Thalassophobia

THALASSOPHOBIA: The irrational fear of open water.

*

At the edge of Čertovo Jezero, in Western Czechia, the cautionary trees grow in a way that feeds… isolation. The forest of Šumava cocoons a deep bed of water stretching for two miles. Even in the peak of Summer, the lake’s inky surface maintains a glacial stillness.

Renowned as truest of its namesake by those who have trekked to the apex, Devil’s Lake is steeped in mysticism and age-old tales of insidious occurrences. Drownings are commonplace (reportedly much higher than the Czech average), and grim fortunes befall campers and hikers with unnerving regularity.

Somehow, it lures people to its salient shores, year after year. How can this be? It's been coined "The Devil's Wading Pool" in urban myth. Perhaps thrill-seekers make the journey for an eerie experience — or might suicidal ideation play a role?

*

Karolina stands as stiff as the pier's weathered oak boards, her chestnut-colored hair blows lightly in the curt breeze. She's wearing all white: bland trousers and a collared t-shirt, replete with Vasky shoes.

The back of her shirt is emblazoned with the letters LPI in olive green.

Her pale blue eyes face outward toward Devil's Lake's aqueous blanket of unease, and her face is wracked with obvious signs of fear. Her slender hands tremble, crippling anxiety forces her stomach to tighten, and her heart is racing in fluttering tachycardic repose.

Her eyes dart to a female figure gliding across the lake's horizon, laughing maniacally and performing... backstroke? In the middle of Winter?! Karolina squints, trying to make out the woman's face; it resembles her own, save for the blackest eyes.

She blinks. The doppelgänger vanishes.

“Ten meters,” shouts Dr. Pietr in a hearse voice, checking his stopwatch. “You’re already further along than last week.” His assistant, Dr. Chakvetadze, watches on with some trepidation. She scribbles half-sentences into her case notes whilst chewing bubblegum obnoxiously.

“I can’t see the bottom, AND someone was swimming, it was her,” Karolina whimpers.

“You don't need to see the bottom, and she doesn't exist, remember?”

“I need to know what’s down there. Something's wrong, it's resistive, I can feel it!”

“There’s nothing perilous down there. A few Graylings and European perch fish, that's all. I would never put you in danger, Karolina. Continue with your treatment and jump in.”

Dr. Chakvetadze's blond curls bounce as she nods her head with the jest of a keen understudy. "He's correct, just fish."

Karolina fakes a giggle, and her faux nonchalance appeases both doctors. She balls her hands into fists, tighter until her knuckles lose circulation and resemble ice. She knows the only way to overcome her phobia is to fall forth into the abyss, or is it?

She was never given a choice in relation to alternate treatment options.

Dr. Pietr clears his throat and instructs with the sternest tone he can muster. "Now, simply jump in the water, and we will pull you out and cover you with thermal blankets. This can be your turning point; exposure therapy is the peer-reviewed, gold standard for thalassophobia."

Karolina inhales sharply. A tremor passes through her face, small at first, almost imperceptible, like a bizarre ripple moving beneath her cheek. Her gaze fixates on Devil's Lake's imposing expanse. Her pupils widen until the blue in her eyes blends with ochre.

“NO,” she barks, uncharacteristically. Dr. Pietr appears startled momentarily, whilst Dr. Chakvetadze continues jotting down her impressions.

“Karolina,” he whispers, stepping closer. “Stay with me. Anchor yourself. Tell me what you feel.”

“Cold. No. Warm? NO. Cold?! I'm scared, Pietr.”

"Fight the fear."

Both doctors begin walking slowly behind Karolina. Arousing her suspicion or startling her would derail their questionable plan. Dr. Chakvetadeze nudges her superior — it's time…

With both palms of his wrinkled hands, Dr. Pietr pushes the center of Karolina's back and watches as she hurtles headfirst into the lake. A patient with a lifelong fear of open water is now unwillingly engaged in exposure therapy dialed up to eleven on the Richter scale of terror.

Dr. Pietr knows this is the last chance for a cure. Countless medications failed: Olanzapine, Lorazepam, Buspirone, Quetiapine, to name a few. Every cocktail resulted in never-ending carousels of baseless therapeutic stasis.

Minutes pass, and no air bubbles rise to the surface?! Dr. Chakvetadze switches her flashlight on as the late-day sun settles behind a cavalcade of cavernous trees. Only husked dusk casts lowlight glimpses beneath the water. She points the yellow beam down, yet there's no sign of Karolina under the glassy surface.

"Dr. Pietr, we cannot lose her. Our careers will be over!"

He glares at her. “Is this all you care about? What kind of mental health professional will you become, lacking such empathy?” Embarrassed, Dr. Chakvetadze covers her mouth and scrambles to appease her boss. “Karolina… Karolina,” she whimpers.

Dr. Pietr knows the timeframe for survival. He knows the physiological cascade of a possible drowning. Hypoxia. Loss of consciousness. The quieting of the body. Remorse lodges itself in his throat like a razor, slicing his larynx each time he screams Karolina's name.

“I'm calling the psychiatric institution, hang on! Help is on the way."

BOOM!!!

A supersonic explosion breaks the water's stillness, and there she hovers. Her Louny Psychiatric Hospital patient clothes are stripped and tattered; she's mostly naked. Water beads with mercurial brightness against her venous skin — so many veins, pulsing with coagulated blood.

Each thrum and whoosh of her beating heart grows louder. It’s deafening.

“You fucking rat,” she screams. “I always knew you were bad for her. Does the psychiatric hospital know you're here? I bet you decided to wrest her away to the wilderness to have your way with her after you'd drowned her, pathetic necrophiliac doctor.”

“Kristyna!” he shouts. "Bring Karolina back, at once! You have no place here. She voluntarily checked herself into my hospital to seek help and banish you from her subconscious."

Dr. Chakvetadze drops her clipboard and pen, aghast at what's unfolding. Her file notes flow in every direction as the wind speed picks up.

“P-P-Pietr, we are not alone!” she shrieks, snatching pages she can salvage amid the gusts, before turning and running toward the shore. Kristyna raises one crimson right hand in her direction.

"And you, Pietr's bitch. He never told you about me, did he?"

Dr. Chakvetadze half-turns her head to glimpse at the levitating entity as she continues sprinting. She stops suddenly, jaw pried open, as her head spins in 360 degrees half a dozen times. Kristyna weaves her charred hand in circular motions with focus until the spinning stops. Dr. Chakvetadze's bobblehead body tumbles off the pier and into the shallows with an unremarkable thud.

"Haha! I never liked that uptight tart with the terrible perm," she snarls.

"KRISTYNA!" Dr. Pietr shouts, "Please, no more! How can you possess such sorcery? And wickedness? Return Karolina to her body, I beg of you."

Kristyna points her right hand at Dr. Pietr, hesitating. Now radiating searing energy from her exalted form, dispersing volcanic heat as warmer tones calcify her ethereal skin. “You brought her here, Pietr. Thus, you brought me here. And now? Everybody dies.”

Dr. Pietr falls to his knees. “This is controlled exposure,” he replies. “Gradual, measured, safe!”

“Measuredddddd,” she repeats, lips hissing on the last syllable of the word like a serpentine chimera. “You think you can measure this place, or her paralyzing pain?!”

Kristyna's hair mutates into barbed tendrils with serrated ends, wrapping around Dr. Pietr's neck. “You think in neat shapes: Savior. Servant. Cause. Effect. Ego.”

“You’re trying to protect her,” Dr. Pietr says, voice choking. "I get it, I do, but we use cognitive behavior tools to cure mental illness and prevent life-altering complications."

Kristyna tilts her head to the left and bellows with laughter. “Oh, Pietr. How you fail to understand protection, and you'll never psychoanalyze me with your gobbledygook.”

Dr. Pietr's face flushes like a beet.

“You are a dissociative structure, an emergent identity! You responded to a perceived threat. The lake triggered her fear, and a surge of adrenaline summoned you. You have NO place in this world, and you KNOW it."

Kristyna appears stunned by his anger and audacity. Her eyes begin to flash like strobe lights against the backdrop of a pitch-black blanket of night.

Still levitating, her body begins writhing and gyrating, readying for retaliation.

“ENOUGH,” Dr. Pietr shouts as he tears the noose-like hair from its stranglehold on his neck. “I'm pulling Karolina back into her rightful body. Karolina! Reject her, come back to me!”

Kristyna doesn’t move. Her feet remain rooted a meter above the water in impossible poise. Her head snaps to the left, as though she’s listening to something beneath the water. “You hear it, don’t you?” she quizzes.

“There is nothing to hear,” says Dr. Pietr as his brow furrows, lined with age spots, tensed and creased.

“There is, it has always been here. The preternatural power of Devil's Lake, it's why you brought her here, isn't it? I can read you like a cadastral map. The senile doctor believed a tincture of the lake's poison would finally cure sweet Karolina. How foolish, hajzl.”

Dr. Pietr is perplexed, yet oddly fascinated.

He rationalizes his panicked thoughts; what if he manages to contain (even control) Kristyna by decoupling Karolina's consciousness? World-first proof of telekinesis would immortalize his career.

Teetering on the edge of the unstable pier, he gently feathers her fingers with his. “Karolina, remember our first session together?” he whispers. For a fleetfooted moment, her eyes return to blue. Clean, bright, frightened.

“Please,” she mutters.

He seizes her hand. “It’s alright, my dear, we’re stepping back now, and we'll return to the hospital. We can put all this behind us.”

But something in him resists retreat. A calculation, half-formed and stubborn. This is the threshold. This is the moment where risk is amplified.

He's seen patients plateau throughout his four decades in clinical psychiatry; he's seen fear imprison former patients in permanence. He doesn't wish this fate for Karolina. He's always seen himself as somewhat of a father figure for her.

However, the possibility of a captive Kristyna under his wing fuels a Freudian speech riddled with manipulation.

“Trust me, once you face your fear of open water, Kristyna will be banished. You will become the author of your own destiny." She shakes her head, barely lucid. "You're right! I don't want to live in a white room for the rest of my life, I don't want to be petrified, I don't want Kristyna in my head!"

He hugs her, and Karolina's head snaps back in revilement. The tendons in her neck constrict violently, and her slender hands rip Dr. Pietr's tartan coat...

Kristyna is back.

He doesn't have a chance to scream. His demise ensues in a picosecond.

A rupture rips through Dr. Pietr's body faster than his mind can process. His body does not break cleanly. It separates via layers, skin parting from muscle, muscle unraveling from bone. There is heat, sudden and consuming, cleaving his life force to particles of incendiary matter.

"Good riddance, moronic quack.”

Kristyna hears a car skidding to a hallowed halt on an embankment of cement, a few hundred meters from the pier. The doors to a white Škoda Felicia open and slam shut, and the voices sound familiar. Psychiatric nurses Jans and Pavlek must have been paged earlier by Dr. Pietr.

Kristyna drifts toward them, gliding through sacrosanct air. The last of her tattered clothing has dissolved, and she's covered in nothing more than salt, sweat, and droplets of dried blood.

"Karolina! Come with us at once, put some clothes on for God's sake, you'll get hypothermia," shouts the tall, tousled-haired Jans. "What on earth?! How are you doing that? You're floating?"

He sprints towards her, but she raises her right hand as he's thrust backward mid-stride. His body lifts, twists, and folds in bone-breaking compression. Kristyna wiggles her fingers, and Jan's teeth fall out of his now-disfigured mouth. All 24 bite-sized pearly whites pierce his skull, one by one, forming a sickening decorative halo. Her paranormal will releases him, and his body falls into a crucified heap.

Pavlek covers his mouth from afar but vomits uncontrollably on the bonnet of the car.

"Come to rescue me, have you? I don't need anyone's help, nor does she. Two more burly men wanting control of me."

Kristyna vanishes instantly. Pavlek seizes the opportunity, bolting to the driver-side door to pry it open. Somehow, it's locked from the inside. He smashes a window with his bare fist; shards of glass pierce his knuckles whilst thinning blood washes down his tattooed forearm.

Pavlek crawls into the driver's seat with his legs dangling out and jams the key in the ignition. An infantile voice stops him from turning the engine on.

"Dearest Pavlek, I know you're only doing your job, but it's best to send you into the next life now, paltry DEBIL."

Kristyna is sitting in the passenger seat, legs crossed, applying... lipstick. Foamy saliva forms at the corners of her smudged mouth. She leans sideways over the handbrake and licks the side of his face — the saliva from her tongue burns through his skin. "Jesus Christ! You can't be real?! SOMEONE HELP ME!!!"

She picks up the sharpest piece of broken glass and plunges it deep into his abdomen. Twisting with inhuman strength as his intestinal entrails flop out.

“Mmmmmmm, delectable intestines! I could eat them up in one gulp. On second thought, I do enjoy a barbecued meal.”

The car lights ablaze as Kristyna cackles with laughter, calmly opening the passenger door as flames encompass Pavlek's body. He’s barely alive, repeating his entreaties for mercy.

Her savage skin is unharmed from the fire, no burn scolds? She waves at him comically as he roasts.

Pavlek’s skull is now visible among the pyre; he rolls his eyes back and gasps for the final time. The metal framing of the vehicle begins to melt. Kristyna presses her hands together, and the charred car compresses to the size of a Rubik's cube.

Only sixty or so meters away, a 20-something man stumbles toward the foreshore, presumably for a midnight swim. How could he not have seen the fire?

Clad in a singlet emblazoned with the words “IOWANS DO IT BETTER”, coupled with all the hallmarks of a skinny cornfed-and-raised wannabe Chad, he side-eyes Kristyna and winks. He's swigging from a bottle of Bohemian Pilsner, visibly drunk and unperturbed by blood and viscera peppering her nude body.

She decides to tail him for amusement.

He sways like an uncoordinated baby penguin on its first waddle from sand to sea, she's gliding mere inches behind him without making a sound. He begins removing each item of clothing at a snail’s pace. A hunting knife holstered to his wafer-thin waist piques Kristyna's interest.

She warps to his left and links arms, as if they were old friends. “Greetings, Mr. Midwest American, what brand of knife is that?”

“Whoa, babe! Whe-whe-where'd y’all come from?! You into skinny dipping? Love a woman with Southern grit, y'all such a sweet thang, darlin. See here, this damn knife is an Argali Sawtooth, my papa passed it down to me.”

He opens the leather pouch and hands her the blade. She snatches it, surgically examining the sharpest point. Lightly pricking her pinkie finger for curiosity's sake, Kristyna's expression hardens as a minute dome of blood appears.

“It’s a fake, probably made in China. BORING,” she slices his throat without warning in a swift anticlockwise arc and turns her back as the tourist’s blood spumes like a ruptured hose.

“I think I’m going to like it here. Fresh kills all year round,” she coos.

Kristyna returns to the now-decaying pier, tiptoeing around Dr. Pietr's mass of bone and blood. She picks up his deformed head and, like a playful child, sticks her tongue out at it. She grabs a ballpoint pen from what remains of his oversized coat and maniacally stabs his eyeballs.

"How I wish I could resurrect you to kill you a thousand times over. Ty jsi ten pravý ďábel!"

She skips off the edge of the walkway and begins levitating again, ascending higher, invoking more miasma from Devil's Lake. She stares at her reflection in the vastness, and for a moment her expression shifts. She's lived for thirty-three years in a human shell; is there not some flicker of humanity left?

A word chokes within Kristyna's chest as she tries to quell it.

“Karolina,” she mumbles. That name dissolves on the edge of her bottom lip, and as the signature leer of her deadly demeanor wanes, blue presses against her black irises — briefly.

The dark always wins.

Kristyna's agency over her body is complete, and the lake parts its ghostlike mouth for her. A hollow grave of pondweed and clotted silt beckons her descent. "Well, well, well, call me Moses, ha! How biblical of you. I cordially accept your invitation, dear evil. "

She sinks slowly, so slowly, with both eyes shuttered as water churns and Devil's Lake envelopes her within its corrupted epicenter. A willing transmutation of supernatural nerves and fibers swallowed whole by a sentient, iniquitous lagoon.

AWAKENED...

Kristyna's eyes flutter spasmodically as she tries to wrest free from her padded bed restraints.

"Haha!?! In the depths of Šumava's drowning well, I'm catalyzed and consummating with encircled power... HAHA!?!"

Dr. Pietr smiles, gently stroking Kristyna's hair. He injects 4ml of liquid Diazepam into her IV cannula.

"Yes, Kristyna. I've heard this all before. Rest now and settle those nerves; your twin sister is coming to visit in the morning. Karolina will be so happy to see you!"

(c) Edward Swafford 2026

*Hajzl = Bastard

**Debel = Idiot

***Ty jsi ten pravý ďábel = You are the true devil

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