“We can’t possibly drag it back to the lodge,” Mia said.
“I know,” said Zeb. “The shape it’s in, it would fall apart anyway. But if we can get a look at the clothing, see if there’s any identification on it, maybe the rangers will be able to figure out who it was.”
“God, this is gruesome.”
“Eh. Good an end as any. Bottom of a quiet pond in the Sierras.” He was edging out onto the ice.
“Be careful. I couldn’t drag you back, either.” Now that she was down by the pond, the air felt even wetter, almost slimy. The hole was close to the edge of the pond, only about eight feet away. From close up, it looked larger and somehow hungry. Zeb’s skis were leaving long, brown-soaked tracks.
“Give me the tip of your pole to hold on to,” he said.
Mia did. “I don’t like this,” she said. “How can you go out there?”
“If you were in there, you’d want somebody to find out who you were.” Zeb’s voice was calm, the voice of a man who didn’t believe he’d fall in. He was gingerly testing the ice. As he moved, the body bobbed. His weight was bouncing the ice on the water like a raft. Mia winced.
Zeb moved further out onto the ice, still holding onto Mia’s pole, and she moved up behind him. Her skis were resting mostly on the land, with about two feet of the tips out on the ice. Zeb was all the way out, his weight distributed by his skis.
“I can almost reach it with my pole,” he said. “Maybe I can pull it over and grab it.”
“I don’t like this, Zeb.” Fear welled in her throat like vomit.
“There’s something else in there!” Another light-colored mass was moving in the brown water, coming out from under the shelf of ice.
Mia pulled back, the hair bristling coldly at the nape of her neck.
“Don’t do that!” shouted Zeb angrily.
Ashamed — they were dead bodies, after all — Mia moved out again onto the ice.
Zeb was redistributing his weight, extending his pole to snag the body on the top. There was a sudden splash, and something whipped out of the water and grabbed the pole, just above the round plastic basket at the end. Zeb let go of Mia’s pole and without even a yell was pulled into the water.
Mia froze as Zeb disappeared under the surface. She could see more bodies below. Huge and pale, they rose like feeding fish from under the ice. The water began to ripple, then to boil furiously.
Mia yelled. She moved out onto the ice towards the hole, striking at the shapes in the churning water. A long thin hand reached like a tentacle out of the water and grabbed her pole. It was dead white, the skin wrinkled and sloughing off the wet bones. Mia pulled back, but it was too strong. She was losing her balance. She let her hand go limp, and her pole and globe were ripped away. Without thinking, Mia scrambled back for the bank, and landed heavily on her side. The hole in the pond was getting wider; brown patches appeared in the snow-covered ice and sank away into open water. There were more things trying to get out.
At the edge of the pond, she hesitated, stunned. It had happened so quickly. Zeb was still in there. Could he still be alive?
More holes opened in the ice and more claw-like hands grasped toward her. The water in the pond lapped at her skis. It was rising.
Faster than her brain, her body acted. When she snapped to, she was already half-way up the hillside, with no idea of how she’d gotten that far. She kept going, moving almost straight up the slope.
When she got to the top, she stopped, but didn’t look back. Were there sounds behind her? She was paralyzed momentarily: her need to get away fought with a sense of duty. She should go back down to the pond and find Zeb.
The soft sounds behind her got louder. She didn’t look back, but pushed off down the hill toward the lodge. Two sets of tracks went up the hill, only one was going back down. Mia forced herself to concentrate on her skiing.
After an interminably long time, pushing herself through the darkening forest, she swung onto the logging road that led toward the lodge. She pushed her way ahead with long skating strokes; it was a low, easy grade downhill. There were no more noises behind her. But was that a soft slithering in the trees to the right? Just the wind? She refused to listen.
What had really happened, she asked herself. Could she have helped Zeb? Was there anything she could have done? Would the rangers believe her if she told them, or should she make up a story that made more sense?
There couldn’t have been live things in that pond. Maybe Zeb had caught his pole on some weeds, and the ice cracked and collapsed. She should have kept her head, and pulled him out. She had killed him by panicking.
The sound in the trees had passed her — just the wind after all. Mia knew she couldn’t have helped Zeb. She pushed her body harder. A muscle throbbed in her thigh. She ignored it.
She came to a small meadow, with young pines freckling its edge in the fog, and Mia recognized the last steep grade before the lodge. It was almost dark and she was tiring. She wasn’t good on steep hills, even when she was fresh, and with only one pole, she wasn’t balanced properly. She pushed her heels down and dug in the edges of her skis going around the narrow curves. She didn’t slow down.
She could see the lights up ahead now, hear the clanging of the yard-bell that helped skiers get their bearing in the fog. She dreaded arriving at the lodge. She dreaded having to tell anyone what had happened.
The logging road opened into the clearing, and Mia finally broke free of the forest. She was certain that nothing was following her: nothing had ever been following her. She stopped and looked back. There were no sounds behind or beside her, and she could see nothing moving.
Mia wanted to turn around and go back to the pond, to find Zeb and pull him out of the water, to breathe life back into him. She wanted to make right everything she had done wrong. It had been the anger inside her that had killed him, the force that lashed out at people close to her. Mia wasn’t crying, but her face was wet with tears, and they kept coming, as if they belonged to someone else.
She faced back towards the lodge and pushed off, but there were no lights up ahead now. Power failure? It was almost too dark to see, but the trail was still a lighter tone than the forest.
Suddenly, the outside lights of the lodge came on again. She was very close, just a few hundred yards more. It had started to snow, and the lights illumined the heavy flakes as they fell slowly. But there were still no lights on inside the lodge.
She skied closer, staring at the dark picture windows that faced the beginners’ slope. There was nobody inside, and it was very quiet. In the snow near the door, there were long brush marks, as though somebody had dragged a broom across it.
Mia peered into the windows. She had trouble focusing her eyes at first. Inside she could see huge, pale shapes bobbing slowly against the panes. Ragged bits of flesh and detritus swam in the air as in soup. Zeb floated there with the rest of them, his skin white and puckered, his eyes open and unseeing, his jaw slack. Aimlessly, as if on a current, he was drifting closer to the window.
These things wanted her. They were a part of her already — perhaps they had come from her. She would see this through to the end.
Mia skied over to the doorway and stopped. She tapped the toe clamps with her pole, and stepped out of the skis. Then she opened the door and went inside.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
One day, early in 1981, my ever-helpful father called to tell me that Stephen King was judging a short-story contest for the Boston Phoenix, and I should enter. I had never written horror, but I was looking, as usual, for a deadline that would propel me through a story.