Lake Daemon

Don’t visit Lake Daemon, The Old Timers say. Time runs funny there.

This is the warning they tell their children. And their children’s children. There’s something off about that place. No fish live in the lake. The dark water is only good for breeding mosquitoes. And tussock rushes. Vermillion clay cakes the banks, cracks when the heat sucks the water up into the sky. And in water, a peculiar viscous fog wafts and ebbs the lake’s surface like an evil, ethereal crown. The local magpies keep camp at Lake Daemon, deep seated nests balancing in the fork of oak trees. They gleefully swoop unwelcome visitors, pecking at their hair, stealing strands for their nests.

They’re protecting something, The Old Timers say. Keeping people safe.

The original name for Lake Daemon was a warning itself. The young Bennett boy learnt that the hard way when he came back from camping there on a dare one night. When he came back early the next morning, he was shivering, drenched, pale, a blood-stained handprint on each shoulder. A monster, he stammered, shaking, it tried to pull me into the lake. The young Bennett boy was never the same again after that. He came back broken from Lake Daemon.

You see, Lake Daemon’s original name translated into "a limping creature with bloody hands". See? It’s a warning. A warning in a language long forgotten. A language that some say only witches use now.

Sapphy never listened to the rumours about Lake Daemon. Her: eyes so blue they’d see right through you. Her: skin bronzed; spirit fearless. Her: friend of all the magpies. They welcomed her at Lake Daemon. Never once swooped Sapphy. They would sing intricate songs in exchange for meal worms. They loved her. She loved them. They’d let her climb the trees, feed their fledgling chicks, let her sing to them strange songs in a language no-one ever used anymore.

Something magic about that girl, The Old Timers said. Something off about her too.

Sapphy was unobtainable. Not that the local boys didn’t try: oh, they tried. Made fools of themselves trying. Sapphy could run, jump, throw a punch just as well as any of them. They learnt not to mess with Sapphy. Rest assured, when a local boy came home with a black eye, Sapphy was usually to blame.

But she found a friend in Justin. Him with the pancake coloured hair and inextricably sorrowful eyes. Him so tall he’d have to bend over to hear what you said. Not that anybody spoke to him, for fear of catching his sadness.

Something tragic about that boy, The Old Timers said. Something off about him too.

But Sapphy made him laugh, there, on the shore of Lake Daemon. He’d stand up tall, let Sapphy find a perch on his shoulders so she could thread strands of their hair into magpie nests. Town folk could hear their laughter rolling across the fields. It made the town boys jealous. Rumours blossomed like bruised egos.

The day Justin ran into town, screaming, hands vermillion as if caked in blood, the men and boys jeered around him, demanded to know what he’d done. She fell, he cried, trying to put a baby magpie back in its nest. They dragged him out to Lake Daemon, couldn’t find the body. So they took care of him themselves.

They did awful things to him. Awful things involving fists and words and branches to his leg and petrol poured. They watched him fall backward, into Lake Daemon, thrashing, trying to put out the flames of their hate. They watched until the bubbles stop popping at the surface. The magpies shrieked and swooped the lake. Then the magpies swooped them. The men and boys ran home, went back to their lives, never spoke of it again.

But still, from time to time, local kids visited Lake Daemon. Some stayed the night. But they never came back the same: eyes wide, pulse thick and urgent like magpie wings, swooping. They all told the same tale: an unbelievably tall monster with blood covered hands and sad eyes, leg limping behind it, trying to drag them into Lake Daemon. Then fog rolling in from nowhere, even in summer, and in the fog the voice of a girl, singing in a language no-one ever sings or speaks anymore. And how the monster calmed at the sound of this song, calmed enough to let the kids go, scrambling and screaming off toward dawn and home.

Don’t visit Lake Daemon, The Old Timers say. Time runs funny there.