Blackmere

Content warning: blood, death, gore

Nestled between two mountains, the small town of Blackmere sits on the side of a shallow lake, one too small to have a proper name. A forest grows off to its right, but the valley is high enough in altitude that trees don’t grow on the mountains surrounding it. 

With a population of exactly 1,853 people, the folks who live in Blackmere tend to know when anything unusual occurs. That’s why everyone knew, within a day, when Ms. Chrissy Wyatts went out swimming and didn’t come back.

This was particularly strange because the lake next to Blackmere was rather shallow, at a maximum depth of twenty feet, and also rather small, being more representative of a pond than an actual lake.

The next unusual incident was that her body could not be found. One would assume that since there is such little lake to search, they were bound to find her eventually. They did not. 

This could be explained in a million different ways, ranging from her being eaten by a predator to running off to the big city (though it was weeks away by foot and rather impossible to get to). 

What couldn’t be explained though, was that the same event happened twice more in the following weeks: two bodies, one of seventeen year old Maya Daves and the other of her older cousin, Jonathan Hurley. 

That was when the townsfolk knew something was wrong with their lake. 

This is the point in horror movies where the main character would go to the lake and investigate, but our main character, who we’ve yet to meet, was more intelligent, and agreed with the town council to block off access to the lake, for the good of the public. 

His name was Callum, though he went by Cal at all possible opportunities. His mother had blonde curly hair and blue eyes, as had his father—so naturally, he had straight black hair and brown eyes. His sandy skin was constantly blemished with cuts and scrapes that came from his job in carpentry, but he’d stopped noticing a long time ago. That being said, a long time ago to him was only about twenty years, namely, when he’d started. 

Cal, like everyone else, did not know what was going on with the lake. What he did know was that no one should go there. In fact, he helped build the fence surrounding the lake, along with a few others, to prevent anyone from going.

For another month or so, the town was fine again, happy to ignore the mystery hidden beneath the lake, until the disappearances started again. 

The only school in Blackmere got out at 3 PM, and, as soon as the bell rang, a flood of children talking and laughing would shove open the doors and run off home, or to someone else’s house, where they would spend the better part of their afternoons. 

Rex and Sophie Johnson weren’t even out of grade school, but their home was close to the school, and they could easily and safely walk there every day. They were Cal’s neighbors, cute kids who weren’t too loud or rude. 

That day, a month after the first round of disappearances stopped, Cal noticed Rex running home, breathing hard with a wild look in his wide eyes. Rex ran inside his own house, and then, strangely, ran quickly back out and over to Cal’s house, banging on the door with impressive strength for a seven year old. 

When Cal worriedly opened the door, Rex, still breathing hard, said, “Sophie. She’s gone. We were– we were walking and then there were… eyes.” He froze, staring at something that wasn’t there, just over Cal’s shoulder. 

Cal crouched down, as one does to speak to a small child, and pulled him in an embrace. “Where’s your mom?”

Sobs began to wrack Rex’s small body as he quietly explained that his mother, Katherine Johnson, was not in her house, where she was supposed to be, to meet her kids. While she was probably just getting one thing or another, it was very unfortunate timing. 

Unsure of what to do, Cal walked Rex over to his own home. Perhaps his mother was in there, and her son had just missed her. Taking the shaking little boy over to the couch where he could entertain himself with cartoons, Cal glanced around the seemingly empty house and decided to find out for himself if Katherine was there. 

Making his way up the stairs, he determined that she was, in fact, in the house, because of the loud set of footsteps that sounded in the room to his left. He headed in that direction, knocking on the door briefly before stepping into the room and… no one was there. 

But that wasn’t right. Someone was there. Or, rather, something. Not in the room, but in the small closet next to the mahogany dresser that almost seemed to have just clicked shut.

More cautiously now, Cal approached the closet, putting his hand on the handle and pulling to find…

A body. Maybe it once was Katherine Johnson, but at that point it was just a destroyed corpse crumpled on the ground. A dark substance pooled out around it and its skin was ripped and torn, whitish bits of bone showing through the shredded pieces of clothing still left on the body. The worst part was the face. The eyes were completely gone, seemingly ripped out of the skull, and the mouth lay open to reveal blood filling it and pouring out onto the hollow cheeks.

Cal stumbled back, horror filling him. He tripped over something that was certainly not there before and spun around to find… nothing. His spine prickled with the intense feeling of being watched, but with the curtain closed, nothing could possibly be watching him. Breathing heavily, he hurried back downstairs, calling out, “Rex, come on. You can stay with me until– until your mom gets back.” 

Using the momentum of the stairs’s railing, he turned quickly into the living room, where the television was playing some weird cartoon. Rex didn’t reply, so he walked around the couch, grabbing the remote as he did. And then he froze.

Rex was gone. The TV went silent as the realization struck him, and then he could only hear the pounding of his heartbeat and his heavy, fearful breaths. This disappearance was nothing like Katherine’s, and was in fact rather similar to that of Ms. Wyatts’s, because the child was gone without a single trace. 

Now thoroughly shaken, Cal ran out of the house, ignoring the car door that had been left open across the street and the toys that sat in the grass on the other side of his own house. Too panicked to notice the sharp silence, he bolted down the street to where the police station lay. Throwing open the double doors, the first thing he noticed was that no one was there. Hurrying back outside, Cal next went to the barbershop that sat next to the station. Empty. Every location he went to resulted in the same thing, until he found himself at the far edge of town, standing next to the fence that blocked off the lake. 

He stared at it. Everything bad seemed to have originated from inside of the wall, where three people had disappeared only a month ago. While it wasn’t easy to get through, Cal, as mentioned earlier, had helped build it, and knew a specific area on the other side of the lake that was particularly weak.

He broke through the fence easily and found himself staring at the surface of a lake that seemed darker than a month ago. Carefully, he made his way to the edge of the water. Something seemed to be moving inside. 

With nothing to lose, he carefully pushed his hand into the lake, only to immediately retract it as the moving thing bobbed up to the surface. An eyeball, completely unattached from anything else, floated in front of him. The pale sphere floated face-up, dripping with lake slime and mapped with thin, bloody veins in a gruesome display of where he was sure Katherine’s eye had gone.

Cal stared at it, paralyzed, as more and more eyes began to float up to the surface as well, as if his touch had triggered them. He scrambled back, falling onto his hands and knees as he tried to back up, but his back hit the wall, and he couldn’t seem to gather up the courage to move as the thousands of eyes now floating on the surface began to turn towards him slowly, until each and every dead, glazed over pupil was facing him.

Finally remembering to move, he forced himself up into his shaking legs and darted back through the hole he’d made in the fence. His heartbeat sounded loudly in his ears as he crashed into the forest, breathing heavily. He didn’t dare look back, for fear of falling, and couldn’t tell if the noises he was hearing came from his own feet or some monstrous creature behind him. 

After another couple minutes, Cal’s side burned intensely from the pain of running, so he slowed to a stop, gasping for breath and clutching at his cramp as he leaned back against the squishy bark of a tree. He needed to keep running. He needed to–

The forest was silent. It had been quiet before, occupied with just the sounds of birds’ alarm calls and wind rustling through the trees, but now even those sounds were gone. And the tree he was leaning against was squishy. Slowly, not breathing, he stepped away from the tree and then turned back towards it, only to fall away from it. His head hit the soft ground as he tripped on a root and was forced to stare at the canopy of leaves above his head. 

He wasn’t staring at a canopy of leaves, though. He was instead staring at a million eyes, and they were all staring back. 

Terrified, he glanced at the tree he’d been leaning against, now fully taking in the tree he’d previously thought to be nothing particularly out of the ordinary. The bark was completely gone, instead seeming to be a horrifying amalgamation of flesh and bone with glazed-over eyes coating it almost completely. 

Still laying on the ground, Cal felt something slimy work its way over his stomach. Trying to move out from under it in a panic, he found that it was holding him in place. With no way to move other than flailing around desperately, the ground underneath him went soft, and he began to fall. 

Nestled between two mountains, the small town of Blackmere once sat on the side of a shallow lake, one too small to have a proper name. Now, if one were to go there, for trade or for travel, they would find neither the forest, nor the lake, nor the town. Only blood and eyes are left there, connected to the flesh that climbs over the mountains in search of more.