* * *
We followed the dogs to the lake, did Marken and I. There wasn’t any part of me that wanted to be near Lake Henpin at night, not since seeing the drawings in that damned book, not since hearing tales of the Sathlattae, rituals and chants and spells related to Ubbo-Sathla. Incantations with which water spirits could be raised. Summoned. Created. And, thankfully destroyed. It was the last knowledge that Marken had been seeking. Not just since he’d come back to Leighton. From earlier. Much earlier.
“My family is charged with destroying the Old Ones,” he said as we moved through the woods. I had my Webley and he an old axe that looked brittle, carved with pictograms and strange words. More a work of art than a weapon, though he clenched it as tight as his teeth.
Marken said, “The tower wasn’t erected to stop any Saxons. Not for any Vikings or Normans, either. It’s a defense against invaders from the lake. It wasn’t part of the original abbey. Has nothing to do with it, unless you count fighting for the other side.” The dogs were still howling at the lake, but it was too dark, too many trees in the way. I could see nothing. My heart was a hammer, beating against my chest in waves.
“I’ve travelled the globe. Fighting. Well… not much fighting. Acquiring artefacts, mostly. Stopping others from fighting. And I’ve been learning about the Cabershaw family. Learning about the lake house. Learning about… God help me and keep my soul in His hands… Lake Henpin.”
It was then that I saw the glow from the lake. And as sure as a man knows light from dark, I knew that light was wrong. It was unsettled. Not shimmering, but… moving. Creeping out from the lake. Like a mist. The dogs were growling. Whining. I think they would have fled if they weren’t all together in a pack, with a thousand teeth and a mob’s nerves.
I realized at that moment that I had a hundred questions for Marken. That I’d finally begun to understand. That the wet coming down from the sky in infinite raindrops was different than the wet that was gathered together in the lake. And that Marken was, I suppose, an officer of a greater law than I’d ever served, with answers as far above my own eyes as if a child had been asking me about mine.
I began to understand that he had much to tell me. That he had been keeping many things hidden. That I wasn’t ready. That I had only a drop of knowledge. Just the taste of an ocean.
We were still, I swear and believe, a hundred feet from the edges of the lake. But that makes no matter. None at all.
We still fell in.
There was a rush of earth, of water, as if the lake had nabbed us from below in the manner of a mole stealing vegetables from a garden. The dogs were in chaos, paddling as best they could, but the water was churning and alive and I lost sight of the surface, of Marken, of everything. I tumbled and flailed. There was nothing but the water. For long moments, there was nothing but the water. And me, of course, being drawn down below. Then… old Steggs, the police dog, came sinking past me, struggling as he was for air. I dove for him, needing to save something, to act for a cause, to believe in something. I dove for that dog. Down and down. Down and down. Always down. My lungs should have been bursting. My lungs should have been furious. But I felt nothing. Only dove for the dog. He was just out of reach. Looking to me. Scared. Trusting. But I couldn’t reach him.
I pulled up short when I saw the city.
Nothing could induce me to put onto paper what I saw of that city. Of its people. Police psychiatry be damned… I will not bid my mind to speak of what I will never forget. Those temples of stone. Those streets made of nothing but water, curling through and around and over the buildings, and men walking about them as if these streets were a true surface, as if water could hold them, as if the wet were solid. And the men were not men, of course. I only call them men to save my mind. They were as much slugs as men. Creatures of jelly. Blobs of flesh that changed shape with every facsimile of a step. Tendrils always and ever reaching out, but tendrils changing to arms, to wings, to faces, to legs, then all of these at the same time, and then they were nothing, nothing at all, only whisked away by the water that whirled around the spires and the rooftops, each surface of each building worn by untold millennia of footsteps, grooves worn into the stone of the rooftops and the walls and everywhere, all of the motion a mad whirl around me, and down past it all at the bottom, down at the bed of the lake, past Steggs, past the sinking dogs, there was the source of the light. A glacier, I thought, at first. A strange white glacier that was beneath the water, that covered the bottom of the lake, that stretched into caverns that went even farther below, that sank deep into the heart of this world.
A glacier.
But of course it was not. I will not write anything more of it in this report. Nothing of how, without eyes, it looked up to me. Nothing of how, without a mouth, it spoke my name.
I swam madly for the surface. I swam away from the buildings, from the city that stretched beneath me. I abandoned the dogs that were floating past me, their dead eyes bulging in fear, then closing in death, then opening once more, staring at me, though I had no thought that they had come back to life. None of that.
I could see the surface. It was like a roll of clouds above me. A hundred feet, it seemed. I swam as a madman. Closing the distance. Planning how I would run when I was on land. No destination. No stopping. Just running. I would run.
A hand went on my shoulder.
Marken, I hoped. I hoped for Christopher Marken.
But when I turned it was Maple Cabershaw.
At first I thought she was drowning. At first I wondered how she had traveled from Wath-upon-Dearne, where I knew she was being kept, to find herself in the waters of Lake Henpin. But then I saw the look of blackness in her eyes. The depths of space within her. The smile that was somehow both uncaring and malignant at the same time. I heard her laugh, even underwater, casting aside Earth’s rules and speaking to me even as water filled her lungs, even as her skin flashed into impossible colors and her limbs flickered into tendrils, or thick seaweeds, and then back to human again.
But she was not human. She had never been human. The Cabershaw family were guardians and I had come too close to their secrets and their domain. Maple slid her fingers into my hair and began to pull me back down, back down, laughing at my struggles and whispering through the water and into my ears. She spoke of citadels. Of rulers. Of servants. Of sustenance. Of life. But nothing of her words was of Earth. It was all madness. Grand madness. And all true. Her madness was true.
I fought. I fought and I clubbed her with the Webley that I still held clutched in my hands. I brought it down on her face, shattering nothing. Her features merely moved aside. Slid around the impact. My lungs were heaving and I clutched at her throat; I clenched at her throat while trying to choke the life out of the beautifully strange creature, but her smile never changed. I was nothing. Only a minnow swimming against a whale. Still, a minnow may fight, and fought I did. I fought until I saw how we were near the surface of the lake, how I was nearly to freedom, separated momentarily from the creature I once believed was human, who I once believed was Maple Cabershaw, a woman who had sat for long years in silence, and who had once nearly drowned in this lake.
She swam for me, and I saw no humanity in her eyes. Only death.
But then, before she could reach me, hands came down from above. A man’s hands. Maple gave a start of surprise, and then a grin of realization, and then she smiled at me as she was plucked up and out of the waters. She went limp as she surfaced.