The Stone Under Lake Terrine

Humans have an odd fascination with flooding.

Noah and his Ark. Achilles diverting a river to decimate the Trojans. The Great Flood of Gun-Yu.

The ability for humankind to divert, manipulate, dam – and all the destructive potential that comes along with them. Since the earliest sparks of civilization, humans have viewed floods as acts of divinity and sought to emulate them. To control torrential rapids is to be as God.

Okay, I’m being a little dramatic, but not as much as you’d think. Have you ever heard of “drowned cities?” Cities that someone deemed undesirable, so they wiped them off the face of the earth. Usually by damming or diverting rivers on such a massive scale that entire towns were covered.

Now, the “official” reason for most of these cities is that their placement wasn’t ideal for modern urban planning. It’s harder to make the necessary adjustments than to just… Well, I already mentioned Noah, didn’t I?

And that makes some amount of sense… but it also rarely tells the whole story.

If a city is destroyed – either through negligence or malice – it’s easy to hide the evidence of misdeeds beneath thousands of gallons of water. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s one thing if the ruins are still visible, but how do people ask questions about a city that isn’t there at all? Obviously, there are situations where practicality is the primary motivator, but other motives are common enough that somebody needs to be asking questions.

That’s what I do.

I’m a professional diver and historian. I know, it’s an odd combination, but passion takes you where it takes you, and I’ve certainly found my niche. Normally, I get hired by people who feel like they might have an example of what I described. They have me come in and look over their town’s records. If there’s anything substantial left beneath the water, I dive down to document what’s there too. I help people find the full picture.

That isn’t exactly what’s happening here.

About 6 months ago, I came across a bit of a… blind spot.

Lake Terrine in western Montana.

It’s in an isolated valley in the Rockies that used to hold the mining town of Richter Springs. In the 30s, a nearby river was diverted into the valley. That’s where things get weird. Originally, the plan was to just dam off the river to create a reservoir in a neighboring valley for Richter Springs. That reservoir was practically finished when a handful of marine engineers took a truly absurd amount of dynamite from their reserves and blew open a trench, hundreds of feet long, diverting it into Richter Springs instead.

Everyone involved perished in the incident. Engineer and townsperson alike.

It was either a catastrophic accident or a highly coordinated terror attack. You’d expect there to be a big story there… but there is nothing. Simple planning documents. Bare-bones incident reports. News articles that speak around something happening, but never directly address it.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how suspicious that sounds.

Like I said before, it’s not unusual for people to use these damming projects to subtly sweep things under the rug, but a big part of subtlety is making it look like nothing is wrong in the first place. I have never seen something so obviously hidden on such a massive scale still go unquestioned. I guess that whoever is responsible scrubbed the records clean enough that it took nearly 90 years for someone to notice, but that just raises even more questions.

Something is up with Lake Terrine. I’ve already exhausted the research I can do from home. The only thing left is to go there in person.

***

I’ve been here a week now, asking around the nearby towns and I have found even fewer answers than I expected.

Terrine is isolated, but not impossible to get to. The nearest town isn’t that far away on a straight line, but the path between the two meanders through several valleys so it seems much farther. There are no real roads either. A handful of hiking trails go around the lake if you’re ready for a multiple-day trip, though.

The weirdest thing is how nonchalant people are about it. With all the signs of government involvement, I expected there to be men-in-black patrolling the area to keep people out. Or for there to be whispered stories and conspiracies about something going on in the valley. Or that I’d have one of those horror movie encounters, where some spooky gas station attendant tells me to turn back and stop sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong.

Nobody seems to care though. It’s just a place to them.

It’s been a week and nobody’s tried to stop me. Multiple people even recommended it as a scenic destination. One of Montana’s hidden wonders, only phrased more like a tourist pamphlet and less like an ominous warning.

In fact, the only warning I got was to not drink the water. Something about sulfur deposits making it taste foul. Not even unsafe, just a little gross.

I’m honestly starting to think that I jumped the gun on this whole thing, but since I’m out here I might as well see it through. I’ve got all my camping and diving gear packed and I’m going up to the lake proper in the morning.

Who knows? Maybe it really is just a lake.

***

The hike was as uneventful. It was a tough trip with everything I had to carry, but I crested the mountain pass as the sun was setting on my second day. The sunset is perfectly framed this time of year so it passes into the valley opened by the incident and seems to melt into the mouth of the river.

I set up camp just past the tree line on the banks of the lake.

The next morning, I do a lap of the lake. Nothing unusual to report. The banks look normal, as do the plant and animal life in the valley. I hike out to the mouth of the river itself and manage to follow it back to the dam. Other than how isolated and undermaintained it is, nothing about it stands out.

The only thing left to do is dive.

It’s getting late in the evening, but I’ve got just enough time to do a preliminary dive. I’ll do a more thorough job tomorrow but can’t contain myself. I need to see.

You might even call it an obsession at this point, but I don’t care. My gut is telling me that something is wrong here, despite everything to the contrary. If I were to try and put it off until tomorrow, I wouldn’t sleep anyway. It has to be tonight.

I suit up and make my way out into the water.

Once I’m fully submerged, I realize that the water’s temperature is… wrong. Instead of getting cooler as I descend into the darkness, it stays the same. There’s probably some logical explanation. I couldn’t find many records of Richter Springs, but it wouldn’t be a leap to assume there’s a hot spring in the valley.

Even as I try to find an explanation, my skin starts to crawl, so I push those thoughts away.

The water is so cloudy that I can barely see 3 feet in front of my face. It’s a big valley and Richter Springs wasn’t that large to begin with. Hell, with how violent the flooding had to be to kill everyone involved, there might not even be anything left. I brought enough equipment for a little over one big day worth of diving so I have to find something in that time. I’d probably abandon the project entirely if I had to make a second trip. I don’t think I’d have the spirit to keep going.

I find Richter Springs almost immediately.

Like passing through a curtain that I don’t know is there until I’m on the other side, the swirling sediment around me completely disappears and I find myself suspended in warm, clear water. I look back and see a wall of roiling dust just behind me, like it’s being held back by something I can’t see.

I look down and there is just blank, white nothingness.

The muddy lakebed below me had also given way to something as I passed through the veil. It looks like limestone. Like the bottom of a cave coated in a smooth white sheet left by thousands of years of steady trickle. Or, more appropriately, like calcium deposits that build up on things when they’re left underwater for too long.

As I look longer, it grows more certain in my mind that that’s what this is. I’ve seen it so many times before, but never like this. I shake myself out to try and throw off the uneasy feeling building in my gut.

Everything is fine.

The sudden transition got to my head, that’s all. This is nothing.

As I push forward, gliding over the smooth white below, shapes slowly start to form in the distance. Without the clouds of dust blocking my light, my range of vision more than doubled, but the looming white figures still make me jump as they creep into vision.

Buildings.

Coated in the same calcium deposits as the ground, they come leering out of the darkness, swollen and rounded like they’d been smothered in coat after coat of white paint. It’s hard to place what they are at first, but as I get closer, I’m able to see the fine details that still show through. On the windows, I can see each pane of glass and the strips of wood that separate them. Doorknobs, hinges, nails, the warping in the wood planks – I can even peek through the old keyhole on one house, nearly completely swollen shut, only a couple millimeters wide.

Nothing but darkness on the inside.

I expected the buildings to slowly become denser as I moved inward, the way most small towns are structured, but I hit what appears to be a main street almost immediately. Only a few hundred feet from the first house. For some reason, only the center of town was left intact.

It’s completely still, like being on the soundstage of an old western film. It doesn’t feel real as I kick and drift my way through the town.

My foot brushes something on the ground.

My heart jumps out of my chest, but I quickly laugh it off. I’d been like this since I set foot in the water, and nothing had happened yet. I’m sure it’s nothing.

I look down.

A face, frozen in swollen agony stares back at me. Mouth agape, eyes a milky white.

Terror grips me again and this time I let it run its course. I desperately kick and paddle away from whatever the fuck that thing is. I tuck into a narrow alley between two buildings, where I turn and wait to see if it follows me.

A second passes. A minute. I lose track of time, waiting for the slightest sign of movement so I can start kicking upward, but the water is still.

I muster what little courage I have left and push forward enough to peak around the corner. I quickly catch a glimpse of it, still just as horrifying, but as I realize it hasn’t moved an inch, I can already feel my heart starting to settle.

It’s a person. A middle-aged man with long thick hair and simple overalls. Just like everything else, he’s slightly swollen, but I can still make out details. The folds in his clothes, the way the hair fell across his shoulders. It was almost more like an unfinished marble sculpture than the remains of a person. He’s laying on the ground, one arm outstretched back in the direction I’d come from.

He’s missing a couple of fingers, but I catch sight of two small nuggets settled on the ground below us, gently swaying in the currents. I pick them up and see that they’re solid white stone, even where they would’ve once been attached to the rest of the body.

That’s odd… If they were broken off before, then surely either they would have drifted away or been sealed to the ground by the deposits.

I remember I kicked something and the pieces start to come together.

Sorry.

I say a quick apology for disturbing his final resting place as I wrap the fingers up in a cloth and slide them into one of the pouches on my belt.

I do a quick glance around and start to notice there are other shapes like him. Human lumps laying fused with the ground. Now that I know what to look for, I notice about 5 nearby.

Whatever uncertainty I had before I came down here is gone. Something big happened here. I’m going to have to call in a whole team. I quickly abandon the idea of another dive tomorrow. It’ll be better to just take what I have and come back with more hands now that I have proof.

I check my tanks and see I’m already pushing my limits. It’s time to go, but I can’t help but feel the flutter of excitement in my heart.

This is the start of something big.

By the time I decompress and surface, it’s already fully night. I make my way back to camp, strip my gear and get ready to sleep. My mind is busy making plans, but I fall asleep holding the two fingers wrapped tightly in their cloth, fixated on what they could mean for the future.

***

I wake up to the shadows of leaves dancing on my tent in the gentle light of morning. I take a deep breath, stretch, and go to rub the sleep from my eyes.

Ow

Something scrapes my face.

I open my eyes and look down.

My left hand, the one I had been holding the fingers in, has patches of stone holding it tight against the cloth, which has also become a solid mass.

I panic as I shake my hand, trying to let go of the bundle. The muscles flex in my hand and I feel skin pulling at the seam between skin and stone, but I can’t let it go. That’s when I notice the seam is moving. It’s advancing around each of my fingers, crawling up toward my wrist.

I scream as I fumble out of my tent. I need to get it off me. I need to smash it. Cut it. Anything.

I briefly feel the warmth of the morning sun on my skin before it turns into a searing pain in my left hand. The seam speeds up. Before I have time to realize what’s happened, it makes its way to my wrist.

I fumble through my packs for my knife.

I eventually find it deep at the bottom of one bag. Before I can do anything, I feel a stiffness in my shoulder. The seam creeps onto my chest. It gets harder to breath. The knife won’t cut it anymore.

I think quickly for any last-ditch effort. The stone didn’t spread while I was in the water. Is that the trick - the answer I’d been missing this whole time? Did they divert the reservoir to stop this?

I stagger toward the lake. It’s a hundred feet away. I should be able to make it…

As I clear the trees and step out of their shade onto the rocky shoreline, I’m met with another flare of pain. I look down and the seam is racing over my skin, twice as fast as before. I’m less than halfway to the water’s edge when my body collapses.

*** *** ***

It’s been a week.

I think I’m dead, but it’s not how I imagined it.

I have a nice view here. I was petrified looking straight at the lake, so each evening I get to enjoy that extravagant sunset I told you about earlier. It’s gotten even more beautiful. It was hard to see underwater, but the crawling limestone has small crystals that reflect the light like freshly fallen snow. With the orange light just peaking into the valley it turns every plain white surface into a little light show.

It kept spreading. Not quite as fast as it had on me though. It seems like it prefers organic material – the trees also went quickly – but it’ll take anything as far as I can tell. Fast in the daytime but slows down at night. I can also say that I was right. It hasn’t spread under the water at all. If only I had been quicker.

It’s reached about halfway up the mountains. Within another week the entire valley will be turned.

I’ve been thinking about what I said a while ago. I always thought the Noah’s story was about God’s vindictive negligence. I think there’s more to it now. Simultaneously realizing his own limitations and having to destroy something he loved must have been dreadful. I imagine the choice hurt him.

Is that what it truly means to be as God? Did we take on burden’s we never expected when we started to bend the world to our whims?

Maybe there’s something there, maybe I’ve just got too much free time to think. It’s hard to say…

I wonder if anyone knows yet?

I assume so, but is there anything to do about it? I realize know that the person who chose to blow the dam caught it early. Probably within a day or two.

It’s too late for anything like that at this point.

Planes roar overhead.

Huh.

I wonder…

I mean, if anything was going to do it, that would probably-