Beneath the Lake

by Christopher Ransom

  Megan and Sierra head off for the beach, leaving father and son to walk together, and it takes a while.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Ray asks again.

  ‘Good day for sailing,’ his father answers.

  Ray focuses on walking. A yellow craft comes into view, beached and waiting, its sleek pontoons angling up from the packed damp shore. The red- and yellow-striped sail lies in an accordion pile over the boom. Their boat, the one and same, from thirty years ago. The Aqua Cat.

  Ray doesn’t bother asking where it had been hidden for the past three days. Probably in the trees, or under a camouflage tarp. His father has prepared for every eventuality, as if he knew this day would come.

  Two lawn chairs are set out beside the boat, a cooler between them, filled with ice and bottles of a brand of beer Ray has never seen, some lager Warren had grown fond of in Florida. The label has no name, only a toucan sitting on a palm frond, its giant orange bill standing out below two dark eyes. Neither man remembered to bring sunglasses, and Ray wishes his father had some now, so he wouldn’t have to see the old man’s eyes. They have turned a deep brown, with only a little white showing around the corners, lifeless as the toucan on the beer bottle.

  Megan and Sierra are a quarter of a mile away, strolling the beach hand in hand like figures on a postcard.

  All of this preparation – the breakfast, the chairs, the cooler, sending the girls away, and most of all the Aqua Cat, preserved and sailed through time by his father’s attachment to the past, to the lake itself – is part of an upcoming ceremony, Ray understands now. His father has a plan for their exit, probably their last and only hope. Ray knows, too, that Megan is in on it. Warren must have talked to her about it last night, or this morning, and whatever he said must have earned her loyalty, otherwise she wouldn’t be so calm. Calm and distant.

  Warren drinks, pushing his bony feet into the sand. Mom and Colt seem to have been forgotten already. Ray realizes he still hasn’t told his father how they died, and the old man hasn’t asked. Tempting to assume Megan told him, except Ray never had time to tell her, couldn’t do it in front of Sierra. And things spiralled out of control so fast after he woke up yesterday afternoon, it’s not possible any of them know the truth.

  Ray can’t stand it anymore.

  ‘Mom was on the cliff,’ he says, taking another deep gulp of beer. ‘Last night. The night before, I mean. The wall came down. She was buried. Colt and I tried, but it was too late.’

  Warren nods, gazing out at the rippling blue water. ‘I’m sorry, Raymond. Sorry you lost your mother. She loved you always.’

  Ray wishes he could cry, but knows he won’t. Can’t, won’t.

  ‘Colette was murdered by the ranger,’ he says, ‘or someone related to the woman. She was poisoned, and then stabbed… she died in the back of the truck. Right after she told me Sierra was my daughter now. She knew it was coming, before the ranger got out of his truck, I think. She confessed things to me on the road. I buried her in the beach, about seven miles from here, I guess. I don’t know.’

  ‘They all knew,’ Warren says, emptying his beer, then flipping the cooler lid to open another. ‘As soon as we arrived, and maybe before that. They knew, and they tried to beat it, but there is only one way to escape it and we were too late for that. That’s my fault. I told you we saw everything, the rest of our lives. And we didn’t know it would culminate here, but I should never have tried to bargain with it. We should never have come back. That we did, that I organized this, is on me. All of this is on me. I failed my family, and for that I can only regret every second until I am gone.’

  ‘That is so much bullshit,’ Ray says, his anger as worn out as the rest of him. ‘You’re all insane. I wish you could admit that, once, if only to me.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Warren says, stealing a glance at him. ‘But in the end, does it matter? We are here, we are stuck, and you have to get out. We have to get you three home. Better we focus on that.’

  ‘The three of us, or the four?’

  ‘Megan heard everything that woman said last night,’ Warren says. ‘When you had her pinned to the ground with my fly rod. The trailers windows were open. She related it all to me this morning. And, you know, I saw it in Megan’s eyes before she finished describing it, how much she understood. We are in agreement on this, Megan and I. Sierra, too, in her instinctive way.’

  ‘You want to go out on the water,’ Ray says. ‘To do what?’

  Warren drinks, wipes his lips. ‘To break free from the storm. Get out from under the cloud of evil that has been hanging over us ever since that night, first blessing us with fortune, then turning on us over the years, as if we had done what it wanted, but not enough to last. Like the woman said. You have to feed it, or it feeds on you.’

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘This time we’ll get it right.’

  ‘Dad… stop.’

  ‘All along I’ve been arguing that the lake changed Megan’s family, made an abomination of them. That it tricked us, compelling us to put them in the water. Out there,’ Warren tilts his bottle toward the lake. ‘But the real trick was letting us escape, thinking we could resume our lives. We know better now. It’s time to finish what we started. This time the real thing. Not an accidental encounter, not a mercy. A true offering. The last one.’

  Ray is afraid to turn his gaze from the lake.

  ‘Look at me, son.’

  Ray does. His father’s eyes are ancient, black as night. The deep brown of his retirement tan has been drained away, replaced by a pallor mapped with the veins crossing his skull. War and loss and the murder of innocents have left salt in the tiger’s brain.

  Ray does not realize he is backing away from his father until his lawn chair topples over. He lands in the sand and his father leaps up to stand over him, lips spreading, teeth stained yellow.

  ‘Stay away!’ Ray cries. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  Warren looks furious for another moment, then confused. He backs off, hands up. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to – I thought you were injured. Please, Raymond… this isn’t about you. My God. No. Never.’

  Ray uses the pontoon to pull himself to his feet. The pain in his leg awakens once more and he pounds his fist against the boat, a flood of anger surging along with the pain.

  His father steps forward to help.

  ‘Just give me a minute!’

  ‘Okay.’ Warren retreats to his lawn chair and hangs his head. ‘I can’t blame you for thinking your father’s become a monster. I have.’

  Ray hops back, twists around and lowers himself. He is out of breath. The wind is picking up, sharpening the ripples in the bay, the water turning dark green as the first rows of clouds begin to march in, breaking up the sun.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘My nerves are shot. And you’re talking about…’

  ‘The only way out.’ Warren turns to him slowly. ‘Not you. Me. I’m the one. Today. You will put me in the place where I was happiest, before all of this. It will be difficult, maybe the hardest thing, and that’s why it will count. Together we make a sacrifice, so that you and your family can go home.’

  Ray looks over his father, up the beach. The girls are returning. Megan waves tiredly. Sierra hops along like a toad. And it is while watching them, his girls, that the last link in the chain tethering Raymond Mercer to the world that makes sense – a world where families grow old together and spend Thanksgiving in a mountain lodge with football games on TV and roast turkey on the table, where laughter and silly old resentments and arguments break out with no real consequences, a world where grandmothers and grandfathers go quietly into assisted living and chemotherapy and Hospice, and one last birthday cake with eighty-six candles on top is wheeled into a darkened room filled with friends and three generations who all help blow the candles out – this last slips through his hands and is lost into the mud of his soul.

  ‘Yes,’ Ray says to his father. ‘I will.’

  Aqua Cat

  Ray sits o
n the trampoline the way he did as a boy, letting his father do the heavy work of shoving the boat out. His leg wound is too fragile, his arm too weak. Warren lifts the aluminum spar at the stern, a rope clenched between his teeth, and for a moment Ray is sure he will not be able to free them from the wet bank. But with a final growl, tendons snapping taut in his neck, Warren summons the strength of a man half his age and the pontoons rise. The lake carries the bow and the craft severs from land. Warren leaps on deck, his face neither white nor tan but dark red, a dangerous pulse visible in his throat.

  The red and yellow billows, crackling into full sail, and the wind rocks them to port as the waves beat against the hulls. Overhead, the sky thickens with puffs of white and silver, another line of black clouds piling up at the north end. They cut through uniform rows of waves, the murky brown from the shallows giving way to the expanding blue that is already turning gray.

  Ray looks back to the beach and the remains of Leonard’s tent, the Bronco, taking in his first real view of the cove from anywhere but inside it. Sierra stands at the edge of the water, her brown hair a tattered flag. Beside her, Megan watches with one hand at her brow. Ray waves but she doesn’t return this one. She must know what lies ahead.

  Warren inhales the wind as the waves grow taller and throw spray over the pontoons, drumming the canvas. The lake has turned a stone gray, black where the shadows overlap, and Ray begins to notice patterns under the surface. Long, circling blobs that slide like eels, their ends opening like tunnels before swallowing themselves.

  Ray looks away. Five or six miles to their left is the dam, a low ridge of rocks spanning another mile or so, the last patch of blue sky shrinking as the gray dome slides east. To his right lies the rest of Blundstone, something like twenty-five miles of it, though Ray knows by now it could be much less than that. For the first time, he can see the end, from gray lake to green land. There is a limit after all. If the human eye is capable of detecting the curvature of the earth, it’s not here, not on this flat plane of ugly chop, and Ray feels cheated.

  Another wave smacks the starboard hull and a crater opens under the swell. Ray leans away as the Aqua Cat dips violently. Just a few feet beneath the receding foam, a bloated white corpse rolls over, sexless and hollow-eyed, one arm reaching out as the pontoon passes by.

  Ray recoils, dragging himself to the other side, and Warren yells for him to duck. The boom swings overhead and the sail ripples in confusion until his father sets another rope. The boat jostles Ray onto one elbow and he hangs forward, watching the lake rush between the pontoons. At a depth of no more than six feet there is a logging river running within the lake, crowded not with trees but bodies. The drowned, the lost. Twenty, thirty, dozens, dead hair swirling, their skin whiter than marble. The mouths gape below the black eye sockets as they drift and collide with one another. Others, closer to the surface, claw blindly for what they sense passing overhead. Cold blue fingers. Missing limbs. Men. Women. Children. Deformed variations of each, then only blackness. Then a mass grave as another slew of twisted forms daisy-chained together drift in the current, until a tar-worm of liquid nothingness rises ahead and devours them in a loop and descends back into the leaking abyss.

  Ray shoves himself back from the edge and closes his eyes, a scream locked in his chest. His father remains oblivious, captaining them through his final nightmare.

  The tip of the point retreats. Rain comes in a series of walls.

  Lightning crashes and more waves assault them, washing over the little craft as it slows. Warren shouts for Ray to duck, releasing one rope, and the boom swings overhead. The sail ripples in confusion, beset by wind on either side, and then collapses. The Cat drifts in a rocking, seasick circle as Warren drags the rubberized canvas bag onto his lap. He begins to withdraw a heavy length of chain, then rope, and finally the anchor. The red anchor of old, not the bleached pink shell they found the other day. He sets the coil in a pile beside him, the anchor at its center.

  Ray stares at the new red anchor, knowing it cannot be the same one, but terrified of the possibility.

  ‘Time,’ his father growls, wiping another broken wave from his eyes. ‘One life! My life!’

  Thunder returns the old man’s challenge with a chorus that rumbles through Ray’s skull. The clouds are black, the lake obscenely so, all the light in between compressing into a surreal borderland that is neither day nor night but something more awful than total darkness.

  ‘What time is it, Raymond?’ his father barks.

  Ray braces himself, arms spread wide, his wet hands slipping along the aluminium frame holding them inches above the chaos and death below.

  He starts to speak but chokes on lake water, rain: impossible to tell the difference. He spits overboard and finds his voice. ‘What do you care? You got some place you need to be?’

  The old man lunges forward, crawling until he latches onto Ray’s shoulder with one hand, the other squeezing behind his neck. Silver nodes of water stand on his brow, his eyelashes, and their foreheads touch.

  ‘Whatever time it is,’ his father says, in a calm and heavy voice that walls out the storm, ‘must be the right time. Whenever it comes. I tried to understand that in the war, and here, so long ago. But I never fully understood it until this weekend. And it’s not the right time because God says so, or because men frame it in such a way they may take false comfort in the promise of Heaven. It doesn’t work that way. Not for me, and I hope not for you.

  ‘We choose our lives. Accept what we are given. We fight for more, and in the end we go with grace. There is beauty in that, regardless of duration. One good year in a marriage. One perfect sixty minutes on a football field. One night saving your best friend’s life in a sweltering jungle as the fire rains down. The morning spent watching your son being born. A week at a lake in Nebraska, with the only people who matter.

  ‘We are real. Our days are real. And that’s enough because a day can mean everything, Raymond. If we understand that all of it is a precious gift. One big vacation.’

  A massive tree of lightning forks over the cover and his father releases him. The black water lifts the stern and drops them as another waves pitches over the bow, the lake’s hunger bursting up in mindless turbulence.

  ‘Put the sail up!’ Ray shouts. ‘Not here. Not like this. Let’s go home!’

  ‘This is my real home,’ Warren calls back, coiling his rope. ‘This place. It’s always been here, on the Big Lake.’

  Warren reaches into the anchor bag once more and comes back with his sidearm, the M1911 he carried through South East Asia. He lobs it to his son, who finds himself reaching out to catch it.

  His father taps the center of his chest with two fingers. ‘One shot and we’ll both be free.’

  Ray raises the gun, aiming at his father’s chest. His hand shakes, steadies. His finger curls around the trigger. His jaw tightens. He stops breathing.

  His father bares his teeth.

  Ray squeezes, squeezes, and releases the trigger. ‘No! NO!’

  He lowers the pistol.

  Warren is furious. ‘We’re out of time! Everyone’s going to die here if you don’t make your sacrifice. This has to be it. Now! Now, goddamn it, NOW!’

  Ray throws the pistol overboard.

  His father seizes him by the collar, shaking him, spittle flying. ‘How can you deny me? How dare you!’

  ‘You’re my father,’ Ray says. ‘You made me. And I say fuck the lake.’

  Warren releases his son in disgust, choking back a sob. He swallows it down, nods to himself.

  ‘Good boy,’ he says with a rueful laugh. ‘My son. My gift.’

  Ray shudders, guilt-stricken, lost.

  His father leans over and kisses him on the cheek. ‘I love you, kid.’