Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (27 page)

I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t talking directly to me, that he had forgotten I was even there with him. He stared out across the water, and I remember thinking that the lake must look weird to him, too, because his eyes didn’t appear to be focused quite right. They had a milky, glazed cast that scared me. They reminded me of the eyes of this blind kid in school, Hank Randall.

The wind picked up, and as it did, a low, hollow whistling sound filled the air. At first, I thought the sound was coming from behind me, maybe from the old shed, but when I turned around and looked in that direction, the sound shifted and seemed to come from behind me again.

I turned quickly, trying to get a fix on it, but no matter where I looked, the sound thrummed softly, like someone was standing behind me, blowing gently into my ear. At times, I imagined it was the faint sound of distant music. And with the sound, the smell I’d gotten a whiff of earlier got much stronger, smelling like something rotting.

“It was in the summertime,” my dad continued, still acting like he was unaware I was there with him. “Just around sunset ... like this ... only in the summer. We’d been playing baseball, down at Pingree Field. We’d ridden our bikes to the game and were heading home, but for some reason ... for some goddamned reason—I don’t even know whose idea it was—we decided to come out here instead.”

“What, were you gonna go swimming or something?” I asked.

The sound of my voice barely intruded on his awareness. He shook his head slowly as through he was in a dream and was struggling hard to wake up. I was gagging from the decayed smell that was getting stronger. It reminded me of rotting fish or sour vomit and ... something else ... something so horrible and noxious that it’s still indescribable, no matter how hard I’ve tried over the years to find words for it.

“Yeah, but then ... Billy disappeared,” my father said, “and ... Oh,
Jesus!
It’s happening again!”

I looked up at my dad, wondering what he was talking about. In the gathering gloom, his eyes widened, and he pointed with a trembling hand out over the water. The flat, dimension-less surface of the lake was still, perfectly smooth and unruffled, but now that the sun had dropped behind the trees on the far shore and stars were starting to twinkle in the sky, the color of the water rapidly deepened as well.

Too rapidly
, I thought, and then my father whispered hoarsely, “See ... Out there... There it is.”

As much as I didn’t want to look, I tracked my eyes out over the lake. After a moment or two, I saw what he meant. The center of the lake was ...
thickening
is the only word that comes to mind. The water was turning a deep black—as black ... no,
blacker
than the oncoming night. And in the very center of the lake, a round patch of darkness was spreading out slowly like an ink stain seeping into cloth. But this stain didn’t fade on the edges as it spread out. It deepened, if that’s possible, as thick, winding strands of pitch black radiated out from its center.

I stared at what was happening to the lake, overcome by a feeling of intense vertigo. I couldn’t resist the nauseating feeling of falling forward, spiraling headfirst into that thickening darkness. No matter how desperately I wanted to look away, I couldn’t. Twisting, waving, black arms reached out to me, and I watched in stunned silence as a hideous shape gathered and took on a three-dimensional quality as it rose up out of the water. Coiling strands of darkness clawed at the night, spraying fetid water in all directions. I knew, if that darkness reached me … and touched me, I would be destroyed by a cold vacuum as deep and lifeless as space.

“...
run
...”

I heard the word distantly. It barely registered in my brain. I couldn’t move ... I couldn’t breathe or swallow or blink my eyes. Frozen with fear, I didn’t move as this darkness, deeper than the gathering night, quivered and rose above the water’s surface. Black tendrils twisted and writhed, taking on hideous shapes that I was and still am powerless to describe. The horrible stench of rot and death filled my throat and chest, gagging me.

“
Bobby! Run! It’s real! Get the hell out of here! Now!
”

My father’s voice came to me as if from an impossible distance, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Vaguely, I knew I had to save myself, but I was frozen with fear, riveted where I stood.

The black, amorphous shape shifted and grew into impossible dimensions as it covered the night sky, blocking out the stars and casting a thick shadow across the land. Thick, rounded shadows streamed across the ground, swallowing, embracing everything in their path as they moved closer and closer to where my father and I stood.

Still unable to move, I suddenly felt something grab me roughly by the shoulders and spin me around. As soon as I wasn’t looking at the monstrosity on the lake, its hypnotic spell was broken. My body was rigid as I lurched forward and then, just to keep my balance, I started to run.

Even after all these years, I find it impossible to describe the fear that gripped me.

It wasn’t just my imagination.

The cold and horrible emptiness of that darkness gathering behind me filled me with terror. I realize now, all these years later, that I wasn’t just imagining it. There was a cruel, unfathomable intelligence inside that darkness that didn’t so much want to destroy me as it had no awareness or regard for pitifully small human fears and emotions. It was the cold, uncaring destructive power of the eternal void that swept away whole worlds as easily and unthinkingly as it destroyed human life.

I have no idea how, but somehow I made it back to the car. I have a single, clear mental image of my hands fumbling to open the car door open, and then, more vaguely, I remember hurling myself onto the front seat and slamming the door shut behind me before rolling onto the car floor.

Even then I knew I wasn’t safe as I cowered on the floor, whimpering and curled up in a fetal position with my head down and my hands covering my head. The darkness outside was still rising, still swelling and gathering power, sucking energy from the night. I heard a soft, strangled cry, but it was a while before I realized I was making the sound. By the time I did, I knew ... I could feel that the darkness had retreated. My face was streaked with tears and snot as I cautiously raised my head and looked down toward the lake.

The night was too dark to see clearly, but the stars were shining through the trees. Behind me, a half-moon had risen, casting a silvery glow over the shore. Long dark bars of the shadows of trees scored the shoreline like pinstripes. I remember being surprised that the lake now looked like it was back to “normal,” whatever the hell
that
means. Its water reflected shimmering starlight, and far out in the center, I could see that a gentle breeze was ruffling its surface, giving the lake a beaten-metal look.

“
Dad?
” I called out in a strangled voice.

I raised my head and slowly unfolded my body, looking all around.

I already knew the terrible truth of what had happened.

My father was dead ...
gone
... destroyed by that indescribable darkness that had risen out of the lake.

He was gone, and I—somehow … for some reason—I had been left alive.

“I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

I haven’t got any clear memories of what happened after that. I know from what my Uncle Mike told me afterwards that I managed to drive the car out of the woods. How, I’ll never know. After I got onto the main road, I ran off the shoulder of the road, smack into a tree. A passing patrol car found me unconscious behind the wheel some time later. I told the policeman that my father was missing, and he went back to look for him, but—of course—they never found him. The authorities concluded that he’d gone for a late night swim and had drowned, but his body was never recovered.

I knew different, but I never told anyone—not even the police—what I had seen. I knew no one would ever believe me. They’d think I was crazy, maybe even take me away from my aunt and uncle, and lock me up in a nut house.

For years, I was consumed with grief over losing my father, but more than that—infinitely more—I was filled with the deep, indescribable terror that has filled me ever since that night … even in my dreams.

There’s still so much to tell ... about how my aunt and uncle raised me, and how I tried to deal with what had happened that night. How I tried to believe it hadn’t happened. I’ve never stopped feeling as though my entire life has been a dream, that I am a walking, talking phantom that has no business being here on the earth. I’ve kept this journal and, over the years, have worked and re-worked my description of that night because I think it will help.

But it hasn’t.

Not really.

Ever since that night, I’ve been lost in a surreal feeling that absolutely nothing is real in this life ... nothing except the nameless horror that I saw and felt that night when I watched a dimensionless darkness rise up from the waters of Watcher’s Lake and take my father away from me.

Even now, one small, rational corner of my mind insists it had to have been a dream … that it couldn’t
really
have happened the way I remember it, but I know what I saw.

And I wonder sometimes ... all the time, in fact, if it’s still out there ... if that nameless darkness really lurks in the depths of Watcher’s Lake ... if Watcher’s
Lake is, somehow, a lens that focuses whatever it is from whatever dimension it originates.

For the last several years, I’ve been having some disturbing dreams about what happened back then. I’ve been toying with the idea of driving up to Hilton just to take a look around. I still own the property around the lake, so I know no houses have been built out there along the shore. Everything should be exactly as it was that night more than thirty years ago when my father disappeared.

If I do go out there, I probably won’t go down to the lake.

Or if I do, I’m going to make damned sure I don’t get too close to the water’s edge ... especially if it’s late in the afternoon. I know how fast it gets dark out there in those woods.

Still, I wonder what that thing is that lurks in Watcher’s Lake, and I wonder what I might find if I were to drive down that narrow dirt road just to take a look around.

It’s a beautiful autumn afternoon. Maybe when Matt gets home from school, he and I will hop into the car and take a drive up north. I’m sure we can get to Hilton—and the lake—long before dark.

Every evening, it was always the same.

No matter what John Newcomb did, just after the sun had set, its glow still lingering in the sky, he found himself halfway across the metal footbridge that crossed the
Presumpscot River on the old black iron railroad bridge a mile or so out of town.

The river had many moods, and staring down through the waffle-shaped metal grating, John was always fascinated by the darkening water rushing by less than twenty feet below.

Like the sky, the river was never the same. Sometimes its surface caught the fading colors of the sunset, reflecting back the brilliant swatches of red, yellow, and gold that shot across the sky in the summer or, in winter, lit up the horizon with vicious streaks of purple and orange. Night after night, John watched the light and deepening shadows shift across the water’s surface until they faded to black. On other evenings, when the sky was overcast, the river looked like a sheet of dull, beaten tin dimpled here and there where bass or sunfish popped up to the surface to snap at low-flying insects. Other nights, when it was raining or snowing, the water fairly vibrated with concentric ripples. And still other evenings, the river appeared to be as silent and black as the rusted bridge that spanned it … as black as the thoughts that filled John’s mind because every night, no matter how much he tried to vary his routine so he wouldn’t end up here on the bridge at the same time, he always did.

Recently, as the shadows deepened from gauzy gray to deeper black, he had started seeing another person, standing at the far end of the bridge.

John always froze where he was, halfway across the bridge, unable to move forward or back when he felt this person’s gaze turn to him. He tried not to look directly at the person, but he couldn’t stop from taking sidelong glances at him.

At least he assumed it was a man. In the gathering darkness, it really was neigh on impossible to be sure. The shape certainly appeared too large to be a woman, but then again, the stooped shoulders and bowed head certainly didn’t look all that manly, either. And every night since he had begun to appear, the stranger would hesitate at the far end of the bridge as if he didn’t dare cross while John was standing there, gazing down into the swirling water below.

What really bothered John was knowing … or at least suspecting … who the figure lurking in the shadows might really be. After so many nights of standing there, pretending not to notice him, John had come to the conclusion that this was, in fact, Death … waiting for
him
to cross over the bridge.

Of course, night after night, John also told himself that such a thought was ridiculous.

If Death was, indeed, a “person” who was after him, He (and John always thought of Death with a capital letter) could easily chase him down and claim him.