Lakeside

It was a Tuesday evening, and he’d forgotten to let the dog out again. He must have. Why else would Juniper be sat, panting at the backdoor, lolling her head around to stare at him every few minutes? He took another languid sip of his tea and listened to her whine and paw against it a few more times. Finally, he stood to let her out. 

Juniper stumbled back to give him room. Her tail flopped from one side to the other and she began to scamper around his legs.

“Juniper!” 

He grabbed her collar and attempted to shuffle her fluffy body out of his way. 

“Stop it!” 

Ever disobedient, she continued to dash around, paws clattering and sliding on the kitchen tiles. After struggling with the latch, the door finally swung open, and she was out – a glossy brown blur over the grass. He stayed to watch as she scampered around the garden.

The garden backed onto farmer’s fields and a portion of woodland, there was even a lake somewhere down the hill. But it was too cold, and too late to visit either of those. Standing in the doorway, he pressed his hands together to rub off the chill in the twilight air. It seemed too early for such bitter cold. The rosehips would be suffering. He looked across to the larch tree over the road, hoping to spot the robins that had been nesting there that summer. Even squinting, the darkness prevented him from making out the tell-tale lumpy shadow amongst the branches. 

There was a peculiar excitement in the air that irritated him. Something that raised the hairs on his arms and tingled along his scalp. He found himself scowling and was quick to shut the dog outside, instead returning to his tea as it grew cold on the counter. Then he went to sit at the kitchen table. There were a few crisp packets, cans, unopened letters to clear away, but he swept them to the side before he sat. And breathed.

He took a deep drink of his tea and grimaced. It had gone cold – despite the fact that he’d only made it a few minutes ago. Without its warmth, the chill in the room seemed to tuck in close to him, leeching his body heat. Outside, Juniper was barking at something, a squirrel perhaps, escaping along the fence. Over the stove, the clock read a quarter past 9 – she could stay out a bit longer, since he had no desire to go back out into the cold. In fact, he was already chilled. Placing a hand on the radiator told him the heating was off.

“Oh for Christ sake.” 

He glanced out the window at Juniper, who was still running in circles and barking intermittently, and then headed down to the boiler.

The cellar was far colder than the kitchen had been. He felt along the wall for the light switch and winced at the slight dampness collected on the walls. 

The light grumbled on. It buzzed at him as he approached the boiler - a great, hulking, off-white water tank crouched in the far corner. A bouquet of copper pipes erupted from its top and scurried off across the ceiling. Here and there, they’d begun to show signs of age. The seashell green of copper oxides crusting the fastenings and joints.

He found the ‘ON’ switch and flicked it. An LED encased in a red rectangle lit up and the boiler began to gurgle. Odd, that it had turned off. A frosty coating seemed to have formed over the switch, perhaps that had caused the circuits to cut off. 

The walk back up the stairs passed quickly, and the humming returned to their dingy quiet.

He poured the rest of his tea down the drain and set himself to making another. Holding a hand against the radiator while the kettle boiled, he began to feel the stirrings of warmth within. He chuckled to himself, relieved to have some heat in the house again and proud that he’d brought it about.

“Nicely done, old boy!” 

Returning to his seat at the table, he brought the steaming mug to his lips to blow. Warmth bled into his hands, and he settled back into his chair. The room seemed to get a little brighter and more comfortable, and he looked for Juniper.

Juniper.

His chair scraped along the kitchen tiles as he stood and stepped to the window – darkness had fully blanketed the garden now; she would be invisible. And he couldn’t hear her barking anymore. The latch took an age to pry open, but once the door was wide, he called out into the night.

“Juniper?”

No sound in response, not even a snuffling or scattering on the patio. The wind picked up and for a breath, he heard a woman’s laughter, before deciding it was an owl. He called out again.

“Juniper!”

Still no luck. He grabbed a jumper, his raincoat, and squeezed his feet into some battered wellington boots before entering out into the dark. It was icy and moonless, and the darkness formed a wall beyond where his eyes could see. The torch helped as he swung it from side to side, looking for a scrap of fur, a wagging tail, or any other sign of the dog’s whereabouts. With the fence close enough to reflect the torchlight, the time it took him to search it all felt ridiculous. But the way the darkness swallowed up all the unlit space encouraged him to double check everywhere, just in case.

His fingers had gone numb by the time he found the hole in the fence – a place where the dirt had been dug away to create a dark gap, a place where his torchlight was swallowed. As he crouched down to peer underneath, he heard a scratching. 

“Juniper!”

The sound ceased. His heart sank. He could see a glintof light just on the other side of the fence – if he could grab whatever it was, then it might explain where she’d gone. Lying flat on his stomach, he reached a hand under the fence. Not close enough. He squirmed a little bit closer, and the thing glittered again. He stretched even further through, readjusting his arm as his sleeve got caught on an old nail in the fence. It was so nearly in his hand. His whole arm and part of his shoulder was under now. The object seemed to be made of metal, and roughly the size of a two-pound coin. 

He didn’t see any harm in it, so he put his head through, and from there he could see it a lot better. It was definitely metal, and as he pushed even more of himself through, managed to grab its cool surface with one hand. 

He tugged but felt resistance. Frowning, he tried again to the same effect. Finally, he wiggled the rest of his body through and gripped it with both hands. It flew free and he stumbled upright. 

Juniper’s collar.

“Bollocks.”

He brushed the dirt off and cursed again: it was undeniably hers. The tag stamped with her name seemed to wink up at him from his palm. Scowling at the darkness folding in around him, he wrapped it in his fist. He looked both ways, up and down the backstreet, as though Juniper would be standing there waiting for him to follow. No such luck.

Using his thumb, he rubbed some more of the mud off it and shoved it into his pocket. 

“That bloody dog.”

By crawling under the fence, he’d lost precious minutes looking for Juniper, and thus precious minutes in bed. He scanned the torch over where he’d crawled through. How he’d managed to fit, he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t about to go back. His only hope now was out in the wilderness. Looking around him, he recognised the larch tree, and the tree line in the field far beyond – those he could see from the kitchen window. Nothing else was familiar. For instance, he hadn’t realised there was a path here. In fact, it baffled him. The torch granted a few metres of vision, so he could see the path but not much else. He decided the most decisive course of action was to follow the trodden grass, wherever it led. 

The night only deepened, and he felt truly lost as he reached the end of the path. Instead of turning back though, he reasoned that he’d already gotten this far, and that the dog couldn’t have gone much further. 

“Juniper?”

Blundering through the last line of trees, he came across the lake. Folk stories about the lake resurfaced - ghouls and spirits invented to frighten children. They still made his heart all the more eager for home. He swung around, trying to place himself amidst his understanding of the area’s geography - to no success. By all logic, he shouldn’t have made it to the lake, he’d only been walking for a few minutes. He checked his watch and frowned.

12 o’clock, it read, and all the hands were still. He scowled. It had been ticking earlier. He’d held it to his ears and heard its mechanical heartbeat muttering away. Since then, it must have stopped. When he shook it, nothing rattled or sounded broken. 

“That’s great. Just great.” 

But here it was, broken. And it had stopped dead on midnight. His eyebrows leant in to confer. It just didn’t make sense. 

He shoved his trembling hands back into his pockets and looked up. He would find Juniper and then march home to a warm house and a soft bed. 

Once more paying attention to the landscape, he realised the moon must have been hidden behind a cloud earlier that night, because now he could see the lake sweeping out in front of him, the hunkered trees on the far shoreline and the brass buttons of his coat. The full moon shone so brightly in fact, it cast a shadow behind him. Finding no need for the torch, he shoved it back into his pocket.

The lake was as flat as a silver penny, buried around the edge in soil and bulrushes. After a moment of squinting to be certain, he discovered that the blotchy disturbance at its nearest bank was Juniper, frolicking about in the moonlit water. 

“Juniper!”

She continued to splash as though deaf. He readied his lips to call for the dog again but stopped short. There was a figure by the water’s edge. 

She was stooped, ivory skin glistening like marble under the moon, and using one pearlescent hand to stroke Juniper’s fur. His relief at having found her was buried beneath a tide of other emotions, questions, and sensations. It was as if he’d turned to stone. He could no more approach than he could flee, and his tongue was firmly disobedient, slack, and useless in his mouth. The ground stretched out beneath his feet – the tremors from Juniper’s tail, pounding against the dirt in her effervescent, wagging-way. The water silently lapping against the shore. Even the creaking boughs of the trees that leapt up around them all. He was an observer, merged into the background by the contrast of moonlight against the night. 

The woman stood gradually, her spine unfurling to its full height. Juniper skidded around her ankles, leaping in and out of the water. The woman didn’t notice. She simply stared out across the lake before turning her head. Her neck twisted like that of an owl, the only part of her body retaining structure; the rest rippled like a silk scarf hung over a pole. Her eyes bulged; luminescent amber locked within the pale sphere of her skull. 

He fell backwards. Feet scrambling over one another, hands in the dirt, he only stilled once he was hidden within the tree line. Yet she hadn’t moved toward him. Instead, she’d bent back down and continued to fuss between Juniper’s ears. 

His heart returned to a calmer pace, and he stood, feeling odd aches along his arms.

“Juniper!”

He bent slightly, wary of the woman, and beckoned her over, refusing to take one step closer to the water’s edge. But she would not come. 

“Stupid dog. Juniper!”

It was as he hissed this final phrase that he heard the airy laughter again, and a strange splintering feeling began in his feet. Travelling through his ankles and up his shins, it fractured and froze his knees, then his thighs. With slow-dawning horror, he realised his legs were fusing together, bones swelling and cracking into one solid mass. 

The woman was watching him now.  He felt the sensation of falling or stretching, as though he were being drawn out into the shape of a spear, with its tip buried beneath the earth.

He could taste the soil filling his mouth, writhing dark through his body. 

The moonlight allowed him to see, though he wished he couldn’t – his trousers had been replaced by smooth, pale bark. The ground fell away from him while tumbling closer. His vision narrowed and expanded, and he cried out as the splintering reached his chest.

“Junip…”

The woman watched until a birch stood silent under the moon. Its pockmarked bark was wide-eyed and pallid. 

Juniper trundled over and sniffed about its roots. A snuffle of her nose in the dirt told her its scent was familiar, but then she lost interest and looked back toward the lake. Nothing but empty air and barren trees looked back.  

The dog wandered home, following the path that led her back under the gate. She hoped she’d get some food before bed; all this exploring had made her hungry.