The Monster in The Lake

Jem Tyley-Miller

I tried to take small things. Things that needed saving. Items that wouldn’t be missed. A soft downy possum with an injured leg. The one-eyed dog with a shaved underside who strayed after being beaten. For a while we were family, hidden beneath the gum-filled giants, protected by boulders and bracken. But then the girl stepped onto the crumbling bank.

The water was dark that day. Humid and oily, as though the gums were bleeding on purpose. Ducks skidded across the surface, rippling the water. Only they disturbed the girl’s image, for there was no breeze. The heat held fast in surrounding trunks, rebounding from one another before seeping into the ground to warm that too. I guess that’s why the boys went swimming.

From underneath, their skinny legs looked like tentacles thrashing in the murky depths. I sensed fear in their limbs. Imagined their faces as they splashed about on the surface, pretending not to be scared. Soon they would have no choice but to let that fear course through their bodies.

There were four of them. Three sets of skinny legs and one plump. I’d watched them through the trees earlier, before the girl distracted me. They were teasing the fat kid for slowing them down. Pushing him to jump off the rocks into the water to prove he was one of them. He peered over the edge, shaking, while he tried to ascertain if the black pool below would cushion his fall. I smelled urine right before he jumped, forgave his compulsion to do anything that would mean he could belong.

Those boys would never let him into their group—I knew their type. They came here all the time with their families, laughing at stumbling tourists or snickering at the children who came with their individual carers from the nearby special school. No. Those boys would keep him only until another plaything came along—a more amusing child to torment.

From beneath, I considered the fat boy’s legs. They were meaty and kicked less than the others, his movements a slower beat of the egg. They were also more luminescent. The boys inched towards him, one by one. Included him in their circle before pushing him under and holding him there. I watched his blond hair drifting. Stared into his wide, panicked eyes while bubbles forced their way upwards through the water. His cheeks quavered, as he struggled. Then his face receded above the waterline.

He stroked backwards from the boys’ laughter, which could be heard even through the waxy filter of water, along with his own gasping coughs. I could taste his disappointment, his heartbreak. The adrenaline that told him to swim as far away as he could.

I should have taken him because he would have understood, but it was the mean skinny legs of the closest boy that compelled me to act. He ventured deep enough, out farther where the water is ice-cold. Calling for the others to join him. He was showboating as he stroked my way. Legs fluttering, beautiful and brown, hairs shimmering in the sunlight until they plunged into the dark to flitter between the swaying reeds. I couldn’t resist reaching out and touching them.

‘Shit!’ he said, squealing like the pig I knew he was. ‘There are eels out here.’

Reaching out again, I wrapped my black fingers around those beautiful legs and took hold. He had no time to shriek as I yanked him under. The face of an angel, not dissimilar to the fat boy he himself had made squirm.

* * *

Through the thick broken skin of the blackwoods, I watched the hubbub at the lake. Police cars with flashing lights. Ambulances. Men and women in waders with sticks, scouring the banks. Three boys stood on the small stretch of sand beneath the towering pines, as far back from the water as they could. They were wrapped in colourful towels secured by their now-attentive parents’ arms. The fat kid’s mother was sobbing so hard she almost choked him. Another woman, nearer the bank, stared out into the water. Silent as she probed the black depths with her hands clasped like she was holding a rosary. A heeled detective in a suit with white whispering hair frowned next to her.

‘You should have been paying attention,’ I whispered to the mother from where I now hid amongst the trees.

The dinghies came with the divers. They flicked backwards into the water, casting their nets. The day turned over twice as they kept the lake closed. Examined my cave near the southside. Dog walkers returned to enquire of their progress. Had they found the boy? No, not yet. They stood with corrugated brows, rubbing their heads, as they swept the lake again while speaking of icy currents beneath the surface. Killer currents, the passers-by said. Three days later, an enthusiastic red setter took all the glory. He found the boy face up in the shallow inlet where the ivy-choked branches stretch into the water. Where the mosquitos fly low over the surface, zip-zapping from side to side.

Yellow signs warning of dangerous currents were erected the very next day.

* * *

It took me nine months to get up the courage to take a second child. A sweltering spring day, where the fire danger urged the arrow well up into the red. Families sought refuge beneath the ancient eucalypts with their tinsel-like regrowth, or under the canopy of the more aggressive radiata pines whose scent dominated the air. Bare-bottomed toddlers paddled in the shallows with their dutiful parents, while older children exhausted their legs on paddle boats. More blended into the shadows, around the edges where I sometimes lurk. One even fell in. Shrieks and screams followed laughter, as her father pulled her from the tangled branches, dripping and encased in mud.

But I was patient. Someone always swims out far enough. Going deeper and farther to prove themselves worthy of god-knows-what, just like she did—the same girl from the crumbling bank. Her father sat on his esky, swilling beer and barking his orders whenever he remembered she was there.

At first her slender, glowing legs jerked about. Then they rose as she floated, her long hair sweeping back into the water and spreading across the surface in tendrils. From beneath she looked like a porcelain starfish. Peaceful, she drew me closer to the surface than ever before. Someone must have called out to her because her head raised from the water, sinking her legs again. Swinging them right before my eyes. She was older than the boy, her muscles had time to develop—time to become more toned. Still, she shot under just as fast when I pulled.

This time when they searched the lake, there were more of them. The dinghies came quicker. As did the people with waders and metal sticks. This meant I had to leave her. Abandon her to the dark, where the only light came from the star-shaped holes I’d etched into my old wooden door.

I watched the wetsuits with their masks and tanks search, and thought only of her face. The way her hair lay across her shoulders and hung like leaves when I brushed it. Her body pale, breasts not fully formed. Long legs spilling over the table. Her skin so perfect. I’d taken her just at the right time—before her father’s negligence would have made her scream.

Down by the lake, they gathered. Another family with the same detective—the girl’s father still with a stubbie—on the jetty this time on the other side. By day two they’d pulled out a dog lead, shoes, a shopping trolley, a fine silver necklace with an o-shaped clasp, and an ingot from a diving belt they assumed was left during the previous search. All went into evidence bags, even though the officer logging them complained it was pointless. They should have listened to him and gone away. Left me to my lake in peace. But the woman detective, the one with the fitted black suit and white fairy-floss hair—her eyes said different.

Blue like the height of the sky, they bored into everyone, especially the dog walkers. It was like she was memorising faces, so I kept well back. Took the paths that spun me higher, but still let me look down upon the search. She made them sweep each path, walking in rows. Poking and prodding. Still they came higher. Spoke to everyone while writing down names. As they came closer I left them to it, returned to my hut to look after my friend.

On the seventh day, before the sun crept out from behind the ridge, I took her back to the water. But without her, the hut felt lonely. I missed her lavender lips answering my questions, holding her hand as I spoke of all the horrors of the world. They were watching the lake; the woman with the ice-blue eyes. But I needed a companion. Someone else who I knew would understand, who I still had a chance to save.

I began making plans. Thinking of new ways to enter the water now they knew about my cave. I sat very still. Watching the weather. Reading the intentions of the savage wind. Waiting for the mercury to rise.

Within two weeks it hit forty degrees. Searing gales with not a cloud in sight. The fire authority heaved the dial to red with black stripes, only this time no one came to the lake. No one except the detective.

The same thing happened the following weekend. Thirty-seven. She was there with her team, patrolling the shores. Those knowing eyes searched for me in the water. And I wanted to risk it. Take a chance on sliding in, only I didn’t. Instead I listened from the shadows as people strolled passed. Snippets of conversations; talk of a Bunyip, something hideous like a monster in the lake. ‘How could the current take two children?’ they said. There has to be a creature. Something preternatural ripping innocents from their devoted families. Families who turned their backs just for a moment. It was much longer than that, I thought.

I sprinted home in anger. Scrubbed the hut. Scoured the floors and tables and walls, while rubbing my scarred arms and legs. I was a saviour, not a monster. When one of their dogs strayed from the path and impaled herself on a tree root, I put her out of her misery. A boxer with oversized paws and a trusting face. Still they said nothing different. So, I lifted the dog from my table and buried her deep where she could sleep with the company of the worms.

Desperate, I needed the cooling effect of the water. Was ready to risk it. Risk everything to feel the calming rush of those cold, cold legs.

The sky was overcast the morning the radio predicted a record-breaker. Enormous grey clouds tumbled across the sky, punching into each other, as they began to block out the sun. The heat was to last four days. The water slapped into the shore, kneading the scorched earth. From the path above the lake I saw police walking in twos. There were three sets of them, if you included the plain clothes detective at the bench with his paper and the woman jogging laps of the lake. Ducks came in swarms only to drift away after realising their pleading was pointless: these people would not feed them. They turned their interest to the families who picnicked and played frisbee while their dogs splashed into the water. It was then I was spotted by the ice woman herself. She’d come higher along the path than usual and was peering through the trees. I was left with no choice but to run.

Down the escarpment I scuttled, dodging burnt logs and blackthorn, grabbing onto stringybarks to steady myself, all while skimming the skewed floor for burrows that would swallow an ankle. The detective came down after me, only she didn’t see the mossy rock, nor notice it wasn’t supported, as she reached out to where my blue scarf had snagged in a tree.

Cowering inside my hut, I barred the door. Crouched my hideous form beneath the table, like I did at school the only year my mother forced me to go. By day three I hadn’t moved. But nor had they kicked the door in. One day left of heat and I was drowning in solitude. I pulled my mother’s maps from my trunk and strew them across the table, remembering the places we would go, Mum hoping the children would be kinder so she could feel less guilty. That they wouldn’t point and recoil while their parents scurried to retrieve them. In the end she insisted on covering me up. On me learning to hide what she’d done to me. I grabbed the maps and keys and bundled the neoprene into my arms before rattling down the parched driveway in the ute, weaving in and out of the shadows of trees who were hungry for a spark—any spark—that would help them explode.

I was in the carpark when I heard the news. It was blaring from the cab of a nearby Pathfinder, as a scruffy fisherman with kind eyes hoisted his boat onto his trailer: ‘Police have confirmed the raid of a property near Daylesford they believe to be involved in the drowning and abduction of two children. They are currently on the lookout for a Daylesford woman with severe burns to the neck region who has an interest in diving.’ I nodded to the fisherman when he saluted and spoke over the rest of the report.

‘Sounds like they’ve found that Bunyip,’ he said.

I waited until he drove up the ramp to remove my hat and glasses. Before swinging the tank from the back of my ute.

The water was a dense green as I swam around the groin, dodging the seaweed, while remembering my mother’s words. ‘This is perfect weather for swimming, it’ll cool your skin. But keep close to the granite boulders. Not too close to be snagged by fisherman, but near enough not to be seen.’

There was little swell to muddy my vision as my fins cut through the water. From a distance I hovered, watching teenagers somersault off the diving boards, coveting them as I had as a child. I imagined myself amongst them laughing; swimming with the confident children who scratched their way to the pontoon before grasping the slimy rope and hoisting themselves out of danger.

The beaches were packed. Families everywhere. Children wearing life jackets. Boogie boards and paddle boarders. Large inflatable rings holding dozens of people afloat.

Diving beneath the water, I propelled myself forward to look past the salt and the sand at all those beautiful and perfect legs.