by Hart, Joe
Stopping at the door to his room, Lance peered at the house beneath him. Moonlight filtered in through the bay windows, and he could smell the lingering vapors of dinner wafting up from the kitchen. Nothing moved below him.
Trying to sidle out of the room without making a sound on the wooden floor of the landing was all but impossible, as a creaking board let out a shriek like a banshee. Without flipping on the light attached to the weapon, he made his way around the perimeter of the banister until he drew even with the guest bedroom. Not wanting to burst into his friend’s room with a shotgun in the middle of the night, he hovered outside the half-open door and listened for Andy’s breathing.
The refrigerator’s fan below him whirred into life and he lost any hearing advantage he had. Feeling stupid and as overcautious as a parent checking on a newborn, he nudged the door to the guest room open.
The covers to Andy’s bed were thrown back, his pillow like an island in the middle of the mattress. Andy was nowhere to be seen.
Lance flipped on the light in the room to confirm what he already knew. Ducking low and flipping on the white light attached to the shotgun, he scanned beneath the bed. Nothing but a few dust bunnies were revealed in its glow.
He stood, his heart picking up speed. He turned from the room and began shining the light in swinging arcs across the breadth of the house.
“Andy!” His voice sounded lifeless as it bounced off the hardwood floors. He sped down the stairs, being careful to point the gun at the rafters in case he tripped or Andy startled him. His eyes came to rest on the floor in the living room.
What he had originally disregarded as a patch of moonlight he now realized was the stain he had noticed his first night in the house. The moon had made a full revolution from waning to waxing and now hung bloated in the sky above the lake. Lance walked over to the spot and gazed at the oblong stain. It was exactly the same pattern as before, not a speck of the silvery blotch different. His vision traveled up and out of the window before him and his breath stuck in his throat like something solid.
Andy stood waist-deep in the water below the house.
Lance felt his eyes fly open and his bare feet slip on the polished wood as he scrambled past the alcove and into the kitchen, pausing only to set the Mossberg on the counter before yanking open the partially ajar patio door.
The night had become brisk and the dew from the short-bladed grass felt cool on his feet. It might have been a welcome sensation any other time, but as Lance plummeted down the slope past the gazebo, it only helped further the chill he had felt run down his back when he spotted his friend standing in the water.
“Andy! What are you doing? Get out of there!” His friend gave no indication that he’d heard him, and now that Lance had closed the distance between them, he saw that Andy wore only his boxer shorts, the waistline just visible above the lapping water.
Lance hit the water and felt as if he’d been struck by electric current. Even though the weather had been overly warm as of late, the water felt blindingly cold. In a matter of seconds, as he began to wade out to where his friend stood, his feet went from stabbing pain to pinpricks to numb, barely registering rocks and shells on the sandy bottom.
“Andy! Come back in!” Lance yelled at his friend’s back. Andy’s slight form still seemed a mile away as he waded in, the ice water creeping up his legs. He could see Andy’s backbone in the silver light of the moon, each vertebra standing out like the peaks of a mountain range. Lance’s mind turned to hypothermia, and he wondered how long his friend had been standing in the frigid lake.
Lance felt the bottom drop off and couldn’t help the involuntary hiss that left his lips as the water washed over his groin. Andy held his position, and now Lance could almost touch him. His friend’s head sat tilted on his shoulders, his face upturned, cupped in the moonlight.
Lance lowered his voice, trying to sound calm. “Andy, come back inside, you’re going to freeze to death.” His hand reached out and gripped Andy’s shoulder. The flesh beneath his fingers felt like a half-frozen steak fresh from the fridge; even the bones beneath the skin seemed cold. Lance pulled his friend around to face him. Andy turned in the dark water. Lance’s hand flew away from the other man’s skin as if Andy had suddenly reversed temperatures and become too hot.
Andy’s face was shredded from his eyes down.
The skin hung in loose scraps, barely concealing the hamburger-tissue behind it. Blood dripped into the water in timed drops, counting off the seconds, as the bare gums and teeth smiled in a grisly rictus.
“Down below.” The voice that issued from Andy’s torn mouth wasn’t his own, and couldn’t have been, since Lance could see that there was only an empty pit where a tongue should be. Instead, it sounded like many people speaking at once, their garbled voices melding into something resembling speech. Lance backed away, the water sloshing around his thighs and waist, stirring up white froth in his haste, even though Andy hadn’t moved from where he stood.
“Down below,” the voice croaked again, shards of other vocal tones sounding like a broken synthesizer in his friend’s mouth.
Something grazed Lance’s calf under the water. His mind thought fish, but his instincts told him that no fish possessed soft, rotted skin. His feet tangled and he stumbled backward. The last thing he saw before the water closed over his head was Andy, his face unblemished, turning back the way he had been looking and sliding under the surface as if he was being pulled.
The water temperature seemed to drop as the bottom of the lake met Lance’s ass and a particularly sharp rock bit through his thin layer of shorts. With the image of Andy being dragged underwater in his mind, he launched himself off the bottom, back to a standing position. Water rolled off him and showered down. His eyes searched frantically, but besides the concentric ripples that flowed away from him, the surface remained still.
“Andy!” Lance yelled. Nothing moved, nothing surfaced.
Lance dove and opened his eyes to the blistering cold, imagining his sight wouldn’t work due to his retinas freezing solid. Surprisingly, the world below stood out in fair detail. The moon overhead filtered farther than Lance would have guessed, and nothing prepared him for what he saw by its light.
John hadn’t lied. The lake’s bottom dropped steeply off from where he and Andy had been standing; the soft ground sloped from waist-deep to an abyss into which the moonlight didn’t even dare go. Several enormous boulders sat to each side like a gate unto the mouth of a watery hell, framing the horror that receded below him.
Andy slid silently down the steep decline, a submarine of flesh, his eyes open and pleading to the night sky. His arms were motionless at his sides, and Lance couldn’t discern any movement near his feet. It seemed as if the man were a stone sculpture, sinking to the bottom of the ocean from a wrecked ship above.
Lance swam after his friend, the lake’s temperature no longer a concern. He kicked and pulled at the water around him like an opponent in a death match, his hands striving to grasp Andy’s limp arm. To Lance’s horror, Andy’s feet began to disappear into the dark water below them, and he swam harder than ever, knowing somehow that if his friend slipped out of the faint light, he would be gone forever.
Lance lunged and reached, gliding a few feet, and finally grabbed Andy’s slim bicep. He pulled with everything he had and treaded for the surface, which looked like a rippling sky above them. Lance’s breath bubbled out of his nose in gray orbs that mockingly rose with ease, and the slight progress they had made halted. He looked down at Andy’s flaccid form and pulled again. The other man was caught on something near the edge of the drop-off. Lance swam down again, his breath turning to acid in his lungs. He grasped Andy around the waist and kicked for the surface, expecting both of them to shoot up like dual corks. They remained held in place, as if they were swimming in jelly instead of water. The moment of decision was almost upon Lance, and he could feel it sliding over his mind, nameless and cold like the liquid around him. If he couldn’
t get Andy loose in a few more seconds, he would have to surface without him, and deep down in the recesses of his stomach, he knew that when he returned after a gulp of air, Andy would be gone.
With all of his faculties screaming for oxygen, Lance spun around behind Andy, his weaker arm around his friend’s chest, and pulled with all his strength while at the same time kicking off the silted bottom. Andy moved upward at last, and in that instant Lance gazed down at the depths below them where the light ended and the darkness truly began.
A decaying hand gripped Andy’s ankle.
It slid into the light with the force of Lance’s struggle, its mottled gray flesh missing chunks here and there, no doubt from the hungry mouths of the lake’s native fish. Its fingernails were black with decomposition, and as its hold on Andy’s ankle broke, Lance knew what had grazed his leg earlier.
A scream yearned to rip free of his mouth but he had no air left to fuel it. Moonlight shimmered on the top of the water, dreamlike in its movement and depth. As he kicked feebly, Lance wondered if it was a dream, if he was still asleep in the bed on the second floor, imagining all of this in a room of his mind that he had never visited before.
When the night air bit his face, he realized he wasn’t dreaming. Lance coughed and sucked in copious amounts of air. He felt hungry for it; each breath was sweeter than the last.
He paddled a few yards in open water until his feet touched the soft ground and he began to walk, dragging Andy’s still form behind him like a buoy. He imagined that at any moment he would feel rotting fingers close over his bare ankle. He could almost hear his scream echoing back to him across the lake.
Andy surprised him by vomiting an arc of water as thick as his wrist several feet into the air. It splashed down nearby, as Lance turned and examined his gasping friend. Andy’s eyes were blinking rapidly and Lance could hear the water gurgling in his throat.
“Almost there, buddy, almost there. Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Lance intoned, a mantra to keep the oxygen moving in and out of Andy’s saturated lungs.
The shore loomed ahead in the darkness. The grass beneath Lance’s feet became one of the most beautiful feelings he had ever experienced in his life. He laid Andy on his side on the lawn a few strides up from the rocky edge of the water, and stared at him in the milky light. Andy coughed and vomited even more lake water onto the lawn, and then collapsed onto his back.
“What the fuck were you doing?” Lance asked.
Andy heaved air in and out of his cleared lungs like an automated bellows. He then began to shake with cold.
It was only when Lance noticed his own teeth begin to chatter and his muscles go rigid that he felt fear enter his mind again. Hypothermia had begun to set in.
The ornate bathtub sat in the far corner of the bathroom off the master bedroom. Lance had only been in the room once before when he had initially toured the house. He walked across the dark threshold, trying to balance on wet feet as he carried Andy in his arms.
Andy made no movement to exit the tub as Lance set him into the cold porcelain. He shook uncontrollably, and Lance could hear his friend’s heels drumming and the muted machine-gun clicking of his teeth behind blue lips.
“Warm water’s coming, buddy, just a second.” Lance fumbled with the knobs in the darkness, and finally stood to flip on a light near the door. He didn’t want to flood the old tub with hot water and scald Andy’s freezing skin in the process of warming him up.
As he got the water conditioned to the right temperature, Lance tried to fight back the urge to climb into the tub and warm himself too. He settled for holding a hand under the lukewarm stream and shivering while he watched the rigor in Andy’s muscles loosen. The water crept up the tub’s side and Lance continued to increase the warmth by opening the hot valve further and further. Soon, Andy relaxed, his breathing became normal, and his lips lost their cobalt tint.
“You scared me out there,” Lance said, his voice overly loud against the white tile of the bathroom. Andy’s eyes remained closed and he gave no indication that he had been spoken to, although Lance could see the ridges of his pupils rolling beneath his eyelids. “Don’t worry, you’re okay. We’ll warm you up for a while and then get you back to bed.”
Lance gazed down through the rippling water, at Andy’s ankle. He stared for some time, waiting, watching. There were no marks on Andy’s leg, no bruises in the shape of fingers that would signify the tug of war Lance had fought in the lake.
Fought against what, exactly? the niggling voice asked. Lance shivered without the assistance of his lowered core temperature. His mind tried to show him the scene that had played out beneath the water again. The putrescent hand, somehow alive and gripping Andy’s leg. The struggle to pull against it. The way it slipped into the darkness of the drop-off like a nocturnal eel returning to its den.
“No,” Lance said. The word, meant to be forceful, came out as a plea. When denial failed in light of what he had seen, he tried to rationalize. He had been out of oxygen, flailing in the fist of panic. Fear had caused the hallucination and made it so real his mind believed it. Lance nodded to himself. It was plausible. Enough so that when the image came again, he refuted it and labeled it as a projection of trauma his mind had created.
“So many.” Andy’s voice startled Lance out of his internal struggle and he nearly fell back from the edge of the tub, which almost overflowed with water. Andy’s eyes were open now, his arms still resting at his sides.
“What?” Lance asked.
Andy didn’t move. His eyes focused on a blank wall over Lance’s shoulder. “There’s so many,” Andy whispered. His eyes closed and he seemed to drop into a deep sleep. Lance stared at him for several minutes, waiting for something more, but only the quiet of the house greeted his patience.
After assuring himself that his friend wasn’t going to die, Lance drained the water and toweled Andy off where he lay. After carrying him to the spare room, Lance deposited him into the bed. He drew back into the hallway while studying the sleeping form. The only sounds from the room were the familiar snores he had heard just before drifting into sleep earlier. As he walked into the small bathroom and turned on the shower, Lance marveled at how much had transpired since they had gone to bed a few hours ago.
The hot water rivaled any other sensation he had ever known, as it loosened his cemented muscles and the tendons, tight as fiddle strings, that attached them. He sighed as the adrenaline rushed away and left an immense expanse of exhaustion that threatened to slump him to the floor in a heap. His tired mind tried to revisit the events, but he shoved them away, unable to deal with anything further.
After drying off and falling into his welcoming bed, Lance had a few moments of contemplation before sleep dragged him beneath its veil. He spent them searching for a true explanation about what had happened and wondering what there were so many of.
“I remember going to bed and waking up for a minute in the tub, that’s it.” Andy sat spinning his half-empty coffee cup on the table, the dark liquid within threatening to slosh over each time his hands set it in motion.
Lance sat across from him, as the diner bustled with noise around them on a busy Saturday morning. A waitress stopped, breathless, at the edge of their table.
“You two ready?”
Both men put in their orders, and when the menus had disappeared from the table, Andy spoke again.
“Maybe I had too much to drink, decided to go for a swim. It’s the most probable scenario.”
Lance stretched his jaw until it cracked and let it fall back into place. When Andy had woken that morning, sore from shivering but otherwise fine, Lance had questioned him about his memories, or lack thereof, and had come up with nothing. He decided not to fill Andy in on what he had seen beneath the water of the lake since he himself still seriously doubted it. Instead of making breakfast at the house, they elected to eat in town at the diner. The company of other people felt necessary to Lance, as if the normalcy of other lives might influen
ce his own. When they left for the diner, Andy drove himself, without comment, and took his overnight bag with him. Lance didn’t ask, although he felt a twinge of disappointment when he realized he wouldn’t be spending as much time as he had hoped with his oldest friend.
“Maybe,” Lance offered, looking across the diner at the crowded tables, the people speaking of trivial matters, no doubt. They didn’t seem to be losing their minds, seeing things that couldn’t be and resisting the urge to call their psychologists.
“Thank you,” Andy said. Lance looked back at his friend. Andy’s eyes met his and true gratitude shone within them. “I might’ve died if you hadn’t pulled me out of the water, and the world would have lost its youngest and most brilliant agent.” Lance huffed laughter and shook his head in mock disdain. “What, you don’t think I’m an asset to talented individuals like yourself?”
Lance grinned. “I think you’re an asset, all right, minus the et on the end.” Andy flipped Lance his middle finger and Lance saw several of the customers nearby raise their eyebrows.
“All bullshit aside, I do want to ask you something,” Lance said, leaning forward and cupping his mug of coffee. “What was actually going on when you got to the house yesterday? You didn’t want to say anything, but in light of last night, you need to be straight with me.”
Andy sat back from the table and folded his arms. He regarded Lance for a long moment, and then leaned forward again.
“I felt cold.”
“Cold?” Lance asked.
“Yes, cold. When I drove up and saw the place, something seemed off to me. I couldn’t figure out what it was—maybe the house needed some TLC or I didn’t like the location, I don’t know. But when I got out of the car, it was oppressive, like something was pushing down on me from above, and I felt cold. I felt …” Andy stopped and looked around. The closest people on either side of them continued talking, oblivious to their conversation. Andy leaned closer. “I felt as cold as I did when I woke up last night after being in the lake. I wanted nothing more than to drive the fuck away from that place and never come back. After you came out, it passed, it just went away. I don’t know.”
