Dead Bait Read online

  FOX GOES FISSION

  By Ron Leming

  Spider Lake was...Spider Lake. It could be no more and no less than what it was.

  It was surrounded by ill-manicured parkland, the state's attempted vision of an acquiescent wilderness: fenced in, marred with jumbles of picnic tables, trash cans, fire barrels and portable toilets. Groomed with willows, cottonwoods, creosotes, and cedars, it was a deceptive expanse of water hiding in the core, squatting like a fat hob, hushed and waiting.

  It could unquestionably be said that the lake was seldom looked upon by human eyes. But other eyes watched. There were legends about Spider Lake. Legends told only in whispers. It was a profane place, they said. A noxious spawn of two evil rivers that had taken altogether too many lives over the decades. It should be destroyed, they said.

  The state, once enthused with ambitions for tourists and fishermen, had attempted several times to develop the lake, to clean it up. After the first few bodies floated putridly to the surface, no one was willing to work the lake. "To hell with it," they said. "Let it sit." And there was no way to drain it. It was already as low as it could go.

  It was illusive on the surface. Tranquil, still, overgrown with reeds and choked with hyacinth, bursting with visions of fish uncaught, depths unexplored, and curious treasures undiscovered. Only Spirits and the Great Catfish knew where the bottom might be. And underneath ... underneath there were things. Lake sharks and water boggles, rats, and squirming, writhing things that you only caught out of the corner of your eye as they moved away. And worse that you wouldn't see. Until it was too late. And afterwards, always afterwards, they would reappear in nightmares of the lake.

  William Fox's thoughts were focused on the ever-present obsession of his life. The lake. He'd grown up around the lake. Like most of the children of the area, he had been terrified of it. But he had, unlike the rest, loved it as well.

  He had studied hard in the reservation school and even harder later on in forestry college. He had learned his trade well. And, though they expected it from him, when he'd asked to be the ranger who cared for Spider Lake, what he heard most often was, "That's a job only a crazy Indian would want."

  Well, be damned if he hadn't been just the crazy Indian to want it. Now he was stuck with it.

  He wanted to do his job, to take pride in his job. But no one came to the park. And no one, no one, came near the lake. There were no jolly campers to remind to clean up after themselves or to tell, jokingly, not to feed the bears. There were no children to watch and guard and teach about Mother Earth. Worst of all, there were no fishermen. He couldn't check licenses and limits. He had no one to ask, "How're they biting?" There were no welcoming campfires smelling of frying fish, no cordial bottles of Jack Daniels, no good company to talk bullshit and fish stories with. No one screwed with Spider Lake. They knew. They knew.

  Now and then lost tourists would stop by mistake or out of a misplaced curiosity. They'd ease out of their big cars, stretching and yawning. Then their mouths opened wider and stayed open as they caught sight of the lake, heaving and rippling, its surface steaming and windblown. They would realize, unexpectedly, that there was no wind, and they would look closer.

  They would begin to hear the wails and cries coming from the ancient raft that floated out in the middle of the lake. A few who were more responsive might see strange shadows oozing above the water.

  Later, safe at home, they might tell their friends about the "eerie lake we found on a side road into the backwoods. The damned place musta been haunted." They might even laugh. But they would never forget.

  Fox walked the lake. He walked every day and every night. He walked the lake because someone had to. It had to be watched and guarded, and the guardian might as well be him. He genuinely loved Spider Lake. Despite the people it had destroyed. Despite the lives it had taken. Despite the loss of his wife and child. Despite the pestilent malevolence that steeped and simmered in its depths. Despite all that, he loved it.

  He loved the jagged, raw smear it made through the center of the white man's tame little world. He loved its unfettered wildness, its autonomy, its tumultuous lust for life. Only the Spirits and an Indian could love Spider Lake.

  It was sacred. At least to Fox and his people. It was Manitou-possessed, hot shit, magic damn voodoo bullshit. And if other people couldn't grasp that, Fox figured they could just piss off and die. Who'd ever understood Indians anyway?

  He was the guardian of the lake. Men and women of his tribe had always been the guardians. The state, not comprehending, but knowing no one else would have the courage to do the job, always sent someone from the reservation to forestry college and gave them the job. If they asked for it. And they always asked.

  Now his door opened onto the lake. Fox and his hound, Baskerville, sat on the wrinkled front porch of the cabin. He had built the structure himself feeling that "a damned lake like that should have a damned ranger's cabin." And it was.

  It was two stories tall, half wikiup, half lodge. It had been constructed around some primeval trees that, by all rights, should have been extinct long ago. Its skin and bones were strung together from loose boards and roughly carved logs he had scavenged from the lake itself. The structure had sagged over the years, with the result that it now seemed to smile at Spider Lake. It leered like a misplaced lover, corpulent and bloated with age, smeared with too much mascara and experience. Only a fool wouldn't have perceived that the lake and the cabin suited each other perfectly.

  But it was Fox's home. And it was beginning to look like a good night for fishing. He had dubbed the activity 'fission' because of the nature of the lake. Someone had to do it, and he was the only someone who could. Or had reason to.

  Even in the most well-behaved, normal streams and lakes, fishing was more than a matter of just catching fish. And Spider Lake was too far from well-behaved or normal to even apply the concept to it. But there were still a few, a very few ancient, infinitely great-great-grandfather catfish with needle-like teeth and fingers of razored fin. They were covered with moss and sandpaper scales and their eyes were laden with venomous wisdom. Immense, deranged, and corrupt, only the dark knew what they held captive or what they consumed. No flesh could possibly survive the predator-filled trip to the bottom. No ordinary line would hold them. No common rod and reel could haul them in. Only two-hundred pound test line and deep-sea gear with a twenty-pound weight at one end and a hundred-sixty-pound fool at the other could even try. And only time and the lake stood between them.

  Fox went into the cabin to gather his gear. The interior looked like a Stuckey's Korean-Indian souvenir stand. There were belts and bracelets, silver jewelry, blankets, five television sets in various stages of age and disrepair, and shelves upon shelves of piled-up books.

  He stepped to a blanket-covered alcove and started pulling out his equipment: .22 pistol, ammunition and holster; razor-sharp hatchet and scabbard; chum box filled with ripened rat and toad and squirrel parts; steel bait cage; rod and reel; tackle box; and a huge bowie knife. He piled it all by the door and moved upstairs to dress in his sturdiest rawhides. Then he was prepared.

  He and Baskerville ambled out the front door as if only going for a routine walk. The fogged, full, red moon bleached the lake with a fungoid, yellow-orange luminescence. The first thing to do was to catch bait.

  Fox knew the site. The hidden mounds near the tangled corners of the lake where the blasted, moldering trees still grew, faintly glowing and strangled with parasites. A place where you didn't dig for worms—you shot them when they slithered out of the ground and went for your legs.

  Baskerville flatly refused to ever enter the area. Fox went in alone. He shot four or five fat ones, then a worm larger than he had ever see
n before went for his face. He put his arms over his eyes and stumbled backward, fighting for balance. This was not a healthy place to sit down.

  When it reared up like a cobra and started gurgling at him, he aimed carefully and shot it. Then he went to it and began cautiously pulling it out of the ground. He could never be certain which end he had shot. They were insidiously clever.

  He abhorred the way the worms came up, reluctantly, with buried sucking and tearing noises, as if they were a smaller segment of a massive organism, suddenly maimed and separated.

  It was a reliable five pounds and he stuffed it into the bait cage with the others and then rejoined Baskerville. Whistling to mislead the lake, he sought to appear nonchalant as they strolled the quarter-mile to his spot, stopping only once along the way to take a stick of dynamite from the tool shed.

  His spot. It was the only location he would ever dare to fish the lake from. It was a fifteen-foot strip of rubble-strewn sand and stone, cupped in the crumbling palm of a craggy twenty-foot-high cliff. He had carved crude steps into the cliff face and, once, he had been demented enough to build a short dock out of wood from the ruined mansion that stood on the cliff above. The construction had cost him a finger, a bloody chunk of his ass, and his wife and daughter.

  Yet the dock still stood, taunting him. It was corroded by mold and shrouded with fungi, but it was a spot to stand. A spot to stand and scream out at Spider Lake and sink a hook into its moldering entrails. A place to endure and rip out the great catfish that prowled the depths, that lay mute and murky in the heart of the lake. A spot to rip them out, bloody and screaming and fighting.

  Because when Spider Lake screamed, it screamed nightmares and visions. When Spider Lake screamed, it relinquished a soul it had seized — it gave up a life. And if he was going to be a damned ranger, if he was to be the guardian, he would be guardian over something, even if it was only dragging souls out of that bloated bitch of a lake ...out of the profane, clutching thing that Spider Lake was.

  He was, by the grace of the Spirits, a fisherman.

  He hadn't stood on that dock in over a year. Not since Cheyenne and Autumn had been taken by the lake. He hadn't had the heart or the courage to go back and fish for their souls. Their remnants. The occupation of soul fishing was done by feel and, in the case of Spider Lake, with a savage, intuitive cognizance of all that lived and died and rose again to endure within it.

  Spider Lake twisted lives and souls and turned them against any invaders to its world. Invaders who, winnowed down over the years to Fox, tried to wrest from its damp clutches what belonged to It.

  He scrambled down the cliff onto the sand. Baskerville, who was, perhaps, more sage than his human comrade, remained above, watching.

  Fox settled on a damp, moss covered rock and studied the lake. It was best to be wary. The water rippled. Steamy fog rose torpidly, viscous tendrils of mist caressing the dock. The twisted mass of a lone oak clung suspended between the lake and the cliff. Its gnarled roots held fast to land and water so that it appeared as if its branches grew down and its roots up.

  The tree had stood, once, before what Fox had been told was a storybook mansion filled with lace and dolls and lunacy. But the lake had slowly, steadily, vengefully, eaten its way to the doorway, and the tree had toppled. The lake, content perhaps, had receded, forsaking the cliff, the beach, the bones of the mansion, and the twisted heart of the tree that connected them. Shunned even by the moss that strangled everything near the lake, the tree survived, a continual reminder of all that Spider Lake could be and was.

  He stood up after a time and stepped slowly out onto the dock. He jumped up and down, then rocked side to side, testing the footing. The dock was stable, no matter how crumbling, how rounded and shifting it might appear. He set his equipment down and walked back to the beach to get the now-rusty cages he had abandoned near the cliff over a year ago and brought them to his chair.

  He needed the chair because Spider Lake was not a place to dangle feet in the water or to fish unsupported. The cages because the things wrested from the lake took a long time to die and, even dead, were queer and dangerous. Spider Lake lived. And it died hard. And it was all Spider Lake. All of it.

  He crinkled his nose at the foul smell of the water, the fetor of things still alive but rotting. A splashing and snapping beneath the dock told him there were creatures sensing the blood, the life, above. Lake sharks. Nothing to fret about. They could strip the meat from a carcass, but they couldn't touch him on the dock. The dock was magic. Voodoo. Built with wood from the mansion above, it was protected by the ghost of the lady in white. To a point. The spot remained remarkably peculiar. Like the rest of the lake it was twisted — but in its own unique way and, somehow, in direct opposition to the soul of the lake.

  Fox saw the lady often. She appeared doll-like and pallid, long years dead. He had seen her standing on the dock, glaring at the lake with red, burning eyes, arms outstretched as if her presence could drive away the nightmares and malignant darkness. Fox had watched her, felt her spirit. He sensed in her the same love of the lake he himself felt, the same tearing melancholy.

  Her legend was well known. The lady who loved the lake and had, unwisely, allowed herself to love the wrong man. His betrayal of her, her rejection and loathing of him, his twisting of the lake to his own ends, their eternal struggle, he a casualty of the lake, she a captive of the mansion.

  Her wretched soul had been standing, night after night, year after year, decade after decade, untouched and unabsorbed by the lake. Fox knew, somehow, that she was, or would be if she could, the rightful heart of the lake. She had been evicted and ravaged by its depravity, but she still fought. And Fox fought with her.

  A few hundred yards away, over the water, a scum-covered raft floated in hyacinth. It had been there, always. There was also a rowboat that sometimes floated near it. Both had existed far longer than any wood had a right to survive in Spider Lake. Sometimes the raft was barren. At other times it was filled with visions of rat-mangled corpses, wailing and twitching and beckoning for rescue, even while being devoured.

  The raft was silent, and the rowboat nowhere in view. Still, Fox knew it was best to keep an eye out, lest one of them creep up on him while he was unaware.

  His hands trembled as he held the dense, greasy bulk of one of the worms up to the red moon and whispered a few hushed prayers to the Spirits. Then he impaled it on a large treble hook. He set it down and turned to the chum box to begin chucking blood-drenched chunks of rats and squirrels and toads into the lake. That would take care of the surface pests for a while.

  He watched the water seethe and churn until he spotted a smooth open spot in the hyacinth. He rapidly lit and threw the stick of sweating dynamite into the hole and watched as the water geysered up. That would stun some of the lower predators long enough, at least, for his bait to descend to the bottom. As for hauling his catch up, well, nobody but a crazy Indian would mess with anything that could be caught on the bottom.

  He glanced over his shoulder. The lady was standing behind him, moonlight gleaming through her as she scrutinized the lake.

  The fog congealed and began to cling. Racing against time, Fox picked up his rod. The hole was twenty yards out. No big deal for a normal rod, but a substantial task for deep-sea gear carrying twenty-five pounds of weight and bait.

  His was no common rod. He had sanded it down and sharpened the tip and reinforced its length with reed strips torn from the lake until it had the snap and crack of a bullwhip and could manage anything up to a thousand pounds. It was more lethal weapon than fishing pole.

  He slipped the lock, set the drag, hefted the rod over his shoulder, and snapped it forward. Twenty-five pounds of bait, weight, and hook lofted up and over the water, straining his arms and shoulders to the utmost. The line flew until he snapped his wrists and stopped the gear over the hole, where it dropped and sank with no bubbles.

  He watched the line zigzag, felt tugs and jerks as the bait was hit o
n the way down by things even the dynamite couldn't paralyze. But they wouldn't get his bait. Not this time.

  The line went slack when the bait and hook hit the bottom. The water stood eerily hushed and still as he took in the line just enough to secure it and raise the bait off the bottom. Then he locked the reel and sat down in the chair to wait.

  He had salvaged the chair from the remains of a battered houseboat that had risen up out of the lake for a few days and then been sucked down again. Scum-coated, gnawed, and bitten, the chair had been ambitiously equipped by some quixotic fisherman with a seat belt and a tube for rod butts like the ones used in deep-sea fishing, where interminable battles and unwieldy fish were the routines one hoped for.

  The slime-encrusted houseboat hadn't been the worst. It had the stench of rotting flesh, and he'd thought he heard a crackling voice from within the cabin. He'd had to watch his fingers to preserve them from the rats that lived in the hyacinth and scrambled up onto the boat to snap at his hands and legs while he'd unbolted the chair from the deck. That hadn't been so bad. No. The worst had been the puny black-and-white kitten that slashed manically at the rats, yowling and shrieking as its insubstantial claws passed through their bodies with no effect. That had frightened him from the boat with no more than the chair and a few cuts and bites.

  He had bolted the chair to the dock. It was a small thing, but anything salvaged from the lake was a victory.

  He looked to the top of the cliff where the hound lay watching him. Baskerville would no more set foot on the beach than he would deliberately step into a horde of blood-starved fleas and ticks. Fox's ancestors would have, and often had, called the lake a mad place. A portion of the Land of Dark Stars. It was a place where the corners of the worlds met, where a Shaman could seek battle visions. It was a conflict so sublimely ancient that only Fox, the lady, and the lake cared.

  The line jerked and the water bubbled around it. A nibble. Then a yank. The line went wild, shrilling from the reel. He readjusted the drag and hauled up on the rod to set the hook.