The hook fell on a Wednesday, and it took Davis Nielson.
Davis is an army veteran—he has a wife and kids but spends the majority of his days down at the rotary club, playing poker with his buddies and drinking stale beer. He drives an old flatbed with rust-colored peeling paint, and he lives somewhere between the cornfield and the farm stand.
The way Nielson’s friends tell it, Davis wasn’t having a good night. He got poor hand after poor hand, bad bluff after bad bluff, and by the end of night, he owed just about everyone quite a bit of cash. Davis’ best friend, Charlie Danes, walked back to his truck with him—he claimed Davis was pretty mad about the way the card game shook out, and Charlie wanted to discretely offer to pay part of the tab.
“We were talking, you know,” Charlie told me, as he sat across my desk at the Habitsville Gazette office, “I was trying to push a couple bills into his hand, Davis wasn’t having it—and he said so too, he said, ‘I’m a grown man, blah blah blah, I can pay for myself’ and all that—but he kept bringing up how he thought Bill Weathers was cheating, so you know he was pissed—”
“I thank you for the details, Mr. Danes,” I said with a polite smile. “But let’s try to keep the story moving.”
Charlie cleared his throat. “Right, okay,” he said. Then he paused. Like he didn’t want to get to the next part. And honestly, after hearing what he had to say, I don’t blame him.
“He was mid-sentence,” he said quietly, “when the damn thing came down.” Charlie shook his head, one hand nervously petting his scraggly beard. “It didn’t make any sort of sound. I don’t think Davis even knew it was coming. And it was dark out, so I couldn’t really make out what it was until—until—” he cleared his throat.
“Until it went through his back, and the tip came out the front of his chest.”
I stopped what I was writing in my notebook. I even put down my pen. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What exactly came out of his chest?”
“It was a hook,” Charlie said, “about this big,” he added, holding his hands apart about the length of a loaf of bread. “It was on a big wire or something, coming down from the sky. It got Davis on the line—he just sort of stopped talking, and then the blood started gurgling out of his mouth, like a baby spittin’ up—and then—and then—”
Charlie stopped himself, his mustache quivering with the shallow breaths he was taking. “I’m sorry,” he said, laying his hand on his chest, “I’ve been having chest pains since it happened. Doctors say it's stress.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “What happened next?”
“Well, it went real quiet for a minute. It was dark, and there was just the one streetlight outside the rotary, and Davis’ shirt was gray—no, green. A real dark forest green. So, the blood spread slow and the end of the hook didn’t stand out so good. But we both sort of looked at it, more surprised than anything.”
Charlie shifted in his seat. I could see his hands clasping and unclasping, the thin sheen of sweat beaded on his upper lip. He pulled his baseball cap down tighter, so there was more of a shadow on his eyes. “And then—well—” he took a deep breath.
“It lifted him up.”
I blinked. “It… lifted him up?”
Charlie nodded, a desperate, scared nod. “Like suspended him. Just off the ground?” I asked, picking my pen up again and scribbling in earnest.
“No,” Charlie said, his voice coming out as a croak. “It lifted him up. On and on and on, up into the damn sky, until I couldn’t see him anymore.”
Then, Charlie and I had a moment of silence of our own. A spasm built in the back of my throat, but the look on the man’s face told me that this was no laughing matter.
“And then?” I asked.
“And then, I called the police, of course,” Charlie said, clearing his throat. “But they didn’t believe me, not that I blame them. Probably thought I had too much to drink. There wasn’t any sort of evidence, just a bit of blood in the dirt. But Davis, he was gone. Totally gone.” He nodded towards the stack of papers on my desk. “I’ve read a bit of the work you do here. So, I figured, if everybody else thought I was out of my gourd I might as well see what you think.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. I knew better than to assume the man was crazy-- but the alternative was much worse. So instead of any of the things I was thinking, I said the one thing I always say to people who come into the Habitsville Gazette office looking for Sam Singer.
“I’ll look into it.”
I started with the police department, who have seen their fair share of the strange and unexplained-- but this story was too much for even them. They didn’t suspect Charlie of any foul play, but they didn’t believe his ‘giant sky hook’ tale, so they chalked up his report to an old buddy trying to cover for his friend skipping out on his wife and kids.
And as for the wife and son themselves, they weren’t too heart-broken about Davis being gone. I couldn’t get them to talk too much, but from what I understand, Davis was far more interested in other hobbies than being a family man.
“So, he wasn’t around much,” I said to Deborah, Davis’ wife, as she stared at me through her screen door. I hadn’t been invited inside, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to ask a few questions, as long as I was there.
“He wasn’t around at all,” Deborah said with a scoff. “He was always at the rotary club, or fishing in the lake. Anywhere but here.” I could hear kids’ cartoons playing somewhere in the background. If what Charlie had told me was true, that kid wasn’t abandoned-- their father was more than likely dead.
“Mhm,” I said with an absent-minded nod. I jotted a few notes down in my notebook, but honestly, I wasn’t getting much from this home visit, even less than I got from the police. Though it was going to be difficult, I feared I was going to have to tell Charlie the truth: that I couldn’t help him. “Thank you for your time, ma’am,” I said as I turned to leave the Nielson house.
And then, I stopped.
Something about what Deborah Nielson had said was odd. “He was always at the rotary club, or fishing at the lake.”
The lake.
There are many bodies of water in Habitsville-- mostly small creeks, and a few ponds-- but there is only one place that we ever refer to as the Lake. “Mrs. Nielson,” I said quickly, stepping back towards the door. The woman came back into view behind the screen, looking impatient. “When you say your husband was always fishing at the lake,” I paused, “do you mean Mr. Neilson was fishing in Lake Lura?”
I hadn’t expected her to laugh, but that’s exactly what she did.
“You should see your face, kiddo,” she said. “Don’t tell me you believe all the small-town superstitions? Davis sure didn’t, and I don’t neither.” She chuckled one more time, and then her grin fell, and her mouth hardened into a thin line. “Davis didn’t disappear in a lake, fairies and leprechauns didn’t drag him off-- and I’m pretty sure Santa had nothing to do with this, if you want to jot that down too.” She turned her head over her shoulder, back towards the sounds of the cartoons on the TV. When she spoke next, her voice was low. “Davis Nielson was a lousy husband and father. He’s taken his son to one baseball game, maybe to walk around the forest once. He’s a deadbeat.” She practically spat that last word. Then, she shook her head. “He’s told me he’s walking out on us about a hundred times. Looks like he finally did.”
And then, the door shut behind the screen.
If Davis Nielson had had any other fishing hole, my investigation would have been over right there. Between the lack of evidence and tipsy witness, there was no reason to think anything out of the ordinary had happened to Davis.
But Lake Lura changes everything.
If you’ve read my other account of the strange happenings surrounding Lake Lura,you, too, might share the feeling of dread that gripped me as I left the Nielson house. It’s a mysterious pool hidden in the woods, where no one dares swim or drink, not even animals. People go missing around Lake Lura, or lost objects float to the surface—and no one, in the history of Habitsville, has ever truly found the bottom.
Or, if you’re me, you fall into the water and nearly drown—and, of course, are treated to a disturbingly realistic vision of your own death. At least, I’ve convinced myself it was a vision.
But all of that is beside the point because Davis Nielson was nowhere near the Lake Lura when he disappeared. The rotary club is at least eight miles away.
Even by the time I got back to the Habitsville Gazette office, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Lake wasn’t just a coincidence. There is no such thing as coincidences, as far as I’m concerned. That’s why, once I got to my desk, I called Charlie Danes.
He answered on the second ring, and immediately asked me if I’d found out anything about Davis’ disappearance, and I felt a little bit guilty when I said no. There was a disappointed silence, but then, I asked my question, the reason I had called.
“Charlie, did you ever go fishing with Davis?”
The other man said nothing, but it wasn’t the ordinary quiet of idle conversation—this was a heavy pause, where something unsaid hung in the air. “No,” he answered, in a hushed voice.
“Why not? Not much of a fishing kind of guy?” I asked, probing carefully.
There was another long pause. “There just aren’t many good fishing spots in town,” he said gruffly, his tone dismissive.
“Well apparently there was one good place,” I said. “Mrs. Nielson informed me that Davis liked to go cast a line in Lake Lura.”
This was the longest pause of all, a deafening quiet, so still I could each individual crackle of the telephone line where Charlie’s stubble brushed the receiver. Then, the man spoke.
“I always told him he was stupid for going there.”
I had been speaking slowly and deliberately, trying not to betray too much earnestness. But when Charlie started to admit that there was something off about the lake, something he might have warned Davis about, I jumped at the chance to find out more. “Why Charlie?” I asked quickly, “Why is it stupid to go fishing in Lake Lura?”
Silence.
“I’ve got to go. Got somethin’ on the stove.”
Click.
I spent the rest of the day at my desk, debating.
The evidence was stacked against Davis, and against Charlie’s completely bizarre account of what had happened to him. Davis’ family wasn’t interested in getting him back, and neither were the police. If anything, I should be suspicious of Charlie. In any other town, he would sound psychotic. But not in Habitsville.
As my coworkers left, and the sun set, there was only one thing for me to do.
The drive to Lake Lura was rough, and at a certain point, I had to get out to walk. Though it’s been almost a year since I’ve traveled the woods around the lake, I still knew my way around. I couldn’t forget it if I tried.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t surprised when I actually saw the lake itself. I had forgotten that for all of its stories and superstitions, it was only a small pool of water. But the closer I got, the more I could recall the feeling of it. The eerie silence of the woods surrounding it, like every living creature was holdings its breath; the glassy, mirrored surface, that never wavered in the breeze; and of course, the dark, murky water that went down, down, down, endlessly.
But there was something else there, too. Something I hadn’t expected.
Charlie.
Sitting on the bank of the lake was Charlie Danes. He was holding something in his hands, something small, and as I neared closer, I could see that Charlie was staring down at a fishing rod.
A child’s fishing rod.
“Mr. Danes?” I said. He didn’t answer.
“Charlie?”
He didn’t look up, but he spoke. “Do you know what happens when you cast a hook into Lake Lura, boy?”
My heart rate sped up at the way his voice growled, low and grave. “No, sir, I don’t.”
“They say if you cast a line into Lake Lura,” he said, “the Fish gets angry.”
Charlie still didn’t look away from the child’s fishing rod, and I didn’t look away from him. I was confused, to say the least.
“A boy needs his father,” he said quietly, and then, somehow, I knew.
Charlie’s hands started shaking, and his head was low, and at first, I thought he might be crying. But when he finally lifted his face, I saw his skin flushed with fury, his teeth grit with rage. “I told him not to fish here!” He yelled at me from the other side of the lake. “I told him that! I told him!”
Before I could say anything, Charlie stood up, and reached for the rocks that littered the bank of the lake. And, with as much strength as he could muster, he started throwing them against the water’s surface.
The rocks crashed into the liquid like breaking glass, and all of the while Charlie was yelling a frenzied, mournful string of obscenities and regrets. “He didn’t deserve that—didn’t deserve—I should have—”
“Charlie!” I called to him, but he didn’t look at me.
He was breathing hard, and after he threw the last rock, he looked around for more, but found none. Then, he picked up the child’s fishing rod again. He stared at it for a minute, grunting with exhaustion and anguish.
Then, he raised it far above his head, and threw it into the center of the lake.
For a moment, it just floated on the surface. It was a kid’s fishing rod, after all, and not a very expensive one. My guess was that Davis had gotten it for his son for maybe one fishing trip, and then never went again. But of course, his son didn’t forget.
We stood there for a moment, the water settled back to stone, Charlie and I on either side.
“Charlie,” I called out to him, “You need to calm—”
I was interrupted.
I was interrupted by something terrible.
It was huge, wet, and dark. It rose out of the water so quickly that I only caught a glimpse of it. Waves crashed onto either side, splashing my legs, but all I could look at was the awful gaping maw that came from the depths. It didn’t have teeth—I don’t know why I expected that it would—like a huge earthworm, it was all gums. It had skin that looked like rubber, glistening and gelatinous in the light of sunset, like the exposed blubber of a whale.
I braced myself for death, braced myself to see Charlie die—but neither death occurred.
Instead, the mouth closed around the floating fishing rod, and sank back beneath the surface.
Charlie and I said nothing. We only shuddered. Charlie collapsed onto his knees, his jeans darkening on the soaked sand.
I was in shock, there was no doubt about that. Which is why, when I started to see it come down from the sky, my mouth couldn’t form the words. I couldn’t yell out, couldn’t warn him—I don’t think he ever saw it coming.
But nonetheless, swinging down from above, came the hook.
In the stillness of Lake Lura, I could hear the sickly squelch it made as it entered through the back of Charlie’s chest, and I could see the red tip emerge from between two buttons of his flannel. Head shaking violently, he looked down at it. He gurgled only once, a scarlet drip working its way down his chin.
And then, he turned his head toward the sky.
Charlie Danes was hoisted up by the hook, and he just kept going. I stared into the coming dusk for long after I could see him anymore, and long after I might have been able to tell exactly where he went.
I came back to Lake Lura at dawn the next morning. I didn’t even look at the water. I didn’t think about the Fish, or why it took Davis Nielson instead of his son.
Instead, I took a hammer, and sunk something into the ground, right on the bank of the lake.
It was a wooden sign I had hand-painted the night before.
It read: “No Fishing Allowed.”
I turned to leave, hoping, praying, that this time, I would truly never return.
And then, I heard it. Unnoticeable at a normal pond, but at Lake Lura, you take note of any noises that break the perpetual silence. A distinctive splash made me turn my head in horror, afraid that the monstrous mouth had broken the surface once more.
But what I saw was much smaller.
A tiny, jelly-like creature, skated along the water’s surface, perfectly at ease. It was rubbery, slimy, and had no eyes or fins that I could see. Just a mouth that it kept open as it swam, toothless and wide.
I left quickly and quietly. I knew I had seen something frightening, something more terrifying than the humongous creature I had seen breach the top of the lake the evening before. I had seen something even more disturbing than the image of Charlie yanked up into the sky on a metal hook—something worse still than his feet dangling helplessly, one shoe untied as he was pulled up and out of existence.
I had seen a baby.
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