A long time ago, before I moved with my mother to another continent, I left behind something beautiful yet terrifying in my native village. A beautiful lake of a magnificent blue color, surrounded by rocks and only known as the lake of oblivion.
Specialized in love at first sight, the lake would tempt anybody to get close, touch the water or even have a bath. However, the lake was used by villagers as some sort of executioner. Anything or anyone considered a nuisance to the villagers was thrown in the lake to be taken away by an unseen entity only known as Oblivion. Yes, expeditious justice.
Each disappearance was a sacred ceremony, after which Oblivion would leave behind an object belonging to its victim, called item of remembrance. Assisted by a mystic force, that item would float to the shore to be carefully picked by a witch doctor without touching the water or else… Each item was said to possess the power to bring back any person or thing it was related to from the lake of oblivion, and such mission, called retrieval, was so dangerous that nobody dared to perform it.
I, Lorett, my elder brother Oluven and our mother Sildell used to live peacefully in the village, until what I thought could only happen to others, happened to our family with devastating consequences.
One day, thirteen years old me noticed that my brother seemed worried and sad. When I asked him about his unusual mood, he simply told me that he would soon leave for a faraway land and handed me his favorite toy when he was a child: a small plastic yellow car.
During the same day, at sunset, village warriors surrounded our house and arrested my brother who surrendered peacefully. He was accused of stealing an item of remembrance and performing a retrieval the night before. When my mother and I went to the village headman for his trial, we could not believe how and what he stole.
A longtime ago before that dreadful day, a wounded foreigner, seeming to flee from someone or something, arrived in our village with a black bag full of foreign banknotes. The woman succumbed shortly after from her wounds, and the money she carried was labeled evil and corrupted to the dissatisfaction of many, who wanted the money to be shared or used for the village development.
Still in the black bag, the money was thrown into the lake of oblivion and taken away by the entity, which left behind one banknote. It was the item of remembrance that Oluven stole supposedly to satisfy his greed, but I knew my brother to be a kind-hearted soul with better intentions than just that.
When night fell, as tradition demanded, the village head, our mother, myself and a few witnesses — among them my mother’s friend Remja, as well as several village guards stood on the rocks surrounding the lake of oblivion. Four witch doctors chanted incantations on the shore with one of them using a strange dark liquid to draw a strange symbol on Oluven’s torso.
My mother’s and my own cries increased when they tied him up, arms and legs, placed him in a pirogue with one witch doctor, who paddled until they reached the center of the lake while others held a rope tied around the witch doctor’s waist. With absolute care, he lifted Oluven and placed him at the water surface, along with the money my brother had retrieved, avoiding to touch the water, before paddling back to the shore as quickly as possible.
He did not even reach the shore that already, the water started to boil, and a strange light appeared beneath my brother. He started shaking, maybe as a result of pain or panic. My mother and I alternated between crying and silence, divided between our distress and the fear of the entity that was maybe about to appear. The witch doctor reached the shore before a cyan luminous color enlightened the totality of the water.
“I SHALL RETURN! I SHALL RETURN!…” My brother kept shouting to the point that my mother had to cover her mouth with her hand to avoid crying louder.
Oblivion pulled my brother inside the water, and everything ceased instantly. The water was back to normal. No more light, no more boiling, no more Oblivion and no more Oluven. A painful silence ruled, accompanied only by the blowing of the wind until a voice pierced the former:
“Can you see anything? There’s nothing.” One of the witch doctors said as we all noticed that Oblivion did not leave any item of remembrance. Therefore, they chose to consider that somebody who performed a retrieval for such vile reasons should not be given one chance to return.
It took weeks to console my mother and I, a period during which my nights were populated by nightmares. One of them recurred every night and stood out among the rest: I would dream about being at the lake standing on the shore and see my brother’s head at the middle of the lake calling for me and begging me to free him, until giant tentacles would suddenly rise from the water and scare me so much that I would wake up shaking.
Two months after, when nightmares and fear finally lost their hold on me, I mustered the courage to do exactly what I was seeing in my nightmares, therefore, one night, I found myself standing on the shore, facing the lake of oblivion. It welcomed me with glints of the moon on its blue water.
Scared of Oblivion, nobody dared to even watch after the lake and fortunately for me, everything I needed, in this case the pirogue and a rope seemed ready just for me. I tied the rope around my waist and its other end to a rock on the shore. I pushed the small boat, hopped in and paddled until I reached the middle of the lake.
What now? I thought. I was no witch doctor and did not know any incantation. In fact, I only knew that Oblivion needed an item of remembrance. If it had not leave one behind, then it had to be that toy, I thought. I took out the small plastic yellow car from my pocket and threw it inside the water.
“Please Oluven, come back to us.” I whispered, determined to not leave that terrible place without my brother.
Before even two minutes, I understood that I foolishly angered the entity as I found myself under attack. Something hit the boat from below and destabilized me even though I was sitting. It hit the boat, again and again, and made me forget the need for discretion as I screamed at each strike.
I lied down, braced myself, clenched my teeth and closed my eyes, until the thing stopped. I then slowly opened my eyes, breathing heavily and saw the cyan light coming from below the boat. I wanted to sit back but refrained from doing so, terrified at the idea of seeing Oblivion, but my attention rapidly shifted to the heavy breathing near the boat.
Who could that be? I thought. My heart was beating so hard that I could hear it. The thing soon placed one hand on an edge of the pirogue. My eyes widened when I saw its fingers, with its pale blue skin and black nails. It then placed a second hand that bore the same anatomy. My breathing was slowly evolving into gasps, laying the foundation for my most genuine scream of absolute terror.
The head soon followed, and I saw its dark hair, then its pale blue forehead, then its green glowing irises diving straight into my soul. The thirteen years old teen that I was screamed and made uncontrolled movements of sheer panic that plunged me into the luminous water. I could not see anything and only felt fear, and two forces pulling me in two opposite directions.
Paralyzed by fear and unable to do anything, I let myself being pulled and surprisingly found myself out of the water. I saw the pale blue skinned entity watching me from the middle of the lake, it resembled Oluven, but it was not my brother.
“Are you okay?” I heard my mother ask. She had come to my rescue and plunged her caring eyes into mine, repeating the question as I slowly passed out.
She woke me up the day after, and while the whole village was distracted by something that was happening at the lake, we seized the opportunity, assisted by Remja, to flee the village for good before being judged and selected as Oblivion’s next meals just like Oluven.
Months after, Remja told us that the lake of oblivion expanded and that its waters overflowed in the village but she did not elaborate on the consequences of such an occurrence. Rather, she told us that she had to make the difficult choice of severing all ties with us and so she did for reasons known to her.
To this day, as a thirty-one years old woman, I do not know if I caused an entire village to disappear, how my mom won a pulling contest over a supernatural entity, if the village still exists or if the lake still exists. You know, we live on this planet, unaware of what we walk on. Many things and places yet to be discovered, that might be much more terrifying than Oblivion.
As for Oluven, I may understand that I had performed the retrieval in a very wrong way, but that thing that I saw could not be my brother. I later accepted that we definitely lost him. Fortunately for us, he is still in our hearts and memories, but unfortunately for me, he is still in my nightmares too.