It started, as these things often do, with stories.
They were only murmurs around town—but Habitsville is so cavernous that even the whispers have echoes. And so, it wasn’t long until the news reached me, Samuel Singer, Habitsville’s resident investigative reporter.
There’s something at the bottom of Lake Lura.
Have you ever heard of thassolaphobia? Many people have it, without ever realizing it. Though it's mostly used in reference to the sea, I would extend that definition a bit. Put simply, it’s the fear of vastness; wide open skies, the dead infinity of space—or, the murky surface of a large body of water.
That’s why most of the citizens stay away from Lake Lura. It isn’t especially huge—it’s pretty charitable to call it a ‘lake’ rather than a pond or a pool. But the terrifying thing about it isn’t how wide it is—it’s how deep. And this is why the idea that there’s something below the surface is so troublesome.
As far as we know, Lake Lura has no bottom.
Kids do it as a dare sometimes: traveling back through the trees and cattails, diving deep into the sun-warmed water. Their friends wait on the shore, and soon, the diver resurfaces, incredulous—there is no bottom to the lake.
One group of local scientists even tied a concrete block to the end of a rope, to lower into the clouded depths until it landed. But the block just kept sinking down, and eventually they ran out of rope.
And of course, there are those stories of people going missing. A young couple frolicking out in the woods, small children lost on their way home—they're groundless rumors, mostly meant to thrill teenagers and scare the little ones.
And then, there was Walter Emerson.
I don’t remember Walter Emerson very much, mostly because he was an old man when I was very young. He had the strange pastime of trying to fish in Lake Lura, despite the fact that there wasn’t a single living creature within it. Legend has it that it was on one such fishing trip that he disappeared—he and his grandson, Peter, who I went to school with—though most believe he merely moved away.
But I didn’t go to the lake that afternoon because of local folktales and urban legends.
I went because odd things were rising to the surface of Lake Lura.
It isn’t necessarily unusual to find old things in a small town pond. It is however, odd that these items belonged to our townspeople. Not belonged. Belong. As in, they were things they hadn’t yet lost.
I heard about the phenomenon from Heather, my coworker and friend over at the Habitsville Gazette ( yes, we’ve patched things up since the whole, uh, finger incident.) She went down to the lake to do a bit of reporting herself, when she found it—a framed picture of her parents and herself as a child. It was a photo I recognized, when she showed it to me. Because, of course, it is the same exact one that still sits on her desk at the newspaper office. Now, there sits two, seemingly identical.
I’ve done a lot more for a lot less, so of course, I had to make my way down to the lake.
There was no one else there, which wasn’t unexpected. If you’ve read other Habitsville stories, you’d know that it would take more than duplicating items being spit out of a pond to attract a crowd. It’s back amongst the trees, so I had to park my car by the forest’s edge and walk the rest of the way, a seldom-trodden path still beaten into the dead-leaf ground.
Seeing it made me shudder, though I wasn’t sure why. There was something eerie about the entire scene, and as I stood in front of it, I could tell why: it was completely and utterly silent. There were no insects buzzing by, no birds fluttering overhead—and most notably, there was nothing moving the water’s surface. It was smooth and flat, like a great brownish-green disk.
This was especially notable, because it was raining. Lightly, but enough to dampen my hair and coagulate on my lashes. And yet, no ripples appeared on the surface.
I watched it for a while, waiting.
And then, just as I thought I was going to have to turn back empty-handed, I saw it.
I’m an old fashioned writer. Before I go typing on my computer, I always like to handwrite out my stories and experiences—I find that my handwriting depicts that which clicking on a keyboard can’t—more often than not, the slanted characters of intense fear.
Despite knowing that my little red notebook was safe, laying on the passenger seat in my car outside of the trees, there it was. A dot of scarlet amongst the earth tones, my notebook floating on an old piece of cardboard. As it drifted closer, I could see that despite being in the lake, and the rain overhead, the pages were dry enough to flip in the wind. As they turned themselves, I could make out my own handwriting, plain as day.
It came closer to the water’s edge, and that thrilled me. I began to lean slightly, arm outstretched, anxiously awaiting the notebook’s approach. What was going to be inside? If I compared it, word for word, to my own notebook, would it be exactly the same? More importantly, what was going to be different?
It floated closer, just out of reach, as though it was teasing me. I dug my heels into the wet silt on the lake’s bank, and bent even further over the surface. I let my eyes drift down, just for a moment, a quick glance at my own reflection, captured perfectly in the glass-smooth surface of the lake.
And then, a slight slip of my foot, and I had fallen in.
My head was only under the surface for a second, my heart hammering in my chest. Drips of salty, stagnant water tasted unpleasant in my mouth, and I quickly pushed myself towards the shore. I had one foot on the sand, my body heavy with my water-soaked clothes, my other leg still submerged. But then, before I stepped all the way out, I caught sight of my notebook, dancing in the water on my right. I leaned over to reach for it, my hand closing around it’s familiar red binding, and then—
I saw it, for a moment. Something large, moist, and alive, wrapping around my wrist, and pulling me under.
I don’t know how long I was in Lake Lura, but it seemed an impossible length of time. The force around my wrist refused to let up, even when I thrashed and beat against it with my other hand. It pulled me deeper and deeper, the pressure on my head growing uncomfortable. The lack of oxygen was painful, and when I opened my eyes, black dots danced before them, interrupting the dark brown view from within the lake. My ability to fight eventually left me, my limbs feeling fuzzy and far away. And as the gears of my mind ceased to turn, one simple fact remained in my brain’s hollowed center:
I was going to die.
And then, my head broke the surface.
I gasped for breath, my lungs aching and raw. The pressure, the thing that had coiled itself around my arm had slacked. I scrambled out of the lake, a rush of adrenaline and relief flooding me as I coughed out more and more lake water.
The notebook I had almost died for was gone. I must have let it go when I was fighting for consciousness, which meant that the only thing I was leaving Lake Lura with was my near-death experience. At that point, I had no interest in stories—I just wanted to go home.
I made my way back out, until the tree line broke and I was quite literally out of the woods. I was incredibly tired, the fatigue of almost drowning unlike anything I had ever felt. But, there was a problem.
My car was gone.
It had stopped raining, which was good, It wasn’t a long walk back to town, but like I said, I was tired. My lungs were so damaged from the water that I couldn’t stop coughing, so I was out of breath the entire journey. So by the time I reached the cobble-stone streets of Habitsville, I didn’t have the strength to really pay attention to my surroundings. Until, I saw something that I couldn’t ignore.
I had just turned onto the Main St. of Habitsville, lined with the usual shops and boutiques. But, despite the hour, they all seemed to be closed, the lights off, the doors shut. But, this wasn’t what I noticed.
There, in the center of main street, was the longest table I had ever seen. It stretched down the length of the street, and it was decorated elegantly, like a Thanksgiving photo shoot for one of those Home Décor magazines my mom likes to read. There was even a large ice sculpture of a swan on one end, and a cornucopia of autumn fruits and squashes spilling out over the end on the other.
Seated in chairs on either side of the table was everyone I knew. Heather was there, eating ravenously, a napkin tucked around her collar. Phil the mailman was there, doing much of the same. Grease and sinew dripped onto his chin, making his skin shine in the setting sun. Derek, Mr. Chatter, Luke, Nora van de Velde, the mother and kids from the Planetarium— there was someone else there too, someone I couldn’t place at first, but as I watched their teeth tear into flesh, their eyes vacant with hunger, I recognized them: a much, much older Peter Emerson.
They were all there, and they were scarfing down the meal that had been laid before them. The meal, which upon closer examination, made bile rise to my throat, and my skin prickle with horror and dread:
There, browned from being flame-broiled, teeth hidden between burned lips clamped firmly onto an apple, was a body. A human body.
My human body.
My face was a dried husk, and someone had poked one of my eyes out with a fork, but still, I knew it was me.
I could hear the crack of my bones as they tore my individual ribs from their cage, mouths sucking the meat and fat from the cartilage. The little planetarium girl took my other eye, biting into it with a splatter like a cherry tomato. Those eating from my stomach dipped their knives into the coagulated fat and spread it like jelly over bread, every stab and prod of a fork making me cringe with phantom pains. Everyone was eating with such gusto there was no time for talking, other than grunts of appreciation over their feast.
That’s why everyone heard it when I coughed.
I couldn’t help it, that last bit of lake water working its way out of my lungs. The moment I made a sound, the chewing and tearing of flesh stopped. The citizens of Habitsville ceased eating, and all collectively turned to face me.
They stared at me, and I stared back.
They turned towards the collection of my bones that was piling up on the table cloth, and to the body that was slowly being robbed of its meat. Then they all turned back to me, as though gazing at the tender food that still remained on my skeleton.
Then, dozens of tongues licked dozens of lips.
I was already running when they got up from the table, the clatter of dishes rattling against the wood enough to motivate my legs to move faster than I thought they could. I was tired, so incredibly tired, and yet, I couldn’t stop. There was only one destination that made any sense to me, and yet at the very same time, made very little sense at all.
When I approached the forest’s edge, I stole a glance back, and I could see them. Moving together like an angry mob, bibs flapping in the wind, utensils raised to grab what they could, all of my friends and neighbors were sprinting towards me with eyes of gluttony.
I dove into the trees, brambles scraping against my skin, watching carefully for tree roots and struggling more and more to lift my sandbag legs. I could hear the chorus of heavy breathing behind me, the branches breaking as they tore like a freight train through the wilderness and towards their prey.
And then, I was back at Lake Lura.
Despite everything, I hesitated at the water’s edge. That thing, what had grabbed ahold of my wrist and almost drowned me, was still in there, I was sure of it. But then I thought of the small girl biting in my eye ball. I shuddered, took a running leap, and just as I heard the crowd break through the trees and into the opening, I was underwater.
I swam down as hard as I could, and though it was impossible to see through the murk, I could tell by the strange silence around me that none of the crowd had followed me into Lura Lake. I propelled myself deeper and deeper, far deeper than I would have ordinarily been comfortable with. But drowning at the bottom of the lake would be far better than the alternative.
I was losing strength quickly, and as my movements slowed and my mind grew blurred around the edges, I felt it—the smooth surface of something warm and alive, threading itself this time around my ankle. It hesitated for a moment, and the fear in my heart momentarily brought me back towards lucidity. I kicked once, in fear, and that was it—it began to pull.
It dragged me hard and fast through the water, down farther and farther, the liquid pushing so hard against me that it quickly filled my nostrils and my chest. Flitting thoughts of death danced before me once more, and then, it happened again.
My head broke the surface, and, spluttering, I pulled myself to shore.
Cool rain hit my already soaked skin as I coughed back up the lake water, my nose and chest burning. It would be a long time before I would be able to get that taste out of my mouth. I looked for any sign of a cannibalistic mob to burst through the trees, but there was nothing.
And so, I made my way back through the forest, and there it was. My car, my sweet, merciful car, waiting for me by the tree’s edge.
I rode back to town, and as I drove down main street, I could see it: the shops all open as they were meant to be, no long table filling the streets, my fellow Habitsville citizens milling about and enjoying their afternoon.
I longed to be in their shoes—blissfully unaware of the taste of the water of Lake Lura, unknowing of what lies deep, deep below the surface.
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Credits
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