Thread by @JessZafarris

Well, I’m here, obviously.

And it’s… over—more or less.

This will be my final update.

Here’s what happened.

It was just past midnight. We got into the Subaru and made our way toward the lake.

I didn’t want to be there. I would have paid my life savings to be anywhere else. I could just hop on a plane, go to New Zealand. How long would it take them to cross half the earth?

But no, I had to do this.

Out the window I searched the treeline for skeletal figures.

Somehow I knew they were there.

Halfway down the hill, I saw the first glimpse of one, pale eyes gleaming from the shadows beside the road.

The head turned, watching us drive by.

I looked back and saw it step into the road behind us, stride long, loping, jaw flexing.

It wasn’t chasing us exactly. More like… keeping an eye on us.

Calculating our next move.

Drew gripped the steering wheel hard, knuckles white.

“Pay them no mind,” Johanna said from the back seat.

For our first stop, we drove past the police taped gate, stopping around the corner.

Per Johanna’s instructions, Drew got out, withdrew a torch mounted on a long stick from the trunk, withdrew a lighter from his pocket, and ignited it.

“Maybe we should all go?” I suggested.

“No,” Johanna said flatly. “He goes. We stay here.”

She handed him the empty, white plastic bucket out the open window on my side of the car. I kissed him and told him to be careful.

He nodded, pale-faced, and said he loved me.

Johanna tched impatiently.

He must have only been gone for ten minutes, but it felt like years. The moment he left, Johanna and I each lit a torch and held them out the windows.

As the minutes crawled by, pairs of pale orbs began to appear amid the trees on either side of the road.

One, two, four now.

“How many are there?” I asked. “In all, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Fewer than there used to be.”

We sat in silence a few minutes more before the light of Drew’s torch shone from around the bend, the sight flooding me with relief.

He passed the bucket, filled with lake water, through the window to Johanna and handed me his torch.

“Did you see any?” I asked anxiously.

He nodded, his expression grim. “Two, but they stayed in the water and didn’t come close. I could just see their eyes above the water, watching me.”

We didn’t have far to go back up to the gate, so I simply held the two small torches out the window in one hand. It didn’t matter if they went out—we had more, and they wouldn’t be too hard to re-light.

The dancing flames were a small comfort in the cold, dark night.

I squeezed Drew’s hand with my free hand, and he squeezed mine back.

We parked on the side of the road beside the gate, turned the car off and climbed out.

We opened the trunk, and a few moments later, Johanna and Drew each had a staff-torch, and I gripped a fresh, handheld one in one hand, the bucket of lake water in the other.

The weight of the water bucket made the handle cut into my fingers uncomfortably.

I felt so, so small.

“Are you ready?” Johanna asked.

I nearly shook my head, thought better of it, and nodded.

My ears rang. I wondered for a moment if I would simply faint.

“I could go instead,” Drew said, voice shaky.

“No,” Johanna said. “It has to be her.”

“And there’s no other way?”

“No.”

Drew kissed my forehead, then pulled me into a tight, one-armed hug. I leaned against him. “You’ve got this, love,” he said.

When we parted, Johanna gripped my shoulder tightly, almost painfully, and looked me hard in the eye.

“When you are settled—no matter what you hear or sense around you, do not open your eyes.”

I nodded again.

“Do NOT open your eyes.”

“I won’t.”

I turned toward the gate.

Right on cue, a blood-chilling scream tore through the night.

It was the woman’s voice—the one I had heard from the mouth of the bent, elder-looking lurcher I had been calling Pharynx—on that first evening up the hill.

The voice begged, sobbed, shrieked in agony.

I shuddered and glanced at Johanna. Her jaw was tight, free hand clenched in a fist by her side.

“Go,” she ordered without looking at me.

I met Drew's eyes one more time, and gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile but probably looked more like the nausea welling up in me.

Once again, I squeezed past the gate. I made my way up the hill, now-dry leaves crunching under my boots.

I walked slowly and deliberately, praying my usual gracelessness wouldn’t send me sprawling, losing me my water or igniting the whole damned forest.

The flickering golden light from the torch accompanied me in a warm orb, but after a moment I became keenly aware of a rustle of leaves and recognized the lurchers’ uneven gait.

I kept my gaze straight ahead, but I knew they were approaching up the dropoff to my left.

The hill before me began to steepen, climbing more sharply upward. This was where the stairs had been, I realized.

The lurchers seemed to suspect I was up to something. Not so easy to get to them this time.

The soles of my feet ached, still healing from my Friday night somnambulance, but Johanna had smeared them with an unpleasant-smelling balm that eased the pain.

Three steps up, my toe slipped, and I gasped as I fell hard onto one knee.

A bit of water sloshed out of the bucket, and I had to stop myself from breaking my fall with the torchbearing hand.

I rose painstakingly, finding my footing once again, and kept climbing around the curving incline to the crest of the hill.

I reached the clearing…

… and found myself looking across it at Pharynx.

From the treeline opposite me, its dead eyes met mine with blank, predatory hunger, its mouth gaping as ever, jaw dangling like a snapped limb, the depths of its macabre gullet glistening in the flickering torchlight, its ribcage expanding and contracting with each hoarse breath.

I can’t quite explain how, because its gaunt expression did not change, but something about its posture also seemed wary, hesitant.

Maybe it was just that the lurcher wasn’t actively staggering toward me.

Over each of its shoulders peered two others, and as I regarded them, I knew the others were closing in from the left. No going back now.

The soft rattling surrounded me on all sides, just beyond the glow of the torch. They did not scream.

I was trembling. My breath came in shallow, terrified bursts that blossomed into clouds.

I could feel sweat standing out on my brow despite the chill night air.

It was time to make my move.

I took a steadying breath, stood up taller than I felt, stepped into the center of the clearing, and set down the bucket of water in front of me.

My heart beat faster.

I didn’t want to do this.

I couldn’t.

I had to.

I plunged the torch into the bucket of water, the frigid water chilling my hand up to the wrist as I let go of the bundle.

Darkness crashed down around me, and immediately the rattling crescendoed to a triumphant, deafening screech, human screams bursting from all sides to mingle together in a gruesome, grating clamor.

They were coming for me—and fast. They were just steps away.

No time to think about it. Don’t freeze up.

As quickly as I could, I sat down, crossed my legs, closed my eyes, and released my awareness.

My mind slipped back into the lake.

Doing this on command, getting to the point where I could do it, even with distractions, took dozens and dozens of attempts over the previous day and a half.

Johanna had made me practice while she was playing music, screaming in my ear, poking me in the ribcage, whacking me with a broom, slapping my cheeks—until I could do it, and remain under, no matter what was happening around me.

Inky blackness surrounded me once again. I drifted in the endless dark, the pressing silence.

It was almost peaceful here.

Dimly I became aware of distant sounds.

I focused my hearing, not through my physical ears, but through my awareness in the water.

The sounds were indeed the rattling, snarling, shrieking creatures that surrounded me—recognizable, yet muffled, far away.

It increased in volume, but Johanna had told me they would not touch me.

I believed her. I had no choice.

Suddenly, piercingly, a scream lanced through the silent waters, clear and close as a lightning strike.

It was a scream I had heard before—the woman. The one that tore from Pharynx’s throat as it struggled to devour me, to rip into me in the woods on that first, terrible day.

The cry of pain ripped out of her, cut off by the gut-wrenching ripping and tearing and wet sucking, gulping of flesh and blood. She gasped, uttered a sharp, reverberating shriek that devolved into guttering, hitching sobs.

Even in the lake I could hear it, crystal clear, and the connection dragged me partially back to my physical body.

I became aware that every hair was standing on end, every nerve ablaze, my heart hammering.

I nearly opened my eyes, but Johanna said not to under any circumstances, to keep myself immersed in the lake—so that’s what I did.

I squeezed them tight, breathed deeply through my nose, concentrating on my diaphragm, and sank back into the darkness.

“Do not force it,” she had advised. “Relinquish your awareness of your physical experience. They have already called you to the water—you just need to let yourself see it.”

I focused on the water, tiny particles drifting through the blackness.

I could still hear that hideous cry, that ghastly crunch and tear of human flesh.

I tried not to listen. I so badly wanted to help her. I knew I could do nothing.

It wasn’t happening here and now, I told myself. It had already happened. It was over.

A tear squeezed from one tightly closed eye.

The screams fell silent.

Everything fell silent.

Then, a great rustle of leaves.

Long, loping, lurching, staggering feet all around me, moving eastward across the forest floor, back toward the lake.

Dragging, dragging, dragging.

As the sound faded, another sort of oppressive silence lifted.

I heard insects and birds again.

I breathed deeply, and suddenly I was… unburdened.

I opened my eyes.

The bucket was there, the extinguished torch floating on the water’s surface. The clearing was empty.

The leaves were a tumult around me, churned into chaos by long, emaciated feet.

It was dark—very dark, only illuminated by a sliver of crescent moon in the sky, but I saw see wetness on the leaves.

Lake water, I thought to myself—but I feared something else. It was darker than water. I couldn’t look at it long. I didn’t want to.

I got to my feet and went back down the hill, somehow unconcerned about the lurchers pursuing me.

Drew was there, waiting for me, his torch still alight. I ran to him, held him tightly. He returned the embrace, one-armed. He could feel the relief too, I was sure.

I pulled back. “Where’s Johanna?” I asked, looking up at him.

His brow furrowed. “She’s not still up there?”

“Up where?”

But I knew the answer.

“She followed you up the hill,” he said, “just a few minutes after you. She told me not to leave this spot under any circumstances.”

I remembered the scream, the ripping and tearing.

No. No no no.

“We have to drive down to the lake,” I said urgently.

“What? Why?”

“Please—now.”

As he produced the keys I snatched them from his hand and took the driver’s seat. I floored it down the hill. We screeched to a stop by the big estate, the same one where I was cornered against the shore just a few nights prior.

There they were, striding into the lake.

Seven in all, wading through the shallows, rippling the glassy surface.

One of them—Pharynx—turned to regard me. It stood up to its calves in the water. Its hands hung close to the surface, glistening to the elbows, dark and slick in the moonlight. More dark wetness smeared its face between its eyes.

“What did you do with her?” I screamed at it.

It turned back to look ahead of it at two that were walking in tandem, Tantalus and another, pulling something along behind them, something that floated, horribly still, on the surface of the water. Gray hair drifted like moonlight in the blackness.

I dropped to the grass, eyes streaming.

Pharynx glanced back once more before continuing on, and they all descended, curiously graceful as they made their way into the depths, the floating thing sliding down beneath the surface with the rest of them.

The crests of two heads remained, blank eyes gleaming above the water for just a moment, before they slid into the black.

After we returned to our house, it was another sleepless night, my mind wracked with misery and guilt rather than fear.

I almost longed for the fear to return. It was better than this.

I replayed every moment I had with Johanna in my mind.

I did this. I let her do this.

She said it would happen again next year. Would it be someone else next time?

I would know, and do nothing to stop it except hide in my house behind my fire like all the other neighbors.

All the other neighbors.

I sat up.

They know about this.

Beth. Beth knows about Johanna.

As soon as the sun came up I was hammering on her door.

“You knew Johanna,” I said, unapologetic about her bleary, bed-disheveled appearance.

At Johanna’s name, her brows flew up.

“Ah.” she said. “Yes, I mentioned your… situation to her. I take it she—uh, stepped in for you.”

I blinked. “Wait, how do you—?”

“She… you know, stepped in for Jon a few years ago too, when we first moved here,” Beth said. Jon is her husband, whom I see less often and who I assumed was still sleeping.

My mind reeled. This has happened before.

“So you mean that she—”

“Yes,” Beth interrupted, clearly not interested in letting me say what actually happened. She shuddered, folding her arms. “It was awful."

"But don’t worry about her too much," Beth continued after a moment. "It’s not really your fault.”

I'm still not sure I agree, but I asked. “Has she… done this for other people too?”

Beth nodded. “I don’t know how many, though. Best not to talk about it too much.”

Johanna’s clenched fist before I went up the hill. Her references to “others” who have “learned.” Her words echoed in my mind. “Every year they come back—and will until they deem the price has been paid for their ruined earth.”

“She’ll be back,” Beth said.

I’ve spent the rest of the day at my tiny local library, digging in the archives.

After six hours, I’ve found some materials I believe to be related: A newspaper clipping of someone called “Jo,” a widow in her early 70s who was reported missing in late October of 1947.

The clipping said her former husband, Thomas, had also been reported missing, but 19 years prior in 1928—just weeks after the lake was declared complete. Same month. He was declared drowned after he—or some of him—turned up in the lake.

He had worked on the Candlewood project, relocating corpses from the Jerusalem graveyard.

After his death, Jo became a recluse, living alone in their cabin on a dirt road atop a hill near the lake. She was said to visit select neighbors, and linger by the lake in autumn.

Before her disappearance, Jo had gained a reputation among more superstitious residents as an occult figure. A quote in the clipping speculated she had simply walked into the lake of her own accord.

Another quote, this one from a man named Edward Brown, read “Good riddance to that old witch.”

(I also found a reference to a Henry Brown, a boy of 12, drowning in the lake in an article published three years later. Edward’s son, perhaps.

“Not everyone is so lucky as you,” Johanna had told me. “I don’t always get to them in time.”)

I found more recent accounts of attempts to raze a decrepit cabin in the neighborhood—attempts that were thwarted by nearby locals who said it was historically important to them, but would neither go near it nor approve repairs.

So.

If you’re ever near Candlewood Lake in late October, keep your fire lit, stay away from the water after dark, and don't follow the voices in the woods.

And if you see a grouchy little old lady walking around with what looks like a fanny pack, do whatever she says.

As for me, I’m hoping you won’t see her—not just for your own well-being, but because I’m getting to work.

The way I see it, I have just under one year to figure out how to break the cycle and make sure no one—not even Johanna—has to go through this again.

/thread