The Death of Jack Lawrence

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. It was a small candle, from the looks of it. It was difficult to tell from across the lake. The light it put out was probably impossible to see by, but it burned incessantly from dusk until dawn, never once going out.

“Someone’s taken over the place,” Stevie said, leaning back in the ancient rocking chair, blowing cigarette smoke into the damp air. “I don’t know who’d buy such a scrappy shack, though.”

“It wasn’t for sale,” Jack replied, waving away the smoke as it wafted in his direction. “Hasn’t been since it was built.”

“Did anyone buy it then?”

Jack thought back. It had to be fifteen years, at least. Maybe longer. If anyone had bought the place, it would have been on everyone and their mother’s tongue for at least a month. Turnover was rare out here, and nothing new came without sending a ripple of gossip fifteen miles from its origin. No one’s business was safe, but in a way, that provided a security blanket for everyone, kept things from getting too innovative. It had stopped the wood mill when they started dumping toxic pulp in the lake and got the government to shut down the nuclear plant when the roaches started to glow in the dark. Alongside the other desolate buildings that lined the lake, the cabin didn’t bear any real significance.

“No.” The answer felt obsolete to Jack, having taken so long to spit it out, but Stevie didn’t seem to care.

“Someone’s broken in, then.” It was fact, not theory.

“The police should get on that.”

Stevie nodded, though they both knew that wouldn’t happen, not with the search still going on.

A chorus of young voices grew out of the distance as a group of boys came hurtling toward the lake. “Speak of the devil,” Stevie said and drew himself up. “Hey!” He boomed, his voice making them skid to a halt at the bank, splaying mud into the water. “Stay out of the lake! Don’t you know what’s in there?”

The boys seemed to have their memories jostled, and they crept away from the bank like a wary gaggle of geese. One of them ran out and kicked at the water before they all turned tail and sprinted back towards town, shouting their approval at their companion.

“Dumb kids,” Stevie grumbled and sat back in his rocking chair.

Jack eyed the waves splashing on the bank as they dragged sticks and fallen leaves into its depths and vomited up debris and dark mud in return. Jack had grown up by this lake, never thinking twice about swimming out to the middle of it and lying on his back as the sun burned him mercilessly. However, when a boy, Fred Hardy, went missing and turned up two days later on the bank as a stripped skeleton and a set of shredded clothes, the water that had been churned up day and night by fishing boats and swimmers had gone eerily still. Not so much as the flick of a fin from a bass or a croak from a bullfrog had broken the silence since then. Something was in the water, they said, a Loch Ness of sorts, but they had scoured the whole lake and found nothing. Of course, Jack was the last to know about this incident, and the way he found out was not in a way he would easily forget.

He had been swimming, as he tended to do in the early morning when the sky was still pink on the horizon. He had been far out enough that he couldn’t feel the muddy bottom anymore, but he knew if he went down about three feet he’d hit it. Mrs. Patrick was walking her dog when she saw him. She was a close friend of the mother whose boy had just been buried the day before–a pile of bones in a cemetery filled with corpses. Jack later found out they had wrapped him in the clothes that had been found with him, just to make him seem not so naked among the other buried kin. Mrs. Patrick hollered out to Jack, shouting at him to get back on “God’s green land” and out of “the depths of consuming chaos.” She had a knack for sounding like a Baptist preacher when frantic. When she had shouted to him something about a leviathan, a sudden force yanked on Jack’s foot, dragging him under the surface.

It had been slimy and slick, and in the moment Jack was convinced it had been the tail of a sea serpent come to claim his life. Fear grabbed hold of him so fast that he immediately decided he was going to die. He saw his childhood flash in front of his eyes, his college years, his four years spent in his hometown, waiting for an opportunity to pick him up and fly him away to New York or Chicago. He saw his funeral, people crying over him, girls he knew confessing they had loved him though they never said anything, his mother telling everyone how proud she had been of her son. It was all really sappy and romantic, and for a split second, he was glad to die. However, upon kicking himself free and rising to the surface again, he discovered that it was merely a piece of seaweed that had tangled itself around his foot. The whole fantasy seemed stupid after that, and he decided that dying wasn’t that romantic after all. He also decided to write up his will, although he still had yet to commit to putting that plan into action.

The sun was completely gone. A haze had settled over the water as the sky darkened to a navy blue, almost as dark as the still lake over which a pale, crescent moon was casting a sliver of a reflection. Still the candle burned on, dim and yellow.

“Someone’s over there,” Stevie suddenly said, breaking the chorus of cicadas. He leaned forward in his rocking chair, gesturing with his dying cigarette to the cabin. Jack raised himself to Stevie’s view. Standing on a small peninsula that jutted out from the bank was the outline of a man hobbling toward the water. He paused, standing motionless at the water’s edge, and reared back, throwing something out into the lake. It was large and heavy and landed with a ka-plop, sinking immediately. He repeated the motion four more times before turning and disappearing in the shadows of the trees.

“We should report him.” Stevie stood up.

“He may own the place,” Jack responded, ignoring the fact he had said no one had ever bought the cabin only five minutes ago.

“Then we’ll go talk to him.” Stevie disappeared into the house and came back a moment later with a loaded revolver. Jack eyed the weapon but said nothing as he strapped it to a holster Jack had not noticed he was wearing. Without so much as looking back for confirmation at his friend, he grabbed a walking stick that had been leaning against the paneling of the house and started off to the cabin. Jack followed.

Stevie had always been a bit of a hothead. He played football in college and fought for bets in the dorm. Since he had moved back home, though, he had laid complacent, like a badger full and sleepy in the middle of February. There was nothing for him to fight, no one who wanted to pick a fight, no dragons to slay. Jack couldn’t have stopped him from going to the cabin if he wanted to. And he didn’t want to. Part of him wanted to see Stevie in action again, to know he had placed a winning bet even before the first punch had been thrown. It was vulgar, he knew, to treat his friend like a game piece, but it was a habit at this point.

Thus was his excuse when Stevie hammered on the cabin door with his stick, stepping back a foot and staring at the dim light emanating under the door. The candle was glowing on the left side of the house, closest to the bank. From its light, Jack could just make out the fragmented choppy water, the bottom of the lake invisible even at the shoreline.

No water looked as black as this lake did, not the ponds on campus or the Atlantic on a cloudy night. Those bodies had color, a trace of brown or gray in a sea of navy, dotted with insects or gulls as they skated across the surface. This water looked dead. Poisonous. Jack had swam in that water all his life, swallowed a lot of it too. He suddenly wondered if that poison was still inside of him, killing him slowly. How much water had Fred swallowed before his skin, muscles, and organs had been stripped clean off him? His skeleton wiped down and polished cleaner than a new car?

Jack was blinded momentarily by the dim light, much brighter now that it was spilling from the open door, and blinked away the darkness as an old, hairy man scowled up at them.

He looked like a sailor, or at least the relative of one. He could have been captain Ahab’s distant cousin or grandson. He wore a navy beanie over a mostly bald head and his turned down mouth was covered by a white, shaggy beard. His overalls were stained with blood, fish blood, presumably, and he held a carving knife in one hand.

“What’d you want?” He growled. He even sounded like a sailor.

“We want to see what you’re doing,” Stevie pushed past the old man and into the cabin, seeming not to notice the knife gripped in his hand and turned about the tiny structure. “Get a load of this,” he gestured for Jack to come in.

He followed, not as afraid of the old man as he would have been if he had come alone. Inside, illuminated by the single, low burning candle in the window, was a proper butcher’s shop.

Slabs of dark red meat hung on thick hooks from the ceiling, dripping blood in fat droplets into rusty buckets below. Blood spattered the wooden floor and walls, crusted in some places and fresh in others. A single table sat in the middle of the shack, a slab of meat seeping juice onto the boards, apparently what the man had been preparing to work on before he had been interrupted. In the corner, several buckets were filled with the remnants of the animals he had carved up. One held fleshy, yellow lumps of fat, another held a pile of pinkish substance, presumably silver skin from pigs. No bones though. Not a rob or hoof in sight.

The place also held a strange smell, different from the raw, juicy odor that tended to linger around a butcher’s house, but a heavy, stinking metallic stench. Jack didn’t think a place could smell heavy, but this place did. His lungs felt weighed down as he inhaled the air, like someone had put a large weight on his chest.

The dim light made shadows flicker. Jack had to squint to focus on objects, and the smell was so thick he couldn’t breathe. His mind began to dance away with the shadows, leaving him confused. Where were the bones?

“You set up shop here long?” Stevie asked, seemingly unaffected by the light and smell.

“Yeah,” the man answered gruffly. The open door let in the only fresh air, but it wasn’t doing any good on the smell. The wretched stench.

“Do you sell your meat anywhere?” Stevie prodded the slab of meat on the table. It squished and oozed. Jack had to look away to keep from gagging.

“No.”

A silence followed in which Stevie seemed at a loss for what to do next. Jack said nothing. He was rocking on his feet now, his vision narrowing and desperate for fresh air. How did the old man work in this place?

“Did you, by chance, happen to throw some of your meat into the lake a few minutes ago?” Stevie rounded on the old man, a sudden ferocity taking over his voice. Jack put Stevie between him and the butcher, who was clutching the knife in his hand tighter than before.

“Yeah,” he responded.

“Why?”

“The fish,” he nodded to the window, where the black water sloshed quietly. “I give them the chum. Take a look if you want.”

Stevie narrowed his eyes, his broad shadow encompassing the butcher. Somehow, it made the man look more menacing, the candle lighting only half of his face, the outline of the knife hidden against the side of his overalls. He looked almost mad, despite his composed demeanor. Jack wished Stevie would shrink a little, just to let the light show his whole figure, to reveal the invisible knife.

“I will,” Stevie muttered, and walked out the cabin door, Jack in his wake. He caught a single glance of the man fully in the light before the door closed. It didn’t feel like enough.

Stevie had stalked down to the water, prodding the surface with his stick. “Let’s go!” Jack called. Stevie stepped in up to his ankles, the water swallowing him up. Jack’s breath caught in his chest. He could just hear Mrs. Patrick shrieking “The leviathan! The leviathan’s got him!” as he was swallowed up to the knees, the revolver in his holster just grazing the water as he sent out ripples like radio signals, the only disturbance along the whole lake. If anything was out there, it was sure to feel it, and come for him.

“Stevie!” Jack called, his voice almost a girlish shriek. “Come back!” Stevie didn’t even turn around. He kept wading farther and farther out. He would be swimming in a few feet. He looked like a convert, Jack thought, marching out to be baptized in that poisonous water. Could you really be un-christened? In a place like this, maybe.

“Stevie!” Jack stumbled to the bank, stopping just at the water’s edge. The moon lit his reflection, though his expression was hidden in his outline. But he could see himself. And someone else.

The point of a knife dug into the back of his spine. “Get in,” the old man growled, wolf-like. “Now.”

Jack put one foot forward. The water was cold, it seeped through his shoe, his sock, right to his bones. He gasped as the knife pressed him forward into the mud. He felt himself sinking as he was enveloped at the knees. The knife point drew itself out of his back. The old man wasn’t getting in the water, he realized. But Jack didn’t dare turn back, not for fear of being stabbed, but because out here, the pathetic candle wouldn’t light the butcher’s face. There would only be his gnarly outline and that unseen psychosis. Jack would rather face the leviathan and the watery chaos than see that madness again.

He approached Stevie, who had stopped at the waist and stood with his head bent down as if in prayer. The ripples were only coming from Jack, and they weaved around Stevie’s huge frame, a disturbance in the broadcast. “Stevie,” he breathed. His voice had been stolen by the cold, his teeth chattered as he spoke.

He finally turned. By the crescent moon, Jack saw Stevie’s eyes. Just his eyes. They were black, wide, and empty. “I can’t swim.”

A splash. The only splash that lake had seen in a month. Stevie screamed as he thrashed in the water, fighting an invisible force. Jack lunged for him, catching hold of his sodden arm, and clutching it, his feet sliding in the mud.

Stevie screamed like he never had before. He had shouted when he scored a touchdown on the field, when he won a boxing match that everyone expected him to lose. This came from some part that he had weeded out as a boy, when he had grown six inches above everyone else’s head. It came up now and strangled him, throttling him in a grasp that Jack never imaged would come from his friend.

He was gargling now. On water, on blood. Who could say? Jack had his hand. He was chest deep in the water. Stevie was just an arm and a screaming head. His body was lost in the waves and the foam but dragging Jack deeper into the mud, splashing poisonous water in his mouth.

Jack remembered when he had swam in this lake, when that seaweed had caught his ankle. Maybe this was just that, or maybe that was just what the poison was telling him.

But he had pulled himself free. Stevie would too.

He let go.

A gargle and a final splash. Jack fell back sprawling in the water. The waves stilled momentarily, and then a groan filled the air, like a deep, satisfied sigh sounding from the middle of the lake. A single ripple rolled over Jack, to the shore, and the lake became silent once again.

The old man had disappeared. Jack waded up the bank with difficulty. The candle had been put out and the moon had been covered by a cloud. It hadn’t been cloudy when they came out.

Chicago. That rested on Jack’s mind as he walked back down the path. He had the inexplicable urge to go to Chicago. It was like instinct. The same gut feeling that buzzed in a lemming’s brain and told it to run off a cliff into the ocean. It was calling to Jack, and to deny it would be suicide.

It took him about an hour to get back to his house, pack his suitcases, and load up his truck. He was on the highway before midnight, driving towards that cliff twenty-five miles over the speed limit. No cops would stop him, though, not with the search still going on.

Three days later, put up in a hotel with his feet propped up on a coffee table and a cigarette in hand, Jack stared at the television as an attractive woman related the tragic and mysterious death of Stevie Carter, whose skeleton was fished from Lake Pandemona. He had been identified by a Smith and Wesson Model 19 revolver that had been perfectly nestled in his ribcage, unscathed, and a shredded Michigan University sweatshirt knotted around his cervical spine.

The one image shown was that of a grave surrounded by friends and family, wailing over his death, his mother howling above the rest, and all laying flowers at the foot of the mound. It was all very romantic, Jack thought, almost Shakespearean.