Page 10

Chapter 10

Lillian

J ust keep swimming, just keep swimming…

It’s amazing how your brain will spin up the most unhinged commentary when you’re frightened for your life. I bolt out of the cave like a cannonball, stroking through the cool, deep water faster than I’ve ever swum in my life. It’s like the “curse” that Erik talked about made me a better swimmer in addition to letting me breathe underwater.

Eventually, the lake floor rises, and I find myself close to land. I surface without thinking, trying to get my bearings for a minute.

The sky is inky black, sprinkled with white stars. The moon is barely a sliver in the sky–which means that I’ve missed a whole day in this weird magic-induced coma. The night Tiffany and I fought was a wide crescent, so I must have been out for over twenty-four hours.

I shiver.

Wherever I passed out, I seem to have traveled or been carried far away from there. The land of the UP is just a black line against the dark surf way out in the distance. The strange little island I stumble upon appears to be miles from the mainland, nothing but pebbles, sand, and evergreen trees.

Fuck.

To make matters worse, my stomach growls, and I realize that one plate of sashimi wasn’t nearly enough to make up for a whole day of not eating.

I rise from the water and test my ability to breathe. It takes a minute, and more coughing than I’d like to admit, but eventually I get the water out of my lungs and my land-based respiratory system sputters to life.

I touch the side of my neck gingerly, and feel the little closed-up slits quiver beneath my fingertips.

Holy shit. I really do have gills.

And I’m still completely naked.

Welp. That’ll be fun to explain to Tiffany when I get back. And Dean, I guess. My family…

I scramble up to my feet and walk the rest of the way onto the shore. The temperature, while well above freezing, is chilly on my wet skin, and I start gathering twigs and sticks to start a fire for the night. Which gives me plenty of time to reflect and regret how few people in my life would be bothered by me returning from vacation with gills.

My family only sees me once a year, over the holidays. We keep our visits to a strict three day, two night protocol, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, just long enough that we don’t end up at each other’s throats and ruin next year’s annual visit.

They never approved of me moving to Chicago. But then again, they made it clear they weren’t going to let me be one of those millennials who moved back into their childhood bedroom after college. You know. One whose parents love and support them.

Tiffany has been my only true family for close to a decade.

And now, she’s starting one of her own.

Work is work. For years, I’ve been one of three assistants to an overpaid lawyer at a fancy commercial firm. The three of us rarely interact: only speaking enough to make sure we keep the boss well-caffeinated, his email inbox orderly, his calendar up-to-date, and his dry-cleaning picked up. I keep my head down. Put in my forty-five hours a week. And then…

What then?

What now?

The sticks in my arms poke and scratch at my exposed skin as I gather what I think is enough to start a fire. Of course, even if I stack it perfectly, I still need to start the dang thing, which is going to be interesting. At the cabin, we’ve always had matches or one of those stick lighters to catch the kindling. But as I dump the pile of damp wood down on the beach, I realize that I don’t even have so much as a newspaper to help get a flame started.

Exhausted, I plop onto a large driftwood log by my sad stick pile, and think for a second.

What am I going to do?

Even if I did have the energy to swim back to shore tonight, I can’t see well enough in the dark to know how long that could take. I have no sense of direction aside from the north star, which does not give me the Google Maps-level analysis of my surroundings that I’m accustomed to.

Besides, I’ve never even seen this island. How the hell am I supposed to know how to get back to the cabin, when I have no idea where I am in relation to the campsite?

I don’t cry. It isn’t worth wasting the tears.

Instead, I let out the mother of all sighs, find the two driest sticks in the pile, and start rubbing them together in hopes of getting a spark.

Fun fact: if you want to get the worst night of sleep in your life, try lying naked on a pebbly beach in the 40-degree cold with a bunch of smokey twigs by your face.

Oh, and bonus points if you can get your stomach to growl so loud it wakes you up. Multiple times.

It’s the fifth such time that my own hunger rings its alarm that I finally decide I’m done tossing and turning for the night. Shivering so much I can barely feel my fingers, I attempt to rekindle the smoldering pile of ash and sadness that is the fire.

I fail. It’s not surprising.

I’m so hungry my stomach is twisting in knots. I’m also still exhausted, to the point that it’s difficult to focus my vision. The glare of the morning sun on the lake is blinding. My eyes water every time I look out to better triangulate my location.

“What do I do?”

My voice is hoarse, likely from dehydration. Desperate, I trudge to the edge of the lake water and cup my hands to take a drink.

It’s no Fiji, but it is cold and surprisingly clean. I drink more, and more, until my stomach starts to cramp.

Weirdly, that pain doesn’t feel as bad to me as the gnawing emptiness I woke up with.

“Okay, well, that’s one necessity off my list. Now it’s just food and shelter.”

Two far more difficult tasks, if my ability to manage a fire is any indication.

A shift in the trees catches my attention, and it takes a moment before my brain can process it’s a squirrel.

Squirrel. Squirrels are edible.

Digging through my kindling pile, I find a still-green split twig that has some give to it. Then I fumble around the shore until I find some weeds strong and flexible enough to tie around the ends of the stick, and a little more searching yields some good-sized rocks.

A little bit of trial and error, and I’ve got a somewhat serviceable slingshot. I wouldn’t get any Girl Scout badges for it, I’m sure, but it’s a weapon.

And I guess I’m a hunter.

The sun is high in the sky by the time I feel confident enough to take this thing out for a spin. But luckily for me, the rodents of the island seem fairly confident in their safety around here. They don’t skitter away when I approach, which makes it easy to at least attempt to shoot them.

Of course, that ends after the third time I launch a rock at them, and they realize I am , in fact, trying to hurt them.

They rush back up into the high branches of the endless evergreen trees, where the canopy is dense and impossible to see through. Even if I could make out where the bark ends and squirrel begins, my aim wouldn’t be good enough to take one down from the forest floor.

My stomach growls again, and my shoulders sag in defeat. I wonder if I’d have better luck with fishing.

I graze a hand across my neck, where the closed slits of my gills pucker the skin. It’s all like some horrible nightmare.

The last thing I want to do is go back into the water, where the monster waits for me. Even now, I can still feel the way He hypnotized me down in the cave, flooding my body with unnatural urges.

Because it is unnatural, right? To be attracted to the idea of getting impregnated by a giant, ancient squid? Monster smut and Japanese brush paintings notwithstanding, coitus with a tentacle monster is a fantasy ideal. It’s fodder for dildo manufacturers and horny auteurs like Guillermo del Toro.

It is not something I agree to on a whim on summer vacation.

It isn’t something I sacrifice my actual, physical body over to out of curiosity.

No matter how curious I might be.

Looking down at the sad slingshot in my hand, I examine myself. After an entire afternoon of hunting down squirrels, my skin is covered in tiny scratches and dirt. My shoulders and chest are an angry shade of pink from the hot sun, and the soles of my feet ache from trouncing over rocks, pine needles, and sticks all day.

I venture deeper into the shade of the forest, switching gears to the idea of building shelter instead of hunting for food. After all, I’m a bigger girl. What are all my fat deposits for if not fueling me during my unplanned stint on a deserted island?

I can just picture my colleagues at the office now. “Oh, Lillian, you look like you lost some weight! What’s your secret?”

“It’s this new fad I tried over vacation. I call it the “Naked and Afraid” diet!”

I snort to myself, even though it isn’t all that funny. My coworkers don’t even look up from their laptops long enough to notice my existence most of the time. I doubt they’d spot me losing a couple pounds.

Will I even make it back to the office?

No. No, no, no. I’m not going to go all existential crisis in the middle of the woods. Pretty sure that’s Rule Number One in surviving in the wilderness. Focus on the positives, Lil. Like… mosquito season is over! That’s something to be grateful for, yeah? I could be starving, sunburnt, and itchy right now, and instead I’m just starving, sunburnt, and chafing from the sand in my crevices!

So much to be grateful for.

As I stack a bunch of pine branches into a pile to build with later, something catches my eye. Only this time, it’s way bigger than a squirrel.

Deer.

And as luck would have it, it’s a female deer. Which means it shouldn’t try to attack me, right? And even if it did, it doesn’t have any horns. So I could probably take it, right?

It takes a few steps into the small clearing where I’d been planning to set up camp. So far, it either hasn’t noticed me behind my pile, or doesn’t care, because it seems perfectly calm as it bends its neck, sniffs at a young sapling, and starts chewing at it.

I must be suffering from hunger-induced insanity, because in that moment, I swear this doe was sent directly from God to save me. I am woman, the fiercest and most dominant of this planet’s species, and I will devour this prey like my ancestors before me!

I straighten my arm and aim my slingshot for its eye. Of course, I miss, and the rock sails right past the doe’s nose, startling it. It bolts from the clearing.

And in its wake, just barely hidden in the trees beyond, I see the actual apex predator of this forest. With its glowing, yellow eyes.

Eyes that are now focused entirely on me.