Hedge Lake

by Brian Harmon

  “Sounds like you’re out of luck to me,” said Eric.

  There was that creepy smile again. “Oh, I didn’t say it was impossible. In fact, I know for certain that it can be done.” Leaning forward again, steepling his hands under his chin, he said, “Did you know that in the late eighteen hundreds there was a serial killer at work in this area?”

  “I think Pete mentioned something about that,” he recalled.

  “He might’ve. I was the one who told him.”

  Eric nodded. “Well, that’s about all I know of it.” And he was pretty sure it wasn’t the sort of thing he should’ve known. Obscure Serial Killers in Midwestern American History wasn’t on the regular rotation of classes when he was in college. Maybe they’d changed that since he left.

  “I’m not surprised. It’s not well known. Not even in the area. There are very few surviving records to be found.”

  “Sounds a little fishy to me.”

  He shrugged. “It was a different time back then. Social media wasn’t around to fan the flames every time something bad happened. Things occurred and then they were forgotten. This guy was said to have killed at least twenty young women. But he was never captured. His identity remains a mystery to this day. But the locals gave him a name. They called him Jeremiah Bog.”

  “Creepy story,” said Eric. “But I don’t really get how it has anything to do with what we were talking about.”

  Fettarsetter chuckled. “Patience. I’m just getting to the best part.”

  Eric spread his hands in a “please go on” gesture and shut his mouth.

  “Jeremiah Bog, just before he vanished forever, sent a letter to the local police, claiming he’d killed over a hundred women. Except he never used the word ‘killed.’ He said he was ‘curing’ them. He also claimed to have visited what he called ‘the bottom of the world’ where ‘nothing living grew’ and ‘the dead had gone mad.’”

  Eric raised an eyebrow. “The bottom of the world?”

  “I think we both know what he meant by that.”

  “The bottom of the triangle?”

  “He claimed to have seen a beast so terrifying that he nearly died of fright on the spot.”

  A beast…?

  “You’ve been inside the triangle,” said Fettarsetter. It wasn’t a question. He knew he had. “You’ve seen the dead. They have gone mad down there. And it’s no wonder.”

  “I haven’t been in very deep,” said Eric. “Like you said, it’s impossible to navigate.”

  “Jeremiah Bog navigated it.”

  Eric shrugged. “If you say so. But how’d he do it?”

  “In this letter, he said he had a compass.”

  “A compass?”

  “Not a regular compass, of course.”

  “Well, of course.”

  “A special one.”

  Eric considered this. Back in the fissure, his phone had served as a compass, but this place didn’t seem to work quite the same. There, it was the cell phone’s signal that told him where he was. Losing reception was a sign that he was venturing deeper into the fissure and away from this world. He hadn’t lost the signal since he arrived here, in spite of the fact that he seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

  Although Jordan had mentioned a town on the far side of the lake. Maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched that there’d be a tower nearby.

  “If I had that compass,” reasoned Fettarsetter, “then I’d be able to navigate the triangle’s deeper levels, the way Bog did. I could finally reach what I’ve been searching for my entire life.”

  Eric nodded. “Sure. A magic compass. Who wouldn’t want one of those?”

  The creepy smile didn’t come back. Fettarsetter stared at him, considering him.

  “Even if this is all true,” said Eric, “and this Bog guy had a compass that could guide him to the bottom of the triangle, how does that help either of us now? I mean, you said the guy vanished. He probably took the compass with him. Along with whatever was the secret to making another one.”

  “True,” agreed Fettarsetter. “But I don’t believe Bog ever left the triangle. I believe he’s still here somewhere.”

  “What? You mean one of the ghosts?”

  “Probably, yes.”

  Eric laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Well I’ve met a few of these ghosts already. They’re not good conversationalists. I doubt he’ll tell you how to make another compass.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. But if Bog’s still here, then so is his compass. I believe it was lost somewhere in the triangle.”

  “Let me guess: You think I can find it for you.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. I wouldn’t ask such a thing of you.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “But I know Bog made his way to the bottom of the triangle at least once. If he can do it, so can I. And so can you, for that matter.”

  Eric stood there for a moment, taking all this in. He came here because he still didn’t know where to go next. He still had no idea how to find the “secret path” that Mrs. Fulrick told him about. And this guy was talking about a compass that could guide him through the lower levels of the triangle. It made sense. But how the hell was he supposed to find a compass that had been lost for over a hundred years? Such a thing would probably be rusted away to nothing by now. And like his phone back in the fissure, a compass didn’t necessarily have to be a compass. Just that morning, Karen had described him as a compass, with his bizarre urge to travel north. But although that compulsion had brought him all the way here, that was as far as his psychic GPS worked. It’d told him nothing once he was inside the triangle.

  Finally, he asked the most important question of all: “What is it? What’s down there at the very bottom of the triangle?”

  Fettarsetter smiled again. If anything it was creepier than ever. “Something magnificent. Something terrifying.”

  Eric nodded. “That narrows it down. Thanks.”

  He sat back in his chair, still smiling, and said loudly, “But see, amid the mimic rout, a crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out the scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs the mimes become its food, and seraphs sob at vermin fangs in human gore imbued.”

  Eric took a step back. Poe again. Another poem. Suddenly, his mind was racing. An evil presence in the lake. A great shadow towering over the land. Something tearing its way through from another world, threatening to destroy us all.

  Fettarsetter went on: “Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm, while the angels, all pallid and wan, uprising, unveiling, affirm…”

  He paused and waited. As he expected, Eric finished the poem: “That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’ and its hero…the Conqueror Worm.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Eric felt a sick dread growing in the pit of his stomach, an almost childlike terror creeping through him. The Conqueror Worm… It was a terrifying thought. The poem was Poe’s metaphor for the futility of life and the inevitability of death, centered on the haunting image of angels gathered to watch a play of mimes pointlessly chasing a phantom and ultimately being devoured by a great, blood-red worm, all while strange, shadowy figures controlled everything from behind the scenes.

  He looked at Fettarsetter, with his creepy smile. “You’re telling me that the thing at the bottom of the triangle is a…a worm?”

  “A terrible worm,” he affirmed.

  Eric stared at him. He looked overjoyed at the idea of a giant worm terrorizing the planet.

  “Try to imagine a crawling, writhing shape stretching the length of the horizon and more, crushing and devouring everything in its path.”

  Eric shuddered. He didn’t have to try. His imagination was more than willing to cooperate with this madman, regardless of whether he wanted it to or not. “It won’t,” he said.

  Fettarsetter blinked, surprised. “What?”

  �
�It won’t crush or devour anything here. Once it tears through, our world will shatter. We’ll all be destroyed the very moment it reaches us.”

  He looked impressed. “Maybe. It’s a theory.”

  “It’s a fact. We have to stop it.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much we can do about it, honestly. It’ll break through any day now.”

  Eric rubbed at his eyes. He needed to focus. He couldn’t afford to be distracted now. It wasn’t any day now. It was now. It was tonight! The worm would come with the rain. It would rise from lake and the world would turn itself inside out.

  He should’ve seen something like this coming. This was exactly the sort of thing an agent would be into. He was probably sent here to investigate the thing. His bosses in the nameless organization probably had any number of evil plans for a gargantuan, world-devouring worm.

  And, of course, any details about how they might plan to control such a thing would not be given to Eric. Even Fettarsetter might not know. There was a high level of secrecy involved with these people.

  “I’ve got to go,” he announced.

  Fettarsetter didn’t stop him. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks for stopping by. We’ll talk again sometime.”

  Not on your life, thought Eric as he turned and left the room. He made his way back down the hallway and across the book-littered living room to the front door. He kept expecting Fettarsetter to stop him, but he didn’t even rise from his chair.

  Outside, he stopped on the porch and forced himself to take a breath.

  The Conqueror Worm. The very idea was…well…honestly no harder to believe than half the stuff he’d already discovered to be true. And yet, the idea of a giant, inter-dimensional worm shredding the fabric of the universe and laying waste to the planet was utterly terrifying.

  His phone buzzed against his thigh. He withdrew it from his pocket and answered it.

  “That guy is seriously wrong!” declared Isabelle.

  “Is he?” Eric asked, hopeful.

  “Well… Maybe not about the worm.”

  He stepped off the porch and started down the driveway. “What do you know about worms?”

  “They’re slimy and gross.”

  “Okay. What about conqueror worms?”

  “I remember something called a ‘great worm’ once,” she recalled. “A guy trapped in an abandoned house in a remote town somewhere in Argentina was muttering about it. I thought it was just nonsense. An absurd myth. His mind was already mostly gone when I met him. But after hearing that Fettarsetter creep talk about it, I’m not so sure anymore… According to that guy, the end of the world would involve all of existence being devoured by a colossal worm.”

  “That does sound similar,” agreed Eric.

  “I don’t know what’s scarier, the idea of the world ripping open and obliterating us all in a flash, or the world holding together and that thing being set loose.”

  “Neither option is on my bucket list.”

  “Mine either.”

  Eric reached the end of the driveway and turned left. The moon was illuminating the wide road, but the sky was quickly filling with clouds so that it kept slipping in and out of view. Before much longer, it would be completely lost.

  Then the rain would come…

  “How’re you holding up?” he asked. “Any better?”

  “I still feel like my head’s going to explode.”

  He shook his head. “I hate that. I feel like I should be getting you out of here.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You should—”

  Eric stopped walking. “Isabelle?”

  “Eric… You remember that strange energy I felt around Fettarsetter and that hellhound?”

  Eric felt a chill creep down his back. “Yes…”

  “I feel it again.”

  He said a very bad word and turned to scan his surroundings, but the moon slipped behind another cloud and everything went dark around him. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Near.”

  He saw no glowing red eyes, no jack-o-lantern teeth silhouetted against hellfire breath.

  “Get out of there, Eric!”

  Get out? How? He didn’t even know which way to run! He turned in circles, sweeping the surrounding forest with his light, but there was nothing there.

  Get ahold of yourself, he thought. Don’t panic. But it was easier said than done.

  A rustling noise… Did that come from in front of him or behind him? It was so hard to tell. His heart was racing.

  He was seriously getting too old for this nonsense.

  The moon slid back out from behind its cloud, bathing the road in light once more. But still he saw nothing. He swept the trees in front of him with the flashlight. Then he turned around.

  It came out of the forest. Not a hellhound, not a shallows walker, but something far stranger than both. It ran on two thin, hairy legs with a round, shaggy body, short, meaty arms and a long, flexible neck. Its head was small and birdlike, but with an enormous, cavernous mouth opened wide to reveal rows of gleaming fangs.

  It kind of looked like an ostrich, except it was covered in long, matted hair, like a mammal. It was as if someone had pieced together a creature that sort of resembled an ostrich from parts of a goat, a potbellied pig and a gorilla.

  Or maybe that was just how he perceived the thing. After all, he only actually saw it for a fraction of a second before he was moving as quickly as possible in the opposite direction, tearing through the woods and screaming for help.

  The thing was quick, but awkward. It seemed to have a pronounced limp and didn’t navigate the underbrush well, allowing Eric to stay ahead of it for the moment. But he had no idea where he was supposed to go. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the thing stumble. Facing forward again, he pushed himself to run faster.

  Another cloud passed over the moon, sinking him into a dreadful darkness, forcing him to concentrate hard on where he was going to keep from braining himself on a low branch.

  The flashlight beam leapt from tree to tree and then the woman was there, blocking his path. She was neither the bloody woman nor the weeping woman. Her filthy hair was blonde. Her clothes were soaked and muddy. Her flesh was gray and pallid. And her eyes had been gouged out.

  Yelping at the startling sight, Eric abruptly changed course, avoiding both the not-ostrich and the blind woman.

  Fettarsetter said that the alleged serial killer, Jeremiah Bog, preyed on women. Was that one of his victims? Was that why he kept finding women out here? So far, only the burning man and the shadow man were male. (Of course, that was assuming that it had always been the same shadow man, and not multiple shadow men.)

  In front of him, the blind woman materialized again, her mouth moving with silent words.

  He didn’t mean to be rude, but he really couldn’t stop to talk. He changed course again and tried to concentrate on not tripping.

  Behind him, he could still hear the ostrich-thing tearing after him.

  God, he hated the woods.

  The blind woman appeared again in front of him. This time, she was pointing to her left. His right. “Sure, lady!” he said. “Whatever!” He didn’t have any better idea, so he changed course again and ran in the direction she was pointing, hoping she wasn’t leading him to something even more terrifying than a mutant mammal-bird with a mouth full of fangs.

  The spirits were human. They were merely people, victims of the violence and madness on which the triangle fed. They weren’t inherently evil. At least some of them, it reasoned, should still be capable of kindness. Hopefully this one was like that and not an embittered ghost filled with jealous, murderous spite for the living.

  Eric, his mind always a mysterious thing, found himself wondering if the dead really envied the living, or if that was merely a thing invented by horror writers and Hollywood.

  If these adventures had taught him only one thing, it was that his brain was a little on the odd side. He couldn’t count the insane things that’d crossed his mi
nd while being chased by something terrifying.

  But then again, how many people regularly found themselves being chased by monsters? Maybe that was just the way the brain worked. Maybe everyone was funny like that.

  But it was probably that he really was strange.

  He ran on. He seemed to be outpacing the Franken-ostrich. It sounded farther away. He risked a look back and saw that it had fallen back.

  When he looked forward, the blind woman was there again, one gray finger thrust out to the side, pointing the way.

  “Thank you!” he cried out as he rushed past her. “I think…” He hoped, at least. His mother taught him not to accept rides from strangers when he was a child, but she never said anything about taking directions from the dead. It seemed like something she should’ve brought up if it was an issue…

  The moon peeked out again, illuminating the forest around him, and a small structure emerged from the gloom before him.

  This is where the blind woman was leading him. This was his safe haven.

  He ran around to the front of the little cabin and banged on the door.

  No one answered.

  He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the ostrich thing run into view, its strange head (not really a bird’s head, he realized, but not like anything else he’d ever seen before, either) scanning the area for a moment before spotting him again.

  He checked the knob. It was locked, of course. Why wouldn’t it be locked? It only made sense that it would be. Who the hell left doors unlocked in this day and age?

  The ostrich thing stalked toward him. It opened its wide mouth, revealing those countless fangs again, and hissed at him.

  Not sure what else to do, Eric turned and ran around the side of the building.

  The monster followed. It seemed to have a bad foot, so it wasn’t very fast, thankfully, but it made up for this lack of speed in sheer determination. It simply wasn’t giving up.

  He checked the back door on his way past, but it, too, was locked. Not knowing what else to do, he circled around to the front again, simply trying to keep distance between himself and the hideous creature.