Lake Sweetwater

The chanting coming out of the forest was new. At least, Kirsten was pretty sure it was – possibly it was typical for the town of Sweetwater, but having only just moved here, she couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. Maybe this was simply another quirk of living in a small town, another mundanity to the locals.

Until recently, Kirsten had always lived in cities. Her parents were originally from Sweetwater, but they had moved to Seattle before she was born. Kirsten’s career as a corporate arbiter had also not been conducive to small town life – the company she’d been at for the last fifteen years had offices in New York, LA, London, Paris – Kirsten had been to them all, but never to anywhere with a population under, say, half a million. It never occurred to her that she would want to.

The idea to move to Sweetwater sparked in her mind after her mother died of cancer five months ago. Kirsten had been standing at the graveside, watching her mom’s coffin lowering into the ground, and instead of being present in the moment, she could only focus on the feeling of her phone buzzing in her pocket with what could only be calls and emails from work. She stared at the headstone that bore both her parents’ names – her mother’s date of death freshly engraved, her father’s worn and duller looking. He had passed almost a decade earlier in a car accident. Kirsten had no family now. This realization kept crashing over her, ebbing away only to return in full force later; it left her feeling untethered, like a lonely sailor on a vast and stormy sea.

When she found her parents’ old yearbooks while cleaning out their house later, she was entranced by the picturesque backdrop of their hometown, Sweetwater. Even the name was perfect. A quick Google search revealed that it was a tiny town with a population of only around two thousand people, located right on the edge of northern Washington, less than an hour’s drive to the Canadian border. Her mother’s senior class had posed for a picture in front of the lake that gave the town its name and Kirsten found herself smoothing her hand over the image of the calm, mirrorlike surface of the water.

Taking time off for the funeral gave her the space to realize just how exhausted she was. Her job was beginning to drain her. The constant travel had seemed glamorous and exciting at first, but Kirsten was nearing her fifties now and growing weary of living out of hotel rooms, existing as just another anonymous face in a never-ending crowd. Sweetwater could be a fresh start. The town became a Disney-movie daydream in the back of her mind that she couldn’t seem to shake. When her parents’ house in the Seattle suburbs finally sold, Kirsten cashed in some vacation time to settle everything. After the paperwork was signed, she traveled four more hours to Sweetwater, intending only to visit, and left two days later having made a down payment on a house there and with her resignation letter drafted and ready to go.

Life in Sweetwater had not turned out to be quite as perfect as Kirsten had hoped, though. Making new friends, in particular, had been tough. The people here were largely insular and tight-knit. They rarely smiled and engaged in small talk reluctantly, with the air of being forced to suffer a disconcerting and inconvenient ordeal. Kirsten’s dreams of joining all the book clubs, running groups, and trivia nights she imagined an idyllic little town might have were also dashed. These kinds of community events didn’t seem to exist in Sweetwater – or, rather, they almost certainly did, only they weren’t being advertised, and Kirsten certainly wasn’t invited. She knew the townspeople had to be gathering somewhere, though: how often had she driven down deserted streets after work, trying to figure out why the place looked like a ghost town? It was almost summer, the days were getting longer, the weather was perfect. Kids should be playing outside, people should be walking their dogs and riding bicycles down the street and getting ice cream to go at the local diner, but Kirsten saw only empty streets and dark, silent houses. It was driving her crazy.

She was trying her best to focus on other things, though. She loved her new job at the county courthouse, though she had to commute about forty-five minutes each way to reach it. The work kept her busy but didn’t eat into her time off the clock, which was a huge change. Her new co-workers were friendly, but mostly young. Many of them were just starting families and were therefore busy after work. So, Kirsten decided to use her new-found free time to get into some solo activities while she continued trying to figure out how to break into the mysterious and elusive Sweetwater social scene.

This was how she found herself on a deserted hiking trail after work one evening, watching the shadows grow longer around her and listening to the unmistakable sounds of ritualistic chanting somewhere to the west, in the direction of the lake. Kirsten shifted her weight, feeling the chafe of her brand-new hiking boots against her ankles, and considered her options. On one hand, every instinct she had, honed by the countless hours she’d spent watching horror movies in her lifetime, was screaming at her to turn back. On the other hand…well, how could she expect to make friends if she didn’t put herself out there, Kirsten reasoned. She could learn how to chant as well as anyone. Having made up her mind, Kirsten adjusted her hat against the sun’s dying rays and stepped off the path, into the trees.

The ground sloped downward as she neared the lake, first gradually, then starkly, so that she was forced to adopt an embarrassing, shuffling gait to maintain her forward momentum as she moved down the hill. The chanting was growing not only louder as she approached, but more impassioned. Whatever was happening, it was about to reach a climax. Kirsten found herself hurrying, pressed forward by the urgency of the voices ahead of her.

The forest spit her out right at the lake’s edge. The effect was disorienting – one moment she’d been looking at the grass beneath her feet, concentrating hard on not rolling an ankle, and the next second she was sinking slightly into damp sand. When she looked up, she was astonished by what she saw. People were packed into a semi-circle that opened up at the lake’s edge. It looked like most of the town was crowded around. Kirsten saw people of all ages, from young children to elderly people with walkers and wheelchairs, all chanting in unison in that strange, sinister-sounding language that was unlike anything Kirsten had ever heard before. At the edge of the circle, right next to the water, a young man and woman were kneeling, facing towards the crowd, hands bound behind their backs. Kirsten was amazed to see the waitress from the diner, who she was pretty sure was named Elizabeth, standing at the center of the circle. She was holding a cruel-looking black dagger with a curved blade above her head and seemed to be leading the chant.

Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem like the sort of friendly neighborhood gathering she had been envisioning. Kirsten wanted nothing more than to slip back between the trees and disappear. As soon as she got home, these boots were going straight to the back of the closet – she didn’t think hiking was the right hobby for her after all. She might have turned then and left quietly, if only she hadn’t made eye contact with the girl kneeling by the lake, if only she hadn’t seen the tears streaming down the young woman’s face, if only she hadn’t mouthed the word “please.”

The sun was slipping toward the horizon faster now, turning the lake red and orange. The chanting reached an all-time crescendo and Elizabeth, still in her waitress uniform, turned sharply toward the two figures at the lakeside. Before Kirsten could even think to move, the black blade of the dagger was sliding across the young man’s throat. He fell backwards into what should have been the shallows of the lake, but somehow, he seemed to sink rapidly out of sight. His body was gone before Kirsten could even understand what had happened.

Elizabeth was turning to the young woman now, and before Kirsten even knew what she was doing, she was shoving her way into the circle. “Stop!” she cried, but her voice was lost in the cacophony of the townspeople around her. It was like they were in a trance. No one moved to stop her – in fact, no one seemed to register her at all. Their eyes were locked onto the lake. Only their mouths moved, keeping up that awful chant. Elizabeth was raising her knife, seemingly intent on sinking it into the young woman’s chest, but Kirsten darted forward and grabbed her arm. In the confusion, the woman staggered to her feet and tried to run. She didn’t make it far before she tripped and fell onto her side. Kirsten wondered if she had been drugged.

Elizabeth let out a cry of confusion and rage, twisting like a wild animal as she tried to evade Kirsten’s grasp. They struggled for the knife for what felt like an eternity, until Kirsten finally decided that it was useless. Elizabeth was simply too strong. She shoved the waitress away from her with all her might, hoping to catch her off guard, and ran for the young woman on the ground.

“What the hell?” Elizabeth screamed. She had fallen to the ground next to the water. Her voice seemed to echo in the sudden, ringing silence left by the absence of the chanting. It must have stopped when Kirsten had tried to grab the knife, but she only had time to notice it now.

“You killed somebody!” Kirsten yelled back. She was shaking so hard she could barely pull the young woman to her feet; undoing the bindings around her hands was out of the question for right now. She was well aware that they were completely surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered.

“No, no, no,” Elizabeth was muttering, frantically scrambling to her feet. “This is so bad – you have NO idea what you’ve just done!”

“I saved someone’s life! I stopped a murder!”

“You’ve ruined EVERYTHING!” Elizabeth’s voice had become so shrill that Kirsten actually winced. The frenzied, snarling woman hunched in front of her, clutching a knife against her chest, was so different from the soft-spoken waitress who had served Kirsten a slice of apple pie with her coffee only two days ago. She could hardly reconcile one with the other.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” Kirsten forced herself to speak in the same tone she might use with a frazzled client at work. Miraculously, her voice didn’t shake as badly as her hands. “Perhaps this is some sort of…misunderstanding? Maybe we can reach an agreement that will be amenable to all parties.” Well, everyone except the dead guy. There was nothing Kirsten could do for him now.

Elizabeth tipped her head back and laughed. “Oh, it’s a misunderstanding alright.” Kirsten was starting to get the sense that the primal anger radiating off of Elizabeth was also tinged with fear.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Kirsten repeated firmly.

“You interrupted something that you had no business sticking your nose into. What goes on in this town is for the people who belong here to worry about. I don’t need to explain myself to some blow-in from the big city who’s here trying to recreate a Hallmark movie.” In spite of everything she had just witnessed, Kirsten had to admit that this stung a little.

“I’m not just ‘some blow-in,’” she snapped. “My parents grew up here.”

“And they never told you about Lake Sweetwater?”

Kirsten hesitated, not liking the feeling of being out of the loop. “No,” she finally admitted, “they didn’t.”

Elizabeth laughed again, but hollowly this time. “And you never thought that was odd?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Every single person in this town depends on the lake ritual. We do it every twenty-seven months, at sunset on the closest equinox, and the town stays safe.”

“And the ritual is, what, exactly? Chanting in unison and then stabbing two people?”

“There’s more to it than that.” Elizabeth’s lip curled; she clearly took issue with Kirsten’s dismissive tone. “It takes months and months and months of preparations. It has to be timed just right.” She looked down at the dagger in her hands, defeated. “You’ve ruined everything.”

“What could possibly be worth killing two people every, what, two years?” Kirsten was appalled. “There’s got to be another way to accomplish whatever it is you think you’re doing.” She still wasn’t clear on the parameters of this ‘ritual,’ exactly, but it seemed like a young couple was the intended offering. Was this why her parents left and never returned, all those years ago?

“The ritual hasn’t been broken in forty-eight years,” Elizabeth whispered. She raised her head, eyes narrowing as she looked at Kirsten more closely. It appeared she was coming to the same conclusion. “Who did you say your parents were, again?”

Kirsten opened her mouth and closed it again. She had no idea what to say. She wished someone else would speak, but the townspeople still seemed transfixed, as if under some sort of spell. Elizabeth’s face was flickering back towards rage. Kirsten saw her hands tightening on the dagger again and began backing away instinctively, pulling the young woman she had rescued along with her.

Then two things happened almost simultaneously: first, the sun slipped at last below the horizon, leaving only a faint orange afterglow in its midst; second, a rotting, mottled-grey hand emerged from the depths of the lake and grabbed Elizabeth’s ankle, yanking her hard towards the water. Kirsten was not aware that she was screaming at first, but she wasn’t the only one: it seemed the townsfolk had woken from their reverie at last. People started stampeding toward the forest, running for their lives, as more and more hands and arms and faces in various stages of decay began to emerge from the dark water. She recognized one as the boy Elizabeth had just killed. She watched him grab hold of a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit and begin pulling him back toward the lake. The man struggled and pleaded futilely; the young man's face had no expression at all. Blood was still oozing from the deep wound in his neck.

“We have to go!” A voice in Kirsten’s ear snapped her back to reality: it was the young woman, who seemed to have shaken out of both her stupor and her bindings. Kirsten turned to follow her and together they pushed their way into the fleeing crowd and began fighting their way up the slope, away from Lake Sweetwater. Kirsten forced herself to ignore the horrific sounds behind her and focused only on the escape. The forest seemed strange and alien in the growing darkness, and the shapes and shadows of other people racing through the trees only heightened the terror Kirsten was feeling. She held tight to the young woman’s hand.

They didn’t stop until they reached Kirsten’s car. For one horrible moment, it sputtered like it wasn’t going to start, but Kirsten turned the key again and then the engine caught and roared to life, headlights flooding the dark trees with light.

The young woman let out her breath in a long exhale then, and Kirsten realized she’d been holding her breath too. “I’m Amanda,” the woman said, as the car pulled onto the highway and they sped into the darkness.

“I’m Kirsten.”

After that, they didn’t talk anymore. Kirsten focused only on holding the wheel steady. She kept her eyes fixed firmly ahead as they left Lake Sweetwater behind.