Amrita

  The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,

  and the oldest and strongest kind of fear

  is fear of the unknown.

  She rode her stolen bike all the way past Edgewood and on into the national forest without stopping at home. Her parents knew she stayed out late sometimes, and they’d just think she was with Oliver. The two-lane highway was ancient, and she dodged potholes by moonlight. She’d seen the signs for Miskatonic Pond once or twice on family camping trips into the woods, but she’d never been there. It was too far to take a spur-of-the-moment walk from Edgewood, but too close to be interesting when the family wanted to go someplace. Karen Porter had said it was boring, and that had been that until her dad had mentioned that her grandma held her rituals there.

  She was halfway hoping Gilman’s church folks would be mid-chant when she got there so she could make nice and get some solid answers, but on the other hand, she wasn’t super anxious to see another raging tentacle monster. Who knows if they even use the place anymore? Go home, dummy. It’s nearly midnight, and it’s been a hell of a day. As tired as she was, though, the thought of turning around and heading home sounded about as satisfying as soggy Cheerios. She was gonna figure this out, dammit.

  About five miles past her neighborhood she saw the faded brown sign that said Miskatonic Pond Trailhead in grayed, peeling letters, an arrow pointing back into the trees. The pull-out just past the sign was deeply rutted dirt; nobody had ever bothered to pave the parking lot hidden behind a screen of trees. Only a dozen cars could have fit in the space, and from the look of the weeds, it wasn’t a popular hike. The narrow groove in the dirt winding back through the trees on the far side of the parking lot had to be the trailhead. The trees were thick enough that she knew she wouldn’t be able to ride all the way to the pond, so she dropped the bike. Hardly any moonlight made it through the canopy overhead, and the trail was dark enough to be scary. She wished Oliver were here. He’d have brought a flashlight.

  She clutched the headless statue in her hoodie pocket like a talisman. “Don’t be a baby,” she told herself, stepping out onto the trail. The trees towered a good fifty feet overhead, and a thin mist hovered over the composting leaves and dying grasses. All the night was missing was a wolf howling in the distance, she told herself sourly. The trail was easy enough to follow – it was worn a good foot below the forest floor, and if she ever put a foot wrong, the sloping ground guided her back to the center of the path. The only annoyance beyond her own fear was the occasional tree root that caught at her toes; she contented herself with swearing loudly whenever it happened. The bursts of noise reminded her of her own anger and strength as much as anything else.

  The forest opened into a glade up ahead of her that let the moonlight through, and she hurried forward, glad of the light. Is the pond that close to the road? It’s only been ten minutes. What she saw in the moonlight was no pond, though. The trail meandered through the open space and was swallowed into the forest on the far side, but she stopped, suppressing the sudden urge to run back to her bike.

  “Are you shitting me?” she muttered. Shadowed giants stood in the glade, standing perfectly still, each with one arm to the sky. They had to be twelve feet tall or more. The open space was completely silent. No wind, no bug noises, no owls. The world held its breath.

  After a long, tense minute that seemed to last the entire night, Amrita screwed up her courage and stepped into the glade. Nothing had moved; the things obviously weren’t alive. What are these things? She walked up to the nearest one. There, finally, a few feet away, she could see that it was made of rotting fiberglass. Stepping around to its front, she looked up and laughed.

  It was a Big Boy. They were all Big Boys, the enormous, stupid-looking statues that stood outside the burger chain stores with a big tummy, swoopy hair, and a shit-eating grin as they held their burgers in the air.

  Amrita remembered hearing that they’d shut down most of the stores in the state a few years ago. What did a place do with their Big Boy statue once they tore the joint down? Ship ‘em to the ass-end of Indiana and haul ‘em out to the woods to decay in peace, apparently, because there was a dozen or more of the things in little clusters around the glade. The color of this statue’s checkered overalls had faded to squares of gray and white, and its burger was covered in bird shit. Walking around it further, she saw that the half of its face that got the most sun had rotted away, rough fiberglass strands sagging in the gap, the smile opened into a silent scream. The hole in its head made its sidelong glance panicked instead of coy and playful. The one across the way was missing its arm. Another had sheared off at the waist, its aggressively cheerful smile staring at the stars.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Everything comes to Olmstead to die,” she whispered. She left the statues behind as quickly as possible. The moonlight that had been such a relief before now left her feeling exposed, and she hurried back onto the dark trail. She no longer thought she’d find a cultist bonfire at Miskatonic Pond – if anyone ever took this trail, those fiberglass statues would have been full of birdshot holes and graffiti – but she was determined to see what she could find nevertheless. My grandmother used to come here. Maybe she left me a message. That was stupid, but she wanted to believe it anyway. Somebody had to help her understand what was going on, and somehow her dead grandma was her best option.

  Twenty more minutes of stumbling in the dark finally brought her to the edge of Miskatonic Pond, which looked like more like a lake from where she stood at the edge of the trees. Willows and oaks crowded the shoreline, their branches dipping down to drink from the shallows. The moon glared at her from both sky and water. There was not a soul in sight.

  Now what? she wondered. This was where her dad said his mother had performed her rituals and whatnot, and Amrita had imagined there’d be some sort of park or open space for people to meet… but all she saw was forest and water. No wonder nobody hikes out here. Why even bother with the sign? She picked up a clod of dirt and chucked it out into the lake, where it gloomped into the black water. Shit on a shingle. I might as well go home. This is pointless.

  She was about to turn away when the moonlit ripples from her dirt clod moved strangely in the water off to her left. The expanding circles refracted and rebounded along a straight line, almost as if there was a bridge there or something. She didn’t see anything there, but her curiosity prodded her. She wound her way through the trees in that direction, tripping over vines and the thick underbrush that grew close to the water. Finally, after much quiet swearing and a little lost skin on her ankles, she reached the shoreline near where she’d seen whatever it was.

  There was nothing on the water, no pier or footbridge or anything. She pried up a rock from between two roots and tossed it out into the water, repeating her earlier experiment.

  Splash-CLACK. There was something right under the surface of the water, and it was hard. Fishing in the underbrush, Amrita found an old, rotten stick as long as her leg, brushed off the dirt, and poked it out into the water a foot out from the shore. It jabbed into a hard surface only three inches down. The same thing six inches to the right, the same thing another foot to the left. Ditto another foot out from the shoreline. Again and again she prodded at the hidden hardness until she found its edges. There was a submerged concrete something as wide as a sidewalk just under the water’s surface.

  “Why in the hell?” she muttered. It extended out from the shore as far as she was able to reach with her stick. Who makes a bridge underwater? Where does it go?

  She looked out over the black water. Moonlight glimmered faintly over everything, but everything was nothing but leaves and water. She could see the green leaves bleached gray by the moon on the far side of the huge pond. Except… She peered across the water, squatted and then stood again, shifted to one side and then the other. The indistinct foliage directly across from her moved more when she shifted postion. It was closer than everything else. There’s an island out there. If Grandma Rajani was doing weird shit out in the forest, what better spot than an island with a hidden bridge?

  Bracing herself, she stepped into the water. Her shoes and socks soaked through instantly, and water started wicking up her jeans, but the walkway underfoot held firm. It felt like concrete. She kept one hand on her lucky statue in her hoodie pocket and used her stick in the other as a sounding guide as she shuffled forward. Maybe this wasn’t a bridge after all; maybe it was just the footing for an old pier or something. Amrita was more than willing to get a little wet in search of the truth, but she didn’t much like the idea of suddenly stepping off into deep water because she’d been wrong.

  There were a few spots along the edges where the concrete had eroded and sloughed away under the water, but the center was solid and she kept moving. The closer she got, the more clearly she could see the little island. It was nothing but a little wooded hump of earth maybe thirty feet wide, its trees knotted and wild. It looked like maybe the middle of it had been cleared, but she wouldn’t be able to tell until she got closer. It was a good two hundred feet from the shore to the island, and even with the hidden walkway it was slow going.

  She was maybe twenty feet away from the island when she realized that the clear space she’d seen amidst the tangle of trees had something in it. There was a circle of standing stones like a miniature Stonehenge, the worn natural pillars pressed right up against the trees that ringed them. In the middle was some kind of table or maybe an altar. The moon had shifted just a little during her journey, and the silver light now gleamed down on its surface. Amrita froze, wishing Oliver was with her. There was something on that table; a motionless hump of red and black that glistened wetly in the moonlight. It could have been anything – a pile of decaying leaves, a dead buzzard, somebody’s wet coat left behind – except that when she looked again, she saw a pale arm sticking out from the center mass, fingers dangling off the edge of the altar. There was somebody dead out there. Dread wormed through her belly, and Amrita suddenly knew she’d made a mistake coming to Miskatonic Pond.

  Then something fastened around her ankle and yanked hard, and she was floundering in the water. She screamed, clutching at the concrete beneath her, but something had her, and it towed her effortlessly out into the water. She didn’t have time for another breath before she went under. Down, down she went, and black water claimed her.