It’s not an easy job, to search the lake.
It’s filthy, for one. Rich people from cities come in their boats to meet in the party cave, where they vomit themselves to dehydration into the water. By this point, the lake’s probably more Vodka and e. coli than H2O.
You also don’t get very much out of the job. Some days you make good money. You’d be shocked at what you can find in the depths of the lake. Yet, most days you find hardly anything. It’s seasonal, This time of year there is nobody out except for the fisherman, And as if they have anything worth diving for.
I use the winters to branch out beyond my norms and explore the rest of the lake. That’s what brought me out to an underexplored cove, hoping to find something buried in the muck.It was a cold, gray day the kind where all you want to do is curl up and watch netflix. That was out of the question for me. Instead I drove my little boat out along the lake’s jagged coastline, until I came to the cove I’d been eyeing on my map.
There was noone around, and when I shut off the motor It was silence. The coast this far down lacked the boat slips and cheap condos like elsewhere. Nothing but gray oaks and other trees everywhere. I took a secondbefore suiting up. I took my time getting ready. Partly out of habit, and because I had no desire to submerge myself into the freezing water. I hung my fins over the edge of the boat and dropped down into the nasty water.
I spent the first few minutes feeling around in mud a couple hundred feet off shore, but not much was coming up. I slowly began moving towards deeper water, hoping to find something so that I could go home and do that netflix thing.I was down deep, probably fifteen meters, when I saw the first tree. Trees weren’t really an unusual sight. When they made the lake, they flooded the countryside. Trees, fields, homes, and all.
This, however, was not a tree trunk. It was a whole tree: branches, leaves and all, just like it was the middle of the summer The leaves shown green and full, practically shimmering with life. I looked up. In the dim, muddy light, the branches extended up as far as I could see. I propelled past the tree. To my surprise, I was greeted by a long stretch of living trees that stood in a line on either side of me. A forest at the bottom of the lake. At first, I thought I was getting turned around, passing the same tree over and over again. Like I said, visibility was low. But, no, I was swimming down a tree-lined street, right there under the lake.
The current was slow and the was calm around me, opening up the view some. In front of me the line of trees extended as far as I could see. I was in a town.I swam close to the building.I blinked and the building transformed into a burned out structure. I blinked again and shook my head. The building was back as it was, intact and undisturbed.
I swambackwards, feeling suddenly uneasy. What had been an interesting find was turning into something else entirely. Yet where were the fish?I spun around, but saw no sign of life anywhere. There was no movement in the grass I needed to surface, that was all I knew.I was about to swim up when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Something shot between the two buildings. It was bigger than a fish, but I couldn’t tell exactly what it was. My curiosity got the best of my common sense. I swam toward it.The figure darted again between the buildings, I followed at a distance. Finally, it stopped long enough that I could see it clearly. The figure was dark and small, but shaped like a person. It stopped in front of a small, white house. Before it disappeared into the open door, I heard a giggle.I stared at the house, frozen in disbelief. A dull, yellow light pulsed slowly in the window. Despite myself, I moved toward it, pulling through the grassy yard. The glass was intact, undisturbed by the water.
Through the window, a family sat around a dinner table, their hands clasped together in what looked like prayer. Candles burned in the middle of the table, their flames flickering even though surrounded by water.There were six people: two larger figures, four smaller. The littlest couldn’t have been more than a toddler.Even through the murky water, I could tell they were burned.Flakes of burned skin floated along their naked, charred bodies, held on by thin slivers of tissue.
None of it made sense. Those bodies were clearly dead, burned and drowned. There was no way candles could be lit underwater. There was no way any of this was happening.I shut my eyes tightly and opened them again. The family was still there, still with bowed heads. The little ones raised its head, I watched wide-eyed as it pointed a finger in my direction, its mouth opening in surprise. The others turned their heads slowly, deliberately to look at me.I scrambled back, falling away from the window. The scene inside vanished from my view, but not before I caught sight of the largest one rising from its seat.
I turned and swam, not worrying about the muck I was kicking up behind me. It was a mistake. I wasn’t sure which direction I was headed. I started to swim upward. I hit my head on a tree limb and the pain drove me down, suspending me beyond the yard of the burned house. In the midst of the pain and heartache, the moan stopped and the water cleared. They were behind me. Standing and watching, all in a row, biggest to smallest. The little one had its hand raised in front of its eyes, as if it couldn’t bear to watch. My stomach sank as I swam away, pulling against a current that was dragging me back toward the house.
Just then I realized I had something else to worry about. How long had I been underwater? My air… I looked down at my pressure gauge and my heart sank. I needed to remain calm, particularly when low on air. I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my fists. Don’t look back, I repeated to myself, trying to forget the black figures from my mind. But I did look back. They were still standing behind me. I concentrated on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Slowly.
They weren’t pursuing me atleast. I could swim back to my boat and be fine. I just had to move. Why wasn’t I moving? I was held in place by the current that swirled around me, watching in growing understanding as the largest figure opened its mouth. The water burst into waves around him, circling out wider and wider. The moan. If I heard it again, I knew I wouldn’t move. I couldn’t move in that crushing sadness. I knew I’d fall to the lake floor and watch my air slowly dwindle to nothing.
I swam harder. My muscles protested and my lungs burned as I propelled myself through the water. Dimly, I could see the gray light of the winter sky above me and I tried to push past my aching legs and empty lungs.
I saw that I was further away from my boat that I had guessed. It glinted across the empty lake as I slowly made my way back to it.I collapsed onto the boat and lay shivering until well past dark. When the cold became too much to bear and hypothermia became a concern, I started up the motor and headed toward home.
Every piece of furniture was black and charred until I blinked and it shimmered back to normalcy. The place smelled of burning flesh. Not even a gallon of bleach could change it. I didn’t dive again, couldn’t bring myself to do it. I told my diving buddies that the winter cold had been too hard on my joints. I asked them if they’d ever seen anything strange under the water.“Strange?” they asked. Like stranger than bikini tops and rescue inhalers? “Something like that.” I told them while they shrugged. I started hanging out at the library, since it was warm and didn’t stink of bloated death. I learned a lot about the lake and its history.
I discovered that when they flooded the towns to make the lake, they burned them first? Just burned towns to the ground. What a thing. Of course, they were evacuated first. Of course, no one stayed behind to get burned up in their homes.