Lake Bonewater

words 1617

Yet still low in the sky, the full moon held a promise to illuminate the surface of the lake. Black, smooth as a slick of oil, the reflections of the surrounding trees were unwavering, showing perfect replicas of their real living counterparts. There was barely a sound to be heard, until a splash broke the spell. Reflections rippled and gentle waves lapped the shore.
Could it really be that those things, only seen in nightmares, lived under these tranquil waters?

Ten years earlier.

‘Stop!’ the foreman yelled. ‘Don’t shift anymore dirt.’

The driver of the front-end loader, cut the engine and removed his headphones. ‘What’s up?’

‘Looks like you’ve unearthed something weird, Mate.’

The machine operator climbed down from the excavator and peered into the hole. ‘Looks like a skull, doesn’t it?’
‘
Yeah, but what has a head that size?’ The foreman tilted his head towards the dirt-encrusted relic. ‘Best not touch it. I’ll call the site owners.’


The site, next to the picturesque lake, belonged to the University and designated to house a new research laboratory. The Dean of the University seemed annoyed when informed about the find, concerned it might delay the progress of the new extension.

‘What do you want us to do? Call the police?’ The site foreman asked, whilst they both stared at the monstrous head.

‘God, no.’ The professor exclaimed. ‘They’ll halt the proceedings while they do some protracted investigation.’ He pointed down the hole. ‘I mean, it’s obviously not human. Is it even bone? It could be bloody plastic!’

‘So, what do you want us to do? Bury it?’

‘No, dig it up. I’ll get some of the science students to examine it.’


The relic lay, sheet-covered, undisturbed and forgotten in a storeroom for ten long years, until one day…

‘What the hell…?’ Julian gasped.

‘You ok?’

‘Take a look at this Chris, I wonder how long this has been here.’

The two research scientists crouched down on the dusty floor to inspect the skull.

‘It must have been here for years, perhaps as long as the facility. Someone probably knows.’

‘Let’s shift it into the lab and take a closer look.’ Julian frowned as he attempted to pick it up. ‘Give me hand, Chris, it’s heavier than it looks.’


Back in the lab the two men brushed off the encrusted dirt.

‘What are you thinking?’ Chris asked.

‘Well, if I believed in giants, I’d say that’s what it was.’
‘
We could start by taking its DNA.’

The DNA threw up some anomalies that neither man had seen before. There were familiar human traits, interspersed with both amphibian and reptilian markers and yet even more that didn’t correspond to anything terrestrial.

‘Look at these segments Chris, they’re moving.’


‘Yeah, you’re right. They seem to be rearranging themselves.’

Julian looked up at his colleague, his face green tinged from the refection of the screen. ‘It can’t be alive. Can it?’

Both pairs of eyes flickered towards the table on which the skull rested under the harsh lab lights. It appeared to be more of a fossil than something which once had been flesh.

Chris took his time before answering. ‘That’s impossible, and yet…’ he turned back to the screen. ‘There’s definitely something weird going on with this DNA.’

‘What do you think would happen if we injected some of the DNA into Charlie?’

As if he’d heard his name, the Chimpanzee jumped up and down and let out a scream.

Chris chuckled. ‘Yes, we’re talking about you.’ He opened the cage and Charlie leapt into his arms. ‘I dunno, it’s not what you might call ethical. But…’

Eventually, after much discussion, they decided it couldn’t do much harm if they transferred just a little of the skull’s DNA, after all no one would need to know.

The first sign of any effects were Charlie’s eyes. Perhaps if the young men hadn’t been on such high alert, they wouldn’t have noticed what was a subtle, but definite, change. His eyes, once pools of dark brown, had slowly changed into an elongated, reptilian shaped, green.

After several more weeks the changes became more obvious, so much so they moved Charlie’s cage from the lab into the storeroom where less people were likely to see him.

‘Have you seen him today?’ Chris seemed disturbed. You won’t believe it.’

‘What’s happened? You look as if you’ve seen an apparition, Mate.’

‘We’re in trouble if anyone finds out what we’ve done.’

Julian went into the storeroom to see what had concerned his colleague. But before he’d even opened the door, Charlie’s grunts and screams alerted him to the animal’s distress. His head had almost doubled in size and more amphibious in form. Gone was Charlie’s former cheeky grin, his gaping mouth held a row of sharp, pointed fangs, bared in a snarl, snapping viciously at the air. His fur had completely been transformed; the swollen body now covered in hard green scales. Where his hands and feet had been, useless, grotesque grey flippers hung limply, which made it impossible for the creature to grasp the bars of the cage. With wild shrieks of anger, time and again he hurled himself at the cage door. White faced, Julian turned his back on the wild creature and left the ensuring the heavy door closed behind him, but the shrieks and screams still resonated.

After they’d partially recovered from the shock of the ‘thing’ that Charlie had metamorphosised into, Julian and Chris discussed what they should do.

‘We can’t let anyone know, Chris. Our careers would be over.’

Chris exhaled; his voice shook. ‘We’d be accused of playing God. We have to get rid of it.’

Not being able to even get within touching distance of the ‘thing,’ as they’d taken to calling it, necessitated dispatching it by some other means. Neither man had access to a firearm, so it was decided to use the tranquiliser gun provided by the University, in case any of their primates became uncontrollable.

It took several darts of a non-lethal anaesthetic to immobilise the alien creature before they dared approach. At last, it dropped unconscious to the cage floor, where it lay twitching until they were able to lift it out.

Chris, loath to touch it, hung back whilst Julian carried it across to the stainless-steel workbench.

‘How are we going to do this?’

‘Very quickly.’ Julian relied before he gripped the scalpel and without hesitation, sliced across the throbbing pulse on the throat where there were fewer scales. A gush of green, viscous fluid splashed onto the bench and floor. The stench, almost chemical, hit them immediately. Chris turned away and vomited.

Later that night the two scientists carried the sheet-wrapped corpse down to the water. The deserted lake was still. Nothing disturbed it. Without a word they hurled it into the depths where hit the water with a splash and sank.

‘Julian whispered, ‘Now no one will ever know.’

But as the body disappeared into the darkness, the ripples in the water never faded.

It wasn’t dead.

A year later.

Strange happenings in the vicinity of the lake had been reported to the police. Dogs and cats disappeared in large numbers. Even a well-known homeless man who often slept near the barbeques and public toilets, hadn’t been seen or heard of for several months. Rumours swirled, conspiracy theorists claimed the lake had been poisoned, linking it to the research laboratory close by. Groups of protestors gathered daily outside the facilities buildings demanding answers about what really was taking place there.

Julian and Chris had returned to their brain cancer research, having been traumatised by their foray into random experiments with Charlie the Chimp.

‘Christ! Julian, have you seen the local newspaper?’

‘Now what?’ Julian snapped. He guessed Chris was about to read him another load of rubbish about the lake.

‘Look! A fisherman caught this!’ Chris thrust the paper under Julian’s nose. It showed a grainy photograph of a deformed fish.

‘Shit! Look at the size of its head. It’s massive.’

‘Yeah. Does it remind you of something?’

‘ I’ve told you, it’s nothing to do with us, Chris. It was dead!’

‘Ah, but was it?’


There were theories, especially from the elders of the population who were adamant the lake was angry. The site had once been sacred, a place of ancient bones and forgotten memories. When the decision had been made to flood it and turn it into a recreational lake, the powers-that-be had ignored the warnings.
Now, it seemed to some, the lake was taking something back.

When Charlie’s grotesque, twisted body had been unceremoniously dumped in the lake, the DNA cells from the skull recognised the lake as home. And so did he. From that night when Charlie’s body sank into the lake, the water changed. It darkened, thickened, became almost alive as it absorbed the DNA and reawakened an entire ecosystem which was never meant to exist on earth. As more inexplicable events plagued the town, the people began to demand answers, yet the police and health inspectors who’d searched the research facility, could find no connection.

Soon the lake became somewhere to be avoided at all costs. Children no longer enjoyed the play equipment or frolicked in the water on a summer’s day. Fishermen grew tired of catching inedible, mutant fish, which dangled uselessly at the end of their lines. The lake was no longer just a lake. It now teemed with the same DNA which had turned Charlie into what he’d become. After the rains it soaked into the soil, ran into the drains, infecting the town’s water. The people bathed in it, drank it.

Slowly, without anyone noticing, the aliens had begun their return.