North American Lake Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

She took one of the cat’s bones from its place on the wall and snapped it in half. The end was sharp and she scraped the flesh from her fingers until hard bone gleamed. Then she went to work again, and was pleased with the difference.

  “Hey, Dad.” Heather stood in the doorway, her overnight bag slung over her shoulder. Considering how little she wanted to be here, Sean thought she was doing a good job of putting up a positive front.

  “Hey, kiddo.” He looked over her shoulder and saw that she had parked directly behind his car again, like she always used to do, and like he had asked her not to do a million times. He actually felt a happy nostalgia at the sight of it. He kissed her cheek and took the bag from her shoulder. “Come on in.”

  She followed him in, rubbing her arms and shuddering. “Jeez, Dad, crank up the AC why don’t you.”

  “Heh, sorry. Your mother likes it cold.”

  “Mom? Since when?”

  “Since recently I guess. Listen, why don’t you go on up to your room and get changed or whatever. I’ll get dinner started.”

  “Sentimental as always, Dad. I’ve been in the car all day, and I really need a shower. Just call me when you’re ready.” She brushed past him on her way to the stairs.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She stopped.

  He held an arm out. “I’m sorry. Come here.”

  She did, and he folded his arm around her, drawing her close. He kissed her forehead. “It means a lot that you came.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m serious. It matters. Thank you.”

  “Okay. You’re welcome.” She returned his hug, and he soaked it in. “So where is she?”

  “Downstairs. She’ll be up.”

  She pulled back. “In the cellar? Okay, weird.”

  “She’ll be up. Go on now. Get yourself ready.”

  She shook her head with the muted exasperation of a child long-accustomed to her parents’ eccentricities, and mounted the stairs. Sean turned his attention to the kitchen. He’d made some pot roast in the Crock-Pot, and he tilted the lid to give it a look. The warm, heavy smell of it washed over his face, and he took it into his lungs with gratitude. He hadn’t prepared anything real to eat in a month, it seemed, living instead off of frozen pizzas and TV dinners. The thought of real food made him lightheaded.

  He walked over to the basement door and slid open the lock. He paused briefly, resting his head against the doorjamb. He breathed deeply. Then he cracked it open and poked his head in. A thick, loamy odor rode over him on cool air. There was no light downstairs at all.

  “Katie?”

  Silence.

  “Katie, Heather’s here. You remember, we talked about Heather.”

  His voice did not seem to carry at all on the heavy air. It was like speaking into a cloth.

  “She’s our daughter.” His voice grew small. “You love her, remember?”

  He thought he heard something shift down there, a sliding of something. Good, he thought. She remembers.

  Heather came downstairs a little later. He waited for her, ladling the pot roast into two bowls. The little breakfast nook was set up for them both. Seeing her, he was struck, as he was so often, by how much like a younger version of Katie she looked. The same roundness in her face, the same way she tended to angle her shoulders when she stood still, even the same bob to her hair. It was as though a young Katie had slipped sideways through a hole in the world and come here to see him again, to see what kind of man he had become. What manner of man she had married.

  He lowered his eyes.

  I’m a good man, he thought.

  “Dad?”

  He looked up, blinking his eyes rapidly. “Hey you.”

  “Why isn’t there a mattress on your bed? And why is there a sleeping bag on the floor?”

  He shook his head. “What were you doing in our bedroom?”

  “The door was wide open. It’s kind of hard to miss.”

  He wasn’t expecting this. “It’s . . . I’ve been sleeping on the floor.”

  She just stared at him. He could see the pain in her face, the old familiar fear. “What’s been going on here, Dad? What’s she done this time?”

  “She uh . . . she’s not doing very well, Heather.”

  He watched tears gather in her eyelids. Then her face darkened and she rubbed them roughly away. “You told me she was fine,” she said quietly.

  “I didn’t want to upset you. I wanted you to come home.”

  “You didn’t want to upset me?” Her voice rose into a shout. Her hand clenched at her side, and he watched her wrestle down the anger. It took her a minute.

  “I’m sorry, Heather.”

  She shook her head. She wouldn’t look at him. “Whatever. Did she try to kill herself again? She’s not even here at all, is she. Is she in the psych ward?”

  “No, she’s here. And yes, she did.”

  She turned her back to him and walked into the living room, where she dropped onto the couch and slouched back, her arms crossed over her chest like a child. Sean followed her, pried loose one of her hands and held onto it as he sat beside her.

  “She needs us, kiddo.”

  “I would never have come back!” she said, her rage cresting like a sun. “God damn it!”

  “Hey! Now listen to me. She needs us.”

  “She needs to be committed!”

  “Stop it. Stop that. I know this is hard.”

  “Oh do you?” She glared at him, her face red. He had never seen her like this; anger made her face into something ugly and unrecognizable. “How do you know, Dad? When did you ever have to deal with it? It was always me! I was the one at home with her. I was the one who had to call the hospital that one time I found her in her own blood and then call you so you could come! I was the one who—” She gave in then, abruptly and catastrophically, like a battlement falling; sobs broke up whatever else she was going to say. She pulled in a shuddering breath and said, “I can’t believe you tricked me!”

  “Every night! ” Sean hissed, his own large hands wrapped into fists, cudgels on his lap. He saw them there and caught himself. He felt something slide down over his mind. The emotions pulled away, the guilt and the horror and the shame, until he was only looking at someone having a fit. People, it seemed, were always having some kind of breakdown or another. Somebody had to keep it together. Somebody always had to keep it together.

  “It was not just you. Every night I came home to it. Will she be okay tonight? Will she be normal? Or will she talk about walking in front of a bus? Will she be crying because of something I said, or she thinks I said, last fucking week? Every night. Do you think it all just went away when you went to sleep? Come out of your narcissistic little bubble and realize that the world is bigger than you.”

  She looked at him, shocked and hurt. Her lower lip was trembling, and the tears came back in force.

  “But I always stood by her side. Always.” He took her lightly by the arm and stood with her. “Your mother needs us. And we’re going to go see her. Right now.”

  He led her toward the basement door.

  What is the story of our family?

  He led her down the stairs, into the cool, earthy musk of the basement, the smell of upturned soil a dank bloom in the air. His grip on her arm was firm as he descended one step ahead of her. The light from the kitchen behind them was an ax blade in the darkness, cutting a narrow wedge. It illuminated the corner of the mattress, powdered with a layer of dirt. Beside it, the bottom two feet of the support beam she had nailed the bird to; something new was screwed into place there, but he could intuit from the glistening mass only gristle and hair, a sheet of dried blood beneath it.

  “What’s going on here? Oh my God, Dad, what’s going on?”

  “Your m
om’s in trouble. She needs us.”

  Heather made a noise and he clamped down harder on her arm.

  “Katie?” he said. “Heather’s here.” His voice did not carry, the words dropping like stones at his feet.

  Our family has weathered great upheaval. Our family is bound together by love.

  They heard something shift, in the darkness beyond the reach of the light.

  “Mom?”

  “Katie? Where are you, honey?”

  “Dad, what happened to her?”

  “Just tell me where you are, sweetheart. We’ll come to you.”

  They reached the bottom of the steps, and as he moved out of the path of the kitchen light it shone more fully on the thing fixed to the post: a gory mass of scrambled flesh, a ragged web of graying black hair. Something moved in the shadows beyond it, small and hunched and pale, its back buckling with each grunted effort, like something caught in the act of love.

  Our family will not abandon itself.

  Heather stepped backward; her heel caught on the lowest step and she fell onto the stairs.

  Sean approached his wife. She labored weakly in the bottom of a small declivity, grave-shaped, worm-spangled, her dull white bones poking through the parchment skin of her back, her spine bending as she burrowed into the earth. Her denuded skull still bore the tatters of its face, like the flag of a ruined army.

  “Daddy, come on.” Sean turned to see his daughter crawling up the stairs. She reached the top and crawled through the doorway, pulling her legs in after her. In the light, he could see the tears on her face, the twist of anguish. “Daddy, please. Come on. Come on.”

  Sean put his hand on Katie’s back. “Don’t you remember me? I’m your husband. Don’t you remember?”

  She continued to work, slowly, her arms like shovels powered by a fading battery.

  He lifted her from her place in the earth, dirt sifting from her body like a snowfall, and clutched her tightly to his chest. He rested his head against the blood-greased curve of her skull, cradled her forehead in his hand. “Stay with me.”

  Heather, one more time, from somewhere above him: “Daddy, oh no, please come up. Please.”

  “Get down here,” Sean said. “Goddamn you, get down here.”

  The door shut, cutting off the wedge of light. He held his wife in his arms, rocking her back and forth, cooing into the ear that still remained.

  He pulled her away, but she barely knew it. Everything was quiet now. Silence blew from the hole she had dug like smoke. She could feel what lay just beyond. The new countryside. The unspeaking multitude. Steeples and arches of bone; temples of silence. She felt the great shapes that moved there, majestic and unfurled, utterly silent, utterly dark.

  He held her, breathing air onto the last cinder in her skull.

  Her fingers scraped at empty air, the remains of her body engaged in this one final enterprise, working with a machine’s unguided industry, divorced at last from its practical function. Working only because that was its purpose; its rote, inelegant chore.

  Acknowledgments

  If a heart is a country, then here is an atlas to mine. These people are my cities, my rivers, my haunted forests. I owe them everything.

  My friend and colleague Dale Bailey has been there since the beginning of this journey, offering good advice and stalwart friendship no matter the weather. My friendship with him has been one of the signal relationships of my life, and he has my faith and my loyalty until the end. Likewise Jeff and Ann VanderMeer: they’ve been my friends for over twenty years now; knowing them has made me a better writer and, more importantly, a better reader. They continue to enrich my life.

  I’m grateful to April White, my dear friend and the first reader for many of these stories, for more than I have room to say in a stray sentence like this (it would take a library); to Neal Stanifer, for talking literature and laser guns with me over those many nights at The Avenue Pub in New Orleans; and to Chris Shanik, for realigning my perspective more than once.

  Thanks to Lucius Shepard, whose influence on me has been profound, and whose subsequent friendship was a welcome surprise. (If my 21-year-old self had known that this would happen, he . . . well, never mind.)

  Thanks to the people from my New Orleans life: Monte and Maura White, Jim McCallum, Ed and Mimi Sammarco, Jon and Vanessa Brink, Brian Jones (from whom I stole the title to “S.S.”), Sara Danek, Ginger Lux, Anna Bourn, Sobha Ketterer, Kimy Brown, Vicki Robinson, Molly Knapp, John MacNichol, Wombat, Violet Vosper, Rick and Trevor; and those who are gone: Craig Stevens, Duane Watts, and dear old Sunbeam. My years in New Orleans were among the happiest in my life, due in large part to these folks.

  Thanks to the editors who bought these stories: Ellen Datlow (many times over!), Andy Cox, Terri Windling, Gary McMahon, and, of course, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant.

  And thanks to the many, many others who offered friendship, wisdom, or a kick in the ass along the way: Pam Noles, Karen Tucker, Laird Barron, John Langan, Jeffrey Ford, Jeremy and Alexa Duncan, Katherine Min, Maureen McHugh, Mark Hartman, Paul Witcover, Theodora Goss, Andy Fox, Livia Llewellyn, Steve Berman, Veronica Schanoes, Glen Hirshberg, Michael Bishop, Jason Van Hollander, and everyone from the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop, where I sometimes disappear for a week and pretend that the world is full of people who love stories.

  Publication History

  “You Go Where It Takes You” copyright © 2004 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in Scifiction, 2004.

  “Wild Acre” copyright © 2012 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in Visions Fading Fast, Vol. 1, 2012.

  “S.S.” copyright © 2005 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in The Third Alternative, 2005.

  “The Crevasse” copyright © 2009 by Nathan Ballingrud and Dale Bailey. Originally published in Lovecraft Unbound, 2009.

  “The Monsters of Heaven” copyright © 2007 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in Inferno, 2007.

  “Sunbleached” copyright © 2011 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in Teeth, 2011.

  “North American Lake Monsters” copyright © 2008 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2008.

  “The Way Station” copyright © 2011 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in The Naked City, 2011.

  “The Good Husband” copyright © 2013 by Nathan Ballingrud appears here for the first time.

  About the Author

  Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts in 1970 but has spent most of his life in the South. He’s worked as a bartender in New Orleans and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His stories have appeared in several Year’s Best anthologies, and “The Monsters of Heaven” won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

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