I ate a lime. I had a paper bag full of them. Some people chain-smoked cigarettes or chewed gum. I ate limes; a doctor had recommended I do so, and I had done so since I was ten.
“We’re almost there, Nicolas,” my aunt said.
Aunt Augusta was a lousy driver. Five hours on the road, and every ten minutes she’d announce our impending arrival. We headed south, following the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan, with a destination of Redgrave.
Redgrave. I’d never heard of the place until that day. It was Aunt Augusta’s hometown—a small village on the shore of Lake Michigan. I didn’t know, as we drove into it that afternoon, that I was going to lose my mind there. I didn’t know I was going to hear about the Tall Ones, and I didn’t know I was going to meet a girl (I think).
I didn’t ordinarily meet girls.
“You need a girlfriend, Nicolas,” my aunt would say, at least once a week, whenever she thought I looked glum. I was sixteen. What I needed was privacy. I was a man of science. I intended to go to university and study quantum physics. I didn’t need a girlfriend.
The first thing I learned on arriving in Redgrave was that there was barely any cell phone coverage; I had been hotspotting my phone for my laptop’s internet connection. There was maybe enough signal in town for a short text message.
“It’s the holidays,” said a woman who looked exactly like my aunt. “It happens every first week of July. The internet and the mobility telephones slow down. It’s probably on account of all the holidaymakers who’ve come into town.”
Mobility telephones?
The woman, Agatha, looked exactly like my aunt, because she was my aunt’s twin sister; she owned a little hotel in the middle of town.
Let me describe my aunt—you can cut-n-paste the description for her sister. Five and a half feet tall, seventy years old, thin, dressed in more colors than you could imagine, head of messy blonde hair that looked like a family of birds lived there.
Aunt Augusta really wasn’t my aunt. My parents had both left each other on the same night: my tenth birthday. They each independently packed up a suitcase and walked out—one out the front door, one out the back door—never to be seen again, each of them assuming the other would take care of me. I was left with an old house, a birthday cake, and a brand-new blue bicycle. Aunt Augusta was the kindly old lady who lived across the street; as I had no next of kin, she signed some papers and became my legal guardian.
“What brings you to Redgrave?” asked Agatha.
“I’m going to swim in the lake,” Aunt Augusta said.
“You don’t want to do that,” said Agatha. “You don’t want to swim in the water.”
My aunt screwed up her face in disgust. “Not that again.”
We’d been on the road for three weeks. My aunt had this bucket list of taking a swim in each of the Great Lakes, and Michigan was the last one. Come hell or high water, or low tide, she was going to complete her list.
“Why shouldn’t she swim in the lake?” I asked.
“People disappear,” said Agatha.
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes, people go out for a swim in the water at Redgrave, and they don’t come back. The Tall Ones get them.”
“The Tall Ones?”
Aunt Augusta had heard enough. She grunted. “I don’t believe in the Tall Ones. I never have, and I never will. It’s just a myth. It’s superstitious nonsense.”
She looked at me. “A dozen or so people have gone missing in the lake over the years. Any rational person will tell you they were simply inexperienced swimmers who got caught up in the lake’s unpredictable currents.”
She looked back at her sister and barked with authority. “I am not an inexperienced swimmer!”
That was the end of the discussion.
Agatha showed us up to our rooms. Mine was on the third floor. There was a view of the lake. Agatha explained there was no in-house Wi-Fi, but there was a network socket on the wall behind the television set, and the bandwidth was complimentary.
She left.
Finally, I was alone.
I sat on the edge of the bed in my tiny room; my suitcase on the floor, my laptop on the bed. At least I had a room; I had had to sleep in the car at Lake Erie. And there was indeed a socket on the wall to plug in a network cable.
I ate my last lime.
I didn’t have a network cable.
Aunt Augusta’s sister didn’t have any cables. She suggested I try the convenience store down at the waterfront. A walk sounded like a nice idea. I had spent three minutes in my room, and the organic spirals and swirls of the ancient wallpaper already bored me.
I walked two blocks to the lake’s edge. There was a pier and a dozen boats for hire moored to it. There were few people about, hardly a holiday horde. Redgrave was little more than a handful of gift shops and a handful of hotels; a scenic pullover for travelers headed elsewhere, anywhere.
The lake water was oddly still. The late afternoon sun didn’t reflect off it. There was no sparkle. I didn’t believe in superstition, or myths, or Tall Ones—whatever they were meant to be—but I wouldn’t have swum in the lake, either. Purely for scientific reasons. I knew my way around chemistry, and there was something strange about the water off the shore of Redgrave. Something weird about the way it lapped at the old blackened wooden poles of the pier. In the late afternoon light, it looked more like soup than lake water. There appeared to be a texture to it, a thickness.
Or maybe I needed new glasses.
The convenience store stood across the street from the pier, and I walked over to it.
A pair of suspicious eyes watched me come. There were two amateur hoods leaning against a brick wall near the store’s entrance; locals, no older than me, smoking cigarettes.
The one with no hair gave me a dirty look, as though he desperately wanted me to behold his coolness, the cut of his leather jacket, the magnificence of his shaved head, but then, was far too cool to actually want me to look. He sneered as though he’d fight me for even daring to glance at him. Idiot.
The convenience store was sufficiently convenient. I found a network cable and headed to a small fruit section at the rear. Then a girl with a shopping trolley nearly drove over me.
“Sorry,” she said, steering her trolley around me. It was loaded with bag upon bag of salt, and a couple of random grocery items. She wheeled it past.
She was about my height, with long dark hair. She was maybe a year older, and her clothes looked colorful and old-fashioned, like she had gotten dressed sometime in the last century, maybe the 1980s; I knew nothing about clothes, to be sure.
I was going to say, That’s a lot of salt. But I didn’t talk to girls.
She glanced at me.
She had green eyes. Vivid.
I don’t think I had ever seen a girl with green eyes. But, I couldn’t remember the color of any girl’s eyes. Maybe I just hadn’t ever been looking?
Then she was gone.
I filled a small bag with limes. I took it, along with the network cable, to the checkout.
I was served by a large, unshaved man with droopy eyes and adult tattoos. He was a bulky fellow with a voice as deep as a tunnel. He could have moonlighted as a grizzly bear.
I paid and left.
“Let’s get naked, green eyes.”
The two local hoods were following the girl with green eyes along the sidewalk. She was carrying six full grocery bags.
The no-hair one was working a theme. “Yo, green eyes. Let’s get naked together.”
“Yo, head,” I called out. “Not even your bathroom mirror wants to see you take your clothes off. Leave her alone.”
I had no idea how those words formed and came out of my mouth, but they did. The two hoods and the girl stopped to look back at me. I don’t know why, but I walked in their direction. Who did I think I was? I had absolutely no idea. It was like some kind of chemical reaction had taken place inside my brain, and my body was dutifully following along.
Maybe I was fed up? Fed up with being hassled by morons, who loitered outside convenience stores, or in school corridors, or anywhere I wanted to go about my lawful business. And maybe I was fed up with the three weeks of traveling on a loop of the Great Lakes with my certifiably loopy aunt.
Maybe I had finally lost my temper.
The no-hair hood stepped in my direction. He probably wanted to know who I thought I was. When we got close enough to each other for introductions, he punched me in the mouth. His fist was like a boulder. I spun about on the spot and went from vertical to horizontal, slamming down onto the ground.
I opened an eye: sidewalk, gum. I heard a voice growling. It was the grizzly bear. He had come out of his store. He said something about eating the two hoods, if he ever saw them again.
They walked away.
“Are you okay?” the girl asked. She knelt alongside me. She helped me sit up and wiped my lips with her fingers, and I saw my saliva and a trace of my blood on her fingertips. She studied it with curiosity. “Your saliva is a strange color,” she remarked. “It’s golden.”
Then she did something I wasn’t expecting. She licked her fingertips. I had never seen anyone do that.
Her green eyes sparkled, as though they were catching the last rays of the afternoon sun. “You’re special,” she said. She looked across at the two hoods walking off together into the sunset, and there was anger in those eyes. “That wasn’t the first time. Shall I do something bad to them?”
“I wish you could,” I laughed. I wasn’t entirely sure she couldn’t.
She helped me onto my feet then turned her attention to collecting up all six of her grocery bags.
I picked up my bag of limes and network cable. “Can I help?” I asked. “Do you have far to walk?”
“To the lighthouse.”
I looked behind me. The lighthouse was in the other direction, down at the other end of town; a tall, shiny white structure with its light already lit for the coming evening.
She shook her head. “The old lighthouse. It’s a half-mile walk, but there’s a shortcut.”
I took three of her grocery bags, and we walked together along the sidewalk. “You have a lot of salt in these bags,” I said.
“You have a lot of saliva,” she replied. “More than other people, I think.”
“I have a condition. Hyper-salivation.” I didn’t know how she knew; it wasn’t as though I was noticeably dribbling. “What do you need with all the salt?”
“It’s a long story.”
I didn’t ask.
“We’re not from around here,” she said.
“Neither am I.”
“Every summer, my uncle brings me to Redgrave. We’ve been coming here since before I can remember anything.”
“This is my first time.”
We turned off the main street and took a detour down an alley. At the end of it lay the beginnings of the woodlands that encroached on the town. We went in, and she led me along an overgrown pathway through the woods. I quickly became aware that there was silence; no birds. I could hear nothing except for the sound of our shoes on the loose gravel of the pathway.
“Thank you for what you did back in town,” she said. “It means a lot.”
I shrugged in a casual manner. I don’t think I had ever done that before.
“My name is Lucia.”
“I’m Nicolas.”
The old lighthouse was another five minutes walking, during which time I discovered we didn’t have much in common. Lucia hadn’t read any of the books I’d read. She wasn’t a gamer. She’d never heard of Carl Sagan, but she knew what quantum physics was, and she could name every one of Jupiter’s moons, which made me very happy.
The lighthouse stood fifty yards back from the lake and was surrounded by a thicket of trees and overgrown bushes. It was a towering brick and concrete structure made black with an entanglement of creeping vines and dirt. Only the very top of the tower, above the trees, showed any sign of its exterior having once been white. The glass windows of the lantern room at its peak were mostly smashed and shattered, and above that thrust a rusted lightening rod into the sky. I couldn’t entirely make it out, but there looked to be some kind of antenna attached to the lightening rod; it hung loose and moved on the breeze. I couldn’t guess its purpose.
The door to the lighthouse was open and, as we walked up to it, I became aware of the throbbing sound of an engine, and of hammering; the noise was coming from inside.
“My uncle is rather old and rather odd,” Lucia said. “It’s best to ignore anything he might say.”
We went inside.
The engine was the lighthouse’s power generator; a great cumbersome chunk of 19th century engineering that filled the ground floor of the building and vibrated the earth with its pulsing. It wasn’t alone. The room overflowed with machinery; it was a kaleidoscope of old and new technology. There were old pipes and gauges, and steam rising, and wiring and cables, and computer towers, and a bank of twenty computer monitors—each flickering with screensavers I hadn’t seen since I was in kindergarten.
Lucia’s uncle was halfway up a ladder, leaning over the generator, hammering a metal pipe.
“What is this?” I whispered to Lucia.
“It’s my uncle’s machine.”
The man stopped hammering. He turned to look at us, with his head turning in a way that didn’t seem possible for a head to do, as though his head could move independently of his body. It was probably a trick of the room’s dim light.
His two dark eyes stared at Lucia and then at me, where they stayed staring.
“This is Nicolas,” Lucia said. “He helped me carry the grocery bags from town.”
The man came down off his ladder. He dropped his hammer and came over for a closer inspection.
“Nicolas, this is my Uncle Otto.”
I held out my hand.
Uncle Otto didn’t take it. He sniffed the air. He looked like he had gotten dressed sometime in the last century, or maybe in the century before that. His machine burped. A new cloud of steam rose from it and the bank of computer monitors came to life. Across each screen flashed a continual stream of web pages, each lasting barely a second before being replaced by the next.
“What does your machine do?” I asked.
Uncle Otto grinned. His teeth were filthy.
Up close, his head didn’t look right. There were odd proportions, his eyes were out of alignment, and there were bumps where there shouldn’t have been bumps. His body didn’t look right, either. It was like it was bursting to break out of its containment, like an overripe piece of fruit the moment before it split its skin.
“It’s going to open a door,” he said. His eyes were wide. His mouth contorted into a maniacal grin.
I didn’t know if the man was speaking metaphorically, or whether he meant it would literally open a door. “What kind of door?”
“A door to the interesting things,” he said. “Do you know what the interesting things are?”
“No.”
The grin became more intense. “When I break the door open, you’ll get to meet them.”
“We need to take these bags up to the kitchen,” Lucia announced. She didn’t seem entirely happy her uncle was planning to open a door to interesting things. She led me over to a staircase that hugged the curve of the lighthouse’s inner wall and spiraled up, and we climbed its rusted metal steps.
A kitchen lay on the next floor up. There was an old stove in the corner. There was an old wooden table and a couple of chairs. The room was made of wood, and large chunks of it were rotting. The room’s sole window was smashed, and decades of weather and wildlife had freely rained in. It was my guess the lighthouse was at least 150 years old. Everything was decrepit. No wonder they had built a new one.
We put the grocery bags on the table. Lucia took out one of the bags of salt. She opened it.
“Your uncle is indeed rather odd,” I remarked.
“It’s his machine,” she said. “He’s been working on it for a long time.”
“Every summer?”
“Yes.”
She took a handful of salt and ate it.
I had never seen anyone do that.
She pointed upwards. “Want to see the lake from up at the top?”
Scenery wasn’t really my thing, but it was the first time I had ever been inside a lighthouse. “Sure.” I left my bag of limes and the network cable on the table.
The spiral staircase continued up. There was another floor above the kitchen: a bedroom. There were two bunks and an old dresser. Broken window. Decay. It didn’t look like anyone had slept in the room for a long time.
I followed Lucia up the staircase. The walls came closer the further up we went, as the lighthouse tapered to its top where we climbed up into the lantern room.
The lantern room was a glassed-in housing for the lamp and its lens—the magnifying glass that concentrated the lamp light and made it visible over great distances. It was a room of shattered glass, and there was a steady breeze through it.
We climbed out onto the catwalk that ran a ring around the lantern room, and I got a closer look up at the antenna that had been attached to the tower’s lightning rod. It was held on with duct tape and looked to have been made of broken cell phone tower components. A thick cable ran from it and down the side of the lighthouse.
Lucia and I gazed out at the lake.
The lake water appeared dark, and the disappearing sun falling behind the horizon didn’t reflect off any part of it. Lake Michigan was supposed to be blue. Through my eyes, it looked like a dark, muddy green soup.
“We are young,” Lucia said. “This is our time. This is our world.”
I couldn’t have agreed with her more. I glanced. She watched me.
“You’re different than the others,” she said.
I shrugged; for the second time that day. I had no idea how to do this kind of thing, but I knew I desperately wanted to kiss her.
She knew it as well. She put her hand over my mouth. “I’m different, too.”
“I don’t care.”
She took her hand away. She looked at her fingers and my saliva on it. She licked her hand. Her eyes sparkled once more.
I leaned toward her, to kiss her.
“I think you can help me,” she said. “Do you want to?”
“Of course. Help you do what?”
My cell phone rang.
I slunk back. I guessed I was high enough up in the air to receive a signal. I yanked the thing out of my pocket and answered it.
“Nicolas?” It was Agatha, Aunt Augusta’s sister.
“What?”
“Your aunt has gone missing. In the lake.”
I sighed. “I’m coming back to town, now.” I put the phone back in my pocket. The most amazing moment of my life had come to an end. “I have to go.”
I knew Lucia wasn’t happy. She didn’t say anything. She turned away, hiding her eyes from me, and looked out over the lake.
I left her on the catwalk and made my way back down the stairs.
Uncle Otto was seated at the table in the kitchen; he glanced at me as I entered. He held a spoon. On the table before him was a soup bowl. It was full of salt. He proceeded to shovel a great spoonful of the stuff into his mouth.
I retrieved my bag of limes and network cable and left. There was something very odd about these people.
I ran back to town; it was late twilight. I could barely navigate my way along the pathway through the darkening woods. I tripped twice.
It was nighttime at the pier. There was a crowd gathered. There was a police wagon and a deputy asking questions. A fishing boat was loaded up for a search: several men, flashlights, a couple of rifles, a spear gun, binoculars, life preserver. The boat was cast off, and it slowly moved out into the darkness.
My aunt’s sister was at the pier. I went to her, and she explained what had happened. Aunt Augusta had decided to take her lake swim that late afternoon as the sun was setting; she didn’t want to waste any time in completing her list. She dived into the lake, swam out two hundred yards, and then vanished.
“I told her not to go into the lake,” Agatha said. “But away she went and did it. And look what happened.”
“There’s evil in that water,” someone said. The crowd at the pier had gravitated around us, all wide-eyed and fearful.
“The Tall Ones got her,” someone else murmured.
There was hushed agreement.
“What are these Tall Ones?” I asked.
Silence.
“What are they?” I demanded to know.
The crowd solemnly dispersed. Nobody wanted to tell me. Even the deputy sheriff looked sheepish.
Agatha stared at me as though she had caught me performing an unspeakable act on her living room rug. “It is best not to talk of them,” she said in a whisper. “It brings no good luck to do so.”
My head hurt.
My aunt’s sister and all those who lived in town were overwhelmed by some type of medieval superstition and hysteria. It was the 21st century outside of Redgrave. It was the 11th in it.
I was a man of science. Of learning. Of reason. There had to be some explanation for the disappearances in the lake. Maybe it had to do with the currents. Redgrave jutted out into the lake sharply, like a very large rock lying along a smooth shoreline; it was not for nothing the town needed a lighthouse. Maybe the combination of rocky outcrop and the water currents around it were the explanation?
I returned to my room at the hotel. I unraveled the network cable and plugged my laptop into the internet. I was determined to look up some facts; some proven, reliable, scientific information.
I searched. The internet connection was painfully slow. Pain…fully.
I learned. Lake Michigan’s currents were quick and often dangerous—rip and longshore currents. There had been numerous drownings over the years, with most bodies being recovered. I found nothing specifically about the currents at Redgrave.
However. More than 200 people had disappeared in the lake at Redgrave since 1888—when the town’s newspaper first went into print and started keeping records—disappeared and never seen again.
How was this not a thing? How had I never heard about these vanishings before?
I found a dusty website that talked about the Redgrave legend: The Tall Ones. The website was older than I was; green on black text, blink tags, visitor counter in the tens of millions. According to the legend, hundreds of years ago, there was no town at Redgrave, but the land still jutted out into the lake, and on this outcrop there lived monsters; or so said the stories that had been handed down from generation to generation by the Indian tribes that had lived in the surrounding region at the time.
The Indians feared these monsters, which they called the Tall Ones. The Tall Ones could not be stopped by arrow, tomahawk, or fire. The Tall Ones were unnatural. And if caught by one, your fate was to be eaten.
However. There came one day, the son of a chief. As a young man, he was sent from the tribe to seek knowledge, to find a way to destroy these monsters.
This young man journeyed to the North, East, and West, and then into the South, and into Mesoamerica, where he met the Aztecs, from whom he learned a great knowledge of spells and magic. It was from them he learned the Water Spell.
Anything can become water. Put a lime into it and, with time, the lime will decay. It will lose its form and become part of the water itself, where it will remain trapped forever. The Water Spell took away the need for time; the Aztecs knew how to make the decay immediate.
The young man returned to his tribe.
It was widely known that the Tall Ones had a weakness: Salt. It was their drug and they feasted upon it. So, a great harvest of salt was made by the tribe, producing it from the ashes of burnt plants. Once enough salt had been extracted, a canoe was laden with it, and the young man took it out onto the lake.
The monsters followed.
A slobbering great herd of them waded into the water and headed out after the canoe. And, once in the water, the young man cast the spell. The legend said the sky cracked open that day, and the waters of the lake boiled, and the Tall Ones screamed. They were decayed. Then they were no more. They were of the lake.
The rocky outcrop of land where the monsters had once lived was given the name of the Water Spell, which, over the years, became corrupted by the white settlers to Redgrave.
I took a lime out of the bag and began to eat it.
Salt.
Monsters.
Redgrave.
My head spun.
It hit me; I hadn’t really been paying attention. Uncle Otto had built some kind of a machine. It was going to open a door. It was going to open the lake and let the interesting things out. Uncle Otto was going to free the Tall Ones.
I was certain of this.
I knew I had to stop him.
There was a mirror on the wall in my room. I stared at myself in it. What was happening to me? I was a man of science, and there I was succumbing to the madness that had been handed down from generation to generation of townspeople.
I closed my eyes.
All I really wanted to think about was Lucia, and the odd, gelatinous touch of her hand on my lips.
Maybe I had become insane; I left the actuality of my room and an internet connection to head back to the old lighthouse.
I didn’t know Lucia’s shortcut through the woods, and least of all in the night. I went back along the shoreline, with its empty dunes lit only by moonlight. The water of the lake seemed to be swelling, as though a great, turbulent force was within it. As I drew closer to the lighthouse, I could hear a thunderous sound through the woods.
There were cables.
There was a thick string of shiny black cables running into the lake, into the water; too many to count, bundled together in a wad as thick as a log. I followed them from the shore, and they snaked their way through the woods to the lighthouse. They flowed out of its door. The thunderous noise was the machine inside.
At the lighthouse, I could see Uncle Otto up at the top of it; out on the catwalk outside the lantern room, with his hands gripping the railing, his mouth open like a bucket, his mad eyes cast out to the lake.
I went in.
The cables fed out of his machine, and the machine was fit to explode. Clouds of smoke billowed. Large, loose chunks of the machine’s metal body vibrated in a blur. The smell of the diesel powering the generator was overwhelming.
The banks of computer monitors mounted above flickered too rapidly to see or understand their content. One at the end did not. It flickered at a fraction of the pace of the others, and on it I could see it was a flow of internet content: feedback forums, user messages, comment threads. I recognized the tone at once; a familiar sea of negativity and anger.
I took a closer look at Uncle Otto’s machine. I knew my way around computer parts, and some of its components I knew well: routers, modems, hubs, switches, and a bank of RAM on a string of connected motherboards, more than I had ever seen in one place.
It was no wonder that there was next to no internet or Wi-Fi in Redgrave. It seemed plain to me. Uncle Otto was downloading the internet; specifically, anything negative or full of anger and hatred. He was doing so on an industrial scale. It was probably gigabyte upon gigabyte of data per second. All of it was being fed into a chain of technology I didn’t recognize or understand. Out of that came the black cables that went out and fed into the lake.
At that moment, a hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. Uncle Otto thrust his face within an inch of mine. His eyes glowed with the red of fire, and his breath was a gust of foul air and salt.
I struggled to free myself from his grip. If it weren’t for his hands being so slippery and wet, I would never have gotten away from him. I ran from the lighthouse and into the woods. When I realized he hadn’t followed, I knew I had to return. I had to wreck his machine.
At that moment, I came face to face with Lucia. She had been running from the other direction.
“I’ve been to the lighthouse,” I said.
“I went into the town,” she answered. “I was looking for you.”
“Is your uncle downloading the internet into the lake?”
“Yes.” Her green eyes stared into mine, and mine into hers. I don’t think I had ever looked into anyone’s eyes that seriously. And there was, at that moment, complicity between us; an unspoken connection and understanding. A binding.
“He’s using the negativity of the world as a power source,” she said.
We returned to the lighthouse. The uncle was now nowhere to be seen. The fat log of cables pouring out through the door now glowed red with heat. The thunder of the machine inside was deafening. The lighthouse itself shuddered.
“My uncle has harnessed human anger,” Lucia shouted. “He wants to—”
“I know,” I shouted over her. I stood at the foot of the staircase of madness.
“I have to stop him,” I shouted. “I have to stop his machine.” I ran inside. I looked for something I could smash it with: a hammer, a pole, a weight.
Lucia followed. She spun me around. “Do you trust me?” she shouted.
“Yes.”
“I want his machine to work.”
I stared at her.
She grabbed my shoulders. She shook me. “Do you trust me?” she shouted with desperation.
My instincts said no. My heart screamed. “Yes,” I shouted.
Lucia pulled me to her and kissed me. Open mouth. Saliva and salt. Her lips hard against mine. I didn’t know how regular kisses with girls went, but this one felt like she was sucking the saliva from me with the strength of a vacuum cleaner.
She broke from the kiss and stood back. Her green eyes shone brilliantly, and her face glowed a greenish color I had never seen before. She ran to the machine and grabbed it with both hands. She screamed as she gripped it with an ear-piercing cry.
All at once, the machine attained perfection. It became silent. Its ground-shaking vibrations stopped. The cables that had glowed red now became white. For no more than a handful of heartbeats, the machine worked at full capacity and then, one by one, like a string of firecrackers, the computer monitors exploded, blowing out great shards of glass and smoke.
“To the lake,” Lucia shouted, letting go.
We ran to the lake, following the log of white-hot cables.
Uncle Otto was at the water’s edge. “It’s working,” he shouted. “After all these years, I found a way!”
The water at his feet began to part, as though it were a door, and beyond it, inside, tall, hideous creatures were beginning to form, taking their shape from billions upon billions of particles coming together out of the lake water.
What had I done? What had I helped to do?
“We are free,” Uncle Otto shouted into the hole in the water, his hands cast in the air in victory.
Suddenly, the overripe piece of fruit that he was burst his skin, shredding his clothes and making a mess of flesh about him on the beach. From the shape of an ill-formed man, he sprang up into a towering creature.
He was not just freeing the Tall Ones, he was one.
Then Lucia pushed him in.
The tall creature the man had become fell, screaming, into the gaping mouth of the water.
Lucia spat a fire hose burst of green fluid across the cables. They were immediately burnt and severed by it. The internet ceased being downloaded into the lake. Before our eyes, the open door in the lake shut. The half-resurrected creatures within, screaming, were returned once again to their primordial soup of the lake water. Uncle Otto went with them.
There was a thundering explosion behind us. I turned back to see the lighthouse ablaze, with its top exploded, and meteor-like shards of flaming debris raining down from the sky.
“That is the last of them,” Lucia said. “The old ones are now all gone.”
“The Tall Ones?”
She nodded. “My uncle was the only one of them who wasn’t in the water when the others were taken. He was caring for me. I was only newly born to the world.”
We stood together at the edge of the lake, staring at its waters as it began to calm and, for the first time, in the light of the moon, I saw a hint of blue.
Lucia then shed her clothes and skin and changed into her true form. She must have been over ten feet tall. “It is the time of the young,” she said.
“Yes,” I answered.
She took my hand in her tentacle.
Aunt Augusta was right. I did need a girlfriend. I may have been a man of science, but some things were plainly beyond science.
And I supposed I would get used to the salt.