Beneath the Lake Read online

  ‘Roll over,’ he tells her. ‘With your hands out in front of you.’

  Andie grunts and rolls to her back, raising her arms. Her face is red, swollen, her tears mixed with blood and patches of sand stuck to her cheeks and one side of her mouth. The blood is dark, but in the dim light he can’t tell if it’s purple or black. She looks genuinely scared and this makes him happy.

  ‘Don’t move. If you move, I will take one of those rocks from the fire pit and smash your head flat. Do you believe me?’

  Andie nods quickly.

  Ray backs up to fetch the lantern, keeping his eyes on her as he bends. He carries it back in his left hand, the fly rod still cocked in his right. He shines the light into her eyes, wanting to disorient her further as he peers at the blood on her face. It’s not black, but very dark. Too dark, he thinks. He aims the light at her hands, checking the thumbs. They are plump but otherwise appear to be normal.

  But what about under her sweatshirt? She could have anything stashed in there.

  Andie notices the drift of his eyes, and smiles.

  ‘What the fuck are you smiling at?’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  Give her nothing. Don’t play her game, whatever it is.

  ‘You want to lift up my shirt and have a peek at my tiddies,’ Andie says. ‘Because you think I might be hidin’ a weapon between ’em, and because you’re a pervert, like all the other mens who can’t get enough. Well, go on, then, if you really want to know.’

  She smiles wider as blood drips from her nose over her lips, down her chin.

  Ray feels sick, for all kinds of reasons. ‘Your ranger stabbed my sister to death. We both know you’re rotten. All I want is the truth. Why she had to die. Why you’re here now. I don’t want to kill you, but I will. I absolutely will.’

  ‘Coward,’ she says. ‘I’ll help ya.’

  Andie reaches under her sweatshirt with her right hand.

  ‘Stop!’ he shouts, raising the fly rod. ‘Not another inch!’

  ‘Easy, young buck.’ Using her left, Andie taps a finger on the breast cancer ribbon pinned to her sweatshirt as her right continues to wiggle higher under her shirt. ‘You wanted to understand what you’re up against out here. I aim to show you.’

  Ray steps back two paces, the lantern held out, waiting for the first sign of trouble. He glances at the fire pit, fixing on a medium-sized rock, in case he needs to brain her quickly. A wooden handle is sticking out from the pit, just like the handle on the shovel he used on the ranger. Did he bring it back with him? No. Must be one of the shovels they used to bury Leonard. Maybe Dad threw it in the fire last night.

  ‘Diagnosed stage four,’ Andie says.

  Ray whirls, focusing on her again as her breasts flatten, her hand withdraws and she drops two flesh-toned plastic inserts in the sand at her feet. For a moment he is so wound up, expecting another trick, he has no idea what he’s looking at. Then he looks at her now-flat chest again, and it dawns on him. They are fakes, what they used to call falsies.

  ‘You’re… cancer?’ he says.

  ‘Not no more. Doctors and hospitals said nothing could cure me. I made my sacrifices, but those don’t account for much. Seven hundred or more people have died in Blundstone’s waters and on her beaches over the last half-century, must be thousands over the ages. What have you sacrificed? What do you know about suffering?’

  Ray is too overwhelmed to answer.

  ‘Nothing, that’s what. But you’re about to learn.’ She starts to sit up.

  He charges at her with the fly rod again. ‘Down! Stay down!’

  Andie chuckles, hands raised. She lies back, resting her head in the sand. ‘Yes, sir.’

  He can’t go on like this, torturing her. And he can’t let her go. Someone will be coming for her soon. So, the only options are to kill her and flee, or tie her up and flee.

  But there are other things he needs to know first.

  ‘Tell me about the lake,’ he says. ‘Everything you know. If you do that, I’ll tie you up and leave you some water and we’ll be gone. If you don’t, I’ll set you on fire the way I did your daddy or whoever that piece of shit was.’

  ‘No one knows how it started. Some people say it’s old, that it’s been here before the dam, when this was just a river. Before the cities and towns. Before man. An ancient that managed to hold on, the last of her kind. But there’s another theory that she isn’t so old. That she came after we built that dam, fiddling with nature and upsetting the balance like we always do. Maybe those of us with family goin’ back a long ways, we’re carrying the rituals over into modern times in order to restore balance, payback for human sin. Blood-letting. Drownings. Littering, contaminating the water with our chemicals and trash. Violence against our neighbors, our own kin. We created a big pool to hold our sickness, and then we helped it grow.’

  She seems more relaxed now, and Ray senses she is almost enjoying the chance to share it with someone new.

  ‘Tell me about the black stuff in the water. The sand. The ranger’s blood. How it gets inside them, why it changes them.’

  ‘Nature’s funny like that,’ Andie says. ‘He was my granddaddy, by the way. Our eldest ranger. Hunnert and twenty-three years old, passed his eye exam at the driver’s license bureau last fall.’

  Ray presses the tip of the rod to her lips again. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’re young,’ Andie says, smirking as she pushes the rod away. ‘You still believe in answers, tidy little explanations for every mystery in this life. You ain’t gonna find that out here, but I’ll tell you another true story like I told you in the diner. Maybe you’re smart enough to take what you need from it, but I doubt it.’

  ‘Make it fast.’

  ‘One night a few years ago I couldn’t sleep, clicked my way into this show on the TV. About these tigers over on the coast of India. The big cats, striped ones like you see at the zoo. But these were unique, a single colony that lived in some of the densest jungle along a coastal river. Most of the big cats don’t go out of their way to hunt man. They might defend their turf you come near their cubs, but otherwise they’d just as soon eat something that doesn’t walk on two legs. But this particular clan, they had a real nasty way of ruining someone’s day. What they did was, they hid in the trees along on this riverbank, waiting for the villagers to paddle by in their canoes. Just as silent as you please, and oh so patient. One of these canoes came sliding by with a couple of people in it, the tiger would leap from the bank. They had footage of this. Them tigers stand eight, ten feet when stretched out, and you better believe they can launch themselves halfway across the river. Villagers thought they was being smart by sticking to the middle, but it was like when your house cat makes a leap from the couch to the windowsill. Picture that, but with an animal weighs sixteen hunnert pounds and got teeth like bullhorns. Hungry, but not just that. They was mad, angrier than hell, the scientist man on the show said. Vicious for vicious’ sake. Do you know why?’

  ‘Because the villagers were trespassing in the tigers’ territory,’ Ray says.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Andie says. ‘But those villagers were doing everything they knew how to give the cats a wide berth, and they still made catnip of ’em. No, see, the scientists got in there doing all their studies the way they do, taking soil and water samples, putting the tiger poop under a microscope, the whole bit. Eventually they cut one of them tigers open, studied her organs, her brains, the blood. Do you know what they found?’

  ‘Human flesh.’

  ‘Well, sure, in the stomach. But in the liver and kidneys? They found a whole lot of salt build-up. Sea salt. Salt from the ocean waters that pushed up into this neck of the river, turning it unusually brackish, kind of water animals usually know better than to sip at. But this jungle was an inferno, and these particular cats didn’t have anywhere else to drink. Big cats need a lot of hydration, like our crops, and so it was the salt water or death. Salt got into their brains. Made th
em ten times more aggressive than the same species a hundred miles inland. Those villagers are primitive peoples, thought they were dealing with demon tigers, bad spirits, like maybe they’d angered the gods. But it was just too much sea salt in the water table. Simple as that.’

  ‘There’s no salt in Blundstone,’ Ray says. ‘But there’s some kind of imbalance, is what you’re saying. Poison in the water.’

  ‘Who said poison? I’m talking about nature, young man. You think you know her, but you don’t. We can call it spirits or demons or climate change or the hundred year flood, but, in the end, it always comes down to nature being nature. The lake is just a means to concentrate what we bring in, what’s lived here for thousands of years. These things are nature, part of us, and they combine with other nature. We call it invasive species, but nature doesn’t know invasive. She thrives on it. On us, because we too are invasive. Your family experienced visions, and it changed them. Other survivors claim to have seen God, leviathans in the deep, sunsets that lasted four days, anything you can dream up. But it’s all mind. Mind is nature. A tiger brain full of salt.’ Andie looks up, elbows digging into the sand. ‘Can I get up now?’

  Ray nods, awed not so much by the depth of her lunacy as by the conversational, unforced conviction with which she describes it.

  ‘You and your family actually do this. You take people and kill them and dump them in the lake.’

  Andie sniffs and looks around the camp ground, at the trailer, the Audi, all the gear and technology. ‘Our people own half of this county and most of the next one,’ she says. ‘What’s your family got? What does your father do now? Did he make his fortune before or after you discovered our little paradise?’

  The fly rod quivers in Ray’s right hand. His father was a vice-president at a humble little regional bank the first few years they camped here. After the storm, he built a fortune in ten years, with hardly a false step.

  ‘My family never sacrificed anyone.’

  ‘Didn’t they? Who was it disappeared here, on this very point, when you were just a boy? Whose family was that?’ Andie turns her gaze on the Airstream. ‘Your girly knows. It was in her eyes before she ordered her milkshake. You can always tell, the ones who’ve been touched and lived to tell.’

  ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’

  ‘I’m a tiger,’ Andie says. ‘You’re the one’s decided to bring your canoe.’

  ‘That’s what you came for tonight,’ Ray says. ‘To take one of us.’

  ‘Your people are dying. She might give you a few more years, the way she done us. But only if you make your offering, and this time you better mean it, Raymond. It can’t be an accident like the others. It has to be true.’

  Ray is relieved. Now he can do what he should have done twenty minutes ago. With the rod or a rock or with his bare hands if he has to.

  ‘Go on, whip me some more,’ Andie says, reading the decision in his eyes. ‘You can do anything you want to ol’ Andie and you can make it last all night. I don’t mind, you see. Because I’ve already been through hell, and that little girl that belonged to your sister? She’s already gone.’

  The meaning of this takes a moment to sink in. Ray’s spine stiffens and his heart folds over on itself before springing into panic mode. He drops the fly rod but keeps the lantern, aiming it at the Airstream’s door. It’s closed, and he would have heard it open. There’s no way anyone could have…

  The window.

  The way his mom slipped out, when they were all sitting around the fire. While Andie the sociopathic waitress has been regaling him with her theories on Mother Nature gone haywire, someone (or something) could have come through the window on the other side of the trailer.

  Ray runs to the door and yanks the knob – it’s locked.

  ‘Megan! Open the door! Megan! Open the door —’ then he remembers that he told her not to, no matter what.

  Behind him, Andie laughs.

  ‘It’s safe!’ he shouts. ‘Megan! Say something! Are you all right?’

  Footsteps inside. Something like a cabinet door slams.

  ‘Megan! Talk to me!’

  ‘I’m here!’ comes the muffled reply.

  ‘Are you all right? Is Sierra with you?’

  ‘She’s in the bathroom. What’s going on?’

  ‘Is she safe?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘IS SHE SAFE?’

  ‘Yes! We’re fine. What’s happening? Ray?’

  This doesn’t make sense. Then it does. She tricked him, but not with her long story. Only the end. The last thirty seconds nothing more than a head-fake.

  Oh, shit.

  Ray turns, swinging the lantern to where he left the Cornhusker on the ground. She’s not there. He swings it right, peering under the picnic table and across the fire pit. The wooden shovel handle he saw earlier jerks sideways, sliding into the dark.

  She planted it. Her weapon was sitting there all along.

  He swings the lantern, can’t find her. A bulky shadow scrambles across the ground, coming at him. His light catches a flash of pink and blue, the sparkly letters way too close and rising up, and then her screaming moon face pokes out of the night.

  Andie shrieks, her eyes wide and black as the lake itself. A concentrated weight slams into his left thigh, then slips past, grazing his other knee as her arms swing wide and a brilliant hot pain ripples through his leg, followed by a warm drench that runs down his left knee, slopping his feet.

  Andie stumbles back, rears up and resets the wooden handle in both hands, the way a batter chokes up on a baseball bat.

  Ray’s left leg buckles and the lantern tumbles to the ground, throwing a flash of light over his thigh. The bottom front of his shorts and the flesh behind it have been gashed to the bone. His flesh is wide open and his blood is flooding out of him.

  He throws both hands over the wound as if trying to pack the blood back in, and the woman shrieks again. No, not a shovel at all. A blade flashes through the lantern’s beam on its way down. Ray doesn’t have the name for it. He only knows it’s curved, like the tool the farmers used before machines, the kind for cutting wheat.

  ‘Help!’ he screams, raising one arm, which takes a nasty slice below the elbow but saves his neck. More of his blood leaps through the night as the force of the blow knocks him sideways to the ground.

  ‘Help me! Somebody! Oh God no no NO!’

  Andie roars into another swing, her long rusted sickle coming for his head.

  Cold White Light

  Ray falls flat, ducking the blade as the trailer door opens with a bang.

  Someone steps on Ray’s back, smashing him to the sand, and then the weight is off, away. He writhes in agony, his only thought to get out of its path, away from that swinging blade, before she cuts him into pieces that can’t be put back together. He tries to stand but his coordination has gone spastic, as if the woman cut all the strings he never knew he needed to get through the day. One of his palms flattens on something sharp, feels like glass, and he screams again, fearing the blade.

  No, it’s a rock, he’s falling over a circle of them, the smell of ash and coal in his mouth. Campfire leftovers. If they had made a new one tonight, he would be rolling in flames now and it feels the same. He is enveloped in a fire of pain. He lurches forth, scraping his hips, and flops sideways, trying to see her, afraid to stop moving, the blade will find him. Everything is odd shapes and shadows. Bushes, a chair, more sand, and he keeps digging along with his elbows and toes.