Jon Fore - Black Water

“What is it, Ethan?”

“It looks like a dog, but it’s hard to tell…about the size of one anyway.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“You missed something, Abs. If it got in here, we can get out, right?”

“Oh, that’s right! Let’s keep going.”

She turned and headed down the passage, her light illuminating the floor, his the roof. More and more of the torn corpses littered the ground as they continued, each ravaged but seemingly unconsumed. It began to disturb them. Neither were naturalists, but Ethan was sure that man was the only animal that hunted for the pleasure of it. He wondered if perhaps these were digested creatures, swallowed without chewing and defecated whole. He wondered if it were perhaps a large snake; he was sure they swallowed their food whole, but what did it look like coming out the other end? Then they found the deer carcass.

It was broken, the bones pulverized in many places, and its hide bore large, gaping claw marks on its flank, one of its legs cleanly cleaved away. The savagery of its death upset Abby greatly, but what bothered Ethan was the fact that the meat had just barely begun to swell with rot and the blood around it was still red, the deep red of dried blood not yet oxidized.

He drew out his revolver and replaced the spent cartridges with fresh ones. He did not know what would take such morbid pleasure in the rending of forest animals but he did not care to be the next one.

They continued along until the tunnel suddenly opened into a large cavern, a sizeable lake in its center reflected their lights in a dead sort of way. The explosion of open space was disorientating, as if they had just fallen into open air and had begun to float. It took them many moments to orientate themselves. The room was chill, but the air was fresher and once more pine-scented, but something else infected the air: the stench of rotting flesh. Ethan was not surprised considering the murdered animals that had begun to choke the passage.

They approached the water’s edge together and looked into its midnight depths. It was still with the exception of the randomly falling droplets from above, which sent ripples rushing across the surface. It would then settle to an inky black, concealing its depths, hiding its contents. For some unspoken reason, the lake filled them both with an uneasy apprehension, a building desire to be away from it. It was a simple mockery of how pooled water should be and completely unnatural.

Abby seemed transfixed on the surface, looking deeply for an answer to some question she had yet to ask. Ethan began to look around the cavern with his light, finding a number of passages leading away again. There were too many for him to consider, and he hung his head in defeat. It was a dangerous emotion for him to have, but why should he be that bastion of hope for others? Why could no other give him an anchor in the storm of life’s unfairness?

He battled shortly with the emotion and defeated it with sheer willpower, a raw and ancient desire to survive. If not for him, he would push on for Abby and see her back to the true and good sunlight.

When he brought his head back up, he caught sight of a faint glow within one of the numerous passages leading away from the lake. “Abby, turn off your light,” he instructed quickly as he switched his off.

“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“Turn it off and look,” he said as they were plunged into darkness.

It took Abby a few moments to adjust to the darkness, but faintly, a whisper of light came from the passage on the other side of the lake, the true white light of the day’s sky.

“Oh, thank you, God! Let’s go; I want to see the sky!” she shouted in exuberance and turned her light back on.

Ethan helped her rise again, and they began the lengthy trip around to the other side of the lake. It was difficult going—spilled boulders slippery with a colorless moss or slime in some places; dangerously narrow strips of ground in others. They navigated all of this while desperately trying not to touch the black water of the lake.

When they had worked their way around to the far side, they heard the water moved by something but they could not locate it with their lights, just telltale ripples across the water’s surface. Being this close to their freedom, fear began to rise but more as desperation, and Ethan began to rush Abby toward the dimly glowing passage ahead.

Something was building, growing, and becoming a threat to them, as it had the forest creatures. It was a hideous thing, and it pleasured itself by rending flesh. Whatever it was, Ethan refused to see it. He pushed Abby harder; she already began dragging her cane in a desperate attempt to get out before whatever was about to happen did happen.

Just before they passed the glow, the wash of dim light from the real world outside, they heard a voice.

“Abby… Ethan… Come and stay with us…”

It was Madison, but her voice had been twisted and dried, baked into a raspy hiss of its original musical sparkle.

“Madison!” Abby screamed, and there she was, just beyond the daylight, standing almost timid, bleeding from many places. Her head hung from her shoulders and her normally vibrant hair lay limply across her face. She was nude except for the torn flesh yawning open to reveal the red beneath. She raised her arm toward them, it clearly broken in places, twisted and crooked.

“The Captain wants to know things…and if you tell him…he can make you feel wonderful…” Her voice trailed off in a pleasurable hiss of agony. “He really wants to talk to you, Ethan…”

Abby began to cry, screaming repeatedly, “Madison! No!”

Ethan swallowed the building surge from his belly and brought the gun up. He hovered just before the limp hair, where he was sure her head would be, and fired.

Her head exploded out the back, and she leaned forward for a moment then collapsed backwards, the young vibrant beauty now nothing more than a brutalized corpse. Abby screamed a long and mournful scream, joined by many other spiteful voices filled with hatred, a wild calling for vengeance. Ethan played his light around the room and found a large number of corpses, all long dead but their decay incomplete and their flesh dripping with the water of the horrid lake.

He shoved the still-screaming Abby into the mined passage and toward the sunlight. He turned with his revolver held out, warding him from the onrush he was sure would be there but did not find. In its place was a pair of blood red eyes, still just under the edge of the water. He lowered the revolver and saw a black segmented leg gently break the surface and come down softly on the shore. It gripped the ground with its wickedly long talons, which sank deeply into the rock.

They rushed from the rough cavern, the ceiling hanging low enough they had to hunch over and move slow for final few feet, avoiding carefully the rounded protrusions of rock. The sun screamed its brilliance at them as they came free, and they stumbled down a short incline, the trees stopping their wild progress.

“I can’t believe you shot her!” Abby screamed into his face when they stopped. “How the fuck could you kill Madison, you son-of-a-bitch!” She began pummeling Ethan with both arms, trying desperately to hurt him as he had her.

“Abby! Stop, Abby! It wasn’t Madison. Didn’t you see her?”

“You don’t know that! It was her; I saw her eyes!”

Ethan grabbed her wrists and held her close from behind, both in an attempt to comfort her and stop the battering. “Whatever lives there, in that hole, it had her. She was not Madison.”

“And you know this for sure, you bastard?” she screamed into the trees.

Calmly, he responded, “Yes, I was sure.”