Beneath the Lake Read online

  It is as though God has taken their family portrait, capturing them at the summit of their true vacation. So that they will never forget, even after tomorrow comes.

  And with it the storm.

  Ray stands near the end of the sand point until the stars reappear. Until the flash-echoes of the grand finale dim behind his eyes. Trails of white smoke from the black powder circle and diffuse on a gentle breeze. The cove falls silent. No one speaks for what feels like a very long time, and Ray wonders if Colt and Leonard are afraid too, the way he is. The stillness becomes a vacancy and he turns around, surveying the beach in both directions.

  The cliffs loom, the boat is anchored where they left it this afternoon, but Ray’s family are gone. They returned to the camper without him? He can almost imagine it, Colt yawning, murmuring goodnight and walking to her tent. Leonard not far behind, maybe detouring through the woods to smoke one of his secret cigarettes. Mom and Dad watching Ray out on the point all alone, arm in arm, wanting to give him some time to digest the magic. But would his parents really leave him alone, without even whispering goodnight?

  Ray walks uneasily across the sand bar, cutting through a tide pool to reach the main beach faster. The tide pools are usually hot as bath water from the long day of intense sun, but now they are cool, almost chilling. They are only a few inches deep, but Ray can’t even make out the pale sand in this one. His legs are visible only down to the ankles, where the water is so black it provides the illusion that his feet have been cut off. He scurries out of the tide pool and glances back, across the cove, then the other way, and the water in all directions is the same, a solid shining black table. Even though he has come to know this cove and her beaches as well as their backyard in Boulder, and has never found a reason to fear it, he longs for a flashlight.

  Anxious but not wanting to give into irrational panic, he trots over dry beach and trips on something that rattles dryly. He stops, turns back. It’s the three-ply grocery sack his father used to carry the fireworks. Must have left it here. Strange. Dad is usually stern with them about anything resembling littering. A good camper always leaves the camp ground in better shape than he found it, he has reminded them countless times.

  Ray picks up the sack, struck by a bit of ingenuity. There might be something left in the bag, a lighter or more punk sticks, any light would be welcome comfort for the rest of the walk up to the camper. He kneels, rooting around in the bag, and comes up with a pair of medium-sized sparklers. Perfect… so long as there’s something to light them with. He runs his fingers around the bottom of the bag, and there it is. A lighter.

  Ray turns away from the paper sack, back against the breeze. He flicks the lighter and uses the light to align the tips of the sparklers, then holds the flame to them until they crackle to life. The hissing orange spray seems pathetic compared to everything else they just set off, but the corona around them is almost as good as a lantern. He can see a good ten feet in all directions now, and wanders up the beach with the sparklers held at arm’s length the way he has seen people in castles do in the movies.

  He walks faster, knowing the little rods will burn down in only a minute or two. No problem. He just has to find the cutaway path in the cliff before then, the one that leads up to the point only a few car lengths from the camper. The breeze comes at him head-on, pushing the sulfurous blue smoke from his torch into his eyes. He bunches them closed and makes the mistake of inhaling, drawing more of the smoke into his nostrils, down his throat. The bitter stink is overwhelming, and he whirls away, gagging, dropping the sparklers in the process. His eyes burn, his tongue feels coated with chemicals. He coughs, spits, rubs his eyes with the arm of his sweatshirt.

  Hurry! The sparklers are going to burn out in the sand!

  He searches through watery eyes, picks one up by the wire stem, and turns for the other. His foot finds it for him. The searing burn comes a second or two after the thorn prick of the steel point registers in the middle of his bare sole. He cries out, leaping away, his weight shoving the fizzling ember into the sand, killing it.

  ‘Aw, crap, no!’

  He considers trying to relight it, but there’s not enough time. By then the one in his hand will be toasted too. It’s already halfway spent. He leaves the sack behind and rushes on, jogging despite the raw burn under his foot, aiming the sparkler to his right, trying to locate the path in the cliff. But it’s all vertical wall, rough-edged, the hardened and much darker sand he remembers from a spot way past their camp site.

  Has he gone too far, past it already? Seems impossible, but he doesn’t recognise this section. He runs faster, loses confidence, doubles back.

  The sparkler has burned down to its last three inches. It’s okay, he tells himself, you can’t be lost here, but he runs faster anyway. Back to where he started? Yes. That’s the smart thing to do. Find the sand bar, he knows the way from there. Take the other beach, to the boat ramp or Leonard’s tent. Easy.

  Ray holds the sparkler up above his head, squinting as he runs. Only an inch left, the twinkling fire already shrinking, dying. He can’t see more than a few steps ahead, but something stands out against the long stretch of beach… those dark outlines… are those people? It looks like three or four people clustered around something.

  Ray shakes his little magic wand. ‘No, no, wait!’

  But the sparkler fizzles out, a final curl of smoke threading off toward the lake. Dark again. Even harder to see through it now, his eyes slow to compensate for the loss of light. Ray tosses the metal stick aside, squinting ahead.

  The people are there, standing side by side. He can’t tell if they are facing him or have their back to him, but he can count them. Four. Mom, Dad, Leonard, Colt.

  ‘Hey! You guys!’ Ray calls. ‘I’m down here!’

  They shift slightly, but do not holler back.

  Relief propels him on, jogging, grinning at what an idiot he turned into there for a few minutes. The foursome solidify as he approaches, their varying heights distinguishable. Man, woman. Leonard’s thin form. Even the girls’ longer hair.

  ‘I’m okay,’ Ray calls, some fifty feet away. ‘I thought you all left!’

  He’s breathing hard, sweating, but there’s no need to panic now. He slows to a fast walk, even the burn under his foot a minor complaint.

  The four of them cluster again, as if huddling in conversation, and then crouch. It reminds Ray of the way they all gathered before starting the fireworks, for his father’s toast. But why now? Are they going to set off one more? Was there anything left in the bag? He doesn’t see a light, no flame, not even the tiny orange tip of a burning punk.

  He is within conversation distance.

  ‘Hey, what are you guys doing? Didn’t you hear me?’

  They do not stand to greet him, but one, maybe Colt, turns to face him. He can’t make out her features but knows her shape. The way her hair falls. She waves for him to join them, and then another of them turns, Len or Dad, gesturing urgently at the ground like they found something amazing.

  ‘A toad?’ Ray says, without his usual excitement.

  He stops. Something here is off, and not only how they won’t answer him. Aren’t talking with each other. Something is different about them, the outline of their bodies, their clothes. They look bulkier, darker, as if they are all dressed in baggy pajamas.

  The last two look up from their kneeling position, and for a moment Ray catches the pale shape of his mother’s face in between the others. She smiles, opening her arms to him while the others continue to peer down at the little spot of beach.

  Ray takes two or three more steps, trying to make out what they are so fixated on, but it’s impossible. The beach is darker than the night around them, dark like a hole.

  It is a hole. He can see the edges now. It’s not very wide, only a foot or so, but longer, a clean black plank about as long as…

  His family aren’t moving anymore.

  They are staring at him, all four, and he shouldn’t be able
to see their eyes but he can. They are vacant, black like the hole, set close together in their pale faces.

  Not pajamas. The rest of the black on them. Not clothes at all.

  Black, thick… some sort of rotten wetness.

  Ray backs off, and they rise.

  He turns and runs, but only makes it a few strides before something cold and wet snags his ankle. He slams face first into the sand, breath pounded out of his chest. He kicks and reaches for something to hold onto as more hands tighten around his legs, dragging him back. Sand piles around his chin, into his mouth. He tries to scream but can’t breathe.

  He flails in full-blown terror as they roll him over, two at his legs, two more scurrying on each side to grab his arms. He is raised from the beach, gasping, thrashing, and they carry him to it. He knows what the hole is for.

  His shoulders bounce against the edges, spilling sand over his face, into his mouth, and then he slips through, falling four or five feet before landing with another thud. He screams.

  ‘Help! Please don’t! I’m sorry! What did I do? Mom! Mom! Please!’

  Four black faces loom over him, the black gruel of their skin dripping coldly, running off in streams, squishing behind his back, between his legs. Some horrible change has come over them, but that obvious truth hardly matters because he knows they are still his family. Ray recognizes the shape of his father’s skull inside the black gunk, then Leonard’s chest, his collarbones, his insane grin. They moan like animals in some kind of terrible pain, but between these sounds is a wet hissing, pneumonia breathing. Hunger.

  Colt reaches down with one impossibly long arm and her cold slimy fingers poke into his mouth, his ears. Ray throws his head from side to side, spitting, choking, tasting something he has never tasted before. It makes him think of oil and metal and rotten lemons.

  Sand falls around him, mixing with the thick mucus, a heavy clod of it sticking to his belly, and Ray understands they are trying to bury him. His family hate him and they want to kill him. The magnitude of it shatters what was left of his coherence. There is no more thinking, only raw screaming, raving terror and a sadness that feels like a spike has been driven into his heart. The weight of the sand grows heavier. He can no longer move his legs.

  One arm slips free, he throws himself forward, but his brother dives in, smacking his head through a puddle of black fluid, to the sand bottom, hard enough to make him see yellow sparks. The wet sand seals around him like a blanket of steel.

  Ray tries to scream again, and it fills his mouth. He swallows involuntarily. One of his eyes stops working, half the world turns black. He knows the eye is stuck open, he can feel the cold black gel on his bare eyeball.

  The last thing he sees from the other eye is Leonard’s hungry face – two holes where his eyes used to be and deeper, set inside swollen black lips, his brother’s teeth.

  They are white, small and sharp as pins, and there are hundreds of them.

  Soon after the sucking and cutting begins on his neck, a coldness trickles down his throat, into his lungs and belly.

  Ray’s chest hardens, his heart stops.

  He drowns.

  *

  A bolt of pain thunders inside his chest. His heart pounds once, stops for a small eternity that is nothing but pain, and pounds again.

  A blast of light reaches down through his eyelids, shuts off.

  A woman’s voice, garbled, screaming his name. She sounds like she is underwater.

  Another blast of light, golden yellow, then orange. He blinks, and a blue sky springs open above him like an umbrella.

  Something slams into his chest again, forcing him to cough. He feels like he is coughing, over and over, but the only sound is the woman.

  ‘Ray! Raymond Mercer! Come back! Ray! Come back! Can you hear me?’

  His body heavy, cold, wet all over.

  Her face flashes over him, descends, blocks the sky. Warm soft mouth, stuck to his own. His face swells, water shoots into his sinuses.

  He coughs again, the force of it throwing his mouth open as a stream of water jettisons forth.

  The woman jumps off, shoves him to his side, and begins to pound her fists over his back. The water rushes out like something alive.

  The woman starts to cry, shaking him, saying his name over and over.

  He realizes he is lying on a red and yellow tarp, a stiff and soaking wet sheet of some kind. He rolls onto his belly, barking, spewing more water and then filling himself with new air.

  ‘Go slow,’ she says. ‘Let it come. Easy. There, good, count the breaths.’

  His father’s sail. From the Aqua Cat.

  Lake. Storm. Dad. Gun. Bodies. Anchor. Black lake. Bottomless.

  ‘Yes!’ The woman pulls him upright, hugging him, kissing his cheeks, his mouth, his blurry eyes. ‘Thank God, I thought it was too late. I had to leave Sierra… swam out…’ more crying, ‘but she was with us, she’s here, we’re alive, you’re alive, Ray! I saw the sail in the cove. Red and yellow. The colors showed me! You got stuck in it, you were sinking. But without it, I was sure you were… Talk to me, baby, please say something, say something so I know you’re okay.’

  Dad. Screaming, de-rigging the sail, using the knife to cut the ropes.

  Her hair is wet, cheeks smeared with sand, her eyes bloodshot and naked with relief.

  ‘Say something,’ she says. ‘Anything. I need to hear your voice!’

  ‘M… m… my dad’s gone,’ he says. ‘I tried…’

  She takes his face in her hands and kisses him on the mouth, then drops her head on his shoulder and squeezes him.

  ‘All dead,’ he says, unable to hold it back any longer. ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I let them die. I’m so sorry. So sorry… I’m so…’

  The sobs that have been building for the entire trip, for thirty years, tumble out of him in waves. Sharp crashing waves that bear him up, ushering him across the lake, over the beach that became their graves, to the road out.

  All the way home.

  Sisters

  A new home, in a warehouse loft above the storefront, in an historic building at the far north end of Broadway, back in Boulder. Close to the mountains, in a once sketchy neighborhood now rejuvenated by coffee shops, a wood-fired pizza bistro and artsy entrepreneurs of the sort Ray still can’t believe he and Megan have become.

  He had been outnumbered two to one, so Sisters it was. No apostrophe, no Lounge, only the original concept re-envisioned for girls. More of a boutique than an old-school shop. Not too high-end, aspirational yet playful. They would offer hairstyling, manicures, pedis, an all-organic cosmetics ‘laboratory’ where girls could not only try on new looks but learn how to make their own base applications, eyeliners, personalized lotion formulas, soaps and fragrances. Megan felt it was a progressive take on the girly things that never go out of style, empowering in some way Ray had yet to grasp. To him it all seemed cloyingly princessed-up.

  ‘Princessed-up?’ Megan had responded. ‘Maybe you need to lighten up.’

  Their living quarters above required remodeling, new fixtures, and little touches like bedroom and bathroom walls, toilets and plumbing, a kitchen. The exposed walls were crumbling and drafty, forcing them to sheet-rock over the historic brick and mortar. They painted the three iron girders running the length of the apartment a sky blue. Winter persisted until late March, and the cool spring was still seeping up through the old maple floorboards. New wool carpeting helped, a little. Summer would find them again, they reminded each other. It always does.

  The entire endeavour – business and home under one roof – had kicked off as a survival tactic, the only thing keeping them from falling apart during those first few months back in the world – and probably would remain one for years to come. Soldiers return home to family, civilian life. But how do you leave war behind when your family, what’s left of them, were in the war with you? They needed a long distraction, something to build and look at so they would not see the lake in their dreams, and in daylight,
when the normal world felt alien and a swirl of cream in a cup of coffee could send you careening into flashbacks of your father drowning.