Eat. Move out.

I made the most out of what I had back when I was a boy. We wasn’t very rich and cancer overtook Mama when I was only eight. Daddy and I lived with her shadow in that same little childhood house on the lake. I miss her like crazy, especially then. She used to clean the house real neat for the family, make us grits and bacon on weekend mornings, and she even tended a pretty little garden. That same house wasn’t even recognizable by the time I was eleven. We was in debt from her chemo, Daddy was one of those old-fashioned types that didn’t know how to clean or cook nothing, and our house got broken into and robbed all the time. Still, he didn’t let me see none of that anger he had. At least not first hand.

I’d come home, the house was a mess, all torn up. He’d ask me to tidy it all up. Most of the time he actually blamed it on me. I’d still clean it. I was scared to be frank. Sometimes the mess was in my room and sometimes drawers were pulled out completely or jammed. Always, it was like he was angrily looking for something and ruined everything in his path to find it. There was no way a kid my age could have caused the kind of messes I’d come home to.

Despite it all, the fear and being poor and all, I had that fun little lake in my backyard. Boys my age from school came over. We used to play in it all summer. We came up with all sorts of games and things to do in the lake. My dog Lucky even swam with us everyday too. Year after year, I made more friends and brought them over to play with us.

We was able to afford this house because nobody has wanted to live in our neighborhood for years despite it being on a lake and everything. No new settlements have been built there in ages. I started to understand why when my friends told me about all the creepy stuff going on around here.

The boys always talked about these ghosts of a woman and her babies that all drowned eight years ago. I didn’t believe it to be real until Jonathan found his mama’s old newspaper. There was also stories about demons and a sex cult in the woods near the north end of the lake. All of it gave me a nervous imagination near the water, but the worst of them all was the Sea Monster of Lake Erodo.

At this age, I didn’t know nothing about mythology or the Loch Ness Monster, really. I believed all the bullshit the kids told me. The monster, according to my friend Chase, lived on fish and small children. According to another boy, that was the reason the woman was drawn to drown her babies. The monster was hungry and would whisper things to her while she was out in the yard.

A monster that can whisper? That was more horrifying than the detail about eating people. Chase remarked his older brother saw it one time when he was night swimming drunk. Another boy, Zacharia, said the monster can crawl on land. These stories became a little much for me despite how intriguing they were. None of them lived here but me afterall. I convinced myself that the boys had to at least be exaggerating—especially since they tried to convince me it lived close to my part of the lake.

One day in early August I just had enough. We were playing by the dock in my yard and Chase was going on about a boy in our class that passed away. I knew that boy, his name was Bobby. Bobby used to come over when I was real young. Mama would make us fruit plates and we’d play, watch cartoons, and go swimming in the summer. When I was seven, just two years before I lost Mama, Bobby went missing. I was sheltered from what happened and, to be frank, I’m pretty glad I didn’t know. I used to write him letters and give them to Mama, you know, in case he was just sick or something. I did it pretty obsessively. His family moved out right after he went missing apparently. I was convinced he moved with them, still sick or just overly sheltered from me and the outside world. That is until I accidentally heard a brief news cycle reporting him missing. My mom quickly turned it off before any other details were given.

Chase went on about how his body was found mutilated on the other end of the lake. One night, he went to bed and the next morning his family saw him floating out the window in the distance, unsure it was him for a while before telling the police about the bobbing thing in the distance. I couldn’t hear anymore.

I wasn’t going to let them convince me anymore about this monster. I never saw the damn thing, it had to be some evil person or maybe the ghost of the woman or something.

No. Bobby deserves a more justified reason than some fictional story.

“Why don’t you shut the hell up, Chase?”

And for the longest time after, we finally stopped talking about this stuff. It was out of my mind. Afterall, we still all played in the lake every summer that supposedly contained all these horrible things. If they felt comfortable, there’s no way it was true.

That is until I started seeing the dead things floating in the water when I was thirteen. At first, I assumed it was some seasonal thing—or a parasite—or a hunter—or…

It was just too similar to the Bobby case. It started off as one or two squirrels washing up on the shore of the lake once a week. Then it got noticeable. The boys would ask me what’s going on, if the lake was dangerous or something. There started to be so many animals. Daily.

It was starting to haunt me. The stench was enormous, so much so I could smell the piles of animals inside the fucking house. Daddy started collecting them together with gloves and chucking them away into the woods to minimize our distraught. It became such a problem that my friends stopped coming over to hang out. Worse, they started telling kids at school about it. Soon enough, it was starting to take over my life. I was having nightmares about them. One night, I dreamt that my entire room was covered in them and approaching the house quickly from my backyard was the creature my friends always told me about. It walked with such immense thunder, quickly, and it vibrated through the bedroom. I watched the thing as it crawled its way towards the back porch of the house from the lake. Lizardlike. I let out a gasp, tempted to scream, but I covered my mouth before letting it escape. I locked my door, worried about how to tell Daddy in time. ‘It eats kids!’ I thought to myself. I’m its next victim. Sure, I’m thirteen, but I’m still small. ‘Dear God. Dear God!’

It enters my room with ease, tip toes around my body blindly. It got real close, ‘Can it not smell or see me?’ Eternally, the creature walked in circles, slowly creeping around my body.

Then I awoke. I continued to dream this dream once a week. Then progressively more frequently until the dream was nightly, beyond summer time, and well into fall. Then, the dream mutated.

I would go swimming alone. I would be floating near the dock on a summer day as I always had done since I was a child. Suddenly, I was yanked from the surface by some grabbing hand or the jaws of some creature below. Either way, the sensation was real and sharp. I would slowly drown, waving my arms, fighting to stay afloat, screaming. Screaming. Just screaming for my Daddy, “Please come help, please come help me, Daddy! It’s got me! Something has got me! Help me! Please—”

I was relieved by the time the weather started to freeze; however, that no more animals were popping up in the water. I know Daddy must have been relieved not to see the damn things either. The squirrels and the other rodents had begun their hibernation, the birds have migrated South, and now there is nothing to wash up on the shore.

I was convinced, by now, that this was the doing of the Sea Monster. There was no way around it, despite how crazy I felt for finally succumbing to believing it. I never told anyone about my fears of it. I knew we didn’t have enough money to move out of here, especially knowing no one wanted to live around here. I still dreamed those dreams, over and over, every night.

By late February, something really horrible happened. It changed my fear into rage. I came home from school really early one day because I felt sick, that same foul odor met my nose, and my heart sunk. I reluctantly wandered into the backyard, and a large blonde lump was surrounded by the potent sound of flies buzzing around it. I knew it had to be…it was Lucky. It was my motherfucking dog. The damn thing killed my sweet dog. What did my dog do to it? My innocent dog that my Mama and Daddy gave me when I was kid. Lucky, who I grew up with and so painstakingly taught to sit, shake, roll over, and play dead. I yelled and sobbed and felt immensely sorrowful for several weeks after seeing her like that on my shore.

“‘I’m going to kill this thing, and I don’t care if I die trying. For Lucky, for Bobby, for making my life so miserable after being a poor kid with a dead Mama.”

I was scared of the endeavor, I’m not going to lie. It took a few weeks of meditating on it to figure out how to do it. I remembered how the animals would usually appear the next morning, how Bobby was found the day after, how Chase’s brother saw it nightswimming. I was sure this thing was most active at night. I was to take the largest, sharpest knife in the kitchen, take a flashlight, go out at night, and stab the thing to death if I could find it.

The first night I attempted, I didn’t immediately see anything and got too afraid to stay and search any further. The second, I saw something large in the lake and turned around, sprinting for the door as quietly as I could muster. The third attempt, I decided, would be my last. I hunted around the perimeter and with a certain lucky and dreadful burst of adrenaline. I saw a silhouette of something large and tall emerging from the shore.

I quickly flipped off the flashlight and dropped it, hearing something tearing through the water. The sound was coming towards me. I sprinted into the freezing water, paying no particular notice to just how cold it was, with my knife in hand. I slashed and stabbed flesh, its limbs beat against me with all its force, but I kept managing to fight. I was getting weak, but it was getting even weaker. Despite the pain, I finished it. I successfully stabbed it to death. Catching my breath as best as I could, I limped and then I crawled out of the water, slowly getting close enough to my back porch to turn on its motion light.

Then, I noticed something. The door to the crawlspace, a door I had never paid any notice to, was open. With dread and pain, I got back on my feet, picked up the flashlight I dropped in the grass earlier, and ventured inside.

I saw something devastating. The interior was lined with tarps, there was a small pallet constructed out of blankets and pillows from around my house. There was an incredible body odor, but it was absolutely nothing compared to the stench of a collection of animals over in a makeshift workspace. There, you could see bricks, string, and small animals tied to them.

This had to be how whoever was living down here disposed of the animals—by tying them to bricks and attempting to sink them in my lake. They would eventually come back to the shore with a foul odor accompanying them.

This wasn’t even what the worst part was. Around the entire surface of the tarp, photos of me, me and my Mama, me and my Daddy, and our whole family were tacked to the wall. These were photos that were stored in albums, in drawers. The same drawers I used to think my Daddy was tearing open out of frustration and rummaging through.

Even worse, there were photos of me freshly taken. Different parts of my body, real close up, my ear, my hand, all taken of me asleep in my bed. Clothes I’ve lost, from stored baby clothes to my current clothes, were scattered across his disgusting pallet. Valuables from inside my house were kept in a cup by the work table. But worst of all, there were premeditated murder notes. About me. Scattered among the photos and the clothes, all over the ground. I found one in particular that read,

“Kill dog

Grab weeping boy

Home at 3:30 from school

Eat

Move out”