Lost Lake-Tradup

Lost Lake

Troy Tradup

There are more than one hundred and fifty significant bodies of water called “Lost Lake” in the state of Minnesota. Very few of them are actually lost.

One comes close, nestled in a rough triangle of old-growth forest deep in northern Minnelac County. For reasons endlessly debated but never resolved, this stretch of forest was mistakenly left off early survey maps. Ownership of the trees on the land, if not the land itself, has been disputed by the Feds, the State, and the Anishinaabe ever since. None of these arguments has ever mentioned the lake.

Because the ownership issue has remained mired in court for decades, there’s been no development of this particular Lost Lake. No roads lead to it, no groomed beaches line its shores. There are no picnic tables, no porta-potties, no signs describing what species of fish live in the lake or warning fishermen to watch for invasive species; there are no fishermen.

Experienced hikers sometimes visit the lake just to say they have: it takes considerable effort to bushwhack through a mile of rough forest only to turn around and carve your way back out again.

Once in a very great while, less-experienced hikers will stumble upon the lake by sheer misadventure. If a rescue party is somehow alerted and able to retrieve them, these hapless souls subsequently become known, in local bars and outfitters, as “those lucky fucking bastards”.

Reed noticed the lake on one of the wall-sized maps in his father’s office and knew immediately he’d found the spot. The last road trip. The last adventure. The last summer fling.

Hunter had been arguing for South Dakota – Rushmore, Badlands, tacky souvenirs at Wall Drug. He’d taken the same trip with his parents when he was fourteen, just as their marriage was dissolving, and he harbored a vague idea that he could fix something that had broken inside him on that trip by returning now with Reed.

But then Reed saw the words “Lost Lake” and their destination was set.

“There’s a Lost Lake not six miles from here,” Hunter complained. “Not to mention fifteen other lakes within spitting distance.”

“Not like this one,” Reed said.

“Not to mention you live on a fucking lake,” Hunter said.

But they both knew Reed would get his way. He always did.

Reed’s father was one of the attorneys on the State side of the land dispute. He’d thrown the boys some administrative grunt work over the summer, ostensibly to provide them extra money for the end-of-summer road trip they wouldn’t shut up about, but really to keep them from lazing away the last few months over which he might reasonably expect to exert any parental control.

Reed’s father tried to be a presence in Hunter’s life whenever he could. He saw himself as a positive influence on Hunter and Hunter as a positive influence on Reed. Trickle-down parenting, he thought of it sometimes. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he liked Hunter better than Reed, but he saw things in Hunter that seemed to be missing in his own son. A certain thoughtfulness, a kindness, a deeper moral compass. Funny that, after many years of a certain type of lawyering, he found such qualities so appealing.

Still, there was a guardedness about Hunter he was glad he didn’t see in Reed. A sense of something held close, a hesitation. Hunter always seemed to be waiting for some sign or signal, but from what or from where, Reed’s father didn’t know.

He supposed it stemmed from the divorce, the disappearance of a real father from Hunter’s life, virtually overnight, the year the boys started high school. He and Hunter’s father had never been friends, but they’d been friendly enough. He couldn’t believe the man had simply cut the boy out of his life, cleaner even than he’d sliced away the boy’s mother. Shithead hadn’t even sent Hunter a graduation card.

Hunter wasn’t overly disappointed about South Dakota – he understood his secret hopes for the trip were just vague therapy bullshit. He didn’t really mind where he and Reed went so long as they went together. Even more than Reed, Hunter understood this trip would be the last.

They’d talked about a gap year, hiking around Europe, drinking in pubs, picking up Italian girls.

But in truth Hunter would head to NYU in September and Reed would leave for Colorado Springs. College. Then life. Their road trip days were ending.

“You know, there’s no trails or anything,” he told Reed. “Carrying in food and camping gear will be a major pain.”

“Pussy,” Reed said, although they both knew he was the lazy one. “So we won’t camp. We’ll do a day trip and spend the rest of the time trashing hotel rooms all over the Iron Range.”

“Swimming pools and movie stars.”

“Hookers and blow.”

“Complimentary breakfast buffets and townies with exotic social diseases.”

They spent their first night at a Best Western in Talbot and hit the woods early the next morning. Early for them, anyway – it was nearly eleven by the time they found the old fire road that provided the nearest logical entry point. They left everything in the car except their water bottles, a couple of protein bars each, a compass Hunter had earned in Scouts in middle school and a badass Jason Vorhees machete Reed had purchased at a horror convention. The plan was simple: quick hike, quick swim, back to the car, on to the rest of their adventure.

The “quick” hike took just over two hours, and Reed ended up swinging the machete nearly the entire time. Even hacking away the most obvious branches and undergrowth, the boys were scratched and torn and bloodied by the time they finally reached the lake. They’d sweated through their initial coating of bug spray and hadn’t thought to bring the bottle with them – they’d be eaten alive before they ever made it back. Still, they’d achieved their goal: Lost Lake.

“Wow,” Hunter said.

“Told ya,” Reed said.

The lake was bigger than it had appeared on the map, glassily calm and blinding in the late August sun. The majority of the mosquitoes had abandoned the boys at the treeline, no doubt to avoid both the oven-like heat out in the open and the enormous dragonflies that skimmed the surface of the water on their endless ancient hunt.

Out of habit, each boy checked his phone. No bars. A little surprising – there were cell towers everywhere now, even here in the boonies – but not particularly disappointing. This trip was theirs and theirs alone.

“Hey, check it out,” Reed said. “That wasn’t on the map.” He raised his chin toward a small island, really just a glorified hump of rock with a single scraggly tree perched at its center.

“And I bet you want to swim there,” Hunter said.

“It’s not that far. Ten, fifteen minutes. Maybe less.”

“Maybe more,” Hunter said. “When was the last time you swam that far all at once – and then back?” But he was already peeling off his t-shirt, bending to unlace his boots, eagerly anticipating the soothing coolness of the water on his myriad bug bites and scratches.

“Hey, wait for me.” Reed began to follow Hunter’s lead, hesitating a moment before scrunching his face in thought and then skinning down to his boxer briefs. “Don’t want wet jeans all the way back.”

Hunter laughed. “We could go naked, like real mountain men.”

“You’d love that,” Reed said. “But I don’t want any fish nibbling my dangly bits.”

“Oh, are there minnows in this lake small enough for that?”

Hunter removed his own jeans, only slightly embarrassed he’d chosen tighty-whities today. Not that Reed cared, one way or another. But that was an entirely different issue Hunter forced himself not to think about forty-seven times on any given day.

The boys each ate a protein bar and took a long glug from their water bottles. They picked their way over a small patch of rounded stones and rough weeds until they hit the proper soft sand of the lake bottom.

The lake was bathwater-warm near shore but grew markedly colder just a few yards out. The temperature difference coincided with a steep drop-off the boys could see through the clear water. Rust-colored sand, pebbles, a few darting minnows – then sudden inky darkness. They did a shallow dive, nearly in sync, and began to swim toward the island.

Both of the boys were decent swimmers, although not particularly disciplined. Hunter had spent a year on the swim team in ninth grade but dropped out after the business with his dad and remembered little if any technique, and Reed was strictly a self-taught lake kid. At roughly the halfway point, they paused to tread water and evaluate the continuing appeal of the island.

“It’s farther than it looked from shore,” Reed said.

“I’m okay if you are,” Hunter said. “We can soak up some rays once we get there, catch a second wind for the swim back.”

“Whose stupid idea was this?” Reed said.

They struck out again, fell into an easy rhythm, arm over arm, slow and steady wins the race. The island grew into something resembling a giant mossy turtle shell ringed by gray granite boulders and reddish rock that seemed to be shredding into plates and flakes of varying size. The water of the lake carried a distinctive olfactory tang, some combination of mineral and peat, but as they approached the island another smell took over every other scent.

“Jesus, what is that?” Reed said.

They reached a ring of shallows and worked their way up slippery plates of red rock onto dry land. There was literally nothing on the island that might be expected to smell so revolting. As far as they could tell, the only life on the rock was greenish-gray moss and the single wind-battered tree. The tree was bereft of even a lonely bird’s nest.

The boys crossed the island lengthwise and then zig-zagged across its center; the entire span was maybe the size of Reed’s father’s four-car garage. On their meandering second cross, they located the source of the stench.

“Is that a moose?” Hunter said.

“Was, I think.”

The carcass was lodged in a rough oval where rocks had tumbled away to form a natural catch-trap. It appeared to be most of a full-grown moose cow, although its belly was a hollowed-out cavern and each of its limbs appeared to be missing ragged scoops of flesh. It had been rotting in sun and heat and water too long for them to be sure of what was there and what was not.

“Wolves?” Hunter said.

“Probably,” Reed said. “Tore it up on shore but then it ran into the lake. Finally washed up here when it died.”

“Unpleasant way to go.”

“Circle of life, bud.”

They stared at the mutilated carcass another minute, then retreated back to their original landing spot. A breeze had come up and the smell wasn’t so bad now on this side of the island.

The boys sprawled on a flat bit of rock and let the sun warm their weary muscles. The difficult hike and long swim had taken more out of them than they realized; after a very short time, both were asleep.

They woke abruptly perhaps an hour later, buffeted by more than a breeze and the first tentative drops of a summer storm. Dark clouds obscured the sun and they could see sheets of rain at the far end of the lake, moving toward them at a rapid clip.

“That blew up fast,” Reed said.

“Do we tough it out or hightail it to shore?”

“How long did the swim take – twenty minutes?”

“At least.”

“Storm would probably be over by the time we made it back.”

“It’s cold as hell without the sun, though.”

Reed nodded and picked his way carefully down the rain-slicked rocks and into the water. Hunter followed but stopped abruptly when Reed yelped and splashed awkwardly back to the shallows. “Something bit me!”

He stood in ankle-deep water, blood streaming down his right calf from a ring of tiny puncture marks.

“Jesus!” Hunter scrambled down next to Reed and began scooping water over the wounds, trying to get a better look.

“I think it was a muskie,” Reed said. “Just a little fucker but the bite stings like hell.”

It happened once in a while – a northern pike or muskie grabbing a swimmer’s hand or a bare foot dangling off a dock. Flash of pale skin, a quick lunging bite, yelling and thrashing and instant chaos both out of the water and beneath the surface. The victim’s instinct was to wrench the hand or foot violently away; flesh ripped from a muskie’s mouth looked less like a bite and more like someone had run a bunch of razor blades through it.

Reed had gotten off easy. The fish had let go on its own, and the pinpricks on his calf were already clotting. There was a redness around each tiny hole and the bite sent little throbs of electricity up his leg, but otherwise he seemed no worse for the experience. A good story to tell when they got home. Maybe even his ex-girlfriend Shelby would be impressed for once.

But now the rain had arrived for real, solid sheets of chill water falling from the sky, and the wind had churned up whitecaps across the lake. The boys retreated back to the flat rock and huddled close, although their bodies didn’t seem to be producing much internal heat to share.

“At least there’s no lightning,” Hunter said, and a jagged bolt immediately cut across the sky, followed by thunder that hit the boys like a sonic boom.

They decided to wait out the storm, but the rain didn’t stop after twenty minutes or forty or even an hour. If anything, the wind blew harder and the waves grew increasingly more daunting.

To make matters worse, the bite on Reed’s calf began to redden and swell. The skin grew taut and hot to the touch. Reed began to shiver in a manner more exaggerated than the shivering they were already experiencing. Hunter straddled him from behind and wrapped him in a bearhug to try to keep him warm. One part of his mind realized he was really trying to warm himself in the waves of fever rolling off Reed’s body.

“I think we fucked up,” Reed said through chattering teeth.

“Not the first time,” Hunter said. “Won’t be the last.”

“I think that little bastard was poisonous. Are muskies poisonous?”

Hunter considered what he knew about muskies or any other fish. He’d gone through a shark phase when he was a kid, and Reed’s dad took both boys fishing once or twice every summer, but Hunter had to admit he didn’t know jack about fish unless it was battered, fried and on a bun, preferably slathered in tartar sauce with a big stack of fries on the side. His stomach growled at that – the last thing he needed to be thinking about was food.

“I think it’s probably just bacteria from the water,” he said. “Algae. Fish piss.”

“Fantastic,” Reed said. His shivering continued to grow more intense and now Hunter could actually feel the electric jolts of infection hitting Reed’s nervous system, twitching muscles in his back and chest, making his shoulders jump involuntarily.

“Hang in there, bud,” Hunter said. “We’re outta here as soon as these waves calm down a bit. We’ll get back to civilization and pump some penicillin into you, you’ll be good as new.”

They were silent for a time, each lost to thoughts probably best not shared, even between friends as close as they were. During a particularly prolonged downburst of icy rain, Reed pressed back close against Hunter and pulled Hunter’s arms even tighter around his chest. He let out a small laugh that seemed closer to a sigh.

“What?” Hunter said.

“I can feel your hard-on against my back,” Reed said.

Hunter considered how one was supposed to respond to something like that. He finally settled on basic best-friend bravado: “Shut up and save your energy. Stop worrying about my hard-ons.”

Reed laughed more openly, more like himself. “Remember sleepovers when we were kids? One of us would pretend to fall asleep first so the other could, you know … do stuff to him.”

“I remember you were always the one who pretended to fall asleep,” Hunter said.

They grew silent again. The storm raged. Hunter hugged Reed tight and the waves of heat rolling off Reed’s body felt like embracing a campfire.

Reed dozed for a time, then slumped into something deeper. When he jolted awake again, he looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was. It came back all at once. “I was dreaming about Shelby,” he said.

“Of course you were,” Hunter said. “The infamous handjob.”

“Well, what the hell was that? She whacks me off in the back seat of my car because ‘she’s just not ready for anything more yet’ and three days later she’s fucking David Marcado in front of half our graduating class at some party I wasn’t even invited to.”

“I’m honestly not sure which part of that story pisses you off the most,” Hunter said. “She is so far beneath you, bud. You need to let her go.”

“She said she thought I really wanted someone else,” Reed said. “But that I was just too scared to admit it.” He half-turned so he could look into Hunter’s eyes. “But I’m not scared. I would admit it. I’m just – not. I’m sorry, I’m not.”

“Reed, that seriously is not your failure,” Hunter said.

“Well, it’s not yours either. I wish you’d realize that.”

“It’s hard when you’ve spent your entire life failing one person or another.”

“You haven’t failed anyone, Hunter. Not me. Not your stupid-ass father. You had nothing to do with his leaving.”

Hunter thought of the very last words his father had ever said to him. He opened his mouth to respond to Reed, then thought better of it.

Reed turned back to face the lake. “I’m sorry for being an idiot, Hunter.”

“Then stop being an idiot,” Hunter said. They both laughed.

“Hey, check it out,” Reed said. “I think the storm’s finally clearing.”

The rain was indeed winding down, the waves sputtering and dying. It wasn’t quite dusk but the afternoon was gone and the sun was emerging from the clouds only to fight against the treeline on the western edge of the lake.

“Alright, let’s do it,” Hunter said. He helped Reed to his feet and watched as Reed attempted to put weight on his injured leg.

“Fuck, that hurts,” Reed said. “I don’t know if I can make it.”

“It’ll be better in the water. I’ll help you. We’ll—” He broke off his thought as he noticed a long shadow beneath the surface of the water three or four yards offshore. He was certain it hadn’t been there when they arrived; they would have passed right over it. “Is that a tree? Did the storm—”

“It’s not a tree,” Reed said. As if to confirm, the shadow flicked a tail and disappeared into deeper water.

“How big do muskies get?” Hunter asked.

“Not that big. Four feet, maybe.”

“That thing was at least six. Seven. Maybe longer.”

“Sturgeon probably,” Reed said. “They grow pretty big.”

“Jesus,” Hunter said.

“Sturgeon are basically swimming vacuum cleaners. Bottom-feeders. No big deal.”

“This one wasn’t on the bottom.”

The boys looked at one another but knew they had no real choice. They had no food or water, they were exposed to the elements, no one knew where they were. Hunter helped Reed down off the rocks and into the lake. They waded in up to their shins and surveyed the expanse of water they needed to cross.

“You’re right,” Reed said. “My leg does feel better in here.”

They eased their bodies into deeper water and willed their cold muscles back into motion. Hunter stayed close to Reed, but Reed’s injured leg didn’t seem too much of a hindrance. The key was to go slow, don’t waste breath on trying to talk. Concentrate on shore, the remaining power bars, eventually reaching the car and cranking the heat while they drove to the nearest emergency room or urgent care. Dinner that night, a hot shower, an iced Coke so cold it burned the back of your throat, or a beer, or many beers, or—

“Jesus, I’m thirsty,” Reed said.

They paused to tread water and catch their breath.

“Well, don’t drink the lake water, for god’s sake,” Hunter said. “We’re more than halfway to our water bottles and— ”

Reed’s head suddenly disappeared beneath the surface. He came up thrashing and cursing: “Shit! Fuck! Christ!”

Hunter was at his side in three quick strokes. Reed was beating at something in the water, under the water, and Hunter realized a small muskie was attached to Reed’s injured leg. The fish was maybe eighteen inches long, sinuous and determined. It juddered its head like a terrier shaking a rat and a jagged hunk of Reed’s calf tore away and disappeared down its gullet.

“Oh god!” Reed wailed. “Oh god, oh my god, oh Jesus fucking Christ!”

Hunter got one arm around Reed’s shoulder and clutched him by the chest while he kicked and stroked frantically toward shore with his free arm.

“It took a bite out of my leg!” Reed screamed. “It ate part of my fucking leg!”

Blood poured from the wound and trailed behind them, churning into froth in the wake of Hunter’s frantic kicking.

“Give me some help here, damn it,” Hunter said, and Reed calmed a bit. He rotated out of Hunter’s rescue embrace so that he could set his own arms back in motion. He’d gone only a few strokes before the monster hit him from the side.

This was the shadow they’d seen at the island; an impossible hulking monstrosity of shimmery tiger-striped muscle and a mouth that seemed nothing but teeth. The fish’s head was the size of a garden shovel and it rammed with ridiculous speed and force into Reed’s left side. It scissored its massive head back and forth, half in the water and half out, while its powerful tail drove its bulk against Reed’s body. Seven feet, eight feet – how could that possibly be? And, in the end, what did it matter to a boy all of five-ten and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds on a good day? The massive fish tore away a chunk of Reed’s torso the size of an ice cream bucket. Blood and flesh spilled into the lake and Reed screamed like nothing Hunter had ever heard before.

He grabbed Reed again, fought against Reed’s thrashing, and saw multiple flashes of brightness beneath them. Slanting sun hitting scales, stripes, fins, tails. Three of the flashes rocketed out of darkness to rip bites out of Reed – leg, leg, bicep. These fish were small compared to the monster, three or four feet long at most, but plenty big enough under the circumstances. Reed shuddered and moaned; his eyes rolled as blood poured into the water.

Hunter pulled, yanked, tried to swim, didn’t realize he was the one screaming now. He sucked in a mouthful of frothy red water and choked, vomited up water and bile and blood. Blood brothers, he thought inanely, and then Reed was grabbing at him, pulling him close. Their eyes locked. Reed’s beautiful brown eyes, now white-rimmed with terror; Reed’s beautiful face, the gorgeous clear skin Hunter had always loved and envied, now blotchy and turning gray.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Reed said. “Get away, get to shore, leave. Leave me.” A little one-footer darted in and ripped away Reed’s left cheek, revealing a gory strip of teeth and tongue. Reed’s face rolled into the water and didn’t come back up. The monster rocketed up from the depths, punching through Reed’s torso and back, exposing a brilliant white glimmer of spine. Hunter turned and swam like hell. He didn’t look back.

He expected the bite at every stroke. The piercing teeth, the shredding flesh, the blood in the water, billowing up around him. But the bite didn’t come.

Why Reed and not him? Why always not him, even in something as terrible as this? Why had he never been enough, anytime, ever, to anyone?

Why this lake and not overpriced junk at every tourist trap in South Dakota? Why Reed’s father taking him fishing and never his own? Why, in all the time they’d spent together, their entire lives together, why hadn’t he been … not enough to make his friend into something he wasn’t, that would have been ridiculous, he’d never even wanted that (except when he did), but why hadn’t he at least been enough to save Reed from this fucking nightmare lake?

Why—

He stopped.

At the edge of the drop-off, the monster muskie hovered in wait. Its head, perfectly still just beneath the surface of the water, was monolithic, its large eyes silvery and focused directly on Hunter’s own. Its pectoral fins moved just enough to keep it hovering in place. Its razor mouth gaped and closed, gaped and closed; its massive gills fluttered as if in tune with some ancient oceanic tide.

Hunter treaded water and stared at this prehistoric nightmare suddenly made flesh. The beast slid forward until its snout was nearly touching Hunter’s throat. Then suddenly it flicked its tail and disappeared into the dark.

Hunter waited. He continued to tread water. He was only twenty or thirty feet from the shallows, from land, from the rest of his life. He could see the clothes he and Reed had shed, their water bottles, the silvery wrappers of the remaining power bars, the machete.

He became aware of a sound hissing out of the weeds and cattails at the edge of the lake. A sibilant whisper, more than simple breeze through tall grass, less than mosquito buzz. He noticed movement on the surface of the water, tiny V-shaped patterns disrupting the calm. Water bugs? Hatchling tadpoles or larvae of some sort? After a moment, the V-shapes emerged as small dorsal fins. No more than an inch high, nearly transparent, some marked by the vaguest suggestion of tiger stripes when the fading sun hit them just right.

There were only a few at first, then a dozen; suddenly they were legion. They surrounded Hunter, timid around this anomaly in their midst but darting in and back, in and back, inching ever so slightly closer to his flesh with each circuit.

As the sun dropped behind the trees and the lake plunged into shadow, the yearling fish grew agitated. There were hundreds of them now, Hunter realized – perhaps thousands. They hovered in the water, waiting for some sign or signal.

Hunter considered this. He thought of his father; thought of Reed.

He lay his head back and let his legs drift toward the surface. He floated on his back and watched the first stars blinking to life in the darkening heavens overhead.

Maybe this one time, he could finally be enough.

He drew a deep breath and silently called the yearlings in to feed.

Troy Tradup’s stories have appeared in numerous publications, almost all sadly defunct now. His story “Crawlies” appeared in Fun in the Dark #1: Transformations, but so far he does not appear to have killed this wonderful new anthology series. His plays have been produced in three countries and won a couple of awards. He’s written at least one novel and a handful of screenplays and is currently trying to survive AI at his corporate day job long enough to reach retirement, where he hopes to write another novel or two. Troy lives in Minnesota, although every ridiculously humid and stormy summer he asks himself why.

Without in any way limiting the authors’ and publisher’s exclusive rights, any unauthorised use of any part of this story to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, locations or general circumstances is entirely coincidental and/or used in a fictitious manner.

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