Cam followed the nautical native to Drowning Lake huddled into his coat and hugged by his backpack, tripod and mount in one hand and camera in the other. I merely operated the microphone and did all of the sound for a new show called The Primordial on Discovery +, which at the time still hadn’t come out yet but was in production for the first season. I was privileged to travel the world at only 23, but now I know some mysteries are mushrooms which need be kept in perpetual darkness.
There is a lake in Cameroon that is deadly. Purportedly, it is so acidic and devoid of buoyancy that even the natives, who have lived in this place for hundreds of years, dare not enter. “If you enter, you will sink, and no amount of thrashing will bring you to the surface. You’ll drown with your feet on the bottom”, hence the name so curtly dubbed Drowning Lake. We came to dispell fable from truth. However one glaring contradiction was immediately verbalized - “if the myth is true, then how can the boat, with the weight of three men, not sink?”. The answer? “They do. Which is why we don’t go by boat”. Then I looked at the trees.
The lake is landlocked tightly. Not much bigger than a large pond, so ziplines were strewn across it in sections of spaced, ten yard intervals. The zip lines were thick steel cables threaded into anchors attached to heavy oak trees on either side, controlled by electrical generators that operate the spindles which churn them like ski lifts, and attached to the cables are small gondolas called trollies. Full encumbrance and industrial machinery to avert any “accidents”.
The machinery was surprisingly modern for a community of primitive, indigenous people who live in huts made of mud bricks. “No rickets. You see? No rickets”, exclaimed Mosha, one of the guides, in reference to our utterances about safety precautions, meaning to say “not rickety, but perfectly safe”. Of course the first thing that came up was a testing of the myth. I remember feeling chills, internally and externally, when I watched a gull dive bomb a fish and go straight under, without returning. We asked how fish can even exist if they can’t swim. He said “no fish. Suicide bomb”. We left it at that.
As we slogged along our first run, we dropped a plethora of different items down into the water. The first was an armful of sticks. They went under with the propensity of a rock off a cliff. It wasn’t like they even waded for a moment. They fell straight down. Even the twigs, nearly weightless, which dropped like hundred pound rocks, as if the water was no more than a tree - projected hologram. My stomach must have quadrupled. Twisting like a knotted burl on a mangled, leafless fir, screaming up bile.
We dropped a helmet. Down. A golf ball. Rapid submergence. The water didnt even splash. I started to believe the mystery, and so did Cam. I could see it on his face and in his eyes when, as he watched the items fade to darkness, his expression melt from queer curiosity to spilled milk. His cheeks dropped at the corners and his eyes darkened to shadowed globes. In fact, I wondered if it was even water at all. It was starkly black. Not murky, but black as oil. No coalescing of fading colors from shore onward. Little to no reflection. Scant retracting of sunlight.
However, as he lingered over the edge of the rail reeling in subdued astonishment, I asked the invariable question - “what happens if someone goes down?”. The response - “there is no bottom”. “Wait, what???” “No depth. We try rope and anchor, never reach bottom”. “But there’s got to be. If the acid is produced hydrothermally, then there must be natural venting system in the sediment…so it must have a bottom”. He looked at me with a grave countenance, twisted to a disquieted half - grin of buried truth that has haunted me ever since.
“Can we possibly touch the water?”, I asked. Cam interjected before Mosha could respond. “How about we go one further? Can you suspend one of us???”. We both looked at him like he was crazy. “Are you craze?”, Mosha asked in his disjointed dialect. “No. We have tanks. We have waterproof cameras. All we need you to do is lower me in…so we can take a look….”. “Absolute not. You put us all in danger. You drop, cable pull trolley down, we all die”.
For a moment Cam furrowed his brow and scratched his chin. I could feel the ideas shaping and dissolving in his mind like flash bulbs that stung me sharply with each clicking of the shutter. “Then we tie a rope to the cable. Not from the trolley. I lower myself, take a look, and you can operate the spindle to pull me back up. It should be fine. After all, the trolly must weigh five hundred pounfs more than me”. “You taking your life in your hands, American…but fine. Long as you no implicate us or pester us with lawyers if disaster…”. “Deal. So, we need to procure rope. Lots”.
Assuming the deepest part to be the middle, Mosha employed Silvio, the most limber and familiar with navigating the cable system, as he literally hung free solo and scurried along in a reverse buttress climb, fearlessly, all the way to the center. From there he draped the end of 200 yards of rope (which we had to wait two hours delivery for) around the cable and, with one hand, methodically and without lassitude, tied a double lined Palomar Knot, hoisting himself up with just his legs and mid section, and then coursing all the way back without breaking a sweat.
The natives then huddled together and conversed in their native tongue while I tried plead with Cam to reconsider, though gingerly, as I too wanted to foil the mystery of this evil fucking lake just as much as he. “Hey, bud (I fucking hate it when he speaks to me like a child), who scaled K2? Huh? Who’s taking on Everest in six months? Me. I ain’t afraid of a little lake with some inane conspiracy wrapped around it. I won’t hear anything more. Im going. Hey, this is our show. No compromises. Okay, kid? See you when I get back”.
“Cam? Answer me one question…”. “Quickly. What???”, he asked, catapulting me along as if he was going to miss his chance. “They speak French here.” “So?” “And when they refer to the lake amongst themselves, they call it ‘Bouche’”. “Yeah. ‘Mouth’. So what?” “Why do they whisper it???” “Adam, I’m an explorer. Not an anthropologist. Or a psychic. Stop magnifying things. It’s no big deal. See you on the other side”. He flashed me his signature thumbs up, and went on his way. My back gushed with sweat. It felt as if all of my pores were erupting at once. Like a cold and turbid rain.
Dragonflies whirled in droning swaths in my stomach. Most every terrible nightmare that I have is generally recurring - I’m watching from afar my friends walk, cold and unresponsive to my protests, into certain death. Into houses inhabited by the possessed. Into houses on fire. Into caves of rattlesnakes or onto planes I know will crash, and Im helpless to their plight. And so it went here, and I felt so disoriented I had to do it. I literally cut my hand opened with the tip of a buoy knife to be sure this wasn’t a nightmare. It bled. And hurt terribly.
The sky was in its gloaming, and it would be night very soon. I watched from ashore Cam enter the trolley. The lights glimmered ominously, bouncing off of the passing fog under the oxblood sky like wandering phantoms. An augury to the senses, I could taste the salt of my cold sweat. Could feel my racing heart palpitate. My skin flushed to a cold, translucent white, even in the punishing humidity. Mosquitoes plucked at me like a million frozen insulin pins ùp and down every inch of my exposed flesh, seemingly attacking with purpose.
The device was a steel truncheon with an industrial vice clamp on each side, torch - cauterized by wolfram wire to hold, attached to the front of the truncheon which fed the rope. On each side was the improvisation of cable tool bell stock hinges and a weld - cut fluted wedge split in half and conformed to his waste. The rope was fed through it to what must have been two dozen carabiners, strummed and yanked every which way to ensure security. “I go now”, said Silvio impudently and with a remorseless expression that made me shudder.
The last thing Cam did was cock his head in my direction and, pulling down his mask, flashed me a thumbs up one last time. I was nauseated. Then, he stepped off. I thought he might spill straight down into it, but he had leverage, and it was tight as a drum. He lowered himself slowly with the GoPro and headlight mounted to his helmet, and finally, he went under. As the moon glittered its reflection across the lake, I could finally see ripples. It was water, afterall.
The rope was tense as a tightly tuned guitar string, slithering through the cable feed at an even pace. Though, even after about five minutes, he was still going. Then, seven minutes. Then ten. For Christ sake, a man sky dove from space and it only took him 14 minutes to reach landfall. Sure, Cam wasn’t falling with maximum G - Force, but this was unsettlingly bizarre. Fifteen minutes. Finally, the rope went slack. “BOTTOM!!!!!”, I shouted. But the natives were stone-faced and still as sentinels. Something was wrong. And then, the rope began to fly. It was speeding downward so fast that the calipers were shooting sparks.
All the natives jumped to their feet in unison. The rope screamed like a hundred wailing banshees. Birds began to cackle and stir. Bats spreading like disease swooping down and across in chaotic, gregarious factions as we all ducked and swatted them away. RRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, screamed the Hellishly unspooling rope. Finally it hit its end, and in its feverish propensity, it ripped the cable from the tree and thrust it down into acidic Hell.
The massive trunk of the tree across the pond gutted, spitting and splitting in a billion exploded fragments, gutting it through the heartwood to the rings, crackling with the abrasive decibel amplification the pitch and echo of a hobbled giant’s snapped tibia, ripping the tree forward so that it was hanging diagonal and barely afoot by its massive root system. It pulled it all in. Flushed away like it never existed. The trolley, too. No capsizing. No distribution of sinking weight. Just down, as if it all dropped from a skyscraper.
There is something strangely unique to the land surrounding Drowning Lake. It is very often marred with powerful tremors and small - scale quakes. Truly bizarre for a place so far from the sea, which in part explains why they live in houses made of sediment and vines. Easy to reassemble, and very few amenities. Some low magnitude earthquakes have been recorded near Mt. Cameroon, but that’s 155 miles away. It’s not known why such an earthly anomaly occurs there so frequently.
The slatternly tribeswomen came rushing from their huts like scurrying roaches, with deportments of abject terror. They began to scream and shout before being viciously remonstrated by their men. Some even being backslapped to silence. Some continuing to furiously bark and roar in protest, no sooner mollified to their rightful positions of deference by Mosha’s baritone, tranquilising placation.
The ground began to shake beneath our feet, and a thunderous bellow rocked the surface water to revolutions of speeding waves spreading like celestial bodies, simultaneously echoing in short recession across the sky, out….out…out….. It sounded like the ghosts of a thousand angry quarreling wolves, baying disembodied howls some place far beyond beyond the clouds, rushing in from one world and tearing through another. Panicked, I rushed toward one of the trollies and climbed into it, demanding to be dragged back over the lake.
Silvio directed me to a large shed, as Mosha and a village elder named Petra loudly objected. “None of this on record! No cameras, no recorders!”, the two men hollered. To ease their minds I pulled off my shirt and pants down to the swim trunks. Inside was a stocked profusion of troubling items. Spools of rope and steel anchors shredded and torn like some schizophrenic horde of wolverines had gotten to them and went haywire. Crates of makeshift tools.
In my haste i knocked into a dusty wood bracket and a wealth of urns crashed down over me, powdering me in ashes from head to toe. Silvio hurriedly put them back in place and dusted me off just before the door swung opened and the shadowy silhouettes of Mosha and someone else watched on with careful precision. Shouting disapproval at Silvio in their native dialect which was a molding of French and something indecipherable. Before I could take a step Silvio stopped me. My toes were planted on the ridge of a trapdoor spider hole, its hairy black spinnerets pricked and pedipalps raised. I proceeded with caution. Silvio killed it.
He led me to a crawlspace which contained a stockpile of old, musty smelling rope connected to a black steel anchor. Dark insects of spherical appearance chittered out from under. Centipedes shocked frozen. No widows in sight, but they’re flighty foes. I could feel my skin crawling. Legs all over up and down, almost hallucinatory like a drunk drying out in a ward, strapped down and immobile. I wanted out of this husk. This place. To go home.
It took several minutes to unwind as it was clearly much longer than the 200 yards we lost. Without clear initiative they reeled me across to the middle as I swept the lake with my flashlight, panic draining in cold - sweated rills down my face and legs. Silvio was the one reluctant ally who agreed to scale the cable with me. The light reflected back up at me.
The ground was oscillating in uneven intervals, and the monstrous droning sound forced the trees to sway and creak. Gargantuan black hands waving up from Hell. “That sound”, I began. “It sounds volcanic…”. I asked the men if they were living atop a caldera. They looked at me with expressions of confusion. It had all the familiar attributes. It was uncanny.
A turbid body of water. An acrid stench aromatic of sulfur that seemed to materialize along with the tremors. Rippling. High levels of acidity. Non - existent measures of buoyancy. The tremors themselves. All consistent with an underground venting system on the verge of eruption. God knows how far it stretched underground, not to mention the fact that an active volcano rested not 200 miles away.
He climbed out of the trolly and with the assistance of my light, and tied another Palomar Knot. He hopped back in as I tied the hundred pound anchor to the frayed end. And then, with all my might, I hoisted, and then dropped it off the teetering edge of the gondola. The others quickly reeled us back in. Their words accelerated to mercurial pitch. The entire village infected with dread. The bats storming us from all angles. Suicide bomb. Scratching. Biting. Thoughts of liquid aversion and caking foam. Dying ignobly of thirst, left for dead.
Tribesmen thrusted and swung machetes and paddles through the air, popping them apart like diseased piñatas. Entrails raining like a morbid hailstorm. The earth continued to tremble. The cable jerked and spun, and the anchor kept dropping speedily. The trees groaned and meandered to and fro like the hold of a wooden ship sailing straight into a cyclonic catastrophe.
The rope must have run for 400 yards, accelerating more by the second. Minutes passed. Sweat formed. The villagers icebound and stricken with endemic dread. And then, suddenly, the line tensed, the cable bowed in the middle, and it halted. We all looked on in glass - shattered silence. Even the crickets stopped. It was positively eerie. The cable continued to groan along with the wavering trees.
“Bottom”, I muttered. “God dammit, Cam. Reach for it….”. Just as the moonlight poured through parting clouds and the breeze calmed to a tincture of chill, the forest depth chiming with little chirps far and away, the utmost inconceivably nightmarish vision appeared before all of us. Gasps collectivized to a breath - linked chain.
The lake swelled up to a massive bubble the reach of the entire lake, end to end, at least ten or twenty feet in height, and, instead of bursting, it was siphoned back down into a cataclysmic sinkhole, and all the water went with it, like the spinning whirlpool of a flushing toilet, and suddenly the nightblack water drained down into a bottomless chasm.
The water receded down from the bank into a monstrous hole in the ground. The cable snapped off on one end, and fully uprooted a tree on the other, before being flung back up to a circular tidal wave that spread like fire along a trail of gasoline. The ground dropping off in circular ridges like a diamond mine stricken with doubled over slaves.
We all ran for it. Deep into the woods as the colossal growl moaned like the collective desperation of those mournful, lamenting burning bodies inside the gates of Sodom and Gomorrah. Hellish. Before I knew it I was suspended, jostling without control bounding from tree to tree furiously like I was being spun around the ball pocket of a gargantuan roulette wheel. My bones snapping in different places, spat further and further through the timber until my head collided with something, and suddenly everything went dark.
I awoke under the burning rays of the sun on my back, choking up bitter spurts of water from my lungs, drenched. I was being escorted by medics on a cot stretcher and loaded into an emergency van. In my complete disorientation I could hear muffled wails from peripheral figures - “You fucking destroy our village! It cost much to build cables and you and American swoop in and now look what happen!!!!”. We sped away as hunks of rock and mud were being hurled at the vehicle. The back windshield nearly shattered to bits.
I was in the hospital for some time. Five days, I was told. A broken tibia, wrist, and nose. Dislocated jaw. Severe concussion. I asked several members of staff what had happened. One asked if I was a Brit, to which I affirmed. They said plainly “you fell off small cliff”. I told them emphatically my side of the story, to which one of them interrupted, a scrunched little woman in a nurse’s uniform with squinty eyes and hook nose. Weathered wrinkles that looked like they were packed with dust running up and down her face like a desert map. And in the middle of my explanation, she halted me, and repeated now with intensity in her gaze, “no. You FALL OFF CLIFF. Understand????”. I did. And who would be the wiser? All of my recording equipment went down into that unholy sinkhole in the village. “It’s okay”, I told myself. “That place is gonna blow anyway”.
I never knew Cameron very well, and for months the unfortunate accident had lingered in my scrupulous conscience. The show had been nixed, at least for now. A vigil and mock burial was held for Cam. It was a shame. A young man of only 34 leaving behind a widow and two fatherless orphans. I’d never seen a wife filled with such sorrow.
Eventually life went back to normal, but it wouldn’t be a mainstay for long. Because one day I received a knock at the door of my flat. It was a Federal Express delivery. A shabby box taped up sloppily. I thanked the driver and brought it in the house. Then ran it out into the yard, fearing its contents as some improvised explosive ready to Cam me to bloody bits the moment I opened it. But it wasn’t. It was a helmet. Cam’s blue helmet with the white racing strip sundered down the middle. And…his GoPro and mounted light, cracked down the center.
Something I learned about Drowning Lake from a cultural anthropologist who works for the company is that there exists an underground reservoir that runs for near twenty miles and connects Drowning Lake to a bigger lake, where, very often, ‘things,’ (which, as I’m told, look eroded (not by water, but by digestion)) seem to just “pop up”. Like everything that goes into Drowning Lake is flushed through a main drainage line to this other lake. But no further explanations could he articulated, since it was only hearsay.
I paced the room, staring at a note attached to the helmet. Scribbled in conspicuous handwriting, it read “Keep for yourself, and ONLY for yourself. Deepest sympathie (the latter in French, in case you’ve never studied it), Silvio. The camera was in surprisingly good condition. I fed it to my TV, and finally, after a few swills of vodka, hit play…
…fifteen minutes of speeding water, eddies of whirling bubbles passing by at comet’s pace, and then, something I wish I could unsee. At one time, as a child, everything seemed to be a possibility. Just the way I couldn’t disprove the existence of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, nor could I do the same for werewolves and zombies.
Once I reached the age of adult reasoning, I knew unequivocally, that, to quote John Cusack, “ghoulies and ghosties and long - legged beasties, don’t exist”. And now here I am. 23 years old, and all notions of disbelief have been obliterated once again, and sent me back to the age of latent cryptid agnosticism….
…..because after about fourteen minutes, his light finally shone on the hidden truth behind Mosha’s eyes for a few chaotic flashes of a second- an aperture to a mouth full of rows and rows of knife- like encisors the very length of the man which it sought to devour. And I, unable to turn away, but wanting desperately to, watched my friend get chewed and ripped to shreds inside a typhoon of whorling blood and cascading appendages, the camera falling away from his flickering light, deeper and deeper into blackness, until his screams of agony rescinded to muted, static discord.
The crunching of his bones, even under water, carried as the uncanny chittering sound of tires rolling over gravel, garbling in an atmospheric, ghostly ruin of echoing pleas that carried far and wide in the murky abyss. And then went his helmet, drifting off like the infnitesmal thorax of microscopic krill, the rest of him a fleeting phantasm of expanding reds and tumbling bones. The lake isn’t the feeding ground for a monster. The lake is a monster. The camera’s survival was incidental.
His muffled screams linger in my nightmares almost every night. Now, they stroll into burning houses, caves of venemous snakes, rooms of the disembodied possessed, and calderas of mass digestion. And this one, I take to the grave.
Not like anyone would believe such a thing anyway.