Tell Us Where You Are

Drown in Fear

Prologue

The still water gleamed beneath the rays of the sun, which blazed down, warming even the depths of the lake. In a cooler corner, tucked away in a cave, hidden by roots, shaded by branches thick with summer greenery, the water stirred. The walls of the silty cave cracked apart, clouding the water. A woman’s hand emerged, then a slender arm. The wall crumbled away, and the woman slid out into the water. She stretched, took in a great gulp of the clean lake. And she smiled.

I am awake! Awake again. She swam to the surface and breathed deeply. She opened her eyes and gazed at the trees sheltering her underwater home. They had not been there before her sleep.

A gnawing, burning feeling in the center of her body distracted her. She groaned, held a hand to her stomach. She had always felt this way upon waking. Hungry.

Some time around five in the morning on a Saturday, Albert leaped out of bed, pulled on a pair of cut-off Levi's, a T-shirt, and the fisherman's vest his Pa had given him for his eighteenth birthday two years ago. He gathered his fishing pole, tackle box and cooler and hopped in his rusty, banged up Ford pickup. Half an hour later he pulled off the road and walked the thirty or so yards through the pine trees to the edge of Chatham Lake where he set up his gear. As the sun brightened above the horizon, Albert began to fish.

Albert lived in the town of Trevoy on the western side of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Chatham Lake was in Glasgow, the town next to Trevoy, and even though there was a lake in Trevoy, too, Albert preferred Chatham. It had more trout. He thought he had already caught all the fish in Trevoy Lake. He grinned widely every time the idea occurred to him.

After sitting in his canvas folding chair for an hour, Albert wondered what kind of fishing day it was shaping up to be. It didn’t look good.

Not a single bite, he thought. That’s funny.

He waited, though. On a good day he'd have already caught a couple of good sized trout. Maybe a bass, too. On a bad day he would have at least caught something too small to keep. This was starting to look like a really bad day. No fish at all. Then he smiled. Maybe I caught all these, too!

He stood, held the fishing rod with one hand, reached around with the other and plucked his boxers from between his butt cheeks. A fart escaped as he did. He strained to make another one, but couldn't.

"Oh, well," he said, and sat back down.

The sun had risen high above the mountain peaks on the other side of the lake. The light reflected off the water making it shimmer like a new coin. The greenish brown water near the edge was still. A slight breeze fluttered the leaves on the trees. The air felt cool to Albert, not very humid for July. He sighed, a small, content smile on his face.

The hairs on the back of his neck rose, and a shiver passed through his body, destroying his feeling of calm. He sensed the presence of someone nearby. He felt watched. He looked around, peered through the leaves of the trees. Nothing. Goosebumps covered his arms and legs. He hoped it was only some other fisherman, but even that thought bothered him. He liked fishing alone, and he rarely had to share space with anyone else. Before his Pa had died, they had fished together almost every weekend. Fishing alone was Albert’s way of remembering his father.

He craned his neck to see over branches, and saw no one, but he still felt as though someone was there, watching him.

A loud splash startled Albert out of his chair. His heart hammered in his chest.

"Whoa!" he shouted. He looked toward the water. What the hell was that? he thought, careful not to make another sound. It didn't sound like no fish!

He leaned forward, but still saw nothing. A weeping willow tree, whose delicate branches reached almost to the water, blocked his view. The splash had originated from the other side of the weeping willow. The ripples from the splash gradually made their way to Albert's line and tugged at it slightly. Fear crawled up his spine like an army of ants.

"Anybody there?" he called. He knew no fish in the lake were big enough to make a splash that loud, so he wondered if something had jumped out of a tree. Something big like a bobcat. Bobcats didn't usually like to swim, but they could, and they were pretty good at it when spooked into it. A spooked bobcat wasn’t something Albert wanted to run into. He reeled in his line quickly. If it was indeed a bobcat out there, he wanted to hightail it to the truck.

Once he had reeled in his line, he reached for his belongings and prepared to run. Instead, his hand froze, and he looked over one shoulder, feeling someone’s eyes on him again. Another splash. A little closer this time. Albert jumped, stiffened and held his breath.

He took a step toward the water. He bent over and peered under the tree branches. He saw nothing.

But he heard a voice.

"Can you help me?" the voice said.

Albert relaxed. So there had been someone there after all! He felt foolish for nearly running away from an imaginary bobcat. He stared into the dense willow leaves.

"I need some help." It was a woman's voice. A sweet, almost musical voice. Albert thought of honeysuckle as she spoke.

"You fall in the water?" he asked.

No answer.

"Where ya' at?" He stepped past a maple sapling, brushed a spider web out of his way and went toward the weeping willow tree.

"I'm hurt. I went for a morning swim and something bit me."

Honeysuckle. Albert could taste it.

"Well, try to swim on over here to me. I'll help ya'." Albert reached the willow's trunk. He looked under the branches. The water, in the shade of the thickly interwoven leaves, looked black, like oil.

His eyes widened and he backed up, bumping his head on a thick old branch. "Ma'am!" he exclaimed. "Lemme go get you a towel!" He looked away, covering the side of his face with one hand.

A woman stood in the water beneath the willow branches. A woman unlike any other he had ever seen. A woman and her breasts. Grandma had taught him it wasn’t polite to look at a woman’s naked body in public — not that it was polite of a woman to show it. Albert concentrated on staring at the knotty trunk of the willow instead.

"It's all right, Albert," she said. Her soft voice seemed to float on the breeze.

Again, honeysuckle.

"How did you know—" He looked back at her. His eyes widened more.

Her red lips curled into a smile. White teeth barely peeked through. Her hair — great mounds of it — was piled atop her head with long, silken pieces flowing down and framing her face. A section of it trailed down her slender neck and barely caressed one round, smooth breast.

Albert felt himself move forward, toward the water. He couldn't actually feel his legs, but he knew he was moving them. He could almost hear Grandma scold him. The space between him and the woman closed. A second later he was at the edge of the water. She smiled at him again. A "jump right on in the water with me" smile. As quickly as that smile appeared, Albert felt something was wrong. It was something more wrong than just seeing a beautiful, topless woman in the lake. It was even more wrong than this woman wanting him — Albert — to come on in. It was ugly wrong.

And then he saw. Just for a moment he saw. It jolted him into action, and he ran faster than he would if a bobcat really had been after him, directly back to the truck. He didn't look back. He didn't utter a sound. He somehow had the presence of mind to dig his keys out of his pocket before he reached the truck. He flung open the door, jumped in, started the engine and hit the gas full force. He was squealing wheels and throwing up gravel before he even had his door shut. He drove eighty miles an hour all the way back to Trevoy, and he didn't think he let his breath out the whole time.

News traveled fast in Trevoy. Especially bad news. Three people had died in Chatham Lake in the two weeks following Albert's last visit, and he had heard the news within hours of each body being found. He had heard whole body parts had been missing from one of the people — Adam Clinch who worked at the post office part time — and he had heard the other two had just been chewed on. For the first time in fifteen years, the word "murder" appeared in the local paper. Albert knew in his gut who caused it, but fear prevented him from speaking up. Surely they would send him to the loony bin. Grandma had told him often when he was a boy that sometimes he needed to keep his mouth shut or it could get him in trouble. And Albert didn’t want any trouble.

When Albert was a boy he had said his prayers every night before he went to sleep. Right after asking God for forgiveness of his sins and blessings for those he loved, he asked God to keep the Night Mare away. Grandma had told him he should do this. It would keep away bad dreams. When she told him this Albert imagined a horse coming to his bedroom window at night.

"No, no, no, my dear boy," Grandma had explained. “This Mare is a spirit. She comes to us in our sleep sometimes. She sits upon us, she breathes on our faces and stares at our closed eyes. She whispers horrid things in our ear that make us have horrid dreams."

Albert hadn’t understood then, but he did now. He hadn't said his prayers since he was fourteen, but now he felt the need to say them again, especially the prayer Grandma had taught him.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray Thee Lord, my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray Thee Lord my soul to take.

If I should live another day,

Lord please keep the Mare away.

He thought the prayer must have worked when he was a kid, but it sure as hell wasn't working now. Either that or his dreams would be a whole lot worse without it. Better to be safe than sorry. That was another thing Grandma had taught him.

He wished Grandma was still around to explain to him just what the hell was living in Chatham Lake eating all the fish and sometimes the people.

The dreams started a week after the fishing trip. The woman from the lake appeared in every one of them — always topless, always beautiful. Only a few circumstances changed in each dream.

The first night she stood outside his window, impossibly tall. He dreamed he awoke facing the window, and when his eyes opened, he saw her. And she smiled. She reached a slender hand out and beckoned to him. As he sat up in bed, her hand and arm turned to bone and shattered.

Another night she appeared at his bedside. He felt her warmth and smelled honeysuckle as strongly as if it were growing inside his room. A week of dreams later she lay in bed beside him, and when he looked at her face she had no eyes, no sockets, only smooth skin where there should have been eyes. She didn't seem to have any legs, either. He never, in any of the dreams, could see or feel below her waist. All that existed was what he had seen of her in the lake.

Gradually the dreams worsened. She began to chew on different parts of him. One night an arm, one night a leg, yet another night his penis. The pain and his own screams awakened him, and he forced himself to stay awake.

Fighting sleep became useless because he started seeing her in his waking hours as well. Always from a distance — hiding behind a bush or at the end of the driveway.

He needed no explanation from Grandma now — he knew full well what a Mare was. The woman in the lake was a Mare. This beautiful woman came to him at night, sat upon him, breathed upon his face, stared at his closed eyes and whispered horrid things in his ear.

He recited Grandma’s prayer nightly anyway, hoping it would eventually work.

Albert prayed for protection from the Night Mare for the last time the night he dreamed of a white horse with a woman's torso. In his sleep he rode the horse naked, bareback down dirt roads, through the forest and to Chatham Lake. In the morning, Gertrude Hawkins, who had been Albert’s fourth grade teacher, took her daily walk around the lake and found his unclothed body floating just past the big weeping willow tree on the eastern side. When they talked about it in Trevoy, they said he had been chewed on.

Excerpt from Drown in Fear