The Lagoon

Life grew lonelier around the farm. Grandpa and Grandma had both died. The rest had left me. The floors in that old house always creaked, and sometimes I could pretend that was my family rather than the house settling. But I knew in my heart that the only thing left to keep me company was the dead.

When Uncle Jimmy had abandoned us years ago, all of the chores fell on me. Grandma still lived then, though she could barely walk, let alone tend to the place. I had been left a sizable piece of land, covered with dead or dying grass. Some buildings littered the property, most fallen into disuse; only the house and one of the barns was still being used. Even those were close to joining the others in abandonment. Sometimes I looked at the old barn-- decades ago it was replaced by a newer one that was now just as old and rickety--and I thought of my brother Trevor and I making leaps from the top of the hayloft, or scraping ourselves on nails in the rafters seeing who could climb higher.

Three pastures plagued the property, though only one was occupied, and even then it was filled by cattle so thin they wouldn’t sell to a blind man. The other two had been reclaimed by nature. We were supposed to rotate the cattle every so often to different pastures, but unless I found a way to split into three separate people, that wasn’t going to happen.

Inside the barn, only a dozen and a half dairy cattle remained. Nearly as skinny as the beef cows, only the best gave me any more than thirty pounds of milk each day. An outhouse sat by the back porch, door hanging on rusty hinges that banged and squealed from the slightest gust of wind. And fifty feet from all that mattered, there was a lagoon. Moss-covered and manure-colored, it was older than everything else on the farm.

Being the only one around, I was the only one who saw what crawled out of it at night.

I still remember when Trevor disappeared. Not two years after our dad left and it was clear he was gone for good, Trevor and I went wandering with Barf and Puke, Jimmy’s two blue heelers. This was before they put the fence up around the lagoon. It wasn’t too long before, though. Jimmy always joked that they threw the naughty children in it and left them to drown in shit. That had always terrified me, but Trevor thought it was funny.

His laughter must have died while he drowned there. Of course, no one ever knew that was where he had gone.

But I knew.

It had only been a minute. I’d turned away and wandered off barely ten feet from where he was. The last time I saw him, he was toeing the coast of the lagoon, and I would never see my older brother again.

The next few days were spent looking for Trevor, and while everyone else combed through every other inch of the property, I cruised with the gator around the coast of the shit pit. Grandma sat hollering from the back porch--she never left the damn place--that he wasn’t gonna be there. I never paid attention to her though. My eyes were always drawn to Uncle Jimmy, standing across the yard and casting a look of knowing in my direction. Maybe he saw it happen. I didn’t, even though I had been with Trevor five minutes before. I was the only one who might have known, and I didn’t. But in my heart I knew. I truly knew that Trevor had drowned.

An image invaded my mind: Trevor’s slight form teetering at the edge, his shoes losing traction in the mud. I could always envision his legs sweeping under the sludgy surface while the thick waters filled his mouth, catching and gurgling in his throat as he desperately clawed for the surface…

Even after twenty years that image remains in my mind. I thought the clarity of the picture would fade, yet I still can see the accident so clearly. Even now that I know it wasn’t an accident.

On the third day of looking, Barf rode in the back of the gator with me. I heard the bell on his collar and glanced back to see him staring at… something. Maybe he felt something. Had an instinct. Or… Whatever it was made no difference, because he leapt into the water all the same. I had time to process that he was gone before the last of the bubbles came. The surface broke slightly at what must have been a valiant struggle for the air, but Barf succumbed to the same fate as Trevor. And that was the end of it. Someone--I never learned who--decided it would not be worthwhile to drain the lagoon, as Trevor would have been dead for days when we found him. A tantrum thrown by Jimmy--more about his dog than his nephew--to the sheriff was the last of that affair.

That was when the fence went up. Little did we know it would make no difference.

Ten years later I had a dream. Trevor didn’t slip. In the same way that I always envisioned Barf, his head snapped towards the water, and he watched, entranced as the slight ripples disrupted the slimy coverage of moss. And then he jumped in. Maybe he struggled once he was in there, but it was too late. He sank to the bottom. I watched with disembodied horror as my seven-year-old brother’s body jerked less and less as life slowly drained away from his eyes.

That dream came the night that Puke disappeared. Jimmy was furious. Fire and rescue came in, and we had the whole lagoon emptied. Jimmy put his foot down this time. I watched the argument, and my grandmother was convinced nothing would come of it, yet for the next two days the water slowly seeped out. Not the way it did when cleaned, but completely drained away until nothing was left.

I stared at the empty pit. When I had talked to Jimmy, I asked if the bottom would be covered in bones. He gave me a doubtful look but never answered. And now I had my answer. When I stared at the steep edges leading to the muddy floor five feet below, I wondered if it would have been more horrifying to have seen bones. A young boy--my brother--and two dogs would have been down there. Somehow it was more frightening that they weren’t.

And that night I saw it for the first time.

It was just a shadow. It skirted the farm, thin and multi-limbed, twisting in the strangest ways. At first I thought it must be a tree swaying in the breeze, only I saw it at a strange angle. Yet later that week I heard the drips and saw the same thin, twisted shape emerge from the murky waters of the lagoon. It moved at an inhuman speed, disappearing in the tall grass of our third pasture. I watched in horror, knowing that at any moment it would pounce an unnatural length to kill me at a single stroke, and only snapped out of it when my cigarette started burning at my fingers.

I told Jimmy about it maybe a month later, after a half a dozen sightings.

“Always thought it looks like a Wittikka. ‘Cept it crawls around like a snake. ‘Ad a little Indian in school with me. I asked him if they’s ever crawl like that in his stories. ‘E thought I’s makin’ fun of ‘im.”

“What do you think it is?”

“‘E’s what drags ‘em under. Simple as that.”

It went on like that for a few years. From time to time the count of our cattle would drop by one. A few books on Wendigo collected dust on my shelf--I’d never been much of a reader--and I listened closer to the stories about the farm.

When I was younger I would tune out the lectures. This old uncle I never met once owned the farm, and his old grandpa who I’d never heard of owned it before him. My family would boast of thirteen generations on the same farm. That was important to them. Then I listened to those stories for a different reason.

I looked closer at photos of old family pets. I pored over old genealogies of people I never cared about and found reasons for death. One drowning. My grandpa’s cousin went missing on the property. 30 years before that, another went missing. There never was too much, only a hint here or there that something was wrong.

I found a scrap from a cousin Alice’s diary about “Daddy’s new fence” that never was built. Nothing piqued my interest. All of it was from generations back, anyway, and so how relevant could it be? So I started asking questions. My grandmother called me foolish. Uncle Jimmy, though, humored me a few times.

“When I’s in school,” he told me once. “I’d a buddy named Cooper whose folks lived down the road. We walked every day together. ‘Cept one day I saw ‘im walking down the road near that darn lagoon. No one ever saw ‘im again.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all she wrote,” he said, taking a deep draw of his cigarette.

Around this time he met a girl named Cindy. He brought her around a lot. They were dating for only eight months before they got engaged.

It was nice to have someone else around, since my mom had started spending her days picking up extra shifts at the courthouse and started spending nights with her boss. Finally, she was happy again for the first time since Trevor disappeared, though it broke my heart to see that she had to do it so far from me.

Lectures from my grandma about how you don’t turn your back on family became even more frequent then. I suppose I had taken it to heart, since I was now an adult and still lived with them. A part of it was that Grandpa had died recently, and Jimmy needed more help than ever. Cindy wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, so she was a big help in that too. They got married about a year after she first came by, and they took my room upstairs, relegating me to the spare room in the basement.

For a while I’d almost forgotten about the creature, but there was a lot of rustling outside of the small basement window that felt unnatural.

Almost a year after that, Cindy had her baby in the house. I had to help deliver it. Delivering cows didn’t prepare me for that. There were times I hated living on this farm, and this was one of those times.

Grandma joked that Cindy would have to convince Jimmy not to name the baby Vomit, which made me laugh. In the end, they called the little girl Harper, which was a surprisingly inappropriate name, since the baby never made a sound.

Her being so quiet might have been why none of us noticed when she disappeared.

She had been strapped into a stroller, outside with her father. Later that night we found the four-month-old’s stroller upside down in the lagoon. The straps that had held her in were cut clean through.

While everyone wailed and mourned, I sat quietly wondering how the straps weren’t frayed at all, and how the stroller had gone over the fence. My mind always went to those places in times of grief: it was easier than thinking about never hearing Harper’s gentle coos ever again.

For months after that, the only time the house wasn’t dead silent was when Cindy and Jimmy shouted at each other. Grandma was too old to be horrified or give any lectures by the time they divorced. I could tell she had dementia or Alzheimer's--I never did learn the difference between the two--but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I dropped her off at a nursing home.

The last thing Jimmy ever said to me was telling me to leave. To take grandma with me if I had to or to leave her if I needed to. I never would forgive him for that.

I watched him go, thinking about how red his eyes were. I had never seen him cry before, and that would be how I remember him. Forever.

It has been seven years since Jimmy left, seven months since Grandma died, and I’m still here. Nowadays I see the creature every night. I try to ignore the prints it leaves that look like human hands. I try to ignore how when it gets close enough to me it looks like a wet dog. Or several wet dogs. I try to forget the time that I shot at it twice, and one of the bullets connected, ripping a baby’s wail out of the creature at the impact. But the thought always hovers at the back of my mind. When it finally gets me--when the call is strong enough that I jump in, or it crawls to me itself--which part of my body will it add to its own?

Someday it would kill me. But better to live on this farm forever than to run from it. This was my home, and one day I would be a part of it. Forever. I smiled.