I stepped out of the cabin, hoping my grandfather would be there for me or the beauty of the Underwood. Instead, no, I was alone and back at the edge of the lake. I’d stepped out of the ruined cabin’s door despite Grandfather’s cabin being thirty miles away in the real world. The harpoon that had been in my hand was gone now, leaving no sign that my vision had been anything other than a pleasant dream or the hallucination of a deranged weredeer woman.
Emma and Maria were nowhere to be seen. I was grateful that they weren’t corpses lying by the water. Of course, they could be in the water. I had to learn to stop thinking. Okay, I needed to examine the scene. There weren’t any obvious pools of blood and…um, I should have been looking for broken twigs and bent grass or something. If there were any grass that looked particularly bent, it eluded my skills, and there were twigs in varying states of disrepair everywhere.
I probably shouldn’t have quit Girl Scouts after a month. I’m sure I’d be a master tracker now if I’d stuck with it. They went into the woods, right, or was that just Boy Scouts? There was nothing left to do but look to the water.
I had not, before that moment, realized I hadn’t been looking at the water, that my eyes had been avoiding the single most obvious feature of the landscape as if it were as bright as the sun and would burn my eyes. It was nothing of the sort, of course. It was as dark as its name suggested. But still, I saw no signs of them. Or anything else. The water was flat, resolutely ignoring the breeze trying to make it ripple.
Darkwater Lake wasn’t large enough that I couldn’t see the other side, even in the darkness, but it was large enough it would take someone quite a while to swim across. Not that I had any intention of going into the water. I’d come here with Jenny, daring her to swim in the forbidden water. Nothing had changed here that I could see. They’d never found the body, so it had to still be down at the bottom of the lake. Another thing I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about.
I turned away from the lake as if that would keep me from my guilt. Then, steeling myself, I turned back. “I have to find some sign here, some pointer toward where… Oh crap, I can hear the water moving.”
Reluctantly, I peered back over my shoulder. Not ten feet down the bank, the water was rippling as something dark and large rose up. It was large, black, and covered in silt and stank like rotting garbage. Once the water fell off of it, I could see it was a horse. Or something shaped like a horse. A real horse didn’t have glowing red eyes. It also wouldn’t seem to be made of water, plants, and detritus suspended in a horse-like shape.
I remembered ‘water horse’ was another name for the creature in Scotland. Grandfather had called it such before. I was facing the kelpie in its true form. Even now, the vision of my grandfather was fading and I desperately wished he was beside me to fight this thing. There was no sign of his shade, if it had ever been there to begin with, and I was alone with what weapons I’d brought. I hoped my grandfather hadn’t brought me here to my death, but if he did, really, then it was only justice.
Okay, I really needed to stop thinking like that. My friends needed me. Sorry, Jill, you’re going to have to wait for your pound of venison.
“It’s been a while,” the kelpie said. Its voice was like a babbling brook, rushing out of its lungs like water instead of air. “But I knew you’d come back.”
“I didn’t,” I said, wanting to back away, but the ridge around the lake made walking backwards dangerous. Besides, I wasn’t going to run away as much as I wanted to. I was too terrified to. This was, literally, the creature that had haunted my nightmares for decades. Even if I had suppressed the particulars. “You must be smarter than me.”
I don’t think that horses can smile, but I got the impression that it was doing so anyway. “Come, Jane, we have so much to talk about.”
“Aren’t you supposed to look like a beautiful woman or something?” I said, speaking more in a whisper than my usual sarcastic tone. “I mean, I’d prefer for you to appear as Brad Pitt circa Troy or Link from The Legend of Zelda (don’t tell anyone else about that fantasy) but I thought most spirits loved tradition.”
Good, yeah, that was sarcastic. Did it help me feel less scared? Not really.
Crap.
The kelpie wasn’t impressed. In fact, it looked amused, which was the worst emotion it could be expressing right now. “I can appear as a man or woman, but we have no need of illusions between us. You must tell me everything you’ve done.”
I summoned my courage, what little I had left. “I want to know where my friends are.”
The thought of Emma and Maria (though Maria was more like an acquaintance my brother had sex with—ew, bad mental image) helped me face my enemy. Turning to it, I managed to take a full half-step forward before stopping.
“Friends?” the creature asked as if it was a word from an alien language.
“The people I was here with earlier.”
“The sacrifices you brought me? I gave them to Him.”
I wanted to throw up. “You mean they’re dead?”
No, God, Goddess, and Grandfather. Please, no. Please don’t let me have done it again.
The kelpie stretched its head and shook it like a real horse. “I’m hardly the one to ask. What He demands is best surrendered to Him. Perhaps you could bring more. It’s been so long.”
“I’m not bringing you anything,” I snapped at the creature.
“Do you want another Gift?”
My mind lurched as if trying to escape from my skull. There was something I wasn’t remembering. Something I didn’t want to remember. I heard myself asking, “Gift?”
Memory wasn’t something humans like to acknowledge was as fickle as the weather and as substantial as a rainbow. In the 1980s, there was a satanic cult scare that involved child abuse and sexual molestation. As far as I knew, that was false despite the fact that there really were a bunch of demonic cults out there. The patients involved had created false memories through the power of suggestion by their therapists.
However, that ran into the fact human beings were also capable of repressing memories until adulthood about past trauma. Those evil things done behind closed doors were far more common than anyone gave them credit for. My uncle Jeffrey, a therapist, had said there was no way to tell the difference without evidence. That wasn’t even getting into how magic could affect the mind. What had I forgotten?
“I helped you,” The kelpie said, moving closer, its backward hooves leaving prints in the muck around the lake. “‘I don’t want to be like my mother,’ you said. Didn’t want to deal with spirits. Didn’t want to see, did you? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten all we did for each other.”
Its voice was hypnotic and made me relaxed rather than terrified. No, that wasn’t right. My body relaxed but my mind was screaming. It was a dichotomy that made my present experience all the worse.
I stepped back. The more it spoke, the more I remembered, the more I wanted it to be lying. But the creature wasn’t lying. I was remembering. But was I remembering right? I couldn’t tell anymore. The worst part of being a shaman was losing your certainty what was true and what was real. The Spirit World made thought reality and that was a source of dreams as well as nightmares.
“I’d come into the woods,” I said, quavering. “The spirits frightened me.”
“But then you met me. And I offered to help.”
“You said I had to bring someone else to swim in the waters.”
“And you did.”
“You didn’t say you were going to kill her!” I said, falling into its spell. Had I given Jill up to this thing?
Yes.
No!
“You never asked. And I fulfilled our bargain and took the spirit sight from you. No more the daughter of a shaman, and I left you the Gift to see the truth of the world in your touch. So that you would learn how much hate and fear define your kind and return when you’d grown old enough. And here you are.”
“No!” I screamed out loud.
“The sacrifice was well used,” The kelpie continued. “I gave its soul to the old wolf spirit, made the demon strong again. Strong enough to draw those children into his circle. Once he’s free, he’ll pay me back with so many children to drown.”
I couldn’t move anymore. All of this. The coven, Victoria’s death, the deaths of the others… I’d started it.
No. I hadn’t!
All I came here for was swimming! To get away from Mom and Dad! I’d wanted to be a shaman as a child and hadn’t started training until later.
Right?
“I can see it in your eyes that you understand now,” the kelpie said. “You’re one of us. I knew it as soon as we met. Welcome to the dark, Jane Doe. We’re going to have so much fun.”
Yes.
Everything the creature said felt true, completely true. I was evil. I was corrupt. I belonged with this forest and could stay here, becoming something powerful and dark. No more would I have to worry what anyone else thought of me.
No more jobs, no more bowing to social conventions, no more being polite when I just wanted to tell someone what I thought of them to their face. The part of me that wanted to scream no at these thoughts was getting smaller, I knew it, but it was so hard to think of why that was a bad thing with the siren blaring in my ears and… the siren. It had come up quieter this time; the shift of the moon to red had happened more slowly, escaping my attention as the kelpie spoke, trying to make me my worst self. These weren’t my thoughts. Like last time, making me hate, last time, the gun! I’d touched Alex’s gun and the influence had dissolved. I reached for it now, only to find it gone, pulled from me by a vine that was dragging it across the ground. I dove for it, but the kelpie’s speed was fantastic. It was in my way before I even realized it had moved and I grabbed only its wet, rancid fur.
“An unfortunate choice, young Jane,” the creature said, its breath fetid like a swamp. “If you won’t choose to join us in life, you will have to join us in death.”
“You are a liar!” I screamed.
“Maybe,” the kelpie said. “Maybe not. Humans are the ones who invented truth. A tree may make a sound when it falls and no one is there to hear it, but without humans then who cares? Your lies to yourself make your life meaningful. Hope, justice, and love.”
I tried to pull away, but my hand had sunk into its rotten flesh, no, not flesh, but swamp slime. I couldn’t pull it back. The creature reared back with a whinny and then raced toward the Darkwater, dragging me along with it. When it reached the water it kept going, throwing itself in. I screamed one once as I found myself pulled helplessly under the water.
This was my nightmare. Ever since I had watched Jenny drown, ever since I’d seen this monstrosity kill her, this was the dream that kept me up at night. Being held underwater, unable to breathe, unable to even scream.
I flailed more than fought, kicking and punching, but the creature no longer had any real shape. It was made of slime, silt, sticks, and decaying pond plants. Yet, as impotent as my strikes were toward it, its mass held me under the water firmly. This was how Jenny had felt. This was how she had died. Helpless to do anything but watch the daylight through the water as her need for oxygen grew and grew until…wait, that was how she had felt. It was night now; I was seeing her view through my power, pulling her memories from the lake itself.
For some reason, that calmed me. At least I wasn’t going to die alone. I could feel the energies of the memories all around me. And there were others, so many others, who had drowned in the swamp. All that silent pain, gathering around me, glad to finally be heard at long last. My lungs were aching now, as I reached out and shared all those memories with the kelpie.
I had not, before that moment, known I could do that. The kelpie and I were both touching the water, and I could make the memories flow into it as well as myself. Made it listen to the voiceless, agonizing deaths of every person it had drowned. Made it listen to the chorus of despair that it had created.
“No!” the kelpie howled, its voice echoing through the water to my ears. “I don’t want to hear it.”
Tough noogies.
I shoved all of them I could into the creature. And then, lost amidst the seemingly endless march of deaths, was one other memory—the kelpie’s own. Once, it was an undine, a spirit of the lake, pure and unsullied, until the forest grew dark and the spirits within it became corrupted, causing what was once clean to become foul. That memory, more than all the others, caused the kelpie to surge up over the water and release me.
For a second, I got to see the world as the spirits saw it. So much of it being wild, free, and untamed without any reason or rhyme. Humans had brought sentience to the universe with their dreams, though, or perhaps the things that had preceded humans. That had been both a blessing and a curse as they’d become capable of good and evil. Huh, maybe there was something to the Bible after all. Except man had given knowledge of it to everyone and everything. I don’t remember a passage dealing with that.
I heard its voice in the water. More feelings rather than words but still clear to me. I could hear it in my soul thanks to my shaman powers. Power I hadn’t been able to use for years. So much pain. My soiled lake, toxins in my waves, chemicals in my water, carried by the rain and bubbling up from underneath. Rage from the Lord of the Forest and pain. So much pain. So much I want to give it out again.
I erupted from the lake, breathing in huge gulps of air, not even minding that it still stunk of Darkwater Lake’s fetid waters. Once I was no longer desperate for breath, I dragged myself out of the water and to the shore. There, several yards away, was the creature.
What it looked like now was hard to describe. It was still the pile of lake sludge and plants it had been in the water, but in the vague shape combining the features of the undine’s female human form and the kelpie’s horse-monster shape. She/it was shaking violently as its tendrils and slime kept trying to shift the whole shape into one or the other.
“Please,” it gurgled. “Don’t let me go back. The darkness here is too strong. Please, Jane. End this life. Let me start over.”
I kept scraping what seemed like gallons of muck off my clothes as I looked for my gun and picked it up. The runes glowed and warmed me after the cold of the water. I didn’t owe this creature anything. I didn’t. But somehow, it felt right when I fired the gun and the bullet struck the creature’s form. That was when all of the mud around it surged forth, wrapped itself around the kelpie, then glowed orange-red before collapsing into indiscriminate sludge. I didn’t know what sort of spells Alex had wrapped into this thing, but it was packing a serious wallop.
Either way, the lake spirit was dead. It would eventually form a new one, but it would take years, probably, until it had anything resembling a consciousness. Even in these woods.
“Go in peace,” I said, staring at it. I didn’t hate it like I wanted to or feel any sense of triumph. I was just numb. Had I actually made a deal? I’d never be able to tell now that it was dead. Somehow, the fact I couldn’t tell made it worse. At least if I had, I could begin the healing. Now I’d just always wonder if I was capable of something so awful. “I’m sorry, Jill.”
That’s when I heard Jill’s voice in the wind. “It’s all right, Jane, I forgive you.”
I fell to my knees and broke down crying.