The Lights Below

Everyone in town agreed the lake was haunted, but only I knew what was actually buried beneath it.

They tell stories, as small towns do, about fog that rolls in too fast, fishermen who vanish without a trace, and strange lights that ripple beneath the surface as day settles into dusk. Some say it's the dead, restless and waterlogged, trying to find their way back. Others whisper about an ancient curse, woven through the forest and steeped into the water.

But I know better.

The rumors began in the summer of 2006. People started disappearing. Hikers, campers, boaters. All were last seen near the lake. The park service blamed the usual. Steep cliffs, frigid waters, wild animals. The other rangers believed the explanations we gave to the families, or at least they wanted to believe them.

But they didn’t know what I buried fifty feet down beneath the layers of glacial silt in that dark lake.

I’ve worked this park longer than any of them. No one asks where I'm from, why I have no family or why I prefer solitude. They also don’t question why I haven’t aged a day since I first took the job. I think it’s easier for them not to ask.

They just think of me as the quiet one. Watchful. And they’re right. I watch everything. Families laughing while enjoying their picnics, teenagers giggling over cheap beer they not so subtly try to hide, retired couples soaking in the calm of nature. I’ve grown to love those sights.

I’ve grown to love you.

When I first arrived, I didn’t know what love was. I was a scout, the first of many. My vessel tore open the night sky and crashed into the lake like a comet. I was meant to be the beginning of something sinister.

But I got stranded. The ship sank. The signal failed. And in the stillness that followed, I watched your kind. I lived among you. I learned.

I believed the disappearances were necessary at first. I was collecting data, gathering biological samples, doing the job I was sent here to do. But they stopped in the winter of 2013 as suddenly as they had started.

I stopped.

Yet still the lake pulses. People see the lights beneath the water and call them cursed or sacred, depending on who you ask. They say the souls of the lost linger below, their glow a plea to return home. But the light is not from beyond the grave. It’s the fractured core of my ship still emitting a faint glow, barely alive. A heartbeat where there shouldn’t be one. I thought it had gone silent. I hoped it had. But last week, I felt a shift. A low hum beneath the earth. A signal received.

They are coming.

This time it will not be a lone scout. It will not be quiet. It will be swift. Absolute. You believe your lake is haunted. And it is, but not by ghosts. It’s haunted by me, and by what I've brought.

I came here to end you. Now I’m the only one trying to save you.