In The Light Of The Moon

Tommy never forgot the way its skin shone in the moonlight, slick and pale like something that had never seen the sun. The summer of ’74 had started like freedom in a bottle. The air around Dunker Lake smelled like dried grass and gasoline, and the world felt like it belonged to them. Tommy had his dad’s station wagon, Linda smuggled a six pack from her old man’s stash, Pete had a crumpled baggie and rolling papers, and Kim brought the loudest laugh anyone in Grafton had ever heard. They barreled down the dirt road with Zeppelin hissing through warped speakers, yelling along to the lyrics like they had all the time in the world.

They built their bonfire at the spot where the ground sloped toward the black water. The flames jumped high, painting their faces orange, turning their shadows long and goofy across the shore. Kim tripped on the cooler and almost wiped out, only to wind up in Tommy’s arms. “Smooth move, jive turkey,” Pete snorted, and Kim stuck her tongue out at him. “You’re just jealous I got the cute one,” she said, giving Tommy’s shirt a playful tug. Linda raised her beer in a mock toast. “To the hottest couple at Dunker Lake,” she said. “And to us not getting busted by the fuzz tonight.” For a while the night felt wide open, a place where nothing bad could ever happen.

The radio sat on the hood, its antenna bent, picking up more static than sound. A DJ’s voice came through now and then, talking about rolling blackouts and weird interference on the lines a few towns over, but nobody cared. Linda twisted the dial until Fleetwood Mac drifted into the warm darkness. “Now that’s more like it,” she said. Pete took a long drag and passed the joint along. “This is it, man,” he said, exhaling toward the stars. “We’re gonna remember this night when we’re old and boring and yelling at kids to get off our lawns.” Kim laughed and said, “You already sound old, Pete,” and for a moment all four of them believed this was just another harmless summer story they would tell someday.

Sometime after midnight the fire burned lower, settling into a bed of pulsing coals. That was when the smell came. At first Tommy thought it was just the lake turning over, but then it thickened, heavy and putrid, like meat left in the sun and soaked in swamp water. The chorus of frogs that had been singing all around them went silent, one voice at a time, until there was nothing. “You guys smell that?” Kim asked, pinching her nose. “That is rank.” Tommy tried to play it off. “Probably a dead fish or some critter,” he said, but his eyes kept sliding toward the tree line, black and close and somehow closer than before, as if the woods were leaning in to listen.

The noise came next, low and huge, a wet moan that seemed to start in the earth beneath their feet and roll up through their bones. The fire popped, sending sparks into the sky, and then even that sound died. Pete’s beer stopped halfway to his mouth. “You hear that?” he whispered. Linda elbowed him, forcing a laugh that sounded too thin. “Relax, man. It’s just a cow or something.” “That ain’t no cow,” Pete muttered. The radio buzzed on the hood, then coughed out white noise. Underneath the static, faint and garbled, something like a voice whispered backward syllables, rising and falling in a rhythm that made Tommy’s skin crawl and his teeth ache.

Linda reached for the radio, twisting the dial. It only got worse. The whispers folded over themselves, too fast to understand, too wrong to be a broadcast. “Forget it,” she snapped and dropped the radio into the dirt. It kept hissing, a jagged whispering that sounded almost like laughing. Kim stood, hugging her arms around herself. “You guys are being real spooky,” she said. “I gotta pee. Don’t let any monsters get me, dig?” She grabbed her lighter and walked toward the car and the shadows beyond it. “Real funny,” Pete called after her. “Don’t let Bigfoot see your bare butt.” Kim’s laugh floated back, then cut off as the lighter flared a small, shaky circle in the distance and went out.

The scream that followed did not sound like it came from Kim at first, it was too sharp, too raw, like something tearing in half. “Kim!” Tommy yelled, bolting to his feet. He sprinted toward the car, half expecting her to jump out and yell Gotcha. The lighter lay in the dirt, still burning, and one of her flip flops sat a few feet away, bent at an odd angle. Near it the earth glistened. In the faint firelight he saw streaks, dark and wet, smeared through the brush as if something had dragged a sack of red mud away from the circle of warmth. The smell of iron hit him hard enough to make him dizzy. “She fell,” he said, voice shaking. “She just fell.” Pete stepped closer, then staggered back, gagging. “No, man,” he whispered. “That’s blood. That’s way too much.” They ran for the car. The mist had crept in from the lake, low and thick, curling around the tires like it was trying to hold them in place.

Tommy slid behind the wheel, hands slick with sweat. “Everybody in,” he barked. Linda slammed her door and locked it. Pete’s breathing turned ragged. “Let’s blow this scene, man,” he said. “I’m not staying, I’m not staying.” The key turned, the engine coughed, the dashboard lights flickered weakly. For a second Tommy thought it had caught, then everything sputtered out, leaving them in a silence so deep they could hear the blood in their ears. A slow, heavy drag started behind them, as if something enormous was pulling itself through the dirt, claw by claw. The smell thickened until it burned their noses and eyes. The radio, dead moments before, crackled to life all on its own. Static roared, then thinned, and between the harsh bursts a voice whispered, low and garbled, shaping his name and stretching it wrong. “Turn it off,” Linda gasped. “Turn it off.” “I didn’t turn it on,” Tommy whispered.

Something bumped the back of the station wagon so hard the chassis jolted and the glass buzzed. The car dipped as if a full grown bull had stepped onto the bumper. Linda screamed and clamped a hand over her mouth. Pete sobbed, “I want to go home. Mama, I want to go home,” the words fumbling over each other. The roof sagged a little, creaking, dust sifting down from the overhead lining as a massive weight settled on top. In the fogged back window something huge slid past, blotting out the faint glow of the dying fire, a pale mass like a boulder made of flesh. The rear glass spiderwebbed with a sound like cracking ice. Linda scrambled for the front seat, clawing at Tommy’s shoulder. Pete yanked his door handle and panted, “It’s stuck, it’s stuck.” Then the car tilted again and his body jerked backwards as if hooked by some invisible line. Tommy saw him pulled toward the rear, his hands sliding on the vinyl, his nails shrieking against plastic as he fought for a grip. Pete’s face vanished into the dark behind the back seat, his scream rising until it turned into wet gurgling. The hot, salty stink of fresh blood spilled into the car, choking them.

“Out,” Tommy croaked. “We gotta get out.” He threw his whole weight into his door. It burst open and he spilled into the cold, damp air. Linda tumbled after him, sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. They ran without thinking, shoes slipping in mud and needles, the mist curling around their legs like something alive. Behind them the dragging sped up, a hideous scraping that followed them into the trees. Branches snapped like matchsticks. Something huge moved in a straight, deliberate line, unbothered by the twisted paths that snagged their clothes and slowed their feet. “This way,” Tommy gasped, aiming for the glint of the lake through the trunks. “We can cut around. We can lose it.”

Linda’s hand tore from his. He heard her cry out, short and sharp, then the heavy thump of her body hitting the ground. When he looked back he saw it in the thin seam of moonlight between the trees, and his mind shied away from the sight even as it stamped itself into him forever. A pale bulk, slick and massive, rose out of the shadows, shaped vaguely like a torso with no head, its shoulders a hunched, grotesque knot of muscle and fat. The top ended in a rounded stump where a neck should have been, black fluid pulsing out in slow dribbles. Thick long arms, far too long for any human body, drooped from its sides, ending in warped claws that dug trenches a foot deep as it moved. Linda’s legs kicked once beneath that looming shape, then vanished as it leaned down like a lover bending in for a kiss.

Tommy ran. Every breath was like a knife to his chest, every step a splash of pain up his shins, but he ran anyway, driven by a blind animal terror that hollowed him out and filled him with speed. The dragging behind him carved a crooked trail through the forest floor, closing the distance no matter how fast he went. The trees finally broke, spitting him out onto a muddy stretch of shore. He stumbled into the black water and went under with a splash that shocked his lungs. The cold was a slap that jolted him into a savage, flailing swim. His arms thrashed, his ears filled with water and his own heartbeat. When he risked a look back he saw it at the tree line, framed in the thin gray of coming dawn. The creature hunched at the edge of the lake, its pale body heaving, arms hanging low so that its claws scraped the rocks, leaving grooves like plow marks. It did not have a face, but he felt it fix on him all the same, a pressure like a hand pressing the back of his skull. The stump where its head should have been pulsed, and from deep inside its bulk came a single, shuddering moan that rattled the water around him and made his jaw ache.

He woke up on the far shore with mud in his mouth and someone shouting his name. A fisherman in a faded flannel shirt and scuffed boots stood over him, a cigarette crushed under his heel, staring like he had just reeled in a corpse. “Easy, kid,” the man said. “Easy. You’re safe.” The morning sun was too bright and the trees looked too ordinary, like a cheap set built to cover something rotten underneath. At the hospital they said he had been through an ordeal and used words like shock and trauma. The cops asked what happened to his friends. He told them about the smell and the sounds and the headless bulk at the edge of the trees, about the dragging and the way Pete disappeared into the dark without so much as a body left behind. They wrote it down, but he saw how they looked at each other when they thought he could not see. No bodies were found. The car turned up half sunk in mud, one window shattered, streaked with something the lab techs later called lake sediment and rust.

People in Grafton started saying Tommy Cole had lost his mind at Dunker Lake, that he had fried his brain or snapped and done something unspeakable. He grew older. He moved away. But some nights, when the nightmares got too bad, he drove back and parked on the ridge above the water, never any closer. The town changed, but the lake stayed black and still, ringed by trees that seemed to lean in just a little too far. On damp nights the mist crept up to the road, bringing with it a faint breath of rot soaked in river mud. Once, sitting there with the engine off and the lights dimmed, he heard it again across the water, that slow, patient dragging moving along the opposite shore. Tommy put the car in gear and left without looking back, telling himself he would never return, yet knowing deep down that the Grafton Monster had already marked him and that it was only ever a long drive and one foggy night away from finding him standing too close to the dark.