Hedge Lake Read online

  “We are,” replied Owen before Pete could speak. “We investigate all kinds of paranormal phenomena.”

  “All kinds?”

  “Ghosts. Cryptids. Aliens.”

  “Bigfoot,” added Pete.

  “Bigfoot is a cryptid, dork.”

  “He deserves his own category.”

  Owen rolled his eyes again. “Lake monsters. Time slips. Whatever’s out there.”

  “Sounds like a lot of ground to cover,” said Eric.

  Owen’s eyes widened. He looked almost giddy as he dramatically exclaimed, “It’s all related!”

  “Hypothetically,” added Pete.

  Owen turned and glared at him.

  Pete wasn’t intimidated. “Can I use the camera now?”

  “No.”

  “You promised.”

  “Shut up.”

  Eric sighed. He really didn’t want to trust these clowns with anything, but he supposed he had no choice. “I don’t know anything about any of that stuff,” he lied. He’d actually had more than his fair share of experience with ghosts. And with monsters. And even dimensional rifts. But he had no intention of telling these two about it. Worst case scenario, the two dummies would actually go looking for those things. And they’d almost certainly get themselves killed. “But maybe you can help me.”

  “See?” huffed Owen, a smug look overtaking his features. “I told you he wanted something.”

  Eric ignored him. “See, I’ve been having this recurring dream lately.” He gestured at the water. “About this lake.” He half-expected Owen to accuse him of lying, but he seemed to have already captured his attention. “It’s frozen over in the dream. And there’s a woman, I think. Something bad happened to her here. I think she died.” He paused a moment for effect and saw the intrigue on Owen’s face. “I haven’t been able to figure it out. Do you think this triangle might have anything to do with my dream?”

  Unsurprisingly, Owen was immediately convinced that it did.

  Chapter Six

  “You swear?” asked Owen for the sixth or seventh time.

  Eric groaned, frustrated. “I swear I’m not here to steal your stupid research.”

  “Because if I find out Kirby sent you…”

  “You know what?” said Eric. He stopped walking and turned on the boy. “We can just forget about it if you’re not comfortable with it.”

  Owen threw his hands up in panicked surrender. “No! No, it’s cool!”

  “Because I’m really not sure about it, myself.”

  “It’s cool, dude! Really!”

  “Then shut up already.”

  “Okay. Fine. Shutting up.” He backed away, his hands still out in front of him.

  Eric followed the two boys who called themselves Specter Ten deeper into the woods. “Where are we going?”

  “Base camp,” replied Owen proudly.

  “Of course.” Just like on television, with those popular paranormal teams they no doubt dreamed of one day joining. He pictured a couple of tents, some folding tables, lanterns, multiple computer screens displaying live feeds from several remote cameras catching little more than hours upon hours of leaves swaying in the breeze and a sophisticated arsenal of digital equipment. But as they emerged into a clearing, Specter Ten’s base camp was revealed to be a badly painted old utility van with a mangled front fender parked just off an old fire trail. Covered in flat globs of black, green and brown, it was clearly supposed to be camouflage, but the result, in Eric’s opinion, was that he only wished he couldn’t see it. It was easily one of the ugliest vehicles he’d ever laid eyes on.

  The back doors stood wide open. Inside, Eric could see a single laptop computer, a few duffel bags, and an averagely pretty young woman about the same age as the boys. With her watered-down blue hair, leather jacket and piercings, she didn’t look like she belonged with Specter Ten, but she was stretched out in the van in her bare feet, playing with her cell phone as if she were at home.

  “This is it?” asked Eric as they approached the van.

  Owen managed somehow to look both insulted and embarrassed. “We’re just getting started,” he explained. “But we’re fully equipped. We’ve got infrared and full-spectrum cameras. We’ve got thermal imagers, digital recorders, electromagnetic field detectors, Geiger counters, white noise generators…”

  Eric was familiar with these gadgets. Or at least, he was familiar with their names. This was the same stuff they used on those popular paranormal television shows he’d been watching for years. It wasn’t very creative, but if he really had all this stuff here in these duffel bags, he had to admit it was impressive. Some of that stuff was pretty expensive.

  “This is Mandy Dorling,” introduced Owen as they stepped up to the back of the van. “She’s our base operator. And my girlfriend.” As he said this last part, he puffed up a little, as if it were some kind of challenge. Or as if he were staking his territory.

  Mandy glanced up from her cell phone at him, but didn’t seem very impressed with what she saw. “Hey,” she said flatly, and immediately returned her attention to the phone.

  She wasn’t astoundingly beautiful, but she was attractive. Eric supposed the girl was practically a trophy to someone like scrawny, zit-covered, hyperactive Owen.

  “This is Eric Fortrell,” he told her, as if she were acting the least bit like she cared. “He’s been having recurring dreams about the triangle. Wicked stuff.” He placed the tablet on the worn, rubber flooring beside her and began rummaging in one of the duffel bags. “I think there may be a psychic connection. He may be the key to solving this whole thing.”

  Eric glanced at Pete in time to catch him rolling his eyes. Just moments ago, the guy was convinced he was a rival investigator out to steal his findings. Now he was the Rosetta Stone of the Hedge Lake Triangle.

  “That’s super cool,” said Mandy, managing to sound not-at-all like she thought it was even regular cool.

  Owen didn’t seem to notice. “I know, right?” He turned back to Eric. “We should get started,” he announced. But then he only stood there a moment, looking back and forth between him and Pete, clearly having no idea what he was supposed to do next.

  Eric didn’t care to waste any more time. “Tell me about this triangle,” he said.

  “Right! The triangle!” He snatched up the tablet again and began swiping at the screen. “This whole area has been teeming with reports of paranormal activity for decades. There’ve been monster sightings, hauntings, reports of lights and strange objects in the sky and a bunch of unsolved disappearances.”

  “Disappearances?”

  “Over the past eighty years,” Owen replied, nodding. “A dozen people just,” he made a crude and inappropriate farting noise with his mouth. “Gone forever. Just like that.”

  “There were ten of them,” corrected Pete.

  “Whatever.” Owen flipped the tablet around and showed it to Eric. There was a Google Earth satellite image of what he could only assume was the nearby lake with bright, yellow lines forming a triangle that covered its southern tip and a portion of the neighboring forest. The Hedge Lake Triangle. Drawn out for him… As if he lacked the imagination to picture it…

  “The first occurred in the summer of ‘thirty-seven,” said Pete. “Nine-year-old Robert Kapper lived somewhere in the area. He used to play in the woods behind his house. One day he went out to play and never came back.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Eric. He hated to hear of anything happening to a child.

  “Then, in ‘forty-nine,” continued Pete, “a hunter named Grover Storning walked out into the woods and also never came back.”

  “Pete can tell you the entire history of the triangle from memory,” Owen boasted. “Names, dates, the works. He’s the best researcher on the team.”

  “I’m the only researcher,” grumbled Pete, casting his teammate an accusing glare.

  “I do my research in the field,” returned Owen.

  Eric didn’t care who did
what. He only wanted to know more about this triangle. “Have they ever found a body?”

  “Not a trace,” replied Owen before Pete could answer the question. “It’s like they all just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  Eric didn’t think that was unlikely at all. He happened to know of a few places where a person could disappear off the face of the earth. But he kept this to himself. Instead, he recalled the dream that brought him here and asked, “How many were women?”

  “Five,” replied Pete. “Half of them.”

  He nodded. There wasn’t anything more to ask. He didn’t know the name of the woman from his dream, nor did he have any kind of description. He hadn’t seen her face. And if no bodies had ever been found, he couldn’t even know if any of the victims appeared to have been attacked by an animal. “What about the monster sightings?”

  “Shallows walker,” said Owen, returning his attention to the tablet and swiping at the screen.

  “What?”

  “Some kind of lizard man,” said Pete. “Usually sighted by fishermen on the lake, walking upright on two legs in the shallow water near the shore.”

  “Some kind of monster fish, too,” added Owen, apparently incapable of going a full minute without attention. “Massive thing. Supposed to be able to overturn a fishing boat.”

  “It hasn’t, though,” said Pete. “Overturned any boats,” he clarified.

  “But it could,” argued Owen.

  “It’s what they say. But it hasn’t.”

  “That we know of.”

  Pete shrugged, then turned back to Eric again. “And then there’s the hellhounds.”

  “Hellhounds?” asked Eric.

  Owen nodded. “Black. Vicious. Glowing red eyes. The works. There’ve been hundreds of sightings over the years.”

  “More like dozens,” corrected Pete.

  “Same thing,” snapped Owen.

  “No, it’s not.” Turning back to Eric, he said, “The sightings vary from one to the next. Some have been described more like werewolves than hounds, bigger, up on two legs. Others swear they’re not canine at all, but phantom cats. And a few sightings were described as some kind of four-legged reptilian creatures. Might be hodags.”

  Eric found that incredibly unlikely. Hodags were a hoax. And a bad one at that. Or at least, that’s what he’d always thought…

  “It’s possible there’re multiple creatures out there. It would explain the discrepancies.”

  Many monsters? That sounded like just his sort of luck.

  “And then there’re the carcasses,” added Owen.

  “Carcasses?”

  He turned the tablet so Eric could see the screen and revealed a blurry, black and white picture of what looked like a bald gopher lying dead in the grass. “These things have been washing up out of the lake for decades.” He swiped the screen and revealed another picture of two fishermen standing over a large, floating fish that appeared to have four legs protruding from its swollen belly. Another swipe revealed something bloated and misshapen with a long, limp neck. Another revealed a great lump of gelatinous goo. Yet another showed an impossibly long, snake-like fish with a sharp, bird-like beak. “Nobody knows what they are or where they come from. They just turn up in the lake from time to time.”

  “All this and aliens, too?” marveled Eric.

  “Oh yeah!” said Owen, who apparently wasn’t familiar with the concept of sarcasm. “Burning lights in the sky. Strange objects hovering in the trees. Little gray dudes running around in the underbrush.”

  “‘Little gray dudes?’”

  Pete bent forward and held out his hand, indicating a height of about three and a half feet. “Big, bald heads, scrawny little bodies.”

  “Huge, black eyes,” added Owen.

  Pete frowned at his interrupting partner again.

  Eric tried to take all this in. To him, it seemed preposterous, even after all he’d seen. It was just too much. He was ready to believe any one of these crazy claims, but there was so much. It was nothing more than rampant local hysteria and over-imaginative thrill seekers.

  It had to be.

  And yet, something had to be going on around here. It wasn’t Isabelle’s imagination that the area was saturated with spiritual energy. And his dream hadn’t been a story. That was real. He’d felt it. That woman was running through these woods, fleeing from something. It certainly wasn’t hard to imagine a demonic dog or a man-sized lizard sending her running for her life.

  Or maybe it was the so-called aliens. Perhaps it had been one of those “little gray dudes” that had frightened her. Or an entire spaceship crew of them. He did recall something about a burning light high up in the trees, now that he was thinking about the dream again.

  But seriously? Aliens?

  Owen stretched his arms out and declared, “It’s all related, man! It has to be!”

  Eric stared back at him for a moment. “So then… Do the aliens bring the monsters with them in their spaceships? Or how does that work?”

  He half-expected Owen to become angry at this mocking, but he only stared back at him, his eyes wide with wonder, and proclaimed dramatically, “No one knows!”

  He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or groan, but he forced himself to keep a straight face and nod seriously. “I see.” He knew now what Holly had meant by “funny space men and their toys.” It was Specter Ten, with their crazy extraterrestrial theories and their high-tech gadgets.

  “But we’re going to find out,” promised Owen. “Especially now that you’re here.” He turned on Pete and demanded, “Get the digital recorder.”

  Pete didn’t move. “What’s wrong with the one on the tablet?”

  Owen glanced down at the device in his hands. For just a second, Eric could clearly see that he’d forgotten that the tablet included a digital recorder in its arsenal of apps, but he recovered impressively fast. “The other one’s better,” he snapped. “Jeez, Pete, use your head. We’re not amateurs.”

  “Yes we are.”

  Owen closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose again as he took a deep breath. “Just get the recorder, please.”

  Pete shook his head, exasperated, and sauntered past him. They hadn’t moved. The van was still right there, with Mandy still playing with her phone almost close enough to reach out and kick him with her bare foot. All he did was walk around his bossy partner.

  He picked up a small, digital recorder and then turned and, without having to take a single step, handed it to Owen.

  “Thank you.”

  Eric stood where he was and said nothing. If these were the guys he was going to be relying on this time around, he was in serious trouble.

  Chapter Seven

  Begrudgingly, Eric sat in an uncomfortable folding chair and allowed Specter Ten to record him as he recounted all that he could remember of his bizarre dream, which was pretty much all of it. Even after all this time, it remained shockingly vivid. Every detail rushed back to him as he recounted it. But delving back into it didn’t help him understand what was happening. He still had no idea who the woman was. He wasn’t even sure how it was that he knew it was a woman. From his peculiar vantage point behind the person’s eyes, he’d seen nothing but forest and lake and snow and ice. He didn’t even see what attacked her. She was turned away from it, crawling across the ice and calling out for help that would never come.

  He couldn’t even remember precisely what her voice sounded like, which was a little curious since he could remember the biting cold, the exquisite pain and the numbing terror with perfect clarity.

  When he’d finished, Owen switched off the recorder and made a show of stroking his ridiculous facial hair and considering what he’d just heard. “Have you ever had any other dreams like this?” he asked.

  “No,” lied Eric. “Never.” They didn’t need to know about his other dream or about the fissure. He couldn’t trust these guys. Their goal was obviously to expose secrets. And he intended to keep most of his. />
  Besides, he was fairly certain that this genius would only end up getting himself killed if he ever learned the location of an actual fissure. They were dangerous places, crawling with dangerous things. And if a person happened to venture too far off the path, there was a very good chance that he could be lost forever in whatever nightmare version of hell awaited on the other side.

  “Ever have dreams that come true?”

  He started to lie again and reply that he didn’t believe in such nonsense, but a better idea struck him: “Only this one. So far. I mean, until I got here, I didn’t know this lake was even real. But I recognized it as soon as I arrived.” He leaned forward a little and tried to sound dramatically serious as he said, “This is where it happened.”

  Owen’s face lit up with excitement. Isabelle was right. The kid was so desperate to find something supernatural that he was instantly willing to believe anything he said.

  The truth was that he couldn’t tell the lake in his dream from almost any other lake in the world. It was Isabelle who’d known he was in the right place, because of the spiritual energy radiating off it. But of course, he had no intention of sharing Isabelle with these people any more than he intended to share the location of the fissure. If the wrong people ever found out about her, they’d stop at nothing to hunt her down.

  And he knew perfectly well that there were some very wrong people out there…

  “Prophetic dreams!” exclaimed Owen as he began pacing back and forth in front of Eric. “This is great!”

  “Not so great for that woman,” Eric reminded him, recalling the desperate scream that had ejected him from his dream that morning.

  (Don’t let it take me!)

  But Owen didn’t seem to be listening. His eyes swept the ground in front of him as he paced, his thoughts racing. “Something was obviously calling out to you. Summoning you here.”

  “Sure,” agreed Eric. “Why not.”

  “Maybe it was a spirit seeking justice,” suggested Pete.

  Eric looked up at him. “Spirit?”

  “Some say these are the most haunted woods in the Midwest,” he explained. “Maybe the country.”