Fossil Lake II: The Refossiling Read online

  “But why, Daddy?“ Billy pleaded as he rotated overhead, getting closer and closer to the column of ice.

  “Well it was Tina’s idea. You would have been a bad influence on the twins. With you gone, we have a chance to do things right by Kim and Ken, not to mention make the world a better place.“

  “And we get to be filthy rich, too,“ Billy’s stepmother shouted without a trace of remorse.

  “Fuck you bitch!“ Billy screamed. “Fuck all of you, you crazy assholes.“

  “You see,“ the well-dressed man said, “that’s the problem with the kids today, no respect for their elders.“

  Billy was about to unleash a torrent of defiant obscenities, but the chain holding him stopped moving. He was now directly above the glowing, icy column.

  The hook he hung from started to lower and he began to descend towards the ice. Billy looked down to see that the column was hollow and in its center a dark, man-sized thing lurked. As he got closer, Billy felt the incredible cold radiating out from the hollow shard. It froze his tears to his cheeks and instantly dried up his running nose.

  He was sinking into the center of the column, surrounded on all sides by shimmering blue-white ice. As he sank lower and lower, Billy heard something even over his own sobs and the chanting that the circle of robed, mouse-eared people outside had begun. It was a rustling, crinkling sound and it was coming from beneath him.

  Not wanting to look down but unable to stop himself, Billy saw a frost covered thing twitching and shuddering beneath him. It shook a layer of rime from its body like a snake shedding skin. Then a head that was little more than a skull bound in withered, bluish flesh looked up at him through frozen, unmoving eyes. Thin, withered lips peeled back from yellowed teeth and a dry whisper wafted up.

  “Hello little boy, what’s your name? You can call me Uncle if you like.“

  Then Billy, who had thought he was all screamed out, began to scream from the depths of his soul. Outside of the icy tomb, faithful followers in ear hats chanted and prayed, and above them crowds of happy tourists continued to enjoy one of the happiest days of their lives.

  And as night fell and the lights came on in the Kingdom of Magic they seemed to shine just the tiniest bit brighter than before.

  EXHIBITION: THE AUTHOR AS FOSSIL

  James Ebersole

  It had always been Chauncey Anton Nicoletti’s ambition in life to be a writer, and not just any writer, but one of the greats, a man of historical note, remembered long after all of the bullies, his so called peers, were rotting in the ground.

  They mocked him in middle school. They mocked him in high school. They mocked him in college (well, they would have if he had gone, which he didn’t because he saw what was coming for him!)

  When he put out his first collection of short stories he hoped to finally be recognized and accepted. But that didn’t happen. He was only mocked even more.

  But while they were mocking, he was making plans. He was going to be the most well preserved and remembered writer to ever live. Long after sea level rises and drowns Hemingway’s house in Key West, or Brite’s in New Orleans. Long after the statues of Shakespeare and Dickinson crumble to the ground. Long after all things Lovecraft are swept into a far corner of the cosmos, and the houses of Poe fall amidst the rubble of the cities that claim them. Long after all this and more. He would outlast it all, for he had a plan.

  He was going to fossilize himself.

  Sure, he tended to go off on tangents from time to time, and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind about his enemies, but he didn’t understand why his videos got so many negative comments. His final video said only this:

  “Hey everyone, Chauncey here. This is my last video, and to all my enemies, I only have one thing to say. You think you all are hot shots, writers who have succeeded. But you haven’t and never will. You’ll die and be forgotten. You can’t win. But C.A.N. can. And C.A.N. is me, Chauncey. See you on the other side of the lake.”

  The comments came in swarms.

  They thought he had lost it (though they’ve thought that for a while) and that the video was a suicide note. Let them think that. Even if the process was technically a suicide, it was killing off a sub-par life to pave the way to a greater existence.

  He drove the stolen car twenty miles south, to the lake that would seal and fulfill his fate.

  In the trunk were all the books he had never sold. He tied bundles of these together, joined to ropes knotted around his arms and legs. These would weigh him down. All the way down, to the bottom of the lake, where trilobites and other things have clung to the darkness, to outlast eras, to be preserved.

  He dove into the water, black as the sky above it, black as the t-shirt crumpled on the stony shore, black as the ink of the text on a page, black as his heart.

  His long dark hair billowed in the water around him. He dove deeper into the murky depths. When he could no longer see the moonlight above, he stopped paddling.

  And as the oxygen deprivation was taking hold, he felt a momentary sensation of being flipped around, and could not make out which way was up, or down. And in that moment of disorientation, doubts crept into his mind.

  What if a revered literary immortality was not his destiny? What if death was the end of him? What if he had been the villain all along?

  But no. He wasn’t. He was something greater.

  He was the writer. He was the fossil. He was, in his darkening and fading mind, one with the lake.

  66,666 years later, at the Milky Way Museum:

  The girl wandered away from the rest of the field trip tour group, to a forgotten corner of the museum where bits and bobs of organic matter from the first modern era sat in dusty, climate controlled cases. The half remembered menagerie formed a ‘U’ shape around the centerpiece of the exhibit, a fossilized human, the remnants of his face hinting at a sublime yet anticipatory agony.

  The plaque on the pedestal at his feet simply read:

  ‘THE WRITER’

  Carbon dating put’s ‘the Writer’s’ death at circa 2000 AD. Because of the prevalence of a ‘print only’ catalogue of work by the more technophobic and copyright obsessed writers of the era, it is doubtful works penned by ‘the Writer’ have survived.

  However, the cryptic nature of the fossil encouraged wild speculation about the man. Anything with an anonymous or indeterminate authorship was attributed, at first jokingly, to the writer. This soon caught on in more legitimate academic citations and cataloging practices in the aftermath of the EARTH ARCHIVE Wipe of 2214.

  ‘The Writer’ currently has

  67953686439694766680867856668196783466654758069079375768798666

  written works attributed to him by the Library of the Universe.

  Even in the moment the girl’s eyes scanned the digital counter, the number changed a dozen times.

  The spinning numbers, rapidly increasing with each second, nauseated the girl. She began to make her way to the rest of the group over by the space exploration exhibit. But she felt a nagging sense of something similar to a hot breath on the back of her neck. She turned around, craning her neck up at the fossil.

  The fossil looked down at her, and smiled.

  THE SURFACE BENEATH

  Michael Burnside

  It was on a hot, muggy day some twenty years ago when Jamie Dugan suggested we go for a swim. I was fourteen. Jamie was fifteen. The lake was called Fossil Lake by most of the kids on account that you could find fossils of shells and small crustaceans all along its shores. I called it Mud Lake. The water was always murky. You couldn’t see anything in front of you once you had swum a few feet below the surface. Fish would often brush past your legs and, in the shallower areas, plants growing up from the bottom would grab at your feet.

  I hated that lake.

  I agreed to go to the lake with Jamie right away. You have to understand, it was Jamie Dugan, the most popular kid in school, asking me to go. I’d been lucky enough to have grown up in the house right next door
to his. I was friends with him before he ever became popular, and managed to hold onto that friendship even after his social circle exploded. Without Jamie, I’d have been sitting in the far corner of the lunchroom with that kid who dresses funny. Jamie was the key to all the friends I had in school, so when Jamie asked me to do something, I did it.

  We arrived at the lake in the afternoon. The sun was high overhead baking the mud on the shore into a crunchy crust that hurt to walk on. I remember insects chanting in that strange rhythm that rises and falls, a sound that provides the background music to every summer outing on a hot day. Growing and dying vegetation clustered in the shallows , giving off a smell that was a mix of fresh cut grass and decay. The lake was shaped like a kidney, a mile across at its widest point. It was supposedly thirty feet deep in the center.

  Jamie ran out in front of me, his blond hair bright in the sun, his eyes impossibly blue. “Today we’re touching the bottom!” He pulled his shirt off and kicked away his shoes.

  “Can’t we just try swimming across the narrow part ?” I asked. I understood that we needed a challenge. Adolescent males can’t just do a thing for the fun of it. They must always be proving themselves lest their fragile egos collapse like a deflated balloon.

  But my ego be damned, I had no desire to try to reach the bottom of the lake. We had tried it before, swam down into the murk, our lungs straining, our heads aching from the pressure. You had to know when to quit, when to head back up. Push yourself too far, quit too late, and you wouldn’t have enough air to reach the surface. The last time we had swum for the bottom, I had thought I was going to die.

  Jamie dismissed my suggestion with a “Nah.” He tramped through the weeds and splashed into the water.

  It didn’t even occur to me refuse. I accepted my fate glumly. I took off my shirt and kicked off my shoes. I winced in pain as my bare feet stepped on the jagged surface of dried red mud. Tall grass scraped the skin on my legs as I walked into the brown water. The mud beneath the water oozed up between my toes. The water wasn’t cold. The water in Fossil Lake was always spit warm. I waded into the lake, the mud trying to hold onto my every step, until I was in deep enough to swim. Jamie waited for me, bobbing up and down in the brown slop. We weren’t at the center of the lake, but we were well past the point where the bottom dropped away. We were far enough out that the fish that brushed past felt massive. The flick of their tails was strong enough to push your offending limbs out of their way.

  “Ready?” asked Jaime.

  I wasn’t. Had I known what was about to happen, I would have realized I never would be. I inhaled and exhaled in long slow breaths, trying to prime my body with oxygen. Jamie waited patiently, confident in his ability to hold his breath for several minutes or more. It wasn’t a lack of air that had stymied his past attempts to reach the bottom but a lack of direction. The disorientation of swimming blind had always resulted in him swimming up when he thought he was going down. Direction had not been my problem, rather it had been a lack of nerve. I resolved that this time I would give it everything I had. This time I was going to come back up with a fistful of mud to show Jaime. He’d brag about my feat at school. I might even become cool enough to stand on my own.

  I sucked in as deep a breath as I could and then nodded to Jaime. Jamie inhaled deeply, and then flipped upside down. His legs kicked furiously and he vanished beneath the surface leaving great bubbles of foam behind.

  I dove down after him. After the first few strokes, I could still see his feet off to my left, but after a few more strokes, they vanished into the brown gloom. I tried to pace myself, to not use up too much energy and air with useless flailing. I moved my legs back and forth smoothly. I reached forward with both my hands, flexed them into cups, and then pulled them back to my sides with wide sweeps. I was maybe ten feet down when I lost sight of my hands.

  I pulled myself deeper into the brown realm. It grew darker with every kick. I began to feel the water pressing in on me. It pushed on my temples and shoved in my stomach. This was where the disorientation kicked in, where up and down become impossible to tell apart. The natural buoyancy of the human body urges it to rise. Tired sloppy strokes shift one’s direction. But I knew the trick was to simply swim toward the black. That had to be the way down; that had to be the path to glory.

  I shoved myself down farther. My lungs were beginning to burn.

  Something large swam past me. I felt the sharp edge of a fin cut into my face. I clamped my jaw shut, willing myself not to scream. I was still moving. I had to be close. With every stroke I expected my hands to touch the bottom, at any moment my face would smack into the muck.

  But instead the water began to brighten, the dark brown giving way to caramel. I thought I had somehow gotten myself turned around. I inwardly cursed in frustration, but my survival instinct was ecstatic. My body was spent, my lungs were on fire. I pushed my way up toward the light. My body’s natural tendency to float helped lift me through the water. I gained speed quickly and the shimmering surface rushed toward me like a freight train. I came up so fast that half my body rose up out of the water. I breathed in deeply.

  The smell of sulfur burned my throat. I hacked and coughed and almost inhaled water as I plunged back beneath the surface. I came up sputtering, gasping, and choking. As I treaded water, trying to catch my breath, I noticed that everything in the world looked wrong. Everything was gray.

  The water was gray. The shoreline was gray, as if dark charcoal coated every bit of ground. The sky was gray. At first I thought that I had held my breath too long. I must have burst a blood vessel in my brain and now could only see in black and white.

  But then I saw Jamie bobbing in the water a few yards to my left, his bronze tanned skin and blond hair a stark contrast to the colorless world that surrounded us.

  I felt something running down the side of my face. I reached up and touched it and found my fingers colored red. I heard a soft dripping sound and looked down. The drops of blood falling from my face looked like tiny red cherries dropping off a branch. The fish that had cut into me had gotten me good.

  I looked around for any sign that this was the Fossil Lake I knew. Perhaps some freak storm had hit while we were underwater and had dumped a strange gray powder on everything. But nothing looked familiar. There were no plants along the water’s edges. Instead, large gray rocks lined the shore. There was a warped dead tree a dozen feet back from the shoreline. It had four trunks that joined together into a single twisted shaft that rose up and then bent down like a worshiper before some unseen altar.

  I had never seen anything like this place. All I knew was that we had to get back home and the only way I could think of to do that was to go back the way we came.

  “We have to swim back down!” I yelled at Jaime.

  Jamie ignored me. His eyes were wide open and his mouth partially agape. Something else had his attention. I followed the direction of his gaze. That’s when I saw the thing that would steal my life.

  Reclining on a gray rock was a woman with ash colored skin. She had a perfectly symmetrical face, full gray lips, and round eyes that appeared to glow white. Long silver hair flowed down across her back and draped off the side of the rock. She was covered by a piece of linen that looked like smoke. The fabric was translucent, allowing us to see her smooth back, the curves of her hips, and long shapely legs. She was beautiful, but I somehow knew she wasn’t really human.

  Jamie swam toward her; perhaps his mind was filled with the tales of daring spacemen who always managed to bed beautiful female aliens.

  I yelled at him to stop, pleaded with him that we had to go back, that we had to try swimming back down. He paid me no mind.

  I swam after him but found it difficult to make much progress. The water had an oily, greasy feel to it. It beaded and ran off my skin like rain on a waxed car hood. Jaime’s larger limbs propelled him through the strange liquid at a far better pace. I saw him reach the shore and approach the thing. I paddled furiously, but just
ended up splashing more.

  I saw Jamie clamber out of the water and walk up to the gray woman. She sat up and looked at him, her robe of smoke shifting and barely covering an ample bosom.

  I kept swimming. As soon as I could touch the bottom, I began trying to run. The mud in the lake engulfed my feet. Great clumps of it shifted beneath me as I willed my legs to move me onward. I dug a trench there, my feet scooping and shoving mud behind me. My chest was out of the water when I saw Jamie trying to talk to her. The water was churning around my knees when I saw her bend down to him.

  He had raised his hand to stroke her hair. She smiled at him and brought her face close to his, as if to kiss him. Then she opened her mouth revealing rows and rows of sharp little teeth. She chomped down on his arm.

  Jamie screamed and tried to pull away. She slid off the rock upon which she had been lying and stood up on perfectly formed gray feet. She grabbed Jaime’s arm with both hands and continued to bite down.

  My legs were free of the water. I ran up the slight bank and seized a log I had spied on the ground. The wood felt wet and warm and wrong somehow, but I ignored that and charged the creature. I swung the log at the back of her head. It connected hard with a loud smack, but I felt the log give way as if it were flesh instead of wood. Though I had not delivered the crushing blow I had hoped, she did release Jaime. He fell away from her with his arm drenched in blood.

  I pulled the log back and swung at her again. And that is when I lost my self. She reached out and grabbed my wrist, stopping my swing with ease. Her touch burned my skin, not with heat but with the frigid pain an ice cube delivers when it is stuck on your flesh. I felt something leave my body. My center felt hollowed out. My heart was chilled.