Hedge Lake Page 7

  “Ghosts, too?” He couldn’t help but think about the shadowy figure he’d seen moving through the forest just before he met Jordan, the one that vanished without a trace before he could get a good look at it. But he still didn’t know what he might’ve really seen back there. And there were a suspicious amount of crazy claims about this area. Monsters and aliens. Ghosts and vanishing people. He’d seen enough in his journeys that he was ready to believe most things, but he had a hard time accepting everything these guys were telling him. He was beginning to think he was wasting his time here. Finding any grain of truth in all these local legends would be almost impossible. He would’ve been better off on his own.

  “I’ll bet it’s the aliens,” suggested Owen. “Maybe they sent out a signal to lure you here.”

  Eric couldn’t think of a single reason why advanced, extraterrestrial visitors would have any interest in him, or why they’d need to induce a bizarre, recurring dream and lure him into the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It seemed like a lot of trouble for a thirty-three-year-old, out-of-shape English teacher. Shouldn’t they be infiltrating the government or stealing cattle or something?

  Before they could discuss it further, Mandy spoke up from the back of the van: “Hey, guys… You know that creepy Fester Sweater guy…?”

  “Mr. Fettarsetter,” corrected Pete.

  “Yeah, him.” She hadn’t moved from her spot, but now her eyes were fixed on the computer screen. She lifted a slender finger and pointed at it. “He’s um…lurking on camera two.”

  Owen and Pete both leaned into the van to see.

  Eric stood up, curious, and peered between them. The image displayed was a low-angle shot through a thicket of trees and out over the lake. He recalled Owen mentioning camera two when he was narrating into the video camera after their first meeting. He’d apparently walked in front of this camera, alerting them to his presence and sending them running noisily in his direction. Now, however, someone else was in the shot. A tall, slender figure was standing motionless at the water’s edge. He was nicely dressed in an expensive-looking suit, as if here on business, but Mandy was dead accurate when she described the guy as “creepy.” He appeared to be staring directly back at them, his dark eyes fixed on the camera’s lens.

  “What do you suppose he wants?” asked Pete.

  “Dunno,” replied Owen, sounding a little anxious. “But we’d better go see. He won’t like it if we make him wait.”

  And with that, the two of them took off back into the woods, crashing through the brush without so much as a “goodbye” or a “thanks for the interview.”

  Eric watched them go for a moment, then glanced back at Mandy. “Mr. Fettarsetter?”

  She’d already returned her attention to her cell phone and didn’t bother looking up at him as she said, “One of the local landowners. Total creep, but apparently he’s into this supernatural stuff. He bought the guys all their equipment. Says they can keep it if they find ‘irrefutable evidence’ of…um, anything, I guess.”

  “Have they found anything yet?”

  Her eyes remained fixed on the phone. “They found you.” Her tone made it pretty clear that she didn’t consider him all that great of a find.

  “I guess they did.”

  She said nothing more. It was painfully obvious that she didn’t care to carry on a conversation with him, so he didn’t attempt to continue having one. Instead, he decided to follow after the Specter Ten boys and find out more about this Fester Sweater guy.

  These two reminded him of some of his freshmen students, kids not even old enough to drive. And they managed the woodland terrain like his students managed their classwork: With a lot of noise and far too much arguing. They stumbled through the brush, practically tripping over themselves in the process so that he had no problem tracking them, even long after they were gone from his sight.

  He didn’t bother trying to keep up. He wasn’t going to lose them. If they hadn’t captured a Hedge Lake Triangle monster by now, it wasn’t any wonder. Any monster worth its reputation could hear these two coming from a mile away. He was no expert, but he was fairly certain that Bigfoot and his friends weren’t stupid enough to stick around where people kept spreading their scent around, much less where people were making enough noise to wake the dead.

  As soon as he was alone again, he pulled out his cell phone and whispered, “This feels like a waste of time.”

  THEY’RE GOOFY, I’LL ADMIT IT, agreed Isabelle. BUT THEY’RE BOUND TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE LAKE THAN ANYONE ELSE

  “You don’t really believe there are aliens here, do you?”

  WELL, NO

  “Waste of time.”

  I NEVER SAID THEY’D HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS FOR YOU. IT’S NEVER THAT EASY. BUT THEY’RE A FINE PLACE TO START

  He supposed that was true. If not for them, he’d still be blindly searching for the dream cove, which probably wouldn’t reveal anything to him, even if he found it. Now, at least he knew what people thought might be going on in these woods. As he learned more, he’d be able to piece together the truth around the myths. Given all that he’d seen the past couple years, there was probably a grain of truth in it all somewhere. He just had to find it.

  He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and picked up his pace, but he only made it a few more steps before he came to an abrupt halt.

  A strange feeling rapidly swept over him, a disorienting tide of dread and sorrow that hit him with a powerful wave of vertigo, a bitter mix of crippling emotions that came from nowhere and without warning, and yet seemed to churn upward from somewhere deep inside him. It was so overpowering that he had to lean against the trunk of a tree just to keep from collapsing onto the forest floor.

  What the hell was happening to him?

  He lifted his face toward the sky and looked up at the twisting branches that were slowly spinning above him. It was so quiet. Was the forest this quiet before? He couldn’t hear the song of a single insect, or even the whisper of the breeze through the branches. All he could hear was the blood rushing past his ears and a strange, faint ringing sound.

  He lowered his eyes and looked out into the trees around him. There, to the right, he saw the same shadowy shape that had eluded him just before he met Jordan. It was definitely the form of a man, with broad shoulders and strong arms, but once again the figure was unnaturally dark, as if he were wandering through a dense gloom instead of through soft shade.

  The figure was moving away from him, deeper into the woods, and as he watched, it passed behind a cluster of trees and vanished.

  Eric watched after it for a moment, then turned and scanned the rest of the forest. That strange feeling was still with him. It didn’t vanish with the shadow man. Something else was out here.

  The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Sensing something, he turned and looked behind him. A woman was there. She was bloody and ghastly, dressed in a tattered, blood-stained coat and pants, with wild, black hair and deeply haunting eyes. As soon as he saw her, she lurched forward and seized the sides of his head in her gory hands.

  He didn’t have time to even cry out in surprise.

  The forest changed. The tree he was clinging to vanished and sent him sprawling to his hands and knees. The ground was muddy. A hard rain fell around him, instantly soaking him to the bone.

  He rose onto his knees and turned to look behind him. There was the lake, its surface boiling, spraying mist high into the air. The water was rising fast, swallowing the bases of trees, racing up the hill toward him.

  Yet he couldn’t move.

  Voices carried on the wind. Screaming. Howls of pain. Shrieks of torment. It was as if hell itself had cracked open and spilled its vileness out upon the earth.

  The swelling water crept closer to him. He could see something in it, just beneath the surface, something that churned and boiled, like an endless mass of writhing snakes.

  It was getting closer with each second that passed, and yet he still couldn’t mov
e. He was frozen there on his knees, drenched in the pouring rain, listening to the tortured wails that carried on the wind.

  In the center of the lake, a terrible form rose up from the water and stretched toward the sky. A massive thing, unthinkable not merely in size but also in dreadfulness. It was a horrible thing, a vile, insatiable thing that would leave only desolation in its wake.

  This was the end, he realized.

  The cold water surged toward him with its foul, roiling things that were eager to devour him.

  He closed his eyes and tried to scream, but found that he could make no sound.

  When he opened his eyes again, he was still leaning against the tree. He was dry. The sun was still shining.

  He was alone.

  He remained there for a moment, trying to catch his breath, waiting for his heart to calm. Then he stood up straight, shoved his hand into his pocket and withdrew his cell phone, which rang even before he could lift it to his ear.

  “Did you catch any of that?” he asked.

  “Every disturbing moment,” Isabelle assured him. He could tell by the slight quaver in her voice that she was just as horrified by the vision as he was.

  “What was it?”

  “Premonition?”

  He fought back a hard shudder and said, “God, I hope not…”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “That was like doomsday… Who was that woman?”

  “I think she was a ghost.”

  “She was terrifying!” He’d met a few ghosts on these trips, but until now, only one had ever frightened him.

  “You’re right,” Isabelle informed him. “They felt similar.”

  “Hosler Avenue,” sighed Eric. Last summer, while exploring a series of inexplicably invisible buildings in his own hometown, he’d stumbled across an overgrown lot and an ancient and barely recognizable wreck of a home that was guarded by the nasty spirit of an old hag.

  “The same kind of dark presence,” said Isabelle.

  Eric ran a hand through his hair and leaned against the tree again. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, but it can’t be good.”

  He shook his head wearily. “You’d better call Holly. Tell her what just happened. I think it’s time for her to cast another spell.”

  “I’m on it.”

  The line went dead and Eric pocketed the phone again. That was a whole new kind of weird. He very much hoped that kind of thing didn’t start happening all the time. He wasn’t sure his heart could take it.

  He turned around once, getting his bearings, then set out after the boys of Specter Ten once again.

  Chapter Eight

  When he finally arrived at the lake, he found that Owen and Pete had confronted the man on the computer screen. Even in person, Mandy was right about him. This guy was creepy. Considerably taller than even Owen, the guy had a slim, but muscular build, with long, bony hands. He had a pronounced chin, big nose and grimy, black hair and his eyes were dark and eerily sunken. His pricy suit looked appropriate for a high-class business boardroom, but to Eric, he looked more like the sort of person who might clean up after the mob by running a shady funeral business.

  It didn’t help that the man appeared to be in a very bad mood. He was looming over the boys as Owen sputtered on about hours of unviewed footage and lack of manpower. Clearly, Fester Sweater was unhappy with the progress his crack team of investigators was making.

  Pete stood next to his partner, fidgeting with the little audio recorder he’d fetched a short while earlier, looking for all the world like a huge, scolded child.

  Eric didn’t approach them. According to Mandy, this guy had supplied Specter Ten with the gear they so proudly wielded on this investigation. That essentially made him their boss. And if they weren’t delivering the proof that he wanted, proof that Owen, with his big mouth, had almost certainly promised him, then he had every right to be angry.

  He decided instead to leave the boys to their groveling and continue exploring the lakefront, but he’d barely turned his back when Owen caught sight of him.

  “This guy!” he exclaimed. “He’s our evidence!”

  Eric turned to find all three of them looking back at him. He felt like a deer in headlights. “Say what?”

  “We were just interviewing him,” Owen explained. “He had a prophetic dream about this lake!”

  Eric didn’t want to be dragged into this, but Fettarsetter now had his creepy eyes fixed on him, a curious mix of interest and suspicion painted across his deeply-lined face, and somehow he found himself frozen in place.

  “Prophetic dream?” he asked, his bushy eyebrows crowding together.

  “He saw someone being killed on the lake,” explained Owen. “A woman. I’m betting it’s a vision of the next victim of the triangle.”

  A vision of the next victim? This was the first Eric was hearing about it. The kid was making this stuff up on the spot!

  “We don’t really know that, yet,” said Pete, who clearly realized the same thing, but his partner shot him a furious look and he shrank away.

  Fettarsetter didn’t seem to notice either of them. He stood where he was, examining Eric, making him feel like an item on display at an art auction. Priceless masterpiece? Or loathsome, modern junk?

  “It’s the lake,” Owen explained. “It called out to him. I know it.”

  But Fettarsetter shushed him with a dismissive wave of his hand and raised his gruff voice for Eric to hear: “This true?”

  Eric wasn’t sure what to do. A big part of him wanted to lie, to say that he’d never seen these two before in his life, but that would be childish. Besides, they had his voice on tape now. “Um… I don’t know anything about any ‘prophetic’ anything,” he replied. “I just had a dream. A nightmare really. It was disturbing, so I came out here to see if I could make sense out of it. That’s all.”

  Fettarsetter remained quiet, his eyes fixed on him, measuring him.

  He’d met his share of frightening people, but this guy was making him genuinely uncomfortable. And they hadn’t even approached each other yet. They were each still standing where they were when Eric first emerged from the woods, more than forty feet apart.

  Finally breaking the silence, Fettarsetter said, “Some say dreams are open windows into the larger world around us, glimpses of the universe as it truly is, so long as we possess the wisdom to understand what they mean.”

  Eric wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. He hadn’t expected such depth from a man who looked suspiciously adept at digging shallow graves. Finally, he decided on, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.”

  The man’s stare was intense. He couldn’t help but feel that there was something dreadfully wrong about this guy. “I think you probably have,” he returned. “In fact, I think maybe you came to that conclusion yourself somewhere along the way, even if you’re not entirely aware of it.”

  Eric frowned. He had no idea what this man was talking about. And yet, there was something profoundly true about the words.

  “What’s your name?”

  He hesitated for a moment, not sure if he wanted this frightful man to have his name, as if he might do something evil with it, but he’d already shared it with Specter Ten, so he gave it to him.

  Fettarsetter continued to stand there. He didn’t reply. He seemed to consider Eric’s name, to study it in whatever twisted laboratory of a mind was working behind those creepy, sunken eyes.

  The guy was seriously giving him the creeps.

  Finally, he said, “Do you think your dream will come true?”

  Eric hesitated. “I don’t know,” he replied. Technically, it was the truth, since he had no way of knowing if his dream would come true or if it already had. But if he were to be honest, he didn’t just believe the events of the dream were real, he knew it. Unless he could find a way to change that poor woman’s fate, she was doomed to die on this frozen lake…even though it wasn’t currently frozen…

  It wa
s always so confusing.

  The big, frightful man took a step toward him. “My name is Jonah Fettarsetter. I live on the eastern shore of the southern tip of the lake.” He lifted his long-fingered hand and pointed out over the water. “You can see my boat dock right out there.”

  So he could. He hadn’t noticed it before. It was little more than a small smudge on the shore from here, but now that he was looking for it, he could see it there, nestled in against the trees.

  “You should stop by when you have a chance. I’d love to discuss your dream. And I’m sure I can enlighten you about the history of the lake far better than these boys.”

  Eric glanced at Owen and Pete. Owen was scowling at the ground, clearly unhappy about the prospect of his boss stealing his only promising lead, but for the first time since he’d met him, he was silent. “That sounds…” he looked back across the lake at the tiny dock, toward the trees that apparently concealed this man’s home, “um…interesting.”

  “I promise you, you’ll find it fascinating.”

  “I’m sure I will.” But Eric wasn’t interested in a date with this guy. He probably had a shelf in his freezer just waiting for a head in exactly his size.

  “Just think about it. I think you and I might have a lot in common.”

  He wasn’t so sure about that, but he only said, “Is that so?”

  “It is. You have a look about you.”

  “Do I?”

  “Are you, by any chance, a fan of Poe?”

  This caught Eric off guard. “I am,” he replied. Edgar Allan Poe was just one of many literary figures of which he was a fan.

  “I thought you might be.” Fettarsetter smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. There was something almost carnal about it. “‘Ah, distinctly I remember,’” he quoted, “‘it was in the bleak December, and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.’”

  Eric felt a chill race all the way down his back. In the bleak December… He tried to conceal his horror, but he wasn’t sure how successful he was. His mind raced back to the dream, to the woman running through the snow and bitter cold.