When the body washed up, the same name was on everybody’s mind: Bloated Bill. It was hard not to think that with the state the corpse was in. We get bodies like that every now and then up at Lake Alpo, usually because some kid or drunk bonked their head real hard and drowned in the water. Not this time, though. This time, it was clear what had killed her.
Racheal, I think her name was. Didn’t see much of her before that day. She seemed nice and sure sounded that way from how folks talked about her. Same to see her gone so suddenly. Worse was how it had happened. We saw the wounds as they pulled her out: two massive gashes running down her chest and giving way to two giant holes where her lungs had been. Her ribs were broken off in jagged ends, and her skin and clothes had been torn up something fierce. It was obvious from that that it was no accident. Something had ripped open poor Rachael and tore out her lungs. Just like in the stories.
You see, there’s this old tale around Lake Alpo. That of Bloated Bill. Every kid in Grand Falls got told about him, usually around a crackling campfire one dark summer night. The story goes that before we had drones or underwater cameras, people still wanted to know what was at the bottom of Lake Alpo, and one man set out to do just that. He grabbed an old diving suit, the kind with a fishbowl for a helmet, and set out into the murky depths. He was down there all day until about midnight when the crew he’d left to pump air to his suit got a signal: two tugs on the safety line. Bill needed more air. So they start pumping faster now, but no matter how hard they try, old Bill keeps tugging on that line.
I need air. I need air.
A few minutes later, the line goes still, and the crew starts rushing to pull old Bill out of the water. Seven minutes later, his bloated corpse broke the surface, naked and swollen on lake water. Problem wasn’t just there was no sign of his suit, but the line, the tube feeding back into the lake, something was still pulling on it. Two tugs. I need air. Nowadays, people say Bill is still trapped down there, needing air, something fierce, and if you find yourself lingering too close to the lakefront, he’ll rise from the water and steal the breath right from your lungs.
Didn’t take a genius to make the connection. It was more gruesome than we’d imagined, but we figured Bill just had some trouble getting the air out, so he took the whole lungs instead. Authorities tried to calm us down, but good luck calming an entire town after someone washes up with their guts ripped out. Even those who weren’t whispering about Bloated Bill were starting to panic. To make matters worse, poor Rachael wasn’t alone.
A week later, another body was found at the edge of the lake. Thomas Lorn was his name. He was ten. Same MO, too. His lungs were ripped out, leaving two gaping holes in his tiny chest. That got folks real riled up. Rachael was one thing, but now another body and a child’s no less; that was unacceptable. People started demanding the police do something with much greater fervor. Someone even graffitied a cruiser. But the police couldn’t do much. There were no fingerprints left on the bodies, no blood stains not their own, not even a trace of the lungs. Only thing they had in common was where they were last seen: Lake Alpo.
“Of course they’re not gonna find anything,” I remember someone saying one night. We’d all gathered in the town pub to drink down our worries. Not that it worked, though. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was feeling antsy sitting there with my thumb up my ass.
“You can’t arrest a demon!” That same person said. His voice was like gravel, but his words were exactly what I wanted to hear. “And this be a demon. Y’all know it! It’s Bloated Bill out there, and he’s come for us all! The fuck the cops think they can do!?”
“The hell you expect us to do about it?” Someone else said, but no one was having it.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not sitting here like some lip wristed pussy waiting for Bill to come to take someone else! This is our town, goddamnit! If he wants it, well, then he’s gonna have to go through us!”
“And you think we’re gonna do more than the cops?”
“Ain’t nothing on God’s green earth that can survive my Twelve Gauge! Nothing, you hear! I don’t care if it’s a ghost, a demon, or some psychopath out there, I’ll blow it clean back to Hell!”
A flurry of “yeah’s” rose up from the crowd, and I was right there with them.
“So I say we go down to the lake ourselves and wait for that sonofabitch to come crawling on out. Then we give it a taste of good old-fashioned Grand Falls justice! Yah hear!?”
A roar surged through the room. Us all being liquored up like we were, there was nothing he could say that we’d object to. So we all stumbled on back to our homes, grabbed our pieces, and marched on Lake Alpo like a conquering army. In hindsight, it wasn’t the brightest idea. Even without the talk of demons and such, you never want two dozen drunk, armed assholes all in the same place. Something was gonna happen, and it wasn’t gonna be pretty. But none of us could have predicted what came next.
Our plan was the half-baked stepchild of booze and bloodlust. We just squatted down in some bushes by the lake and waited. Sure, we sent some poor boy out to sit right at the water’s edge, but he wasn’t so much bait as a lightweight readying to take a piss in the lake. Most of the night was quiet, which was something, given how much lead and liquor there was between us. Occasionally something stirred in the water only to end up being a trout or mosquito. It wasn’t until around midnight that something finally started to happen.
I was half asleep when the guy squatting next to me shook me awake. “Was happenin’? Did we get ‘im?” I asked only for my compatriot to raise a hand to his lips and then point to the lake. Peering between the bush branches, I saw something passing through the lake. It’s hard to describe what with the beer goggles I had on, but the best I can call it is a shadow. A real weird one, though. You ever look at a white wall and noticed one spot whiter than the rest? It was sorta like that. In the black water of the lake, it stood out for being darker than all the shadows. Your eyes couldn’t quite focus on it either. The edges all blurred together as if they were trying to melt into the shadowy waters, but those dark depths were too bright for it.
It drifted to the waterfront at a snail’s pace. From that, I knew it wasn’t no ghost. That thing had some weight keeping it chained to the lake floor. Didn’t change the fact I still had no idea what I was seeing. None of us did. Even drunk as sailors like we were, no one thought to fire at the shadow. Curiosity, infusion, and a thimble of fear kept our eyes alone, aimed at the water. Eventually, it drifted into the shallows and started rising from the water.
First thing I saw was that fish bowl stuck to its head. The iron was rusted dark and covered in green gunk that’d grown into its crevices. The window glass, however, was in remarkably fine shape. You couldn’t find a single crack on any of them, and inside, you’d make out the dark water kept trapped inside the suit. As it rose, you could make out more and more of the suit, and while it was old as dirt, it was in real good shape, all things considered. Even the air tube was in perfect condition as it stretched back into the murky depths.
The suit rising from the lake wasn’t something any of us expected to see. Fear worked its day down to us, even in the depths of our stupor, and we were all frozen to our various spots. I, for one, wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t hallucinating until I saw everyone else’s reaction. Even then, I couldn’t do much. When you see something impossible, everything you think of starts sounding stupid. I only knew that I didn’t want that thing to notice me, and if that meant hiding in the bush like a pansy, so be it. A mindset I’m pretty sure was shared, with only one exception.
“Hah!” The boy we sent out as bait said as the suit trudged towards him through the water. “Now that, that right there’s funny. Where’d you guys even get a-a-a fucking whatever suit?” A laugh followed quickly after his words, but nothing motivated him to move. I wish I could say I wanted to scream at the boy to move. In actuality, I was glad the diver took a liking to the poor fool. Better him than me, was my thought.
The diver stopped when it was standing right in front of the boy. He was still laughing his stupid little head off and gave no struggle against what happened next. The diver reached behind it and drew a strange-looking knife made from a strange metal I’d never seen before. It’d been poorly carved, giving it jagged edges and vaguely curved back like the hook of a fang or canine. The face was black too, but leagues more so than obsidian and the sort. When you looked right at it, the blade’s features vanished into its dark face. It almost didn’t look like a blade but rather a chunk of the night sky someone had cut out and shaped.
Weird as that blade was, it didn’t seem to knock the boy back to his senses. He just kept laughing and laughing even as the diver raised the knife high over its head and drove it down into his heart. It wasn’t quite what I imagined it would be. In movies, you see blood fly everywhere and someone making all these garbled sounds when they get stabbed. But not that boy. His whole body went rigid as the knife went in, but that was about it. A moment later, he slumped against the shoreline and just stopped moving. Nothing more. It was honestly chilling.
The diver wasn’t finished with him, though. It carved its way through the poor kid until it had cut open two massive holes in his chest and ribcage. It flung all the shards of bones over its shoulder and into the lack like scrap not worth a second thought. It wasn’t until it had a perfect view of the boy’s lungs that it finally stopped. Reupholstering the blade, it slowly lifted them from the chest, handling them carefully like they were newborn babes. That alone would have been more than enough to scar my memory, but it was forgotten after what happened next.
The diver reached up and began unscrewing its helmet. Water guzzled out of the edges and came exploding out when the diver removed the bowl. Not sure what I was expecting, but it was at least something human. Maybe a zombie, like Bloated Bill, with pale, all cheeks puffed out, and eyes shriveled like raisins. Instead, I saw a true monster.
I don’t want to say it was like a fish. It had sickly scales, fins, and even those dead glassy eyes like one. But there was something wrong about it, and it wasn’t just that it was wearing a diving suit. The face looked like an ill-fitting mask, as if it didn’t sit right on the bones. I think it was too small or something. Yeah, that was it. The face was too small and gruesomely stretched over its skull. Any moment now, it would break and tear open, I swore. That wasn’t what stopped it, though.
Seconds after it took the helmet off, its gills started flaring and gasping for water. I heard what sounded like gasps come from it as its eyes bulged in desperation. Part of me hoped it would suffocate then and there, but it seemed ready for that. It raised the lungs over its head and opened its jaw wider than I thought was possible. Rows of needle-like teeth glistened in the moonlight for a second before flattening themselves against pale gums. It then dropped the lungs into its massive maw and swallowed them in one bite. I saw them bulge through the skin of its neck before disappearing into the suit. Even then, I could see something moving, rearranging in its chest as water within. The creature seemed to be struggling at first, looking like it got something caught in its throat before the churning within it stopped. Then, that creature took a long, deep breath.
“Finally.” Came a mangled voice from somewhere in its gullet. “Air.”
Not sure why that did it for me and not seeing that thing ripe out a man’s lungs. Guess a part of me thought that, despite everything, that thing couldn’t stay up here for long. I even saw it choking on the air. I figured it’d have to go back to the depths and took comfort in that idea. Never would have guessed how wrong I was.
I’m pretty sure I fired first. Can’t be certain, though, because the rain of bullets that came was pure chaos. The forest ignited as every last man opened fire with everything they had. Iron shredded the water’s surface, but that thing was far tougher. Bullets simply bounced off its scales like they were tic tacs. I don’t think it even knew we were shooting it at one point because, for a split second, all it did was stand there, staring. It was curious, I think. Like a child with a new toy. A toy that breathed.
If it wasn’t for the lungs, I’m not sure what would’ve happened. Whatever that creature did, I don’t think it had perfected such yet. It sucked in a few more breaths of air before it suddenly gagged. One wet breath followed another before blood began spewing from its mouth. The creature lurched forward as it violently hacked up the lungs. They splattered across the ground in a shredded mess, full of holes and torn ends. Seconds later, the creature started to gag once again. I smiled, but not for long. Even as it choked, the creature snatched up the shredded lungs and helmet before diving back into the lake. I watched its figure dissolve back into a great shadow before disappearing into the murky depths of Lake Alpo.
We fired long after it was gone and only stopped when our clips ran dry. The silence that followed was the worst I’d ever heard. All eyes were on that boy or what was left of him. No one knew who he was. That was the worst part. We got him killed and didn’t even know his name. Couldn’t bear to drag him back like that. So we all just stayed there until the booze pulled us into sleep. No me, though. I couldn’t take my eyes off the lake.
A hiker found us in the morning and ran screaming for the hills. I don’t blame him. If I stumbled across a group of willy drunks surrounding a body with its lungs scooped out, I’d race like a bat from Hell too. Cops came not long after that and detained the lot of us, though we were let go in the end. Not a lot of evidence we did the deed apart from just being there. Our stories, though, kept us there for longer than we’d have liked. Many of the boys had been sober enough to remember the whole thing and blabbed about it all over the jail cells. Smart ones, me included, knew better than to talk about monsters to cops. Official story was that us assholes went down to the lake to find Bloated Bill only to pass out. The real killer then snuck up and butchered the poor boy while we were asleep. It didn’t reflect the best on us, which was fair, all things considered.
The killings stopped for a while. I tried to find some pride in that, but I know it wasn’t because of us. Things stayed that way for some time until about a week ago. Her name was Josephine Peterson. She had kids. Little tikes begged to look at their mother, but we wouldn’t let them. Seeing their mother like that, guts pulled out a slaughtered mule, it wouldn’t have done nobody any good. That wasn’t even the worst part. You see, Josephine was a smart woman, and she’d stopped going near the lake the second they found the first body. She’d instead taken to the bar to occupy herself. That’s where they found her, some ten miles from the lake.
I don’t know a lot right now. Can’t say what that thing was, how it did what it did, or what it even wants. Nothing kills for air alone. Whatever reason it’s doing all this for, I don’t care to find out. I’ll be moving out within the week. My sister has a place I should be able to hunker down in. It’s right in the middle of Arizona, too, miles and miles from any lakes, streams, or even puddles. Will it do any good? More so than if I stayed, waiting for that thing to come for me. I might not know much, but I do know this:
There are no ghosts in Lake Alpo. Instead, there is something much, much worse.