go by. Maybe a week.

  The mudmaid wonders at the word. Monster.

  She rubs the bull dancer’s skull. Would a monster keep such dreams alive? Was a spider a monster for eating flies?

  Visions of hooves and naked feet flit through her mind as she ponders it.

  ***

  “Hey. I know you’re out there.”

  The mudmaid winces and peers at the shoreline, her scaled form hidden behind the bulrushes. The girl is back. Again.

  She crosses her legs to sit in the sand, a backpack beside her, and stares at the water expectantly for a few minutes. Her face twists into a scowl when nothing more than a kingfisher disturbs the lake’s calm as it dives and retreats.

  “You can’t keep hiding, you know. Sooner or later, someone’s gonna
figure it out, and they’re going to catch you. You’ll end up in some science lab as someone’s prize experiment.” The girl fishes in her backpack. “I brought you something.”

  Paper crinkles curiously as the girl unwraps a package from the bag. “I don’t know if you can read or not, but I found this story about you in a book of folktales at the library. Or someone like you, anyway. Jenny Greenteeth? Does that sound familiar? The camp counselors told me you’re just an urban legend, but we’re not supposed to come to this lake either.”

  The mudmaid frowns at the words, and she silently paddles closer for a better look, rising from the water a few feet away. She can’t say what drives her to expose herself to her potential prey.

  Boredom? Loneliness?

  Hunger.

  The girl glances up for a half a heartbeat, face paling. She freezes, as though steeling herself against some instinct that tells her to run. “Jenny? Is that your name?”

  The mudmaid shakes her head. “I have no name, save that little sound the children make as they breathe their last,” she rumbles.

  The girl swallows. “Well, that’s all right then. I’ll call you Jenny anyway, perhaps? Though you don’t look anything like the picture in this book. They make her out to be a hag, but you’re very pretty.”

  The mudmaid blinks, flashing her teeth. “I do not know . . . pretty. Only hunger. And dreams.”

  “Didn’t your mother call you anything? My name is Jocelynn.”

  “I ate my mother. And my sisters too, newly hatched as we were.”

  “Ate?” Jocelynn’s mouth tightens. “I don’t understand.”

  “It is the way of our kind,” the mudmaid murmurs, easing into the shallows so that only her carp’s tail remains in the water. To her credit, Jocelynn doesn’t twitch a muscle except to slide the book toward her.

  The mudmaid’s gimlet gaze lingers on the descriptions of Jenny Greenteeth, but she’s far more interested in the image of the faery dragging a child into the water than anything else. Her nails are caked with detritus, thick and hard; her webbed fingers leave a muddy trail upon the page when she traces over the picture.