Joel Arnold - Fetal Bait Apocalypse - 3 Collections in 1

“Please, Dad?”

“It’s not safe.”

“Can’t we at least try it?”

“How many times do I have to tell you—”

They’d had some damn good times that winter out on the lake, and Paul wanted it to last as much as his son, but you can’t break the rules of nature. Ice melts. It’s as simple as that.

But Jack didn’t listen. He hopped on his bike and struggled for five miles over roads covered in slush and wet gravel, his jigging rod wobbling behind him, an antenna tuned into the frequencies of cold, deep water.

The ice still looked strong enough on top of the lake, even though there was not another fisherman to be found. Paul knew his son’s heart was filled with such a longing, the lake, the fish luring him — that he must’ve ignored the telltale signs of thin and rotten ice. First was the fact that there were no shanties left on the lake. And second, there was open water along the shore in places, and surely that must have been a clear enough sign. Paul thought he had taught his boy well, taught him about the intricacies of ice, that he should never go if it’s thinner than four inches. But apparently the pull was too great in the boy’s soul.

They found his mountain bike that first day, and two frantic days of searching later, his Twins cap and denim jacket washed up on the shore, belched up from beneath the receding ice cover. Once it melted, they dragged the lake, but it was large and deep, and they had no luck finding his body.

That was one of the hardest things to deal with. The lack of closure. Paul wanted to believe that Jack was still alive somewhere, just run away, or perhaps abducted but still alive, for these are the fantasies of grown men who have lost their children. But deep in his soul he couldn’t deny the overwhelming probability that his boy still laid on the murky lake bottom, communing with the fish he used to dream about in his warm bed at home.

They had a funeral. There was a polished granite headstone in the cemetery, but Paul couldn’t bear to visit it. Instead, he piled up the stones he collected from the lake’s shore, made a mound of them just for him and his son. Silly, probably, but he thought of it as a beacon. A beacon that made no sense except to himself. A beacon he could focus his loss on.

He started coming out to the lake again with his fishing gear in December, when the ice was first thick enough. And he’d come out most days since, even with Peggy fussing about how he should stop torturing himself.

“It’s not going to bring him back.”

“You don’t understand, Peg.”

“How can you say that? How can you tell me I don’t understand? He was my son, too.”

“But it’s not about that.”

It had gotten harder and harder to be with her, to come home to her after work and face her, the guilt of Jack’s death like a dulled ax blade pressed slowly into his gut. If only he would’ve taken Jack to show him how thin the ice was. If only he would’ve…

The list was endless.

So he came out here when he could, which was most nights now, after work. Watching. Waiting. Wondering what would bite.

There were times when he didn’t even drop a line in. He’d just sit, hovering over the dark hole, his thermos of coffee slowly growing cold next to him. He’d sit and watch, the exposed skin on his face and neck not registering the sub-zero temperatures, his breath blossoming before him in ghostly whispers before being snatched away through the hole in the shanty’s roof.

He’d sit and wait, wondering at the movements he sensed not far below the surface. When the wind died to a whimper and all he could hear was his own heart and the deep, dull crack of settling ice — he was sure he felt something stirring below him.

One night, only his second night out this winter, as he sat eating a cracker and thinking about his son, he felt a tug on his jigging rod. He jerked it back with a flick of his thick wrist, feeling the hook set. He concentrated on the hole, on the weight that bowed his rod. Must be one damn big walleye, he thought. A heavy one with not a lot of fight in him.

He began to reel in his line. He’d been using one of Jack’s favorite lures, one that Jack had carved and painted himself. Using it brought Paul that much closer to his son, and now with a big old walleye appreciating his lost son’s abilities, Paul couldn’t help but smile. He continued to reel the line in, hoping it was strong enough.

The tip of the rod bent to the surface of the water. Paul kept turning the reel, his hands growing numb from the pressure, his head steaming with perspiration. He thought he saw something in the dark, murky water, a large shadow slowly rising.

A log? But it couldn’t be a log, could it? Hadn’t it tugged a bit, played with the line at first? Could a log do that?

He pulled at the rod, strained at the reel, now worried that his son’s lure would be lost forever in the cold depths. He squinted. Thought he could see a large silhouette close below the surface. It was a familiar shape. He felt his heart in his throat, his breath spurting from his mouth in frozen blasts.

My God, it can’t be.

But just as Paul’s desperate hope turned to a longing to believe, the line snapped. He fell hard on his back, seeing real stars blur above him through the hole in the roof. He blinked and shook his head, sat up and scrambled to the hole, leaning over it until the tip of his nose touched the cold surface of the water, hoping, praying that his eyes could penetrate the impenetrable murk. He saw nothing but his own panicked face reflected back at him.

He rolled over onto his side, curled his knees up to his chest, and stared at the plain wooden walls of the shanty. What had he hooked? His mind told him one thing while his heart told him something else entirely.

But that was over a month ago. Now he sat twitching his jig, wishing Sven’s dog would stop its miserable barking. He wanted silence. He wanted to be able to listen, to hear the shifting subtleties of ice and water.

He’d spent the last month wondering what had brought about that tug on his line, and it finally came to him just the night before.

The lure.

It had been Jack’s favorite. Perhaps it still was.

Paul had to find something else. Another lure. He had to try again. He’d gone through both their tackle boxes, spreading the contents out on the surface of his worktable at home. There was nothing else; nothing like the lure Jack had carved only the year before.

What else could he use? What else would coax his son to the surface, cross through the icy threshold back into this world?

The answer was simple, really. Obvious. He twitched the jig up and down, up and down, trying to entice that which he knew deep in his soul resided below the frozen surface.

Something tugged hard at the line, almost ripping the pole from his hands. He fell forward hard onto his knees as the tip of the rod arched dangerously, it’s tip smacking the water. He hoped the line would hold, hoped the rod wouldn’t snap.

The bait was working. Whatever had grabbed it pulled it frantically deeper. Paul strained at the rod, staring wide-eyed at the unblinking hole. Why was the line playing out so fast? He didn’t want that, didn’t want the bait to be taken like a token to whatever lair existed below. The bait was meant to be an enticement. A lure to this world above.

“Don’t be so greedy,” Paul whispered hoarsely, struggling not to let the rod jump from his hands. He wedged the handle between his arm and chest so that he could free one hand to grab the bait bucket. He knocked off the lid, the smell of the bait bringing fresh tears to his eyes. He reached into the warm, steaming contents and grabbed a handful of the bloody mixture. He dropped it into the hole, grabbed another handful and dropped that in, too.