Originally published at Storytellersunplugged.

Richard Dansky’s short story, besides being an intriguing story about monsters and possibilities and what hides in the dark, challenges the reader to think about our preconceptions and how they affect what we see.

He introduces the story with this tidbit:

There are a lot of lakes and ponds in the Triangle, many of them man-made. There’s one I pass driving to work every day, and another that sits across the street from my office. You can go there on your lunch break and see people fishing or sailing or throwing frisbees into the water for their dogs to chase. I’ve even availed myself of the facilities a few times, and am pleased to report I’ve only fallen out of a rented canoe once, and briefly.

An admittedly unscientific sample suggests that most of those folks have no idea that Lake Crabtree (and the “lake” part is purely an honorific; it’s about as deep as a Bret Michaels interview and covers only slightly more territory) was dug out with backhoes and bulldozers in the not-too-distant past. Even the signs posted at various semi-prominent points don’t get the point across. Maybe they’re ugly signs. Maybe people have come up with their own stories about where the lake came from and how long it’s been around, and if things are otherwise, they don’t want to know. Either way, it works for them.

Which, I suppose, is the point of the story.

Enjoy.

***

THE DEEP END OF THE SHALLOW WATER

We got out of the car just before sunset, a half-mile down a gravel service road that we shouldn’t have been able to access. The spot where we’d stopped was a pretty one, a clearing in the second-growth pine woods that ran up the edge of the body of water we’d come to investigate. Soft dirt gave way to sticky clay down by the shoreline, and tree roots and tufts of grasses marked the bank all the way down. I could see reeds poking up through the water, stands of them here and there in places where the bottom was muddy enough to support plant life that ambitious. Across the way I could see the other side, red dirt and green grass underneath a purpling sky. It didn’t look terribly far away.

“What do you think?” Lester said, and grinned. His boots crunched on the white rock of the road as he moseyed around to the trunk, the better to pop it and get out the equipment. “Is this spot perfect or what?”

I stared at him for a minute, then pointed at the water. “Lester,” I said, “That is a pond.”

He nodded. “So it is, Tyler, so it is.” The trunk squealed open and his head disappeared inside as he began rummaging around.

“Let me try this again,” I said, and took a couple of steps closer to the water. “Lester, this is a pond. Moreover, if I am reading that sign there correctly” - I pointed to an innocuous piece of metal that proclaimed the pond to be “Flood Control Structure #32? - “it’s a man-made pond. Constructed, I might add, in 1966.”

His head popped out for a moment, now adorned with night-vision goggles. “Is it, now?”

I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and let it go slowly. No sense letting Lester drive me crazy this early in the evening, I thought. He’d have all night to do it, if I let him.

“Lester,” I said in my most reasonable voice, “stop that. What we are looking at is an artificial pond so small I could swim it without kicking my shoes off first. Hell, it’s so shallow I could probably walk it, and never have to hold my breath. If there are any fish in there, they were artificially introduced when this thing was built. There is maybe enough biomass in that whole thing to support one moderately anorexic snapping turtle as the local apex predator, and that’s it.”

“Really.” He sounded distracted, or at least he did until he straightened up too fast and bounced the back of his head off the inside of the trunk lid. “Owww.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” I stomped over to the car and relieved Lester of half the armload of equipment he was carrying. It was all there, the usual gear for this sort of trip: NVG, infrared cameras, motion sensors, microphones, and more. There was also a sealed thermos marked “rotten fish” in Lester’s wife’s handwriting, more proof that she was the most patient and sainted of women to walk this earth, and what looked like 250 feet of 50 pound test line with no other fishing equipment in sight. “You all right?”

“Yes, yes, fine. Just…put that down over there.” He waved vaguely toward the water. “Ow.”

“Don’t think self-mutilation’s going to get you out of answering me,” I told him, even as I did what he said. “You still haven’t told me why the hell you think we’re going to find something here.”

“Because it’s there,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world, and slammed the trunk with casual malice. “That’s the reason we go everywhere, right?”

I shook my head. “Lester, we go where there are genuine, verifiable sightings of cryptozoological specimens, not hysterical impossibilities.”

He joined me at the top of the bank and deposited his load of gear next to mine. “You’re absolutely correct, and again, that’s why we’re here. Give me a hand down?” Without waiting for me to answer, he slid down the muddy slope. His heels gouged long, smooth lines in the clay as he went.

I waited for him to find his footing, then started handing pieces of gear to him. “Les, we did not have a genuine, verifiable sighting here. We had a couple of drunk teenagers with a cell phone camera.”

“And the images they recorded clearly show something in the water. Which is why we’re here.”

“For God’s sake, Lester, where’s the breeding population going to come from? Old packets of sea monkeys?”

He shook his head, and brushed his hands on the well-worn fishing vest he always wore on trips like these. “You’re missing the point, my friend. Come on down here and I’ll try to show you.”

“Show me what?” I grumbled suspiciously, but by then I was already moving. “Another cell phone video?”

“No, not quite.” My heels hit ground and I skidded backwards. Only Lester’s hand caught me, stabilizing me from going over while I lurched to my feet. He said nothing until I was upright and steady, then gestured toward the far shore. “Now, look out there. What do you see?”

I peered out into the gathering dusk. Overhead, the sky had settled to a shade of deep-bruise purple, warning us that we were running out of light. The water’s surface was still, an indigo mirror reflecting featureless heavens. Across the way, a single heron picked its fastidious way along the shoreline, pausing every so often to stab at something small and unseen. Frogs, maybe, or minnows.

“I see a pond,” I said.

Lester shook his head. “No, you don’t. You know there’s a pond here, a crappy little hole in the ground they poured some water into, so that’s all you’ll let yourself think there can be. But what do you see?”

“Lester-” I started, but he shushed me.

“You see a flood control structure. Those kids? They saw a pond that’s been here all their lives, dark and scary and with something they’ve never seen the bottom of. Maybe their older brothers told them that it had a monster in it, and they believed.”

“Then they’re idiots,” I muttered, but Lester was rolling now.

“How deep is that water? What moves underneath it? What might have been buried, asleep in the muck for centuries before the return of the waters awakened it? From here, we don’t know; they certainly don’t, or they do, and their answers have nothing to do with what the engineers might say. Us? We can’t know. All we see is that-” he waved out at the smooth surface of the pond before us - “and that reflects all our thoughts back at us. It’s impenetrable, and beyond it lies whatever we can imagine living in those murky depths. Why shouldn’t there be monsters here, if those kids want there to be some?”

“Because there can’t be,” I said weakly. “Because there’s no room, and no food, and no history. There’s a million reasons there can’t be anything bigger than a catfish in there.”

“Ah, but there can, if we want it to be there badly enough. That’s the thing about monsters, you know. They come when they’re called. When they’re possible. When they’re told that they’ve always been there.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that he was crazy, that we’d agreed to do scientific investigation only, that I was done with this partnership if he was going to sprinkle magical pixie dust over everything I’d thought we’d stood for.

And from across the water, there was a splash. I looked up, just as Lester did, just in time to see the heron disappearing in a spray of black water. Its wings beat frantically against the water’s surface for an instant and then it was gone. A handful of feathers floated into view, bright against the dark outline of a vast shape moving slowly to deeper water.

For a moment, neither of us said anything. Lester looked at me. I looked at the ground.

“Did you…see something,” I heard myself asking.

Lester sounded noncommittal. “I might have.”

“Right.” I kicked a pebble toward the water. It hit with an audible thunk, then sank out of sight, instantly. “Why don’t I go set up the equipment?”

“Why don’t I help you?”

I shook my head. “Why don’t you keep an eye on the water?”

Editor’s pick by Heather A. Goodman at L’Chaim. Richard Dansky writes for video games and authored the novel Firefly Rain, a supernatural thriller. Richard blogs, along with a team of writers, at Storytellersunplugged. Storytellersunplugged brings together 30 authors, editors, booksellers, and publishing professionals to offer the reader short stories, tips on writing, and “behind the scenes” glances at the writing industry. On any given day, you never know what you might find: a bit of humor, a horror story, or a piece of advice to keep you typing the words that you love. One thing is for sure: This blog is for all who love words and, specifically, how these words come together to create a good story. You can find the blog here and subscribe to it here.