Dear Clay,
Long time no speak. Your mom told me you’ll be getting your degree this year. When you’re a hotshot doctor, don’t forget to write me a script for some grass. You’re probably too busy partying and getting laid now that you’re big man on campus, but you need to give your uncle a call sometime. Better yet, hop on a train and come spend a few days here. One of the local kids made an interesting discovery in the lake—a kind of slug that patches other bugs onto its body. May not sound totally enthralling, but if you’re still as morbid as you were when you were a kid, I think you’d get a kick out of it.
I’m here all the time. Surprise me.
Love,
Your Dastard of an Uncle
#
When Clay disembarked from the train, an empty station greeted him. Famished from the long journey, he banged on the door of the café inside the station. The sign indicated three hours remained before closing time, the lights were on, provender filled the display case, but no one answered his call. He gave up and got a coffee and two chocolate bars from the vending machines–the prices more digestible than he’d found them on the train. Exiting the station, he found himself at the top of a hill, the fog casting the landscape of white spruce trees in two dimensions.
The ground shook and he waited for the rush and clangor of an oncoming train, but nothing came and the rumbling subsided finally.
He unlocked his phone, opened the map app and programmed directions to his uncle’s house, then set off down the hill, nose in and out of his phone as he compared representation to reality. The path cut through downtown Potsdam, circled the roundabout, and passed by a park thickly carpeted with maple leaves. He stopped to peer in the window of a hardware store, where his uncle had bought him a magnet fishing game a lifetime ago, which Clay had spent hours playing, making long magnet trains of the fishes. The shop was empty, the lights extinguished. In fact, the entire town was dead, but then Potsdam had always been a sleepy getaway.
He reached the lake and skirted around the frontage road, which ran past more parks and shops and at last residences—shotgun houses on narrow plots of land. A strange sound attracted his attention, a croaking basso coming from the lake, swelling then waning like a tornado alarm. Out in the water, through the fog, he thought he could make out the silhouette of an island. Odd. He didn’t remember there being an island out in the water. As he watched, the landform vanished in the billows of fog, and when the atmosphere thinned, it proved to have been a trick of his imagination.
When he reached his destination, he tossed his coffee in the trash bin at the curb and gagged at the thick miasma released upon cracking it open. He knocked at the front door, tore open a candy bar, waited, knocked again, had a bite, then circled around to the driveway, checking that his uncle’s pickup was parked in front of the detached garage. It was.
He returned to the door, banged this time, tried the knob, found it open.
He popped his head inside.
“Winston,” he called. “Hello?”
The mirror in the front hall revealed his own furrowed brow and through the doorway, standing out in the lawn a small figure clad in yellow rain gear, watching his backside.
He reeled around to survey the front yard. A spruce branch was swaying as if something had just disturbed it, but otherwise the yard was empty.
He turned back to the house and entered, unshouldering his backpack and setting it down in the front hall. The familiar odor of his uncle—Speed Stick and Black Lab—greeted and comforted him, and time seemed to collapse. He was a kid again visiting during summer vacation. He turned into the cramped kitchen, an alley skirting the side of the house. The home was much narrower, much more claustrophobic than in Clay’s memory. He checked the fridge and snagged a can of beer. Winston, with a villainous, gold-toothed grin, had always snuck him sips of alcohol, Clay remembered fondly.
He poked around the house while he drank the beer and ate the second chocolate bar. Even entered his uncle’s room for the first time in his life. He loved the house, the touches of bachelorhood—framed Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin posters lining the hall, shag carpeting, a room of musical toys, model cars angled across every free surface, stacks of Playboys in the bathroom, a library of pirated movies obscuring an entire wall of the living room.
He picked out a zombie movie he’d never seen before, put it on, and plopped onto the corduroy couch (the same pullout he’d slept on in the 90s). He only half-watched the movie, instead allowing his mind to roam through so many childhood episodes. Until an unsettling scene roused his attention: the protagonist entered a kitchen in an abandoned town and passed by a fruit bowl filled with black sludge and a swarm of flies.
Leaving the movie playing, Clay returned to the kitchen and saw what he had only registered unconsciously an hour ago: flies buzzing around a bowl containing three deflated black bananas and a brown mottled apple leaking muck. He opened the fridge again and checked the expiration on the deli meats (gray-green) and milk (thick cottage cheese).
“Christ, Winston,” he murmured and then frowned at the sound of his voice, which exposed the emptiness of the place.
He noted the deepening grays of the fog in the alley and wondered what was keeping his uncle, whom he had assumed was out walking his now-ancient dog, Bartleby.
The sounds of flesh-tearing and screams burbled out of the family room, and he jumped, heart skipping a beat, then laughed with relief. Still, the sense of disquiet that had been gathering ever since he disembarked from the train soon washed back over him, slimy and cold, as off as the food in the kitchen.
#
After muting the zombie movie and fortifying his spirits with another beer, Clay threw his jacket back on and headed outside. Winston was a creature of habit, as Clay’s mother forever complained, given to scouring the beach with his metal detector or throwing tennis balls into the water for Bartleby to retrieve. In either case, he would be at the beach, and so that’s where Clay headed, tromping several blocks downhill towards the spread of fog. At the frontage road, he leaned over the wet metal railing, looking left and right down the white shore, listening to the wind, smelling the coppery tones of the lake water. There was something changed about the beach, the whole scene, that he could not quite put his finger on.
A spot of yellow caught his attention.
He studied it for several moments. A person.
“Someone at last,” he murmured and descended to the shell-coated sand. A sun-bleached branch caught at his jeans.Things crunched and shifted beneath his feet as he jogged toward the figure.
It was a child, he realized, with boots and slicker streaked with brown. The same one, he suspected, that he’d spotted in the mirror earlier.
The child appeared to be collecting shells, dropping them—clunk, clunk—into a large pail.
As Clay neared them, he began to wonder if he was being unwise. The boy or girl had probably been warned not to interact with strangers, and Clay’s parents had warned him never to interact with strange children without their parents’ present, in case he were to be accused of some indecency. But he was so relieved to have at last found someone, that he decided to risk it.
“Umm, excuse me.”
The child turned to him. A girl with a perfectly oval face, blue eyes spaced far apart, hair long and curly and of a blond nearing translucence.
“I’m looking for my uncle. Winston Stanford. Old dude with a beard and ponytail.”
“He’s around here somewhere,” she said in a thin voice and stooped down for more shells.
“You’ve seen him?” he asked.
Clunk, clunk.
She nodded. “I saw him yesterday.”
Clay chuckled. “But not today?”
She shrugged. Something in her eyes, the way she looked him over, made his skin crawl.
“All right. Thanks, kid.” He started to turn away.
“I can take you to him. If you want.”
“So … you did see him?”
“I saw him yesterday.”
“We’re going in circles here. I’m trying find him today.”
“He’ll be in the same place. More or less.”
“That does sound like Winston. Where?”
She indicated out towards the invisible shoreline.
Clay squinted in the direction she was pointing. “I don’t see anyone over there.”
“He’s there.” She began walking, and Clay fell in behind her.
A long silence suspended between them, their feet crunching and grinding the shells, some of which poked him through the soles of his thin walking shoes.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked at last.
“Saying sorry.”
Clay chewed on that for a moment.
“Sorry to whom?”
“My dad.”
Clay glanced around. The beach wall and the stairs had already vanished back into the fog. The world seemed to stretch around them endless and bleak like an Ingmar Bergman landscape.
“Is your dad around?” He tripped on a white log and cursed. “I haven’t seen anyone today.”
“He’s back where we were talking. More or less.”
Clay scrunched his nose at this—but continued on.
“The beach is bigger than I remember. Than when I was a kid. The water used to come up nearly to the wall, I think. Yeah, I remember throwing paratroopers into the water from up on the wall.”
“It drained out after the dream I had.”
“Wait … what? The lake drained?” In one sentence the girl had pinpointed what had been bothering him ever since he had arrived in Potsdam: he couldn’t hear the sound of the waves.
She nodded. “When I found Cree-Cree and everyone wanted to come and see him and dad wanted to sell him and I yelled and told him I hated him.”
“Cree-Cree?”
“Cree-Cree’s my best friend. It used to be a bug. More or less.”
He stopped walking, and his uncle’s email sprang into mind, the vague mention of some slug creature.
Noticing the silence, she turned back to him and smiled for the first time with small, uneven teeth. “Are you coming?”
“How much farther?”
“Almost there.”
The ground rumbled again, but it was much louder, more bone-rattling than it had been when he first left Potsdam Station. Yet he knew that it was the same sound.
“I think I’m going to head back,” he said, voice cracking.
“He’s right over here,” she said, watching him.
He nodded, ashamed that for a moment, a nine- or ten-year old had frightened him.
They walked a bit farther. The ground began to slope down, rather severely in a few places, and the smell of the water was growing stronger and stronger. Then the girl stopped.
“Here he is.” She bent over, picked something up and turned around.
She was holding a cracked skull, its mandible missing and the maxilla crushed to such a degree that only a handful of upper teeth remained. One a golden cuspid. What sickened him was how casually, how automatically, the anatomical terms came to mind when gazing at bones that had been or still were in the family.
“Winston?” he whispered.
“You can hold him if you like. You can take him back to his house. The rest of him should be around here. Cree-Cree won’t mind. He doesn’t use the bones.”
Clay looked down at his feet and gasped with the sudden realization that the entire beach was strewn with battered, splintered bones.
“I put Cree-Cree in my fish tank, and it squeezed the other fishes onto its body. Like different colors of Play-Doh packed together. It got bigger and bigger, and Dad took it away from me, and I hated him for it. They kept him at the town hall, so everyone could see him, and a naughty boy fed him a mouse and other pets. Cree-Cree only wanted to be with me, so it packed on everyone else in Potsdam and everyone else that came to get a look at him.”
The ground shook again, the croaking song re-sounded, and the bones around him danced and clattered. The girl looked out towards where the water had once been, and Clay followed her gaze. The ground looked as if it funneled downward, a whorl of discarded bones, and along that vortex a massive shadow lumbered in the fog, a shifting, sliding mansion. The wet, fleshy sounds sickened him.
The image of that mushy mass of apple he had seen not twenty minutes ago flashed now in his mind’s eye.
He was not sure why he had not realized until now what those brown streaks and splashes were soiling the girl’s slicker and galoshes, was not sure why he had not realized earlier that the coppery tones of the lake water were the coppery tones of—
“Cree-Cree’s coming,” the girl said. “I think he wants to have a look at you.”
—
Tim Boiteau lives near Detroit with his wife and son. His fiction has appeared in such places as Deep Magic, LampLight, and previously at Theme of Absence.
Uh oh, Clay’s in trouble. Good horror story, nicely written.