The Lake & 17 Other Stories Read online

  The boy looked at his feet, shuffling them in that innocent manner young children possess, and his face reddened. Damn, but his cheeks looked sweet filled up with blood as they were. Perhaps Beakle would have them for dessert tonight, maybe with a bit of sweet cream or cherry glaze.

  “Look here, boy,” Beakle squatted down so as to place his face right in front of the boy’s, though his knees howled in protest. He reached out with a gnarled hand and grasped the boy’s chin, raising it up so their eyes could meet. “This house is just old, like me. It is no more haunted than I am.”

  The boy remained unconvinced, and Beakle’s touch seemed to have spooked him. Probably the Twisting Disease; it had that effect on the young. The boy looked ready to bolt, Beakle had to do something quick.

  “You must not pay attention to rumors, boy,” he said. “Your mother needs you now.”

  The boy’s eyes brightened with moisture at the mention of his mother. Delicious! Oh, God, Beakle thought. Just two more bloody steps! His knees felt like they were on fire, but if he stood up now he would lose the boy, and that was not acceptable. He swallowed his pain and stroked the boy’s cheek – so tender! – with the fingers of his left hand.

  “Can’t you bring the medicine out to me?” The boy asked, his lip quivering.

  “I have to make it, yet,” Beakle said. He knew this one; he’d used it before. “And I can no longer reach everything in my kitchen, nor can I lift my kettle to the fire. I need a young, strong body to help me.”

  The boy turned his head back down the street, possibly envisioning his mother lying in bed, coughing and whooping in the late stages of plague. Then he turned, and Beakle saw resolve in those little blue eyes. Inwardly Beakle jumped for joy; the boy was his! He maintained a calm, yet earnest exterior, however, lest he give the boy reason to doubt.

  “Ok,” the boy said. “For mother.”

  He stepped around Beakle and into the house. Beakle smiled, took one last look down the street, and stood. His knees creaked and spit fire at him, but he smiled just the same. The lad was inside. Time to get to work. He stepped through the doorway after the boy and closed the door behind him.

  He reached out to the lamp just inside the doorway and pulled the tinder from its post. Lighting the spark wasn’t as easy as it used to be, but he soon had the lantern lit, casting a dancing, if somewhat dim, light through the front room of the house. He shut the dampers almost entirely to preserve the lamp’s oil, and turned to find the boy staring at him from the hallway.

  “Where do we go?” The boy asked, his confidence apparently bolstered now that he’d entered the house and found it to not be as bad as imagined. “Where is your kitchen?”

  Beakle pointed down the hall. “Second door on the right, down the stairs.”

  “That’s an odd place for a kitchen,” the boy said.

  “I keep my herbs down there, as well as the big kettle.”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders, turned away, and headed to the door. Beakle followed behind, shuffling his old man’s gait and feeling an old man’s pain in his limbs. He ignored them. Soon he would eat, and he always felt better afterward. He watched the play of the boy’s calves as he walked down the stairs. Magnificent! Maybe he would eat the calves first, instead of the thighs. Decisions, decisions! He smiled to himself; it really didn’t matter which part he ate first. With this young lad, each piece was likely to be just as good as the next.

  Beakle closed the basement door behind him and slipped the key into the lock. There would be no escape now. He started down the stairs, gnarled hands reaching to the wall for his shovel. One quick blow and the boy would be out long enough for Beakle to tie him up and stick him in the huge iron pot he kept downstairs. The boy would awaken to water that was just beginning to get warm. Beakle could not suppress his smile; he would have to boil the boy slow. That was best, anyway; it made for more tender meat. The idea excited him. Why, even his Old Man Downstairs was starting to stir, which surprised him. How long had that fellow laid flaccid and dormant? Too long, he thought. Maybe he would do something about that soon, as well.

  The boy reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into the basement. The feeble light cast little illumination, and the boy stood half in and half out of the shadows. Beakle stood behind him.

  “Up there,” Beakle said. “The orange pot. That’s where I keep the thistle root.”

  The boy reached up, grasping for the pot, still with his back to the old man. The pot was just out of his reach, so he stretched further, and his fingers brushed the edge of the handle. Beakle raised the shovel high overhead, then brought it down on the back of the boy’s head with such force the shock traveled through the shaft and into his twisted hands. Beakle knew to expect the jolt, it happened every time, but expecting it didn’t lessen it at all. Pain flared in his wrists and hands, and Beakle clenched his jaws and eyes shut against it. It would pass soon enough, and then he could tie the boy up, put him in the pot, and have at it. Well worth a few moments of agony.

  Beakle waited for the pain in his hands and elbows to subside, then he opened his eyes.

  The boy stood facing him, not seeming at all the worse for the blow, and regarded him with a curious expression on his face. Amusement? Then the boy’s eyes began to glow, looking like a coyote’s near a campfire. Beakle sputtered and staggered back, his frail hands clutching the shovel’s handle. This couldn’t be? He’d heard the blow connect. Heard it and felt it. The boy should be unconscious.

  “I knew it,” The boy said, and pointed an accusing finger at Beakle. “I knew you weren’t a nice old man. Thank goodness, I was getting hungry.”

  With that, the boy began to squirm and groan. He twisted and writhed until he fell to his hands and knees, and then he began to scream. His high-pitched shriek pierced through Beakle’s heart and shriveled it with fear. What the devil is this? He thought. He turned and shuffled for the stairs as fast as his twisted knees would take him, dropping the shovel in his haste. It hit the ground with loud clang, and he stared at it, noting the blood on the blade. He’d hit the boy plenty hard, of that he was sure.

  He reached a gnarled hand for the railing, trying to ignore the boy’s screams, which seemed to grow louder as the seconds passed. Just as he put his foot on the bottom step, the screams changed in timbre and length. Instead of long, loud screeches, the boy now issued a series of short, chuffing grunts. It almost sound like… laughter?

  “Where are you going, old man?” A gruff voice behind him asked.

  Beakle turned, but the boy was gone. In his place stood something else, something dark and hairy, like a large dog standing on two legs, but more muscular and solid than any dog he’d ever seen. The thing stood about five feet tall, with long, sinewy arms that reached almost to the floor. Beakle shuddered as he noticed the thing’s hands, which would have looked almost human had it not been for the five-inch claws jutting from all ten fingers. Its muzzle parted in a wicked, canine grin, revealing a set of gleaming white fangs.

  Beakle screamed and turned and tried to run up the stairs, ignoring the bright flash of pain in his knees and hips.

  He got about three steps up when a wave of searing agony tore through his shoulder. He brought his hand up to it and found four pointed things sticking from it. The creature’s claws; it had skewered him. The tips of the claws curled inward, grabbing hold of him by his torn flesh, and Beakle felt moisture build in his eyes.

  He was jerked backward, the smell of his own blood in his nose. The pain in his shoulder burned like gunpowder. The boy/creature slammed him to the hard floor of the basement and stood over him, licking his chops. A slow strand of drool fell from its jaws and landed on Beakle’s cheek, but he didn’t move to brush it away.

  “Yes,” the thing said, sniffing the air. “Yes, I can smell it! You smell good, old man. Fear is a wonderful spice!”

  “Please,” Beakle said, sobbing, “Please, boy, don’t hurt me.”

  The thing snorted out another bit of la
ughter, then nodded his head in the direction of the big pot in the middle of the floor. “The spider and the fly,” the thing said, echoing Beakle’s earlier thought. “Which is which, old man?”

  “Your… your mother,” Beakle said in a last-ditch effort to save his life. “I can help her, you know. I can.” He pleaded, but pain and loss of blood did their work, and he started to grow dizzy. “I can help…her,” he mumbled as his vision faded.

  More chuffing laughter. “What mother?”

  Brothers

  Wide-eyed, Mark blasts by me as I peek around the corner.

  “Come on. We gotta go!”

  “Why? What is it?” But I am asking Mark’s dust; he never even slows down. Now terrified, I take off after him, but he is too far ahead. “Mark, wait! You know I’m not as fast as you.”

  I think I hear him shout, but I can’t quite understand the words. “What?”

  Suddenly I am yanked backward. All I can see is a snarling, berserk mass of fur and teeth.

  Mark’s voice comes to me from up ahead, “I said, that’s the point.”

  Bobby and the Mayor

  Adults never believed a kid. Ever. All over town people were dying, and all the mayor could say was “Where’s your proof, Bobby?” Like a ten year old boy couldn’t have a brain.

  Well, this time Bobby came prepared. He reached into his backpack and pulled out the evidence. It was heavier then it should be, although that could just be a trick of his mind. “Here’s my proof.”

  He dumped the bag over the polished desk. The mayor screamed when his wife’s head rolled out, trailing blood behind it.

  “They ate the rest,” Bobby said.

  Cold

  Cold. After the pain fades, that's the first thing you feel.

  Your insides shrivel up and your first instinct is to wrap your arms around your chest for warmth. But it doesn’t help. Soon you realize your body doesn’t shudder like it used to. Your flesh doesn’t pebble with the chill and your breath no longer fogs the air. That’s because the cold isn’t outside, but inside.

  After that it doesn’t take long to figure out how to warm yourself. The very first time you see a stranger walk by, you just know.

  Fresh blood is so very warm…

  Writers Wanted

  Writers of short fiction wanted.

  Jim checked the ad again, wanting to make sure he had the right address. The building looked deserted.

  2122 Wilshire Blvd.

  It was the right place. He knocked.

  An old man answered. “You a short fiction writer?”

  Jim nodded.

  “Come in.”

  The old man led him down a long hall to a sturdy wooden door. “I do enjoy short fiction writers,” he said as he opened it and stepped aside.

  Jim gasped. Blood and gore covered the walls. He felt a sharp pain in his back.

  “They taste so much better than novelists.”

  The Lake

  This time of year, the water in Green Lake is so thick with algae you can’t see past the layer of light green goop floating just beneath the surface. The combination of large volumes of rain and direct sunlight contribute to a generally nasty-looking body of water, yet people still swim in it. They paddle their kayaks across it or run their powerboats through it. Hell, they even water ski in it. And why not? After all, it’s just algae, right? Nothing to stop a person from, say, skinny dipping or fishing out a nice bass.

  That’s what Wally said as he walked out the door to the cabin and strolled down to the beach. I told him the water was disgusting, and I wasn’t going near it. Being from the south, I’m not used to Maine lakes, and Green Lake seems to get more algae and moss than most. But Wally grew up in the area, and swam those nasty green waters as a kid.

  “It’s perfectly fine,” he told me, but I wouldn’t budge. No one else wanted to go, either. He shook his head at us. “Come on, guys. It’s gorgeous out, and there’s supposed to be a full moon tonight. Let’s go have some fun!”

  “Can’t we go to a pool or someplace clean to swim?” I asked.

  He just laughed and walked out the door, saying something about me being too picky.

  That was noon. Nine hours later, Wally still hadn’t come back to the camp. The guys and I started to worry. There were only five of us, plus Wally, and only he knew the area. The rest of us had flown in from various parts of the country in response to an ad online. Wally placed it. It said he needed five housemates for the summer to split the cost of renting a small camp on the shores of Green Lake. I’d just finished my freshman year at Baylor, and a quiet summer on a lake sounded like the perfect getaway after the bustle and noise of Dallas.

  The other four were all college guys like me. And believe me, after the first week in Maine, we all started to think we should have gone to Miami for the summer like every other red-blooded college kid in America.

  “Should we call the cops?” Brayden asked.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “We’ve got enough pot here to choke a horse and you want to call the fucking cops? How stupid are you?”

  “We could hide it.”

  “It’s too risky.”

  “I got an idea,” Spencer said, “Let’s smoke it all, then call the cops.”

  Brayden, Spencer, and Josh laughed so hard I thought they were going to choke. Mickey and I just stared at them. Between those three, they’d managed to smoke half the weed already, anyway. That’s all those guys did; smoke Wally’s weed and complain that there weren’t any women in the cabin. Like they could have found one who wanted to fuck them, anyway. Bunch of lazy, stoned-out-of-their-mind hippies.

  “We’re not calling the cops,” Mickey said. “Besides, which one of you bright guys even has a fucking signal out here?”

  None of us did; there wasn’t a tower around for miles.

  “And we aren’t smoking any more weed tonight, either,” he continued. “You guys already smell like a burning pot field.”

  Brayden’s face fell at the mention of no more weed. I felt a stab of anger at him. How his life must have sucked so…Oh, no. We’re out of weed. It’s a crisis! Sheesh. Some guys just don’t want to grow up. Meanwhile Wally was out alone somewhere, maybe hurt or dead. But hey, we had weed, so all was cool.

  Ugh.

  “Listen, guys,” I said, “We need to go look for him. He should have been back by now. He could be hurt. Or worse.”

  All four heads nodded, but Brayden chimed in and said he wasn’t going unless he could bring a doob or two. “To chase away mosquitoes,” he claimed.

  “Whatever,” I told him. “Let’s just fucking go.”

  We stepped outside as a group – Brayden brought three joints, of course, and happily puffed away at the first one with Spencer and Josh – and headed toward the shore. There wasn’t much light, but Mickey had his Coleman lantern set on high, which lit our way to the lake. At one of the few other camps, music and laughter pumped from windows propped open against the oppressive humidity and heat of a Maine July. Most of the surrounding camps don’t have air conditioning, so open windows and ceiling fans are about as good as it gets unless you wanted to sit in a tub of ice water.

  “Man,” Spencer said, “We should be in that camp. Those guys are having a blast, and there are girls there.”

  “Just start looking,” Mickey snapped. “The sooner we find Wally the sooner you guys can go get your party on, OK?”

  That seemed to satisfy the guys and they managed to quit complaining the rest of the walk to the lake. Since the camp is only about a hundred and fifty feet from the water, that isn’t saying much.

  We got to the shore and Mickey held up his Coleman. “Wally?” he called, “You out there?”

  We couldn’t see a thing. Just water. Green Lake isn’t a big lake, not compared to, say, Lake Tahoe, or even nearby Moosehead Lake, and there aren’t nearly as many camps around it. But at night, in the dark, it can seem a good bit of swimming to try and cross it, and there’s a lot of shoreline t
o cover. And that algae glowed in the light of the Coleman like a phosphorescent ooze.

  We decided to split up. Since Mickey and I were the only ones who brought Colemans, he started out going south along the shore, taking Spencer and Josh with him, while Brayden and I headed North. The idea was to meet up at the cabin at midnight if we didn’t find Wally because by then the three stoned guys would be sober enough to talk to the cops, at least in theory. We’d have to stash the weed, but by then it’d be inevitable; the police would have to become involved. One of us would have to grab the jeep and drive into town so we could use a cell phone to call the Aroostook County Police.

  Brayden and I walked north along the shore for about an hour, but there was no sign of Wally. Brayden kept giggling and puffing, puffing and giggling. You know the type; they don’t take anything serious. When he stopped to light his third joint I just kept walking, wanting to put a little distance between us just in case we did end up having to call the police. I could smell Brayden from twenty feet away, and I didn’t want to smell like pot.

  “Hey, wait up,” Brayden called. “Don’t you want a hit?” I ignored him and kept walking.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, still giggling. “More for me.” Then he jumped into the lake and started to splash around, making a ton of noise in the process.

  “Damn it, dude,” I said, “Would you cut that shit out? It’s annoying.”

  Brayden didn’t stop splashing, but he did stop giggling. He gurgled and sputtered and tried to say my name but couldn’t seem to get it out. I started to worry he was too stoned to be in the water and might drown, so I turned around to see if he needed help. I immediately wished I hadn’t.

  Brayden wasn’t so much in the water as he was lying on top of it. Glowing green algae covered his torso like a blanket, slowly creeping up his body toward his face. His mouth was underwater, but he tried to kick his neck up and scream. Something held his head down, and as I watched, the algae crept over his head and covered it. I heard his muffled voice coming from under the green hood for another moment or so, then he slid under the surface of the water, his feet kicking so hard one of his Sketchers flew off and plopped in the grass next to the lake.