When Hell Is an Ever-Present Room

Lonnie saw his father get pulled under. In the unforgiving light of day, a light which fully showcases age and crestfallen expressions, he watched his father disappear. There was a struggle, of course, but the disruption of the lake’s surface quickly smoothed to present a type of fraudulent peace. And then, it was just Lonnie and the late afternoon, alone.

“Dad?”

Urgency jolted him toward the water’s edge, as he stumbled awkwardly over logs. Lonnie was wearing his blue twill pants, rolled up to his calves, and his matching polo shirt; his father had picked him up straight from school today. His discarded lapel jacket still lay by the car with a cricket in the front pocket.

“Dad,” he breathed, wading into the lake. The sharp pin pricks and heaviness of the water gobbled up his legs and waist as he felt his way deeper. Once he was chest-deep, the needling of his skin pacified, and he assimilated to the lake’s form and quiet strength.

Scouring the surface, Lonnie quickly realized the algae was too thick and plentiful, obstructing any chance he had of seeing below. Like the meat of a jellyfish, it spread and sprawled around him, a curtain shrouding the lake in slime and discouragement. He knew he needed to go under, hating that his face would be kissed by the tentacles.

Words his father said before he’d vanished briefly sounded in Lonnie’s head: “No colder than your gramma, boy.”

Lonnie took a deep breath and plugged his nose, how his mom used to do at the public pool before she would dunk her head and then bob right back up like a fair-haired dolphin. He didn’t know how long he could hold his breath, and he also didn’t know the real size of Lake Corbin. His father had made the lake look small, but now Lonnie felt swallowed and untethered.

When his eyes adjusted, he saw contorted and stringy greenery with pockets of light between the webbings. The juxtaposition of the shadows and brightness felt disorienting. Lonnie’s eyes burned as he scanned through crawling shapes while he parted his way through the seaweed. He frog-kicked to a desperate rhythm in his head, each time drawing his legs inward and thinking simultaneously: Just a little longer. With the repetition of his fingers meeting the algae, then the muckiness brushing along his arms and sneaking up his pants, he began to question the heartiness of his lungs and the effectiveness of his swimming lessons two summers ago. Maybe it had only been a minute underneath, but Lonnie felt sandwiched now between two life sentences. His chest instinctively drew him up toward the surface, and he tilted toward it expectantly, toward the promise of brief relief.

The dark dome-like bubble could have just been another reservoir mystery, explained only by mind tricks and Lonnie’s strong leanings toward selective perception. It was a foot or so in front of him, possibly some forgotten crevice or floating fragment. Akin to the shadowed figures that danced outside of his bedroom window, he planned to give it no life in his thoughts. He swam past, until a hand jutted out from it.

The hand grabbed a fistful of Lonnie’s shirt, causing him to choke on the lake water and jerk like a hooked fish. With one resolved yank, he was pulled into the murky bubble. There was a krrsplat sound, clearing the faint humming in his ears and enclosing him in a damp grey sphere. Lonnie found himself on his knees, wondering if he was in someone’s upset stomach.

“Boy. You can breathe in here. Take a breath.” He looked up to see his dimly-lit father. Sitting, with his feet behind him, his father looked unnervingly concave. Every inch of him was either wrung out or leaking.

With a throat that felt as if it was filled with loose gravel, Lonnie inhaled and winced. No water filled his lungs, but a scratchy pollutant seemed to coat his inner linings like powdered sugar on the laminate kitchen countertops.

“Look, you’re safe now. But we need to kill that thing before we can get gone.”

“Kill what?” Lonnie clutched at his soaked polo and looked out toward the surrounding water. Outside of their cloudy bubble, Lake Corbin appeared blurred and inky.

“You listen to me – it’s out there!” his father shouted, exasperated.

Lonnie saw it immediately: the maroon couch with one unmatched plaid cushion, his father’s dog Dusty by those wine-stained slippers, and the Vietnam Service Medal laying on the fireplace mantle. Behind his father’s current panic, he could hear other crisp sounds, too: his father yelling about the establishment and “Society’s handcuffs” and “Don’t you move my glass again, boy!”

“It will tear straight into us if we don’t kill it. Right now, it’s circling.” His father spun his finger around with a grimace.

The living room, where his father would rant and bloody his knuckles, was a stage set that materialized when Lonnie smelled sweat mixed with tobacco or saw rage take the reins in his father’s eyes; it took up space in his young brain where maybe geometry or nice girls would have occupied if he was a different twelve-year-old.

“Boy, you’re gonna need my knife.”

Lonnie took another sand-coated breath, wincing. He saw the pocket knife being offered by his father and shook his head feebly.

His father inched closer, scooting now on his knees. “I can’t do it, boy. So, you just stab it in the eye when it comes close and we’ll get outta here, okay?”

The older man thrust the pocket knife toward him, his big hands shaky and frantic. The younger boy, with his own unsteady thoughts, could imagine the weight of those hands at his shoulders, pressing down, and then closing in around his throat . . .

“Take it, boy!” His father flicked open the blade and nodded at him.

Lonnie took the knife and held it at his side stiffly. “Is this why mom never wanted to bring us to Lake Corbin?”

“She don’t like to have fun, your mother.”

Lonnie’s thumb nail dug into the wooden handle. He studied the border of their bubble. Vague nightmarish configurations were visible through the taut film encircling them. When he turned back to his father, he saw there was glistening blood in the tear ducts of his father’s eyes. It was jarring – just pooling there and accentuating the bridge of his nose. The liquid pulsated and expanded, with no droplet releasing.

“Before you kill it, there’s something you gotta know,” his father said. He didn’t wipe his eyes, just let them collect blood and threaten a sort of spillage Lonnie had seen once during communion, when Father Terry had too much caffeine before service.

Lonnie swallowed and nearly choked, his throat burning with the taste of cigar ash and the sensation of rusty gears grinding inside of him. Despair seemed to be seeping from the bubble, from his father too; it wasn’t just blood, and it wasn’t just lake water. It smelled foul and felt dense.

“Tell me. Tell me dad,” he spluttered. His eyes bounced around the bubble. “I can’t-I can’t breathe in here.”

“Oh, we’ll go after you kill it. Just a stab to the eye, boy. Then we’ll get.”

Lonnie rose to his feet. He crouched slightly as he stood, even though the hazy vaulted ceiling was perhaps an arm’s reach above his head. Looking down upon his father, in their grey and stifling den, the child nursed a raw longing for his mom, for safety. This craving heated his face the way disloyalty or shame might, and he reminded himself that he had made his choice.

The blood crept along his father’s bottom eye lids, contained and rising to cradle brown irises. There was no acknowledgement of this overtaking, none that showed on his father’s face. The rage that had complete jurisdiction in those eyes would also be veiled now, Lonnie realized. The blood ruled.

“-Like your mother,” his father was saying.

“What?” he asked.

“Damn it all. I said that it looks like your mother. That’s all.”

The knife in Lonnie’s hand quaked as he felt a wave of nausea. Fury seemed to bubble up in his gut, brewing from the wooziness, but he didn’t see his living room in his mind; he saw his mom, with her hair tied at the base of her neck. She was holding hands with his little brother, and she was telling Lonnie, with a weary mouth, “When you’re ready, honey.”

“Just one stab,” his father said, hurrying him. “Go on.”

Lonnie couldn’t take a breath to steady himself, as his entire body felt constricted by the immense saturation of their bubble.

“You and me, boy,” his father encouraged. The orbs of his eyes were encased in blood.

Lonnie took a wobbly step back, bracing himself to leave the underwater room that felt as if it was melting into itself. He assessed his father one last time, hoping for a sign that this all was a figment of his own conception. The snap-shot of his living room had long ago started to feel imaginary because its contents had become fear-based folklore, conjured so often in times of distress. Maybe this bubble, containing his desperate and blind father, was the new haunted room.

Lonnie had never intentionally stabbed or even prodded someone else in his life. He tried to visualize the movements required, the force he would need to take. “Can you show me?” he asked.

Lonnie’s father cursed under his breath and rubbed at his gaunt neck. As he grumbled, Lonnie caught a slimy glint behind his father. Then, the boy noticed the algae that had swallowed his father’s feet; it was knotted and tangled around his ankles. His thoughts all started hammering in his mind as he suddenly felt grateful and freed by the sight of his father’s green shackles.

“Dad!” Lonnie staggered toward him. “I can cut you loo-”

“No, no!” his father boomed. The blood in his eyes rippled.

“Dad. You’re stuck here.”

“Boy, I’ll wait here until that thing’s dead. You sound like your baby brother: weak and stalling for time.”

Defeated, Lonnie wished he knew right from left in that clammy, awful, sphere. He held the knife in one hand and his head in the other. He thought about admitting to his father that he was scared, but his feelings had no space there. The blood had taken his father’s eyes, but not the venom in him.

“Use that knife like a man,” his father ordered. That was that.

Lonnie never quite knew what his father wanted from him, but it usually involved being a man.

“Okay,” he said, mostly to himself and mostly before he had fully decided anything. He drew back his shoulders and confronted the skin of the bubble before pushing his way out.

Briefly, he connected with the stretched-wing rind. Smooth and fragile, it sent a fleeting reassurance to Lonnie’s brain. Then there was a whooshing sensation, dropping him from the top of a rollercoaster. Krrsplat. He was cold again, refreshed, and he stretched out his limbs in the water without reservation. Air felt secure in his mouth for the moment. It was slightly clearer outside of the bubble, with life more discernible.

Lonnie began watching for any type of lake terror, his stomach still unwillingly riding the rollercoaster. He tried to focus, not on holding his breath or his desire to be in his mom’s arms, but on identifying a monster who would look like his home. He knew she might be scary, angry, or blood-thirsty, but there was hope nestled inside of his preadolescent body that she would also see him and love him for just a moment. Under the water, maybe she wouldn’t only resemble his mom, but maybe she would love him again like his mom.

Lonnie still clutched the knife, aware enough to keep it from his body. He didn’t think he could stab his lake monster mom in the eye, no matter what. Yet, he carried the knife because he could hear his father. He could hear his father saying, “You already stabbed her, boy. Stabbed her the day you didn’t go with her.”

He cried out under the water, releasing air, frustration, and a terrible whimper. He wondered if his eyes were bloody, too. He’d never checked, never wiped for evidence. Yes, he could see, but Lonnie had always questioned the true clarity of his vision.

A massive shadow suddenly ate up the entire lake and, very likely, the universe, as a whale-sized creature glided in front of the young boy. The scales of the creature looked old and stiff, with age spots and scum adorning its body. Perhaps it had existed for centuries, but it also could have been created there in that moment for Lonnie. Its head came into his vision as it faced him with a powerful composure. Lonnie clamped his mouth tight and felt entranced by a distinct insect head. Antennae flowered from its thick, buggy, helmet, hovering whimsically between big black hexagonal eyes.

The wide-eyed boy treaded water in front of the creature, in awe of its size and authority. He knew that his knife could plummet into one of those bug eyes with the ease it might take to fire an arrow into the night sky. There were no targets, just abysses.

With only the soft wafting of its antennae, and no mouth to be seen, the creature spoke. It sounded like a tree cracking down upon the still lake, both an ordinary occurrence after a storm and also a commotion that would be felt in all crevices of the lake.

The creature said, “It was your father who stepped upon me. Out on the sidewalk, he saw me and stepped on my legs. You found me, yes? You asked your father if he would help you nurse me back to life.”

In the obscure depths of the lake, where Lonnie had been wet and confused for too long, he suddenly felt attuned to his surroundings. The bubble was floating right behind him, expectantly, buoyed by thick seaweed. His home was far beyond this pit of a lake, and all he needed to do was swim up to leave it behind.

“Thank you for the sanctuary your body heat provided,” the creature said. “It was a fine way to die. Give your father the same courtesy, dear Lonnie. Then, go home. You don’t belong here.”

Lonnie shuddered, wondering if this was where his father belonged.

“It is,” the creature said.

It hovered before Lonnie as his father’s bubble softly swayed against his back. He couldn’t conjure up the living room anymore. He only saw the blood eyes, and the rage that was trapped behind those red curtains. The hell of the room in which his father lived was no home.

Now, right now, Lonnie was ready.

His fingers remembered the knife, and he knew all that was required was a stab to the eye. His father had entrusted him with that much. A stab to the memory of the eye.

Away from the creature, Lonnie felt for the bubble.

Krrsplat.