Dropoff

by Brian Herbert and Marie Landis

Tom Mullen’s memory of his childhood summers was a farrago of frightful nights, sunny days, a large lake, and his Mummy’s screams.

He was thirty-three years old now, but her screams still reverberated in his head, distant, indistinct echoes that came and went. Sometimes he thought they might be no more than a case of intermittent tinnitus, a ringing in his ears. But once in a while her words would come back to him in dreams, loud and grating like a fire-truck siren, and he’d awaken damp with sweat.

“The dropoff will get ya, Tom. Ya hear me?”

Her voice rasped his memories like metal scraping a blackboard, and with it came the image of her face, wide with small eyes set close together above a stubby nose and cheeks tinted with round circles of pink rouge. The same color that covered her ever-moving mouth. A cookie face, he thought, decorated with two raisins and colored frosting.

Her resonant voice belied the rest of Mummy’s physiology. She’d possessed a tall, angular body with shoulders wider than his father’s. Mummy could have lifted his short, flabby father off the floor any time she’d wished to do so. He wondered if his father had recognized how vulnerable he was.

Tom was glad he’d inherited Mummy’s sturdy body structure, one of the few things he appreciated having received from her.

When Tom was young, his family spent summers at the lake. At least he and his mother did. His father was only there for evenings and weekends, while the rest of the time he worked as a bartender in town.

They stayed in a log cabin that had once belonged to Grandpa. The structure tilted to one side, as though foundering in the sea of weeds that surrounded it. The interior smelled of mice droppings and rotting wood. The stench never seemed to bother his parents, who, for the better part of the summer stayed inebriated and unaware of their environment.

It was difficult to conjure a pleasant picture of the cabin. It sat in naked ugliness upon a piece of land cleared of everything but stumps and weeds. Beyond the structure lay a serene body of water, a large lake surrounded by a forest of fir and cedar and coarse ferns. A low dock jutted into the lake from the shoreline, a place where you could tie a boat if you owned one, or read a book, or sunbathe, or watch sunsets.

His family never did any of those things. Mummy and Father stayed inside the cabin and played cards and drank beer. There was never any breakfast or lunch, but for dinner they ate pork and beans and Mexican corn from cans. His parents drank beer and puffed on their “ciggies” and, if Tom was lucky, they might come up with an Orange Crush for him or give him a puff of a cigarette or, on a good day, a Hostess cupcake. The rest of the time they kept him locked out of the cabin.

He searched his memories for a good day. When had he ever had a really good day? There had only been one in Tom’s recollection. He always called it “his special day.” His awakening.

“Isn’t this fun?” Mummy had said as they sat inside the stuffy cabin scraping cold beans from the bottoms of cans. “Life doesn’t get much better than this.” She swilled a can of beer and threw it on the floor, where it clattered off into a corner. Her long, square fingers riffled a stained deck of cards. The big diamond ring on her right hand glittered.

Five-year old Tom had liked to watch the light dance along its facets, fascinated by the blue and pink colors that flashed at him. On impulse, he had reached out and touched the ring.

She’d screamed and swiped the back of her hand across his cheek, sending him reeling. “Be careful!” she said. “This is an heirloom! It belonged to your grandma.”

Tom’s cheek stung. He reached up and touched it, and when he looked at his fingers they were covered with blood. He wiped the blood on his shirtsleeve.

Mummy flew into a rage. “Dammit, now look what you’ve done. How the hell am I supposed to wash anything out here in the wilderness? Can’t even take a damn bath.” She spewed bad words at him, like venom from a snake.

Tom wished he was someplace where there were carousels and clowns and swings and ponies to ride and other kids with whom to play. Instead of inside this stupid cabin that reeked of stale booze and cigarette smoke.

“Tom!” Mummy howled. “Can’t you smile or speak or react in some way when I talk to you?”

He couldn’t think of a proper reply.

She leaned over and said. “Now listen, you little shit, we came all the way out here on your account, so you can see what it’s like with all this nature around you, and you don’t say a thing. Not a thank you or even a good morning. You know what? I don’t give a doodle damn if the dropoff gets you or not.”

That night his parents slept inside the cabin. There was only one bed and, no, they’d told Tom, they weren’t going to share it with him. He was a big boy, they said, so he could sleep outside by himself. As a result, he’d slept on an old mattress on the porch, under a single blanket that didn’t provide much protection against the wind and rain and dew.

He hated being alone in the dark. The night sounds frightened him, those unidentifiable squeals and grunts and whistles that crawled through the shadows toward him. On that particular night the sounds seemed closer, and they’d kept him awake with chuckles and words, the bad kind Mummy had told him not to use. It didn’t seem fair that she could use those words but he couldn’t, that she could drink and smoke and have all that freedom, while he could only do what she said was okay. Tom liked to curse sometimes, but only when she wasn’t listening. He could write one of the bad words, too, in the sand with a stick. But always he smeared the sand to cover up when she approached.

That evening the bad words frightened him. Who was speaking them? The wind? He couldn’t run inside and tell Mummy because she’d only scream and send him back outside again. So he pulled the blanket over his head and didn’t come out until morning.

The following day, the special day he would remember for the rest of his life, he’d awakened in the morning and run to the lake’s sandy shoreline. Life was much better in the daytime. He was allowed to wade in the water, but not permitted to advance more than a few feet from shore. The lake’s clay bottom was slippery and silky, like wet skin, and he pretended he was walking across a giant’s body, an invisible friend who lived just beneath the surface of the lake.

Someone who could protect him against Mummy.

And just about the time he was beginning to forget his night terrors, he heard Mummy scream from the door of the cabin, “Watch out or the dropoff will swallow ya up Tom, and we’ll never see ya again!”

He wasn’t certain what “dropoff” meant and had been afraid to ask her. Whatever it was lay in waiting just beyond the end of the dock, she said. Was it a giant fish, like the one he’d heard about at Sunday school, the one that swallowed Noah?

Or something worse?

The dock was another place he was not supposed to go, but he very much wanted to walk out there one day and see the dropoff. When Mummy wasn’t looking, of course.

Wearing a green and white calico dress, Mummy staggered toward a beach chair not far from the shoreline. A big floppy hat was tipped over her face to shield her from the sun. She held a beer can in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Don’t give me any problems today!” she shrieked. “I have a headache.”

He waited at the water’s edge, where the waves lapped gently against the sand. After a while, Mummy’s mouth dropped open and her cigarette slipped from her fingers, but she still clutched the can of beer as she slept, making loud, wheezing sounds.

As for his father. Tom figured he was in a similar drunken state inside the cabin, smelling like beer and cigarette smoke.

The boy climbed up on the dock.

Timidly, he walked out on the structure, which had a few missing planks. At the end, way out over the water, he peered down into the lake. It was blue and clear. A school of miniature fish clustered near the dock pilings. He looked a little farther out and saw that the water was a deep blue there, almost black, and he wondered if that was where the dropoff lived. What sort of creature was it?

Something made a noise behind him. Frightened, he turned. There was Mummy clutching for him and screaming. “I warned ya! I warned ya!”

Quickly, Tom danced sideways and ran back toward the shore. But she caught up with him, passed him and blocked his path, her legs stretched wide, a barrier across the dock.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

He turned and ran back again, toward the end of the dock, the only direction to which he could retreat.

She screamed and rushed him, and he danced sideways once more.

She slipped, and for a moment that Tom would remember forever she balanced on the edge, teetering and tottering. Then Mummy fell into the lake. Her eyes were filled with drunken terror, and twice she screamed out, splashing and flailing as the lake water spun wildly around her.

The dark coolness embraced her and pulled her into its world. She cried out for help, then gurgled and slipped beneath the surface.

Everything was quiet again.

A piece of green and white calico bobbed to the surface, the belt of her dress. Then a raging whirlpool took it down, where Mummy had gone.

For a long time the small boy sat on the dock and watched swirls of dark water. Bored, he turned his attention once more to the little fish that continued to swim around the dock. After an hour or so he wandered back to the cabin and awakened his father.

“The dropoff swallowed Mummy,” Tom said.

His father lay on the rumpled bed. He reeked from a lack of bathing, and his jeans and torn T-shirt were spotted with stains. A dark stubble of beard covered his face. Slowly, he came to awareness and sat up.

“What?” he asked.

“Mummy fell in the lake and didn’t come back up.”

“Jesus!” His father ran outside and down to the end of the dock.

The boy followed.

“I don’t see her!” Father said, anxiously. “Where did she go in?”

Tom sucked on his thumb. He removed it long enough to point at the water and say, “Right there. You better jump in and get her.”

The dropoff got Father, too.

O O O

Tom thought of his parents often, as he was doing now. He parked his aging Plymouth as close as he could to the old cabin and walked across a weed-infested yard to the structure. The tattered mattress that he had slept upon as a boy was even more torn and stained than he remembered, and was draped over a table on the porch. The front door hung by one hinge, and there were gaping holes in the roof.

He went inside.

The floor creaked and there were spider webs and evidence of infestation by rats and other creatures. Something small and unseen scurried for cover. Beer cans and pork-and-beans cans still lay on the floor and on the kitchen table, much as he had last seen the place, except everything looked dirtier and more decrepit and forlorn. An old sideboard was missing. A couch was missing, too, and so were the chairs his little family had sat upon.

He opened cupboards, found only a few broken dishes, some old paint cans and a rusty, broken screwdriver. The place had been ransacked, but obviously the thief or thieves had found little of value.

Although Tom had never sold the property, he no longer owned it, having lost it to the guillotine of unpaid taxes. The county owned it now, as shown by a sign that had been posted out on the road. Apparently the place was of little interest to its current owner or anyone else, undoubtedly due to its remote location and the poor economies in nearby towns.

This was the first time Tom had revisited the place, in twenty-eight years. He’d come because this was the eternal resting place of his parents, beneath the surface of the lake just offshore.

“I’m here to pay you a little homage,” he said aloud. “Ya hear me Mummy?”

But most of all he’d been thinking of something else, something that could help him overcome monetary difficulties that had driven him close to bankruptcy.

He was at the window now, gazing out at the dock, which had been in disrepair in his youth. He could see signs of some repair work, but in general the structure didn’t look much better than it had so long ago. It still had immense holes, and missing planks, and sagged and drooped toward the water.

Mummy and Father were out there just past the end of it, in the dark water.

So was Mummy’s huge diamond ring. It belonged to him now, and he had to go find it. He didn’t know what his chances were of locating it, but had brought along diving gear and metal detecting equipment, as well as a powerful underwater flashlight. He wondered if his parent’s bones were still down there, or if fish and water currents had spread them around like pick-up-sticks.

The dropoff. How foolish he’d been as a child to imagine that it was a living creature, perhaps a large and ferocious lake fish. He knew better now, and that his parents had undoubtedly been unable to save themselves, because of their drunken stupidity.

He thought about the cold pork and beans and canned Mexican corn of the old days, food he would never touch again, no matter his financial difficulties. In his car he had two bottles of good white wine, purchased when he’d had more money, and he’d brought along some Camembert cheese and French bread.

“I have better taste than my parents,” he said to himself.

At one time, he’d owned a new BMW and a nice townhouse condominium and ate in the better restaurants without worrying about the cost. He used to travel freely.

Then things had turned sour.

Now he had a hot tip on the stock market, inside information about a company whose stock was about to go through the roof. Mummy’s diamond ring must be worth twenty thousand dollars or more. He could use that sort of cash right now.

He didn’t miss his parents, not one bit. Mummy had been the worst. Tom had tried to forget a lot of things about her, but memories were returning to him now, the mean things she used to say to him, and the time she hit him across the face, cutting his cheek with her ring. He still had the scar to remind him each time he looked in the mirror of how much he hated the woman who’d given him life.

He remembered that a social worker had spoken of how irresponsible his parents were, and how they had abandoned their son in a cabin and run off, bound for who knows where.

Tom hadn’t told them anything different.

Most of all he’d hated the way Mummy had enjoyed scaring him with the dropoff story, the way she didn’t explain anything to him, and instead let his child-mind imagine the worst.

A dropoff, he knew now, was nothing more than a change in the topography of the lake’s bottom, an incline, a deviation. It wasn’t an undertow. It wasn’t a monster.

It was time to find his parents’ bones and the ring.

He went back to the Plymouth, pulled off his expensive clothes and put on his swim trunks and an equipment belt. He located the flashlight, secured it to the belt, and then as an afterthought buckled on a hunting knife too, for reasons that eluded him. Did a small part of his mind still think of the dropoff as a threatening monster? Of course not! Still, the knife provided him with a level of comfort. He would go in the water first without diving gear, just to look around. If luck was with him he would see the diamond ring, glinting at him not too far down, inviting him to pluck it up and take it away.

Maybe Mummy was still wearing it. He envisioned the ring on a bony finger.

He walked across weeds toward the shore.

It was quiet here. No sound of passing traffic, no people, no screams. His therapist had told him many times to face his past. Well, here he was, doing exactly that and hoping to turn a profit in the bargain. He’d learned to swim in the Pacific Ocean through riptides and immense waves, and he could hold his breath underwater for more than four minutes. A swim in this lake would be easy.

He popped soft plastic earplugs into his ears, then waded out into the lake. He swam a few feet out from the end of the old dock, where he treaded water for a short time. Then he inhaled a giant gulp of air, jackknifed his body and plunged down, using strong breaststrokes to propel himself toward the bottom.

At first the water was translucent, a crystal ceiling overhead reflecting sunlight, but as he pushed deeper the water grew darker, more opaque.

He continued to swim, seeking the bottom. As he went down, smooth walls of rock became apparent around him in a wide, continuous circle. An underwater formation, it was like a giant wormhole, wide at the top and narrowing at the bottom. Like a funnel. He felt his heart pounding. Had his parents come this way? Should he go back for the diving gear? He would explore for just a few moments more.

I’m in some odd sort of crevice, he thought. Got to conserve my air. He burped up a little from his stomach, a trick he’d learned from a lifeguard to extend his time underwater. After thirty seconds or so, he’d burp up some more.

Below he saw a faint illumination, and it grew brighter as he went deeper. There was little room in which to navigate, but he tucked his arms against his sides and paddled his feet. Down, down and down. God, where did this funnel end?

Sudden confusion came over him, and the fear he’d been down too long. His lungs ached and he lost all sense of direction. Though he’d thought he was descending he now appeared to be surfacing, for the light was getting bright, like sunlight. Was he about to emerge?

A quick glance at his waterproof watch told him he had been under for a little over two minutes, half of his air capacity. Better figure this out quickly.…

He popped his head out of the water, sucked in air with relief and climbed up a wooden ladder that hung off the side of the dock. He sat down on top for a few moments with his feet dangling over the edge.

How could he have lost track of up and down?

He heard the shriek of a female voice behind him, and turning saw a woman on the porch of the cabin. The old abode, while weathered and leaning, was in better condition than it had been only a few minutes before. There were no holes in the roof. Likewise, the dock on which he sat wasn’t sagging as badly as it had been.

The woman wore a green and white calico dress. She was familiar. Tom’s heart raced, telling him what his mind withheld.

“Tom!” she screamed. “I told you to stay away from that place! Do you want the dropoff to get ya?”

Mummy? And now she was running toward him, bounding across the yard with her long legs. She held a heavy stick. A hitting stick.

Instinctively, Tom took a deep breath and dove back in the water.

This time the lake was different, and all around he saw jellyfish-like creatures, similar to those he’d seen when diving in ocean water, but unlike anything he’d seen in a lake. The jellyfish swam toward him rapidly, a great cloud of them. As they neared he saw that they had human eyes and sharp canine teeth and didn’t look anything like regular jellyfish. Their dangling tentacles were arms and legs and obscene appendages, waggling and wiggling as they approached.

Frantically he kicked his legs and stroked with his arms, propelling himself deeper.

A faint light became apparent ahead. Something stung his back and one of his legs, and he swam faster. His lungs screamed for air. The light grew brighter, and presently he emerged, gasping for breath.

He was back at the dock.

It relieved him to see that the dock sagged and drooped into the water, and that the cabin was in a similar state, with great gaping holes in the roof and a run-down porch. His old Plymouth could be seen parked beyond the cabin. Everything was as it should be.

Forget the damn ring, he told himself. Get in the car and get the hell out of here!

He reached the shore and stepped out of the water onto the beach, where long ago he’d used a stick to scrawl bad words in the sand.

A stick.

His mother had also chased him with one, in the other place, the world on the other side of the water.

“Tom!”

It was only a whisper from behind, but spoken urgently. A chill coursed his spine, and he whirled to look out into the lake where his parents had drowned so long ago. Sunlight on the water made him squint.

“Cold!” the whisper said, this time coming from another direction, from the cabin. Perplexed, Tom looked that way. His mind seemed to be playing tricks on him today.

“Warmer!” the voice said.

Cautiously, Tom headed toward his car. To get there he had to pass the cabin. He felt like breaking into a run, but thought better of it. Best not to show fear. Walk, and appear calm. Someone was playing games with him. Whoever it was, he didn’t want that person to sense his fear. Animals and people attacked when they smelled fear.

“You’re getting warmer!” the voice said, in a loud, throaty whisper.

The cabin was only a few feet away. A cloud passed over the sun and a cold wind whipped his hair.

Suddenly a stocky old man emerged from around the side of the cabin, between Tom and his car. The man, in blue jeans and a stained T-shirt, held a hatchet. Tom’s mind struggled to comprehend. A stubble of beard covered the man’s face. The eyes were crazed and wild.

“Father?” Tom said, hardly able to speak the word. If it was, the man had aged severely. Had he been alive all these years, living on this place?

“Mummy’s here, too!” a voice screeched from the porch to Tom’s right.

Looking in that direction, Tom saw an old woman in a tattered green-and-white calico dress—a much older version of the woman who had chased him with a stick only moments before, in the other place that was like this place, but was different.

The old man moved toward Tom with surprising agility and speed, wielding the ax. The old woman moved toward him too, carrying what looked like a piece of iron bar.

Terrified, Tom turned and ran toward the lake. He waded out in the water to the end of the dock, took a deep breath and dove in. Down he swam, deeper and deeper. His mind raced, searching for answers, and he knew he had only a little over two minutes until he reached the other surface, where the other Mummy was, and the other Father. Younger versions of them.

The hideous jellyfish surrounded him, and he could see them more clearly. They wore nasty, knowing little grins, and their bodies glowed bright red, with their long tails flipping back and forth as the creatures accompanied him.

To where?

They whispered and chuckled the answer.

Mummy and Father were waiting for him. They would drive Tom back into the lake, and he would seek the surface again and again. But they’d always be there, wherever he appeared. He was caught in a hellish, time-twisted funnel that ran in both directions.

The only escape he had was in the coolness of the lake, in the swimming interval between worlds, a few minutes at a time.

That’s all he would ever have for eternity.