Family Tradition

“Once we’re done with our chores on the island,” he reminded her, patting the little gun in his belt, “this veritable treasure trove of Crackjaw eel will make me rich. I’ll buy you a new nose! And anything else you want. On this, you have my word.” Then James finally leaned over to help her up and—

“Whoa!” he shouted.

—his knees buckled and he fell overboard.

At the sound of the splash, Rochelle reclaimed her composure; this might prove a bit more serious than her nose. “Mr. James!” she cried out, looking over the edge of the boat. The lake barely rippled. She’d heard the splash but nothing else after that. “Mr. J—”

««—»»

“—ames!” M. Gerald James was able to hear beneath the water. Bubbles exploded from his mouth; something felt wrapped around him. He couldn’t see, and that was probably a good thing. He seemed to be cocooned in writhing snakes a foot thick, and pressed against an expanse that was like a cool wall of slime. The wall seemed to heave back and forth. James was blind beneath the treacherous water, and he was about to drown. Suddenly it was not blood that coursed through his veins but sheer electric terror, and just as suddenly, all the things he loved—cooking, being pissed on, Crackjaw eel, and committing murder—faded into nihility. All that remained was his life, which was now being clutched away by some—

Thing! James managed to think.

Whatever it was around him felt huge, more than a match for the thin debonaire pencil-mustached master chef. Nevertheless, within the moment before he knew the last of his breath would expel from his lungs and leave him to inhale lake water, a final superhuman burst of strength ensued. His legs pumped in the water as effectively as the back fin of a dolphin.

And suddenly, in spite of the stout snakelike thing girded about his waist, James propelled upward in the dragging water. Higher, higher, fighting to the last fiber of his living being, until his hands broke the surface, and he’d grabbed the edge of the boat, and then—

««—»»

—Mr. James hauled himself upward. Rochelle rejoiced…in spite of her smashed nose.

“Help me!” James wailed.

The side of the boat began to dip as Rochelle’s employer tried to climb back aboard. Something seemed to be holding him back, but Rochelle couldn’t imagine what.

“Help me!”

Bottomless, nose throbbing, and damp with urine, Rochelle bravely reached out. She grabbed James’ outstretched arm and pulled.

But the harder she pulled, the further the edge of the boat began to tip toward the water.

I’ll…sink the boat, she realized.

Something, indeed, was trying to pull back, something very strong and clearly much stronger than she.

Rochelle—

“Noooo!” James shouted.

—let go of James’ arm, if only for the common sense of self-preservation.

During the bizarre tug-of-war, James had managed to haul himself up to the boat to the point of his waist, but when Rochelle let go, he snapped back down, clinging to the edge now only by his hands.

“Help me, please!” his wet, manic face begged.

“Fuck you!” she shouted back. “It’ll tip the boat over!”

Rochelle then appropriately cowered in the stern, watching and shivering. In the final moments between the time her employer became her former employer, James regained a few precious inches, tipping the boat again as struggled to climb upward, and it was then that Rochelle, in the clean moonlight, was able to get a glimpse of the thing that had a hold of James.

It looked like a shiny, slick elephant’s truck that was wrapped around his waist.

Then the trunk abruptly tightened and—

“ARRRRRRRRG!” came James’ muffled scream.

—the entirety of his gastro-intestinal tract exploded from his mouth and landed in the boat. A final constriction quickly broke James’ back like a piece of dry spaghetti; a reflexive response caused his teeth to gnash which bit off the connective innards.

James body was pulled back down into the lake, leaving his guts in the boat.

Then—silence.

Rochelle shivered from the fetal position she taken up in the stern. She was sucking her thumb she was so scared. From the water, something long emerged, rising. It seemed to look down on her, and it was not an elephant trunk.

It slapped down wetly onto the floor of the boat, then it slithered about Rochelle’s waist. For one horrible moment she was able to see the vast thing that the appendage was connected to, then in one quick flex, it constricted, and, just like James, it squeezed all of her gastric organs out of her mouth.

Rochelle didn’t have time to scream; she scarcely even had time to feel pain, before the thing lifted her up and then pulled her down into the water.

The last sensation she detected before death’s inevitable embrace was her flesh being sucked off her bones like beef strips off a skewer.

««—»»

When Bob regained consciousness, he quickly realized he was still alive, then just as quickly wished he were dead. He could see nothing but black, but he could smell.

Oh, could he smell.

He smelled the devil’s toilet.

One whiff of the caustic, evil odor and he thought his head might explode like a firecracker in a hard-boiled egg. Any inhalation he took felt like death seeping through his lungs and into his blood.

He seemed to roll over logs of slime. Anything he reached out and grabbed was pestiferous. But as he tried to crawl toward what he sensed was upward, his hand landed on something that felt familiar.

His flashlight.

He snapped it on, roved it around—

And screamed.

What he’d fallen in was a corpse-pit, an endless one. His sanity snapped. A mindless swipe of the light showed him a cavern of slick skeletons and moldering corpses, descending down into a chasm whose depth he could not calculate.

And since humans needed oxygen to live, he was forced to continue breathing. The pit was hot and humid. Nameless bugs and worms crawled on his hands each time he tried to crawl away. The only problem was…there didn’t seem to be anything to crawl away from.

Then the flashlight slipped from his hand, clunked away into foul darkness. Bob lay stranded in utter black again.

Until…

Was it a hallucination? As his hand sunk in warm corpse-meat and rot-slick bones, his eyes seemed to detect the most minute variation in the darkness.

Starlight and…the moon.

Yes! he thought, crawling upward more rapidly over the mountain of human kindling. Above him, he could see it.

He could see the opening.

It was like a flap of some sort, the same ingress, no doubt, through which he’d fallen. It was an opening back to life!