Jim Wright (he/him) lives in central New York State, USA. He writes short stories when he can and works as a school psychologist when he must
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The man woke. He lifted his head and looked around like a person lost. A bedroom. The room was dim. A square of reflected light rippled across the ceiling. His head ached.
He lay diagonally across the bed. He was fully dressed, still wearing the polo shirt and jeans from yesterday. He could not recall what he had done last night—just a fragmentary memory that he had planned to drop by the Blue Haven in North Bohemia for some drinks. He looked at the clock. Late afternoon. He pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He sighed. His head was spinning. As the room came into focus, he was startled to see that his forearms were badly scratched. On the back of one arm was a scalloped bruise, like a bite mark. He studied the scratches closely, as if they might help him to remember events of the night before. No luck.
Through the open window, he heard the gentle lapping of the lake. He stood, shaky, and walked from the bedroom of the cottage into the living room. Here he turned, pushed open the screen door, walked out onto the deck, and took in the lake, aglow in the mellowing sunlight. As he came out, he sensed motion to the left and heard a loud splash. He turned toward the dock. But the disturbance had come from farther away, at the swim-raft, a bright yellow rectangle bobbing thirty yards out. He could make out concentric ripples marking where the thing diving from the raft had entered the lake. He watched intently yet saw no movement within the water or at the surface. After a pause, he walked back inside and opened a beer.
He stayed close to the cottage for the next few days. He had a vague feeling that he might be in trouble. When, after three days of waiting, no police showed up, he began to relax. It was mid-September, and the weather was exceptionally warm and sunny, as if summer were indefinitely extended. On a whim, he had rented this cottage for two weeks and still had a full week on the contract. The rental was cheap because it was outside of peak season. In fall, almost all of the surrounding cottages were empty except on weekends, so he had the lake mostly to himself.
One afternoon, he rested in a hammock strung between two posts on the deck and idly gazed out at the water. His eye was drawn to a flutter toward the middle of the lake. He squinted. Someone swimming. The swimmer moved with a quick, confident butterfly stroke, arms slicing precisely through the water, head and body porpoising rhythmically. Hard to tell details from this distance. But the swimmer had dark hair and with each stroke flashed bronzed skin. He thought to run inside and grab binoculars for a closer look but was held by the grace and beauty of the swimmer’s transit. Soon the figure was a faraway dot, then merged with the dazzling sparkle of the sun-flecked water.
The warm spell continued. He grew restless and began to take the canoe out. At first, he explored close to shore, sliding by marshland and dense stands of trees with brightening foliage. Then he ventured into the middle of the lake. Out here, the gabble of shore birds faded, and the face of the water darkened, hinting at the depths below.
On one trip, he pushed on to a far corner of the lake, away from the cottages. Here a long peninsula jutted out, lined with towering willows. He paddled silently along the hushed shoreline. As the tip of the peninsula came into view, he saw a young woman about forty yards ahead, near the shore, standing knee-deep in the water. She was slender, deeply tanned with brown hair cropped short. She wore a simple belted dress, that extended to mid-thigh. Her arms were bare. The woman stood very still, slightly crouched, arms spread and palms open, staring fixedly at the surface. Suddenly, she lunged, shooting both hands into the water and pulling up a shining trout that wriggled and twisted in her grasp.
Without thinking, he shouted, “Nice catch!” He tossed the paddle into the canoe and clapped loudly. The woman twitched but did not turn. In a fluid movement, she knelt and gently placed the fish back in the lake. It shot off like a bolt of silver. Then she pivoted and strode away splashing.
He watched the woman vanish around the curve of the shore. He was going to follow, then thought better of it. He sat drifting in the canoe for a long time before slowly moving the craft out into the lake. As he paddled, he kept glancing back at the beach where he had seen the woman.
Then he shook his head, making up his mind, and circled the canoe with strong strokes to again approach the peninsula. As he moved into shallower water, the lake floor became visible. Now, the canoe was gliding past plate-shaped leaves and white blooms of water lilies. He paddled with greater energy, gathering speed, intending to run the canoe up onto the gravel beach. The gap of water separating canoe and shore shrank rapidly.
Suddenly, the front of the canoe lurched violently upwards. The craft tipped over to the left and capsized. He fell sputtering into the cold lake. He instinctively began to tread water but quickly discovered that he was able to stand. He waded through four feet of water to grab the floating paddle. He used it to probe for whatever submerged log or rock the canoe might have struck. The paddle scraped the gentle slope of the stony bottom. He peered into the water, seeing only weeds and the occasional gleam of small fish. He dragged the swamped canoe up on the beach and emptied it. Then he climbed back in, shivering, and made his way home.
The next day was overcast. After breakfast, he sat out on the deck with a pair of binoculars he had found in the cottage. They were German-engineered, the kind of precision optical instrument that birders used. He wondered if anyone would miss them. He casually scanned the far shore then dropped the binoculars in his lap. He was bored. After a time, he stood, walked to the railing, and again swept the shoreline with the binoculars.
The magnified image bounced crazily, a disorienting jumble of trees and bushes and lapping water. In a moment, though, he stopped and trained the binoculars on a particular spot. Framed perfectly he saw a great blue heron, standing in muted shadow under a large willow.
As his eyes adjusted, he could make out that the bird was in profile, balanced on one leg. He caught his breath, seeing what he thought was a hand moving in a delicate, fan-like motion. Then the figure fully resolved. He could see that a woman was standing by the bird, lightly stroking its bill. She too was standing in profile. The woman was naked, with streaks of mud on her legs. It was the same woman that he had seen catch the fish yesterday. He watched in astonishment. The woman seemed to be murmuring as she caressed the heron.
He gazed for a long time, rapt, breathing deeply to steady his hands. Then he saw the woman stop speaking to the bird and turn her head in his direction. She must be at least a half-mile away, he thought. Yet he could feel the woman’s gaze lock onto him. Her expression was blank, but her unflinching stare unnerved him. He put down the binoculars. Just as quickly, he was again peering through them, trying to locate her. He found the heron, still standing placidly. The woman was gone.
The man did not sleep well that night. It was windy. Twice, he thought he heard footsteps on the deck. When he snapped on the outside light, he saw nothing. Racoons maybe. He got up at dawn and brewed a strong pot of coffee. The weather had turned colder. He threw on a sweatshirt and jeans and walked out on the deck. Gray clouds scudded across the sky. Erratic gusts of wind roiled the water in strange patterns.
He looked out across the lake. Then he noticed the woman, wearing the same dress as when he had first seen her. She was kneeling motionless, her back to him, on the yellow swim-raft that bobbed in choppy water out past the boat-dock. She seemed to study something in the depths. He hesitated, then approached the railing with his coffee cup.
“Rough day to be out on the water,” he called.
The woman made no response.
“You on the raft. I said it’s a rough day to be out,” he said, more loudly.
She continued to stare unmoving at the surface of the lake. He grew angry.
“Hey, I am talking to you!” he shouted.
The woman tilted her head slightly but otherwise remained motionless. His lips compressed in fury. The man looked up and down the lake. There were no boats out. He hopped off the deck and walked quickly to the water’s edge. He jumped onto the dock, hoisted the canoe from its rack, tossed a paddle into it, and slid the craft into the water. Crouching, he stepped lightly off the dock into the rocking canoe and paddled with force toward the swim-raft.
The woman stood without hurry as he approached. He saw her teeter at the edge of the raft. He was just gliding to within a paddle’s length of her when she dove into the lake, supple as an otter.
He backpaddled to stop the canoe and waited. The wind had picked up. Its random whistling hinted at a faint skirl of music. He scanned the water and peered under the floats of the raft. The woman did not surface. He pulled the canoe alongside the raft and grabbed a piece of rope he found tucked under the seat of the boat to tie it to a strut. Then he clambered onto the raft. She still had not appeared. He felt no fear—only excitement. He stripped to his underwear, piling the clothes into the canoe, and dove into the lake. The man shrugged off the initial shock of the cold water. He descended several feet and got his bearings. This section of the lake was about twenty feet deep, he guessed. Although the day was overcast, the water column below seemed to glow faintly. From beneath, thick stands of watermilfoil rose up to weedy heights like an elegant forest of undulating trees. He drifted lower to hover just above the watermilfoil canopy. As he peered into the leafy depths, he caught a glimpse of the woman. She lay in a tangle of vegetation on the lake floor, her eyes closed.
He turned and swam quickly to the surface. He gulped several deep breaths, then submerged again. This time, he dove with determined strokes, plunging rapidly downward, pushing through the stately columns of lakeweed. He felt tendrils brush his limbs and body and fall away as he passed. Strange, he still seemed to hear a faint piping of music, though he had left the wind far above.
As he approached the lake bottom, he struggled through a curtain of weeds to reach the woman’s still body. Abruptly, she opened her eyes and shot upward. He gave out a muffled yell, marked by a long spiraling streamer of bubbles. The woman now swam up to him. Floating no more than a foot away, she regarded him impassively. At that instant, the man realized that his arms and legs had somehow become ensnared in lakeweed. He could feel a burning in his lungs and a craving to breathe. Alarm flooded his brain. He began to flail wildly, weeds wrapping ever more tightly around his limbs.
The woman lightly caressed his cheek. He was overwhelmed with panic, asphyxiating—but at her touch, his body went quiet.
Even as oxygen starvation overwhelmed him, he saw in her eyes a savage gleam, felt her lips press to his. And in his last moment, he heard the deafening crash of the music.
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