Hedge Lake

by Brian Harmon

  “Stop by any time,” said Fettarsetter, still smiling that strangely evil smile. He then turned and gave Specter Ten a long, disapproving look and then walked away. He was nearly out of sight when he paused and looked back. “Mind your equipment, boys,” he said, though Eric thought it was him his eyes were fixed on. “It’s going to rain tonight.”

  Then he was gone.

  Eric felt an awful knot twisting in his belly. Rain? Tonight? His thoughts raced back to the vision given to him by the bloody woman. It was pitch black and pouring rain.

  He shook it off and approached the boys. “Nice guy,” he said.

  Owen grumbled something that he couldn’t hear, but was pretty sure wasn’t a compliment about his boss’ nice suit.

  “What’s his story?”

  Pete pocketed the digital recorder and said, “The guy contacted us about three weeks ago on our blog.”

  “My blog,” grunted Owen.

  “His blog,” amended Pete. “We’d already been out here and wrote about the triangle. We didn’t have any evidence, but—”

  “We had those EVPs,” argued Owen.

  “EVPs?” asked Eric.

  “Electronic voice phenomenon,” explained Owen. “Voices captured by our equipment even though we didn’t hear anything at the time.”

  Eric nodded impatiently. He was familiar with the term. He’d watched all those shows, too.

  Pete rolled his eyes. “Those weren’t conclusive.”

  “That one clearly said, ‘Find my killer.’”

  “That was your voice. You were asking, ‘What’s for dinner?’”

  “I keep telling you, I was all the way on the other side of the lake when that was recorded.”

  “You never walked to the other side of the lake. You won’t even walk to the van to get your own camera.”

  Owen sighed. “If anything, it’s your negativity that’s bringing us down. Can’t you be just a little optimistic now and then?”

  “I’m perfectly optimistic. But I’m not going to pretend something is hard evidence when I know it’s not.”

  “You just have a really hard time accepting that the world is filled with strange and unexplainable things.”

  Pete growled, frustrated. “The only thing I have a hard time accepting is your bullshit!”

  “Guys!” snapped Eric. “Fettarsetter? You were telling me how he contacted you?”

  “Right,” said Pete, deflating a little. “Him. Yeah.” He gave his partner one last dirty look and then turned to face Eric. “He wanted us to come back and investigate further. He was convinced that there was a lot more going on than we’d seen. He gave us more details about the history of the lake, pointed us to some local history sources and assured us we could find something if we dug deep enough. Owen didn’t want to do it. He was already excited about a cemetery in the next county where the ghost of a naked woman is supposed to run crying between the gravestones on nights when there’s a new moon.”

  “We totally could’ve gotten that on tape,” insisted Owen.

  Pete went on, ignoring him: “But he said if we came back right away and promised to stay, he’d supply us with all the equipment we could possibly need. Ours to keep as long as we came up with irrefutable proof.”

  Eric nodded. Mandy had told him this much. She’d even used the word “irrefutable.” “And you haven’t found any proof yet?”

  “We haven’t looked at all the footage, yet,” grumbled Owen. “These things take time. Days. Any idiot knows that.”

  “How long have you guys been out here?”

  “Three days,” replied Pete. “So far, we haven’t seen anything.”

  Eric considered this. They’d been out here three days and they hadn’t seen anything yet? He hadn’t been here two hours and he’d already twice glimpsed a shadowy figure in the underbrush, a mysterious shape in the lake and the terrifying image of a bloody spirit who gave him a nightmarish vision.

  (It’s going to rain tonight.)

  These guys clearly weren’t very good at this. No wonder Fester Sweater was pissed.

  “So he’s just a guy who’s fascinated with the local lore?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s one of the aliens,” said Owen.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s not,” returned Pete.

  “Come on,” snapped Owen. “I was joking.”

  Pete looked back at Eric. “I’m not sure he was.”

  “Just get back to work, already,” Owen growled, “before we get yelled at again.”

  But Eric had already had enough of these two for the time being. “I’m going to have a look around the lake. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Okay,” said Pete.

  “Wait!” shouted Owen. “We still have to analyze your dream.”

  “You’ve already recorded everything I can remember,” Eric reminded him.

  “But we should…I don’t know…take some readings or something.”

  “For a dream?” asked Pete.

  “A prophetic dream.”

  “I don’t think those give off EMF.”

  “We should look for thermal anomalies.”

  Pete cocked his head. “Really?”

  “Shut up. I’m in charge here.”

  “Maybe I’ll catch up to you later,” amended Eric.

  But Owen was insistent. “Wait. Will you sign a release form so I can post your recording on my blog?”

  “No.”

  “What? Why?”

  Eric threw his arms up as if it were the most obvious thing in the world and shouted, “Because I don’t want the aliens tracing it back to me!”

  Owen stared at him for a moment in silence. Then, in a deadly serious tone, he said, “You’re probably right.”

  Pete rolled his eyes again.

  Eric turned and walked away.

  “Let us know if you see anything weird out there,” Owen called after him.

  He followed the shore until he was out of earshot of Specter Ten and then withdrew his phone. It rang even as he pulled it from his pocket.

  “Okay, there was definitely something off about that Fettarsetter guy!”

  “No kidding. I think I saw him in a horror movie once. And he wasn’t the one screaming and running up the stairs in a skimpy nightgown.”

  “No, seriously. That guy was oozing bad vibes.”

  “‘Bad vibes?’”

  “Bad energy.”

  Eric frowned. He glanced around, half-expecting to see Fester Sweater glowering at him from the shadows somewhere. “What exactly is bad energy? I thought you said this whole lake was lousy with spiritual energy.”

  “It is. But that guy’s putting off something else, something I’ve never felt before.”

  “Why do I not like the sound of that?”

  “You should probably stay away from him.”

  “But he invited me back to his place and everything. I think he likes me.”

  “I’m serious. I think he’s dangerous.”

  He stopped and looked out over the lake toward the tiny dock. “An agent?”

  On his previous journeys into the weird, he’d had the misfortune of meeting individuals who worked for a mysterious, nameless organization. These men were cold, ruthless killers with terrible powers and a dark agenda. They made the strange and unexplained their business. And this lake was overflowing with strange and unexplained things.

  “I’m not sure. It was similar. If he is, he’s giving off more than the usual goons do. I can’t explain it, but there’s definitely something not right about him.”

  “He knows something. That bit about the ‘bleak December’ wasn’t a coincidence. He was baiting me.”

  “Definitely,” agreed Isabelle.

  “Whatever his story is, I’ll bet I have to deal with him before this is over.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  Eric felt his stomach roll over at the thought. It was bad enough he kept dealing with all this weirdness, but he kept running into bad
people in the process, people who kept forcing him to make terrible choices. Four of these people were now dead because of him, and no matter how much he told himself that he’d had no choice in the matter, he still sometimes found himself lying awake at night, obsessing over it.

  He didn’t know why the universe kept choosing him of all people to do this crap. There had to be someone better suited, someone who actually had the stomach for it.

  “Just stay on your toes,” encouraged Isabelle. “I’ll be watching.”

  Eric nodded and hung up the phone. So Fester Sweater was bad news. No surprise there. If there was one thing he knew for sure it was that he had no intention of showing up for that date.

  Specter Ten, the funny space men with their toys, did little more than waste his time. Although they did tell him about the triangle and its cornucopia of weirdness. Aliens, mysterious disappearances, ghosts and monsters.

  He started forward again, scratching at his chin. What was it Holly said? The territory of the beast with many names? That sounded like the hellhounds Pete described. The ones that were sometimes described as hounds of hell, sometimes as upright werewolves, sometimes as phantom cats and sometimes as hodags. Maybe that’s what the spell meant. And maybe it was like Pete said: Maybe it wasn’t one beast with many names, but many beasts.

  He rounded a corner and spotted the two old fishermen. They were standing out in the water, about ten feet from the shore, their lines in the water. Their gear awaited them on the shore. They were apparently in it for the long haul. Beside their tackle boxes were heavy-duty flashlights.

  The old men nodded at him. One asked him how he was doing in a thick, Yooper accent. (How ya doo-in’?) He replied that he was just fine and returned the question. They were also fine. They thought it was a great day. The fish were biting.

  Eric carried on, following the shoreline farther along until the old men were out of sight again.

  It didn’t seem like much of a hell on earth. Aside from the fact that something weird was clearly going on here, it was practically a paradise.

  Still trying to piece it all together, he turned and glanced back the way he’d come. He still seemed to be alone. But he wasn’t. As soon as he turned back, he caught sight of a small boy peering at him from the trees.

  Surprised, Eric stood there for a moment, looking back at the boy. He wore nothing more than a pair of baggy shorts, in spite of the coolness in the air, and was frightfully thin. As soon as he realized that he’d been seen, he turned and fled back into the woods, quickly vanishing from sight.

  “Wait!” called Eric, but of course the boy didn’t listen. He took off running after him, but after only a very brief pursuit, he gave up and stopped. First of all, he’d already lost sight of the kid. Secondly, he wouldn’t possibly be able to catch him. He was far too out of shape for that.

  Besides, he didn’t even know what he’d say to the boy. He was probably just a local kid, like Jordan, who was playing in the woods when he wandered by.

  But there was something off about the kid. Why was he dressed for summer in late April? The weather was mild enough for lighter clothes. Owen was wearing a tee shirt, Mandy was barefoot and Jordan was wearing shorts. But this kid looked like he was ready to find a swimming hole.

  Eric stood there for a moment, staring into the trees, a faint prickle working its way down the back of his neck. Back at Specter Ten’s basecamp, Pete had told him about some of the people who’d disappeared in the triangle. The first was a boy named Robert Kapper. He disappeared in the summer of…was it thirty-nine? No. Thirty-seven. He wandered off into the woods to play and never came back. He was nine years old.

  The boy he’d just seen fit that description eerily well…

  Chapter Nine

  Before he could consider the boy any further, Eric’s phone rang. It was Karen.

  “What’ve you gotten yourself into now?” she demanded as soon as the phone was against his ear.

  “God, I wish I knew.”

  “Isabelle said you were assaulted by a ghost again.”

  Eric gave a huff of a laugh. “Remember when my life was only weird enough that you didn’t need to add the word ‘again’ to a sentence like that?”

  “Personally, I preferred our life before you became weird.”

  “Yeah. But then you wouldn’t have met Isabelle and Holly.”

  “That’s true.”

  Eric smiled. As much as she hated him going off on these adventures, she couldn’t deny how much she’d grown to love Isabelle. And regardless of all the grief she gave him about Holly, she really was a wonderful friend to have around. That she was a stripper when Eric met her—that she was, in fact, stark naked the first time he saw her—was not her fault. Karen didn’t hold it against her at all. For some reason that Eric couldn’t comprehend no matter how hard he tried, that was all his fault.

  He neither attempted to argue with this logic nor understand it. There was no point in doing either. The fact was that she would forever hold it against him for no reason that any man could possibly understand and that no woman would ever hesitate to agree with.

  And it didn’t help that the vast majority of Karen’s friends didn’t even have the entire story! They couldn’t possibly, since they knew nothing of this strange life that he led. Only a small handful of people knew about these excursions into the weird.

  He had no idea what she was telling these people!

  It wasn’t fair. The fact that Karen and Holly had become such good friends should have acquitted him of his crimes. But according to all of Karen’s friends, it just didn’t work that way.

  Of course, Karen had taken it upon herself to set Holly on a new life path. The girl had been perfectly content to seek out work as she’d done in her Illinois life, earning her living on a dance floor, taking off her clothes to entertain men. She saw nothing wrong with that life. She actually enjoyed it. But Karen forbade it. Instead, she found Holly a job at the same bakery she’d started out in while she was still in high school and a small apartment within walking distance.

  It was fine work. Holly’s love for baking made it a nice fit, but the early hours had been a rough transition for her, and while she refused to complain, she’d confided confidentially to Eric one night that she found the paychecks disappointing in comparison.

  Apparently, stripping could be a surprisingly profitable career choice.

  But in these past nine months she’d grown used to the hours. And she found that she earned plenty of money for the life she lived now that she was on her own. Back in Illinois, she’d struggled to help pay the bills for her entire family, a dozen witches and wizards in all, before the magic man turned their world upside-down.

  Right now, it was Holly’s witchy heritage that he needed. “Did Holly find anything?”

  “She cast another one of those spell-thingies. That’s really freaky, by the way.”

  “I’ve seen it.” Although Holly’s spell casting was a far cry from the theatrical horrors one might see on television, involving little more than a few candles and a bowl of hot water, it could still be a strange thing to witness the first time.

  “It gave me chills.”

  “I’m sure it did.” It gave him chills, too, the first time he saw it. “Did she make the water boil?”

  “Um… No… Was she supposed to?”

  “I don’t think so. Not on her own. But when all her sisters sat around it, they brought it to a rolling boil before they were done.”

  “That’s just creepy!”

  “A little bit, yeah. Did she see anything?”

  “I guess so. I couldn’t see anything.”

  “It takes practice. I couldn’t, either, really. What did she see?”

  “She said she saw hell rising from the lake.”

  Eric glanced back toward the lake and scratched nervously at the back of his head. “She saw hell rising? Like fire and brimstone kind of hell?”

  “Do you know of any other kind of hell?”
<
br />   “I guess I don’t.”

  “I asked her what she meant, but she said she couldn’t see any more. She said when the rain fell hard, hell was going to rise from the lake and innocent people would die.”

  Eric felt a chill creep down his back. It was just like the vision the bloody ghost gave him. In a heavy downpour, something vast and terrifying was rising from the depths of the lake, something unimaginable.

  But…hell?

  He recalled the unearthly wind and those terrible voices that floated on it, wails of anguish and torment, and such a fierce chill passed through him that he nearly dropped the phone.

  “Not at all scary,” said Karen.

  “Not in the least,” he agreed, already beginning to feel numb with fright. “Did she see anything else?”

  “She said you need to look for the purple giant and the invisible footpath. And she said to make sure you watch where you’re going.”

  “Purple giant, invisible footpath and watch my step. Got it. Is there any point at all in asking exactly what the hell any of that means?”

  “Nope. She couldn’t tell me, apparently.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Something about not getting lost in the mist.”

  “The same mist where the people wander?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Maybe I should talk to Holly.”

  “She had to run home. She said she was feeling weird.”

  Eric frowned. “Weird how?”

  “She said she felt uneasy. I guess it happens sometimes with this spell-casting stuff. She said it was nothing to worry about and that she had some tea at her apartment that helped.”

  Eric didn’t know if he liked the idea of the spells leaving Holly feeling uneasy. But then again, she seemed to be the only one who could tell him anything about what he was supposed to do out here, even if it was only in maddening riddles.

  “Are you okay?” asked Karen. “What’s going on out there?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ve got ghosts, multiple monsters, decades of mysterious disappearances and aliens.”

  “Aliens, too?”

  “Apparently, they’re the ones behind it all.”