The Pond

The locally infamous Gorman’s pond was a five-minute walk from the Fremont family farmhouse, hidden on the edge of the north field surrounded by dry scrub brush and several gnarly black oak trees. Vin Fremont’s older sister Alice and her boyfriend Joey spent a good part of their summer swimming in the murky, foul water. The football playing, self-important Joey, who wore his letterman jacket like a suit of armor, was an itch Vin could never scratch, constantly teasing and punching him and calling him a pussy for any reason that came to mind.

So the story that kids told other kids about the pond was that a long time ago a little girl went missing. Townspeople were suspicious of a recluse named Allen Gorman. A gang of locals broke in and searched his house and found the girl and several other dismembered and partially eaten bodies. Being a long time ago, they didn’t bother with a trial, but tied up Gorman, filled his pockets with rocks and dropped him into the pond. True or not, and even Vin knew it was probably not, he had a love/hate relationship with Gorman’s pond.

Between cigarettes and cocktails, mother Fremont warned her children to stay away from the pond, but the reality was she probably wouldn’t have realized one of them was missing for several weeks. No one paid much attention to the boozy and broken old woman in the stained housecoat. She’d forfeited her caretaker role years ago, drifting into a hazy alternate dimension of self-pity and self-destruction. Father Fremont kept himself in the fields or the garage most summer days and would have told Vin to just be a man and stand up for himself, as if this was an actual alternative the boy had never thought of.

It was August 1961 and a typical hot, oppressive late summer day in eastern Iowa. Vin, a thin, reticent 12-year old redhead, sat on a grassy berm overlooking the pond trying to cool himself with a large leaf he’d found, watching Alice and Joey playing “deep dive.” They’d hold their breath for as long as they could and swim straight down. The winner was whoever could stay under longest. No big deal, but what Vin thought was weird was that neither of them had ever made it far enough down to touch the bottom of the pond.

They had both disappeared into the dark water for what seemed like a long time, but soon Alice’s head broke the surface and she splashed around and gasped for air. When she realized Joey was still under, she slapped the water with her hand and pulled herself up onto the muddy pond’s edge. She sat panting and waiting. Too much time elapsed and Vin could see by his sister’s body movements she was preparing to jump back in, but at that moment, Joey breached like a whale off the California coast. Instead of laughing and taunting Alice as he would have typically done, he swam quickly to the edge and struggled out of the water. His dripping white body was shaking and his expression was wide-eyed shock. He sat down on the bristly grass, grabbed his legs and pulled himself into a ball.

“Hey,” asked Alice as she walked over to him. “What happened? You okay?”

            His muscles sill trembling, he looked up at her. “I felt something…weird touch me.”

            Alice sat down next to him, and Vin wandered over, hovering nearby. “Weird like what?” she asked

            “At first I thought it was you fooling around, but then I looked up and I could see your legs treading water above me. Then, I felt something wrap around my ankle. Look.” He showed her a line of red, irritated skin around his leg like a rope burn just above the anklebone.

            “Probably just seaweed,” said Alice with a smile.

            “Seaweed? In a farm pond?” laughed Vin.

            “Hey, shut up you little dip,” ordered Joey. “It felt like a hand.”

            Against his will, Vin looked down into the dark pool, swallowing hard at the terrifying thought of something grabbing his leg and pulling him down into the black abyss. He took a step back.

            Everyone kept their distance from Gorman’s pond for the next week. Summer boredom and isolation finally drove Vin back to the hole one cloudy afternoon. He sat on the berm, swatting mosquitoes and aimlessly tossing rocks into the water. They disappeared almost instantly. Sometimes he pretended he was feeding fish. The sun was so warm and soothing he lay back on the grass and pulled his baseball cap over his eyes. The sound of splashing woke him up just in time to see something swirling near the pond’s surface. It was a thin and pale water snake or eel. Hypnotized, he got up and walked slowly down to the muddy edge of the pond, entranced by the idea of actually seeing something that could live in the fetid, toxic water other than his sister. He cautiously stepped closer to the water, trying to push back his fears. Something was moving in the inky depths, roiling and turning just far enough below the surface that he had to lean in further. Then, a milky tentacle erupted from the gloom and wrapped itself around Vin’s leg. He looked down in horror and screamed as the ghostly appendage began pulling him toward the water. He shouted for help and twisted and tried to plant his other foot in the slippery gook near the water’s edge. The grip was strong and he couldn’t get enough leverage to stop the momentum. Soon his one leg was falling into the inky water and he screamed in terror and grabbed at the mud and filth around him, but it was no use. He was suddenly submerged in the cold suffocating liquid, his lungs filling with breath-denying death.

            Turning on his side, Vin gagged, his body caught up in spasms of both panic and relief as he realized he had been having a nightmare. He gasped for air and sucked it in between dry heaves, thankful he had only been asleep. The heaving slowed down and he struggled to his feet, looking back, the black hole was calm and placid and foreboding as it had ever been. Its secrets still contained below the surface.

            The next afternoon was sultry with grey thunderheads roiling overhead. Vin and his friend Derek made the dusty hike to Gorman’s Pond.

            “Why do you come here if it scares you so much?” asked Derek, picking up a rock and tossing it into the water.

            Vin stopped walking and looked at Derek as if he’d never considered the question before. He struggled for an answer. “I…nothing else to do.”

            “You see the Twilight Zone last night?”

            “My stupid sister and her boyfriend wanted to watch 77 Sunset Strip. I got outvoted.”

            Derek was now close to the water. “This spooky little kid has crazy mind powers…hey, Vin. Come here and look at this.”

            Vin approached cautiously, wary of a prank. “What?”

            “Look at these prints in the mud.”

            Vin lowered his gaze to where Derek was pointing. He saw deep hand prints as if someone was pulling itself out of the pond, mixed with man-size footprints. Vin shrugged. “What? Someone was swimming here.”

            “Look closer.”

            Vin bent down. Then he noticed it. The hands only had three fingers and a thumb.

            That night at dinner, Vin’s discovery was lost in the chatter. “It’s something with three fingers.”

            “Pass the mashed potatoes,” said his father. “Animal tracks. Christ, can you believe the Cubs lost again? Five in a row. I don’t know why I care—“

            “Jim, watch the swearing, please.”

            “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” joked his father in a deep voice.

            “I wish.”

            “Mom, I want a bikini,” pleaded Alice.

            “Over my dead body. Is the pork done enough?”

            “It’s fine. A bikini?”

            “What animal has a hand like a human with only three fingers?”

            “Emily’s mom let her get one.”

            “Get what?”

            “A bikini.”

            “Well, we don’t do things simply because somebody else does them. Especially the Lamberts.”

            “What’s wrong with the Lamberts?”

            Vin gave up and put his half eaten dinner in the sink. It was Wednesday, so he was supposed to be cleaning his room, but he was soon lost in the Encyclopedia Britannica looking at animal tracks with background music from his sister’s room courtesy of the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown.” Nothing matched the prints he saw in the mud earlier. Tink. Tink. Vin went to the window and peered out. Derek stood in the yard looking up. “I got a surprise,” he said, wearing a clownish grin.

            Derek had on a jacket on a very warm, muggy evening. He looked around Vin’s bedroom suspiciously.

            “What’s wrong with you?” asked Vin.

            The boy slid a magazine out from under his jacket and held it up triumphantly. “Playboy. July, 1961.”

            Vin grabbed it out of his friend’s hand. “What? Are you kidding me?”

            “It’s the real deal, my friend. The best thing is that my dad will never ask me where it is because then he’d have to explain why he has it in the first place.”

            “You are good. Very, very good.”

            The boys spent the next half hour ogling the voluptuous women of July, until Vin’s mother knocked on the door. “Bath time.”

            “Derek’s here, can’t I do it in a half hour?”

            “Okay. A half hour.”

             “Look at those tits,” said a dreamy Derek.

            “There’s no animal that makes prints like the ones by the pond.”

            Derek looked at Vin as if he was speaking a foreign language. “What?”

            “The prints by the pond. It’s not an animal.”

            “So?”

            “So what made the prints?”

            Perturbed that Vin was off topic, Derek closed the magazine. “How the heck should I know?”

            “What if it’s a monster? Huh?”

            Derek rubbed his nose nervously. “A monster? Monsters are in the movies. There aren’t any real monsters. Are you crazy?”

            “Then explain the prints.”

            “The prints. The prints. I bring you the latest issue of Playboy, and you’re worried about some prints in the mud. You can be pretty strange sometimes.” Derek put the magazine back under his coat and walked to the door. “See you later, Vin.”

            The next afternoon, wearing his mother’s garden gloves, Vin sat on the berm overlooking Gorman’s pond, wrapping a flat, stinking skin of road kill he’d found on the highway that morning to a bowling ball-sized rock with one end of a large spool of twine he’d taken from the garage. Maybe whatever it was down there was hungry. With the weight and bait securely fastened, he got close enough to the pond to toss it in, keeping his foot ahead of the unwinding spool. He figured there was maybe 100 feet of twine, but that was a guess. It kept unwinding and the spool kept shrinking. Then it stopped. Thinking he’d reached bottom, he bent down to pick up the spool, but just as his fingers drew close, the twine began unwinding again at a ferocious speed. Before he could react, the last few feet shot under his foot and disappeared into the water.

            He stood entranced by the light dancing on the surface, now knowing that the pond was deeper than 100 feet. Shadows grew long as dusk descended and Vin walked slowly back to the house wondering why a stupid farm pond would be so deep. He could see his father out in the field pulling a sprayer behind the tractor. He played a cat and mouse game with his father during the summer, Vin always trying to stay out of sight and out of mind to avoid being recruited for some kind of meaningless, dirty chore. He wasn’t cut out for farm work and couldn’t wait for the day when he could work as a scientist and live in a clean city somewhere with people instead of muck-covered animals. Just as he stepped onto the porch, Joey and Alice came out of the house.

            “Hey, it’s the king of dorks.” Alice poked Joey’s arm, but he just smiled. “What kind of weird stuff are you up to today, dork?”

            “Just going in the house,” said Vin.

            Joey stood in the doorway blocking Vin. “Time to get your diaper changed?”

            “Joey, cut it out,” asked Alice with little real emotion.

            Joey’s smile broadened and stepped to one side. As Vin passed Joey flicked the back of his head with a finger.

            That night in bed, Vin wondered about what lived in the pond. It was scary, but only because he didn’t know what it was. No one believed him, and maybe he was dreaming up the whole thing. He didn’t think so. What he really didn’t understand was why he was so captivated by re-experiencing the fear of the place. It terrified him and also drew him closer. Did the ghost of Gorman live in the inky water? Was it some kind of unknown amphibian? Was it his imagination? There were no answers tonight. Only sleep.

            Derek was already at the pond the next morning, trying to hit a broken bottle with rocks when Vin wandered up.

            “Get tired of the tits?” asked Vin, who picked up a rock and tossed it awkwardly in the direction of the bottle.

            “Tired of tits? Never. I just got tired of listening to my mother’s voice. Pick up your clothes, take out the garbage, ride your bike into town and get some milk. So I disappeared.”

            Vin was about to respond, when he noticed something on the edge of the pond. The rock he’d thrown into the water yesterday was sitting in the mud on the pond’s shore. “What the heck?” he shouted as the approached the small boulder.

“What?” asked Derek. “More monster prints?”
“I was here yesterday, and I tied a dead squirrel to this rock and tossed it in the water to see how deep the pond was.”

            “A dead squirrel?”

            “Look at this. The rock somehow came up from the pond and landed here, without the twine or squirrel. How could that happen?”

            Derek was genuinely perplexed. “I don’t know. You tied a dead squirrel to a rock?”

            “Come on,” urged Vin and they both took off running back toward the house.

An hour later the panting, sweaty boys were back, and Vin was tying a dead, decaying cat to the rock with some old wire while his friend looked on in disgust. Derek’s stomach churned. “How can you touch that? It stinks.”

            “It’s in the name of science. Something down there took the squirrel, let’s see if it likes cat.”

            “Man, you’re strange.”

            Finished securing the animal carcass to the rock, Vin dropped the heavy weight into the murky water and watched it quickly sink out of sight.  “There. Tomorrow we’ll come back and see if the rock is here again.”

            “Did you ever think that whatever is down there eating road kill might like fresh humans even better?”

            “Yeah, I did think about that, but if that were true, it would have eaten my sister and her stupid boyfriend a long time ago.”

            “Maybe, but you don’t know that,” said Derek, stepping slowly back from the pond.

            “Come on. Let’s get our BB guns and go hunting,” said Vin. Derek shrugged and followed his friend back toward the house.

            Vin ran to the pond the following afternoon and pulled up short when he saw that the rock was indeed back on the muddy bank. His heart was racing as he walked down the slope to the pond. He was communicating with something, and it was the weirdest experience of his young life. He stood over the rock for a minute just staring at it in wonder, then he turned back toward the house ready to hunt for more dead animals. Just as he was about to leave the small alcove, he heard a familiar voice.

            “Hey weirdo, what are you doing?”

            Joey walked over the berm down toward the pond. He was wearing cut off jeans and a stained white T-shirt. A cigarette dangled from his thin lips.

            “Nothing,” said Vin, wondering whether he should just bolt. “Going back to the house.”

            Joey walked up and stood in front of the boy. “I don’t like weird kids, and you are definitely weird.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and blew smoke into Vin’s face. “If your sister wasn’t on her way down here, I’d beat the crap out of you, just for the fun of it.”

            “Leave me alone,” protested Vin.

            “Leave you alone? You want me to leave you alone? Sure.” Joey grabbed Vin’s hand and crushed his cigarette into the boy’s palm. Vin shouted in shock and pain. “Shut up, you little creep. Don’t every mess with me, you understand?” Vin was red-faced and fighting back tears. Joey leaned down. “If you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll come to your bedroom some night and slit your throat. Now get out of here.”

            Tears streaming down his face, Vin took off running, holding his wounded hand with the other. He passed his sister who was carrying a towel and walking toward the pond. She could see he was crying and turned to say something, but Vin was already in the house running for the bathroom.

            The frightened boy flushed the raw red circle in his palm with cold water. It throbbed and he had to try very hard not to yell out in pain. He bit into a towel and splashed some hydrogen peroxide on it, the pain rushing up his arm like a hot flame. Finally, he bandaged it, ran up to his room and buried his face in his pillow to cry.

            Ten minutes later the front screen door banged.

            “Mom?” yelled his frantic sister. “Mom? Where are you?”

            “I’m in the kitchen,” came the woozy reply.

            Vin jumped off the bed and crept to the top of the stairs where he could overhear his sobbing, frightened sister.

            “I don’t know what happened,” she cried. “I saw him swimming and then he was gone. He just disappeared. Yes, I know what you told me. Please, call the police or…. Just call them.”

            Vin looked at his bandaged hand and smiled, knowing now this was going to be the best summer of his entire life.