Beneath the Lake

by Christopher Ransom

  Francine takes it the worst, perhaps because she had not been hunted in the same way and forced to kill. She can’t believe those things loping down the beach were the people now dead before her. The children defend their father and themselves, but soon they are all arguing, hysterical.

  ‘It’s too late!’ Warren shouts, his voice booming across the cove. ‘What’s done is done, and now we have to solve the problem at hand. That is all, and it is everything.’

  There is no time for a philosophical debate or some kind of amateur search for traces of the inhuman inside the human corpses. The bodies have already been more than autopsied, and it’s completely dark now.

  ‘We acted in self-defense,’ Warren says. ‘We know that. But, come morning, the police or park rangers or any other campers who happen by – anyone we could possibly call – will not see it this way. No one will believe our explanations. We have no evidence beyond this mess. These people. But whatever it was, it was evil. It was fight or die. We almost lost each other out here. I’m not about to put our fates in the hands of the law or anyone else. We decide what to do tonight. We do it. And it’s over.’

  Their silence is their agreement. Even Francine, still crying, nods her approval. ‘I want to take our children home,’ she says. ‘That’s all that matters now.’

  Graves are not an option. Buried things have a way of turning up at a later date, Warren knows. The lake or something in it had done this, sent these people into a frenzy and changed the rules. The lake will have to take them back.

  He wants to finish the job alone, but Francine and the children won’t allow him to separate the family. He needs their help, anyway. Warren has no idea whether the dead will stay dead, or become something else. But even if the remains of three dead bodies are all they have to reckon with, there is still real work to be done. They are exhausted, but together might find the strength to get through the terrible night.

  They wrap the three bodies in two of the sleeping bags and it takes all four of them to lift the burden onto the Aqua Cat’s trampoline. The little catamaran isn’t designed to hold more than four adults, but Warren knows she will accept the weight. The storm is well over now. The lake is utterly calm. They won’t have far to go, and they will be half the weight on the return trip. He attaches the trolling motor and the foursome walk the boat out and lower the prop as the children climb aboard.

  The Aqua Cat sputters out through the cove and the motor sounds loud enough to wake the residents four miles away, on the opposite shore. Warren cannot imagine what he will say if they are met by another vessel or a ranger upon return. Fortunately, there hadn’t been many campers on the point to begin with and the storm has chased away what was left of them.

  They chug beyond the cove and Warren hopes to make another mile before sinking them, at a depth of seventy or eighty feet. He is counting on the anchor and chain to keep them down long enough to decompose. If something of them washes up days or weeks later, the Mercers will be home, rested, in frame enough of mind to have concocted a reasonable story, should the authorities bother to trace them through the park permit. The storm can be blamed for most of it, except of course for the chain and anchor. And the nature of the wounds. But if the bodies do turn up, that would mean they had come free of the gear and the connection to another family will be difficult to make.

  The hour has grown late and very dark, more so because Warren will not allow them to use the spotlight, which could draw attention. Staring at their tired faces in the dark, seeing the sublimated terror in his children’s eyes and their shaking hands, Warren knows he must choose a location soon and get back to land. There is still the matter of checking the rest of the beach for evidence, then packing up all of their camping gear to drive out before sunrise.

  ‘This is far enough,’ Francine says. ‘I can’t stand being out here another minute.’

  Warren shuts off the motor and they drift. The lake is as still as they’ve ever seen it, black as a starless sky and so quiet he is sure their voices are carrying back to land, to strangers who are watching, listening, growing suspicious. Leonard helps bind the sleeping bags with rope, then the chain, and Warren cinches the anchor at the center of the bundle. Colt and Francine scoot to the bow while father and son drag the mass to the stern, heaving and shoving with their legs until the tipping point arrives.

  The shroud disappears into the black water as swiftly as a round stone. Colt covers her mouth but can’t keep the wounded animal sounds from escaping between her fingers. They watch the ripples spread until the surface is smooth once more. Warren knows he needs to start the motor and head back immediately, but the gravity of what they have done, under his leadership, won’t allow him to move. His mind races with possible additional precautions, anything they can do to cover their tracks. He has to think it through, the before and after, because once they return to dry land and sweep the beach and head home, there will be no coming back.

  The light comes first, from below the boat, from something far down in the deep. At first it is like a round lamp, glowing softly, then expanding into a ball as it rises toward the surface. It is faint purple, with streaks of white or silver, illuminating the water in a volume whose diameter reaches one hundred, then two hundred feet. The first detail to emerge from its center is the nautical rope, snaking its way back up to the surface. The rope has been severed from the chain, the end frayed as if chewed off. Warren snags it in one hand and frantically begins to reel it in while his family members lean over to peer down into the surreal light.

  ‘What is it?’ Colt asks. ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Start the engine,’ his wife says. ‘Oh God, please help us. Start the boat!’

  Warren gapes at the shredded rope. The chain stayed down, and with it the bundle of bodies. There is no sign of the double-bagged coffin down below.

  The lake brightens, turning sharp white with spirals of blue like a marble or an eye, the streaks of light spinning as the boat drifts. It is dizzying, as if the lake is turning around them, the earth rotating while they are stuck.

  ‘Hold on!’ Warren barks, scrambling to get the motor started.

  Some kind of music carries over the water and Colt shrieks, clinging to Leonard, who gazes into the light mutely, hypnotized. Francine looks so pale in the white glow that her husband fears she is about to faint, to topple over into the lake. No, the music is not carrying across the lake. It is emanating from inside the lake. A foreign music of murmuring voices and long, deep tones. Wordless, without rhythm, keening one moment and droning like a foghorn the next.

  Warren’s hand is on the starter cord when the lake falls out from under them, cratering into a bowl that causes the catamaran and her passengers to fall, dropping through an immensity of distance and time where such terms no longer hold any meaning. Their screams are drowned out by the chorus of ancient lowing, and still they fall. Eventually, something catches them, suspending them in a starlit void.

  Where it shows them things the human mind was never meant to see.

  Multitudes

  The campfire has burned down to a bed of orange coals, and no one bothers to rebuild it. Ray is still sitting close to Megan but he can’t see her face as well as he could an hour ago. At some point during the story, his arm fell asleep around her shoulders and she seemed relieved when he pulled away. She’s been sitting in stony silence since hearing of her family members considered dead, the moment Warren gave up trying to resuscitate them. She has yet to interrupt him or accuse them the way Ray expected her to. Maybe it’s because of the things they have seen on this trip. Only one day in, and they have come to expect the unreal.

  ‘It happened so fast,’ Colt says, tucking her knees under her chin, curling up in her lawn chair like the frightened girl she was that night and, Ray understands, has been in one form or another ever since. ‘I was falling under my own screams. Everyone was screaming.’

  ‘The falling only lasted a short while,’ Warren adds, returning to the fire pit, stretching h
is back and sipping at his newly refilled cup of scotch. ‘Something caught us, but in another way it was like we never moved.’

  ‘What happened?’ Ray prompts. ‘What made you scream?’

  ‘I thought the boat turtled,’ his dad answers. ‘But there was no wind, only that light, and then the lake was being swallowed by something… deeper. We were upside down in a blink, then falling, then slowing to a rest, in some kind of free-floating stasis. But not on the water, not in the water, but deep under something like water, looking up at the sky and still able to breathe. You could see the stars, more than I saw in the Indian Ocean. Maybe all of the stars.’ Warren pauses. ‘I was screaming because I thought I was dying.’

  ‘Yes,’ Colt says. ‘We had no idea where we were. There was no “we”. I felt so alone, lost, falling like in one of those dreams. Something powerful had taken me away.’

  ‘But what was it?’ Megan asks. She sounds at once broken-hearted and close to running out of patience.

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Warren says. ‘I can only tell you what it wasn’t. It wasn’t water. It wasn’t air. Wasn’t the lake. It wasn’t here or out there or underground or in the sky. I’m not sure it was a place at all. I might have been another state, one very different from Nebraska. Time seemed to bend. Every thought seemed to weigh a ton and take forever to crawl through, to absorb. That was the agony. Like psychological torture.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Ray says.

  His father eyes him carefully, saddened by a memory. ‘Remember when I used to go away on business for a week? Your mother said it was like a month for her. It hurt her. And when you were just a little boy, how a few hours of waiting seemed like days? The last hot week of school before summer… the days I counted in the war, praying to make it out alive. It was like those things, but much worse. Time dragged. For lifetimes.’

  ‘That’s just it,’ Colt says. ‘What it showed us. Lifetimes, huge complex structures. Our lives. So many of them. And you could see and feel every one.’

  ‘Same for Leonard, your mother,’ Warren says. ‘Many lives, then each with a glimpse of a pivotal moment that would come in the future, about thirty years as it turned out.’

  ‘Mine was a betrayal,’ Colt says. ‘Simon. Which I won’t detail now, because the details aren’t important, but the meaning is. Leonard saw himself living on the beach here, on the run from what he called “the worst three men in Idaho”, because he owed them money. Mom saw herself in a wheelchair, stuck in the sand here, waiting for the thing in the lake to give her her legs back. See? They were like triggers, and they all came true, more or less.’

  ‘You had some visions,’ Megan interjects. ‘But frankly I care less about what you saw than what caused it. You must have some idea, after all this time. Right? First the lake turns my family into monsters, then it shows you the future? I must be missing something here because this sounds fucking ridiculous.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Colt responds. ‘Haven’t you been listening? We went through hell —’

  ‘She wants to know what took her family,’ Warren says. ‘What made us do it, and where they went. Isn’t that right, Megan?’

  Megan glares at the two of them, and Ray can feel her rage as he felt the fire before it burned out.

  ‘Anyone in your position would,’ Warren continues. ‘But I’m sorry. I don’t have an answer for you. That’s part of why we came back, to understand it and to stop it.’

  ‘Stop it from doing what?’ Ray says.

  ‘Making the things it showed us come true,’ Colt says.

  ‘Then I guess you better hurry,’ Megan snaps. ‘What did you see, Warren? Besides all the beautiful stars.’

  Ray knows his father’s strategies for dealing with confrontation, and sees him employing them now with Megan. The angrier she becomes, the calmer he will pretend to be, in order to diffuse her. He crunches up an ice cube as he answers.

  ‘I was back in the war for a little while, napping just outside of a village, under a cool canopy of brush. I woke up and it was night, all of my soldiers were gone. The Viets were gone. A bunch of little chickens and a few oxen milling around in the dirt. I got to my feet and looked past the thatch huts. Saw the three of them, Colt and Len and Mom, standing on a plank bridge that crossed the rice paddy. I got up and walked to them, and as I got closer the rice paddy became the lake. Is it time to go home? I asked them. But they didn’t answer. We stood there together, not speaking, under a sky filled with many moons. Some red, others white, orange, yellow, a sky no telescope has ever captured from here. Then time began to reel me in again, and we were back in the Big Lake.’

  ‘That’s how we came to describe it later, at home,’ Colt says. ‘We always said the Big Lake, but that was just a catchall for the thing that held all the versions.’

  ‘Versions of what?’ Megan asks.

  ‘We didn’t have any idea at first,’ Warren says. ‘In the moment it was chaos, insanity, multiple personality disorder. Like they say about your entire life flashing before your eyes, during a near-death experience. Except this was the inverse. We didn’t see the lives we had lived up to that point. We saw our many possible lives, many possible versions of what was to come. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, too many lifetimes to count. Like watching ten thousand movies across a single giant screen, in which you are the star of every feature. Different ages. Friends. Classes. Jobs. Big changes and small ones. Injuries, sickness, loss. Your mother and I were divorced in this one, had another child in that one.’

  ‘I was pregnant at age seventeen in one,’ Colt says. ‘A drug addict in another. I chewed through fashions, careers, men, spending years with total strangers, friends I would later meet in the most innocuous of circumstances. Simon was there, and Sierra, but not always in the same lifetime. I worked as a concert promoter once. A pediatrician somewhere else. I broke my ankle stepping out of a cab in Detroit, running late for a blind date. I saw the same man in another life and he was staring at a photo of me, crying. I never knew why. Once, I wrote a book on female athletes. I had three cats, and then dogs, and I loved them all, knew all their names, their lives, even the veterinarian appointments. Everything was in flux, but I was always me.’

  ‘Leonard saw this too?’ Ray says. ‘Mom?’

  ‘All of us,’ Colt says. ‘We could spend all night giving you examples. Too many lives to digest, all mine, all there for the taking. Or living. You were in them too, Ray.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t talk about me in this, because I don’t want to know.’

  ‘They were our futures then,’ his father says, as if trying to console him, ‘but not now.’

  ‘They were all true,’ Colt says. ‘I believe that. This is only one of the millions, and they are all real. We just can’t be in more than one at a time. No, we can. We are. We’re just not aware of it, I think. We can’t be, or we would never be able to function. We’d be reduced to stammering idiots.’

  Warren focuses on Megan, who looks truly miserable. ‘Of course we understand how this sounds now, far-fetched and metaphysical compared to the very real fact of your loss. Your immeasurable loss.’

  Megan is crying. Staring into her lap, fists clenched, shoulders bunched up. ‘Finish it,’ she says. ‘Get it over with.’

  Warren sits down. ‘After what seemed an eternity, it ended suddenly. We were left swimming in the lake. The light show was over, the boat was upright. We were wet and terrified, gasping and clawing our way back onto the trampoline. When we were all accounted for, I started the motor and pointed us back to shore. We were physically and mentally shucked clean, unable to speak. We tied the boat up and staggered up to the camper, which is when Ray got his first look at us in seven or eight hours. We tried to sleep but couldn’t. I knew we had only a few hours till dawn, but I no longer feared running into a ranger or the police. I was scared of the water. What it might do if we stayed another day. I could almost feel it pulling inside me, wanting us to stay, and in some
corner of my imagination we did just that. Stayed another day, a week, all summer. Prisoners to it. That’s true in one sense, and it might be true in a more literal sense. Another lifetime where we never left at all. This became home, the last of them.