“I’m a girl. I can’t be a sissy.”
“Can too.”
“Can’t can’t can’t can not!” She splashed him again. “Besides, Mama just fixed my hair.” He thought Gail’s hair was probably really long, but he didn’t know for sure because she always kept it wrapped around her head, held in place by a huge hair clip. “And there’s nothing to see, either. It’s not like it’s the ocean, with fish and stuff.”
He had had this same conversation with her each day since their families arrived, and it always stopped right there. Charlie’s home in Virginia was less than an hour from the coast. In the summer they went to the beach at least once a month, and while Katie couldn’t wait to get there, Charlie was less enthusiastic. It was kind of exciting being in water that was always moving, but in the shallows, which was as far out as his parents would let him go, the water and the sand were constantly churning into each other. Even on a sunny day the water was grey, and if there was anything interesting beneath the surface it didn’t matter because you couldn’t see two feet in front of you. The pool was better.
“Besides, you told me it took you a long time before you could duck your head.”
“When I was six. Gah.” He looked past her to the people sunning on the patio beyond the pool. Katie was still there, still talking to the same group of boys. She looked in his direction, smiled and waved. Smiled? Waved? Something else that never happened back home.
“So you’re just going to sit there and not come in?”
“Maybe in a little bit.” She kicked her legs in the water again but this time without splashing him.
“Ok,” he said, and pushed off toward the deep end. He paused to let the teenager on the diving board do her cannonball into the water. When she surfaced, shrieking happily, he bent at the waist and dove. As the water covered him, he felt a sting where he had scraped his shoulder on the side wall of the pool. Halfway down, he looked back up and saw the blurred image of Gail on the other side of the water. He thought she was smiling at him, but he wasn’t sure. He also saw a small dark blob suspended near him. His shoulder must be bleeding. He’d need to get a band-aid when he got out of the pool.
The water still swirled from where the girl had cannonballed in. It looked like she had almost hit bottom before she shot back up. Charlie moved through the turbulence and went deeper. He wanted to see what was up with the drain cover. He wanted not to be talking with Gail and trying to think what to say next. He wanted, he realized for the first time since they had arrived, to go home where things were as he knew them to be.
But right now he just wanted to look at the drain cover. As he pushed himself toward the bottom, the pressure started against his ears. There was no nose clip on his mask, but he pushed its lower lip hard against his nose and blew until his ears popped. He kept moving down until he reached the bottom.
The cover still lay by the drain opening. It was coated in something that looked slimy. The water around the opening was still, and there was no sound. It was safe to approach.
Charlie pulled himself along the bottom with his hands. The chlorine was making his shoulder sting even more. His breath was ok, but the air in his lungs kept pushing him up. He peered into the drain.
The water in the opening started to churn and an arm reached for him.
It had a hand and fingers, but it wasn’t a regular human arm. It was something else. The wrist was too thick for the rest of it, and it was all covered in the same slimy stuff that covered the drain cover. The hand touched the front of his mask.
Thirteen feet underwater, Charlie screamed. All the air went out of his lungs and bubbled in front of him, so that he couldn’t see the drain or the arm that reached out of it. He backpedaled on the bottom like he was on land and felt the concrete scrape his feet. Then he pushed and shot himself back to the surface, kicking and thrusting as hard as he could.
When he broke the surface he choked and sputtered and gasped for breath, but before he could refill his lungs an arm pushed his head back under the water. He screamed again, thinking the arm had come out of the drain after him.
But when the arm quit pushing and he came back up, gasping, he saw that it was attached to the boy he had collided with earlier. There were two other boys with him.
“Hey, squirt,” the boy said. He motioned to one of the others, who reached out, ripped Charlie’s mask off, and tossed it away. Charlie heard a small splash where it fell, through the noise of all the people in the pool who weren’t paying any attention to what was happening to him.
The other two boys were the same size as the first one. They were all older than Charlie, maybe in junior high.
“You know what this is, little boy? This is traffic court,” the first boy said. “We need to teach you the rules of the road. You can’t just be running into people.”
Charlie sputtered and tried to tell the boy what he had seen, but the boy splashed water in his face, which started him choking again.
“Shut up, punk! I’m doing the talking here.”
“Don’t be looking for the lifeguard,” one of the other boys said. “He’s on break.”
“Taking a leak,” the third boy said.
“Getting laid,” the second said, and they all laughed.
Charlie hadn’t even thought to look for a lifeguard. He never paid attention to the lifeguard. He didn’t need a lifeguard. He was a good swimmer. He looked around frantically for his mother, for Katie, but he couldn’t see them anywhere.
“What’ll we do with him?” the first boy asked.
“Take him and toss him in the ladies’ room!”
“Take his trunks off!”
“Take his trunks off and then toss him in the ladies’ room!” They all laughed again. Charlie splashed and circled and looked for a way out, but they circled with him.
“Let’s drown him for a while first and then we’ll figure out what to do.” The first boy moved toward him, followed by the other two. Three sets of arms moved in and pushed him back under the water.
The arms, and then their whole bodies, pressed down and kept Charlie under the water. He had been able to take a breath before they pushed him under, but not much of one. He swirled and punched and kicked and tried to get away. One of his kicks connected with something that felt like a swimsuit that had something soft and bulging beneath it. Suddenly there was an opening as one of the boys pushed away. He yelled so loud when he broke the surface Charlie could hear him under the water.
Charlie twisted, turned, and plunged through the opening. This was his chance.
But instead of getting to the surface where there was air and his mom and Katie, and his dad somewhere, he felt his body bend at the waist and push itself back toward the bottom. Toward the drain.
He knew he was out of air, but somehow he was able to keep moving. He had to keep moving. Something was pulling him down. His head knew he should be drowning, knew he should resist, but his arms and legs kept pushing him down to the bottom and his lungs amazingly did not complain. He swam out of the churning water where the boys had corralled him into the clean transparency of the bottom of the pool. It was like looking through a telescope. It was like that song where the singer said he could see for miles.
When he reached the drain, the arm was still there. Now it was attached to a shoulder, and through the telescope view Charlie thought he saw a head emerging. It had eyes and teeth. It looked like the monster they had watched in that movie about Florida, then it looked like pictures he had seen of sharks, then it didn’t look like anything he had ever seen at all. The eyes didn’t change. They stared at Charlie and made him want to go closer. If he could just go a couple more feet things wouldn’t be strange anymore. Things would be just as they were supposed to be, and he’d never have to get out of the water again.
The creature in the drain reached out, and Charlie felt as if he could breathe normally if he wanted to. He extended his own hand.
Then he felt another hand grab his left ankle, and yet a
nother grab his right. He tried to kick them away. He didn’t understand anything that was happening, but he knew where he wanted to go.
The hands on his ankles held firm. As they pulled him away, he could see the eyes and the teeth and the head squeezing back into the drain through water that was churning and bubbling again. Then the shoulder and the arm followed, and finally the hand that, before it disappeared entirely, grabbed the drain cover and pulled it back in place with a clunk Charlie could hear as clearly as he had ever heard anything. And now the water was still. He felt his feet hit the air, and then the rest of his body, and finally his gasping, crying mouth and chlorine-burned eyes.
They laid him by the side of the pool. The sun filled his burning eyes, but he squinted and saw it was Katie. And Gail. Gail’s hair was wet and hanging in tangles down beyond her shoulders. It really was long. Katie was yelling at him, and Gail may have been crying, but Charlie wasn’t sure. His mother appeared, pushed the girls aside, and knelt down to see after her son.
Later Katie told him that Gail had seen the boys circling Charlie and had yelled for help. Katie heard and jumped in after him, and Gail followed her. When Charlie asked her what it was like to finally stick her head under the water, Gail said, “It was awful! It burned my eyes. I couldn’t see hardly anything.” Then she punched him in the shoulder, right where he had scraped it, and told him how scared she had been, using a word that Charlie had only heard other boys use.
His mother insisted that they go home. Dad wasn’t too happy about missing the last day of his meetings—He’s all right, isn’t he? Just keep him out of that goddamned pool—but Mom just stood there and stared at him, and Katie, who, like Charlie, usually got as far away as she could from their parents’ arguments, stood right there by her. So Dad tracked down the lifeguard who hadn’t been there and yelled at him, and Mom found the parents of the boys who had gone after Charlie and yelled at them. The lifeguard just said something about boys being boys and didn’t seem too concerned. Two of the boys’ parents said they were sorry and would punish their boys. The third boy, the one Charlie had run into, only had his father with him, and his father just said the same thing the lifeguard had said. Katie said they ought to sue the hotel but Mom gave her the same kind of stare she had given Dad and Katie didn’t say anything else.
Just before they left the hotel, Charlie’s mom asked him if he had packed his mask and snorkel, and it wasn’t until then that Charlie realized he had never gone back and gotten it from wherever the boys had thrown it. Katie went to look for it, but couldn’t find it.
Charlie didn’t say anything immediately about what he’d seen coming out of the drain. He thought about it for the whole long drive back, and when they got home he decided he wouldn’t say anything. He almost wrote to Gail about it after she started sending him postcards, but he didn’t do that, either.
How could he explain to anyone that when he had moved toward the creature in the drain, he had felt safe, and when he had looked into its eyes, he had seen himself?
He couldn’t tell anyone that. Ever.
When they got home Dad bought him a new mask and snorkel, and new fins that were full-foot and didn’t have a strap that would break. Charlie put them in the closet, but it took him until almost Labor Day before he could stick his head under the water again...
Even then, he didn’t dare open his eyes.
THROUGH MILKWEED AND GLOOM
Wendy Nikel
No one entered the bog unless they had to, but when Jacob Rey’s daughter went missing—the third child this spring, all from our neighborhood—there wasn’t much choice, was there? We all knew what had happened to them, even if the police couldn’t figure it out.
We gathered at the old Templeton place, which teetered so closely to the edge of the bog that Old Mr. Templeton could sit out on his back porch and watch the eerie bog-lights flicker. Some said the proximity had done something to him, altered him somehow and that’s why, at the ripe old age of ninety-two, the old man didn’t look a day over sixty.
Mama—refusing to have anything to do with it—dropped me at the door, her worry lines deeper, more pronounced than usual. As I walked up the porch steps, she leaned out the driver-side window and asked if I had my cell phone. Habit, I guess, since she knew as well as I did it’d be worthless out on the bog. I waved it at her anyway, and along with it the leather pouch she’d given me, heavy with the amulet she usually wore on her own neck, the one that had been passed down from generation to generation and was supposed to grant the wearer protection.
“Whatever you do,” she called out as I waited for Mr. Templeton to answer the doorbell, “stick with your partner. Don’t let them separate you. And wear that amulet. You’re all I’ve got, Hilly; I can’t lose you.”
“I’ll be fine,” I called back, but her words stuck strangely in my ears. I was used to Mama’s overprotective nature—that’s what comes from being the only child of a single mom—but something about her admonition went beyond the typical “call me as soon as you get there” nagging.
I must’ve been the last to arrive, which figures, considering how long it took to convince Mama to let me help. Everyone else was already there, gathered around Mr. Templeton’s table as if waiting for Thanksgiving dinner, but, instead of a turkey and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie, the table was filled with sharp, gleaming tools from his shed and maps Mrs. Ferris must’ve photocopied from the library’s reference section. She stood at the head of the table, wearing bulky, red waders that looked out of place with her cardigan and bifocals.
“I’ve compiled a list of mysterious disappearances from this part of town, dating all the way back to its settlement in the 18th century,” she said, holding up a three-ring binder, “to narrow down what specific sort of threat we’re dealing with here.”
I slid into an empty seat next to Gregg, who looked so pale I thought he’d pass out right there. “You okay?” I whispered, and he nodded dumbly, like one of those bobble-head figures you see at comic book conventions. The whole time, his gaze didn’t stray from Mrs. Ferris’s binder. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”
He looked at me like I’d grown fins and gills. “You think I’d turn down a chance of finding him?”
Him, of course, being Gregg’s brother, who disappeared when they were kids. It’d been over a decade now since the two had been playing hide-and-seek in the forest behind their house and Lloyd, the older of the two, had simply disappeared. I bit my lip and sat back to listen to Mrs. Ferris; there was no way I was going to be the one to remind Gregg the chances of finding his long-lost brother were astronomically small.
“I believe what we’re dealing with here is some form of supernatural water entity,” Mrs. Ferris continued, opening her binder to some sketches straight out of Grimm’s fairy tales. “Sprites. Nixies. Näcken.”
Around the table, murmurs arose, obviously from our newer neighbors. You didn’t have to live near the bog for long to realize that something about it didn’t follow the natural laws of the world. In my short lifetime alone, we’d seen surveyors, land developers, and city officials attempt to drain it, to map it, to tame it, and all were met with failure after failure. No one who went in alone ever came out, and the most recent team wandered in one day and emerged an hour later with full beards, convinced they’d spent months trying to escape it. For the following week, if you went out after dark and held your breath, you could hear the sprites—if that’s what they were—chittering with laughter at the trick.
“How do we get our children back?” In the back of the room, Jacob Rey held an honest-to-goodness pitchfork. With his wife beside him looking just as grim, they reminded me of the American Gothic painting I’d seen at the Art Institute on our field trip to Chicago last year.
Mrs. Ferris pursed her lips. “First and foremost, we need to protect ourselves. These beings are shape-shifters, so we’ll need a safe word, a code to indicate we are who we say we are. I suggest the word Grimm. We’ll provide steel
for everyone’s pockets as well; these can protect against drowning.”
I nearly snorted out loud. “If steel could protect against drowning, no one on the Titanic would have died.”
“Hilly,” Gregg scolded. “This is serious.”
I slouched into my seat, crossing my arms over my chest. I knew it was serious. I also knew the difference between supernatural and superstition and there was no way plain old steel would deter the bog. Still, when Mrs. Ferris passed out the stainless steel cutlery, I slipped the spoon into my pocket along with everyone else.
“You’ll be paired with Louis Bartleton,” she said.
“I’m going with Gregg,” I said. Sure, I felt bad that the Reys’ kid was missing, but at the end of the day, I was here to help him. “Neither of us are minors, and different types of water sprites target different genders. I’ll help him resist any sirens with damp hems, and he can hold me back if I start fawning over some handsome young fiddler.”
Her lips twitched as she thought, but finally she gestured to the pouch in my hand. “Did your mother give you that?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll probably be the best protected of all of us, then.” She nodded curtly. “She’s the only person I know of who’s gotten out of that bog alone.”
* * *
It was different than I expected, out there on the bog. Like most kids who’d grown up around here, I’d played on the edges, testing the limits of Mama’s patience by seeing how close I could get to the bog without going in it. But those moments of near-disobedience didn’t prepare me for the strangeness of it, the feeling of wandering in some other place, of finding oneself suddenly lost in the fog and gloom, where every step felt like a departure from the world…a departure from life itself.
“You never told me your mom went out on the bog,” Gregg said as soon as we were out of sight of the others.
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