Lucifer's Lottery

Jesus, Hudson thought. He watched her hang there, the nude body agleam, swaying ever so gently. The rope creaked several times, then tightened to silence.

(II)

“The lake,” Dorris muttered, “is empty.” How sane she was at this time could hardly be estimated. She’d been standing there on the pier for several minutes—six minutes, to be precise—when, sane or not, some modicum of reason began to wriggle back into her consciousness . . .

What happened to my beautiful lake?

Overhead, the white moon sliver beamed. Stars sparkled in gorgeous, deep twilight, and the cricket sounds that had abated so abruptly earlier began to resume. All that she perceived would’ve been normal again, save for one irrevocable fact:

The lake was empty.

She remained there, cockeyed, limp armed, and slump shouldered, her eyes holding fast to the vast black depression that had once held six billion gallons of water.

It’s gone. It’s . . . all gone . . .

A fleeting thought returned again to the young man. Still, his wheelchair remained at the end of the pier, and when Dorris was cognizant enough to look back out with her binoculars, there was no sign of him or the boat.

A crisp static sound made her flinch, like a radio with bad reception. Then: The walkie-talkie!

It, too, remained at the end of the pier. Her lithe legs took her desperately to the small device. She snapped it up—

“Hon?” she shrieked when she jammed in the talk button. “That you? Where are ya?”

The walkie-talkie crackled back, and within the burst of static she felt sure she heard someone speaking.

“The lake!” she blurted. “Somethin’-somethin’ happened, and the lake ain’t here no more.” She didn’t know what she was trying to say. “But wherever it went . . . I guess you must’a went with it!”

More static after she released the button to listen. But—yes!—a voice was responding, however weakly, through the shifting white noise. It said this:

“All hail Lucifer the Morning Star. We bow down and sing praises to his unholy name—”

Dorris stared at the walkie-talkie. There could be no mistake; she had heard the voice, and the voice had not been that of the young handicapped man. The voice sounded deep, wet, and rotten.

It continued, “It worked! In the name off all things offensive to God—it worked!” And there followed a guttering round of the blackest laughter.

Dorris dropped the walkie-talkie, not only from the shock of the hellish voice but from a sudden return of the massive crackling sound she’d heard earlier. Again, her shiny white hair began to stand on end, and then—

BOOM!

Just like before, Dorris was thrown all the way back to the dock entrance, to land hard on her back. It was that same bomb-blast sound, and the concussion that followed in its wake. Half-unconscious, she tossed and turned on the old wood planks, and after many feeble moments of this, she managed to crawl up another mooring post. She took one deep breath—

OH MY GOD!

—and fell back to her knees to violently vomit.

It was not the earthy, low-tide smell that so effectively sickened her, it was something else, an odor so obscene it nearly shut down her senses. Her stomach kept heaving, and when it was emptied, it heaved more. Her eyes stung and her head pounded from what was not only the worst stench she could ever imagine but actually the worst stench to ever exist on the planet Earth.

Bile hanging in strings off her lips, she then dared to look back out . . .

With that second incomprehensible boom, Lake Misquamicus had been refilled, but not with lake water.

With blood.

With blood, and body parts, and debris, and sewage, and nameless and unnameable creatures, and myriad else not of this earth.

Dorris’s screams flew out of her mouth like tossed ribbons. Fish with vaguely human faces broke the bloody surface to snap at her with doglike teeth. Skeletons, severed limbs, and even some severed heads floated by, some of which moved with impossible life. A shadow beneath the red water wove under the dock, sidewinding and clearly a hundred yards long. Dorris staggered backward, unable to close her eyes, fearing—and even hoping—that the evil stench would kill her in her tracks. Several dented kegs floated by, like oversize beer kegs. From within one of them, she heard a rapid beating sound as of frantic fists, and a shrill female shriek: “Would somebody PLEASE let me out!”

The lake teemed with sounds now, sounds Dorris had never heard and would never be able to describe. When she managed to backtrack off the pier, another trickle of reason returned in spite of the madness she’d born witness to, and from a tiny pocket in her shorts, she unconsciously withdrew her car keys—

Got to get to the car! Got to get out of here!

But just as she would turn to do so, she froze at another sound.

Footsteps?

Yes, a procession of wet, slopping footsteps, like someone in hip waders marching out of a shallow tidal pool.

And then, in the silverish moonlight, she saw that someone with her own eyes, the figure of a man—a very large man—marching out of the noxious water and onto the shore.

First one, then two, then three such men.

Doris continued to stare dizzily at the spectacle. Most of her sanity, by now, of course, had been corrupted by what she was beholding. As the shlucking footfalls drew closer, she saw that they weren’t really men at all but hideous facsimiles: great glistening slablike figures almost ten feet tall. Details of the physical bodies seemed half formed as though they were but massive clay dolls bestowed with only the merest humanity. Their faces barely existed, just slits for eyes, slits for mouths . . .

Dorris couldn’t move as the three things approached. Her heart was trip-hammering; she could only pray that it would stop beating before they got to her.

But it didn’t.

A wide shadow cast by the tinseled moonlight crossed Dorris’s face. She stared and drooled. The things seemed to be staring, too, at her, but not with eyes for they had none, but with gashes where their eyes should be.

They looked at her a while, then turned, then moved hulkingly away to eventually stand up near the bait house. They stood perfectly still, in a perfectly straight line, almost as if . . . they were waiting for something.

SomeTHING? Dorris’s faltering brain managed. Or someONE?

Perhaps the horror had ravaged her consciousness so intricately that she’d been tainted with some psychic inclination, because when she looked dazedly back at the blood-filled and blight-infested lake, she did indeed see someone else coming out—but not another of these looming clay monstrosities.

It was a man.

(III)

Oh, wow, I don’t like this, Krilid thought after he’d debarked from the Nectoport and sent it back to Ezoriel’s headquarters. Suddenly his fear of heights returned, with no more Nectoport to shelter