North American Lake Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  He saw the vampire, once, just beneath the lip of the house. It said nothing, but its face tracked him as he worked.

  The sun was sliding down the sky, leaking its light into the ground and into the sea. Darkness swarmed from the east, spreading stars in its wake.

  Joshua hurried inside, dropping the hammer on the floor and collapsing onto the couch, utterly spent. A feeling of profound loss hovered somewhere on the edge of his awareness. He had turned his back on something, on some grand possibility. He knew the pain would come later.

  Soon his mother returned, and he took some of the medicine she’d bought for him, though he didn’t expect it to do any good. He made a cursory attempt to eat some of the pizza she’d brought, too, but his appetite was gone. She sat beside him on the couch and brushed the hair away from his forehead. They watched some TV, and Joshua slipped in and out of sleep. At one point he stared through the window over the couch. The moon traced a glittering arc through the sky. Constellations rotated above him and the planets rolled through the heavens. He felt a yearning that nearly pulled him out of his body.

  He could see for billions of miles.

  At some point his mother roused him from the couch and guided him to his room. He cast a glance into Michael’s room when he passed it, and saw his brother fast asleep.

  “You know I love you, Josh,” his mother said at his door.

  He nodded. “I know, Mom. I love you, too.”

  His body was in agony. He was pretty sure he was going to die, but he was too tired to care.

  A scream woke him. The heavy sound of running footsteps, followed by a crash.

  Then silence.

  Joshua tried to rouse himself. He felt like he’d lost control of his body. His eyelids fluttered open. He saw his brother standing in the doorway, tears streaming down his face.

  “Oh no, Josh, oh no, oh no . . .”

  He lost consciousness.

  The next morning he was able to move again. The fever had broken sometime during the night; his sheets were soaked with sweat.

  He found his mother on the kitchen table. She had kicked some plates and silverware onto the floor in what had apparently been a brief struggle. Her head was hanging backward off the edge of the table, and she had been sloppily drained. Blood splashed the floor beneath her. Her eyes were open and glassy.

  His brother was suspended upside down in the living room, his feet tied with a belt to the ceiling fan, which had come partially free from its anchor. He’d been drained, too. He was still wearing his pajamas. On the floor a few feet away from him, where it had fluttered to rest, was a welcome home card he had made for their father.

  The plywood covering the open stairwell had been wrenched free. The vampire stood on the top stair, looking into the deep blue sky of early morning. Joshua stopped at the bottom stair, gazing up at it. Its burnt skin was covered in a clear coating of pus and lymphatic fluid, as its body started to heal. White masses filled its eye sockets like spiders’ eggs. Tufts of black hair stubbled its peeled head.

  “I waited for you,” the vampire said.

  Joshua’s lower lip trembled. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t get his voice to work.

  The vampire extended a hand. “Come up here. The sun’s almost up.”

  Almost against his will, he ascended the stairs into the open air. The vampire wrapped its fingers around the back of his head and drew him close. Its lips grazed his neck. It touched its tongue to his skin.

  “Thank you for your family,” it said.

  “. . . no . . .”

  It sank its teeth into Joshua’s neck and drew from him one more time. A gorgeous heat seeped through his body, and he found himself being lowered gently to the top of the stair.

  “It’s okay to be afraid,” the vampire said.

  His head rolled to one side; he looked over the area where the second story used to be. There was his old room. There was Michael’s. And that’s where his parents slept. Now it was all just open air.

  “This is my house now,” the vampire said, standing over him and surveying the land around them. “At least for a few more days.” It looked down at Joshua with its pale new eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed out.”

  The vampire descended the stairs.

  A few minutes later, the sun came up, first as a pink stain, then as a gash of light on the edge of the world. Joshua felt the heat rising in him again: a fierce, purging radiance starting from his belly and working rapidly outward. He smelled himself cooking, watched the smoke begin to pour out of him, crawling skyward.

  And then the day swung its heavy lid over the sky. The ground baked hard as an anvil in the heat, and the sun hammered the color out of everything.

  North American Lake Monsters

  Grady and Sarah shuffled out of the cabin, bundled in heavy jackets and clutching mugs of coffee that threw heat like dark little suns. Across the wide expanse of Tipton’s Lake the Blue Ridge Mountains breached the morning fog banks, their tree-lined backs resembling the foresty spines of some great kraken trawling the seas. Together they descended the steps from the front porch onto the unkempt grass and made their way down to the lake’s edge, and onto the small path which would lead them a couple hundred feet along until they came to the body of the strange creature that had washed ashore and died there.

  They did not speak much as they walked. Out of jail for only three days after six years inside, Grady was struggling to recognize his thirteen-year-old daughter in the sullen-eyed, cynical presence striding along beside him. She had undergone some bizarre transformation since he’d last seen her. She’d dyed her hair black; strange silver adornments pocked her face: she had a ring in her left eyebrow, and a series of rings along the curve of one bejeweled conch of an ear. Worst of all, she’d put a stud through her tongue.

  “Man, I can really smell that thing,” he said. Sarah had discovered it last night, and was eager to show it off. The early cold snap had held off the smell to some degree, but it was beginning to creep toward the cabin.

  “Wait till you see it, Dad, it’s amazing.”

  Sarah had not come to see him during his last three years in prison. At first that had been at his own insistence, and she’d taken it badly: he told her of his decision while she and her mother were visiting, and she threw a tantrum of such violence that the guards were obliged to cut their session short. His reasons, he thought, were both predictable and justified: he didn’t want his little girl to see him in that environment, slowly eroding into a smaller, meaner, beaten man. But the truth was simply that he was ashamed, and by keeping his daughter away he spared himself the humiliation he felt in her company. After less than a year of that, though, his resolve failed, and he asked his wife to start bringing her again. But Sarah never came back.

  They rounded a thick copse of pines, cutting off their view of the cabin. From this vantage point it was easy to imagine themselves far from civilization and all its attendant rules. Cold air blew in off the lake. Grady lowered his chin into his jacket and closed his eyes, smelling the pine, the soft wet stink of the mud, the aroma of real coffee. He’d smelled nothing but sweat, urine, and disinfectant for so long that it seemed to him now that he was walking through the foothills of Heaven.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re gonna do with it,” Sarah said, ranging ahead. She cradled the mug of coffee he’d made for her like a kitten against her chest. “It’s way too big to move.”

  “Won’t know till I see it,” he said.

  “I was just telling you,” she said, sounding hurt.

  Grady was immediately irritated. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Christ, managing her moods was like handling nitroglycerin. Wasn’t she supposed to be tough, with all that shit on her face? The old anger—irrational and narcotic in its sweetness—stirred in him. �
�So who’s this boy your mother told me about? What’s his name . . . Tracy?”

  “Travis,” she said, her voice muted.

  “Oh. Travis.”

  She said nothing, picking up her pace a little bit. She was on the defensive, which only provoked him. He wanted her to fight. “What grade is he in?”

  Again, nothing.

  “Does he even go to school?”

  “Yes,” she said, but he could barely hear her.

  “He better not be in fucking high school.”

  She turned on him; he noticed, with some dismay, that she had tears in her eyes. “I know Mom already told you all about him! Why are you doing this?”

  “Jesus, what are you crying about? Never mind what your mom told me, I want to hear this from you.”

  “He’s in ninth grade, all right? You should be glad I’m dating an older boy, he’s not an immature shithead like the boys in my school!” Grady just stood there, trying to decide how to feel. He felt a calmness descend over him, in an inverse proportion to Sarah’s distress. He studied her. Did she really believe what she was saying? Had she grown so stupid in his absence?

  “Well. I guess I ought to be grateful. Do I get to meet this Travis when we get back to Winston-Salem?”

  She turned and continued down the path.

  After a few more moments of trudging in strained silence, they rounded a small bend and came upon the monster. It was as big as a small van, still partly submerged in the lake, as though it had lunged onto the ground and expired from the effort. Grady drifted to a halt without realizing it, and Sarah went ahead without him, walking up to the huge carcass as casually as if she were approaching a boulder or a wrecked ship.

  “Jesus, Sarah, don’t touch it.”

  She ignored him and pressed her fingertips against its hide. “What are you afraid of? It’s dead.”

  He was having trouble apprehending its shape. It looked like a huge, suppurated heart. It seemed a confusion of forms, as though the weight of the atmosphere crushed it out of true: he had the strong impression that underwater it would unfurl into something sensible, though perhaps no less strange. Its skin, glistening with dew and sickly excretions, was dark green, almost black. Enfolded in the flesh near the mud was an eye: saucer-sized, clouded, eclipsed by a nictitating membrane which covered it like a bone-white crescent moon. A two-foot-long gash was partially buried in the mud; it could have been a mouth, or the wound that killed it. An odor seeped from it like a gas, candy-sweet.

  Grady felt his stomach buckle. “What . . . what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “It’s a dinosaur or something.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  She went silent, pacing calmly around it.

  “We need to uh . . . we need to get rid of it. Push it in or something.” The thought of this smell rolling into the cabin windows at night fueled an irrational rage inside him. It wasn’t right that this atrocity should ruin his homecoming.

  “You can’t. I already tried.”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe I’ll try again.” He placed his hands on it with great reluctance and gave it a cursory push to get a sense of its weight. The flesh gave a bit, and he felt his hands sink. He wrenched them away, making a high-pitched sound he didn’t recognize as his own. His hands were covered in a sticky film, as though he’d gripped a sappy tree. Nausea swelled in his body; the ground swung up to meet him and he vomited into the mud.

  “Oh my God. Dad?”

  He continued to dry heave until it felt like his guts were crawling up his throat. He smelled coffee on the ground in front of him, and he crawled away from it. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”

  Sarah pulled at his shoulders. “Dad? Are you okay?”

  He managed to lean back into a sitting position, rubbing his hands hard against his pants, trying to wipe off the sticky residue. He thought that if he moved it would trigger another spasm, so he sat still for a few moments and gathered himself. He could hear his daughter’s voice. It seemed to come from an immeasurable distance. He crawled over to the water and thrust his hands into it, trying to scrape the residue from his hands without success.

  The thing would have to be destroyed. Maybe if he hacked it up he could push it back into the lake. They were staying at his father-in-law’s cabin; surely the man kept a chainsaw or an axe around for chopping wood.

  Eventually, he grabbed her arm, hauling himself to his feet. His mug lay near the monster, splashed in mud. He decided to leave it there.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He started back along the path without waiting to see if she’d follow. He continued to scrape his hands on his thighs, but he was beginning to doubt the stuff would come off.

  Tina was awake by the time they returned. She was leaning against the porch railing, one hand clutching her robe closed at her neck and the other holding a cigarette. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, her hair sleep-crushed, her hangover as heavy as a mantle of chains. She stood up there like a promise of life, and something stirred in Grady at the sight of her, grateful and tender. He summoned a smile from some resolute part of himself and raised a hand in greeting.

  “You look like shit,” she said amiably.

  He looked down at himself. “I fell.”

  “So did you see it?”

  “Oh yeah, I saw it.”

  “Mom, he got sick!”

  He closed his eyes. “Sarah . . .”

  “You got sick, baby?”

  “Just, I—yeah, okay, I got sick. It’s fucking disgusting.”

  They climbed the stairs and joined her on the porch. Tina brushed at his pants with one hand, her cigarette clenched in her teeth. “Sarah, go get a towel from the bathroom. You can’t walk into the cabin like this.”

  “It’s all over my hands,” Grady said.

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know, some weird sticky shit on the, on the thing. I think it gave me a reaction or something.”

  “We should get you to a doctor, Dad,” said Sarah.

  “Don’t be stupid. I just got a little dizzy.”

  “Dad, you—”

  “Goddamnit, Sarah!”

  She stepped back from him as though she’d been struck. Tina gestured at her without looking, still brushing her husband’s pants. “Sarah—honey—a towel. Please.”

  Sarah’s mouth moved silently for a moment; then she said, “Fine,” and went inside. Grady watched her go, fighting down a spike of anger.

  “What’s your problem?” said Tina, giving up on his pants.

  “My problem? Is that a joke?”

  “You been gone six years, Grady. Give her a chance.”

  “Well, it was her choice not to see me for the last three of them. I didn’t ask her to stay away. Not at the end. And anyway, is that what you’re doing? Giving her a chance? Is that what the rings in her face and that shit in her tongue is all about?”

  He watched a door close somewhere inside her. “Grady . . .”

  “What. ‘Grady,’ what.”

  “Just . . . don’t, okay?”

  “No, I want to hear it. ‘Grady,’ what. ‘Grady, I fucked up’? ‘Grady, our daughter is a walking car wreck and it’s because I spent so much time drunk I didn’t even care’?”

  She wouldn’t look at him. She smoked her cigarette and focused her gaze beyond him: on the lake, or on the mountains, or on some distant place he couldn’t see.

  “How about, ‘Grady, I spent so much time banging Mitch while you were in jail that I forgot how to be a wife and a mother’?”

  She shook her head; it was barely perceptible. “You’re so goddamned mean,” she said. “I was kinda hoping you’d of changed.”

  He leaned in close and spoke right into her ear. “No, fuck that. I’m more me than ever.”
>
  Grady showered—discovering that the substance on his hands was apparently impervious to soap—and the girls retreated to their rooms, nurturing their hurts, stranding him in the living room. He drank more coffee and flipped through the channels on TV. It was not unlike how he spent rec hour in jail, and he felt a profound self-pity at the realization. Goddamn evil bitches, he thought. I’m back a few days and they’re already giving me the cold shoulder. It’s disrespectful. He knew how to handle disrespect in prison; out here he felt emasculated by it.

  He knew he should use this time to go out to the monster and start breaking it down. He’d only regret it if he allowed it to stay longer. But it would be gruesome, grueling work, and the very thought of it made his body sag into the couch. And anyway, it wasn’t fair. These two weeks at the cabin were supposed to be for him, a celebration. He shouldn’t have to climb up to his waist in fucking monster gore.

  So instead he watched TV. He turned on VH1 and was pleased to see that the countdown of the 100 best Eighties songs he’d started watching in prison was still going on. It chewed through his day. From time to time Tina emerged from their bedroom and drifted silently past him into the kitchen, still wearing her robe; he heard the tinkle of ice in her glass and the hum of the freezer when she retrieved her vodka from it. Whenever she came back through he refused to look at her, and he supposed she returned the favor—certainly she said nothing to him. That was fine, though; he’d already proven he could live with hostile motherfuckers. She brought nothing new to the table.