The Dark Beneath the Lake

The Dark Beneath the Lake

In a village where the lake wore its secrets like a damp shawl, nights could feel heavier than the daytime heat. The surface lay perfectly still, a mirror that refused to betray its truth. But when the wind dropped and the stars sharpened, something moved beneath—an answer in the quiet, a rumor sinking deeper than any boat's hull.

I kept returning to the old pier, drawn by a memory that wasn't mine but claimed to know my name. The children had once fished for stories there, and the adults spoke softly of the drowned who never left the bottom. They said the lake kept a library of shadows, and every ripple rearranged its shelves to hide what you'd rather not recall.

On the night I listened, the water breathed. Not a gust or a wave, but a long, patient exhale that traveled up the rope and into my bones. When I lowered my hand, the cold pressed through my skin as if the lake itself had pressed a cold finger into my chest. In the blackness below, I thought I could hear a city of fingers tapping against limestone, a distant market of fins and whispers.

We came for light and found the dark learning our names, then muttered them back to the surface so you would remember to forget.

The more I listened, the more the lake began to reveal what it had kept. The shapes on the bottom were not rocks but memories: a bell that never rang again, a boat that glided without oars, a girl with a harvest of pennies in her sleeve. The lake did not drown people; it kept them, in a quiet, organized archive where every life found a chair, every fear found a shadow to sit beside.

• The surface, if looked at long enough, betrays no fear, only the tremor of something watching.
• Bubbles rise in a sequence that feels like a sentence you almost understand.
• Salt on your lips lingers after you pull away from the rim, a forgotten taste of what lies below.
• The same ring of light appears, not where you expect, but where your thoughts settle when you think of goodbye.
• Whispers travel along the current, naming you as if you were already listening to your own undoing.

When dawn finally loosened its grip on the hillside, I found the shore untouched—the boat still tied, the rope dry, the air tasting of rain. Yet I carried a different weight, a sense that the dark had chosen me as its correspondent, and I, in turn, had started writing back.