Scary Stories, Rituals, and Urban Legends

I work at a lake, body parts keep washing up on shore

I'm a county park ranger. My beat includes a big lake and an even bigger campground. I enforce rules, patrol the water, and troubleshoot electrical hookups when campers can't tell the difference between 30 and 50 amp plugs.

I have to admit, the park is pretty pathetic: an uninspiring spread of dusty, eucalyptus-dotted scrubland ringed by barren hills. The only real attraction is the artificial lake: 5,000 filthy acres of swimmable, fishable, boatable water. You'll never catch me touching that water, though; one year they drained some of it and found a layer of human shit three feet deep. Now look. I used to be a cop. I've smelled dumpster corpses in the dog days of summer and hoarder houses crowded with dead animals. But the smell of that giant underwater shit-cake baking in the July sun tops it all.

Anyhow, ours is the only campground this side of the county with a constant, active ranger presence. There's good reason for it. It's a huge, rural park. We have issues with vagrants and meth cookers. Also, any time you pack hundreds of drunk campers in tight quarters a few yards from the water, you're going to have problems. People drown. Trailers catch fire. Idiots pilot boats when they're drunk and end up killing each other. Body parts wash up pretty regularly: fingers, toes, the occasional limb. Legacies, I guess, of accidents and suicides. At least once a summer, some gangbanger shoots a rival gangbanger and traumatizes everyone in the park.

Yet they keep coming, every summer, without fail.

Now, park rules dictate that the lake stays empty from 10pm to 6am. No swimmers, no boaters, no exceptions.

So when a camper complained about a rogue midnight sailor disturbing the peace in the wee hours of July 26th, I had to take care of it.

Stepping out of the air-conditioned ranger station into the hot night was a special kind of torture. Heat descended immediately, thick and suffocating as a quilt, so dense it felt hard to breathe. Moving through it was like walking through water. I could almost see it: veils of soft red and bruise purple, shimmering just past the boundary of human perception.

It was a little better out on the water. Still dispiritingly hot, but thinner, somehow. Breathable.

I steered the patrol boat past the dock and circled the perimeter. It took a while; the lake's almost eight square miles and the boat's a puttering little relic of a bygone age. I shut it off periodically, listening for the telltale echo of a motor. Nothing. Just wind and the lapping of water against the boat.

The lake has a few manmade islands. Nothing fancy, just mounds of dirt covering infrastructure access points. When the perimeter proved empty, I decided to check them out.

I pulled close to the biggest one and killed the engine. Here, far away from the RVs and tents and campfires, the temperature was almost bearable. I looked up impulsively. A vast array of pale stars spiraled across the velvet sky. I caught sight of the Big Dipper and smiled wistfully. What I'd give to be able to fly, to float up into the tatters of cold, wet clouds and drift under the starlight.

I shook myself and scanned the island. Just rocks, litter, and dry vegetation and their unsettling shadows.

I heaved a sigh and continued the search.

Right around the time distance and darkness reduced the island to a dim shadow, I sighed again and shut off the boat. I looked up the sky, and frowned.

The stars were different.

In the early hours, stars have a high, cold look to them. But these were warm and multicolored: yellow, gold, swampy green and dim, dour red. I'm a little fuzzy on my constellations, but I know the Big Dipper. I'd just seen it.

But it was gone. In its place were flowery arrays, like fireworks set off at a great height and frozen in place.

A shudder crawled down my back. I spun around, dimly aware that my heart was pounding, and saw a boat.