Tales From the Lake, page 1
Copyright 2017 Crystal Lake Publishing
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Cover Design:
Ben Baldwin—http://www.benbaldwin.co.uk/
Interior Formatting:
Lori Michelle—http://www.theauthorsalley.com
Proofread by:
Paula Limbaugh
Hasse Chacon
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“The Folding Man” by Joe R. Lansdale was previously published as part of a collection in a deluxe hardcover edition by Subterranean Press, November, 2013, as well as Drive-in Creature Feature by Evil Jester Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A former version of “Liminality” by Del Howison was published in Biting Dog Press’ 2012 e-book “Fresh Blood, Old Bones”—Kasey Lansdale (editor)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Ben Eads
WHEN THE DEAD COME HOME
Jennifer Loring
THE FOLDING MAN
Joe R. Lansdale
GO WARILY AFTER DARK
Kealan Patrick Burke
TO THE HILLS
T.E. Grau
EVERYTHING HURTS, UNTIL IT DOESN’T
Damien Angelica Walters
DROWNING IN SORROW
Sheldon Higdon
WHENEVER YOU EXHALE, I INHALE
Max Booth III
THE WITHERING
Bruce Golden
GRAVE SECRETS
JG Faherty
END OF THE HALL
Hunter Liguore
SNOWMEN
David Dunwoody
PIECES OF ME
T.G. Arsenault
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCHERS
Maria Alexander
THE STORY OF JESSIE AND ME
Timothy Johnson
I WILL BE THE REFLECTION UNTIL THE END
Michael Bailey
THE HONEYMOON’S OVER
E.E. King
SONG IN A SUNDRESS
Darren Speegle
WEIGHING IN
Cynthia Ward
RELIVING THE PAST
Michael Haynes
THE LONG HAUL
Leigh M. Lane
DUST DEVILS
Mark Cassell
LIMINALITY
Del Howison
THE GARDENER
Gene O’Neill
CONDO BY THE LAKE
Jeff Cercone
FOREWORD
I’d hate to get in the way of you enjoying these wonderful stories, so I’ll be brief.
When Founder and CEO of Crystal Lake Publishing Joe Mynhardt asked me to edit Volume: 4, I was very excited as well as honored. I wanted to get away from the “urban legends” feel that the previous volumes had. I wanted something more modern that would pluck at the reader’s heart strings and resonate with them, leaving them haunted for some time. In a word: Harrowing.
We began picking some of the best horror writers to headline the anthology. Once we opened for submissions, I received nearly eight hundred stories, which is a new record for the press. And the talent and quality made it easy short-listing the stories with the most power, whilst keeping it diverse. There’s something in here for everyone. I had a blast, and sincerely mean it
The worlds you’ll encounter will be dim and cold, like the water beneath your canoe. If you feel a bump underneath, don’t turn off your flashlight.
Ben Eads
Orlando, Florida
August 22nd, 2017
WHEN THE DEAD COME HOME
Jennifer Loring
There were worse things, she told herself, than New Jersey.
Trevor had thought it would be good for her. A smaller house (who needed all those rooms without a child to run through them?), tucked away in the woods where she wouldn’t have to see her neighbors and their children and wonder, Why me?
There were indeed worse things than New Jersey, she told herself. But nothing worse than a dead child.
On an early summer day, boxes full of little boy’s toys lay stacked by the door for Goodwill and all the detritus of their life together heaped into a U-Haul outside. “Why, Trevor?” she had shouted. “Why a swamp in the middle of nowhere?”
“It’s not in the middle of nowhere. We’re right in town. Once you’re on your feet, you can look for a job. Listen. Heather got me a good job with the EMS, and I’m not passing it up. It’s better than what I’ve got here.”
Translation: I want you out of the house so I can fuck her in comfort on my lunch break.
“You know they’re never gonna give me the promotion with all the political bullshit that goes on here. Besides, you’ll have peace and quiet.”
“I don’t want peace and quiet!” Kate screamed, shattering any illusion Trevor might have had that she was recovering. “I want my baby!”
Two days later, they had moved into a small ranch-style at the edge of the Pine Barrens, and she was on Zoloft within the week.
Trevor tried to cheer her up by annoying her with stories about the Jersey Devil. With an indifferent sigh, she stared out the window at the cedars that bled into the Mullica River and watched fog float on the water like the souls of all the dead things drifting in its depths. She thought about wading into the gentle current and slitting her wrists, then slipping beneath the rust-colored bog where five thousand years from now some alien archaeologist might excavate her. If she cut deep enough to scrape the blade against the bone, they would know what killed her.
“Katie,” he said, massaging her shoulders, and she loathed him for it. She loathed him period.
“It’s ‘Kate,’” she snapped. Trevor’s hands abruptly fell away from her.
“You better start dealing with this.” His voice had gone cold.
She did not look at him.
***
It was easy for him to detach from the loss. He hadn’t carried Aiden around inside of him for almost ten months. He didn’t spend every waking moment with him, watching him learn to sit up, then walk, then talk, and finally start potty training.
“I hate you,” she whispered when Trevor wasn’t in the room and knew she hated him because life would be different if he’d never gotten her pregnant, if he’d never given her two years to love something she couldn’t keep. Logically, she understood it wasn’t his fault, but it had to be someone’s. Her chubby, jabbering toddler lay in the ground in another state, and Trevor had taken her away from even that much. For the best, he’d told her.
Bullshit, she’d spat back. But she hadn’t the energy to fight the move or to call a divorce lawyer. Apathy, the cheapest drug of all.
Trevor had taken to sleeping on the couch, and Kate preferred it that way. When he tried to cuddle her at night, she twisted away until he sighed with disgust and rolled over. Alone with her racing thoughts, she stared at the shadows of the pines on the wall and waited for sleep that brought only nightmares.
***
Trevor began working as much overtime as the EMS allowed. Kate grew more convinced of an affair with Heather, whom he had met in college. Although it should have been the final nail in her coffin, she couldn’t make herself care. She lay in bed, listening to the eerie, faraway whistles of a train, and imagined she was running with Aiden in her arms, from the darkness. It had a face, and she couldn’t run fast enough; Aiden began to cry, and he slipped from her arms and the darkness swallowed him up—
A shrill cry startled her out of her daydream. She strained to hear anything unusual, but there were only birds, the ones that made the high-pitched shrieking sound people mistook for the Jersey Devil.
And something else. Far off, like the train whistle—
Oh God Trevor why near the water you know he drowned you goddamned insensitive idiot—
—a baby was crying.
Kate shook her head. Birds, that was all. Next thing she knew, she’d have a nice padded room in the state hospital. She doubted Trevor would hesitate in having her committed. Especially if he was fucking the First Responder that drove his ambulance.
The front door opened, and Trevor threw his bag down beside it. The crying sound vanished.
“Kate? I brought pizza.”
She supposed she could show him some appreciation for that. Kate wrapped herself in a pink terrycloth robe and plodded into the dining room. Trevor flipped open the lid of the pizza box as she slid into a chair.
“What’s wrong?” He wrinkled his forehead in a specific way when he was forcing concern, consciously drawing his eyebrows together to create a deep, troubled V between them.
“Nothing.”
He rubbed his hands on his uniform pants. “Kate, we really need to talk.”
Here it comes. "I’m fucking my co-worker. Also, you’re crazy. Should’ve called that lawyer when you had the chance, Katie.”
“I know how hard
“I heard a baby crying,” she said, startled by her voice’s flat affect. She stared at her thighs. Two years and the weight refused to budge, no matter how much cardio and strength training she endured at the local Curves. Trevor said she looked better with the extra weight, but she did not delude herself with the idea that she was some kind of Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t need pizza, of all things.
He was doing it on purpose. Fattening her up so he’d have yet another excuse to leave. That bitch in the ambulance probably put him up to it.
“Maybe it was just a bird, or—”
“No. It was a baby.” She let out a frustrated snort. “I know what one sounds like.”
“You know, when people saw the Mothman, they often reported hearing a baby crying.” Trevor fancied himself a cryptozoologist. Kate let him have his illusion. “So maybe it’s some kind of weird electromagnetic disturbance, or an auditory hallucination—”
“Great, now I’m hallucinating?” Not that it was impossible by any means. Many animals found the forest hospitable, announcing their presence with various disconcerting vocalizations.
“I didn’t say that. I just—”
“I know what I heard.” Kate massaged the back of her neck, her head, where a headache began pounding on the walls of her skull like an angry neighbor. Heat rose behind her eyes.
“Okay, okay. Let’s just . . . eat.”
“I’m not crazy, Trevor,” she murmured.
Trevor munched on a slice of pepperoni-with-extra-cheese and didn’t say another word.
***
Trevor came home early the next night. He sat in the kitchen, eating as usual. Leftover pizza. He’d picked up copies of John Keel’s books on monsters.
Through the window beside the front door, Kate gazed at the riotous forest beyond the river. The golden, fading summer sunlight created lambent shadows between the trees and on the ground. It would be beautiful, an adjective not commonly paired with New Jersey, under different circumstances.
Yes, there were worse things than New Jersey. Like going crazy.
“Kate?” Trevor called. “What do you think about going to Atlantic City for a weekend?”
That, she knew, was Trevor’s last grasp at saving their marriage. What would happen if she lost him, too? At least he was something of Aiden, even if his face bore too much a resemblance to their dead child’s, making it too painful to look at him.
She started to answer “Yes” when something in the trees caught her eye. Vague at best, and small, and she could distinguish no real detail in the darkness. A fox, she thought.
Until she heard the baby crying.
“Trevor! Trevor, it’s out there! Trev—”
Trevor came thumping into the room. “What? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
Kate listened to water surging down the river. Leaves clinging to their last memories of summer rustled in a wind picking up strength. Nothing else.
“Oh God,” she whispered.
Trevor’s hands were on her arms, guiding her to the couch. “Kate, I think you need to see someone who specializes in depression.”
“It’s only been three months, Trevor. I don’t know why it’s so easy for you.”
“Why do you think I work all the time? So I don’t have to dwell on it. I miss him as much as you do, so don’t even think for one second that I don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. Hot tears burned down her cheeks.
“I’ll make an appointment for you tomorrow. It’ll do you some good to talk to someone.”
She nodded and wiped her face with her hands. She tried not to think that First Responder had encouraged him, because having a crazy wife would make the divorce that much easier. But for the first time in weeks, Trevor enclosed her in his arms as he used to, when they had a big house in Philadelphia and a little boy to love.
***
Kate couldn’t sleep, not even with Trevor beside her. The Ambien had run out a week ago, and her new psychiatrist refused to extend the prescription for what she believed therapy and antidepressants could solve. That seemed to be the consensus these days.
She crept out of the bedroom and into the living room. Tree shadows striped the walls and ceiling. The room was too white, too plain. Too lifeless. The refrigerator should have been plastered with finger paintings, with pages torn from coloring books. She wanted to scrub Crayola stick people off the walls.
Outside, distant trains blasted their spectral whistles, and a shadowy deer or two galloped into the woods. Kate slumped against the glass. It began to rain, and fog rose in ghostly fingers from the ground.
The baby cried.
Her heart hammered in her chest. This time she would prove—if not to Trevor then to herself—that something was out there. She peered into the forest, waiting, hoping it wasn’t a bird. Or the Jersey Devil, just her luck.
Even through the rain, the dark, and the trees, she saw the unsteady, shambling gait and knew it was no animal. It walked on two legs, and while part of her brain told her it could be a large bird, she rejected that immediately. The body was all wrong. Sometimes it fell on the rain-slicked grass but pushed itself up as it continued with great purpose toward the house. Kate shrank back from the window. The creature stretched out its maggot-white arms, opened its purple mouth, and began to shriek. The scream of a terrified two-year-old punctured her eardrums and her heart. She banged a fist against the glass.
“Aiden! It’s Mommy!”
The child turned toward the river. Kate’s stomach churned.
“No. Not again.”
Aiden had been so precocious, sneaking out of his bed and into the bathroom because he loved water, learning how to turn on the faucets—
—floating in four inches of bathtub water, blue and limp and dead—
Kate burst through the front door. Her bare feet provided no traction on the soaked ground, and mud sucked at her ankles. She flailed wildly to keep from sliding down the slight grade of their backyard. The child was mere yards from the river.
“Aiden!”
A shout more distant than it should have been met her cry. Her own name, Trevor’s voice behind her, as she raced through the yard.
The baby must have gone in. She could still save him.
The water’s autumnal chill filled her legs with ice and turned them into numb, useless stumps. Moonlight carved a bloody swathe through what, at night, resembled spilled ink. Kate swished her arms through the water, groping for the baby as mud oozed between her toes. Trevor’s shouts were louder now. She trudged farther, waist deep, found nothing.
Kate plunged into the middle. Calmed by the earthy smell of moldering vegetation and wood, of fresh pine needles and wildflowers, she let the river carry her downstream. Fish slipped past her bare legs. She floated with the current, forgetting that she’d never let Trevor teach her how to swim. She did not share his and Aiden’s fondness for water.
The cold tired her quickly, convinced her to let go, and she began to sink. She looked back once at the shore, where Trevor stood as impassive as an Eastern Island moai. She’d convinced herself the bruises on Aiden’s neck were something else; he had bumped something, or fallen. Children, especially toddlers, did things like that. God, it was so easy, she thought with the terrible clarity of the dying. She was so pliant in her grief. Her entire adult life a deception that, finally, had run its course.
The pain Aiden had felt settled in her chest as water invaded her lungs, heavy and brutal as a closed fist. In the frigid blackness, her last bubble of air was an apology to him as Trevor’s voice faded into a calming burble far above.
THE FOLDING MAN
Joe R. Lansdale
They had come from a Halloween party, having long shed the masks they’d worn. No one but Harold had been drinking, and he wasn’t driving, and he wasn’t so drunk he was blind. Just drunk enough he couldn’t sit up straight and was lying on the back seat, trying, for some unknown reason, to recite The Pledge of Allegiance, which he didn’t accurately recall. He was mixing in verses from the Star Spangled Banner and the Boy Scout oath, which he vaguely remembered from his time in the organization before they drove him out for setting fires.
