Archive of Our Own ^beta

Fin made a sharp right out of the driveway, past the mossy old rock, and started down the road. He'd gotten this cabin at this resort every year for the first Saturday's week in August for as long as he could remember, splitting the cost between whomever wanted to spend a week in the pine trees near the lake. It was usually at least him and Trace and one of those guys from the QA department and their gals.

The air was thick and foggy with barbecues and fires and acrid pot smoke, but the night was cold and biting through that, tearing past whatever protection from the chill it offered.

He pulled his sweatshirt a little tighter around himself as he stumbled on a dent in the road. It wasn't much of a hill until he hit that dent, and from there it was so steep that he had to lean back and take little steps to avoid falling and rolling the rest of the way to the water.

It was only nine, and he saw no stars as he broke through the tree line. Only flat blue sky, a lamp up atop the boathouse's deck, the glittering mansion lights on the other side of the water- a serene evening portrait of the lake he had come to love a little more each year. A boat crossed his view every so often, and though there were other residents milling about near the docks and up near their cabins, he felt oddly alone with just the cicadas and the gentle waves.

He slipped out of his shoes as the pavement turned to smooth concrete, a near vertical slope to the sand, littered with rotted out acorns and bird shit.

He hadn't been smoking that night. He hadn't had a drop to drink. Both of those things were strange to him. The lake was a time to unwind, but something about the idea had just unsettled him. He knew the same was not true about the group of twenty-something year olds crowded on top of the boathouse, shining their phone lights into the water. It was obvious that they were more than likely pickling their livers as he watched, sipping out of those cups and blowing smoke into the light and laughing.

And still, he felt alone, as if he were the only living thing on the lake's shores.

Why had he even walked all the way down there in the first place? The realization hit him like a tossed handful of lake-weed clumps and mud. He'd have to walk all the way up, and it was much too cold to go swimming. No one was having a beach fire. So what was it that had gotten in his brain like a bug and told him to walk all the way down there in the cold night?

A boat bobbed in place, out in the middle of the lake. On one side extended a pale yellow trail of light across the water, and on the other a green one. The driver himself left a trail going back to the shore, back to warmth and safety.

In the pale yellow light on the surface, Fin saw it for the first time. A dark little bump. It could have been a wave, a fish, a duck. He knew with all of his being that it wasn't, that waves and fish and ducks didn't leave faint trails in the future streams like that.

He was so, so cold. His skin prickled, his hairs raised, his fingertips felt numb even where they were touching in his sweatshirt's pocket. There was no reason for him to be so driven to wade into the pitch water on a cold night like this.

But into the water he waded regardless, mechanically, pant legs rolled up to his knees. His feet went numb. After the initial numbness, a calming sort of warmth washed over his skin where it had been submerged. Before he could realize it, he was past his pant legs, past his hips, past his head and he was swimming, determined, focused.

He had to get to that bump.

It was still there, he could see it illuminated momentarily in the boat lights that passed by him, the boats that ignored him as he swam ever further from shore and ever closer to that bump.

And then he was there, numb and warm and face to face with the most perfect creature he had ever seen bobbing there in the gentle wake of the boats.

"You came." It spoke, water streaming from it's mouth like it's tongue was a sponge being wrung. Its eyes were dark hollows in its bloated face, its flesh purple where its dark skin had split open. White teeth remained stuck in its jaws, straggly hair clung to its scalp.

"Of course I came." He didn't know where those words had come from, only that they made the perfect creature bobbing there smile, a zipper opening in a dark face.

"Get rid of that shell. Let it walk." It replied, and for a moment, he felt a rush of euphoria.

Then he realized. He was the shell.

And just like that, Fin was sinking, down and down and yet further down until he could no longer see the stars that were never there and the crushing weight of the water pressed around him like a final hug and his lungs filled and burst as he tried and tried to breathe and his eyes rolled back as he thrashed one last-

A year later, a man stands on the shore of the lake at nine, listening to the cicadas. His nose is filled with the smells of barbecues and bonfires and pot. Fin pleads with him from the murky waves, translucent, barely visible to someone on his best days as a mass of churning, wailing water.

In the light of a passing boat, Trace can make out a faint, dark bump. It could easily be a wave or a fish or a duck, but he knows with all of his being that it isn't. He rolls his pant legs up, and takes his first step into the water. It's cold, but his skin goes numb fast, spreading warmth across his feet, his calves, his knees.

In the distance the bump smiles.