Snowbird Gothic Stories 14 - "The Deep End of the Shallow Water"

Tuesday night, I’ll be appearing at NC Speculative Fiction Night at Atomic Empire in Durham, NC with fine folks like Justin Achilli, Matt Forbeck, Steve Long and many others to celebrate, among other things, the launch of the new issue of Bull Spec. And I will of course have copies of Snowbird Gothic available for purchase, if you’re in the area and want to swing by.

****

“The Deep End of the Shallow Water” is another Halloween tale from Storytellers Unplugged. Now, as noted previously, I am a big fan of all things monster-huntery and Sasquatchy and ghost-investigatory and you name it. Do I believe in it? Not so much, but I love the concept, the trappings of this bootstrap pseudoscience. I mean, who exactly decided that EMF meters detected ghosts? And yet, here we are with the idea as gospel, at least in certain circles.

And so thestory is about a couple of those monster hunter type guys, setting up shop in a spot where a monster is clearly an impossibility even if you believe whole-heartedly in that sort of thing. You don’t get lake monsters in lakes that you can walk around in an hour. You don’t get lake monsters in man-made lakes next to airports that aren’t technically old enough to drink. You don’t get monsters in tame places, Loren Coleman’s famous account of the cryptid kangaroo that beat up a Chicago cop in the early 1970s aside.

But that’s not what the story’s about. Really, it’s a tip of the hat to the whole notion of horror itself, of being afraid of the dark even though we know there’s nothing scarier in there than last year’s fashions. We know there are no monsters out there, but we keep looking anyway because we want them to be there, and that desire overrides our common sense when the lights are low and hour is late.

There are no monsters in the reservoir near RDU, which is what I based the lake in the story on. There are heron, and cranes, and ducks and geese and cormorants, and there’s an eagle who commutes between there and Lake Crabtree. There are fish, I presume - all those birds have to be eatingsomething - and frogs and salamanders and most likely freshwater mussels or something of that ilk, too. I don’t think it gets much deeper than six feet at any point, and I certainly don’t think there are any monsters.

But on a day when the skies are dark and the wind’s whipping along, when something is agitating the herons and they take off with their great GRONK-GRONK-GRONK cries echoing off the trees, when the water washes a little closer to the road than maybe it ought, well, that’s when you look at the water and you wonder, did you actually see something moving underneath the waves? Something fast? Something big?

Probably not.

But you’re going to look back again anyway.