Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  I hesitate and she laughs, warm and carefree, hair blown back from her face.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not going anywhere.” She offers me a hand, helping me up.

  “I’m not too fond of heights,” I confess, clambering up the massive rock.

  “Me neither. But for some reason it doesn’t bother me here. I’ll show you.”

  I crawl up beside her, low and grounded, my hands never leaving the rough surface as I sit beside her. I mimic her bravery, letting my legs hang over, feet dangling in the air.

  “Just look out, toward the horizon. The feeling will pass.”

  After a few moments it does.

  “Everyone kept congratulating me, you know. After that session yesterday. I’ve been here almost two months now. Hardly anyone ever spoke to me and then there I was, naked before them, and all of a sudden, everyone wants to touch me. It’s like I got mobbed, like they all want a piece of me. The girl who had something fucked up happen to her, they want a piece of that, you know?”

  I nod. I do know.

  “Fucking vampires everywhere.”

  I laugh.

  “Anything like that ever happen to you?”

  “I’ve only been here a couple of weeks. People stare at me, summoning up their x-ray vision to figure me out. Whisper-whisper as I come and go. Even a place like this assigns celebrity, fleeting as it may be. Anything to shift their focus off themselves.”

  “Yeah.”

  We let the sun warm our faces, listening to the waves crash below.

  “They say there’s a whole civilization under there, deep down at the bottom of the ocean,” she says, gazing out at the sea. “They say that it sank there, thousands of years ago.”

  Her words linger in the air, before the breeze carries them away. Seagulls drift past, riding the wind currents, crossing the tawny sun. Their cries bring us both to the present.

  Alexandra turns to me, eyes wide, the haze in them dissipated, clear again, reflecting the deep bronze of the sky.

  I have gone through layers, deeper and deeper, league upon league upon league of consciousness.

  I see the park. Pauline is down there. I must get to her before the others. If I can explain before the others get to her, she will understand. I swim downward and try to call out to her. I begin to panic, but not because I can’t breathe. I try to speak, but my words are distorted and bubbles escape with them. I call out to my sister, “Pauline!” Wait for me. Please. Wait…

  If she can hear me, she will know I am here. She’ll come get me. “Pauline!” Wake, wake me…

  Once again I think I’m awake, but have my doubts. I see everyone sitting around in the room downstairs. It is dark, but the rattlesnake lawyer is sitting deep in the corner of an old couch, ankle across knee, comfortable, waiting for nothing. An Asian woman is draped across him. I can feel the heavy atmosphere down there. Something wrong and sinister. I stop to remember rattlesnake lawyer’s name. Jonathan is it? My speech is impaired and I try to articulate that I am there. But they go on without seeing me. Someone please wake me up. Wake me up. Wake me…

  I am not asleep. I just can’t open my eyes or raise myself from the bed. I am afraid of what I will see next. I don’t know what is really going on downstairs. I am dead weight in this bed and no matter how hard I try, I can’t cut through the levels of consciousness. I try to call through them, but no one hears me. No one is listening. I need someone to pull me out. Bubbles float to the surface. I don’t even know what all this means. “Please.” I have gone too deep and I know it. I am terrified. If I could kill myself now, I would.

  “Wake. Please, someone, wake me.”

  Someone is shaking me. “Wake up. Come on, wake up.”

  “Help. Help me up. I need up. Pull me. Pull me up,” I pant, reaching with my arm, groping blindly for whoever is there.

  “Wake me,” I plead.

  Someone takes hold of my arms and pulls me up out of bed.

  “Wake up. Come on. You’re freaking me out. Wake up, dammit!”

  I open my eyes and it takes a minute for me to recognize who it is.

  “Are you awake?” The voice is familiar. She shakes me again and my vision begins to clear.

  I’m afraid my voice won’t work again. I open my mouth. “Ter-ri-fied.”

  “Who’s Queen?”

  I recognize the voice now.

  “You.”

  Everyone in my family has been so good to me, bringing their love and smiles, concealing their concern. But I can’t help but feel guilty that I am here, that I have lost touch with life, struggling to find the desire and strength to breathe, to thrive, to live. Though they don’t show it, I know they worry, probably wondering how they contributed to the disintegration of what little peace of mind I may have had. Everyone says look back to your childhood and figure out where it went wrong. The horrible things our mothers and fathers did to us when we were children, while we were growing up. Whatever memories we are suppressing will lead us to the truth. But for me there is nothing. No suppressed memories of a bad childhood, of my parents doing me wrong. Nothing. And it makes me angry when people insist that there is something there. My parents, my grandparents, my sisters, no one in my family ever did me wrong. Spats, yes. Struggles for understanding, yes. I pushed boundaries to assert my independence and they tried to let up on the reins a bit each time, let me have a chance, trust me to make the right decisions. Any failures were mine. Still, nothing they did or said was unreasonable in this regard. And looking back, I see they were right all along.

  I was born with sadness and an aching that I could never understand. Whatever happened did so long before then.

  I didn’t think I would have trouble falling asleep tonight. I was so tired when I lay down. But now my mind won’t stop. The sobs come and the tears flow far too freely.

  The feeling of loss is huge for me right now. I can’t describe it. The voices come and criticize me all over again.

  Guilt rushes to the surface once again.

  I go to the nurse’s station for the usual.

  I sit on the boulder near the cliffs. Guilt and regret wrack my mind, my soul, and take hold of me. I look out at a stretch of empty beach, watching the sea. The waves swell and rise. I close my eyes and feel them wash over me before they crash against the shore, the tide dragging the heavy burden from me as it recedes.

  All the pain and doubt and regret, all of that is gone. Me and this rock I sit on, the breeze and the birds, the sand and the ocean, we are fine. I realize, it’s time to go home.

  I feel Alexandra’s hand slip into mine. No glove this time. Her eyes are the clearest I’ve seen them yet. We are standing on the rock now, she and I, holding hands, swinging them forward and back, forward and back, building momentum. I look out at the water and feel her eyes on me.

  “It’s easy,” she whispers. “Just watch me now…”

  Wave thou art pretty

  Wave thou art high

  Wave to the city

  Wave to the sky

  Wave thou art future

  Wave thou art why

  Wave to the children

  Wave wave good-bye

  Excerpt from “Wave” in Early Work 1970-1979 Copyright ©1994 Patti Smith

  THE HIKER

  by Jeremy Megargee

  We all have our passions, and hiking has always been mine. I’m drawn to the mountains, the ridges, and the beating green heart of the forest. When I vanish into the trees—those old pillars of solitude—I feel perfectly at peace with myself. Alone in a vast wilderness, the civilized world nothing but a fragmented memory and new and wild horizons presented to those with the will and desire to pursue them. I’ve always had the will. The desire burns in my veins, and the smell of loamy soil and pine bark seems to pull at me with an eldritch magnetism.

  All the best thru-hikers have told me about the detour from the Appalachian Trail that leads to Devil’s Pond. It cuts through a rugged patch of West Virginia, steep and rocky terrain that g
radually climbs in elevation with each fateful step. The trailhead is accessed through a little park that’s easy to miss from the highway, just a parking lot and a solitary water spigot. The spruce pines seem to press in on the lot, sending their long shadows across the picnic tables and sapping any warmth from even the hottest summer days.

  I found the trail just as summer was dying, fall encroaching quickly, the blue blazes on the trees leading up a twisty slope for a moderate three miles of hiking before reaching the pond at the summit. The map listed a shelter at the halfway point and a stream near the summit, but the real attraction was the pond itself. I’d heard it described as crystal clear water that would show you your own rippling reflection in the right light, a little piece of paradise hidden deep in the woods. It seemed like the perfect way to spend an afternoon. I had my pack, my lunch, and my music pounding soothingly in my ears. All that remained was the climb, and how I relished the climb.

  Each new hike is a challenge presented to the hiker. A test of body and soul, mental strength, and the concept that if you work hard, a reward will be forthcoming. I’d conquered more wizened rocks than the terrain offered by the Devil’s Pond trail, so I figured it would be relatively easy. I’d even checked the website HikingUpwards to see how other hikers had faired, and it provided me with only positive experiences. I expected the trail to bend to my will after minimal effort, but it seemed that fate was destined to defy my expectations.

  The terrain seemed intent on showing me cruelty. Pitiless ascents, steep elevation changes, and sharp rocky protrusions that reached for me like teeth eager to chew. I immediately got the sense that the wilderness had turned its back on me. During past hikes I felt like a welcome visitor, but these woods were different. It was clear from the start that I was intruding here. I was unwanted, unaccepted, and clearly out of place. The wind whistled condemnations. The towering spruce pines seemed almost to judge me with knobby scorn. I felt this forest laughing at me with each stumbling step, each drop of sweat from the pores, and each long break I took to allow my lungs to stop burning with internal acid.

  I couldn’t understand it. Why this sudden rejection from nature? Hadn’t I always been respectful to her? Kind to her? Gentle and sweet…like a lover from a bygone era. I romanced Mother Nature in the past, and she always reciprocated.

  Not so on the trail to Devil’s Pond. My boots dragged, my head ached, and my heart pounded like a failing piston in my chest. There were moments when I felt like I was shuffling through purgatory, a wispy ground fog drifting in across mossy stones and tangled oaken roots. It became almost impossible to find the blue blazes on the trees, each one more faded than the last.

  I tilted my head up to listen to the sounds of the forest, but I suddenly became aware of the fact that all sounds had abandoned me. No birdsong, no chirping insects, not even the scuffle of a distant squirrel across dead leaves. It seemed wrong. It felt like the exploration of a wooded tomb instead of a fun hike with the sun high in the heavens.

  I trudged on with jagged thoughts circling in my head. I considered turning back, but it’s a great shame for a true hiker to admit defeat and go crawling back before conquering a summit. I thought my imagination was simply working against me, and I vowed to tough the hike out no matter how difficult it became. I’d not been bested before in the wilderness, and this time would be no different.

  I caught sight of hope in the distance. It was little more than a white blur attached to the trunk of a tree, but I assumed it was a trail sign to gauge my progress. My breath left my mouth in ragged gasps, the sweat glistening on my brow, but a few more yards brought me face to face with the object.

  It was not a sign. It was a horror.

  Some sort of gleaming bone sculpture was strapped to the trunk of the tree, a skeletal conglomeration of chipped animal bones that flowered out into something vaguely spiderlike. A polished deer skull dominated the sculpture with jutting jaw bones emerging from a chest bound in twine. I stared into the hollow depths of the skull’s empty sockets, and I struggled to make some kind of sense of this. Why was it here? Who made this morbid creation?

  A few random theories came to me. Witchcraft? Devil worship? Some bizarre ritual, or perhaps just a hoax to elicit responses from those that passed it. I couldn’t decide. All I knew for sure was that the object stank of death, almost like it was recently peeled of flesh and scrubbed to a shining gleam.

  That symbol of decay offered me no hope. It had the opposite effect, delivering a new kind of dread into my already taxed system. I felt something like the beginning of slithering fear taking root deep inside of me. I stumbled past the thing and kept on walking, intent on giving it no power to spook me. Just a hoax. A few locals playing games for shits ’n’ giggles. Nothing to be concerned with.

  The elevation became brutal again, a tedious slog across sharp granite with the underbrush tangled close on each side. There were moments where I had to drop down to the toes of my boots and use my hands to gain purchase, pulling and hauling my weight up the unpredictable terrain.

  The mist seemed to lick at my ankles, teasing the flesh and exploring with cold, insubstantial tendrils. It felt like tiny fingertips pressing their freezing touch against my skin, and each touch was designed to impede my progress, to make the climb all that much harder.

  I kept going, clawing at the bark of a young dogwood to pull myself up over the crest of the next ridge. The sight that waited for me there stopped my breath in my throat. I swallowed dry, an itchy lump traveling slowly down my esophagus. Panic took over, my fingernails biting down into my palms to keep myself from losing it completely.

  Another bone sculpture awaited me, this one much more intricate than the last. Two ribcages fused together with twine, fibulas fanning out into deathly blossoms, and what appeared to be two misshapen bear skulls wound together in a ball of frayed silk. The fangs seemed almost to beckon, a few sluggish flies crawling across the surface of the mouth to salvage whatever flesh might be left.

  The sculpture shook me even more because I began to visualize that there was a presence responsible for its creation. Something watching and waiting in these woods, a sentient force capable of using these morbid talismans to send doubtful roots into my soul. Oh yes, a Presence. These bone creations were the silent Disciples, but it was the Presence that posed the true threat. It was weaving dark threads against me, drawing me deeper into the labyrinth it inhabited.

  The bear skull appeared to grin, a trick of the light seeping in through the overhead branches, but it was enough to spur me onward and away. I clawed past the abomination and struggled to smash my boots down against the earth with a persistent need to put as much distance as I could between me and the Disciple.

  I considered going back the way I came, but that would bring me back into contact with both of the monstrosities, so I decided to take my chances with the ascent. It was an optimistic plan, but it soon turned to misery when a new terror settled into my head.

  Flashes of the Disciples began to enter my thoughts, and with their appearances came croaking whispers from long rotten tracheas. They put together nothing but jumbled words, the meaning incomprehensible to me.

  “Loop. Repeat. Always the same. Trapped. Loop. Repeat.”

  The words were like barbs, and I longed to reach into my own brain and pull them out with a scream of satisfaction, but that option was not available to me. I could do nothing but march my exhausted shell of a body uphill, haunted by flashes of the Disciples and petrified at the thought of encountering the Presence responsible for them.

  Finally a flare of light in an increasingly dark situation found me. There was a sign up ahead indicating that I’d reached the shelter on the trail. I pushed past spruce branches obscuring my sight, and there stood a small wooden cabin with an open interior, fire pit out front, and a lonely outhouse near the back.

  I staggered toward the building with a vain hope of finding human habitation, but the shelter remained empty, almost like it had been waiting
for my arrival. Nevertheless I found a small modicum of solace to have walls and a roof shielding me from a portion of the wilderness, and I allowed myself to collapse down onto the shelter’s dusty floor. My eyelids fluttered closed and it wasn’t long before restless sleep pulled me down into a muddled abyss.

  I woke in the absence of daylight, the night strangely luminescent due to clear and powerful stars. It chilled me to think that I’d now have to brave the darkness in this void of a forest, but I was thankful that I’d remembered to pack my flashlight before venturing out. I reached in my pack and retrieved it, snapping the yellow beam into life, the glow giving the shadows of the shelter a shuddery illumination akin to multiple lit candles.

  I was attempting to plan my next move when the beam of the flashlight crawled over the cover of the shelter’s trail journal. I’d read such journals before on previous hikes, the pages usually full of whimsical notes from hikers and occasional diary entries about their own personal trials and tribulations in the wild. A desperate curiosity compelled me to pick up the book and crack open the spine. I expected to find the same content that I’d seen time and time again when reading a trail journal.

  This was wholeheartedly different.

  It seemed that all of the entries were made by one person, a hiker with the initials D.B. I started from the first page, squinting against the shadows to make out the words there.

  “It’s a loop. GET OUT. Don’t go to Devil’s Pond. It’s always worse at Devil’s Pond. Stuck. Lost. It’s a cage, and the trees are the bars.”

  I shuddered at this. It seemed I was reading the thoughts of a madman, but I flipped through a few more pages to see if the narrative would change.

  “Starts with the bone sculptures. They mock, but also hint. They’re telling you why you’re here. What you are. Why you can’t stop until you reach the top. Find a way. STOP YOURSELF. Don’t go any farther. It’s bad. It’s so fucking bad. I WANT OUT, I WANT OUT, I WANT OUT…”