Beneath the Lake Read online

  Christopher Ransom is the author of internationally bestselling novels including The Birthing House and The People Next Door. He studied literature at Colorado State University and worked at Entertainment Weekly magazine in New York, and now lives near his hometown of Boulder, Colorado.

  Also by Christopher Ransom

  The Birthing House

  The Haunting of James Hastings

  The People Next Door

  The Fading

  The Orphan

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  978-1-4055-2341-7

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Christopher Ransom 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  SPHERE

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Beneath the Lake

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Christopher Ransom

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Storm

  Invitation

  The Waitress

  Cover Story

  Two Families: One Alive, the Other…

  Exit Camp

  Getting Lost

  Folklore

  The Gate

  The Beach

  The Tent

  Pleased to Meet You

  Mercer Base Camp

  Night Swim

  Brunch Is Served

  The Anchor

  Trust

  Black Water

  Sabotage

  Awakening

  The Stranger

  Digging

  Campfire

  Cocoons

  Multitudes

  Splitting the Herd

  The Cliff

  Bathing

  Gatekeeper

  Dust

  The Shovel

  Survivor

  Mimicry

  Airstream

  Offering

  Cold White Light

  The Medic

  Aqua Cat

  The Eye

  Sisters

  Glitch

  Sand

  Ñí Brásge

  To Kamuran who takes care of his people and travels without fear

  In spring of youth it was my lot

  To haunt of the wide world a spot

  The which I could not love the less –

  So lovely was the loneliness

  Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,

  And the tall pines that towered around.

  But when the Night had thrown her pall

  Upon that spot, as upon all,

  And the mystic wind went by

  Murmuring in melody –

  Then – ah! then I would awake

  To the terror of the lone lake.

  Yet that terror was not fright,

  But a tremulous delight –

  A feeling not the jewelled mine

  Could teach or bribe me to define –

  Nor Love – although the Love were thine.

  Death was in that poisonous wave,

  And in its gulf a fitting grave

  For him who thence could solace bring

  To his lone imagining –

  Whose solitary soul could make

  An Eden of that dim lake.

  Edgar Allan Poe, The Lake

  The Storm

  Born of an ancient river and dammed by man, fighting for survival, Lake Blundstone lies sprawling, stretching, endlessly reshaping its borders in north-central Nebraska. The state’s name is derived from the Otoe Native American Ñí Brásge, or flat water, given to the Platte River system that feeds Blundstone. The lake earned a reputation as a sailor’s paradise, thanks to winds that almost never cease. But when cooler pressure fronts roll down off the Rocky Mountains onto the long runway of the Great Plains and collide with opposing warmer fronts, paradise is no more. Stalks of grain are crippled, windmills become helicopters, barns are shorn of their siding. On a lake with over one hundred and thirty miles of shoreline, thunderstorms can turn treacherous in minutes, unleashing tornadoes that haul skyscrapers of water into the sky.

  The Mercer family have been vacationing at Lake Blundstone every June – peak season for the storms – since 1979, this being their fifth trip. Which is to say, the Mercer family have been very fortunate.

  Until today.

  *

  Raymond Mercer, still proud of turning eight three weeks ago, begins the morning with a cheese Danish and tumbler of Tang while his parents sip their coffee around the picnic table at the center of Mercer Base Camp up on Admiral’s Point, the sand bluff overlooking the small bay on one side, the real lake on the other. The camper, the Ford Bronco towing it, and the fourteen-foot catamaran’s trailer hitched behind that, together form a semi-circle around the family fire pit and lawn chairs, giving Raymond an unspoken but very real sense of security in what has become their humble vacation home.

  Raymond’s twelve-year-old sister Colette, who goes by Colt, is across the plateau, brushing her teeth and washing her sun-streaked blonde hair under the old well with its orange iron pump handle. Their big brother Leonard, fifteen and always looking for an excuse to practice driving, has buzzed off on the small Honda mini bike Dad salvaged from a yard sale for seventy-five dollars and restored in his workshop. Sometimes Leonard lets Raymond ride on the back as they jounce along the bumpy dirt trails through the tall weeds, nicknaming this one Turtle Lane, that one Bullsnake Row, the native animals basking up an appetite before seeking shade during the hot midday. Raymond is still tired from the fireworks celebration they shared on the point last night, so he doesn’t mind that Leonard left without him.

  By eleven, everyone is down on the beach, the lawn chairs set up, water toys spread around, Warren’s transistor radio pulling in oldies from towns unknown. Always the protective mother, Francine applies sunscreen to Raymond’s nose and shoulders before they all head out on the sailboat, the Aqua Cat’s yellow pontoons cutting through the cove’s calm green with its suspended flakes of brown algae and out into the deepening blue. Warren drops anchor and lets the kids swim under the trampoline deck, hauling Raymond up between the pontoons only to launch him out once more like a cannonball.

  By afternoon the Mercers are spread out, playing or lounging in their own private reserves within the larger resort. Francine is inside the camper preparing turkey, apple and Swiss sandwiches while Warren fusses with some new project he’s cooked up this year – augmenting the ceramic grill, mounting a new sun shower system to the camper shell. Leonard is out fishing from his inner tube, Colt is reading her book back in her tent and Raymond is playing with his toy soldiers on the crumbling slopes of the sand cliffs, throwing clods at infantrymen.

  Tiring of his war games, he carries his bucket down the beach in search of toads. Night is the best time, when the heat drops and the insects come out, but sometimes the day brings a surprise. He ventures as far as he is allowed but finds no toads.

  A little girl in a yellow swimsuit appears, walking with her own plastic bucket. She has blonde hair like Colette’s and she’s younger than he is, six or seven at most. She is alone but for th
e dog at her side, a bulldog mix of some sort, muscular under a cinnamon coat. The dog pulls a little steel cart with two knobby rubber wheels like the ones on Raymond’s dirt bike back home. He watches the dog keeping step with her, gradually understanding it is not a cart but a custom, dog version of a wheelchair. The animal’s head is wide, with powerful jaws and a white spot on his muzzle. He looks happy, lips pulled back, tongue hanging to one side, jowls catching the breeze. The tail wags in odd half-swings that make Raymond’s heart ache.

  Now and then the girl plucks something from the beach. She holds her find before the dog’s muzzle and his ears perk up, he sniffs with little interest, and she drops it before moving on.

  Bored or thirsty, the dog trundles away, the braces of his two-wheeler clanking across the thick beach and down to the water, where he laps up some of the lake. He wades in until his chest meets the surface and his wheels are submerged to the axle. He drinks, then retreats, front legs U-turning him back to dry land, where the smooth cinnamon turns into a coat of spikes that shrug off a glittering mist. The dog stares across the lake for a moment, ears tucked low over the thick round of the skull. He sniffs, guarded, waiting for something.

  A few steps later the girl halts in surprise, reaching cautiously, taking the new find in her small hand. She studies it closely, then looks up, noticing Raymond for the first time. She smiles and waves to him.

  Raymond waves in return and the dog makes a practiced pivot with the vehicle, the uncoordinated hind legs prodding at the small dunes. The powerful chest and front legs compensate with a sudden stampede, hauling the buggy, its tires fanning little roosters of sand until the dog is close to galloping. When he reaches her side the dog is panting, stumbling, offering his services once more.

  The girl lowers the new thing and the dog sniffs it once, then barks at it, backing away, tail curling. A succession of barks comes deep from his chest, warning her.

  The girl pats the dog’s shoulders and smoothes his pointed ears, then looks to Raymond. They are closer now, but not close enough to talk. The sunlight is white around her small shape, her tiny dark shoulders and wet blonde hair. She holds up her find for him to see, but all he makes out is a speck of green or blue between her fingers, like a rough or blocky gem.

  Raymond doesn’t know what to do, what she expects.

  She tilts her head, as if just now noticing something about him that puzzles her more than the gem. The dog looks to Raymond and barks again, cheeks loose, the tongue a little gray surfboard bobbing between coral spikes.

  She sets the object in the sand, smiles at him once more, then turns and heads back up the beach, the bulldog in his buggy keeping pace at her side.

  Only after the two of them disappear around the next bend in the cliff does Raymond understand she left it for him.

  ‘What time is it, Dad?’ Raymond likes to ask, having lost his sense of time and sometimes the ability to recall which day of the week it is.

  ‘What do you care?’ Warren always responds. ‘You got somewhere you need to be?’

  The hours melt. The days blur. Warren likes to brag that after three days at Blundstone he is so detached from the real world he forgets his phone number at the office. It is a place and a mindset that distracts even prepared people from the encroaching storm. Including a little boy lost in the construction of a sand castle.

  The sky darkens by the slightest of shades. At the far south end of the lake, inside the pretty stacks of white cumulus, gray thunderheads gather like a hidden fighter squadron. The tame breeze Raymond has come to take for granted picks up so gradually, he thinks nothing of his mother’s straw hat tumbling down the beach. Every sand castle needs a moat, and he has been careful to dig one out near the water line. The first few flecks of rain are no more noticeable than a splash of lake.

  Fleas bite at Raymond’s eyes until he realizes they’re actually sand kicked up by the wind. Covering his face, he crawls into the shallows to rinse off, only to be greeted by waves pouncing up to his chest, knocking him on his back. He is on the verge of tears, betrayed by this beach and the water that has only ever been his friend, and then his mother is shouting, running toward him, and he is too shocked to cry. She yanks him up so fast he thinks he is being punished.

  The two of them scramble up the powdery cliff, through a cutaway path. The howling wind is almost indistinguishable from his mother’s panicked breathing. On the bluff, a point of knee-high weeds and yellow flowers, one of Raymond’s green Incredible Hulk flip-flops is shucked off and the weather is like something from another planet.

  The camper door is slamming itself against the fiberglass sidewall. The picnic table is upside down. The lawn chairs and an entire row of clothing that had been strung out to dry are twirling across the field. Leonard’s little motorcycle is lying on its side, leaking gas. Across the field, a Park Ranger’s truck speeds along, horn honking, its brown door badge running with dirty water as if melting. Everywhere the rain is cutting at them sideways, mixing with clouds of sand grit that stings Raymond’s bare back.

  Raymond’s mother shoves him inside the camper, drawing the fiberglass shades down over the window screens. She orders him to stay put, then leaps out once more, latching the door, running toward the boat ramp. Raymond remembers that the boat was beached around the corner, on the other side of the point, and his father is probably scrambling to secure it now. Where are Colt and Leonard? He doesn’t know, but they are bigger, stronger, and Mom and Dad will make sure they are okay.

  The camper has a refrigerator, stove, bathroom, kitchen galley, room for five. It must weigh a couple thousand pounds and sits on leveling jacks, but is now rocking as if the lake has already crept up over the cliff, hellbent on taking Raymond away.

  He hops over seat cushions and counters, moving from window to window, trying to see his family. ‘Mommy,’ he whines, the fear in his own voice adding another layer to the dread coiling inside him. The fiberglass shields leave only shapes and shadows, sealing him inside a bubble of deep gray light. He imagines himself locked inside for days, weeks, a boy cut off from the world, coasting hundreds of miles away, flying or floating until they find him in another state, Ohio perhaps, or Texas, and he will be a hero, the brave kid who survived despite it all. He is old enough to entertain such visions of heroism, and young enough to shudder at the real possibility of being stranded.

  He remembers the window beside his bunk, the raised bed at the rear end of the camper. He scurries up and tucks himself cross-legged into the pile of his sleeping bag, hunched over, peering out. The perch affords him his first aerial view of the lake, which sprawls outward from the beach some forty feet below.

  The water that was just an hour ago a large, safe, slightly rippled lagoon now looks like a raging sea. The waves come in a tumbling broken puzzle of white-capped chop, ridges and angles of charcoal-colored water tall as his father and wide as a school bus. Though the camper is still warm from the morning heat, Raymond pulls on his hooded sweatshirt and stuffs his hands in the front pockets. For a long while he cannot move, cannot avert his eyes. He is mesmerized by the raging lake, the low dark sky, the whirling devils of sand racing by.

  There is no sign of his parents or siblings, but maybe they have all taken shelter down in one of the tents. Or they are just a few feet away, hiding in the Bronco. Or maybe they got lost, wound up…

  Drowned.

  He stifles a panicked sob and looks away. The lake is too scary, too ugly. What else does he have up here in his bunk? There is a strange book Leonard gave him for Christmas last year, a comic with panels and illustrations of freaks and freak accidents. Ripley’s Believe or Not!, a sort of greatest hits anthology of the early comics. Raymond digs into it now, focusing on the man who lived with the railroad spike through his skull, worms able to regenerate their own heads, the baseball pitcher who was struck by lightning during the game and finished it, maniacal Nazis, Sasquatch sightings, creepy mummies, abnormal pets, and even the ads for toys and novelties he has
seen a hundred times – it’s all deeply fascinating in this moment. Anything but the storm.