by Chris Raven
The Lake Crimes II
The ouija session
Chris Raven
Copyright 2017 Chris Raven
Title: The Lake Crimes II: The ouija session
Author: Chris Raven
Copyright of this edition: © 2017 Chris Raven
Date of publication: July 3, 2017
Any form of reproduction, distribution, public communication or transformation of this work can only be carried out with the authorization of its owners, except as provided by law.
You, always you, even if you don’t want to.
How am I not going to dedicate all my stories to you if you have filled mine with light?
Index
Swanton, August 2001
I
II
III
IV
V
Burlington/Swanton, August 2016
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
Swanton, August/September 2001
I
II
III
IV
Swanton, August 2001
I
“Take him out, take him out... He’s drowning.”
I didn’t want to look into the water, but I had to. Bobby’s body floated on the lake, with a sleeve of his Bart Simpson T-shirt hooked on the roots. The soft current rocked his corpse, causing it to be hit against the tree. In the silence that flooded it all you could hear the sound of his body when colliding: Thump, thump, thump...
I couldn’t move. I was hypnotized by his dead-eyed look. I could only think that it was the first time I saw his nose without boogers.
I heard a splash. Jake had just thrown himself into the water. After a couple of jumps, he came to the point where Bobby floated. He unhooked his shirt from the root and grabbed him under the armpits to bring him to the shore. Jim was still crying, and Dave was screaming for help. I don’t remember anything else.
My parents told me later that the police arrived only to declare him dead. Someone had drowned him in the lake. They had to take me to the hospital. I was not responding to any stimulus. I didn’t talk or look at people.
The doctors did a lot of tests for me. It did not react to the human voice, the loud noises or the pain. I was diagnosed with a short post-traumatic stress disorder and sent home. My parents protested. They didn’t know how to take care of me and they thought I’d be better off at the hospital until I recovered, but the doctors insisted. They said it was better for my mental health to be in a safe and known environment and that it was very likely that in a few days I would react. They told us that the human mind is a mistery, that perhaps we should be prepared for a potential chronic disease such as being in that state for a long long time.
Fortunately, I reacted two nights later. I woke up in my bed, confused and frightened, convinced that there was someone with me in the room. I sat up slowly, trying not to alert the being who was spying on me in the shadows. And then I saw her.
She wasn’t hiding or stalking me. She was standing, with her back to the window of my room, looking up at my bed. The streetlights that illuminated the room through the window allowed me to see her from behind, but, at the same time, they were preventing me from seeing her face clearly. However, I recognized her. I would have recognized her anywhere. It was Anne.
I sat on the bed and, with great care not to scare her, I stretched my hand towards the bedside table and lit the lamp. On second thought, it’s ridiculous to be careful not to scare a ghost, but it was important to me. I had to see her. I was more terrified of the idea that it would fade away in the light and not being able to keep watching her than the fact that she was there despite having seen how they buried her less than a week ago.
When the light went on, she didn’t disappear. She was still there, in front of the window. Her brown eyes stared at me. I wanted to talk to her, tell her how much I missed her, ask her not to leave, but the words didn’t come out of my mouth. I was so surprised to have her in front that I think I even forgot to breathe.
She did try to talk to me. She tried to open her mouth, but her lips were joined by a thick black thread. She only managed to separate her lips a little and to release a groan that contained all the pain of the world. She looked at me with grief and stretched her arms towards me.
I think it was at that moment when I realized she was dead. I got scared and stepped back until I was embedded against the bed’s headboard. Then, she began to come closer and closer laying her arms.
Suddenly she stopped as if she had realized that her presence frightened me. She stood in the middle of the room, with her arms hanging on the sides of her body. From her eyes began to flow water. I thought she was crying, and I hated myself for being so frightened that I could not even get out of bed and hug her. However, I soon realized that what was flowing from her eyes was not tears. It was a torrent of dark water, water from the lake, which soon began to sprout all over her body. In a few seconds, she was drenched and shivered uncontrollably. Then she disappeared.
I started screaming with all my strength. My parents got up and entered running into my room. I hugged them, desperate, while they were trying to comfort me. I told them what I saw, but they didn’t believe me. They just told me that it had been a dream, that I did not worry, that they were glad that I had reacted... Since they couldn’t calm me, they took me to sleep in their bed. With twelve years I should have been ashamed to sleep with my parents, but I felt safe and happy in their arms.
The next morning, I was also convinced that it had only been a nightmare. I went back to my room to get dressed and, as I passed through the center of the room, I was paralyzed, feeling like a glacial cold rising from my feet and freezing my soul. I had just stepped on a carpet area that was still wet. I was sure it was lake water.
II
I spent the rest of the morning following my mother, afraid to be alone. I offered to help her, do the chores of the house, I accompanied her from room to room, I was always one step behind her every time she turned around... At first, he was amused, then she was sympathetic, later she began to become nervous and finally she burst:
“Eric, son... don’t you have anything to do? Don’t you feel like watching something on TV or drawing a little bit?”
“No, I am well,” I answered, shrugging.
“Maybe he should go out and play with his friends,” my father suggested.
My mother threw a poisoned look at him. Swanton lived in a state of maximum paranoia after the deaths of Anne and Bobby. There was nothing else to talk about. Everyone had their own hypothesis: that someone from the village had gone mad and had become a serial killer, that he had to be some outsider of those who came in summer to rent the large mansions near the lake, that some crazy or some dangerous criminal should have escaped, and the authorities did not want to say anything... There even were people who defended Jake’s aunt’s crazy theory: the Champ had lured the children to devour them. What everyone agreed on was that all the children in the village were in danger until the authorities captured the offender.
“How is he going to go out on the street alone? For God’s sake, Jack... You know what’s going on.”
My father left the sports newspaper he had been peeking. He stood up and came close to me to caress my hair with affection. Then he threw my mother a confident smile.
“You know what the doctors said: the only way he can recover is to make a perfectly normal life.”My father pointed out the luminous landscape that was seen through the window. “Do you think it’s normal for a kid to be locked up at home on a day like thi
s?”
“Surely there will be no other child on the street. I don’t think their parents let them out.”
“Well, nothing is lost to try.” At least he’ll take a walk.”My father winked his eye. “Come on, Evelyn... Nothing’s going to happen to him.”
She looked out of the window for a few seconds, as if she wanted to make sure that there was no psychopath hidden among the garden hedges willing to jump on me as soon as I set a foot away from home. In the end, she gave up and sighed, resigned.
“OK, but I don’t want you to stay away from the neighborhood. No taking your bike and going away. And I want you to be home by lunchtime. And if you don’t find any of your friends, come home immediately...”
“Evelyn, give the kid a break. Do you want to go out, Eric?”
I nodded, excited. The truth is that the walls of the house fell on me. I felt like feeling the sun and the air and chatting with one of my friends. I was sure that out there no specter would appear to me. I was going to be among the people of the town, everyone could see me and sunlight was at its peak.
“If he’s not going to do what I ask, he won’t come out,” my mother kept insisting.
I promised to behave well by shouting, while I ran to the street door, fearful that she would repent. When I got to the garden gate, I saw her peeking at the window. Her worried gaze and the way she bit her lower lip made me think she was about to cry. My father was behind her, embracing her by the waist, trying to reassure her. That image, far from making me feel guilty, filled me with a strange joy. I had two amazing people who loved me and cared about me. They’ll make sure nothing bad ever happened to me.
I started walking through the streets of my neighborhood with my hands in my pockets. In spite of the good weather and the clear and bright sky, there was a sad and heavy atmosphere around the village. No children were riding with their bikes nor on the park swings nor playing ball in the streets. People walked in a hurry and didn’t stop to talk to their neighbors. It would almost be said that, as they crossed, they looked at each other with distrust, as if they thought that anyone could be the murderer who was taking the children to drown them in the dark waters of the lake.
My stroll took me in front of Jake’s and Dave’s house. They were sitting on the porch. Dave was entertaining reading an X-squad comic book, but Jake was merely sitting on the stairs, with his elbows on his knees, and his hands on both sides of his face, looking into the street with the same yearning with which an inmate looks through the bars of his cell. As soon as he saw me, his face lit up. He got up in a jump and ran to the garden door as if he feared I would pass by.
“Eric, how cool to see you here. We thought you were...” He left the sentence halfway and remained with his mouth opened, while his whole face blushed.
“That I was mad? Well, maybe I am a little, but it has got better for me.”
Dave had left his comic book and had also come to greet me. Although he and I Had never get along as well as we wished, I realized that he was really glad that I had recovered. I saw it in his smile.
“Where are you going?” He asked me.
“I am taking a stroll around the neighborhood. I was dying of boredom at home. Do you want to come?”
Jake joined me right away. I think he was so bored that he would have aimed to go and chip a mine. Dave hesitated a few seconds before nodding and entering the house to warn his mother. After the woman went out on the porch and gave us a thousand safety recommendations, she let us go.
“How’s Jim?”
“Very fucked up,” said Jake. “We saw him at his brother’s funeral and he was like out of his mind.”
“That’s just wrong. Do you think we should go see him?”
The two brothers looked at me and shrugged in unison. When they did things like that, they looked so much alike that they caused shivers. I know that there are thousands of twins around the world and that it is totally normal, but, seeing two people so similar doing the same gesture, gave the impression that one of the two was only a reflex escaped from a mirror, that the universe had been mistaken creating two beings duplicate, where only one was needed.
I took that double-shoulder shrug like a yes and we headed to Jim’s house. There was no one outside and the shutters were half down. In the garden, lying sideways, there was Bobby’s tricycle. I felt the same shiver that you feel before a crypt or an abandoned house. Fortunately, Dave decided to take the lead. He opened the gate, climbed the three staircases on the porch and knocked on the door. Jake and I followed him, and we stayed in the garden, keeping a respectful distance.
Jim’s mother appeared on the threshold. She was disheveled, and her eyes were swollen. In spite of the overwhelming warmth, she wore a thick robe and she was hugging herself as if she were prey to an inner cold that she could not fight with anything. She seemed to have aged twenty years since the last time I had seen her.
Dave talked to her in whispers. The woman got into the house and closed the door again. Jake and I looked at Dave, hoping he would explain what had happened.
“She says that Jim will come down right away, that it would be good for him to go out for a while. She asked me not to go far away, and I promised her we would stay at her treehouse. Does that sound good?”
We both nodded. For some reason, all we wanted was to be together, no matter the place. We waited impatiently until the door opened again and Jim appeared. I gave him a sad smile that he didn’t give back to me. He had a lost gaze and red, swollen eyes, but there was no trace of tears. I wondered if you could cry so much as to make your eyes dry.
We headed to the treehouse, climbed up and sat quietly, each in a corner. The atmosphere was uncomfortable. Nobody seemed to know what to say. Jake took a baseball and started passing from one hand to the other, while Dave was peeking around in the comic box. It was Jim himself who broke the silence.
“What are we going to do?”
The three of us stayed quiet. We did not know what to say, we did not even understand the question. Jim didn’t add anything else. He merely went looking at us one by one, demanding an answer.
“What are we going to do about what?” Jake asked at last.
“With the murderer. What are we going to do to stop him?”
We went back to look at him quietly, wondering if we would have understood him well. Jake cleared his throat and pretended to be very focused on playing with the ball. I just looked at him without knowing what to say.
“We are not going to do anything,” answered Dave. “The police are already working on it.”
“The police...” Jim made a contemptuous grimace. “They’re not going to get anything. We were a lot closer to seeing Bobby’s killer than they have been. Come on, guys... They have already killed Anne and my brother. Aren’t we going to do anything?”
“I don’t know what we could do.” Dave tried to explain. “Dude, we’re only 12 years old. Do you think we can do something?”
“We could watch.” I intervened, excited. “We may not be able to stop him, but we can see him and warn the police, or at least look at him.”
“And what do you want us to do? Patrol the lake?” David kept trying to reason with us, but we were already smiling and ignoring logic and common sense. “Our parents would kill us if we go there.”
“There’s no need to go to the lake,” I explained. “The killer catches the kids here in Swanton. We can split the village between the four and patrol with the bikes.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to be separated,” Jim intervened. “How are we going to let ourselves know if anyone sees anything?
“Well, I have a couple of walkies and Jake and Dave also had. Do they work?”
Dave was silent as if he were still resisting entering that crazy plan, but Jake nodded excitedly and, without waiting any longer, began to come down from the treehouse to go fetch the walkies. Dave wouldn’t give any trouble. He always ended up giving in to his brother’s impulse.
“I’
m going home to look for mine too,” I said to Jim.
“And what do I do?”
“Try to find a map of Swanton so we can share out the terrain. This afternoon we start.”
III
That same afternoon we started patrolling the streets of the town. It seemed that our parents were somewhat calmer because they let us carry our bikes out. We were able to finally, get some of our freedom back. Jim’s mother was the hardest to convince and only allowed him to take the bike if he promised to spend every ten minutes in front of the house and ring the doorbell so that she was sure he was well. We had to assign Jim the task of looking out our neighborhoood. From First st. to Spring st. This way, he could meet his mother’s limits.
We assigned Dave the Westside, from Spring Street to the river. It was a quiet area with lots of shops and parks, and Dave agreed that it didn’t seem too dangerous. I decided not to remind him that that was the area where Bobby was when he was taken away. I would have loved to patrol there. I was sure that the murderer could be walking around on those streets and I was dying to catch him, but my father had his carpentry shop at Merchants Row, right in the middle of that area, and I didn’t want him to see me passing alone again and again.
Jake insisted about patrolling the Southside, from First Street to the elementary school. It was the biggest area and he said he was the fastest with the bike, so we assigned it to him. All that was left for me was the Northern Area, a place full of small suburbs and forests, a place too peaceful and quiet for the assassins. I was sure I would be bored to death.
We tried the walkies and we agreed to speak for them every five minutes, sending a simple confirmation message that everything was still in order. I would start, Dave would follow, then Jim, and finally, Jake. The rest of the time the channel had to be free in case anyone saw anything strange and had to warn the others.