Wet Dreams
Goosebumps rise along his arms and hairline despite the evening’s heat. In his distraction, the beer bottle—slick with condensation—begins to slide through his fingers, but he manages to tighten his grip just before it falls to smash on the rocks.
He squints—it’s there again—and raises his hand to shade against the setting sun’s tangerine glow. The light turns the lake an opaque black-green.
In the middle of the bottle-glass water stands a backlit figure. Though, “stands” isn’t really the correct term; there are no rocks that far out, certainly nothing close enough to the surface for anyone to stand on.
The thought comes, unbidden: “And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, ‘It is a ghost!’ and they cried out in fear.”
He tears his gaze away with forced nonchalance. Well, it’s not fucking Jesus, that’s one thing for sure.
He scrutinizes the bottle in his hand. Perhaps he’s been drinking too much… But this is only his first beer of the night.
Too much time alone, then? Is he so addled from solitude that his mind is conjuring companions out of lake mist and shadows?
He can’t keep his eyes from returning to the distant silhouette form. No. Not shadows. Not mist. Definitely something. Someone.
When he cannot take it any longer, he blinks, his eyes watering from staring directly into the sunset. He raises his fists to rub away the tears; firework swirls explode beneath his lids. By the time his vision clears, the sun has slipped below the horizon and—just like the past four nights—the figure is gone. The lake’s surface is smooth, without a ripple to mark where the unmoving form had hovered.
. . .
He dreams of her again. She comes to him in the cool hours of the morning as he tosses in that fitful state between true wakefulness and sleep. Her skin, fish-belly white, is clammy where she twines her limbs about him. Snake-like tendrils of her hair caresses his cheek, tickle his ear: an eel brushing against him as it swims by. The surge of revulsion mingles with lust when she clamps her damp mouth over his to worm her tongue between his lips. He gags once, twice, his body reflexively trying to expel the dead thing in his mouth. But her cool fingers wrap around his pulsing erection and he forgets all about her hair and her tongue and the rotting seaweed taste of her as she brings him up between her legs. He thrusts into her with abandon, a drive stronger than his conscious will, something he hasn’t felt since Anna. Then it overtakes him, and he wakes in a cold sweat to sticky sheets.
. . .
And so it goes. When the dreams had first begun, he hadn’t been able to recall the details upon waking. He’d simply carried a vague feeling of shameful arousal through his days. And every evening, when his twilight walks took him to the lake, there was the dark shape hovering over the water.
But soon, his waking hours, too, are haunted by images and sensations of her, his nights a fever-dream that leave him unrested and trembling the next morning.
He had, for a time, intended to avoid the lake, but finds himself unable to stay away, rousing as though from a daydream to discover he is standing at its edge. Standing, as the light morphs from golden to orange, and gazing out at that figure suspended above the water, the glow of the sunset making it unbearable to stare for long.
But it is equally impossible to look away. So he watches, eyes burning; watches that haunting silhouette form until it disappears with the setting sun.
He knows, of course. Knows she had to have been murdered, drowned in the lake, and it’s her restless spirit calling to him to come and find her body, to give her closure so that she can pass on and rest in peace. She beckons to him, begging wordlessly for his help.
He also knows that if he contacts the police with requests to drag the lake or dive for a body, he would sound, at best, like a lunatic, or worse, a criminal. He’s read the supernatural stories, seen the horror movies, watched the late-night true crime specials. He knows how it would go.
So of course he also knows there’s only one thing for it. She haunts his nights, she shadows his days. Thoughts of the lake, of her, consume his every waking moment. His limbs feel heavy, his reactions dulled, while somehow, simultaneously, he feels jittery. He can’t go on like this. But he doesn’t know how to begin.
. . .
That last afternoon, long before sunset, long before the figure is to appear, he dives in. It wasn’t planned. There’s no reason he finally decides to swim out and find her body. He simply found himself standing at the water’s edge as he had so many times before.
Except this time, he keeps going. He walks right into the lake—the sun-warmed shallows swallow him eagerly—and when his feet no longer touch bottom, he begins to swim.
With sure strokes, he makes his way to the spot. He’d stared at the place so often that he knows it by heart, knows right where he needs to dive down. When he reaches it, he fills his lungs and plunges beneath the surface.
Legs propelling him downward, he opens his eyes, but all is dim and brown in the late afternoon light. Decaying vegetable matter clots the water in opaque clouds. He can barely see two feet in front of his face. He’ll have to go deeper.
With a gasp, he surfaces to refill his lungs before diving back in, forcing himself farther down this time. He uses his arms to pull himself downwards through the water and lets out a stream of bubbles, slowly emptying the air from his body so he can sink deeper into the lake. As the water around him grows cooler, he kicks even harder. Below the sun-warmed layer at the top, the lake is chill. Dark.
And empty.
He can’t see anything.
Because there’s nothing to see.
No ghost girl. No body. No skeletal remains. He’d been so sure he could find her, save her, play the hero and solve the murder mystery.
But of course there isn’t anything.
What an idiot.
Disgusted, he jack-knifes and rights himself to swim back to the surface, but mid-turn, something scaly brushes his ear. He recoils, kicks away from it, and tendril of seaweed slicks around his left ankle.
Then tightens.
A sharp tug, and he’s yanked downwards. He rakes at his left ankle with his other foot, and instead of rubbery water grass, feels the hand there. Bony fingers firmly clasped. Thrashing, he peers frantically through the murk for a glimpse of whatever is holding him, but bubbles fill his vision as panic sets in, the air escaping from his lungs with no way to replenish it.
He cannot see what is holding him, dragging him steadily down, but he knows.
He knows it’s something fish-belly white.
Even when it’s too late, he keeps struggling, trying to claw his way up to the light with fingers that gain no purchase in a liquid world. Instinct takes over and, his chest screaming, he can no longer fight the need to inhale.
Lake water floods his lungs, as, all the while, he gazes up at the air just out of reach.
Then, calm.
The burning in his lungs is gone. He floats up through the water, passes the surface without breaking it. As he rises, he looks down. Below, in the depths, drifts his own pale, gaping face. His own filmed eyes stare sightlessly up to where he hovers, a dark figure above the water, silhouetted against the setting sun.
Moira Gillen
After years of wanting to be an author, Moira Gillen finally quit her job as a librarian to pursue her dream full-time.
She has had two other short stories published and is currently at work on her first novel. You can check out some of her other fiction on her website, moiragillen.com.