WARNING - This story contains graphic violence

By Eric B. Anderson

From the darkness, the wind whispers across Lake Taknuk.  It whispers my name.

Celia put down her pen and looked to the window.  The wind howled and hammered the cabin with a steady onslaught of snow and ice.  The dark interior walls were suffused in lamplight and the warmth of the fire burning in the hearth, but neither afforded the slightest comfort.  Sweat slicked her thin, aged skin, glistening in the flickering light. 

She took another drink from the glass.  The heat of the room had warmed the liquid.  She grimaced.

Bitter.

With trembling, withered fingers she picked up the pen and continued.

###

We have always lived on this lake.  For four generations, the Mulrays have been as much a part of this lake as the water that spills across its banks, as the woods that surround it, as the sky that hangs over it.  The roots of the weather-etched oaks that conceal our cabin hold the ground in a fierce grip, their beginnings laid against the earth like exposed knuckles, digging their fingers deeper, ever deeper.  Such is our claim on the lake.  And its claim on us.

It’s dark tonight, a black, moonless darkness that drapes the trees and the lake in a death shroud.  If this is to finally be the hour of my demise, I shall welcome it.  I have become so very tired.

###

“Mother?  He’s coming, Mother.”  Mary’s voice echoed down the hall.  The wood of the long hallway was lighter, newer than the weathered oak of the outer walls.  Celia heard her daughter’s footsteps shuffling slowly, cautiously closer.  She could envision Mary’s fingertips tracing the walls of the narrow hallway, dancing lightly over picture frames and mirrors, inching forward, betrayed by blindness. 

The strokes of her pen became more hurried.

###

The troubles began before I came into this world, and may continue long after I’m gone, though I pray this will not be the case. 

Many of the natives that predated my family feared the lake.  Early settlers had named it Taknuk, after the Indian tribe that first lived on its banks.  But that is not the name the natives used. 

“Sica,” they called it.  Bad.  Short and simply, “bad.”

The Micmac and Shawnee had long feared the Taknuk.  When my family came, the Taknuk had vanished, but their mark would still be felt.  None of the other tribes dared to settle near the lake.

###

A bulb above the kitchen sink blinked once and burned out with a sizzle.  Sweat began to seep through the thick wool of her dressing gown.  Her breaths were becoming more labored. 

###

It was 1836 when my grandfather discovered the lake.  The area was beautiful then, a lush green thicket of trees surrounding a placid body of water.  The sun glanced off of the lake at sunrise and bathed the banks in warmth.  It is no wonder that Seamus Mulray’s westward trek ended on the banks of this lake.  Seamus and his family built this cabin, a cabin that still stands one-hundred and sixty-three years later.

###

The howling of the wind barely masked the cries buried within. 

Mary appeared at the end of the hall, her white hair wild, haphazardly scattered.  The purple veins in her hands marked a path to long, claw-like fingers.  Her face still bore the scars of her blinding, deep gashes that trailed into the lines that old age had wrought.

“Go to bed, my precious one,” Celia said.  The words sounded more pleading, cloying than she’d intended.

“I’m hungry, mother.  So very hungry.”

“I know, beloved.  It won’t be long.”

###

It was not long after my great-great grandfather put up stakes on this land that the troubles began.  My father, Joshua Mulray, and his brother Michael were swimming.  The boys took to grappling with each other, trying to pull each other under, as young boys are prone to doing.  Although my father was older by several years, Michael was the bigger and stronger of the two.  After several minutes of playful wrestling, Michael got the better of my father, grabbing him by the shoulders and forcing him downward.  Even as my father began to struggle, Michael continued to hold him down, kicking at his waving arms, avoiding his frantic hands.  Finally, Joshua stopped moving.  Michael, realizing what he had done and fearing the worst, quickly grabbed the limp form of his older brother and pulled him to the shore.

My father was not breathing when he reached dry land.  Michael shook him and beat on his chest, somehow forcing the water from his lungs, but still he did not breathe.  Michael ran to the cabin, tears streaming down his cheeks, shouting for his father.  When Seamus and Michael returned to where my father lay, they found him sitting up, smiling, his cheeks flushed with color but otherwise apparently unharmed.  This of course filled Michael with both relief and rage.  The latter of the two being the stronger emotion, he shook my father and screamed at him until he was blue in the face, but my father continued to smile.  Michael later received quite a beating at the hands of Seamus Mulray, but that would be nothing compared to the fate he would ultimately suffer.

My father’s mind appeared to be elsewhere after that.  His family would talk to him directly, but he seldom answered with anything more than the same distant grin he wore the day the change occurred.  They began keeping their distance from him, fearing the worst:  that he’d gone mad.   They did not know that madness was not the worst of their worries, or that he was only waiting.

When winter came, the wait was over.  Lake Taknuk is set in a valley, surrounded by bluffs that are treacherous to cross in the best of conditions.  This, in part, was the charm of the area.  The lake was secluded and safe from the outside world.  Protected. 

But in the winter, it became a fortress, impenetrable.  In the winter, the natives left the valley, knowing that staying inside meant certain death.  Only the Taknuk had ever survived a winter in the valley.  But then, the Taknuk were devourers.  Cannibals.

When winter settled on my family’s land, Seamus, his wife Alice, and Michael found out what my father was grinning about.  In the lake, my father had seen what had become of the Taknuk, and he knew what he had become.

My father had seen death in the lake, and death was hungry.

By the time springtime rolled around, all that was left of my father’s family were the bones that he hauled into the lake at the first thaw.

Of course, my father was no longer himself from the day he entered the lake.  He was Taknuk, and the Taknuk were sica.

The Taknuk had survived for years on stranded settlers caught by winter in the valley or the stragglers from other tribes, left behind due to illness or injury.  In the valley, the Taknuk were the hunters, all else were prey. 

Ultimately, they became too greedy, too cunning, and too ravenous for their own good.  The best hunters tried to hoard food from the weakest.  The weakest were not lacking in cunning, and they soon set traps of their own, killing those that would deny them food, dividing the tribe into warring factions.  They did not see the error of this infighting until winter held them firmly in its grasp and it was too late.  My father says that in his dreams he can see the last two members of the tribe, shivering with cold, afraid to fall asleep lest the other attack.  By the time one man finally passed on, his flesh was so weak and damaged it no longer held any power, and the second succumbed himself shortly thereafter. 

But evil never dies.  It simply moves on.

Since the winter that my father first felt the hunger, more than a century and a half has passed.  My father took a bride, hoping for a son to carry on the family name, not knowing that death would not claim him so long as he continued to harvest others.  Shortly after I was born, he devoured my mother, succumbing to a craving deeper than sex or companionship.  He says he felt grief about that, but I’ve always doubted his sincerity, watching the way he attacks the last morsel of meat attached to the bone.  He must have felt something though, seeing that he has allowed me to live all of these years.

Of course, my daughter and I are hardly innocents.  I was given human flesh from the time that my mother was killed. I understand that I even partook of her, although I was too young to have any distinct memory of it.

Mary came about by accident.  It was no accident that I desired the man who became her father, but finding myself with child afterward was quite unexpected.  It made me wish that he were still with us, but of course that was not to be.  Winter was coming, after all. 

My father and I hid our cravings from Mary for years, until she was old enough to understand them, or so we thought.  We fed her the meat of an Indian woman, boiled to a deep brown, before revealing the dinner’s source.  We were not prepared for her reaction to the Indian woman’s corpse.  Mary’s eyes dangled from their sockets, her fingers drenched in her own blood, before my father and I could restrain her.  Her blindness ended up being more of a blessing than a curse, however, as we continued to feed her, and she stopped asking what it was.  I realize that the hunger had taken her, and she knew what the answer was, whether she asked or not.

Over the years, we’ve gotten efficient at gathering food for the winter.  At first it was difficult, and there were lean times, but as more and more people moved westward, there was little to worry about.  In the early 1900’s, there was a time when my father had to venture out of the valley for food, but he was a successful hunter and we seldom went hungry.  We kept to ourselves and kept up a good front for our inevitable neighbors, even growing vegetables out behind the cabin to allay suspicious minds. 

When the population slowly began to accumulate around us, we were forced to adhere to a strict rule of not harvesting any neighbors closer than five miles.  The last thing we needed was a lynch mob at our door.

We kept to ourselves, secluded from the rest of the community, and were rarely hungry.

By the 1940’s, there were roads running through the valley and we found that travelers were plentiful and nearly untraceable.  It would be more exciting to tell you that there were close calls, but the fact is that there weren’t.

But there is, as you might have guessed, another side effect to the life that was thrust upon us.  My daughter is nearly one-hundred and thirty years old, and I am twenty years older than that.  My father is eighteen years my elder. 

Most people nowadays simply assume that we are either husband and wife (although they don’t know which of us is the wife) or some other arrangement of family.  We are ancient, bony and ugly, but still healthy and stealthy as ever.  I suppose that our appearance has made hunting easier than ever.  Who would suspect us?

I may sound smug and a touch glib (and reading over what I have written, I realize that this is the case), but I am tired.  Desperately tired.

 ###

Celia stopped.  She could sense her father’s presence, getting closer.  She grasped the box of poison in her unsteady hand and dumped the remainder of it into the half-finished glass of cloudy water.  Grimacing, she lifted the glass to her lips and swallowed it down.

Her vision was beginning to blur.  Her handwriting became an unsteady scrawl as she rushed to finish.

 ###

The trees are dead.  They have aged as we have aged, withered as we have withered.  Their branches reach to the heavens like greedy skeletons, seeking to pull down the sky.  The banks of the lake are mottled and gray.  Beneath the ice, the water is an impenetrable black.

Sica.

The snow outside is deep.  The interstate, a four lane superhighway that arcs around the outskirts of the Lake Taknuk valley, was unveiled early in the fall and, combined with the extreme foulness of the weather, it has sapped the traffic through our valley to a trickle.  We were overconfident, lazy, and have failed to stockpile in recent months, knowing that there was more, always more.

My father has already taken our nearest neighbors, the Cavanaughs, and we are sure to be discovered in springtime.  The extreme chill of the winter has brought the mice inside, enticed by the warmth of our fire and the fresh corpses in the cellar; another recent addition, dug by father last spring.  Father brought rat poison from the Cavanaughs.  I’ve dragged more than one hundred tainted carcasses from the cellar thus far.

It has been weeks since we’ve been able to leave our home, and between ourselves and the rats, our food supply was depleted more than two weeks ago.  This morning I discovered Mary crouching in the darkness of the cellar, the bodies of dismembered rats littering the floor around her, the smell of fresh blood on her breath. The small amount of poison in their bodies doesn’t seem to have affected her.  The sight of Mary’s face, her cheeks smeared in flesh and blood, brought the realization that immediate and extreme action had to be taken.

We are ravenous. We’ve not gone this long without nourishment before, and I know that it wouldn’t be long before we’d suffer the fate of the Taknuk, if I were to let it come to that.  But I will not. 

Before I go, hear my final words of caution:  whatever you might find here, leave immediately upon reading my words and burn this place to the ground.  Leave and never look back, or run the risk history repeating.  This place is bad.  This land is sica.

May God look on us with mercy,

Celia Mulray

December 1999

 ###

Celia felt a creeping pain in her belly as the poison began to take hold.  She prayed that it would be enough for all of them. 

She looked up from her writing. Mary had not moved.  She stood at the end of the hall, breathing shallowly, listening.

“He’s back, Mother,” she whispered, her face taut with expectation.  “He’s here now.”

The knob on the front door of the cabin began to open.  Celia stood, stopping to retrieve the razor-sharp hunting knife her father used to skin the bodies.  The knife scraped the surface of the table as she pressed it into her shaking palm.  Her father had returned, and he had returned empty-handed, as she knew he would.  The bone-chilling winds and whipping snow wouldn’t have allowed him to stray far enough to find sustenance.

“Mother?  What was that noise?”  Mary stood, facing the door, her head moving from side to side.

 Celia plunged the knife deep into her own belly and yanked upward.  A burst of air escaped her lips, echoing the gasp that Celia heard her father utter behind her.  Hot, wet blood slicked Celia’s hands, pain slamming into her with the force of a sledgehammer. 

Mary’s head swayed back and forth, her nose wrinkling in staccato sniffs.  She was hunting.  With stunning quickness, Mary was upon her, her face buried in Celia’s chest with ferocious zeal, her chin slathered in blood as she gnawed.

As Celia swooned toward darkness, she saw her father appear over Mary’s shoulder, his face a mask of insanity.  Mary howled in a rapacious rage as Joshua tore at her hair, growling like a rabid beast. They clawed at each other, shredding flesh and cloth in a frenzied battle for the prey that lay before them.  Joshua was stronger, heaving Mary aside with a shove.  He yanked the knife from Celia’s chest and plunged it into Mary’s throat.  Mary continued to clutch at his back, consumed by a hunger more powerful than death, oblivious to her own pain.

As darkness overwhelmed her, Celia felt her father’s teeth scraping against her bones, tearing the flesh from her ribs.

The End