It Came From Beneath

Your mom’s toes were dipped within the blue embrace of the pool’s water. You watched her peaceful eyes as she slept. Peaceful was the keyword, and the reason why you had decided to refrain from waking her up even though her restful sleep opened her flesh up to the slight risk of a sunburn.

It had been a few weeks since your mom had had a peaceful sleep. Most of her attempts at sleep ended with her waking up in a cold sweat. This was the full extent of it at first. But as the nights wore on, you had been dragged into her discomfort by the sounds of her sudden shrieking in the darkness, which would last for a few seconds, usually until the moment she realized she had woken up and realized it had all been a dream.

You sat on the lawnchair, staring at her. Her painted big toe cut a fading line in the cool surface of water as she rotated in her float slightly counter-clockwise. You smiled. You had been worried about her recently, and you were eager to see signs like this, which implied she was about to pass over that horrid phase of night terrors. It was as if your relationship as mother and son had been reversed, with you now taking over the motherly role of being concerned with your mother’s nightmares and her relying on you for support.

But it appeared now as if that anomaly was about to pass.

But before you could fully sink into that relief, she clenched her eyes together, her brow furrowing. Her bottom lip hung open and protruding and her head turned from side to side. It had been the first time you had seen what her nightmares meant on her expression. And you watched, first disappointed to see they were far from over, then worried to see the anguish implied by her sleeping face, and then terrified as her expression went from worry to fear to horror before you, escalating quickly enough to be almost surreal.

Her feet began to twitch like a dog’s does when it dreams, but then they almost began a kick motion, splashing lightly in the water as her head turned from side to side, and though the whole experience was grating on you enough, you were thankful that her eyes were closed through it all, because you dreaded to witness the look in them, knowing through deduction from the rest of her that it would chill you in your veins.

“N-no,” she said. “No!”

She twisted her head to her left, and her sunhat fell off her crown. It floated in the water nearby as she kicked out her heel.

“Anthony!” she screamed. “Anthony! Don’t let me go. Please. Don’t…”

The name of your late father, a new addition to her horrible dreaming, woke up a strange fear in you, and just as you began to remove your shoes and socks, calling “mom,” as you did, ready to plunge into the water to shake her back into the world she lived a waking life in, one of safety and boring small town banalities, your mom seemed to make a motion, almost like winding back her leg, drawing it up to knee under the water, and then with one final and swift movement, she kicked outward, producing a large splash, and a few minor waves which radiated outward and faded out of being. And when she did, she fell off her float and was swallowed up by the surface of the water.

Before you could even jump in after her, she appeared with power, accompanied with a turbulent splash in proportion to the weight of her body and her upward speed, exploding upward into the oxygen-rich air, sucking it in at a lungful with a single breath. She was awake now, but she still had her look of panic, and she paddled toward the pool’s edge with a definitive purpose and desperation, as if to do otherwise would mean drowning. She called out, almost in your direction: “Anthony, please. Please! He’s…” She grabbed the pool’s ledge and looked back. Then she looked around frantically, seeming surprised to see nothing was there. Then she turned back around and looked up at you. She saw you standing there, looking down at her with an expression of wild concern.

Birds chirped in the background.

It was only then that she knew she was safe.

She breathed heavily there for a moment, her shoulders heaving, shining in the sun. After about a minute, she performed her usual song and dance, by telling you, with conjured up humor in her voice, that she was just having a bad dream. And even as she forced out a giggle and a smile, you could see that she didn’t feel as okay as she let on. Her feet kicked through the water as she floated there, supported by a single palm on the ledge. You looked over her in the center of the pool. She saw you, and a look of sudden and indefinable panic took her, only just for a moment, until she turned to see what you saw. It was her hat floating there in the water at the center of the pool, empty of her head.

She looked at it, breathing heavily, but less so with each breath, before her shoulders stopped moving as her lungs inhaled. The corner of her mouth creased in bemusement. “Note to self,” she said. “Don’t sleep in the pool.”

She looked back up at you with an embarrassed smile. And this time, you believed she was telling the truth when she said she was alright.

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You looked at the photograph of your parents on the mantel. They looked so young then. Both of them twenty, as old as you were now. You would be born a year after this photograph was taken. They sat on the edge of the dock at your grandparent’s cabin, your grandpa likely taking the picture, and their feet were submerged within the black water.

You loved that photo, not just for its value as a time capsule, and a look at your dad’s smile, and your mom’s smile when she was with him, but also because that was taken the summer that your mom taught your dad how to swim. You wondered how similar it was to the summer she had taught you, her hands supporting your body as you floated and kicked. Imagining your young-adult dad being treated the same by her had always been a visual you found humorous, though you were often bombarded by your own imagination by unwelcome images of things they would do with each other underneath the water’s shadowy privacy.

It didn’t help that the weight and softness of you mom’s backside could be seen in the photograph, as it was pressed against three wooden planks on that dock, forcing your mind into unwholesome alcoves. That’s why, when viewing this memory in their lives before yours, you always focused on their eyes and smiles, keeping your sights from anything else that would drag your thoughts down deeper into its own hidden depths.

As you admired their glowing youthful faces, your sight was dragged downward, as if it were a curse, down the length of your mom’s shining back, down to the waist of her orange bikini. You kept your gaze there, as if demanding yourself, pledging, to never go any lower. And then you let your sight drop just slightly.

Your mom’s butt sat, preserved in the amber of film, in a state of ballooning outward on each side from the pressure of the hard wooden planks that pressed into it from below.

You looked away rapidly, following her thighs, down to her kneecaps. You rested your eyes there, a safe place without temptation. Then you let them run down her calves down to the upper-half of her heel, hanging above water. The rest of her white feet were submerged beneath, and the water had been disturbed, as if in that moment she had been kicking back and forth slowly through it, whipping up whirlpools with her dainty movements.

You looked within that series of whirlpools and swirls, only just noticing this detail now. The black water was beautified by the discoloration of reflective greys and a bit of the pale blue of the sky sat nearby in a wobbly line, just at the point where the shadow of the dock ended. In that swirl of blacks and greys, your mom’s foot was swallowed, her toes on her right foot just barely visible beneath, the red of her toenails washed out and misshapen, broken along the edges, by the illusion of the water itself.

And that’s when it caught your eyes.

Just below, beneath her right foot, you could make out another hazy discoloration that looked to be some sort of broken shape. The color of the water threw it slightly off, as it did to your mom’s foot, but judging by the water, and using your mom’s foot for comparison, the image was of a similar sort. So much so that you thought that the image was maybe a reflection of your mom’s foot itself, but you knew that couldn’t be the case. It was clearly coming from beneath the water, and beneath your mom’s foot, not on the reflective swirls of its surface.

Plus, if it were her foot, the toes on it would be too long…

and their nails, instead of that washed out promise of red, would be… of the deepest black.

They wouldn’t be toes at all. If anything, their length, and the shape of their articulation, even through the corrupting visual of the moving water, and the obscurity of the darkness within, would be something more like…

The word itself is what did it to you, so much so that you hadn’t even heard the word at the end of your own thought before stopping dead in your tracks and becoming overwhelmed with a shuddering horror.

You could see now, as clear as day what that mystery sight beneath the black water of the dock’s shadow looked like, and what those appendages of various size extending from it were, if they were anything at all. And to know it now was to shudder.

They were fingers. And attached to them below was a hand.

Murderer!

You turned your head quickly, feeling as if your soul was about to leap out from your bones, to look over to the sound of that hushed but urgent voice.

Standing there, from the direction of that horrid whisper was your mom in the backyard doorway. She had her hand on the sliding glass door’s handle, and she lifted one foot up to dry it with her towel. She did the same with her other foot, and then she slid the door back closed.

As it slid shut, the sliding mechanism hissed in an almost whisper-like intensity, a sound which could easily be mistaken for that of a whispy human voice.

You shut your eyes and took a deep breath. Your head was damp with sweat, but your chest warm with relief. Your mom, noticing your face had gone white, and was only in the process of winning back its color, asked “are you okay, sweety?”

You opened your eyes and looked at her. “Yeah,” you said. “You just scared me is all.”

“Me, scare you?” she said with a smile as she dried her hair. “I couldn’t hurt a fly.” She giggled and walked through the kitchen and toward the bathroom for a shower.

You smiled as she went. When she was gone, you turned around and looked back at the photograph.

The shape beneath the water was no longer there.

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You were standing in a barren lot next to a highway. The sun hung over you at the dead center of the sky and you stood underneath it without shadow or shade. You were barefoot, standing on the hot dirt of the lot in your swimming trunks, irritated and upset. You were thirsty and your flesh was uncomfortably hot. You squinted as you looked around, cars passing by, sunlight reflected off their bumpers back at you for split seconds before disappearing down the road.

“I need water,” you said. “I need shade.” You wanted to sit down, but you didn’t want to expose your naked calves to the scorching dry dirt, or lay them out horizontally to the mercy of the sun’s buzzing rays.

“Water,” you said, as you shuffled in place. “Shade.”

An 18-wheeler zoomed pass, its metallic tank blinding you in the sun.

After passing, standing there across the highway, suddenly where it appeared no one had been before, was a solitary figure, indefinable, but vaguely male, and dressed, though in no specific way you could discern, standing there upright, pointing at the woods behind him.

He spoke, and at a great distance from you, though it sounded like a whisper, as if it were being said an inch from your right ear.

There’s plenty of water here. Plenty of shade too.

You looked at the focal point at the end of his outright and stiff finger, still barely visible from that distance, and you saw a little opening and path that existed between the line of trees.

I’ll go first.

He said it, or rather whispered it, again being so far, but sounding as if his voice was originating from just behind your right ear.

I’ll be waiting for you there.

He turned to go walk in that direction, having a ways to go to get there. But only a few steps in, another 18-wheeler passed. It cleared in a moment, but in and after that moment he was gone.

The grassy bank before the trees was empty. The break between the treeline sat there, as if waiting.

Then you heard, though you couldn’t trace its direction, the sound of a woman screaming. “Please help! Please! No! No!” It came through in reflective echoes, as if heard through tin.

You stood there motionless, your soles burning in the blackgrey dirt, looking at that path leading inertly into the dark treeline, its ultimate nature only obscured by its own darkness itself.

“Please, he’s…. Anthony! Help!”

Your eyes shot open and you saw your ceiling bathed in the sickly blue rays of the moon.

“Anthony! Aghh! He’s…” your mom was mumbling in horror from her bedroom.

Your head was damp with sweat. Wind blew in from your open window, blowing through the curtains. You took a deep breath and turned your head over on its side.

Your mom continued to beg fruitlessly, laying there in the safety of her bed, in the harmless shelter of her own home, but her mind was host to a terror unknowable within.

You took another deep breath and you got up. You closed your bedroom window, and the curtains fell noiselessly against your back before you slipped back out from behind them. Then you put on your pants as your mom pleaded in the dark, covering up your involuntary waking erection, and you headed out your door and down the black hallway leading to her room.

And the sick thought you were trying to suppress as you walked through the darkness toward her room, was the hope you held in the back of your mind that she had kicked off her covers in her nighttime thrashing just like she had two nights before, and you’d get to see her again without her sheets to hide from the moon what her clothes in the day hid from the sunlight.

After you went into the silvery halflight of her room, she kicked and violently pleaded without answer for a minute longer, until you went to her bed to wake her, just after she had, without deliberation, thrown her covers back over her shapely lower half, which was draped in nothing except for moonlight and underwear.

Only then could you bring yourself to save her from her terror.

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You didn’t know how it was your mom was making up for her lack of sleep. Today had been like all the others, with her waking up early and preparing breakfast for the two of you, even though she had the entire two weeks off to sleep off any shut-eye she had lost in the night. It was as if she was doing anything she could to avoid sleeping. As her nap in the pool yesterday had proven to you, it wouldn’t matter whether she dreamed in the sunlight or dreamed in the middle of the night, the nightmare - singular or plural, you still weren’t sure - always came. And she seemed to be as aware of this as you were.

There was no way to explain your actions after breakfast was finished. In fact, you wanted to start on what you were ready to do without even eating breakfast, but your mom had convinced you to sit down and eat. You ate with her sitting across from you with rings underneath her eyes. After you were finished, you headed out of the house with your bus pass, telling your mom that you were headed to the library. When she asked you why, you told her it was because you wanted some summer reading.

You had no idea why you were doing any of this. You knew that it was strange, and you knew that the will you had was real, though without flavor or sentiment, like the will one has to follow in the direction of an object pulling them. It was as if you had been moving somewhere in sleep, and your motions now while awake were just inertia.

Your mom offered to drive you, and you knew it was wise to deny her the right to. You told her you liked taking the bus, and with your pass you took the 112 heading to the library, but maybe half-aware that you had no intention of ending up there, if intention even made sense as a word for this context.

As you went through town, the bus filled and became scarce, filled and became scarce, until it was scarce yet again and finally, and then it was on the highway east, stopping rarely at the bus stops peppered along the rural stretch towards the library attached to the town’s museum and the seashell society, with the state aquarium just behind it along the same road.

A few teenagers got on near the grain silo with bags, and then they got off, along with some others, at the stop at the entrance of Howard Beach, the parking lot to which was near-full, a success it had won through the accident of this summer’s heat wave, the hottest in twenty years.

The driver kept it in park for a few minutes to keep from getting ahead of the schedule. Then he put it back into drive, and the bus lurched on down the road. It rounded the lake and you looked out the window at the various half-naked bodies shuffling around the beach, and floating along and through the lake-water, glowing wet in the sun. It was a sight that was mostly unfamiliar to you. One you had seen at a distance often, but had never taken part in, your parents never taking you there as a kid. The only beach you knew being the one at your grandpa’s lakehouse, which you preferred because it wasn’t crowded with other beachgoers and noise. Though when you saw some of the feminine bodies there, their buttcheeks and wet thighs bright with a line of reflective light, you had almost wished that you were tempered enough to the spirit of crowds to go there and feel comfortable amongst them. Just so you could go home with a full scrapbook full of images of tensing and splashing bodies to massage your cock and balls to in your room.

The legion of bodies disappeared behind a few trees for seconds at a time, until the treeline became thick and the beach was gone from view. You looked out to the right at a farmhouse, or maybe several, which emerged into view from around the bend. As you watched an old man leading lead a pig towards a red building, the bus was submerged in the shadow of the trees. After the farm receded back from your view, you looked out ahead and saw an open and unused lot, with nothing there, not even grass, just an extended patch of greyblack dirt next to the highway. And across the highway from it, to your left, was an army of trees. And sitting there, in between two trees which stood there like sentries, was an opening to a path.

You pulled the stop wire of the bus.

You got out of the bus down the street, past a water tower, just next to a gas station. You doubled back toward the open field, dead with its greyblack dirt. When you got there, walking out into the center of that lot, not having any other reason to other than curiosity, you felt the eeriness build as each step into its center, and closer to the place you thought you had stood in your dream, gave you a sense of déjà vu that was almost frightening rather than of interest.

The dream had been half-remembered, and you thought that it was possible that your mind had been comparing what was to what you remembered and filling in the gaps to make it all come together as one in your thoughts. When you got to the place you remembered standing in in your dream, and looked toward the highway, and the treeline beyond it, you noticed that the sun was different. You remember it being straight overhead, but it shone at you at an angle in the sky. And the sound wasn’t the same either. You remember the strange nothingness of sound, but for the buzzing of the sun’s rays and the vehicles, which would explode into sound as they went down the highway, only to be deprived of sound moments after passing out of view. And you remembered your feet being bare in the dry flatness of the dirt, burning almost unbearably.

Thought part of you feared that these were incidental differences, superficial in nature, and that you were only as focused on them as you were to convince yourself that the eerie similarity between what you had seen in your dream and what you stood in the middle of now wasn’t real.

It wasn’t until an 18-wheeler passed by in front of you, and you tensed up in expectation of something being different across the way after it passed, only for it to clear by, and for the patch of grass before the treeline to remain as it was, empty, that it had fully set in for you the terror of where it was you had brought yourself, without effort, without knowledge, and without apparent reason, towards.

You vaguely remembered the figure now. And if you had at all remembered him earlier than this very moment, you would have never got onto that bus. But he was coming back to you now. Not just his vague sight, like a silhouette of the memory but not of live vision, but also, sending chills down your spine as it did, his whispering voice beckoning you. And his outstretched finger, which was pointed toward the break in the treeline, its contents overcast with shade.

Plenty of water down there, you heard in your head as clearly as if you could hear it now. Plenty of shade.

You shuddered.

You looked around, not sure of what to do. But leaving wasn’t an option. You knew this. There wasn’t a fibre in your being that would have let you go. Maybe it was the same force which pulled, rather than pushed, you in the direction of getting here. Though if it was, it took on a sentiment now, which it had been devoid of up to this point. And that sentiment, which outlived the push against it by eerie uncanniness, troubled unease, and mortal fear, was the simple emotion of curiosity, which would have eaten at you back in the safety of your own room, and in the night, before and after your mom’s coming night terror. You knew you had to see what was waiting for you there.

As you got close to the highway, the path between the two sentinel-like trees got bigger, though its content were still too dark for view.

A truck raced by as you got to the road’s edge. You looked both ways, waited for another 18-wheeler to pass going the opposite way, filling your nostrils with the smell of diesel fuel, before you jogged across.

The grass on the other side went up to your calves. You slowly moved in the direction of the opening, and its path began to take on shape as your eyes adjusted to its lack of light as you entered the shadow of the treeline looming over you.

At close range, maybe because it was so unfamiliar to you, the pathway no longer held its ominous implications, and instead looked as natural to your sensibilities as countless other paths through wooded areas and shrubbery.

You entered in, feeling nothing other than slight relief. The thought that you had nothing to fear but fear itself crossed your mind, right as fear itself disintegrated with each step. The shade beneath was refreshing, and you could smell cool air blowing in your direction. As you got deeper in, though not that deep, you could see through what remained of the treeline with the dark blue of the lake peaking through. As you approached it, the yellow sands of the beach on the lake’s western bank became clear to the left, and you could see the little people scurry across its surface like ants.

At the end of the path was a clearing, and a tight part of the lake, where the lake itself almost became as narrow as a river, covered in shade from the bank opposite yours, before ending at the right of where you stood at lake’s edge.

You looked from within the shady opening, across and to the left at the beach with its umbrellas and towels, the sound and commotion faint as it blew with the wind across the lake at you. You see the wet bodies of females, their faces too far to make out, but the curving shape of their bodies still apparent at this distance, one walking out of the water in a black one-piece slowly toward another young man whose smile you thought you could see, or at least which you projected onto him at this distance, as the body of the young woman emerged in the sun towards his direction playfully.

Hard not to touch!

You spun around, and even after doing so and seeing nothing, you still jumped back a few steps out of instinct. Before you was nothing but bare dirt, rich with moisture in the shade, and the trees that shaded it. You had heard it like it was spoken just behind you, near your right ear, as close as one could get. But you were alone, and you could see through the sprinkling of trees for a few meters deep. Nobody was there. Nobody had been there. Not even a footprint in the dirt other than your own.

You stood there, almost frozen, but the faint sound of beachgoers penetrated your concentration, and you forced yourself to turn around again. Seeing them there brought some degree of normalcy and peace, and after a while, you had lost the fear, almost forgetting it, that had gripped you so acutely only a moment earlier.

The girl in the black one-piece was standing close to the man who you imagined smiling. They grabbed onto each other and held each other’s bodies close. Then his hand, unmistakably, lowered itself from her back and he pinched her bottom with the fullness of his palm, to which her head tilted back, and you could almost hear what sounded like feminine laughing, and she brushed his hand away with her forearm. You stood there, trying to imagine what it would feel like to hold someone close to you like that. Especially someone who looked like what that girl’s shape seemed to be from this distance. And you tried to imagine your palm touching that part of a girl, and imagining what it felt like to squeeze that flesh and feel it spill between your fingers. Her partner’s hand came back down from its retreating position resting on her lower back, and again rested itself with his full palm against her cheek. They began to kiss.

You blushed as you stood there, feeling as remote abstractly from the nature of what you were seeing as you were in proximity from it. Your forehead was hot, even in the shade, with indefinable shame and regret. Your cock was hard in your underwear, and you almost felt like taking it out and playing with it. From here, with the shade and the distance, you might have even been able to do it without being seen, even without a tree or bush to hide you, but you felt a shame even in that, emptying yourself in exchange for knowing the real thing.

You looked away from the sight before you, and when you did, something caught your eye, something in your peripheral.

You looked at the water, and just below its surface, you could see something grey and definitive. The slight waves washed over it, bending its shape in your sight, though a shape could be determined, something vaguely anthropomorphic, solid, and unmoving. And that’s when you saw jutting out below that there was a series of legs. After a few moments, you could see that it was three.

Another leg, making it the fourth, seemed to be pointing upward until the kneecap, with everything above the knee, the calf, ankle, and foot, hanging down from where the back of the knee rested on a pedestal, which after some more examination became that of a palm. That’s when you realized, it was a statue of two people, not one, with one standing behind the other, both facing the same direction, tightly together, with the one behind having both feet on the ground, the one he held before him (you assumed it was a him) with her (again an assumption) leg being held in the air.

You could see enough now to guess at the genders and know that it was a statue of two people dancing, possibly a male and a female ballerina just at the moment where he was about to lift and twirl her through the air. What it was doing in the water, especially at this obscure part of the lake, so still and upright it seemed to be almost stationed there deliberately, you didn’t know. The two figures were facing away from you, toward the opposite bank. You stood looking at them for a few moments, the sound of the beachgoers audible but drowned out by your thoughts, some of them without words, now.

After a few moments, racked with curiosity, you decided you were going to go in.

You stripped down to your boxers and removed your shoes and socks, leaving them on the bank, feeling the cool dirt below as the bare-naked sole of each foot met the ground. Then you slowly stepped into the water, feeling soothed by its cool embrace on your feet. You stepped in and toward the statue, not knowing how far below the surface of the water it really was. But as you stepped in further, and the water rose, you realized that you’d have to swim to get down to it.

The line of the water, though less than stable, rose up your kneecaps to your thighs as you continued. You stopped just before it could rise to your genitals, and you braced yourself, as you always did, before continuing. After taking a deep breath, you lifted your foot.

Got ya!

You felt a hand grip you by your ankle and pull.

You kicked in horror, and you used the sole of your left foot to kick at the attacker’s hand, but when you did, you hit nothing but your bare right ankle.

You turned and rushed up out of the water, feeling the pressure against you disappear as your knees met air, and when you made it to the bank, you turned around and looked behind you, readying yourself to do whatever you had to do to stop whatever would be coming at you.

Instead what you saw before you was nothing. A blank bank, with lake-water behind it, semi-clear, with nothing below it to grab your ankle, and nobody near to say a word. Only one set of prints in the dirt matching the exact width and length of your own feet.

You grabbed your shirt, pants, shoes, and socks, all too close to the water for your comfort, and you ran back with them through the treeline. Only when you made it out to the clearing next to the highway did you dare to begin to put them back on again.

After you did, watching the path all the while, afraid even to put on your shirt, lest it obscure your view even for a moment, you turned and quickly looked both ways down the highway before running across. Then you jogged to the water-tower, before speedwalking, looking back every few seconds at the path, in the direction of the bus stop.

You got to the stop without trouble. You boarded the bus much the same way. You didn’t feel safe until the bus was down the road, and you could no longer see the path leading to the lake.

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You had almost seen it last night.

You woke up in the middle of the night to muffled pleas as you had been doing every night for weeks, and you walked down the hallway in their direction. At the end of it, you found your mom in her room, lying facedown, squirming in her bed, with her sheets lying on the floor.

“Anthony, grab my hand! He’s… please Anthony! Don’t let…”

Her underwear, though not quite transparent, was slight enough that you almost imagined you could see her buttcrack through it, which moved from side to side as she squirmed, through the feathery material.

You hadn’t even bothered putting on pants this time, and your cock throbbed in your underwear as you stood by the door watching.

The terror in your mom’s face, still half-visible in the darkness, while upsetting to you, was offset by the sight of her squirming ass in the meagre shelter of her underwear. It had been days since you last jacked off, the last time you had truly considered it being when you saw that girl across the lake in her black one-piece. You promised yourself you wouldn’t since then, plus your trouble feeling comfortable in your room, left to your own thoughts, made finding time to jerk off almost impossible. The lack of attention it had received made it rebellious now, and you stood staring at the softness of your mom’s ass, and the rustling that jiggled its cheeks, with a surprising amount of relish. It was the part of the female body you admired more than all others, the part you had seen the least of than likely anyone in town, yet the best ass in town, you knew that as well as anyone else did, existed with you under your own roof at all times.

What would stop you from jerking off to it, right here in this moment? It was dark enough now that if she suddenly woke up, you’d only have to pull the waistband of your underwear up immediately, and anything she did see, she’d chalk it up to the mistiness of not being fully awake yet.

“Besides,” you thought. “She’s the one keeping me up at night anyways. I haven’t had a goodnight sleep in weeks. Might as well get something out of it.”

Your vengeful impishness surprised you. You couldn’t place whether it was the lack of sleep or the extra level of lust that came from not jerking off for a while, or was it both, which gave you that devilish thought. But you had to admit you liked the thoughts you had been drifting into recently, though you knew they were just you being playful within the safety of your own mind.

Your mom poked her ass up into the air as she moaned in the moonlight. “Help, oh god, please help. I can’t… I’m going to… grab my hand!”

It’s good the sheets fell from her body clean, but you were sure that if you came into the room with her fully covered, you would have walked right up and lifted the sheets yourself. Just so you’d get the view you had been blessed with by mere chance on previous nights.

Her panty-clad ass looked back at you, and its thin fabric hung tight to her cheeks, almost as if it was slightly too small.

You grabbed your cock through your underwear and massaged it as you thought about the fun of that thought, of pulling your mom’s sheets off her body in the night during her most vulnerable moments. Just the proactive action in that direction would make this moment, as hot as it was already, so much more delicious because of the aggressive taboo of it all, the brazen violating of her privacy, leaving her helpless body bare in the moonlight. Then you could remove your underwear next and tug yourself as you watched that ass, naked but for the underwear which clung to it for dear life, like an exhausted swimmer onto another.

As you put your thumb into the waist of your underwear and pulled, feeling it slip from you and snap back into your pelvic region, the thought of your mom’s underwear doing the same flashed into your mind almost reflexively. You imagined the thrill of throwing off her covers in the darkness. You imagined the thrill of standing next to her, sliding your own underwear down. It was only a hop and skip away from the next logical thought: approaching her as she thrashed in her bed, sliding your fingers into the waistband of her underwear, and pulling it all down and seeing whatever it was they hid, naked now and unguarded, for the first time in your life, and possibly the only time ever again.

“Don’t’,” she said as she thrashed. “Please.”

You couldn’t believe it but you knew it was true. Knew what you were going to do next. Knew what the only logical thing to do was.

You approached her slowly in the darkness, feeling your heart thump violently, your limbs pumping rhythmically in turn. As you went up the length of the legs, you rested your hand softly on her left calf, almost as if to test if she would wake. But she slept there, still thrashing and pleading, calling out your dad’s name in the blackness. Again you went up to the back of her kneecap, then the back of her thigh as you got closer to your desired spot, your mouth becoming dry. And then there it was beneath you.

It wiggled back and forth in the dark, helpless.

As if you were observing rather than participating, you watched your own hands lower to her waist band, and you shocked yourself when your fingers wormed their way in between the fabric and her flesh. And just as you were about to pull the panties down your mom’s thighs, she suddenly spun around in bed, looked up at you with wide-open and terrified eyes and screamed.

You backed up reflexively in shock, and before you could clear the distance, her leg shot up and the sole of her right foot caught your cheek and temple, and she pushed you backward, causing you to fall to the floor in pain and humiliation.

Rather than look down at you and register what it was she had caught you doing, she looked around the room in terror and screamed, as if an unknown threat assailed her. Then she began waving her arms around. “No!” she said to something, whatever it was, that she was sure was there with her. “Let me go! No!”

That’s when you realized, to relief so great it felt like a second chance, that she was still dreaming.

“Anthony,” she called. “Anthony!”

All of that happened but five hours ago.

Now you sat across the table from her in the daylight of the kitchen and ate breakfast. The eggs were underdone, and the bacon burnt. You were surprised she had looked as pretty as she still did, even with obvious evidence of sleeplessness in her every fibre of being, whether it manifested itself physically or in her actions and their pace and imprecision.

She sat there, eating, and also apparent in her, much to your great relief, was that she hadn’t remembered you in her room last night. Whatever she saw when she looked at you with those wild eyes, it wasn’t you. You knew that for sure. And as much of a merciful stroke of luck as that was, you shuddered to think about what it was she had seen there, looking back at her that caused her eyes to emote such wild terror.

You had told your mom that you never made it to the library last time you went, that you instead checked out the aquarium and left just as it was closing, so when you told her you wanted to go to the library again, requesting a ride on her way to the sleep specialist that was just down the street from it, she wasn’t surprised.

After breakfast and coffee, she was much more chipper and alert. It was a testament to your mom’s bright personality that she could bounce back the way she had been doing over the past few weeks, every day, as if she didn’t know what to expect whenever sleep came. You couldn’t help but respect her for it, knowing, and knowing even more due to recent events, just how hard that could be.

Even still, you couldn’t help but objectify her by watching from the passenger seat as she slid into the driver seat of the car with your eyes on the very same set of cheeks you tried and failed to get a bare-naked look at the night before (or rather the very early hours of this morning).

As your mom drove through the streets of the town, stopping at red lights, and going through greens, you thought about how close you were to seeing it in that bed. You were only a pull away. One swift motion for a sight that would have lasted you a lifetime. The sight you were deprived of, now clothed, sat in the driver’s seat next to you, and part of you just wanted to reach out, grab and touch it. It was a surprising level of aggression that you weren’t used to feeling. You didn’t know whether it was sleepiness or horniness, or maybe something worse, which had gotten the best of you.

As your mom merged into the right lane to turn, she stopped behind the 112, which was at the stop waiting for passengers to get on. You watched as a couple of girls that you remembered from back in school, belonging to the graduating class one year older than yours, got onto the bus with duffle bags, likely headed to the beach. Your mom followed the bus turning right, and at her next chance on the highway, she passed the bus, leaving it and its passengers behind you.

You thought about the girls on the bus, about just what their bodies looked like in their bathing suits. You thought about what it would be like to get aggressive with them, touching and grabbing, almost like making up for lost time, and not concerning yourself with their reaction, which felt so unfair to you now. An obstacle of their choosing, which became a necessity not through any natural law, but through their choice. You thought about that girl in the black onesie, with her shapely bottom, visible still from a distance, emerging from the water. But to not be concerned with their choice, as you imagined it, what a heaven that would be. To live that brazenness, if only for a weekend, it would be as good as immortality.

You past by the beach, but because your car was much lower than the seats of the bus, you could now only just barely see over the hill and get a hint at what was waiting there to be seen on that yellow sand, the feet that pushed at its grains to propel all those various female forms. That hill was a sight you were used to, even when you were young in the back seat, with both your parents ahead, looking at that hill and the beach it obscured as your parents always drove past it, never turning on the left signal to park in its welcoming lot. Your childhood had been perfection except for that.

As your mom rounded the bend, you saw the farmhouse, with the farmer leading another pig toward the red barn. And after that you saw the lot of greyblack dirt, looking cooler now under the shade of the clouds.

Then, as the bend ended, you looked over to your left, at the treeline, waiting to see it, almost not wanting to. And just as it popped into view, you noticed your mom’s forearm go stiff, and her fist grip onto the steering wheel. It looked like her lack of sleeping was starting to form cracks in her façade of contentment, even if in strange and subtle ways. The path, terrifying at a distance, got closer, and somehow became less threatening just before the point when it past from your sight, even with the memory of that freakish experience in the back of your mind. Eventually you past it, and it was no longer in view, even through the rearview mirror. As you past the water tower and gas station, your mom took her fist off the steering wheel and held it to her mouth. Then she yawned into it and stretched out her arm, before lackadaisically putting it back to the wheel.

Whether it was real or a façade, her relaxed demeanor was a relief to you. You were glad she could pull it off, even if it was a lie.

-----------------------------------------------

You came in through the front doors and were almost assaulted with the distinct sent of book pages, that indefinable smell, which filled your nostrils and conjured up a dark nostalgia that was troubling rather than sweet. Your mom had told you to take your time, that she would wait around after her appointment, until you texted her, not wanting to rush you into checking out a bad book and being stuck with it for a week, knowing from experience how much of a hell that could be, being stuck reading a story to get to an ending you couldn’t care less about, one without consequence or meaning.

You walked through the library and wondered if it was only the beautiful weather of summer which kept its aisles and desks as empty as they were now. The building seemed slightly underlit, as if it was the light from outside which did most of the heavy lifting in keeping it from total darkness. Plus, the blue-greyish color scheme to everything heightened that sense of drab shadow, even in what was total and near-omnipresent light. The librarian stood over at the other end of the room, looking at you blandly through her glasses, with both her hands, one over the other, on the desk she stood behind.

You let your finger run along the edge of the oak table and you looked around.

You were there under the vague assumption that you’d be able to find some sort of documentary evidence, whether it involved newspaper clippings, documents and blueprints, or books about your town’s history. And more importantly, if you could find any information on that lake. You didn’t care whether it was a source from hard scientific works regarding an understanding of its water, sand, nearby foliage, and rock, or whether you could find human stories, whether happy or sad, which intersected with the existence of that strange body of water in some way which stood out to you. A way which was in keeping spiritually with what you had experienced on that day. Something which would give you context, though you feared that you’d regret being provided with that context. Maybe some things weren’t meant to be understood.

You looked over at the librarian again, almost afraid to ask where to look. She was standing there, her hands still on the desk, one over the other. You felt anxious at the thought of approaching her. But you knew that you were wasting your time if you didn’t. So took a breath to build the courage to start in her direction.

You know what she did?!

You turned your head frantically, expecting, but without words hoping the opposite, to see a face behind you, slightly to your right, just inches from your right ear. Instead you saw a near-barren library. The only exception to this perfect isolation was a single library-goer sitting at a desk a ways away from you, holding a red leatherbound book up to face-level, obscuring his entire head from your sight. Even still, something in the way he sat there, spoke of purpose, even in his stillness.

As you watched, feeling unnerved by the man in a way you couldn’t describe, almost as if the moment were tinged with a slightness of déjà vu, he took one of his hands off of his book slowly and methodically, and you watched it move with a measured deliberateness, first without form, then taking form as his fingers curled in, with one of them extending itself fully outwards to point. His hand stopped just at the point when it drew your attention toward a single aisle.

You stood there, looking first at the aisle, then looking back at the man, wondering, but also knowing against your own wishes, that the gesture was meant for you. And that the face now obscured by that red book was once a face instead obscured to you by a great distance and the occasional passing of fast-moving cars and trucks. You didn’t know whether to feel more fear now at the thought that you were dreaming, or at the very real possibility that you were still awake.

Water and shade!

You spun around again toward your right, trying to catch the source of the whispering, always just behind you, and you saw the librarian across the room, slightly startled, looking at you through the thick black rims of her glasses. The voice you heard wasn’t female, and it wasn’t distant to you, unfortunately, like she was now. Nobody else was there.

You turned back around to see the man and were startled to instead see an empty row of desks and aisles. The only evidence that anyone had been there at all was a red leatherbound book which sat there neatly, closed on the table.

You couldn’t believe it when you took your first step forward and were even shocked to find out you were following it up with a second. And by the time you took your third, you had already resigned yourself to continuing, despite whatever terror you felt in doing so. As you passed by the table where that man sat, you noticed that the book he had held was wet. A slight puddle, like that from a sweating glass, sat beneath it in an obscured circle coming from underneath.

You looked away, and then down the aisle he had pointed you towards. As you walked down it, you saw that it snaked and turned to the right. You seemed to know that whatever it was you were being pointed toward, it wasn’t on any of the shelves currently at your shoulders. It wasn’t even around the corner from where you were now walking. You knew that too.

As you turned the corner, you saw a long row of books, the shelves, though seeming to be continuing from the ones behind you in a way that made Euclidean sense, appeared to you as if they were slightly taller, and though you saw no evidence of it, you couldn’t help but feel like the shelves were closing in around you as you moved in deeper. At the end of this row was a turn off to the left.

You turned off to the left and continued, seeing another turn and then another. As you moved through the snaking aisles, which seemed to bend and alternate direction without logic, like one long unbroken corridor without exit or intersection, your assurance to yourself that you weren’t dreaming grew, paradoxically, even as the books on the shelf seemed to take on an older and more dilapidated nature with disturbing consistency. You could feel the darkness now, real darkness, which was bathed in a strange blue, though it was possible that it was a green instead. It wasn’t as if there were no light being shined through the aisle you currently moved in, but as if it were a light being shined through dirty stained-glass, which was a of various greens and blues, with the occasional white, and it moved slightly giving the strange lighting the aura that one felt when opening their eyes up under water.

As you turned another corner, you saw that the snaking labyrinth of aisles continued. But halfway down the aisle, the spine of a book jutted out of its shelving caught your eye. You moved toward it – again, as if pulled rather than pushed – and you grabbed the spine of the book, pulling it out from between its neighbors. The spine of the thing looked so old you were afraid it would come apart as you pulled at it, but it proved remarkably sturdy. Just as it cleared the shelf and you felt its full weight in your grasp, you could smell the sweet and sour tart of lake-water. Immediately, as if the space you had pulled the book from had been unclogged, water spilled out from its orifice and landed on the carpet before you. The stain it left was invisible in the half-darkness, and, what’s more, your attention had been fully focused on the shadowy nook on the shelf where the book used to be.

Your intuition had been correct, and faintly, so faintly you wondered at first if you were really hearing it, a sound came through the cramped shadow of the hole. As you stood there, frozen in place, you could hear what sounded like distant fun. Like a public place outdoors, with hundreds of people, happening far enough away to feel distant from it, but close enough to hear the jubilee and understand its nature.

Then, sounding much more nearby in its sound, you heard giggling. What sounded like the voices of a young man and woman intermingled. The sight of the woman in the black onesie coming out of the water, and the man smiling, admiring her, flashed in your mind. The voices were peppered over sounds of water splashing. And though these voices were audible, their youthful intimacy made them impossible to parse over the sound of the elements.

You listened for a while, strangely, feeling almost a jealousy at the intimacy implied between these two, at what sounded like love, and worse, what sounded like unbearable chemical attraction. Even the timbre of their voices sounding attractive, painting vague images in your mind of their bodies, both paragons of nature and comparable in their unique masculine and feminine beauty. The body of the splashing woman tightly caressed by a black one-piece swimsuit, and the young man in his trunks, with his penis expanding and hardening, pressing itself through the trunks’ mesh, at the sight of her body.

After listening for a while, the voices stopped, though the ambient sounds of lower volume did not. You looked at the hole, sitting there, the opening between two books, which had gripped you now, and the sound which still came from within its rectangle of shadow.

And then you heard it.

The sudden sound of a splash that was at odds with the rhythm of the moment in a way that a listener would never be able to describe to someone who hadn’t heard it. This was followed closely by a scream.

Your heart stopped at the suddenness of it and the terror within it.

What came after was only more splashing. More screaming.

“Help!”

Your hair stood on end.

“Stop! Anthony! Help! Anthony!”

The water splashed violently.

You listened to the screaming and the young man screaming back, both rivalling the sound of splashing in volume and intensity.

“Don’t let… Aggh”

After that point, the words coming from the voices became inaudible, due to the fury of the splashing, screaming and yelling. And then after a few more harrowing moments of that cacophony from hell, the sound started to become drowned out, as if it were heard from underneath water.

The sound of limbs, or other large bodies, moving rapidly through it, that bubbly sound, was all that came from that dark little hole, along with the muffled sound of a woman screaming out helplessly, sounding distorted and without form.

Even through the screaming and the clear disturbance beneath water, human bodies clearly moving through it, cutting gaps within it, which were filled in as soon as the limb moved, you could still hear a distinct sound, which somehow you felt you could intuit as some sort of solid object, possibly made from metal, being disturbed underneath the water, whether by the moving bodies or something else. The only image of metal you could conjure up to fit the sound was that of a pipe running along the bottom of the riverbed or lake floor.

The sounds of movement coming next seemed to change in shape and frequency. The metal object was now continually being subjected to some sort of pressure, making a constant dull noise, while what sounded like a body moving rapidly through the water could be heard. Suddenly, a male voice, again without real form under the water, spoke out in a way that sounded like pleading, a bubbly cacophony could be heard along with it. The sound of the body moving rapidly stopped, while the other sound, which sounded almost like struggling, continued on with the voice.

After a while, the voice became frantic, as if in response to something, its hurried words likely the source of the bubbling you could hear as a constant now, and less than a second afterward, the sound of something moving quickly through the water continued, until a distant splash could be heard.

The bleating male voice became terrified as it continued in its pleading tone, until it was eventually drowned out by the gurgling sound of bubbles, which came through to you in sickening vividness.

And then all noise stopped, but for the ambient sound beneath the surface of water. Not a splash. Not a single movement.

You stood there, staring at the little rectangle, with the book by your side, feeling like you were stuck in place and unable to move.

Do you know what she did? Your cock-tease mother!?

You bolted back in the direction you came from, running full speed, away from what, you didn’t know. The voice sounded harsh this time, almost filled with a sickening rage and urgency, like someone eager to tell someone else a shameful secret, truly looking forward to it.

As you continued, unsure if exit were even possible as you moved through the dingy sickly green aisles, the terror that spurred you on, though feeling like it couldn’t have possibly been worse, was given an extra jolt.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha! You look like her in fear!

You had forgotten the pattern up to this point and assumed in your terror that the voices relative sense of closeness to your ear meant he, whoever “He” was, had gained on you and was now currently right behind you.

You don’t give me as much to look at running away.

At the end of the current aisle, the path turned off leftward, and you could see the light reverberating into view was of a lighter tone, like pure daylight. You bolted towards it as if life depended on it.

It’s too late! You’re already coming my way!

You turned the corner, stopped dead in your track, dropping the book, and you screamed.

Standing there before you stood the startled librarian, her eyes opening wide, receiving your fear through contact with you.

After the panic subsided, the relief came soon after, though it didn’t last too long, making room instead for your embarrassment.

When the librarian had gathered herself, she fulfilled the stereotype of her profession by lifting her finger to her lips, and with barely-conjured authority, saying “Shh,” to you, and doing so for the sake of custom, as the rest of the library, but for the two of you, was completely empty.

As the librarian went back to her desk, still visibly rattled as she went, you kneeled down and picked up the book, noticing that the carpet beneath it was wet.

You passed the desk where the man sat, noticing that the red leatherbound book was no longer there either, instead only a small circular puddle in its place which dripped off the side of the table. You went a few tables over to go sit down.

As you looked at the face of the book you had grabbed, you knew without knowing how that it contained the answers you were looking for. Not just for what you had experienced that day at the lake, but also to the origin of your mom’s night terrors, something which you thought might have been connected in some strange way. Now it had been confirmed to you. The sweat from the experience still over your forehead. The only thing keeping you from fleeing from the building all together was the presence of the librarian, as distant and cold as she was. It was that shared existence in the same place which made it feel as if all the ghosts and ghouls of imagination couldn’t be. As if they could only prey on the lonely and isolated, if anyone at all.

You opened the book up, and though you were completely in the dark as to its contents until then, seeing what was within now felt right, if right was the correct word.

Cut-out news articles were glued to the page below. And the image, somehow making your hair stand on end without surprising you, was that of the beach.

MYSTERY BEACHGOER GETS HANDSY WITH THE LOCALS

The article was from two decades ago, as you could have deduced by the hairstyles and bikinis of the women in the photo. It described what was a string of sexual assaults and harassments all reported within a single weekend near and around Howard’s Beach.

It appeared that a strange man, described similarly by all the victims, had emerged from various places within the wooded areas surrounding the beach suddenly to pinch the bottoms of the victims, all at various times of day, only for him to retreat back into the woods. One young Greek man, in town to visit his family, watched in shock as the man came up behind his sister and tore at the waist of her bikini bottoms, then slapping her on her bare ass so hard she fell forward, before retreating back into the foliage. One mother of two had a similar story, where she felt her bottoms being torn off, and her bottom being spanked, causing her to fall on the ground between her two sons, by a mystery man, who she couldn’t get a clear look at before he managed to flee.

You were surprised to feel your cock hardening under the table as you read these stories. The article was written for the purpose of reporting this series of crimes, but the author couldn’t seem to repress a playful tone of titillating hi-jinx, which you appreciated as you read it. The photo above contained various women walking up and down the beach, and you couldn’t help but think the editor chose the photo with the largest number of attractive women to let the audience imagine the caliber of tail that this serial sexually assaulter could have possibly gotten a palmful of.

You thought about the woman in black, imagining her one-piece thong being pulled by a mysterious hand, so that it gave her a wedgie, lifting her a few inches off the ground, when another hand came into spank the exposed cheeks, and then letting her fall. If you weren’t in the library then, you would have began jacking off right then and there.

You flipped the page.

SEXUAL ASSAULTS OCCUR AGAIN AT HOWARD’S BEACH OVER WEEKEND

This article had dropped the playful tone, though many of the stories within it of bottoms being spanked and pinched could have just as easily fit within the lighthearted milieu of the previous story. But much of what was being described this time was of a much more serious nature. Maybe it was the time lapse between then and now, a solid twenty or so years, which made it so you were able to extract great arousal from the events being described without being distracted from that thrill by the gravity of them.

While much of the article described moments of pinching and sharking just like the previous article, one young man found his girlfriend completely bottomless being dragged toward the woods. Luckily, he had chased the man away. One mother of three wasn’t so lucky. She was picnicking across the lake with her three sons when they all ran off to play hide-and-seek. One of them came back to find her on all fours with a man holding his hand around her mouth with one hand, and removing her jean shorts with the other. He ran off to go find his brothers, and when he came back with one of them, after a considerable time spent trying to find him in his hiding spot, they happened upon their mother being anally violated by the man. Too afraid to do anything about it, they stood at a distance and watched, until the third brother, running through the woods, happened on the events by accident. The man got up and ran off, but not before leaving their mom’s ass with a final spank, the sound of which those three boys probably still remember to this day.

Not long after, three college girls passing through the state on a road trip, had stopped by the side of the highway. A man came out of the treeline asking for help with his wife who was injured by the lakeside. When one of the girls had a bad hunch, her friends told to stay with the SUV while they went to help the man. When the man tried to assault them in the woods, the two girls escaped, but their friend back at the vehicle wasn’t so lucky. The man snuck back up to the SUV, pulled her out, and forced her to perform oral sex on him by the road side. He finished on the woman’s face as a slow-downed passing carful of witnesses yelled at him that they had called the sheriff on their friend’s cellular phone. Probably realizing that they weren’t going to leave their car, he urinated on the woman’s face before running back into the woods.

The man was described as being rather mundane in appearance. Middle-aged. Black or brown hair with slight greying, average height and complexion. The only thing noteworthy about him, something said by all witnesses who had seen him, was his giant smile. It was as if he was getting real pleasure from what he had been doing. Not just pleasure of the obvious variety, but gleeful, almost child-like pleasure. Clearly nobody had recognized him as someone from town, so it was guaranteed that he had come in from somewhere else.

As you thought about the woman sucking his cock by the roadside, or the mother of three on her hands and knees in the woods, a thrill pulsed through you. The wrong place-wrong time nature of these events was what had you going, and you wondered if the car passing by had anyone in it who enjoyed what they were seeing, watching that sociopath’s cock being serviced unwillingly by that crying college girl, and his smile the entire time as her trembling lips and tongue worked his shaft and balls. And then you thought about the mother. Who was she? She could be anyone you knew. And her kids, had you known them from around the neighborhood? They’d all be older than you by about a decade or so, you assumed.

You thought about all the women in your town that carried the scars of these attacks. What a delightful and exciting secret sitting right below the dirt of this little hamlet. You would have had no idea were it not that you stumbled on this artifact of this past.

You were excited to see what kind of mayhem would come next, only to be greeted by this headline:

EXPECTED THIRD WAVE OF BEACH ATTACKS UNEXPECTEDLY ABSENT THIS LABOR DAY WEEKEND

Below the photo headline read an article devoid of excitement or thrill, but for the recapping of the events of the previous two weekend, which were redescribed with extra detail, likely from the police reports themselves, for the titillating thrill of the captivated readership. The mother of three, who you’d kill to know who she was, was the star, with that humiliating moment being described with extra lurid detail this time, improving upon previous efforts of description.

Other than that one plus, there was nothing new. The cops had being patrolling the area, and though that would be a deterrent to most, many assumed the brazen recklessness of the attacker in previous weekends would hold true even with cops around. But he didn’t end up showing up on any of the three days of the long weekend. He hadn’t showed then, and he didn’t show in the weeks, months, and years following. Most assumed he had skipped town. Others that he was murdered while doing something stupid in the meantime. Maybe a family member or husband of one of the girls had found him and decided to take the law into his own hands. Either way, his beautiful spree of terror was over with, with only two of the victims really getting what they deserved (you couldn’t believe that that was a thought that had just entered your head, but it had).

You looked up at the photograph of the beach above the article, seeing that it was about half as full as usual, though the number of full-uniformed officers among the beachgoers almost made up for the numbers of those missing. Even still it appeared that people had found ways to have fun. Likely their proximity to fully-armed officers of the law had given them enough breathing room to not worry, and to convince themselves that it would be a waste to throw away the long weekend over the fear of a reperpetuation freak series of events.

As you scanned over the faces, each one a crystallized moment in time. Many of these faces you recognized, either directly or indirectly, though all of them much younger in the image, it wasn’t until you came onto two faces in particular that the gravity of the whole situation had dawned on you with a moment where your world stopped.

Because standing amongst the sea of face were two that you recognized more than any others. Your recognized them well because you had seen them in your living room every day of your life, in the form of a photograph. And one of them, though much older now, had the same look on her face back then as you would catch plastered on her face now, within the mystery and angst of the last few weeks.

That person was your mom, as recognizable for her ass, still visibly large from the front, just as much as her face. She was looking off in the distance with a tired glare, an expression ripe with concern. Not concern over something coming. Concern over something that came. Something which occupied her with full weight, but which could not be spoken.

Next to her, looking into the side of her face with a resolve, was her boyfriend at the time, your dad, Anthony. And you could tell, though his concern looked only a fraction of hers, that he had sworn himself to secrecy for something as well.

“They told me they never went to the beach because dad couldn’t swim,” you thought.

You looked into your mother’s eyes, which were ripe with that strange and ethereal worry in black and white, like an actress in an old film. Their still images told a story worth a thousand words, but what was that story?

The image of a middle-aged man’s pelvis pumping into a soft young woman’s soft rump flashed in your mind.

The relationship between stomach-churning horror and thrill was a strange and fascinating one, but its ironies had never been as well encapsulated in a moment as they had then when you were near assaulted with that image.

“If it never happened,” you told yourself. “Good. And if it did… who can blame you for being aroused?”

As you looked at her eyes, you could feel your line of sight lowering. You tried to resist, but your eyes scaled down her body, down her chest and stomach and waist, until they found her hip area, and you stared at its exaggerated shape, and your dad’s arm wrapped around it protectively.

A murderer trembles!

You head shot up in terror.

The librarian, noticing, looked up at you, expecting an addendum to your outburst of energy. But when you sat there, saying nothing in the emptiness, only sweating as a clue to your horror, she slowly looked back down at the book she was reading. Only looking up once subtly, then down again when she was sure that there was no sequel to your sudden action.

As you sat there, regathering yourself, you felt a coolness at the end of your hand, closest to your pinkie. Your hand was wet.

You looked down at it and were shocked to see that the page you were just reading was now damp with moisture. You slowly looked upward with real apprehension, fearing to see what awaited you there. But when all you saw was the high ceiling of the library, with not a drop falling, you looked back down at the page. That’s when you realized that the moisture wasn’t coming from anywhere else, it was coming from within the book, and bleeding upward.

You looked down at the page for a moment, your mom’s young concerned face wracked with worry, now dark with wetness. Jutting out from between two pages, something dark-green peeked out slightly. You turned the page.

Sitting there, pressed flat between two pieces of paper, was seaweed.

Suddenly you heard a squeaking noise.

You looked up and at the end of your sight, your mom stood at the closing door, looking calm on the surface, but just like her face twenty years earlier, you could see she had something on her mind. And as much as she would play it up as her just coming to see the library, you knew that she truly wanted to leave. And you were happy to oblige her.

As you sat in the passenger seat, you said nothing to her except for the basic niceties, and she returned the favor. You both had a lot on your minds, and you didn’t want to talk, not just because you had a lot to think about, but because you didn’t think you’d know what to say.

As you past the gas station and the water tower, you looked over to your right, and when you saw the dark pathway toward the lake, you looked away almost impulsively. When you did, you were almost startled to see your mom looking toward the path, then seeing your eyes on hers, she looked back toward the road.

And though her face remained stoic, her eyes placid, her fists spoke another story, one that communicated volumes to you. Because not only was it gripped against the curve of the steering wheel with an amazing tightness, but even as her whole form sat as still and upright as a statue, her fist, rather than conforming to the fibre of the rest of her, broke this conformity with one simple act.

It trembled.

-------------------------------------------

You watched your mom with suspicion as she grabbed a towel and headed down the hallway. Her butt-cheeks danced within the cradle of her jean shorts as she moved, and something about her, though nothing in her had changed, made her feel like she was a stranger to you. Not only had she been dishonest about the extent of her fear for the past few weeks, but she’d been dishonest about its very specific nature.

When your mom closed the bathroom door, you looked at its base to see that it ran tight against the floor, leaving no room for you to slide your phone underneath.

“Just to figure what’s going on,” you said to yourself with a mischievous and knowing smile.

You knew that the surplus volume of semen you had been carrying around in your balls for the past few days was making you mean, and, more so, actively hostile towards your mother. A gorgeous fat ass did more to make a woman unlikeable than anything else, as strange as that sounded. Almost as if it did more to frustrate and tease than it ever possibly could accomplish through pleasing, and the only response fitting was anger.

You looked down at the book at your side. It was a bizarre artifact, looking and feeling like no book you had ever held. Like it was of long-gone origin, but containing contents that were relatively recent in the grand scheme of things. If you had at all been in a logical state of mind, rather than in a sleep-deprived haziness, you would have asked the obvious question: who had put together this scrapbook and placed it in the library just so you could stumble upon it? And in answering that question for yourself, you’d have only to jump to the most wild conclusion possible. Accepting whatever phantasmagoric truth it implied.

But now, standing at the end of the hall, hearing your mom turn on the showerhead, you decided to take the book with you to your room, and to let the story of the mom of three give you sweet and sour company.

“It happened twenty years ago,” you thought. “What’s the harm in enjoying it now? I can’t turn back time anyways.”

You smiled to yourself as you past the bathroom door.

“Though if I could, I wouldn’t.”

You opened the door to your room and threw the book on your bed, then you closed and locked the door behind you. The sound of your mom showering, muffled through two doors, provided the soundtrack for what you expected to be a much-coveted release.

You climbed onto your bed and grabbed the book, resting on your chest with the book out in front of you. You opened it to a random spot, and when you did, you almost gasped at what you saw sitting flat on that page.

“But how?”

It was a photograph. One that would have meant nothing to most. But to you it meant everything. Because the image between its white paper frame, out of every square inch in every remote nook and cranny of your county, was exactly the image that had been burned into the sleepy vision of your inner-mind’s eye for the past few days.

“It can’t be.”

But it was.

It was a photograph of that shady clearing, down the lake from the beach, and the nook of water sitting placid after it.

And as you looked upon that little cove, staring at its features, which sat inert, though to you were alive with dread, your second scare for the moment came with twice as much suddenness, if a concept like that even had legs.

The image began to dolly in as if you were watching a film.

Trees passed out of view as the shot moved past their edges, the section of the lake, the one you had made the mistake of dipping your toes into, became bigger as the shot neared its placid waters.

Suddenly, as the shot kept moving, a figure, moving faster, appeared, with only its lower half visible initially, containing smooth legs and a pair of jean shorts which were stuffed to the brim with flesh. You watched them jiggle as the woman walked.

As she continued, the shot following behind her at a slower pace, before then stopping, and her entire body, by moving away from it and towards the water, became visible, exposing her blonde hair. The woman turned around and said to somebody following her “you coming? Or are you scared?”

And you sat there with your jaw open staring down at the moving image, one unlike any that you had seen; the image of your mom with a slight breeze blowing through her hair, looking just as she did, both in age and attitude, in the photograph in the living room, grinning slyly at a mystery man behind her, about twenty years younger than she was now, and a certain ineffable weight yet to latch itself onto the shoulders of her conscience.

She grinned, and another set of legs came into view, these ones masculine with some degree of hair. His bottom was covered by trunks, and when he got closer to her, the shot following now and re-angling itself, you could see that the man she was talking to, also young, was your late father.

“Scared of what?” he asked. “Of a sea monster?”

She looked at him devilishly. “Why do you say it sarcastically? It’s a good a reason to not learn to swim as any. It would explain it much better than ‘my parents never taught me.’”

“They were foster parents,” he replied. “What do you expect? Feel grateful I’ve had any experiences at all. ‘Sides, shouldn’t you be the one who’s afraid?”

“Afraid of what? I’ve been swimming since I was six.”

“Of that wild madman? The ass grabber?”

Your mom rolled her eyes dismissively.”

“What? You think you’re exempt? With all that cheek in those shorts, he can probably spot us from across the lake. He thinks he’s hit the jackpot.”

“The jackpot,” she repeated, with a wily smile. “Is that what you hit?”

“In more ways than one, yes.” He went to go give it a spank, but she turned her body and backed up with a grin.

“Only if you can catch me,” she said, and she backed up into the water, her feet pushing against its cool and all-filling blanket as she moved backwards.

Your dad stood there, going white.

Your mom realized that she had made him feel uneasy, and she stood there with the water up to her ankles not saying anything.

After a moment, he had regained enough composure to say “besides, we should set out a blanket here and get to making ourselves our first child,” hoping to reintroduce levity with the break in silence.

She turned from him to look at the beach on the other side of the lake. “Who says I want to have a child?” she retorted without looking at him.

That’s when your dad said your name.

Your mom looked at him.

“Isn’t that what you wanted to call him?” he asked. If he was a boy that is. Or Samantha, if she was a girl?”

Your mom smiled and looked away back at the beach without replying.

Your dad kneeled down with his arms on his knees, and then he waved your mom forward. “You go in,” he said, as he positioned himself to sit down. “I’ll watch.”

She looked out into the water, squinted her eyes, then looked back at him. “You know, I’m not sure what your hang-up with water is, but would it creep you out more if under the water there were creepy statues?”

“What?” he asked, almost with a strange comedic timing.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I see something weird in there. It looks like a statue of two people dancing.”

“Don’t tell me that,” he said with disgust, before giggling a little bit. “This better not be some trick to get me to dance.”

“No,” she said, looking out at the water. “I want to go check it out.” She began stepping in.

“Good, why don’t you go sit on it?” he said with a perverse grin.

As she went, the water level crawled up her leg until it almost got to the point of touching her shorts.

She stopped.

“It’s too deep,” she said. She looked back at him from where she stood. “I’d have to come back out and take off my jean shorts first.”

He looked at her saying nothing. And she looked back at him.

“Why not take them off there,” he said, squinting at her.

“Because I’d get them wet, dummy,” she said with a laugh.

They both sat and stood where they were, smiling at each other, feeling whole in each other’s presence.

Your mom noticed a look in your dad’s face, like a pressure ready to burst. He had something he wanted to say. Something which had crept up on him in that moment. Your mom waited, feeling something begin to bubble up in her too, just as suddenly, and she knew it was the same thing he felt. But she knew it was his moment to say it. That it would mean the world to him to say it first.

His lips moved to open.

Your mom jerked back violently.

“Babe!” your dad screamed.

She was jerked back again, her hip rotated back 30 degrees within a second. And she pulled forward, only to be jerked back harder again.

And with that, the knowledge that the jerks weren’t going to stop, she began screaming.

“Anthony! Help!”

“Babe!” he yelled, standing up. He ran to the edge of the water as she was dragged backwards a few more steps, the water level now up to her waist filling in her jean shorts with the cool liquid.

“Anthony! He’s… Grab my hand!”

“I…” he said, running ankle deep into the water. “I…”

“He’s holding me! Help!”

The terrible hoarseness of her voice and the unnatural jerks of her legs after every few moments told him that she wasn’t playing some sort of sick prank. And the terror in her eyes as she was jerked backward, deeper into the shadowy water, solidified it more than all.

He continued forward until the water was up to his kneecaps, and when he slipped slightly, he froze in unreasonable terror, as if he thought he’d be sucked into the deepest point of the lake all at once. And though nothing like that would or could happen, the closest thing to it was happening to his girlfriend right in front of him.

She jerked back further, the water now up to her chest, and she screamed for him. The look of terror on his face, and the helplessness with it, scaring her more than even his absence could.

And then with one more tug, the sight of him was replaced by the sight of his legs through a dreamlike blue-green filter.

She had been dragged underwater.

She blew air into her cheeks and clamped her lips tightly together, terrified she’d let water in through an involuntary scream. Her limbs thrashed through the water as she tried to get loose from the hand that gripped and tugged at her ankle with real power and deliberateness. Your dad’s legs moved about in a frantic dance of impotence as she thrashed about under the heavy pressure helplessly.

And that’s when she felt it.

Another hand had grabbed the waist of her jean shorts.

Her mouth shot open and a thick column of bubbles appeared before her own face rushing upwards.

The one hand twisted at her ankle, as the other struggled to pull her shorts off her bottom. And when she began to kick, the hand twisted harder at her leg to immobilize her, and the other one, using the moment to its advantage, pulled at her jean shorts until they were down her thighs, exposing her bikini-bottomed ass which jiggled slowly through the water.

As the two hands worked the shorts down her legs and past her ankles, she turned to see, and when she did, another column of bubbles erupted past her vision upward. When they cleared, she saw what she thought she saw. The man’s dark hair rose in the water like he lived in a world without gravity, and he looked down with two wide and fascinated eyes at her jiggling ass. He then noticed her looking down at him, and he looked up at her, and a smile formed from one side of his face to the other.

Your mom could feel herself sucking in water as she screamed.

She noticed in her terror that his grip around her legs had loosened, so she pulled back her right leg, feeling her foot brush against something both hard and soft at the same time. Something she knew, with horror, was attached to his body. Her right foot, being completely free now, she extended until it reached the side of his smiling face, and when it did, his smile disappearing, she kicked off it, feeling his grasp against the thigh of her other leg going loose.

She then paddled up to the surface, her empty jean shorts still falling through the water, yet to the touch the lakebed. By the time it had, your mom had rocketed above water, to the sight of your horrified dad.

“Oh thank god!” he screamed.

She began to run to him, feeling the water drag at her waste as her feet touched ground. “Anthony! He…”

Suddenly, he popped up in the water just behind her and grabbed her by her waist.

“No!” she screamed, feeling the horror come back all at once.

She made it a few steps forward, with pure momentum taking her alone, until she stopped and was beginning to be dragged back in the direction of her attacker.

Your dad watched in horror as the woman he loved was dragged away from him by her hips and into the water he had been relieved beyond conception to see her rise out of only moments earlier. The terror in his heart, which was mocked by the grimacing smile of the man who snatched her away from him, caused your dad to scream in anguish.

And then suddenly, shocking even himself, he ran forward through the resistant water and yelled “get off her, you fuck!” and he pushed at the man’s shoulders, feeling him fall backwards from the sudden jolt.

Before your dad could grab her, your mom fell backward attached to her attacker’s arms, and as soon as he was submerged underwater, almost horizontal, with her up against his chest, he kicked off the lake bottom, and swam back clumsily with her back squirming against his hard cock, with bubbles ejecting from her face.

His feet, rotating toward the ground, touched bottom, and as he did, he let your mom go slightly, only to reposition his hands on her legs again. Your mom looked up at the sunlight shining into the water’s surface above, making it look dreamlike in its silvery sanctuary against the horror she had been dragged towards.

After he had grabbed her thighs, his face, just inches away from the ass he longed to see, and when seen, do so much more to, even if it meant either of them running out of breath by the time he was finished.

She screamed again, stupidly she thought internally, as she felt his hands grabbing at her bottoms, trying for them, desperately in need of his ‘jackpot.’ She thrashed about, without leverage to accomplish much, but her rapid movement made steadying his hands against the fabric hard.

As he scrambled against it, moving backward every so slightly each time he pulled her close, he felt pain when his heels smacked against something metal. He tried to side-step the angular metal object below him, but he half-tripped as he did, giving your mom her space.

She winded her foot back, in a repeat of the first time, and then aiming it at his face, she thrust her heel down.

The explosion of bubbles obscured her sight. The only thing she could do, under the deafening and blinding water, was feel. And what she felt next was the cradle of his hand against her sole.

She looked down, past the clearing bubbles to see him standing there, holding her foot with a smile.

She turned around and tried with her arms alone to swim off, but she felt herself being pulled down towards him, with his arms crawling up her legs as her ass got closer to his face, which she knew, against all wishes to not know, was grinning from ear to ear as his object of great and fleshy desire neared him.

When she was finally just inches from his chin, his left arm wrapped tightly around her thighs, his right fist shot up and grabbed the seat of her bikini-bottoms with real force, scrunching them up in his fist. And just before he could clear the bottoms from her ass with one thorough tug, making it naked to him all at once, her free right leg had found its mark.

It latched itself with a swimmer’s precision underneath his left knee, then pulling upwards, brought his ankle up until it exploded in pain after a dull thud.

He went to lift it, but felt it stuck in place. And he looked down, letting go of his prize, to see his ankle wedged in between the angles of some sort of statue. Two brass figures danced below him, suspended, with the female’s leg upwards, and the male’s hand holding it there. He tugged at it, even as your mom used the top of his head to kick off of, and she began to swim off and upward and away from his loosened grasp.

As he tugged now, both his hands free from the softness of her skin and filled with the hairy coarseness his left thigh, he felt the nook’s grip get tighter on him, so he tried to push his foot downward, in hopes of being able to step around the obstacle, but he was horrified to feel it incapable of unwedging itself.

He screamed.

Your mom stopped moving in the water, hearing the explosion of bubbles behind her, and she turned around, floating halfway between the lake’s bed and the water’s surface.

He looked up into her eyes, terrified, seeing hers looking down at him in shock. He tugged his leg, panicking more and more with each failed second at escape. He looked up at her, his only hope. The sun in the sky shining its reflection against the water, which glowed around her head like a halo.

He reached out his hand to her, his mouth opening like a fish as if to plead.

She looked down at him with worry, with fear, and with the slightest implication that she would come down to help him loose. She floated there, her limbs kicking and waving through water ethereally, her ass still visibly large from the front, a fact he noticed even as he struggled for life.

And just when he thought she was coming, she shook her head back and forth, and doing so only as a message to herself now. She turned her head, and then the rest of her body turned with it, and she looked upward toward the surface. Then, causing any shred of hope to extinguish within an instant, she began kicking in the water, aimed away from him. Away from his trapped ankle. Away from his screams. And away from his horrified face. Her butt jiggled as she went. It was the last thing he had his eyes on. His last sight of his mortal life.

And after a final billowing of bubbles from his last gasp, he took in water.

And then he floated there, retrained underwater by that doomed foot, his smile gone, his penis flaccid, and his fun over.

Your dad splashed at the surface of the water with his palms. “Babe! Babe!” he screamed.

Suddenly, a few yards off, your mom emerged from beneath the water, violently sucking in fresh air.

“Oh god!” he screamed. “Babe.”

As she floated toward him, exhausted, he grabbed her and held onto her tightly.

“I love you,” he whispered into her ear.

As he pulled her onto the shore, he fell backwards, and they both laid there, looking up into the sky.

For minutes, they just lay there, saying nothing to each other, neither expecting her to see the unwashed sun again just moments ago. And now she was free in a world of living and colorful things. She could see it all. It had all come back. All back with extra vibrancy, rich with meaning. Every sight, sound, and taste.

After it had set in that she was with him in his arms, breathing and wet, he began to allow himself to think. “Where did he go?” he asked her softly, between heavy inhalations.

Your mom lay there, silently, not saying anything.

“Huh?” he reiterated, and nudged his forehead into her shoulder with grateful affection.

“I don’t know,” she said, dryly. “I think he swam off.”

“Thank god!” he said. “I knew I hated water.” He laughed to himself. “We need to talk to an officer.”

She looked down at him.

He looked up at her, surprised to see her startled.

She grabbed his shoulder. “No,” she said, softly but firmly.

For whatever reason, he could see in her eyes that she meant it. He had never seen her be more serious about anything in her life. It had almost frightened him. He knew he wouldn’t be asking her any more questions. Not about what happened. Not now. And somehow in the back of his mind, he knew it would be never. And a piece of him, a very profound piece, was alright with that possibility. As if he was trading in that knowledge for the very real weight of her against his body, still intact, and still his.

When they both dried off, they got into her parent’s SUV by the side of the road, your dad in the driver’s seat. As they pulled away, your mom looked out the window at the pathway through the woods, leading to that clearing.

And as the car began to move, and the dark pathway got smaller in the rearview, she trembled in her seat.

Murderer!

You looked up at your mirror and saw nobody but you, lines of fright in your face, looking back at yourself on the bed. You looked back down and below you, where the photograph, and all it had shown you, was you saw the third news article.

EXPECTED THIRD WAVE OF BEACH ATTACKS UNEXPECTEDLY ABSENT THIS LABOR DAY WEEKEND

Your mom stood in the background of that photo, next to your dad.

You knew now why she made that face.

Murderer, your whispered to yourself.

The house was silent now, but for the sound of your mom in the shower. Her jean shorts and underwear sitting silently on the tile. The mirror filling up with steam.

That purity of sound was interrupted by a startling noise coming from further down the hallway. After a few moments of it, it began to dawn on you, as you tried to trace the sound from the cul-de-sac of your bedroom, that the sound was coming in from outside. From just out the backdoor.

You slowly opened the door to your bedroom and looked down the dark hallway. The sliding glass door to the backyard was open, and fresh daytime air spilled into the house. And you could hear it, just faintly, spilling in with it, the sound of gurgling. Like bubbles rushing from a sudden burst of oxygen. But slight and constant.

You took your first step.

Then your next.

And your curiosity fueled each successive step down the hall. By the time you were near the end, and almost out of the shadow, you hadn’t even noticed the showerhead in the bathroom had shut off.

The towel was pulled off the curtain rack by your mom’s hand. After a few moments, your mom pulled back the curtain and stepped out of the tub with a towel wrapped tightly around her body. She felt like dropping as soon as her foot reached tile, her exhaustion being almost overwhelming. After she continued through the steam, toward her mirror, she stood in front of it and yawned, and then she rubbed it free of steam with the underside of her fist in a counter-clockwise circle. The circle expanded as her fist went wide with each revolution. Her face was becoming visible in the mirror, though obscured in spots by her circling fist. And suddenly, caught even by herself, her one unobscured eye went wide, and then she stopped dead, her fist pressed against the glass, not moving. A clear circle, just slightly bigger than her head, existed before her, with the rest of the mirror still white with steam. She pulled her fist back and saw her eyes in the mirror looking back at her. Then she let her gaze wander over the mirror, directly at the blanket of steam just to the right of her own reflection. She stared at that patch of steam, and as she stared at it, her eyes, even in her reflection, were wide with apprehension.

She lifted her fist slowly and then extended it towards the mirror, and aimed it toward that very spot, starting to tremble as she did. And before her hand could reach it to clear the steam, she heard a scream from outside.

The bathroom door rocketed open and she looked outside and towards your room. She called out your name. You didn’t answer back.

She pushed the door of your room open and looked inside, calling your name again before she saw that nobody was there. Then she backed out into the hallway and looked at the end of it to see the glass of the backdoor had been slid entirely open. Warm air blew in and stirred the curtains.

She called your name again as she went down the hall. And as she saw a seemingly empty pool out there with nothing at the surface, her face clenched with an acute pang of worry and she ran toward it, frantically calling your name.

The light from the sun near blinded her when she exited through the open door, and by the time her eyes adjusted, she was startled to see a shape at the bottom of the pool. Her soul shuddered.

But before she could scream, and jump in to grab you from the pool bottom, something caused her to freeze. She looked down at the figure, it looking foreign to her, though still familiar. And then she realized. That figure wasn’t you. And what’s more, it appeared like it was moving.

Suddenly, horrifyingly, she felt two hands touch her back and they pushed with full strength against her. And just as she was propelled forward, feeling the hands disappear, she felt her towel being tugged violently from her body.

As she spun off her feet, her cover being unraveled as she went, she spun around mid-air to see you standing there, your arms outstretched with her towel in one fist, now unraveled almost waving through the air like a flag before going limp, as she fell backwards into the pool.

Her ass took most of the brunt of the pool’s flat surface, and she sunk below in a daze, losing momentum quickly, before she felt her cheeks touch the pool’s bottom softly. When she did, she pushed against the bottom with her feet, and she swam upwards towards the distorted rays of sun. She came to the surface drawing breath. And then she looked around and saw nothing there. Not even you standing by the poolside, though her towel sat flat against the concrete empty of her body.

She swam through the water toward the pool’s edge completely naked.

After moving through the water, feeling too exhausted to justify swimming, she began to feel strange.

She looked back up and noticed that she was exactly in the center of the pool and facing the wrong way. She turned around to see the lawn chairs and the open sliding glass door of the house. She began again to paddle towards it.

She could feel the exhaustion like a weight against her waist trying to drag her to the pool’s bottom. But she continued on, feeling the water pass between her buttcheeks as she went. She had never swam naked before, even when Anthony begged her to do so with him, not wanting her dad to catch her like that. Not wanting to give anybody the possibility of catching her like that.

She felt her limbs getting sore as she went and she had just realized that when she exited from the water, she’d be doing so naked, that you or any neighbor who happened to be watching, or who heard your scream, might see her in her state of undress. Her skin crawled in the water at the thought. And if it wasn’t for her exhaustion, she would have stayed in there, floating until she was sure she had her needed privacy to exit, even if it took until the sun sank behind the horizon. The only man who had ever seen her naked was Anthony. She wanted to keep it that way. She swore to herself she would.

Just a little bit further, she thought. That’s all.

Her muscles were burning. Her eyes struggled to remain open, even as she paddled. She wanted sleep so badly. Needed it for days on end. Without interruption. Without cold sweats. Without the screaming. Without the terror. Without the regret. Without the memory.

Almost there.

And then another minute past.

She stopped dead in the water and looked upward. The back patio was half a pool away.

She began paddling again, this time frantically, feeling the tension in the muscles and fat of her legs. The water an enemy to her. Keeping her from moving as quickly as she needed to. Brushing against her. Offering resistance where she only needed to glide. It was hostile. Angrily hostile.

She started paddling faster. Her legs kicked harder. But with every push forward, it was as if the patio was pulled away once more, or her pulled back a paddle’s length.

The water hated her. She knew it. She had no words to express such a thought, all dissolving in her mind into a formless goop. But that was what she felt.

Hatred against her.

Anger against her.

Loss.

Accusation.

The sense that it was catching up to her.

The sense that it had her at last.

And more than all those things, she could feel something in that liquid more than all the others.

Knowledge.

It knew.

Nobody else knew. Not even Anthony. But It did.

And that’s when she felt it.

Something had brushed past her ass.

And she stood in the pool, feeling her cheek for it.

And there was nothing there. But the feeling of something brushing past her wouldn’t stop, even as she held her hand over her cheek.

And then the strangest thing.

She could hear something. Like something moving quickly through the water. It was coming up like it started from deep down, meters underneath, hundreds of yards. And she could hear it getting closer to her, even with her head above the water, though when she allowed her ears to submerge themselves, she heard it more clearly.

In particular though, as she heard it gain and grow louder, and she got the sense that it could feasibly be within the small area of her backyard pool now, when seconds earlier it sounded from miles away, the first thing to take her curiosity by its thigh and pull it until it devolved into an unbelieving terror was when she had realized that what she was hearing, as strange as it was, she was only hearing it from her right ear.

Before she could scream, she felt a hand clutch at her right ankle.

Got ya!

She screamed.

The clutching fist tugged at her, tightly, securely, and dragged her away from the poolside with superhuman force and cruelty. Water, unable to escape past her flesh in time, was pulled against the drag, and only exited from the pressure by entering in through her butthole or vagina.

Your mom screamed, almost more from disbelief than all other things. The strength of the force, which blurred her vision into a kaleidoscope of blues and beiges, and the great inhumanity and fury which seemed to animate it, implied an intense and surreal malice and rage. Like she had been chosen as the particular target for this malice. As if she was its only deserving candidate.

Just as suddenly as she had been dragged, she felt the grip around her ankle loosen and then fade, and she lost velocity quickly and slowed down to a halt. As she floated there, scrambling for breath and relief, it took one sentence in her right ear for her to realize that that relief would be short lived.

I’ve waited twenty years for this!

She then felt a hand slap her in her right cheek under the water, and she spun around shrieking, only to see nobody floating there, under or above the water.

Then, without warning, she felt a hand grab her thigh and hoist it upwards, gaining leverage to then shove an entire arm under the thigh, while another hand started and finished those processes on her opposing leg.

Her tongue and voicebox froze as she felt her two thighs lift up in the water without anyone standing there to lift them. But the pressure felt as real as any she had known, as did the contact of skin against hers.

Fancy meeting you here after all these years!

And before she could make a sound, summon the strength to, she felt something tickling against the flowery opening of her pussy.

You just can’t escape fate!

And then before she could raise an objection, before she remembered how to speak, the tickling against her vagina transformed into a sudden and blunt insertion by some mystery object, stiff and soft at the same time, which penetrated deep within, her feeling it as deep as between her hips.

It didn’t take her long to realize what the object was.

Anthony can’t save you now!

Your mom’s mouth opened, and with great horror and rage, she began to wail.

Yes, scream for Anthony!

Let’s get his attention so he can watch!

She couldn’t see him until now, and above water nothing had changed. But below the surface, distorted by the pool’s violent ripples, his body began to take some sort of corporeal existence, even as his top half, including the upper arms where his forearms and hands should have hung from, was invisible.

Ah, is there any lay sweet than the one that got away!

The cock that your mom had periodically seen in her nightmares since that horrible, horrible day, went through her, in and out, in and out, mercilessly, in great disregard of her screaming and pleads of “oh god! No!”

You’ve truly aged like fine wine. I’ve been watching you from down there.

She shuddered as her body bobbed up and down rhythmically in the water.

I haven’t aged a day since. And for not a single minute have I thought of anyone else but you.

She looked down at the disembodied half-torso, arms, and thighs. And when she noticed the cock which entered her and the balls which slapped against her butt-crack, her whimpering picked up in intensity.

She had only ever been with one man. Before now anyway. She had always had a vague and irrepressible fear that he would come back. She didn’t know how, or what that had even meant, but even in the darkest coves of her mind, she never thought he would come back from that shadowy cove of her memory just to do this to her. Being female, she couldn’t have guesses at sex being used as the tool to make any wrong right.

The birth of your son has done wonders for this ass! He’s done wonders for this moment! The son Anthony helped you create! The one I’ve been watching, as closely as I’ve been watching you!

She wanted to just disappear as she felt her ass being supported and groped by the same hands that tore at her jean shorts and bikini bottoms. His index running through her crack. Her cheeks being pulled out wide by the other hand.

She could see over the eerie and isolated small of his back, down toward his butt cheeks as he pumped into her. “Oh god!” she shrieked at the ghastly surrealism of it.

He’s got nothing to do with it, sweetheart! He knows what you did! He’s seen it too. And now he’s leaving all this cheek to me!

Your mom’s heart chilled at his taunting.

When was the longest fuck session you had with poor ole’ Anthony boy? You never fucked underwater before, have you, you stupid bitch? What’s wrong, you have a funny feeling that I might have seen you from down there? Down in that darkness? So deep that not even light can get there?

Your mom felt naked now. Not just in body, but in mind and soul. He was exposing and violating all of it. His horrid whispering words in her right ear as real and painful to her as his cock inside her body. Not only was his cock reaching into places Anthony’s could never get to, his mind had penetrated places within her thoughts even her late husband could never know or find.

At your dad’s cabin, I was there! In every hotel pool, I was there! In your bathtub as you lay down after a long day at work, I was there! In the waters of Hawaii and Mexico with Anthony, I was there. Waiting, biding my time for when it was just right to float back up and come for you!

There was no consolation in the thought that your mom’s fear was justified. Whether her decades filled with the distant hum of unease, or the past few weeks, which assaulted her with an acute unbearableness. She had been right the entire time, though right wasn’t the correct word for a concern you never let bloom into language, and it bought her nothing. Not a second more of time nor sparing an action against her dignity. Her anger for her crime, and the strength of her sin in committing it, hadn’t lessened one grain of sand since that horrid day. She was finally facing the fate she had asked for.

All you had to do was free my ankle! You had the oxygen to do it. You knew how to swim, and how to swim well. You were in exactly the right position to help save a life, and you just left me in that darkness to die. You think you’re scared now? Think about how I felt!

The inevitability of it, rather than buy her solace, however strange and fleeting, only added to the dread, the sense of helplessness on a pathway going one way. Whether God had abandoned her, or whether he had existed at all, she was alone, and she knew that.

And Anthony, if he existed anywhere, in any shape, could do nothing now but watch, if he could see what was happening at all.

If only she could fool herself, even through all the hints that it was wrong, that it was him was holding her, making love to her now. But she couldn’t. She knew his body and voice. And she knew his spirit. And this spirit, rather than being that of her late husband, was one she had been unfortunate enough to cross paths with once. And she had escaped.

And now she knew, there was no escape any longer. Not from what had come already, and not from what was coming still.

You can feel it, can’t you? Ha ha ha ha ha! What little secret is coming up that pipe?!

His voice was high-pitched, shrill and mean. There had been nothing left of him that wasn’t manifested in the physical by the hatred he had felt for her in death. Hatred over the life lost. Over the dreams stolen. Hatred over the simple and anti-climactic lousiness of his death. Hatred for that little moment of her turning around.

The only reason why I chose you on that day was because I found you attractive! I had never wanted an ass so badly. It was worth the wait! Ha ha ha ha ha!

She whimpered in horror.

You’ll never know what it’s like to desire something so badly you have to take it! That’s why you left me there! Because you just couldn’t understand! You just couldn’t sit still for a second and let me have my fun! Only for a minute! Now the fun is never going to stop! Your ass will never be free from being my plaything.

In one violent and sudden thrashing, she was pulled down underneath the water. And when her eyes suddenly settled, she screamed in horror, when she saw she was looking at him, as he was on that morning, face to face. And what’s more. He was grinning at her.

You may kiss the bride!

Her grabbed the back of her head and pulled it close to his, and even as she squirmed violently, he still managed to place his lips against hers, and fill her mouth with his probing tongue.

You stood on the concrete, your bare feet hot as you watched the pool enthralled. Your cock had been rock hard as you watched your mom bob impossibly in the water. Her whimpering and look of terror thrilling you. Seeing nothing else in the pool with her, but knowing he was there, and seeing, through your mom’s body and its movement, that he truly was in there with her. And when she was dragged under, and you saw her screaming face, and the bubbles that projected upwards, you knew that she had met her old friend now face to face.

And what’s more, you knew that he had been grinning.

You watched as she came back up, and she jerked around the other way, as if being acted upon rather than acting. And then you saw a sight that seemed strangely familiar to you.

Care to dance! Ha ha ha ha ha!

It only occurred to her, though only from desperation, to call to the only person she thought she could trust. The only person who was on the other side. The man she had taught to swim. She had felt the need to teach him it for a reason. The overwhelming need, like some string pulling her toward some redemption in fate. Could it be for this? Could it be for this very moment?

She called his name.

“Anthony! Please! Oh god! Help!”

Ha ha ha ha!

He was howling directly into her right ear from behind.

Why would you think that would help? He didn’t die under unfair circumstances. He has no tether to this plane! There’s only one person who can help! And he’s standing aside watching! You just have that sort of an effect on people! I’m not the only one that wants to see you get yours!

Even after living through the impossible, your mom couldn’t stretch her imagination far enough to know what he had meant. It had been the one thing, even in dreams, that she hadn’t expected. The one horror she hadn’t vaguely guessed at the shape of, even through the sheet of a wordless intuition.

As you watched your mom’s leg, lifted up by some invisible force, and you watched her open pussy convulsing, as if it were being stuffed by something without form, you then saw it stop its convulsions and assume a state of rest. And that’s when you saw it. The sign that the redemption of his year’s waitings had been achieved. Because what you saw there, happening between your mom’s legs as she looked down at the invisible threat in horror, was a sudden, milky cloud of white emerging from the water itself.

Your mom watched the milky ejection and she wailed in a low timbre. It came through in four waves. The first being a thick and ghostly smoke within the blue, expanding out in all directions beneath and into her. The second almost as strong with the same texture and spirit. The third was a thin line, like the smoke rising from a cigarette in an ashtray. And the fourth whimpered out with a satisfied puff.

That hit the spot! Now was that so hard!

And just like that, without any fanfare, he had disappeared, and she felt her leg slowly dropping to the water below.

She took in deep breaths, feeling sore, feeling used, but strangely, now that it had passed, feeling relieved. The horror had come, it had taken what it was after, and it was now gone. And as horrible as it was, and as horrible as it would always be to remember, it was only now that she felt the guilt, that strange and constant albatross, leave her shoulders and neck for good.

“Oh Anthony,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She looked up at the back patio, and was surprised to see you standing there.

You looked down at her, noticing that her eyes had locked on yours for the first time since she had fallen in.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” she said with a defeated smile, and she began to move toward the pool’s edge, prepared to extend her hand to yours when she got there.

When suddenly, she felt a hand grab her ankle.

You thought that was it! A quick fuck and that’s all?

She began to scream as she extended her hand out at you, a look of terror in her eyes, now much more profound, if such a thing was possible, than anything that came before it.

You looked down at her, concern in your face. The sun behind your head in the blue sky, ringing it like a halo from where she struggled.

“Help!” she pleaded.

And to her shock, and to her infinite horror, you shook your head from side to side, more to yourself than anyone else, and you looked back at the house, and your body followed, and she watched with tears in her eyes as you walked toward the back door of the house and away from her forever.

Before you got the cool shade of the doorway, you heard a violent and sudden splash. When you touched the plastic end of the sliding glass door, you turned to look back at the pool. It sat there, completely placid at the edges, but for the final fading of a ripple which expanded until it broke form, and soon disappeared.

And then all that was left was the placid surface of the pool, looking as clean as glass.

---------------------------------

A week had gone by.

It would be the last really warm week of the year, and you came out into the back yard for the first time since that day.

The pool sat there, placid as ever.

You were in your swimming trunks.

You stepped toward the railing, and you walked down the steps. Your right foot touched the water first, and you were pleasantly thrilled to feel a sweet vibration against its sole, which wrapped itself around the rest of your foot as it was all submerged. Your other foot felt he same as it went in.

As you lowered your whole body in, stopping slightly to prepare yourself to lower your crotch, you felt that sweet feeling, like honey, all around you. Engulfing you. Sanctifying you.

You floated in that pool, and that sweet sensation like honey, until the sun fell behind the horizon, and the moon rose to the height of the sky. You looked up at the stars and felt the cool air against your skin. You had been floating on your back, just as your mom had taught you to do, with both her hands underneath you at your grandfather’s lake.

And knowing that you were alone in the darkness, you lowered your trunks, until you felt your hard cock coming out. You still hadn’t touched it since that day at the lake. You knew that now it was time. But rather than touch it with your hand, you allowed your lower half to fall within the pool, and when you did, your exposed member exploded into a delight unlike any other.

Underneath those same stars, a clearing in the trees stood near Howard’s Beach. Water sat beyond it, silent in the moonlight, reflecting the moon’s white beauty back into the sky.

Suddenly, the unbroken lustre of that image was rattled when a gurgling bubble rose to the top and popped, causing a slight movement of the water in the form of tiny waves.

Beneath the surface of that water was a strange object, one which would have drawn the attention of anyone who had seen it, sitting at the bottom of the lakebed. A white ray from the moon shone down through the water and onto the strange statue, which glowed white, multiplying on the beauty of what it seemed to be, two partner’s dancing, dancing into an eternity.

Suddenly more gurgling bubbles came from the head of the female statue being held in front by the male’s hands, her legs being held upward by her thigh.

From the front, the woman stood, her hair long, and her eyes big and beautiful, though they were extra wide, as if in a look of resigned terror and frantic hopelessness. She was completely naked. Her arm was extended forward before her with her palm open, as if hoping, against all odds, for somebody to grab at it.

Behind her, the male stood, wearing a raggedy shirt, though nude from the waist down. And as he clutched her close, his erect penis had been entered within the space between her legs. And though even in the statue’s stillness, it possessed a subtle illusion of movement. And as the woman looked off into the void of the lake, terrified in the darkness, the man looked at the side of her face, his face colored in contrast by a giant grin from ear to ear, and he stood there, in that suspended moment, whispering something into her right ear.

And he would be whispering that sweet sentence to her – forever.