Beneath Blackwater Lake
Nobody in Bellweather went swimming in Blackwater Lake after sunset.
It wasn't a law.
It wasn't even a particularly serious warning.
It was simply something people knew.
Don't go into the lake after dark.
When twenty-year-old Caleb Mercer asked why, the bartender at the only restaurant in town gave him a strange look.
"Because that's when they wake up."
Caleb laughed.
His friends laughed too.
The bartender didn't.
Three days later, they went swimming.
There were four of them.
Caleb.
Mara.
Evan.
And Lily.
They arrived just before midnight.
The lake was perfectly still.
No wind.
No insects.
Not even frogs.
Mara noticed first.
"Doesn't this place seem quiet?"
Caleb shrugged.
He jumped in.
The water was freezing.
They swam toward the center.
Evan brought an underwater camera.
At first, the footage showed nothing unusual.
Dark water.
Floating particles.
The occasional fish.
Then Evan pointed the camera downward.
Something was visible beneath them.
A shape.
Straight lines.
They thought it was a sunken dock.
They dove.
At twenty feet, they could see it more clearly.
It wasn't a dock.
It was a structure.
A wall.
Stone.
Perfectly constructed.
They followed it.
The structure continued farther than their lights could reach.
There were windows.
Doors.
Stairs.
A road.
A town.
Beneath the lake.
They surfaced immediately.
Nobody spoke for several minutes.
Then Lily said:
"There's a town down there."
Caleb laughed nervously.
"No."
"I saw it."
"So did I."
They returned the following afternoon with sonar equipment borrowed from the university.
The scan showed something enormous beneath the lake.
A rectangular formation approximately three hundred feet long.
The professor examining the data dismissed it.
"Probably geological."
Caleb showed him the footage.
The professor stopped talking.
He watched the video twice.
Then asked:
"Where did you get this?"
"Blackwater."
The professor became pale.
"You need to leave that lake alone."
Caleb asked why.
The professor refused to answer.
That night, Evan woke screaming.
He had been sleepwalking.
His feet were wet.
There was mud on his bedroom floor.
Nobody understood how.
His bedroom was on the second floor.
The following night, it happened again.
Then Caleb.
Then Mara.
All three began waking at exactly 3:13 a.m.
Always standing near water.
A sink.
A bathtub.
A toilet.
A puddle.
Lily was the only one unaffected.
Until the fifth night.
She woke to someone knocking on her bedroom window.
Her apartment was on the third floor.
She looked outside.
There was no one there.
But water was running down the glass.
From the inside.
She touched it.
A handprint appeared beneath her fingers.
She moved away.
Another handprint appeared.
Then another.
Dozens.
All pressing against the window from the wrong side.
The next morning, Lily called Caleb.
No answer.
She called Mara.
No answer.
She called Evan.
Someone answered.
But it wasn't Evan.
A voice whispered:
"Come back."
Lily drove to Blackwater Lake.
The others were already there.
Standing at the shoreline.
Barefoot.
Staring at the water.
Caleb turned.
His eyes looked wrong.
Not empty.
Not possessed.
Just distant.
"We found the stairs," he said.
Lily backed away.
"Caleb, what are you talking about?"
He pointed toward the lake.
"There's a door down there."
The water behind him began moving.
Something was rising.
A human hand broke the surface.
Then another.
Then dozens.
Pale hands reaching upward.
Lily ran.
She never saw her friends again.
The authorities searched the lake for six weeks.
No bodies were found.
No equipment.
No evidence of a submerged town.
Eventually, investigators declared the three students missing.
Blackwater Lake remained open.
But the locals stopped swimming there.
Years later, the university professor who had examined the sonar data died.
His daughter found an old box in his office.
Inside was a map.
Blackwater Lake was marked in red.
Beneath it, her father had written:
"The lake was here before the town."
Below that was another sentence.
"The town was built around something."
And beneath that:
"They aren't trapped beneath the water."
"They are waiting for it to go away."
Some places are dangerous because of what lies within them.
Others are dangerous because of what is waiting beneath them.
