Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant

by Ramsey Campbell

  Making friends at camp had been harder this year. Getting older made everything harder.

  Penny had shown up at the lakefront alone and had been partnered with two girls from a different cabin. She’d given no thought to them since she entered the water; now she had to find them. What had they looked like? Where had they gone?

  All around her, campers were standing together, hands clasped together and raised above their heads. The counsellor on the dock paused in his counting to frown at Penny. If she didn’t find her buddies soon, the lifeguard might presume a kid was missing. All the counsellors would have to form a human chain and sweep the swimming area, while the lifeguard dove under the H-dock with a waterproof flashlight to make sure a camper wasn’t tangled up in the anchor chains.

  The other girls would be in trouble too for losing track of her, but they weren’t flopping around in the water all alone while all the other kids stared at them. Penny’s ears burned with shame. She clutched tightly to the shale in her hand.

  “Over here,” she heard a voice hiss at last.

  The speaker, a tall blonde girl, beckoned impatiently while her shorter friend shot a poisonous look at Penny. Penny glared back as she added her hand to theirs; they were supposed to be watching out for her.

  The counsellor finished his count and blew the whistle for the all clear. The taller girl drew her hand away and said, in a snotty voice, “You need to watch where we’re going.”

  “I’m tired of swimming,” Penny retorted.

  She wasn’t, not really, but she wasn’t about to waste her time trailing after people who didn’t want her. She began dog-paddling towards shore, clutching the fossil in her hand. When the lake grew shallow, she walked on her hands, kicking her legs behind her, pretending she was a creature like the one entombed in her grip.

  Her belly scraped the sand. Penny rose upright like a monster from the water and lumbered the rest of the way to shore, feeling awkward and gawky on two legs.

  Wrapping her towel around her shoulders, Penny wandered along the shoreline through the shadow of the boathouse and approached the semi-circle of logs ringing the fire pit. Penny’s favourite time of day was sunset, when campers gathered here to perform skits and sing songs while the sun slowly slid into the lake. Then, just before they went back to the cabins to sleep, the counsellors told them a scary story.

  Mid-afternoon was the wrong time of day for the telling of stories, but the fire pit was deserted now and there was no one to think it strange if a twelve year old girl sat all by herself, talking to an ugly little critter encased in stone.

  Penny sat on the log nearest the fire and placed the shale on her lap. Her index finger stroked the back of her silent companion. Now that it’s here, it has to know the stories.

  “That side of the boathouse is the swimming area,” Penny said as she pointed, “but this side is Leech Beach. We never, ever swim in that water. We launch our canoes and sailboats and then we get in as fast as we can, because there’s all kinds of leeches–thousands–millions–a rare species that travels in swarms and kills its prey. If you get enough leeches on you, they’ll drink your blood dry, until all that’s left of you is a floppy bag of skin. Once there was a kid who flipped his canoe and had to go to the hospital for blood loss. They saved him just in time. So when we swim, we always stay on the right side of the boathouse, where we’ll be safe from the….”

  An ugly tainted flavour rose up in her throat as an idea wormed its way into her mind. What, exactly, stopped leeches from crossing over into the swimming area? How many leeches could there be in one lake? Maybe the camp just didn’t want kids swimming out of bounds, or goofing off in the boat launch area. The camp didn’t dredge the bottom there, either, and the waters that bordered the roped-off swimming area were peppered with sticks and sharp rocks and who knew what else. Penny clutched her fossil and wondered how many more might be out there in the leech zone.

  She briefly considered climbing up on the boathouse deck and sticking her legs in the water and waiting to see if she got leeches on her.

  … But she’d end up sorry if the leech swarms were real.

  Penny stayed put, because there were still stories to tell.

  She told her new friend about the knife-wielding murderers who sometimes escaped from the penitentiary on the other side of the lake. She told it about poisonous spiders the size of dinner plates that spun their webs in the old rec hall, and how those webs were big enough to catch rabbits, maybe dogs; one of the counsellors swore the spiders were bigger every year, and it was only a matter of time before some rule-breaking camper got in real trouble …

  She told it about the Lat Monster – not that anyone was actually afraid of the Lat Monster. The Lat Monster’s tale was told every summer because it was just such a disgustingly hilarious idea; and if Penny, going to the latrine in the middle of the night, sometimes paused and questioned the wisdom of sitting down atop a deep, dark, fetid hole … well, that wasn’t entirely a foolish idea, was it? There might not be any monsters down in the stinking black, just waiting to gobble campers up bare-butt-first, but there might be earwigs, or even snakes. It never hurt to shine your flashlight down the hole before you sat. Just in case.

  And with that silly story, Penny’s well ran dry. She racked her brain in an attempt to exhume more tales. Surely in all these scary stories, there had to be one about ghosts; but if there was, she couldn’t recall it. Camp Zaagaigan really needed a good ghost story.

  Her mind lit upon an idea.

  Up in the mess hall there was an Indian arrowhead mounted behind glass, allegedly found in Lake Mishipishu by a camper in the mid-70s. The Indians here had told a story of their own, the story of the Mishipishu, a being that lived under the waters of the lake that bore its name.

  So Penny told her companion about the fabulous spirit called the Mishipishu, a sort of sea-serpent with a head like a cat’s and brilliant copper horns. She lovingly described its fearsome fangs, as long as her fingers; its razor claws; its sinuous tail, spiked like a dinosaur’s. The Mishipishu was the keeper of the copper, and when people took copper from the lake, the Mishipishu called forth water-storms, and flipped their canoes with one mighty thrash of its tail.

  Then Penny fell silent, because this story had no end. Though she had looked every summer for seven years, Penny had never seen the giant footprints of a cat on the shoreline, or the glint of sun off two copper horns far away on the lake’s horizon. The Indians had all vanished from this place, and maybe they had taken the Mishipishu with them.

  Maybe the Mishipishu, like everyone else, had grown up and moved on.

  Clenching her jaw, Penny said defiantly, “And the Mishipishu lives right in our swimming area. And if you go into the water there, it might decide to take you home with it, down into the dark waters of the lake, for ever and ever.”

  That story was wrong. Penny sat there, in the cooling air, wondering why her story was wrong. Her eyes strayed over the boathouse, the lake, the far-off oval of Hot Dog Island where some of the trees were already touched by orange and yellow, heralds of the dying summer. There was not much time left in which to pretend that grade eight was far away, or that her father would not be coming to pick her up two days from now.

  And there was the heart of it. She was scared of leeches and murderers and giant spiders. She was scared of the future that awaited her. The Mishipishu …

  … She wanted it to take her away.

  “This,” she said quietly, “is the scariest story.”

  * * *

  Once upon a time there were two best friends named Jessica and Penny who were both in first grade. They liked exploring and adventuring and telling jokes and playing together. Jessica didn’t care that Penny’s dad owned a funeral home, and she didn’t think Penny and her dad were creepy. Jessica came over to play with Penny and not just to see if she could get a look at dead bodies.

  Jessica’s parents decided to go on a long vacation and wanted her to spend the summer at
Camp Zaagaigan. Jessica didn’t want to go alone so she asked Penny to go with her. Penny said yes and her dad said okay too. They had tons of fun. It was so great that they went back the next year and the year after that and the year after that.

  Then Jessica grew up when Penny wasn’t looking.

  I only took my eyes off her for a week, I swear. Between the end of camp and the start of grade five, Jessica turned into someone else.

  I mean...

  Penny coughed and put her Storyteller Voice back on.

  Suddenly all Jessica cared about was make-up and movie stars and trying to get the popular girls at school to like her. She didn’t want to explore in the park for fear of getting dirty and she didn’t want to play with toys in case someone saw her being babyish. She spent recess leaning against the brick wall of the school, acting snotty to younger kids and trying to catch the cool boys’ attention. Penny played along for about a week before she got bored. She quit playing the game, and Jessica quit talking to her.

  Penny was not going to let stupid Jessica ruin camp for her. Penny went to camp the next year anyway and spent the whole first day waiting for Jessica’s mom’s blue car to come crunching up the gravel road through the forest. And in her head she made up what she was going to say and it went like this: I’m ignoring you, Jessica, because I’m going to have fun at camp, and you can spend all your time pretending you’re so cool, and I don’t even care, so there.

  Penny never got to use her speech because Jessica never came.

  So Penny made a new friend, a girl named Ratha, and after camp they sent emails to each other all through grade six, and Penny didn’t mind that she had no friends at school. Then they met up at camp again and made a new friend, Mae Wah.

  Halfway through grade seven, Ratha stopped e-mailing.

  Ratha’s not at camp this summer. Mae Wah is, but she’s all snobby now like Jessica and she told me she doesn’t want to hang out with babies and nerds. She says if I want to still be her friend, I need to hurry and grow up.

  Penny took a deep breath, wiped the tears from her eyes, and steadied her voice long enough to put an ending on her story.

  Every year at camp there’s kids crying because they want to go home. I don’t know why. Home is for ex-best-friends and dads who love their dead wives more than their living daughters. If you want to cry you should cry …

  She raked her fingernails over her cheeks.

  ... because thirteen is too old for Camp Zaagaigan…

  Penny finished the story, but not easily.

  … and this is my last year.

  * * *

  Human voices woke her. The other girls in the cabin were whispering and giggling while the counsellor tried to hush them. Even here, at night in her bunk, Penny could still smell the lake; it hid under her fingernails, concealed itself in her hair, and softened the edges of her scabs. She would carry it home with her like contraband, and savour it for as long as she could.

  She was losing everything. Tears streaming down her cheeks, Penny rolled onto her belly and thrust her hands beneath her pillow. Her fingertips traced shale, seeking and finding the clawed creature in the rock.

  She had intended to take the fossil home with her. One last souvenir of Camp Zaagaigan. A friend that she could keep in her trinket drawer and take out when she felt alone.

  How would the creature fare, she wondered, so far away from Lake Mishipishu? Already it looked less substantial; the charcoal rock and copper became pale grey and faint orange when they dried. She drew the stone from beneath her pillow and rubbed it against her moist face, hoping to feed it sustenance. Penny wept a lake of tears until there were no more left to cry; until the lakebed in her eyes was hard and dry.

  When all moisture was gone, truth came to light.

  Driven by an inevitability she did not yet understand, Penny unzipped her sleeping bag and swung her feet over the side of the bunk. She clutched her silent friend to her chest and left her flashlight behind. She walked out of the cabin and into the night alone, without even the counsellor’s voice calling after her.

  The halogen lamps next to the latrines screamed their illumination into the night. Penny turned away from them and headed towards the lake. The moon overhead rimed the cabins and trees with a delicate silver crust, and Lake Mishipishu was a mirror, throwing back the light like a beacon. The H-dock sat black and heavy on the silvery surface.

  Penny slid into the shadows of the boathouse and wrapped them around her like a sleeping bag. The hulk of the boathouse loomed over her, clouding her reflection in the water, merging her into her surroundings. Safely subsumed, she circled the building until she stood on the deck overlooking the water.

  Penny used both hands to tilt the fossil until the moon illuminated the little creature within the stone. At a certain angle, the creature appeared to be bursting free of the shale that surrounded it. Her fingers tightened on the rock; but she knew better than to be selfish. The creature, unlike her, could stay.

  There was no point returning it to the swimming area for some other kid to find. Penny knelt at the deck’s edge on the side overlooking Leech Beach. She had heard a lot of prayers in the funeral home and wished that even one of them could contain the words that granted release. She held the fossil over the dark waters; then, with one last look at the creature, she forced her fingers to let go.

  Water slid over the stone, darkening the shape of the creature within, and for just a moment Penny thought she saw it twitch, as though something darted out of the rock and away into the night-glazed lake. The stone wobbled in the waves, and then the right end dipped and it dropped out of sight into the black.

  From somewhere down in the darkness came a flash of copper.

  It speared through Penny like a beacon of hope, and without thinking, she followed after. She raised her hands above her head in an arrow and let her body tumble forward off the boathouse deck.

  Cold water clasped her in a tight embrace, driving the breath from her lungs. Lake Mishipeshu closed above her like a cocoon. Penny reached out her arms into the darkness, but she felt nothing, and her eyes opened onto water the colour of a night without stars. She tried not to think of leeches and wondered if perhaps the Mishipeshu might come to her if she were still. Her body conspired against her, shoving her towards the surface in quest for air.

  She folded her body in half and wound her fingers into the weeds again, as she had yesterday, but here the weeds were too thin; their roots gave way, and she bobbed to the surface, clutching useless green strands. Frustrated, frightened, she looked back over her shoulder to where Camp Zaagaigan lay sleeping, its silhouette thrown into stark relief by the latrines’ halogen lamps. Nobody knew she was missing, yet, but sooner or later her counsellor would question why Penny had gone to the lats without a buddy, and what was taking her so long to return.

  Concerned, the counsellor checked the lats – and everywhere else a camper out alone at night might go – but Penny was nowhere to be found. Realizing her camper was missing, the counsellor sounded the alarm. Seconds later, the camp’s bell began to ring its urgent warning, and sleepy campers wrapped in blankets stumbled down to the flagpole to be counted by the camp director. The counsellors formed a human chain and waded into the lake …

  Penny would be seen as soon as the bell started ringing; she and the H-dock were the only things that broke the surface of Lake Mishipishu. Penny would be caught and she could not even count how many rules she’d broken by now. They would send her home a day early, and they would never let her come back.

  She snorted, raising up bubbles when her nose dipped under the surface of the lake. She was turning thirteen this fall. She wouldn’t be coming back anyway.

  Her hands checked her arms and legs, just in case.

  No leeches anywhere.

  She looked at the old rec hall, housing the same spiders as everywhere else, and the woods where no murderers lurked. She looked at the sad, stinking, hollow lats and the cabins where traitors giggled in the
dark. She thought of friends grown into strangers and fathers who loved the dead, and in the darkness, the serpentine tail with its copper spines cut through the lake between her and Camp Zaagaigan, severing heart and soul.

  Penny took one last breath and went under, wrapping her hands around the tail and letting it tow her, away from the boathouse and into the swimming area, in search of an anchor more substantial than weeds. Two feeble beams of moonlight pierced the surface of the water; then she was under the H-dock and all was blackness.

  She felt her body weaving in between the anchoring chains like a braided lanyard. Her copper hair swirled above her head: the tendrils of an exotic undersea plant, the Mishipishu’s secret trove. She could feel some small creature zip by her ear, gently tugging on her waving strands with its ragged claws.

  Penny’s lungs felt like a universe waiting to implode; the pain was something she could never have imagined, having nothing to compare it to. She wondered if her friend had felt the rock closing in around it, pressing living cells into fossilized shale, and wondered if it would have hurt so much, after all, to have the years turn her heart to stone instead.

  She spread her fingers and toes wide. It was inevitable that they would find her, but if she was lucky, they wouldn’t find all of her. Penny wanted at least a few little bones to escape; to burrow down into the soft muck in search of eventual shale. It would be best, she thought, if a part of her were always in the lake.

  She had seen her future and wanted no part of it.

  She would rather be a ghost story.

  MALICIOUS INTIMACY

  by William Andre Sanders

  I refuse pretending

  romanticism

  is chocolate truffles,

  accompanying a flower bouquet.

  I'd much rather prefer –

  pampering you with a rodent,

  victimized by road rage,