Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  Something bizarre caught his eye. One wall was comprised of wood paneling, circa 1975, and Alan ran the flashlight along it. Someone had carved the same two words over and over again into the shallow wood. There were still shavings on the floor.

  devil’s stone

  Repeated without variation. A litany, a mantra. He touched the carvings, ran his fingernails into the grooves. Devil’s Stone. What did it mean?

  Continuing to run the flashlight up and down the wall, he found further carvings, and these caused a tight ball to clench in his guts. They weren’t words, though he recognized them immediately. They were symbols. The same hieroglyphs that were carved on the white stones along the path that ran through the woods to the lake: wavy lines, crenellations, upside-down triangles.

  Too easily he could picture an insane Owen Moreland carving the symbols and the mystic words into the wood paneling while waiting for his wife to return to the house just to blow her brains out with his shotgun. Had he carved them before killing the young firefighter, or had he returned from the scene of that massacre, his mind already broken, and started whittling away in the wall? Whatever the case, the notion creeped him out.

  Upstairs, it sounded like someone stepping on creaking floorboards.

  Alan cocked his head, listening.

  There are ghosts here.

  He ascended the stairs, piloted still by that inexplicable drive, and froze in his tracks as a low, scrabbling sound emanated from the opposite end of the hallway—a sound like a piece of heavy furniture sliding across hardwood floors, digging grooves in the floorboards.

  Someone was in the house.

  He was certain of it.

  “Owen?” His voice came out in a pathetic croak. Yet what frightened him more than the sound of his own voice was the fact that he’d thought to call out for a dead man. Was he really expecting an answer? Did he really want one?

  Again: the sound of heavy dragging. It was coming from the last door at the end of the hall. The door was closed; a sliver of white moonlight glowed at its bottom. It was just like—

  (the bathroom it’s the bathroom and Heather is in the bathroom and I push through the door and there she is floating in pink water or she is on the bathtub’s edge shaking the bottle of pills and they sound like a rattlesnake like maracas like slot machines and the clinking of metal bracelets and she is on the edge of the bathtub and her face is dead her face is lifeless there is nothing left inside her nothing there is nothing and when she speaks she is no longer herself no longer my wife because her barrenness has turned her into nothing into nothing into nothing)

  “Hello? Is somebody here?” he intoned, if only to quash his own discomforting thoughts. Despite the mugginess of the air, an icy chill straddled him.

  Somehow, he reached the end of the hallway and touched the doorknob of the closed door.

  It was ice-cold.

  She’s going to be in here, he told himself, abruptly trembling with fear. You will open the door and find your old bathroom on the other side, the bathroom from the apartment in Manhattan. And Heather will be sitting on the edge of the tub. If you listen, Professor, you can hear the shaking-shaking-shaking of the pills …

  (you never left you’re still there you never left and this is all a dream a nightmare)

  He opened the door, a scream catching in his throat.

  But it wasn’t a bathroom. It was a bedroom. Empty. The room had been cleaned out, leaving behind only the galvanized metal skeleton of a bed frame. Moonlight poured in through one of the windows—the boards had been pried away from the window frame and the glass pane had been smashed, leaving a scatter of jagged shards on the hardwood floor. There was more plastic tarpaulin, taped in sections to one whole wall and covering a good section of the floor … though much of it had been peeled back by the swarthy, hunched creatures that now populated the room.

  The flashlight beam shook as Alan trained it on the creatures. They were buzzards, three great big fat ones, all of which turned and jabbed him with their reptilian stares, each one looking as big as a pterodactyl. The sound he had heard—the scraping of what sounded like heavy furniture along the floor—was the sound of their talons scrambling for purchase on the floorboards.

  God…

  One of the birds had a section of the tarpaulin in its bull-horn beak and was in the process of peeling it away from the Sheetrock, exposing a mud-colored, avant-garde spatter of what Alan instantly knew to be dried blood on the wall. The bird froze as Alan let the door swing open and targeted the creature with the flashlight.

  One of its companions bleated at him—a sound more appropriate for a sheep than a bird—and extended its wings to their full span.

  Dry-mouthed and terrified, Alan threw himself against the doorframe. He nearly dropped the flashlight. Too afraid to run—powerless to move, in fact—he could only stare back at them. They filled the tiny room with a rank, rotting fruit smell that was reminiscent of public restrooms and overflowing sewers.

  One of the birds scrabbled to the broken window, its claws hammering a tattoo along the lacquered wooden floor. It splayed its wings and hopped to the windowsill, stirring the motionless air. It seemed to contemplate its next move for a moment before launching itself out the smashed window. Another bird followed its lead, dropping like a lead weight from the moonlit gap in the wall.

  Only the third bird remained—the one with the corner of tarp in its jaws. It jerked its head, peeling the plastic away from the drywall with a sickening snapping sound, revealing more and more of the bloody mess spread like dried black paste on the wall. Unlike its two companions, the creature did not seem perturbed by Alan’s presence.

  “Get the fuck out of here.” The words came out in a groan. When the bird didn’t respond to his command, he slammed one foot down hard on the floor. The sound echoed throughout the room and out into the hallway.

  The bird stopped. It examined him closely with milk-soured eyes, beady as two chips of obsidian, and then dropped the section of tarpaulin from its beak. As if broken and unhinged, its lower jaw hung open, showing Alan the black, greasy funnel of its maw, piebald with whitish pustules. It was like a stage performer, the bead of Alan’s flashlight spotlighting it where it stood.

  Alan crouched and gathered up a shard of broken window-pane and hurled it at the beast. The shard wedged itself into the coarse feathers at its breast.

  The thing wheezed like an accordion and flapped its wings, sending dust motes and cobwebs floating around the room. Then it rose off the floor, its scale-plated claws curled into rheumatic bear traps, and expelled itself out the window. Its wingspan was so great that tufts of hoary feathers were stripped from its wings during the evacuation. The feathers seesawed to the floor.

  The palm of Alan’s right hand was wet. He looked down to find a slender laceration oozing blood from the soft, pink mound of muscle just below his thumb. Carelessly, he’d cut it when picking up the shard of glass.

  He entered the room and stood for a long time staring at the smear of black blood on the drywall, exposed now beneath the partially shorn length of tarpaulin. Why hadn’t this been cleaned up? Why just paper over the mess with plastic and leave it sit here? No wonder the house was still vacant.

  Or had he answered his own question? Not having the house on the market would ensure no new families could move into town, which in turn would ensure that the secret of the lake would be kept as such: a town secret. Yet if that were the case, how come something similar hadn’t been done to prevent Heather and him from moving into his dead uncle’s place?

  Because the house was left to me in his will, Alan thought. We didn’t just pick up and move here.

  Alone in the room, Alan played the flashlight’s beam across the walls and floor. More of the same bizarre sigils were here on the wall, too, only these were painted in a dark substance that Alan recognized as dried blood. The upside-down triangle, the wavy lines. All of them. Again, the words Devil’s Stone appeared, also painted in blood in great
big block letters on the drywall.

  That’s Owen’s wife’s blood, he thought. Somehow he knew this without question. Sophie Moreland. He blew her face apart, then painted those symbols and words on the walls with her blood. Where else would he have gotten the blood?

  There were new words here, too—a triptych that meant absolutely nothing to him. He had to take a step closer to examine the words better, just to make sure he was reading them correctly:

  Amazingly, he thought he would break out in nervous laughter. Young calf ribs? Was this … was Owen Moreland talking some sort of ritualistic blood sacrifice?

  Owen Moreland is not talking to you at all, Bill Hammerstun spoke up at the back of his son’s head. Owen Moreland is dead, fool.

  Out of nowhere, anger welled up inside Alan. Was he really so blind? Had this been one setup after another, all part of the town’s devious intentions of keeping its secret hidden from outsiders? Had they gotten to Owen Moreland just as they had gotten to him? They had tried to frighten Owen away from the powers of the lake the same way Hank had tried to frighten and intimidate him. It was a show, all of it—from Sheriff Landry’s midnight cruises up and down the street to Hank’s little conversation that night on Alan’s patio. Jesus Christ, was the whole goddamn town fucking with him?

  What right do they have? How dare they decide who uses the lake and who doesn’t.

  There was a dried brown bloodstain on the floor. For the first time, he realized the bloodstain on the floor was moving, was swarming with living insects. Maggots. Black summer flies.

  Shining the flashlight down on his hand, he noticed the cut below his thumb had already healed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It did not require much investigation to discover what the Devil’s Stone was: an old Cherokee reservation on the other side of the Great Smoky Mountains. It was printed clearly on one of the maps Alan had purchased at a 7-Eleven, along with a clutch of Slim Jims and a bottle of Mountain Dew. A cursory Internet search provided some photographs and a brief history of the Cherokee people.

  Alan awoke early the following morning before the sun had time to fully rise and, after his accustomed swim in the lake, returned home where he showered under a hot spray. He felt strong, healthy. His ulcer was now a thing of the past, and his tattoos had almost completely faded. Despite the heat, he took to wearing long-sleeved shirts outside, so as not to attract attention from Hank or any of the other neighbors who might come sniffing around.

  By the time he crept out of the house that afternoon, Heather was still in bed, although she was not sleeping. She was staring at the ceiling, the thin sheet tangled about her feet, the slatted light of day seeping in through the blinds over the windows.

  Jerry Lee was lying on the floor on Heather’s side of the bed. The dog raised his head and watched Alan, who filled the doorway. Alan sensed a nonspecific distrust radiating from the dog. He ignored it.

  “Be back in a little while, hon,” he said from the doorway and left without waiting for a response.

  As the mountains grew closer and closer and the farms and green fields became more expansive, Alan found himself lost … which was a regular riot, really, seeing how he’d been driving down a one-lane straightaway through a tract of unblemished countryside for what felt like an eternity. There were no houses, no shops, no signs of humanity save for the sequence of telephone poles strung along the side of the road, their lines bowing and notched with tiny black birds.

  Eventually, the roadway turned to dirt. It crossed up into the mountains, then went through a narrow pass. Jagged bluffs rose on either side of the car, dousing him in shadow and cutting him off from the rest of the planet. On the other side of the mountain pass, he could see a farmhouse and, above the low trees, a grain silo. He rolled the Toyota over two sets of railroad tracks and came to a four-way stop. Small clapboard houses in various states of disrepair slouched against one another. Across the intersection was a feed store with soaped-over windows and a jumble of unattended bicycles on the side of the road. In the distance, the spires of a church spiraled up into the gray sky.

  According to the map, this was Devil’s Stone. There were no street signs so he could only hope the map was correct. He let the car idle at the shoulder while he surveyed his surroundings. Dark-skinned men smoking black cigars eye-balled him from sagging porches. A pack of mangy, emaciated dogs loped across the street. The one bringing up the rear of the pack—some piebald mixed breed with a wolfish face—paused and stared him down before taking off after its companions. Overhead, a hawk wheeled lazily in the gunmetal sky.

  It was three o’clock when Alan pulled into the parking lot of a low, basalt-block building with neon beer signs in the tinted windows. Inside, heavy-shouldered men sat hunched like vultures over a lacquered bar top gripping pints of piss-colored ale. A wall-mounted jukebox with an LED display rolled out some country number, all fiddles, steel guitars, and other melancholic instruments.

  Alan claimed a barstool and ordered a Budweiser on draft. The guy behind the bar, who looked like the descendant of angry pirates, slid the pint glass in front of him without so much as a grunt.

  He wondered what the hell he was doing here. Not just in this seedy bar but on this reservation. His curiosity had been piqued by the words carved into the walls at the Moreland house, but he wasn’t quite sure why he’d felt the need to follow them, like a map leading to buried treasure. What had Owen Moreland known about Devil’s Stone that had prompted him to carve the words over and over into his wall? Also, what about the other words? The calf ribs and such? What did those mean?

  “You lost?” The words came out slurred from a dark-skinned man in a deer hide vest and dark, braided hair.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you lost?” Despite the question, the man didn’t appear to be combative, only genuinely curious. Perhaps a little concerned even.

  “No,” Alan said. “Not really. I was just out for a drive and thought I’d stop in for a beer.”

  “A drive? Out here?” The man sounded incredulous. Then his eyes narrowed. “Are you a fed?”

  “A fed?”

  “A federal agent,” the man clarified. “Sometimes we get FBI or guys from the Interior Department come down this way.”

  “No. I’m a college professor.”

  “Looks like you’re thinking real hard about something is why I asked.” The man drank some of his beer, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Sometimes I think I can read minds.”

  “Is that right?”

  “My grandmother, she was a mind reader.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “She was very good.” Again, the man narrowed his eyes and looked Alan over. “You sure you’re not lost?”

  “This is Devil’s Stone, right?”

  “Is that what you’re looking for?”

  He considered. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “Sure,” said the man. “The town is. Devil’s Stone, I mean. Named after the stone itself.”

  Alan blinked. “What stone?”

  “The one at the crest of Packer’s Pass. The, uh …” The man looked around the barroom, rubbing his rough chin. After a moment, he pointed through the wall of the joint in the vague direction of northwest. “Up that way. Packer’s Pass begins after the school and the train tracks.”

  “What is it?”

  “A rocky plateau. Part of the foothills. Christ, I haven’t been up there since I was a kid.”

  A bright little ember sparked to life in Alan’s stomach. Packer’s Pass, he thought. The Devil’s Stone.

  Then his heart froze and his blood ran cold. Bill Hammerstun and Jimmy Carmichael sat at the other end of the bar, pints of beer in their hands. They were staring straight at Alan though he couldn’t make out their eyes, darkened under the shadows of their heavy, sloping brows. Alan jerked his arm and nearly spilled his beer.

  “Hey,” said the old Indian beside him. “You okay, buddy?”

  As he
watched, he could see a rivulet of black blood seep out of the gunshot wound in his father’s temple. It dribbled down the side of his pasty face and dripped into his beer, staining the foamy head a dark crimson.

  A tremor quaked through Alan’s body.

  “Hey, pal.” The Indian placed a hand on Alan’s shoulder. “You look like pea soup.”

  Alan laughed nervously. He was flushed and could feel the sweat trickling down his ribs. When he looked back at the opposite end of the bar, the two men were still there, but they were no longer Bill Hammerstun and Jimmy Carmichael. Just two dark-skinned men in hats, their faces turned down toward their beers. The foamy beer head was no longer crimson.

  Holy fuck, am I losing my mind now?

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” He managed a chuckle and forced himself to appear calm. “I just thought I saw my dead father sitting over there. Scared the piss out of me for a second.”

  The man grinned, exposing teeth that looked like baked beans. “Aw, hell. I see my dead father all the time. Come on, partner. Let me buy you a beer.”

  Packer’s Pass was a narrow, undisciplined twist of corrugated dirt roadway shrouded by overhanging trees that eased upward along a slight incline through the woods. The trees were healthy and lush, the boles of the slanting oaks silvered by the sun. There were no houses along this route, though Alan spotted rusted, discarded bed frames and the shells of burned-out automobiles through the trees that reminded him of stories about sacred grounds where elephants go to die. Something small and quick darted through the underbrush, a blur of mottled fur.

  The old Indian from the bar had informed him that Packer’s Pass had gotten its name several years ago after a few campers had gone missing in the nearby woods. A search was conducted, and the only thing the searchers had found was one of the camper’s backpacks halfway up the hillside along the dirt road. The pack had been shredded into ribbons, presumably by a mountain lion or bear, the items within strewn indiscriminately around the forest floor. The locals believed the campers were attacked by something much more sinister—something they referred to as Adahy, which, the old Indian explained, translated roughly to “He Who Lives in the Woods.”