Seven
Nightmare
That night, I dreamed of the lake.
At first, it was exactly as I remembered it; quiet and still, the water stretching endlessly beneath a moon so pale it seemed drained of all warmth, its light falling across the surface like tarnished silver. Mist hovered inches above the shoreline, drifting in slow, deliberate currents that never quite obeyed the wind. The pines all stood perfectly motionless around the edge of the water, their black silhouettes rising like cathedral pillars into a sky empty of stars.
The silence here was immense.
Every sound that might have existed seemed to sink into the water before it could reach my ears.
I was standing barefoot upon the old dock. The wood beneath my feet was glazed with frost. It creaked softly beneath my weight, yet even those sounds felt swallowed almost immediately, as though the darkness itself refused to let them travel very far. My breath drifted before me in pale ribbons, each exhale lingering longer than it should have, refusing to dissolve.
The air grew colder.
The kind of cold that seemed to arrive from beneath the skin instead of outside it.
Then…
The lake breathed, a single ripple disturbing the mirror-like surface. Then another. And another. And another still, each one forming without wind or falling rain, spreading outward in slow, perfect circles before disappearing into the endless black water as something enormous moved below. Its presence announced itself only through those widening rings that traveled silently toward the dock.
I wanted to step backward. My legs wouldn’t obey. The wood beneath my feet had become strangely soft, as though the dock were no longer built from cedar but from something older and alive, flexing gently beneath my weight like the ribs of some sleeping creature. The mist parted. I saw him standing there at the edge of the shoreline.
Damien.
He was barefoot too, standing perfectly still, his pale clothes almost luminous against the surrounding darkness, yet they reflected no moonlight. They possessed a brightness that belonged only to themselves. His dark hair stirred although no breeze touched the trees. His face was calm. His eyes found mine across the water; silver, like moonlight trapped beneath ice, beautiful and impossibly sad.
There was one thing about him…
His reflection never appeared in the water.
The moon reflected, the trees reflected, the dock beneath my feet reflected. Only he stood before the lake without casting an image upon its surface.
A strange pressure settled inside my chest.
I tried to call his name, but no sound left my mouth. I felt my lips move, my throat straining to form the words, but only silence answered.
He watched me with an expression that might once have been gentle. Now, it carried unmistakable warning.
Slowly, he lifted one hand, reaching toward the lake. The water shivered below, the ripples stopped, everything becoming perfectly still once more. Then the moonlight vanished all at once as something beneath the surface blocked it, the darkness below rising slowly, blotting out the silver reflection until the lake resembled an endless pit opening beneath the world. Shapes drifted upward; pale hands, faces with closed eyes, long strands of dark hair moving through the water as though suspended in invisible currents. There were dozens of them, perhaps even hundreds, all rising soundlessly toward the surface.
None of them broke through, though. They just… watched.
Damien still hadn’t moved. His eyes remained fixed upon mine.
This time I understood the warning within them.
He wasn’t beckoning me closer. He was silently begging me not to move.
A sound echoed beneath the dock. A dull, heavy… knock. Once, then it came again, as though something far below had struck the wooden supports with enormous patience.
Knock.
KNOCK.
KNOCK.
The dock trembled beneath me, cracks spreading slowly through the frost-covered planks. They were thin at first, then widening, black water appearing between them.
The knocking stopped.
A moment passed, the air buzzing with electric anticipation.
Then the lake opened its eyes.
There was no other way to describe it.
The surface of it split—not with any waves, but with awareness. Every ripple turned toward me, and every reflection suddenly seemed alive. The water no longer resembled water, but a massive face looking back; those beneath the surface all smiling at once, hungry and impatient.
Damien’s expression changed, fear crossing his face in a flash. He shouted something. I saw his lips move, but I heard nothing. Then he was running toward me.
The distance between us should have taken minutes to cross. But the shoreline stretched farther away with every step he took. The forest surrounding us elongated, the dock lengthening impossible over the lake, the moon climbing higher, burning bright and red, watching like a sinister eye in the sky.
No matter how fast Damien ran, he never came any closer to me.
The water beneath me burst upward in a violent splash, pale, white hands reaching up from below, cold fingers wrapping around my ankles, my wrists, the hem of my coat, all of them pulling gently.
I looked toward Damien one last time. His silver eyes met mine, his lips forming two silent words—
Wake up.
The hands dragged me backward. The dock disappeared beneath inky black water, and the red moon above shattered into scarlet fragments around me, fiery and explosive as they launched through the air. Cold flooded my mouth as I went to scream, then I felt something brush the back of my neck. It was sharp, metallic, the taste of iron filling my tongue at once. I screamed again—
And woke violently, sitting upright in bed with a gasp that tore through the stillness of the cottage, my heart hammering against my ribs. The room was dark. The curtains stirred softly. Outside, the lake lay hidden beneath the predawn mist.
My mouth tasted unmistakably of iron. I touched my lips with quivering fingers. There was no blood. Yet for a long time afterward, I could not come to convince myself that whatever had looked up from beneath the water had remained inside the dream.
Hours passed, the storm finally breaking as sunlight peeled across the sky. The lake out there looked like glass, and the clouds above had turned into streaks of hazy light, but the quiet didn’t feel peaceful. It felt like the tense pause that comes right before something breaks.
And then I saw him again, standing alone by the water’s edge, as he had been in the dream.
I realized that I wasn’t afraid of his presence. I was merely curious. Drawn to it, somehow, as if somewhere deep inside, some part of me had already known him, though I knew not why.
Before this town, and before the rain.
Before I was even myself.
That was the first time I stopped pretending that Clearwater was just a town from my past.
And that Damien Cross was just an ordinary guy.