Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant (23 page)

MISHIPISHU: THE GHOST STORY OF PENNY JAYE PRUFROCK

Mary Pletsch

Penny sucked in one last breath as she launched her body off the dock and into the water; then the raucous noise of the other campers was gone, and she hung suspended in silence below the surface of Lake Mishipishu. She reached out and tangled her fingers in the weeds that lined the lake bottom, and opened her eyes onto a brown-green otherworld.

The flavour of the lake seeped in through her nostrils, crept under her tongue.  Lake Mishipishu had its own unique taste: it was not the antiseptic chlorine of an indoor pool, nor the lively freshness of the river where she used to swim with Jessica back in fourth grade, four years and a lifetime ago when she and Jess had still been best friends. Lake Mishipishu tasted of deep, still water, and secrets half-hidden in muck and sediment.

Above her, the sun sent beams of copper light lancing through the skin of the lake’s surface.  A dark shape to her left might be a clump of thicker weeds, or perhaps a rock. Penny kicked out with her feet, exploring beyond the limits of sight. Her toes plowed furrows through the spongy muck; then they curled around something hard and rough-edged.

Her lungs smouldered with warning, but she folded her body like a jackknife and wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the object. She felt a sinuous tendril untwine itself from her find and slither away into the dim waters; the prize left behind was about the size of her palm, with pronounced edges not quite sharp enough to cut. She grasped it and gave her body permission to rise. Freed, her blazing lungs hoisted her skyward, a pair of fiery balloons.

Penny breached the surface and kicked to stay afloat. Her right hand scraped her brassy hair back from her face while her left clutched the object to her chest. The thing felt like stone, smooth and flat, save for a lump on one side. She blinked water out of her eyes and examined her discovery.

The anomaly was some sort of creature–a fossilized, copper-coloured, multi-legged beastie. Penny’s index finger traced the outline of ragged claws, submerged forever in stone. She wondered how many thousands of years the rock and its passenger might have lain under the surface of the lake before she found them and brought them back to the light.

The loud shrill of a whistle interrupted her musing.

“BUDDY CHECK!” yelled a counsellor as he paced back and forth on the H-shaped dock. The H-dock. anchored to the lakebed by four sets of chains, served as lifeguard station, diving platform, and outmost boundary of the Camp Zaagaigan swimming area. Penny frowned and looked around for her buddies.

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…