Beneath the Lake Page 8

  ‘Slow down a little. Keep an eye out for a small building, like a tiny log cabin.’

  They pass another raccoon, no more alive than the others. Its snout is aimed toward what Ray senses to be the direction of the lake. He is pretty sure that all of the raccoons died facing the lake, as if they were on their way to it and something – not a vehicle – stopped them in their tracks.

  For a moment he imagines the two of them driving through a barrier of some sort, an invisible line that, once crossed, will kill them instantly, sending the Bronco careening off into a field or culvert where they will be found days later, the empty beer cans blamed for their tragic deaths. The secret Blundstone conspiracy preserved.

  Megan decelerates, setting her beer in the console’s cup-holder. Ray leans forward, neck bristling in anticipation. A pale skirt of gravel opens to the highway on her side. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Yes.’ It’s a guess, but it feels right.

  They curve left and roll down a dirt lane at perhaps fifteen miles per hour. Small rocks and bits of gravel pop and ping from the tires.

  ‘Turn on the brights,’ Ray says, then reaches over the wheel to do it for her.

  The road and the fields of tall grass on both sides whiten, expand, and reveal a flurry of moths and other flying insects.

  ‘What now?’

  Ray sets his hands on the dash, leaning in anticipation. ‘This always took a while, as I recall. It’s probably no more than three to five miles to the lake itself, but it felt like forever. Dad always went real slow towing the boat and the camper in, like he wanted to torture us with it, draw it out.’

  ‘That your cabin?’ Megan says.

  Off in the field, maybe a hundred yards away but moving closer as they round a bend, is a structure not much larger than a tool shed, its wood siding faded from a deep maroon to a bleached, pinkish red.

  ‘Looks like it. That was a ranger’s… well, I want to say office, but that’s not right. It was a little check-in station, with an emergency phone, a map on the outside wall, and a drop-box you could leave a payment for the permits or fishing licenses. Pull over and aim the lights at it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Maybe there’s a map. This might be Admiral’s Point, or we might be way the hell over on the wrong side of the lake.’

  Megan brings the Bronco to a halt, reverses a bit and turns into the shack until the headlights illuminate the box. The windows have not been cleaned in at least a year. The small door at the rear seems to be hanging open. A bit of senseless graffiti has been scrawled across the siding, a bunch of black lines covering a splotch of yellow.

  ‘Oh Jesus!’ Megan whispers, ducking.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Somebody’s inside.’

  Ray’s skin retracts and adrenaline splashes into various channels, informing him just how much tension he’s been repressing for the past thirty minutes. He doesn’t see anyone inside or around the dilapidated outpost, though. Nothing moving through the high grass. He is beginning to relax when his eyes catch on a solid form behind the dirty window and – yes, sir, one human shape. A body, standing tall inside the shack.

  ‘Oh, that,’ he says, shuddering.

  ‘What is it?’ Megan is still whispering.

  ‘It’s okay, no problem. We haven’t done anything wrong.’ Without thinking, Ray leans over and mashes the Bronco’s horn. The bleat seems deafening.

  Megan slaps his arm away. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘If someone’s in there at this hour, they should know they have a visitor.’

  ‘No one should be in there at this hour!’

  ‘We have the Bronco,’ he says. ‘If someone comes after us, we can run them over.’

  ‘Or leave?’

  Megan keeps her head down. Ray watches the window. The shape isn’t moving. He can’t see a face. Maybe the outline of shoulders, a patch of a brown shirt or jacket, but not much more, and it’s difficult to be sure what he is looking at due to the grime on the window. He honks the horn twice, pauses, then once more, laying on it for a good five count.

  ‘Ray, stop it!’

  Nothing moves, inside the shack or out.

  ‘That’s either not a person,’ he says. ‘Or it’s a dead one.’

  Megan gasps, and he considers going for the gun in his bag, but he doesn’t want her to know he has brought along a firearm, unless they have a true emergency. This isn’t that. Yet.

  ‘Be right back,’ he says.

  She seizes his arm. ‘You are not even.’

  Ray rests his hand on hers. ‘Megan, come on. Now you’re letting that lady’s stories get under your skin. There’s nothing in there, especially not some psycho waiting to kill trespassers.’

  ‘Then why are you going?’

  ‘Because we need to know. Where we are, I mean.’

  Before she can protest again he slips out the passenger door, leaving it open. There is only one way to do this, he reminds himself. Boldly and without hesitation. He marches right toward the shack until he is within ten feet or so, watching the window the entire time.

  ‘Hello? Hey there!’

  No one responds. The bodily shape seems fuller now, but it does not move.

  He cuts left, toward the rear of the tiny building, to the door, which is indeed ajar. The Bronco’s bright headlamps cut through the shack, through another window, and continue across the field beyond. He knows when he opens the door, he will be able to see everything inside quite well enough and this is in no way comforting.

  He reaches for the doorknob, then retreats. Too close. Instead, he toe-kicks it open and steps back. For a moment it feels as though his hair is literally standing upright, flying away from his skull as his face burns in anticipation.

  ‘Hey, hey!’ he barks, jumping back as the shape turns and starts coming for him, twisting to life like a mobile stirred by wind. The skin is desiccated as paper, its eyes hollow, the rest stuffed with sand that trickles from its mouth.

  Ray freezes, exhales. It’s not a person, dead or alive.

  It’s a dummy. A man-sized doll made of burlap or rough cotton, stuffed with something lumpy. Someone took the time to dress it, giving it an old brown button-up shirt with a collar and epaulets. Its stubby, socked feet are hovering above the floor and the neck is snugly cinched in a coil of rope. No hangman’s knot, just a simple loop of yellow nylon cord, leading up over one of three wooden beams buttressing the tiny building’s short A-framed roof.

  The face is utterly blank, and all the more disturbing for its lack of human features. On the shirt’s chest area, someone has used a black marker or few dabs of paint to draw a crude badge, not quite a star, more like the forestry symbol with its rounded bottom and three points at the top. Ray steps a little closer. In small letters above the emblem is the word ‘badger’. No, that’s not right.

  Ray takes another step, then one more, until he is standing half inside the outpost.

  It says,

  B A D R A N G E R

  The only other things in the shed are a few empty wooden shelves built into the wall, some loose wiring up near the left window, probably where the phone used to be, and a concrete floor with a drift of dead weeds and dirty sand blown into one corner.

  He forces himself to look at the bad ranger dummy one more time just to make sure it’s still a dummy. Of course it is. It’s only that the longer you stare at it, the more it begins to resemble —

  A horn honks, and Ray jumps, his heart lurching into a painful beat as he slips in the gravel and almost falls on his ass. He is panting and his armpits are soaked.

  He looks at the Bronco, where Megan is waving wildly out the driver’s window. Well, enough thrills for one night. No. Don’t look back.

  Don’t. Just go.

  Ray walks back to the truck very casually, the urge to look back and make sure it is not following him excruciating to resist. He puts on a smile for her, climbs in and shuts the door.

  Megan is goggle-eyed, waiting for the repor
t.

  ‘Empty,’ he says. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘That wasn’t empty. I saw you jump!’

  ‘Tell you later.’

  Megan doesn’t budge.

  ‘It’s not a body, all right? Some high school kids pulled a prank, is all. We’re close now. I want to see if the others are here.’

  ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because then you’ll want to see for yourself and I don’t want to waste any more time,’ he says.

  Megan begins to reverse back onto the dirt road. ‘Promise you’ll tell?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The dirt road winds through half a dozen more corners, and a deeper line of trees makes itself known on Ray’s side. Tall cottonwoods with rough trunks, their white seedlings drifting on the night breeze like thick, malformed snowflakes. The lake is there, he knows, right on the other side. He has a sudden unquenchable urge to see the lake at least once, to confirm that this piece of his childhood is not a bad dream or a buried family secret, but real.

  Real, and only a lake.

  A final rise takes them up and the road plateaus. They are on the point, the very same land where the family used to camp, and soon he will see the well with its old orange-painted iron handle where Colt used to brush her teeth and Ray used to drink until his head ached from the cold on those hot summer days. Close, so close, he swears he can feel the lake in his veins, in his bones.

  Megan brakes hard, the Bronco’s fat tires sliding on the gravel, and Ray spills his beer as he throws a hand up to keep from slamming into the dash.

  ‘What the —?’

  She points directly ahead.

  He had been gazing off toward the grass and trees and didn’t see it. Now he does. It’s difficult to miss, even at night.

  Two pairs of thick steel arms arching over the road to meet in the middle, the spars plated with metal sheets painted bright yellow, with heavy steel chains looped and padlocked in three places. In the center a square red sign at least four feet by four. The words on this sign were not painted but manufactured, with studded steel grommets that all but sparkle in the headlight beams.

  BLUNDSTONE STATE PARK – LAKE – BEACHES –

  ALL FACILITIES CLOSED TO PUBLIC

  NO EXCEPTION!!!

  VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO

  THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW

  MINIMUM PENALTY OF $10,000 AND 1 YEAR IN JAIL

  They stare at it for a moment that stretches well beyond the time required to absorb the message.

  ‘Wait,’ Ray says. ‘Does that mean we ain’t allowed to do any campin’, huntin’ or fishin’? I can’t tell.’

  Megan laughs, raising her beer. He opens a fresh one and their cans clank together. ‘Cheers,’ she says. ‘We made it,’ he adds. They drink.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Megan looks at her phone. ‘Eleven twenty-two p.m.’

  It feels like four in the morning, and Ray is not the least bit tired. Nervous, scared, wired, a little drunk on beer and road motion, yes. But not tired.

  He looks at his traveling companion. She is grinning, asking the question with her eyes. Do they dare? He leans over the console and she meets him halfway, until he is close enough to catch the scent of her skin and the summer night in her hair. They are steps from the lake, her lips only a breath away. Their eyes hold.

  He wants to cross the line but is afraid. She will have to choose.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ she says, pulling away from him as she shifts the Bronco in gear.

  The Beach

  They edge the Bronco around the gate, into the field, then back onto the road, and a minute later they are still alive.

  The end of the road becomes a concrete boat ramp descending approximately ten car lengths. Megan brakes at the top, the headlights shining down into a bowl of sand and short trees, some of them growing sideways, in tangles and gnarls, as if trying to smother each other. There is no sign of water.

  Ray gets out and manually locks the front hubs. Back in the cab, he shows her how to shift the beast into four-wheel drive.

  ‘Why’d you do that?’

  ‘Lake must be down this year,’ he says. ‘This is actually good. Now we don’t have to walk around looking for them. The sand is thick but we have big tires and the worst ruts are usually only about a foot deep. The rest is firm.’

  ‘But it seemed like such a good idea at the time…’ Megan sing-songs.

  ‘We’re not going to drive off a cliff or down into a sinkhole,’ he says. ‘Think of it as driving across a big parking lot, just a little softer.’

  ‘Right,’ Megan says, unfastening her seatbelt. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘If you insist.’

  They trade places, crawling over and under each other. Ray reverses to engage the hubs, then shifts into drive and they roll down the ramp, leveling onto sand that rocks them gently from side to side, back and forth, in a mushy rhythm. Ahead, there are black dust-tinted ripples in the sand, and taller ridges or drifts, but no tire tracks like he remembers. No one has been here for a while. Months, two years, maybe longer.

  Tree growth is spare, the kind of saplings that thrive now only because they are not weeds submerged under ten or twenty feet of lake, with small yellow and green circular leaves like aspen. The rest of the beach in every direction looks like a blonde-brown moonscape. The Bronco acquits itself well, and Ray remembers his father doing exactly this, in the same vehicle, telling them how going a little faster, closer to twenty miles per hour instead of five or ten, actually keeps the wheels from sinking in. Ray juices it a little and soon they are squirming, cruising, almost hovering over the ridges and berms.

  ‘It’s like a sleigh ride in summer,’ Megan says, waving her arm out the window.

  The cliffs are little more than gradual slopes now, the natural erosion having taken the edges off of the thirty- and forty-foot columns that used to rise and fall up the coastline.

  ‘I’m keeping close to higher ground until we figure out where the water line is, just to be safe,’ he tells her. ‘Sometimes we used to stumble into weird mud bogs, or small lagoons, with about two feet of water and something like quicksand at the bottom. But not real quicksand.’

  ‘Um, yeah. Let’s not drive into one of those.’

  He veers in a broad, side-to-side pattern, scanning with the headlights. No sign of other campers, either. Nothing but the sparse trees, yellow flowers, deadfall branches dried like bones in the occasional shell-fragmented mud bog gone dry. And lots of sand.

  They follow the beach this way for a couple of miles and Megan yawns. Ray realizes this is silly. The lake is over thirty miles from end to end. They could drive like this all night without finding his family. He slows, cutting toward the water, which has to be out there in the darkness somewhere.

  The Bronco rocks and digs through the softer berms and then bites and stutters like a car on a dirt road through the flatter, hard-packed ridges. The air cools as they gradually move deeper.

  As much to himself as to her he says, ‘I’m kind of tripping over here.’