Nocturnes

Deep, Dark Green

We should never have gone near Baal’s Pond. We should have stayed far away from it as we were told, as we had always been told, but young men will follow young girls and do their bidding. That is the way of things, and it will always be the way. Hindsight is worse than blindness, and pleasure and regret walk hand in hand.

And so we had gone to that place, Catherine and I. I had been lured by the promise in her eyes, deafened by the demands of my own appetites. I was young. I did not understand what those appetites could create, how they could be transformed, mutated, degraded.

How they could find form in the being that dwelt in Baal’s Pond.

I think of Catherine often, now that the hour of my own passing approaches. I find myself staring at my reflection on the surface of the lake near my home. I throw a stone and watch my face come apart in ripples, one visage briefly becoming many as I am drawn back to the last day that I spent with her. It becomes harder and harder to depart from such places now, for since her death part of me has always been lost in dark water.

The pain of the disease that is eating away at my insides is relentless, but I think that I shall not wait for my body to betray me. Instead, I will join her in the depths and hope that she will come to me, her mouth against mine as I breathe my last, and yet I have lived with her loss for so long that the thought of being reunited with her is almost too much to bear.

There have been other women since Catherine, although none remained by my side for very long. I was not entirely sorry to see them go. In truth, I found that I came to fear them, and so was unable to open myself fully to them. I was afraid of their desires, their rapaciousness, their ability to draw a man inside them and make him lose himself in the promise of their flesh. Is that not a terrible confession for a man to make? Sometimes I feel that it is. At other times, though, I believe that perhaps I am merely more honest than most of my fellows. My eyes have been opened, and I have seen the worm that coils in the apple of temptation.

So I am alive and Catherine is dead, and her body will never be found. It lies at the bottom of Baal’s Pond, far in the tainted reaches, down where it is green.

Deep, dark green.

There had always been something strange about that place. A long time before, so long ago that none of those responsible, or their children, or their children’s children, remained alive to tell of it, the river was redirected through a small glen. Somehow-it was said that stolen kegs of gunpowder were used-the banks were blown apart and the waters rushed downhill into the little valley, flooding it completely before resuming their original course half a mile farther on. People from distant villages gathered to watch the event, and the only sound to be heard before the gunpowder exploded was the soft uttering of prayers, the rattle of the beads, and the dull clanking of a chain from the cottage far below, as a presence within tried desperately to free itself.

Those who stood, listening and praying, had lost children to what lay below. It had drawn them in through its small, wooden gate, luring them with the wondrous colors of its flowers and their strange, intoxicating scents. Like flies attracted to a pitcher plant, they had entered and died, drowning in strange desires that they could not comprehend. Afterward their bodies were interred in the garden, and the flowers grew sweeter still.

Then, as the tale would have it, the prayers stopped, a fuse was lit, and a great mass of earth exploded into the air. The waters surged forth, exploiting the breach, and descended into the glen. Whatever had once lived in that place-the animals, the insects, the trees and plants, every living thing-had died on that day in a brown muddy torrent.

Or so they must have hoped. Now this place that they named Baal’s Pond was deeper than any other stretch of the river. No sunlight penetrated to its depths, and no fish swam there. The water was so dark as to be almost black, like oil. It even felt different on the skin: it was viscous, and when clasped in cupped hands it dripped like honey through one’s fingers. Nothing could live in such an environment. I still do not believe that anything lives down there.

For whatever is down there is not alive.

It exists, but it is not alive.

I was sixteen years old on the morning that we went there together for the first, and last, time, Catherine and I. She too was sixteen, but so far beyond me that the months between us were really years, and I felt awkward and powerless around her. I know now that I was already in love with her, with what she was and with the promise of what she would become. She stood at the edge of that dark place, and her brightness appeared to mock it. Her hair was blond and hung loosely on her back and shoulders, and the sunlight made her tanned skin glow. But when I looked into the water there was no reflection of her on its surface, as though she had already been devoured by the blackness.

She turned to me as she cast aside her clothing and said: “Are you afraid?”

And I was afraid: I was afraid of the stillness of the water. It should have moved swiftly, fast as the flow that poured into it from the higher ground above, but it did not. Instead, there was a sluggishness about it, a lethargy. At its eastern extreme, where the flooded glen ended and the slope of the hill began, the river regained some of its lost energy, but it seemed that the water had been tainted by its contact with this place, for a thin film of oil was now revealed by the sunlight upon it.

I was afraid too of what our parents would say if they discovered that we were in this place, if they knew what we were planning and if they suspected what my thoughts of her were. That, in its turn, led me to my greatest fear: my fear of her. I wanted her badly, so very badly. My stomach tightened every time I looked upon her. Now, seeing her naked for the first time, it was all that I could do to stop myself from trembling. I shook my head.

“I’m not afraid,” I said.

In my mind, I replayed fantasies of a life we might have together; of marriage, and children, and love, and the touch of her skin against mine. We had kissed, Catherine and I, and I had tasted her before she pulled away from me, laughing. Yet with each kiss she lingered a little longer, her laughter a little more uncertain, her breath a little shorter.

And I lived and died in every kiss.

“Are you sure?”

She stood on the bank and glanced at me over her shoulder. She was smiling, and there was that promise in her smile. She could tell what I was thinking. She could always tell. Then, with one short peal of laughter, she took a deep breath and arced into the pond. There was no splash. The surface simply separated to allow her passage, then bound itself together again behind her. No ripples appeared, and the rhythm of the water lapping at the bank remained undisturbed.

But I did not follow her. I looked into that black pool, and my courage left me. Instead, I waited for her, shivering, the grass sharp beneath my feet, the wind cold against my skin, and willed her to emerge once again from the water, her laughter baiting me and her eyes calling me to her.

But she did not return. Seconds passed, then an entire minute. I stared into the pool, hoping to see her golden form just below the surface, but there was nothing. There was not even birdsong in this place, and no flies buzzed. I thought of the warnings, the old tales. Others had descended into those depths, and some had never been seen again. The riverbanks had been searched in the hope that the waters might yield up their bodies, but they never did. Now only the bravest or most foolhardy came here, young men who hoped that their youthful displays would be rewarded by an embrace, or more. And when at last they walked away from this place, their hands entwined with those of another, they promised themselves that they would never return, for they were the lucky ones. They knew that others had not been so fortunate.

And so my love for her overcame my fear, and I closed my eyes and followed her into the depths.

The water was unimaginably cold, so cold that I felt my heart would stop beating and freeze within my body, and its strange thickness made it difficult to swim. I looked up and could not see the sun, yet there was a light of sorts. I could perceive my hands in front of my face, but the palms were lit from below, not above. I twisted in the water, facing the bed of the pond, and kicked back with my legs, moving toward the source of the illumination.

There was a house at the bottom of the pond.

It was built of stone and had two windows, one at either side of the door, and a roof that might once have been thatched but was now no more than slats and struts. The remains of a low stone wall curled like arms around what might once have been a garden, a gap in the middle where a gate had once hung, and a ruined chimney stack pointed an accusing finger toward the bright, blue, unseen world above. The light came from behind the windows of the dwelling, moving slowly from side to side as if what was bearing it were somehow trapped and, like a caged animal, had bound up its madness in relentless motion. Around the house, tall thick weeds grew, each fifteen or twenty feet in length and swaying gently in the flow. I had never seen anything like them before. It seemed to me that there was something wrong with them, for their swaying made me uneasy. It took me only seconds to realize what it was about them that troubled me.

Their rhythm was not being dictated by the current of the river. Instead, they moved independently of it, seeking, probing, spreading themselves through the dark waters like the tentacles of some great sea creature searching for prey. And at the end of one weed, something golden thrashed, and a broad halo of hair was briefly burnished by the light from below. Catherine looked up at me, her cheeks swollen as she tried to hold in the last of her air, and shook her head desperately. Her hands reached for me, the fingers grasping. I began to swim to her, but the weed wrapped itself once more around her body, twisting her in a circle as it did so, tightening its grip upon her. Catherine’s mouth opened, sending a stream of precious bubbles toward me. Her eyes grew wide and her lips seemed to form my name as the dark green water entered her body. Her thrashings increased in intensity and her hands lashed out at the weed, her fingers wrenching wildly at it. Then her lungs flooded, her struggles became feeble, and she grew still as she drowned. She hung in the depths, her arms outstretched and her eyes open, staring into eternity.

Even then I thought that I could save her, that somehow I could bring her to the surface and pump that foul water from her, that I could fill her with life from my body and taste once again her breath in my mouth. But as I tried to swim to her, she began to recede from me. I thought at first that it must be some illusion, that the water was simply deeper than it at first seemed, but the ruined cottage continued to grow nearer even as she drew farther away from me. I watched helplessly as the weed pulled her deeper and deeper down until, with one final jerk, she was yanked through the doorway, and I understood at last that the weeds were growing not around the house, but from within it.

Inside the cottage, the light stopped moving. Through the wreckage of the roof, I saw Catherine anchored to the bed of the river, the weed still tight around her waist. There came the muffled, distorted sound of an old chain clanging on stones as the light approached and surrounded her, then wrapped her in its embrace. It assumed a shape: arms and legs formed, thin and pale, the muscles wasted and the skin hanging loose upon the bones. I saw long white hair writhing in the water. I caught a glimpse of naked flesh, wrinkled by the relentless flow of the river and pitted with ugly red sores. Old female breasts, flat and lifeless, pressed themselves against the still form of my beloved Catherine, as it bent as if to kiss her.

I was almost within reach of the roof now and, for the first time, the being seemed to sense my approach. It twisted toward me, raising its face to mine, and I saw its mouth. Where lips and teeth should have been, there was instead the round, sucking hole of a lamprey, red and engorged. It opened and closed, pulsing quickly, already tasting the girl it had ensnared. Above the mouth, black lidless eyes regarded me blankly before its hunger finally overcame it and it turned away to begin its work. I tried to wrench one of the struts from the roof to use as a weapon, but my strength was failing and my head ached from the effort of holding my breath. I felt certain that I had only seconds of air left, but I would not leave Catherine to this thing.

Yet as I gripped the wood, I sensed movement around me. White things shimmered at the periphery of my vision. I looked to my left and found that the length of weed closest to me no longer moved gently in the flow. It could not, for the burden it held constrained it. Strands of green had wrapped themselves around the legs of the boy, holding him in place even as he seemed to be reaching for the surface, but this one was long dead. There were dark patches around his unseeing eyes, and the edges of his bones showed like knives beneath his skin. His lips were torn and bruised where that lamprey mouth had attached itself to his for one final kiss.

All around me, boys and girls hung unmoving in the water, each anchored securely by the weeds that emanated from the ruined house below. Some were naked, while tattered clothing still clung to the bodies of the others. Their hair shifted softly in the current, and their hands moved in small strokes, imitating life even in death. They were all here: all of the lost, all of the young dead, their shades lingering in the depths, waiting to welcome another to their ranks.

I felt a huge surge of pity and fear, and my mouth opened with the shock of what I was seeing. Immediately, water rushed into my nose and mouth. I panicked and thrashed my legs, Catherine now forgotten in the urge to save my own life. I did not want to die down there, to be touched in my final moments by the thing that dwelt in the old house before joining the ghosts of children in the waters of that place.

It was my panic that saved my life. I felt something rubbery lashing at my heel as the weed tried to gain some purchase on my body, but I was already leaving it behind as the light below me faded and the dark water filled my lungs, until the sky at last exploded above me and the sweetness of the air dazzled my senses.

For two days they dragged the river and probed with poles the depths of Baal’s Pond, but they never found her. She was lost to us, lost to me, and she dwelt thereafter in a place where black waters flowed and the ghosts of the young hung in the current and watched her, unspeaking. She still waits for me there, and I will join her, soon enough. I have been back there many times since, although now it is fenced and gated, and the land around it has been sown with briers and poisonous plants to discourage the incautious. The surface of the pool still devours the light, and the thing below still waits, pacing hungrily, a being of pure appetite, as it was in life, as it is in death. It lives in a world of only two colors: red, the color of lips and lust.

And green.

Deep, dark green.