Dead Bait 2

by Steve Alten

  Tobias grinned and fanned the cards in his hand. “That’s the thing about the great outdoors. You can’t put a rush on nature.”

  Tobias and Rosselli played Tonk. Tobias won the better part of three hundred dollars while Rosselli wondered who in hell had contrived such a fucked up card game. Like clockwork, twenty minutes into the game Tobias gathered up the cards and his money and broke out the fishing gear.

  “Hey, hold up here,” Rosselli protested. Don’t I get a chance to win my money back?”

  Tobias let a smile leak across his lips. “You wanna fish or play cards?”

  “Un-fuckin-believable, that’s what you are.”

  Tobias checked the anchor and helped Rosselli prep his gear. Soon he was pulling in sea bass the size of dolphins. In less than an hour he filled a hundred gallon cooler, and the forward bait well. He had enough fish to feed the crew of the Lusitania. His arms burned from working the heavy rod and his manicured fingers were shredded with cuts and blisters.

  “Had enough?” Tobias asked.

  “Hell no! I paid for the full ride, I’m takin’ the full ride.”

  Tobias watched the storm eye begin to close, bringing the storm back to life. He didn’t have much time. “Better hang on then.”

  Rosselli’s body was running on the high octane fuel of adrenaline. “I’m still waiting for that monster fish you promised.” He paced the deck shaking his fist and shouting like an angry Baptist preacher speaking in tongues. “Most people can talk a good game, they just can’t deliver. A deal’s not a deal unless it delivers. So tell me Tobias, exactly where is this fish-to-beat-all-fish you talked so much about? Huh?”

  Tobias tightened his grip, holding onto the wheel as if the boat might explode into splinters at any moment. “It’s comin’.”

  The water around the ‘Stormy Weather’ began to churn into a foamy viscous stew of mossy limbs and oily scales. A stench crawled up Rosselli’s nose and tickled the barf trigger in his brain. The contents of his freshly consumed flask spewed out and painted the deck around his toes oatmeal gray. Rosselli felt the line go taut. Three sharp tugs, then something hit the hook with such force it took the tips of two fingers before he had time to clear them from the spinning reel. Blood gushed forth in a geyser, soaking the rod and slickening the handle. Rosselli turned green. “What the hell is it?” he shouted, trying to maintain his grip on the bloody rod.

  “That?” Tobias shouted, pointing to the rolling stench at the end of Rosselli’s line. “Why that’s your full ride.”

  The wind let out a howl—low, deep and animalistic. Rosselli could feel the strength draining from his arms, as if the thing on the end of his line was pulling him down the rod and dragging him into a simmering pot of steaming sewage. The line gave a final yank, then went slack. A bulbous head rose from the ocean. Eyes the size of basketballs glowed orange in their coal black sockets. Its body, black as midnight sin, ran the length of the ‘Stormy Weather’s’ forty-two foot hull. The skin was alive with scales that left oily rainbows in the water. Rosselli turned to Tobias Kunkhe, searching his eyes, hoping for any explanation of what was happening to him. The wicked grin on Tobias’s face told him he wouldn’t be getting one.

  The creature rose out of the water in one slow, smooth motion. Its face was a mass of mossy scales and warts. Gill slits like ragged axe wounds expanded and collapsed with each rasping breath. It moved in close, inches from Roselli’s face. The stench rolled over him in half-pipe waves. His knees buckled. He felt hot slobbering breath at the back of his neck, breath that smelled like a moldy burlap sack full of rotting venison.

  Tobias patted the creature’s slippery lip. It let out a slow whistling grunt. “Mr. Rosselli, this is Ol’ Lloyd. Lloyd, this is lunch.” The creature extended a long pair of spines from its dorsal fin. They lashed out with the force of a rifle shot, impaling Rosselli’s neck. He stood motionless on the deck, paralyzed with fear and the poisonous venom now pumping into his blood stream.

  “You see,” said Tobias, “me and Ol’ Lloyd, we’ve got a—what was it you called it? Ah yes, a gentleman’s agreement. I keep him fed and in return he lets me catch all the fish I want.”

  The creature’s rubbery lips parted, revealing a cavernous mouth full of barbed teeth. They drew inward with each new clack of its powerful jaws. It sniffed Rosselli slowly and carefully, like a dog whiffing a mate’s ass. Rosselli opened his mouth to scream. The creature opened wider, letting out a hideous unearthly wail. Rosselli was devoured in one vicious snap. All that remained was a bloody forearm flopping on the deck.

  Tobias slipped the Rolex off Rosselli’s severed arm and kicked the bloody stump overboard. As it disappeared into the churning vortex, he went to his quarters and added the watch to his collection. It was a nice piece. That new fishing trawler was one step closer to being his. He’d have to sink the Bentley. It was too easy to trace. Besides, what self-respecting fisherman would drive such a thing? Leather seats and burlwood trim weren’t exactly his mug of grog. Now an F150 with a power winch? That was a vehicle.

  Tobias hoisted anchor at the same instant a stunning brunette appeared from the cabin below. She walked with an elegance that made men drive cars head-on into utility poles.

  “Mrs. Rosselli. I wondered how long you were going to stay below. You’ve gone and missed all the excitement.”

  The brunette pulled a French rolled cigarette from a gold case and got it going with her monogrammed lighter. Her voice was an octave lower than one would expect from a woman of her build. “Is he—? I mean did he—?”

  “Yep.”

  She took a long drag from the cigarette, letting the smoke entertain her lungs for a full thirty seconds before releasing it through her nostrils. “Marvelous. You are a man of your word.”

  “All that’s left is to settle up,” Tobias said. “You did bring the cash right?”

  She placed a foot on the rail, eyeing a run in her stocking. The soft material of her skirt hugged the lines of her body. “Of course I brought it. After all, that was the agreement.”

  Tobias secured the dripping anchor and fired the engine. He pictured her long creamy-white legs, alive under the silky material. If her skirt were any shorter it could be a scarf. His head swam.

  “I have to hand it to you, those smelly overalls masked my perfume perfectly, just like you said. He was so busy retching he never suspected a thing.” She moved in closer, sliding an arm around Tobias’s waist. “Now about your fee.”

  Tobias eyed the leather case in her hand. “A hundred grand, all cash, all now.”

  “Got it right here sweetie.” She ran her slender fingers over the smooth leather case. “I was wondering,” she cooed. “Could we maybe work out a deal?” Her free hand gently rubbed his stomach just above the belt line.

  Tobias turned and hugged her close, filling his lungs with her floral scent. Then, he shoved her overboard. “I don’t do deals.”

  The water percolated into a rolling boil, turning in on itself in thick foaming curls. The eye of the storm had closed. The sky opened up, vomiting torrents of rain that skipped over the water like liquid arrows. It stung Tobias’s face and burned his eyes. He smiled and hit the throttle. The ‘Stormy Weather’ responded with a powerful drone. Tobias put the storm to his back and steered toward the shoreline. First thing in the morning he’d call the Marina. Maybe see if he could work a deal on that seventy-two footer they’d just rebuilt. It was a killer fishing boat.

  LONELY AFTER DARK

  Tim Curran

  There were a lot of crazy old wives tales floating around Sawyer County. One of them was that you didn’t go out on Spider Lake after dark, not in the dead of winter, but that particular January night we decided to ignore what old wives said and it was the worst mistake of our lives.

  We were sitting in Dutch Shulman’s ice shanty jigging for pike, listening to the wind screaming across the frozen lake. A blizzard was coming in, blown down from Lake Superior and pushing darkness before it, but the fis
h were biting and already Dutch had laid in a mess of jumbo perch and a pair of walleye on wigglers and waxworms. I was jigging for pike using a spoon and a hunk of chicken skin. I had taken a nice thirty-six incher, but I knew there were bigger ones down there, hunting through the weed beds on the shoal beneath us.

  As things stood, we weren’t about to call it a day. Not after six hours on the ice. Things were getting good now.

  “Funny how it goes, Fife,” Dutch said, hooking a wiggler and dropping it into a hole in the ice, feeding it down deep and feeling for bottom, taking up the slack on the ceiling rig. “You sit on yer ass half a day and you ain’t gettin’ squat, then boom, you can’t get your lines in the water fast enough.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” I said, trying not to double-over with the sudden pain that was chewing at my vitals.

  Dutch’s shack was roomy. Eight foot by ten, benches to either side, six holes augered down through the ice, all of them eighteen inches so you had to watch where you walked. We’d spent most of the day drinking beer, yarning, skimming ice off the holes, and roasting hot dogs in the woodstove, and now the fishing had begun. The blizzard was getting randy out there, making the shack tremble from time to time as if it had been shaken by a fist. The snow beating against the door sounded like blowing sand.

  My bladder was full up, so I stepped outside for a leak and the snow was flying heavy, the wind cutting right through me. Shadows lay thick over the drift making me feel uneasy, but I shook it off, finished my business, and went back inside.

  “Getting dark out there,” I told Dutch, pulling off a cigarette, watching the smoke twist and turn in the yellow glare of the lanterns.

  “Yup. Blizzarding, too. You want to call her a day, start fresh in the A.M.?”

  “No, fish are running, let’s run with ‘em.”

  Dutch liked that idea fine and I could see it on his face. Yet deep inside me, there was a sense of doom that made my old blood run like ice water, made me feel the storm blowing out there and the darkness itself closing in.

  After all, we were over a mile out on Spider Lake.

  And the sun had gone down.

  Dutch worked his lines and I kept an eye on my tip-ups. Now and again, he would cast a look in my direction and what I saw in his eyes was part anxiety and part mischievousness. Anxiety, probably, because we had good reason to be off the ice before nightfall and mischievousness because there was a certain thrill in what we were doing, like a couple kids breaking curfew for a midnight visit to the local haunted house. I felt it too. And despite the fact I was a few years short of seventy, it made me feel almost giddy, really alive for the first time in years. It was a dare, I suppose, and we were taking it on. With the pains coming and going in my gut, I figured I was nearly out of dares so I had to take ‘em where I could get ‘em.

  It wasn’t five minutes later when something thumped against the outside of the shack making us both jump. It made my old ticker skip a beat.

  Then the door swung open, snow and wind blowing through, the gas lanterns swinging back and forth on their hooks. Some guy came stumbling in, scaring the hell out of us, blood splashed over his parka in crazy whorls. I figured it wasn’t his monthly so I knew we were in for it.

  He went down on his hands and knees, breathing hard. “There’s something under the goddamn ice,” he said, just half out of his mind with panic. “Something down there! It came up out of the hole! It grabbed Al…it grabbed him and he was screaming, blood flying…oh Jesus Christ…”

  I looked over at Dutch and he looked at me.

  “Shut the damn door,” he said, getting out his bottle of medicinal Jack Daniels and giving our visitor a few pulls off it while he babbled on, making little sense. The whiskey took the edge off, but he was still in some kind of state. His name was Mike Modek, he said, and he was an architect from Madison. He’d come to Spider Lake with his brother, Al, to do a little ice fishing. It was a getaway they’d been planning for months after Al had visited the Spider—as we locals called it—and caught his limit during walleye season. Sure and fine. Then not twenty minutes ago something had happened, something unbelievable and gruesome.

  I had forgotten about the fish by then. I was seeing all that blood on Modek’s parka, drops of it spattered across his pale face. There were things I could have said to him then, things that would have either curled the hairs at the back of his neck or got him to thinking that I was not only old but crazy. I kept my mouth shut.

  “Tell us again, Mr. Modek,” Dutch said, feeding another pine split into the woodstove. “Just take it easy and tell us exactly what you saw.”

  Modek breathed in and out, his eyes bright with fear, the muscles of his face bunching like they were tied in knots just beneath the skin. “We were at the shack,” he said, his voice breaking high and low, “and I was just sitting there, you know, listening to Al. He…he starts talking, Christ, he won’t let you go…twenty minutes of bullshit about jigging with Swedish Pimples…and then something grabbed Al’s line, it snapped it right off the rig…he reached down into the hole to get his bobber because it was still floating and something fucking grabs him…starts pulling him down…”

  “What? What was it?”

  But Modek just shook his head. “Something white…something fast…it took hold of him, it yanked him down…”

  Dutch got it out of him by degrees. He couldn’t say what it was, but it had come up and taken hold of his brother and pulled him down the hole which was insane to begin with, he admitted to us. The holes Al had drilled through the ice were no more than twelve inches in diameter and Al went in at nearly 300 pounds…it would have been like trying to drag an oak stump through a mouse hole.

  But something, apparently, had managed it just fine.

  “He kinda…he kinda exploded,” Modek said, a sour-stinking sweat breaking open on his face. “Blew up.”

  I sat there listening like a kid hearing a campfire tale of a ghost looking for its head in the forest. It was crazy. Absolutely crazy. There was nothing under the ice but fish. And no fish was big enough in Spider Lake to take hold of a man let alone smash him into something that might fit down a hole a foot in diameter. But the blood…there was no getting around that.

  The shack shook as the howling wind out there picked up, making a distant, lonesome sound. I was hearing something on it. Something that left me cold. It was a mournful sort of moaning, rising and falling, filled with anguish. It had an almost female caliber to it. Then it was gone.

  I kept telling myself it was imagination, only I knew better.

  Modek stayed there on his knees, shivering despite the warmth coming off the stove. He looked like he maybe wanted to pray and under the circumstances that might have been a good idea. “Tried my cell, tried 911, but all I got was static. I’m getting four bars, I should be getting through.”

  He dug it out of his pocket and handed it to me. I was no expert, but it appeared to be working just fine. I punched in 911 and put the phone to my ear with a hand that trembled. There was some crackling static on the other end, but mostly an empty, listening silence. The sort of sound you might have heard putting your ear up to the wall of a deserted house: a sound not unlike a hushed respiration.

  As chills crawled up my spine and down my arms, I was almost certain someone was on the other end, breathing.

  I snapped it closed and handed it back to him.

  “Things get funny on the Spider come winter,” was all I said.

  He just stared at me, maybe writing me off then and there as some crazy old coot.

  “You’re out in the boonies here, Mr. Modek,” Dutch told him. “Nobody gets a signal out on the Spider. Especially not in the winter time. It’s an…an atmospheric thing.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What I’m talking about, son, is that you should have been off the ice by dark. Things happen out on the Spider come sundown. Things that no stranger like you could know about.”

  Modek just kneel
ed there on the ice, his face hooked somewhere between a scowl and a laugh. Just a couple hayseeds. That’s what he was thinking and maybe he was right and maybe he was dangerously wrong. He was city-born and city-bred. I’m not going to say that automatically makes him a fool, all I’m saying is that it takes more than fancy mail-order Gel Lite gloves, polar fleece, and a shiny new L. L. Bean parka to know the ice, to feel its promise and its threat. It’s something you’re born to.

  “What kinda goddamn fish you got around here,” he breathed. “What kinda thing was—”

  “Weren’t no fish, Mr. Modek,” Dutch told him, pulling out his 12-guage Marlin from the wooden box under his seat, breaking it open and pumping a few shells into the breech.

  I said, “You think it was—”

  Dutch nodded. “What else could it possibly be?”

  Modek looked from me to Dutch and back at me again. “Will one of you kindly tell me what the hell you’re talking about, goddammit? My brother…my brother is fucking dead…and I think I have the right to know what this is about!”

  “No,” Dutch told him, “you don’t have the right to shit, Mr. Modek. Because I’m willing to bet that in town they told you to get off the ice before dark. Maybe they said it was because of blizzards or squalls or whiteouts or what not. But I know they told you and I also know you were too damn stupid to listen to them.”

  “You have no right to talk to me like that—”

  “Shut your pisshole,” I told him. “You’ve put all our lives in danger now. So have the decency to shut up.”

  Poor Modek. Here he came for a bit of relaxation with his brother, something to relieve the stress of his corporate life, maybe a nagging high-born wife or a pack of demanding kids…and he gets this.

  Believe me, I wanted to tell him then. I wanted to tell him all about Spider Lake. How it had always been a damn good place to catch your limit, maybe do some swimming or boating in the July sunshine. But come winter, when the ice showed and the wind came blowing and the snow drifted, it could be a bad place. Especially after dark. That’s what I wanted to say. But if I told him that, then I’d have to tell him the rest about people disappearing out on the ice come winter, always after sundown. And he would not have liked that part. It had been going on since 1953, you see, because that was the year a crazy drunken fool name of Bones Pilon had gotten some crazy idea in his head about driving across the Spider in his old man’s pick-up before the ice had set—first week of December, it was. Well, the truck went through, sinking like a brick into the deepest part of the lake, some three hundred fifty feet straight down. Bones swam out, made it back to town like some walking ice sculpture…but his girlfriend, Gina Shiner, had not. They never did recover her body and to my knowledge, Bones’ pick-up is still down there in the mud and silt rotting away like a buried coffin.