The Lake Boy

by Adam Roberts

  I felt as tho I had swum a great age, but I am not a practised bather and my arms worked reluctantly and with aches in both shoulders. I turned, and saw the shore not so distant as I had hoped. At any rate, I bethought myself: it is deep enough here to drown myself, and I awaited the mother waters’ embrace.

  At this thought, with an almost theatrick showiness the cosmos confirmed my affirmation by breaking the shell of cloud and parting them to reveal the sunlight – a great marmoreal shaft of bright white light slanting from the west and rendering the surface of the waters all a-glister. I turned on my back and kicked my legs, or tried to (for they were both so deadened by the cold as I could barely feel them) and thrashed my shivering arms as best I could, to move further towards the centre of the Blaswater. The sunlight stroked the lake from west to east, and then the clouds closed again.

  I pried the other shoe from my left foot, and it fell away through the mirk waters.

  I looked up. Tho the rain had stopped, and I could hear no more thunder, save only the boomy sound of small waves slapping against me and one another, yet did I see lights in the clouds, and a glimmer the colour of clean white china in amongst the purple and the black. Then sparkles of brighter light in a round circlet, and daggers of red shooting out from this ring. It was a sight like unto the lights at night, at June’s end, that I had seen – yet this was solitary where those had been myriad, and this was large and solid, and seemed to move with stately galleon progression skydown toward me.

  It mattered not. My bones were aching so fiercely I could feel the outline of the skeleton within me. The effortful business of moving my legs against the resistance of the muslin of my dress threatened to overwhelm me, and I slipped under the surface. I closed my eyes and breathed out, but the thought of the water penetrating into every limb of my chest and choking the life from me filled me with panic – for there are contradictions in the process I was undergoing, or perhaps the truth is that the raw animal within me awoke, briefly, and struggled again for life. So I moved my legs with as much force and celerity as I could, and my head broke the waves again, and I gasped, and saw – it is hard to be certain – a basket of light, a Montgolfier device of improbable size, spilling light in rainbow glory upon the underside of the cloud and descending. My foot tangled in the leaden folds of my dress and I slipped under the waves once more.

  And so I sank. There was light about me, propping itself upon columns and shafts through the granular water. Pain bunched at my ears, and then spiked so fiercely I could not prevent myself screaming – tho no sound emerged, only a bubble, and water soon rushed in. I writhed, for the pains in my chest were as tho swords were chopping through and through my lungs.

  The light blazed, and I tumbled into a chamber, or out of the lake, or perchance through into the afterlife itself. For a length of time I was unable to orient myself, for I was too busy coughing and expelling the scorching water from my lungs, and afterwards gasping and panting. When my senses returned I found myself into a dark brown cave; yet was the floor not rock but something pliable and brown and covered in stipples or nubbins that withdrew under pressure. The walls of this space were elastic, taut enough to hold, yet soft enough not to injure my knees or elbow as I rolled about. I sat up, and by forming my fingers into a blade was able to push through the barrier and feel the cold waters of the lake on the far side. Yet when I withdrew my hand, did the waters not flow in through the breach I had made, for this healed itself.

  I stood up and walked to the end of my little cave; and when I turned about was not surprised to see the scorch-faced boy there, spectral or physical, ghost or real.

  ‘I turned your head to stone,’ I said. ‘Or so I thought.’

  ‘The man become rock,’ returned the figure: ‘and is there in that no religious mysterium?’

  ‘You are here to tell me where I am.’

  ‘You are already cognizant where you are,’ said the boy. ‘You have affirmed it. You only lack the contentment.’

  ‘And why should I be content?’ I retorted, suddenly hot with fury. ‘She abandoned me in the downturn of a fly’s wing – I loved her, and she betrayed me.’

  ‘Did you say to her, I love you? The quintessence of all affirmation is those words, and that phrase. It is what God says to sustain the whole of creation. And did you utter those words to her?’

  This caused me to breathe more deeply; for the answer was, of course, no – or not in those words – or not quite – or not yet – or, no. ‘I ken what you would say,’ I told the boy. ‘You would say what choice did she possess, but to abandon me? She has a position in society, that I have not; and which I cannot gauge the pain of losing. She has her children, and would give up much, or perhaps everything, not to lose them. My reason knows this; yet my reason cannot locate happiness within it.’

  ‘Ah, but happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination,’ said the boy, smiling his lop-sided smile and putting his hands together. ‘Peter is holding the door open, and you are within the frame of it.’

  ‘How is it the lake water has formed this bubble, and we two within?’ I asked, pressing a hand through the membranum again. ‘What science is here?’

  ‘You think this beast inert? A mere mass of water, combining certain atoms in a certain arrangement permitting interpenetration and motion? The natural capacities of any creature are provoked by their environs to evolve completely to their fittest form. Life, whencesoever it originates, so evolves. Or,’ and he lifted a hand and wagged it at me, dismissively, ‘or did you think that creatures dwelling in other worlds and other realms of the cosmos must look like human beings? Why should they, any more than dogs or cats look like human beings? Any more than tigers or snakes, serpents or amoeboid life does?’ He shook his head slowly, turning first the clear and then the scarred portion towards me, and I bethought me (I know not why) of the moon.

  ‘It is alive?’ I asked.

  ‘The puzzle,’ returned the lad, ‘is that anything is ever not, that anything is ever truly inert – as some things are. The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of a veiled plan to structure forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end.’

  ‘And where are we now? We are – inside its organs? Which? Its stomach, perhaps?’

  ‘It is a body without organs,’ said the boy. ‘And this cell is made as a temporary structure for you and by you, tho you realise it not. Will you stay?’

  ‘The lights,’ I said, looking up (tho the ceiling was the same glum colour as the walls and floor, and nothing was visible through them). ‘They are here for it? They are the same people as it? Do its fellows share the same form as this… entity? Are they dragons with water for muscles?’

  ‘Theirs is not fixed in forms after the fashion of life in your kind,’ said the boy.

  ‘Will it leave with them? Will Blaswater become a dry valley, and this water-tiger, water-dragon, swim through the heavens?’

  ‘Or,’ the boy replied, ‘will the vital principle of this creature depart, unrestrained by the barriers of space and form that confine the likes of you and I? The water left behind, but inert and fluid, the entity gone away – to report, perchance, on the strange fossilised creatures that are pinned by spatiality and temporality to this conglomerated conch of a world? I do not know. I do not yet know, tho I hope to step through Saint Peter’s doorway and discover, soon, very soon.’

  ‘Saint Peter,’ I said.

  ‘In naming him I tell you only what you have already determined in your own faculty of reason, tho such may be opaque to you.’

  He mentioning opacity recalled me to my circumstance. ‘No, no. How is it bright enough in here for me to see?’

  ‘You glow, madam,’ said the boy, and laughed. I took a step towards him –

  – and fell down the slope, into the air, and under the night
-sky. In tumbling I hurt myself, and in truth so brewsed my wrist that I required it later to be bound up. The air all around me was chill, but clear and fresh. I got up and my dress was still heavy and wet about my limbs. I shivered in the darkness, tho even the pain of my coldness and shuddering could not prevent me being struck by the beauty of the stars above. The pricks of light were vast and distant, or small and nearby; and towards the horizon they spread into a mist that formed the Milky Way. I saw trees that brought out the sensation of remembrance, and a low long building in silhouette. Towards this I started, shuddering with the cold so fierce I feared I might drop down and die. I had no Hamletian thoughts of being or not being any more; I only wanted to be warm again. I thought of a fire in a fireplace, and a dry cloak, and so I stumbled on

  The house was a mile distant, or a little less, and the nearer I got the more I recalled it – for it was Magnoble’s villa, and I returned thither from Blaswater by what witchery I know not, save only that it was the same that removed me thither. I arrived at the door with bloodied feet, and tears in my eyes, and my fists made wet and feeble noise upon the wooden panels, and none heeded them, so I found a brick discarded by the side of the house and used that to hammer the door. Eventually a lantern was lit, and Magnoble’s cook op’d the door, in great amazement to find me there.

  I begged her to lay a fire, and this she did, as Magnoble himself rose and descended, and several of the boys too (tho he scolded them back to their beds). I was warmed, and the cook heated a little broth for me to drink, which I could hold in my right hand, tho my left was too sore to clutch a bowl.

  I need not dilate upon this. I had been gone seventeen days, tho to me it seemed only some hours. I know not whence those days disappeared. The window I had broke had been mended, and Mr Magnoble had writ my brother telling him of my flight, but had received as yet no reply. I sobbed, and sought to impart to them that I had been in the lake, and yet that lake a creature from a world unlike ours in every particular, down to the composition of physical bodies, compositum et materiam, yet did they scowl and shake their heads. They thought me disarranged in my wits, and soon enough I was led to my bed, where Cook (in her kindness) agreed to stay; so she muffled herself up in a great blanket, slept in the chair and I under my bedcloathes did slumber until noon the next day.

  I was ill; for my feet were so scratched and battered I could not walk for three days, and my wrist must be splinted where it had broken, or been so badly sprained as to approach fracture, and the cold had entered my innards and led to fever. For a week I was nursed until I began to recover. By then, tho questioned again, I had resolved not to tell what had happened, for fear they would decide me a worse specie of mad than even before, and take drasticker action. So I said I could not recall whither I had gone, except only that it must not be far from here, and they left me alone.

  I had met – I know not what I had met. I had experienced an experience, true or fever dream. Yet does the thought recur to me, as the scarred boy said. Say that there are beings in the heavens, inhabiting worlds, and saved (or not) by the blood of Jesus Christ from death and damnation. Say that. Yet why say that they must be like unto men and women, with two legs and two arms? And once this thought is thought, all the dogmatic rest dissolves away. For say we imagine fish-beings, or snake-beings, or what you will. Why so? All such imaginings are but translations of the forms of life with which we are familiar into unfamiliar locales. Astronomers I met whilst my brother was yet alive assure me that Venus, planet, is obscured always with clouds, most like because it is a world of oceans and seas, as the Earth is a world (mostly) of plains and mountains. Why might life on such a planet not take liquidity as its principle and form, as we take solidity? Or might it not slide into liquidity, as we into out cloathes? And such a being, were it to visit our world, might settle the liquid lake of Blaswater as itself. Perhaps it looked upon the land and the beings who walked there and comprehended them not. Yet sometimes people from our world would fall into the water, and the creature would receive some glimmer of communication. Who knows?

  Or perhaps I dreamed the whole thing in a fever, and it is nothing but my fancy.

  Into the new year, my wounds healing, I began again with my circumscribed life. But the news soon came that my beloved brother George, the prop and stay of my life, had passed to be with his Maker, from consumption of the lungs, and I alone left of all my family. This in turn led to my expulsion from Magnoble’s house, for with none to pay the bills he would not retain me, mad or not. So I travelled to Leeds, and remained in that city for a week, lodging with a Mr. Kincade, and meeting with a lawyer to whom my brother’s will and testament was forwarded. There being no other beneficiaries I received all, and tho it was not much yet it was enough to maintain me in modest means.

  Frail still, I travelled by carriage over the Pennine Mountains and returned to the cottage, to pack up such things as I wanted, and sell such furniture as I did not. I located this journal, in the secret place I had it hid, and wrote out this account, that it not be lost.

  Some in the village avoid me, and even make the symbol of the evil eye in my direction; but others are more possessed of Christian Charity, and have taken pity on my bereavement. From one of these, a certain Mrs Gregor, who had agreed to handle the sale of goods for a set fee of 18/6, from her I learned the gossip. It was meagre enough. The lights vanishing from the sky, the astronomers had all departed the region. The Church had promised a new vicar for our church, to be a young fellow called Priestley, which fact Mrs Gregor thinks comical (‘fitting name to function,’ she said; ‘tho I hope he prove not Romish in his ministry’). I pressed her for more news.

  ‘There was a girl drowned in the lake,’ she said, and looked gravely at the floor.

  ‘O horrible!’

  ‘There was a fire, or so some thought, upon the water – it being late December, and night, and rainy, they could not be sure, but some in the village thought a boat in the middest had caught flame, and two men went out in a rowed-boat to help. But they found nothing, and when they returned they discovered only that Sally Cartman, wife to one of the rowers, who had stood on the jetty with her shawl tight until her man return safe, was not to be found. The next day her shawl was pulled from the water by a fisherman. It is a tragic thing.’

  This news cast my spirits very low. And yet, even de profundis, it is possible to affirm. I debate with myself to write to Eliza, or not to do so. I know how she would seek to defend herself, or else how she would rebuke me for putting her in such social danger, or perhaps how she would merely shun me. Yet in knowing these things, and through them knowing her, yet still do I love her. And I hope and trust it runs not contrary to the will of God that, one day, I will meet her again, in a place other than this, in a time other than this, and be able to affirm to her face I love you, and so the connection will be effected.

  About the Author

  Adam Roberts is the author of seventeen SF novels, most recently The Thing Itself (Gollancz 2015) and The Real-Town Murders (Gollancz 2017). He has a day job, teaching English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and lives in the easternmost spur of Berkshire with his wife and family.

  A Selected Bibliography:

  Salt (2000)

  On (2001)

  Stone (2002)

  Gradisil (2006)

  Splinter (2007)

  Swiftly (2008)

  Yellow Blue Tibia (2009)

  New Model Army (2010)

  By Light Alone (2011)

  Jack Glass (2012)

  Saint Rebor collection (2014)

  Bête (2014)

  The Thing Itself (2015)

  The Real-Town Murders (2017)

  NewCon Press Novella Set 4: Strange Tales

  Gary Gibson – Ghost Frequencies

  Susan MacDonald knows she’s close to perfecting a revolutionary new form of instantaneous communication, but unless she makes a breakthrough soon her project will be shut down. Do the odd sounds �
� snatches of random conversation and even music – that are hampering her experiments represent the presence of ‘ghosts’ as some claim, deliberate sabotage as suggested by others, or is there a more sinister explanation?

  Ricardo Pinto – Matryoshka

  Lost in Venice in the aftermath of the war, Cherenkov just wants to put his head down somewhere and sleep, but her copper hair snares his eye. She leads him to Eborius, a baroque land lost in time, and takes him on a pilgrimage across Sargasso seas in search of the Old Man, who dwells on an island where time follows its own rules. Last of his kind, the Old Man is the only being alive who may hold the answers Cherenkov craves.

  Hal Duncan – The Land of Somewhere Safe

  The Land of Somewhere Safe: where things go when you think, “I must put this somewhere safe,” and then can never find them again. The Scruffians: street waifs Fixed by the Stamp to provide immortal slave labour. But now they’ve nicked the Stamp and burned down the Institute that housed it, preventing any more of their number being exploited. Hounded by occultish Nazi spies and demons, they leave the Blitz behind in search of somewhere safe to stow it…

  2001: AN ODYSSEY IN WORDS

  Edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter

  An anthology of original fiction to honour the centenary of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s birth and act as a fund raiser for the Clarke Award. Every story is precisely 2001 words long.

  2001 includes stories by 10 winners of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and 13 authors who have been shortlisted, as well as non-fiction by Neil Gaiman, China Miéville and Chair of Judges Andrew M. Butler.