Page 4 of Beneath the Surface

His hearing went next: the men’s shouts thinned to an insect drone, the lake’s voice a distant gurgle. His face was pressed sideways in the muck, cheek mashed into sand and decomposed needles, the taste so sharp and mineral it nearly shocked him awake. He tried to breathe and got a mouthful of mud instead, the silt gritting between his teeth and scraping his tongue raw. There was a strange, bitter aftertaste, like root rot or old tobacco, and Quinn almost gagged on it before realizing, dimly, that he was already gagging on his own blood.

He couldn’t measure time anymore. Sometimes the world would go black, silent, the lake’s chill blossoming into a numb, humming peace—the kind of peace you read about in near-death anecdotes, a lightness, as if his body was unhooking from itself, drifting up toward the pale sun smeared across the sky. Then a boot or a fist or a scream would drag him back, fire through his chest and neck, and the agony would explode again, so bright he wanted to claw his own face off just to make it stop.

He could smell them: sweat and stale beer, the sour tang of old cigarettes in their jackets, and beneath it all the sweet, almost fruity stink of lake algae, pressed into his nose as they drowned him by the handful. He tasted blood and snot, felt the knots of twine cutting into his wrists and ankles, sensed the icy lake water seeping into his body through his wounds and his natural entry points.

A heavy hand fisted in his hair and wrenched his head out of the water. The light above was white and liquid, spattering through the trees in a thousand forking rays. The tall one leaned in and whispered, “Go ahead and scream, faggot,” and spat on his face. “No one’s gonna hear you but the lake.” His teeth ground against the shell of Quinn’s ear. “And it don’t give a fuck.”

The next punch caught him in the jaw, a perfect, glass-cutting hook that detonated white light behind his eyes and left his ears ringing, inside-out, like a bell struck underwater. His teeth clacked together so hard he tasted enamel, thick chips floating in the blood and spit pooling inside his mouth. Hands, rough and calloused, shoved his face deeper into the sand and pebbles. The grains jammed up his nose, gritty and sharp, so every breath flayed his sinuses raw. He tried to scream and got only a stuttering gurgle, lake water sluicing into his throat, choking any protest.

They worked him with a rehearsed precision. One held his arms, twisting them behind his back until the sockets threatened to let go; the other hammered his ribs, then his spine, then the back of his skull with a steady, hateful rhythm. The pain was everywhere, a million tiny fires, and Quinn’s vision filled with shooting stars.

They batted him around like a sack of potatoes, all leverage and deadweight, their boots skidding on rocks slick with his own blood. Once, when the broad guy missed and hit the side of Quinn’s head with his knee, he saw a spark—just one, a single blue-white supernova—and then the world blinked out for a moment, quiet as a prayer, before roaring back twice as loud.

He tried to scream. His jaw worked open and shut, but nothing came except a thread of blood and spit. His eardrum popped; for a heartbeat, he heard the lake’s voice, old and wordless, humming through the bones and the mud, as if the water itself was alive and hungry. Then the men’s voices returned, ugly and slurred, vibrating through the cartilage of his ears and into the hollow of his skull. He was just a conduit for pain now: a vessel for their hate and the lake’s chill, gushing it back out in blood and urine and the soft, pathetic noises leaking from his lips.

When their focus centered on his crotch and they began brutally kicking him between the legs, Quinn vomited. The blows came hard and vicious until he was sure they would smash his genitals up inside his body—or the rough tread of their hiking boots would simplyrip them off.Blood smeared his thighs and turned the water red as it swirled around his face, rushing up his nose, forcing him tosmellhis own abuse—a mix of briny urine as his bladder released again, and the coppery scent of blood.

5

They stopped, for a moment, to admire their handiwork. Hands ran over his scalp, searching for soft spots, then slapped his stinging cheek just for the pleasure of it. “Wake up, faggot,” one of them intoned, and another voice, higher and meaner, giggled: “Dude, he pissed himself.” They hooted, delighted, and Quinn’s vision filmed over with tears he couldn’t blink away. The tears were hot, almost scalding in the cold, and he could taste them, salt and copper.

The men released him, and Quinn flopped on the shore, half in, half out of the water like a dead fish, eyes glazed and sightless. His breath rattled in his chest, wheezed up his throat in labored, erratic puffs. He didn’t know if he was still alive or if he was observing the scene from outside his body. The pain remained, yet it felt dull, numb, distant.

The tall man bent down, passing through Quinn’s line of sight, but he was just a blur, his face fragmented into a million pixels. Quinn barely flinched when he seized his arm, his fingers digging mercilessly into Quinn’s chilled, tense muscle. His voice was rough and breathless as he spoke, “When they used to drown a woman accused of being a witch,” he panted in Quinn’s bruised and bloodied face, “they said if she sank, she wasn’t a witch, and if she floated, she was.” His grin curled into a sinister smirk, eyes glinting with malice as he exchanged a knowing look with his broad-shouldered companion. “Bet the same goes for faggots.”

“Let’s find out,” the other man replied, delivering a sharp smack to Quinn’s bloody, silt-smeared cheek that sent another jolt of pain radiating through his head.

Quinn gasped in his delirium of pain, barely conscious as blood trickled from his nose, mouth, and ears… maybe his eyes as well… or was it tears? He tried to writhe against their hands as they hoisted him from the ground, but every movement was a scream of pain, and he went limp, unable to fight back as his head lolled and his mind closed down.

They held him horizontally by his shoulders and ankles. He hovered just above the water’s rippling surface, the cold mist rising to meet him as they waded deeper into the lake.

No… please…

The words never found their way to his lips. It was over; he could feel the icy tendrils of the lake reaching for him, promising a slow, suffocating death as the lake's frigid water crept closer, ready to claim him, breath by breath, into its unforgiving abyss.

“One... two...” The men laughed with malicious glee as they counted down, swinging Quinn like a jump rope. Each thrust sent him arcing back and forth, his bare skin skimming the cold surface of the lake.

Quinn's mind blanked out, a static buzz taking over. The men’s voices faded to a distant muffle.

“...three...” The men jeered in unison, their voices dripping with venom. “Sleep with the fishes, faggot!”

Quinn felt his chest swell with a futile breath, the air tinged with desperation, as the men hurled him into the lake. For a moment, he was weightless—flying—and it was a peaceful sensation, almost serene. Then he struck the water with a force that knocked the breath from his lungs and sank like a stone. The icy water surged over his head, flooding his nostrils and filling his throat with a choking, suffocatingchill. A cascade of bubbles escaped from his mouth as the lake claimed him, drawing him down... down... deeper into its shadowy, murky depths.

He didn’t fight it… couldn’t fight it.

The world around him dissolved into a swirl of greenish-black shadows, the dim light filtering through the water like a fading memory. His lungs seared with an unbearable heat, and an excruciating pain radiated through his chest like a web of thorns. He tried to pull against his bindings, but the twine was wound mercilessly tight around his wrists and ankles, biting into his flesh with every desperate struggle. What remnant of strength that remained, drained out of him, and he let himself go… floating down… down…

He heard the distant roar of the men's triumph above, their taunts rendered muffled and hollow by the weight of the water, and then even that faded as Quinn tumbled deeper. The pressure built with every yard, cold compressing his chest. He couldn’t tell up from down; the world had become a wobbly, wavering darkness punctuated by a searing, hungry pain in his lungs.

Quinn’s ears rang with a soundless, internal scream as the lake’s cold compressed around him—an immense, seething pressure. He flailed weakly in pure survival instinct, his shins colliding with hard water and then with the sudden yielding of something slick and alive. In his suffocating panic, he saw nothing but darkness rimmed with blood-red, tasted nothing but copper and brine. A memory—wind through the birches, his mother’s voice calling him in for dinner, Emily’s laughter—flared in the darkness and was snuffed out by the vise of his lungs seizing, then spasming. He opened his mouth to scream and instead swallowed a mouthful of the lake, thick and silty and freezing.

It happened as his mind began to go—like a blackout at a party, a sudden drop through the floor. A shape pressed to his face: soft, glistening, and impossibly strong. For an instant, it was all mouth. It found his lips and pushed, and his jaw, slack with shock, let it enter—something rubbery, the diameter of his thumb, forcing a way between his cracked molars, over his bleeding tongue. The tendril—slippery, not cold but eerily warm in the gelid water—slithered deep, choking him, then kept going.

He gagged reflexively, but the thing pressed on, slick and insistent. It filled his mouth, his throat, and as it plunged, the urge to cough or retch faded, replaced by something new and terrifying—

It slid down his throat with impossible speed and precision, and as it went, his lungs, a hair from rupture, convulsed. Stinging, burning, a starburst of pain—and into that cavern of death, the thing burrowed deep and, impossibly, he breathed. Not water. Not air. A third thing, thick and buzzy, a taste like salt and static, carbonating his veins. The pain stopped. His chest expanded, skin prickling as blood thundered into his face and extremities. For a heartbeat, Quinn convulsed: he tried to cough, to retch, to scream, but the thing held him open, held him alive.

He could breathe, but the world tasted of brine and slime and the sweet, chemical rot of the lake bottom. His eyes goggled open. The world was no longer dark, but shot through with a greenish glow, a phosphorescent pulse radiating from the tendril in his throat. All around him, the water was alive—alive with a luminous scatter of filaments, blinding as a hundred fireflies beneath the surface, all converging on him. He screamed again, but now the scream was silent and internal. The thing inside him churned, then relaxed.

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