Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

“She wasn’t no fish,” Mickey D. told him. “Cigarette foil, maybe.”

  He peered closer.

  “There it is again,” he said.

  He pushed himself to his feet and took up a long metal rod with a crook on its end.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to see if I can hook it.”

  Down on his knees, he reached the long rod into the water and began to jig it up and down. After a time, he cursed softly to himself and took off his bulky winter coat. He unbuttoned the cuff on his red-and-black check flannel shirt and pushed the loose sleeve up above his elbow. He noticed Gump watching him.

  “I need to go deeper. Maybe if I stick my arm down into the water—”

  “For Chrissake, Mickey, the fish are getting cold. Eat your fish.”

  Mickey D. got up and accepted his plate without argument. He rummaged into the plastic tray that held silverware until he found a fork. Gump pulled his chair around to the other side of the card table and cleared a space between the beer bottles. They ate their fish.

  When they were done, they used a drift of snow to clean the plates and silverware outside the shack. Intense cold made the snow as dry and hard as sand. The light from the open door cast a pale golden rectangle across the ice that contrasted with the chill silver of the moon. Not a sound came from anywhere, not even from the ice shacks further down the cove. Smoke no longer curled from the pipe in the roof of one of them, as it had earlier. The shacks looked deserted.

  Gump handed his scoured plate to Mickey D.

  “I need to take a dump. Be right back.”

  By common consent, when they needed to do the old number two, they did it in the woods on the shore, not far from where they parked the pickup. Gump headed back into the shack for toilet paper.

  “Put on your hat and mitts. It’s brutal out here,” Mickey D. said.

  “What are you, my mother?”

  In spite of his retort, Gump dutifully pulled on his wool cap and mitts, then made his waddling way across the ice toward the dark line of trees. He was jumpier than usual. Truth be told, he did not want to leave the light and warmth of the shack, but when Nature called, you had to answer.

  It came into his mind to wonder how many animals had been killed by predators while in the very act of taking a dump. Probably a whole lot of them, he thought. That was why a dog could do his business so quickly. Survival mechanism, they called it. The less time you were vulnerable with shit hanging out your ass, the better, if you were a wild creature in the woods. Especially at night, when everything was so goddamned black.

  At the edge of the ice, he turned and glanced back at the shack, then stopped still. Just for an instant, he thought he saw movement. He waited, but nothing stirred except the smoke that worked its way through the roof vent and rose in an irregular white plume. Maybe Mickey D. had walked around the outside for some reason, before going back inside.

  His lower belly gave a twinge. Grunting to himself, he continued up the bank and into the trees to the usual place. The moon showed where he had squatted since the last snowfall, but there was no stink. Everything the men had deposited there on previous nights was frozen as hard as iron bolts. He unhitched himself, lowered his pants to half-mast, and squatted, taking care not to let any of the clothes dangle under his ass.

  A drawn-out cry sounded across the still, crystal air.

  “Jesus,” Gump said and stood up, then said, “Oh fucking Jesus Christ.”

  He spent several minutes using the roll of toilet paper to wipe the shit off his pants and belt, then finished his business and cleaned his ass. He hitched his pants back into position and cursed again softly under his breath. They were still sticky.

  The cry had sounded like some animal in pain. Maybe a moose. He stood amid the young spruce, staring around at the shadows of the forest as he listened. He was not sure if the cry had come across the lake or from the woods behind him. Maybe coyotes had brought down a stray dog in the trees. If so, why weren’t they barking in celebration?

  When he started back toward the lake, he found it an effort not to run. The woods made him nervous. All the way across the naked expanse of ice, he kept looking over his shoulder.

  When you expected to see something, it was easy to mistake the black shadow of a spruce for a crouching figure. None of the shadows he stared at moved. By the time he reached the shack his heart pounded in his chest.

  The door was shut to hold in the heat, as expected. He opened it and went inside. The shack was empty.

  He came out again and walked all around it once, then stood looking across the ice at the pickup truck. Maybe Mickey D. had gone to the truck to get something. There was no movement on the snow-covered bank and the cab of the truck looked empty. Gump walked toward the truck.

  “Mickey D.?” he called in his gruff voice. “Where’d you go?”

  The truck was deserted. Gump stood beside it, looking back across the ice at the shack, which the moonlight lit with pale silver and grey. If Mickey D. had gone to the woods to relieve himself, they would have met each other coming and going.

  For an instant he felt the intense urge to dig out his key, climb into the truck, and drive away. He fought it down. He could not leave Mickey D. alone at the cove. He had to be here somewhere.

  Suddenly the answer came to him. The bastard was playing a practical joke.

  “That’s all right, Mickey D., you stay in the woods,” he said loudly so that his voice carried. “I’m going back to the shack to fish.”

  On the way back he looked for footprints in the thin drifts of snow that partially covered the ice, but saw only the lines of tracks he and Mickey D. had made earlier. The sneaky bastard must have walked backwards in his own footprints to the truck, then hidden in the trees. It was probably he that had made that weird cry.

  Back inside the shack, when he took up a fishing line to set its hook into the water he noticed drops of blood on the straw around the hole. It didn’t look like fish blood. It was too dark. He wondered if Mickey D. had cut himself and had wandered out on the ice in pain and maybe collapsed unconscious.

  Gump put the lines aside and went outside. He did a slow walk around the shack, peering across the ice for any shadow or lump that shouldn’t be there. The expanse of ice was as flat and empty as a silver tablecloth. There was nowhere to hide.

  Could he have fallen through the ice? No, it was at least a foot thick, probably thicker. He could have driven his pickup out to the shack had he wished—except that he never took the truck on the ice, just from general principle. Ice was treacherous and let you down when you least expected it to fail. He knew too many people who had lost trucks or snowmobiles through the ice.

  “Mickey D.! . . . Mickey D.!”

  His voice rolled across the lake through the frozen air. They must be able to hear it in the other shacks, if there was anybody left in them. He looked eastward at the tiny rectangles. Could Mickey D. have walked over to them while he squatted in the trees? No, they were more than half a mile away. There would not have been time to reach them before he returned to the lake.

  He squinted in the silvery light. Something moved between the distant fishing shacks. They were not deserted. He saw several outlines of shadow sway beside the shacks. Cupping his mitts to his face, he shouted with all his force and then waved his arms. The tiny shadow-figures near the shacks stopped moving and stood still. They must be looking this way, he thought, and waved his arms again. Instead of returning his wave, they slowly slipped behind the shacks and disappeared from his sight.

  “Mickey D., I swear to God if you don’t come out of them trees, I will kick your skinny ass six ways to Sunday.”

  From the corner of his eye he saw something move between the trees, but when he turned to look at it, whatever it was had hidden itself. An animal, maybe, he thought. Or that son of a bitch he was going to kill.

  Uttering a curse, he retu
rned to the shack. There was nothing in the world he hated more than a practical joke. Mickey D. knew this and pulled them on him regularly. He’s been doing it since elementary school. This time, he vowed to himself, he would not give the little bastard the satisfaction of reacting. Let him stay outside in the cold. Then the joke would be on him, when he finally came back to the shack, frozen to the bone. He had the only set of keys to the truck, so Mickey D. was not going anywhere.

  It was their habit, when they came to the shack, to fish for their dinner, eat, and then fish to take something home to their wives. Gump had no intention of letting his friend’s warped sense of humor change that. He baited the hooks and dropped the lines through the hole. The burner on the Coleman stove was set on a low blue flame, and the iron fry pan on top of it cast enough heat to keep the hole from freezing over, once it was opened. He sat in his chair facing the closed door and nursed on a beer bottle.

  After ten minutes or so, a tapping came on the wall of the shack. It started on the right side and moved slowly around the structure. It would tap three or four times, stop, and then do the same thing a few feet over. Gump sat listening to the tapping with a scowl on his face that drew his bushy eyebrows together and pushed his red lips out beyond his moustache.

  The tapping slowly crept down the right wall, across the back of the shack behind him, and up the left wall, moving toward the door. Tap-tap-tap, pause, tap-tap-tap-tap.

  Gump slowly stood up and moved toward the door. He put his hand on the frosty metal latch and waited. When the tapping reached the front corner of the shack, he threw the door wide and jumped out.

  “You son of a bitch—”

  He stood with his head around the edge of the shack, the words dying on his lips. The ice stretched away, smooth and empty.

  A kind of shiver ran along his spine. Moving as silently as he could on the ice, he ran to the rear of the shack and looked around it. The moon peered down at him impassively. He listened. Silence. He continued across the back wall and up toward the front on the far side.

  From inside there came a scrape, as might be made by a chair pushed back out of the way, and a splash of water. Gump grinned.

  “I’ve got you now, you bastard.”

  He rounded the corner and stepped in through the open door. The shack was empty. His chair lay on its side. He stared at it, and for the life of him could not remember if he had tipped it over when he stood up from it.

  “Mickey D., I don’t know how you’re doing this, but you are starting to seriously creep me the fuck out,” he said in a raised voice.

  Just to prove to himself that he could do it, he went back out into the darkness and walked slowly once around the shack. There was nothing in any direction. He stood looking across the ice at his truck for a few seconds. The moonlight was bright enough to show that the cab was empty. Reluctantly, he went back into the shack and shut the door.

  The lines were twisted and out of place in the hole. He straightened them with numb fingers and put his mitts back on, then set his chair upright and sat in it.

  A long, drawn out howl came from outside and far away over the lake.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  He held his breath and listened, but it was not repeated. After a while he relaxed and went back to his beer.

  What was that? Gump cocked his head to the side. His right ear wasn’t a hundred percent anymore, but his left was still pretty good. It sounded like tapping. He leaned forward with a frown of concentration. It didn’t sound as if it were coming from the side of the shed. His eyes slowly widened, and he stood up and bent over at the waist. It was coming from the ice—from under the ice. The sound was almost metallic, like a sharp little pick hitting the bottom of the ice with a rhythmic tap-tap-tap.

  Something flashed silver deep in the fishing hole. He looked down. There it was again, a quick gleam, like light reflected from a shiny bit of metal. He leaned closer. There was something else down there, deep enough in the murky water of the cove that the brightness of the Coleman lantern did not quite reach it. He lifted the lantern off its wall hook and held it closer over the hole. It was a kind of yellow disk with a black slit down the center of it. No, wait, there were two of them, and between them a sort of ridge.

  “Sweet Jesus mother of God.”

  The words came forth spontaneously from some dusty place where they had slumbered since his Catholic adolescence, when going to church was a weekly ritual.

  Gump realized that he had fallen backwards over his chair and that the lantern had gone out when it hit the straw on the ice. By some wonder it had not caused a fire. He blinked to clear his head. The blue flame from the burner on the Coleman stove cast an eerie glow.

  I’ve got to get out of this place, he thought to himself. I’ve got to get off this fucking ice.

  He pulled himself up on the card table and went out the door without bothering to look behind him, but stopped. Some forty yards away were three shapes on the ice. They looked like the shadows of spruce trees, but as he looked at them they swayed from side to side and moved. They moved toward him.

  He felt the corner of the shack against his shoulders and slid his way around it. There were two more of them between him and the pickup. He edged his way to the other side. Three of them, near enough that he could almost make out their faces. He did not want to see their faces. They had him blocked on all sides. There was nothing else to do but slide backward into the shack and shut the door.

  His mind wasn’t working very well. He did things without thinking about them, without realizing what he was doing until after he had done it. He turned up the burner on the Coleman stove and by its light found the lantern on its side on the straw. He was able to relight the lantern and set it down on the card table. He found himself holding the long steel hook, but didn’t realize what he was going to do with it until after he had slid it diagonally into the latch of the door, jamming it shut. Now the door could not be opened from the outside.

  It was only then, when he had time to think, that he wondered if he should have tried to run between the lurching shadows to reach the truck. But it was too late for second thoughts.

  The door rattled in its frame. Something slammed against the side of the shack and began to hammer on the plywood. The banging came all around him, from every side. Between the thumps he heard something that might have been voices, but they were low-pitched—too low for a human throat. They were deep, gargling animal noises, but they almost sounded like words in some gulping language.

  Something clutched his ankle and nearly threw him over backward. It was an arm, extended up through the hole in the ice. Its skin was blue-black in color and glistened with water, like the skin of an eel. It was impossibly long and seemed to bend and flex as he pulled his leg against it. He saw that the fingers on his boot were webbed, and grabbed up the hot fry pan from the stove. He hammered at the arm near its wrist with the edge of the heavy iron pan, while around him the walls of the shack flexed inward and thundered under the blows of the things outside in the darkness.

  The creature beneath the ice did not release his leg. Instead of retreating, it forced its sloped head into the ice hole beside its elongated arm. Gump stared down at its bulging, malevolent yellow eyes, which were like the eyes of a frog, and shook his head in disbelief. The fucking hole was only nine inches across. The blue-black head of the thing squeezed together like a rubber ball and popped up through the hole.

  Gump started to whimper. He hit the wrist of the arm over and over with the sharp edge of the fry pan. Suddenly, he was free. The severed stump of the wrist waved in the air, spraying a kind of dark, thick liquid that might have been blood.

  He realized that the hand still grasped his ankle. Backing away from the hole, he pried each long, clawed finger off and kicked the hand away. It continued to clutch the air where it lay in the straw under the table near one of the table legs. Attached to a finger on a short chain was a s
ilver spiral of metal, like a kind of jewelry. It glittered in the lantern light and made a tinkling noise against the wooden table leg as the hand contracted and relaxed in spasms.

  The head and neck of the thing was out of the hole. It did not appear to notice that it was missing a hand. It struggled to get its other shoulder out, while its mouth worked open and shut with the effort. Gump saw that its mouth was lined all the way around with multiple rows of small white teeth in the shape of hooks.

  The entire shack rocked back and forth. One wall lifted up from the ice, letting in a rush of frozen air before falling back to the ice with a crash. In that moment he saw the dark, glistening legs and webbed feet of the things that pushed it. There were so many of them. Too many.

  Police found the shattered ruin of the fishing shack the next morning, after the wives of the two men contacted them to express their worry. The investigators puzzled over it for a long while, then concluded that the shack must have been shattered by an enraged bear that had awoken prematurely from hibernation. That explained the long scratches in the plywood, which resembled claw marks. The strange animal footprints in the drifts of snow on the lake lent support to this theory, although they did not look exactly like any bear tracks the police had ever seen before.

  In the spring after the ice melted, the inlet of Crooked Cove where the shack had stood was dragged. No bodies were found. The story got around that Gump and Mickey D. had grown tired of their wives and had lit out for Ontario in a rented car to cover their traces, leaving Gump’s truck behind at the lake. At least it was some kind of explanation, and the human mind always needs an explanation for the uncanny. Neither of their wives ever believed it. They still visit Crooked Cove and lay wreaths of flowers on the shore, across from where the fishing shack stood. The Mi’kmaq have their own story about what happened to Gump and Mickey D., but they don’t share it with white men.

  Notes on Contributors

  The Editor:

  S. T. Joshi is the author of The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). He has preparedcorrected editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for ArkhamHouse and annotated editions of Lovecraft’s stories forPenguin Classics. His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), was expanded as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has edited the anthologies American Supernatural Tales (Penguin, 2007), A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Centipede Press,2013), The Madness of Cthulhu (Titan Books, 2014), and theongoing Black Wings series (PS Publishing, 2010f.). Joshi haswon the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, theBram Stoker Award, and the International Horror GuildAward.