Mike's Pond

Mike’s Pond

  Copyright 2014 Andrew J. Peters

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Mike’s Pond

  About the author

  Other Books by Andrew J. Peters

  Connect with the author

  Acknowledgements

  Even ordinary places have legends.

  I grew up in Amherst, New York, an idyllic suburban town adjacent to the city of Buffalo. In the 1980s, it was a place with tree-lined streets and handsome homes with landscaped yards. The local culture was Little League games and block parties.

  But we had legends. This story is inspired by one of them.

  “Mike’s Pond” first appeared in the quarterly e-zine Wilde Oats. My thanks to editor Stanley Ridge for including the story in his publication.

  The cover design is by Genaro Cruz.

  Mike’s Pond

  I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose, gave Danny a nod, and started across the street toward a gulf of shadow which was as dense and as creepy as a jungle. My stomach told me not to go, but there’s no turning back when you’ve been triple-dared by your older brother, especially when there’s witnesses.

  It had happened after the block party. Danny and I had been hanging out on the front lawn of my house. We had just been watching the older kids and sticking around in case a game of freeze tag broke out and they needed extra players. My older brother Shawn came swaggering up the drive with his best friend Dave Kimball and a bunch of their high school friends. They had called off their street hockey game because it had gotten too dark.

  Everyone splayed out around us, and I would have been happy to disappear into the background of their chatter. Something was up with Shawn that night though. He kept looking at me with a crooked grin. I had a good idea what was coming. He could have dared me to moon one of our neighbors or peg someone’s car with a rock like he had done a bunch of times before. But having to hang out at the boring block party all day must have made Shawn even more sadistic than usual that night.

  He dared me to go to Mike’s Pond, and I told him I would do it. Never mind that he had never done any of the things I had dared him. I was twelve and Shawn was fifteen. I had given up on justice a while ago.

  Danny had agreed to come along, and the words were spooked right out of his mouth as we traveled along the chain-link fence that contained that wild, abandoned plot of land. We had been best friends since second grade and we shared a paper route so it wasn’t like Danny had much choice in the matter anyway.

  “You know why they call it Mike’s Pond?” Shawn had asked us earlier that summer. “A couple years before you two were born, a kid named Mike went swimming there and drowned. It doesn’t look deep, but it’s ninety feet to the bottom and lined with quicksand. Plus there’s snapping turtles and ten foot water snakes. They say Mike still haunts the place. If he catches you there, he’ll strike you dead. Never mind the wood’s filled with vampire bats that’ll rip out your throat.”

  Around the corner of the fence, there was gash that was wide enough to slip through if you did it sidewise. Inside, I made out the bough of a stalky tree that had been bent and pushed aside and a few feet of trampled weeds before the trail went pitch black. Someone had put up a cardboard sign and spray-painted it with big letters: “GO BACK.”

  “I wouldn’t be hanging out at Mike’s Pond,” Troy McGovern had told me and Danny one day while we were walking home from Little League practice. “Awhile back, a bunch of teenage kids broke in there after dark to go drinking. Something about those woods makes you crazy, and one of ‘em took a machete and hacked everybody up. He killed like eighty people and tossed their bodies in the pond. The police could never find the kid, but they say he’s still hiding in the woods. Machete Mike. They never found all of the bodies of the kids he killed either. They must’ve sunk down to the bottom of the pond. Y’know, it’s all quicksand down there.”

  I slipped off the straps of my knapsack and maneuvered myself through the opening. Danny followed. There were insects buzzing loud, and it made me think of the very worst story we heard from Gary Wozniak, a seventh grader, when we ran into him smoking cigarettes behind the backboard at the playground.

  “Don’t believe any of that bullshit about Mike’s Pond. There aren’t no ghosts or serial killers down there, but I’ll tell you this: Before anyone built houses around here, the place was a dump for the chemical factories in Niagara Falls. Whatever they buried in there burned a great big hole in the ground and turned it into quicksand. They tried to fill it in to make it look like a pond and cover it up with lots of trees. But that toxic shit does crazy, mutant stuff.

  “There’s fish swimming in that pond with heads like muskrats and teeth as sharp as barracuda's. Some of them crawl out of the water at night and hunt for dogs and cats. There’s earthworms there the size of your leg that’ll wind around you and swallow you whole like a boa constrictor. The water in that pond’s so polluted, it glows at night, and it burns your skin like acid. If you ever hear a strange chirping noise around the place, it’s probably from the lizards. They’ve got two sets of fangs and can run real fast, on two legs, just like people. Better haul ass read good if you hear that sound.

  “Mike’s Pond,” Gary scoffed. “Never was any Mike. Just a story they told to cover up what the chemical companies did. A load of B.S.. Ever notice how stupid people ‘round this town are?”

  We made it through to the other side of the fence, and we didn't wander from the spot for a while. I swear things felt different the moment we entered the place. The air was warm and thick. There was a mucky, rotten egg smell so strong, I could feel it seeping into my clothes and deeper into my skin and knew it would take a good long shower to get rid of. There was something else about the place that was harder to put my finger on. But it made me feel like someone took a needle with a fishing line, pulled it through my heart and strung me up to hang. We were a good thirty yards from the nearest street lamp, and after standing there for just a minute, I couldn’t make out the way we had come.

  I rooted through my knapsack to get the flashlight. Danny and I had packed anything useful we could think of. Bug repellent. Bottle rockets. A pair of walkie-talkies. Baking soda. Duct tape. Assorted bandages from my parents’ medicine cabinet, and a crucifix hanging from Danny’s den.

  “Maybe we could just tell Shawn we went to the pond,” Danny said. “How’s he gonna know anyway?”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. If we turned back, we could make it back home in time to catch the second half of a double-episode of Happy Days. But Shawn had never been to Mike’s Pond. He’d be the lame one when I came back home and told him and all his friends about it. I found the flashlight, clicked it on, and pointed it down the trail.

  “C’mon. We’ll take a quick look and get outta here.”

  There was a narrow trail where some of the three-foot reeds had been stomped down leading into the thicker part of the woods. The ground was wet. It soaked through my sneakers and my socks. I tried to step with just my toes in case there were any giant earthworms lurking around. Still, I kept sinking into the mud.

  Danny was right behind me. I could hear him shifting around every time there was a rattle or crack or warble coming from the woods. I kept telling myself it was the trees moving around in the breeze. I’d spent the night in a tent in the backyard, so I knew you could drive yourself crazy imagining things in the dark. Danny wasn’t holding up so well.

  “You sure this is a good idea?”

  I didn’t answer. I just kept moving. I knew if I saw a fish with a muskrat head, we were heading back pronto. But besides having wet feet, we weren’t doing too bad so far.

  The path led up a slope where the ground was drier. The trail broadened, and we
found ourselves at an intersection of dirt paths sheltered by tall maple trees.

  I passed my flashlight around the space. There was a rotten log in one corner that you could sit on. Someone had tied up an old tire with a rope and hung it from a tree limb to make a swing. Empty beer cans and cigarette butts were littered all over the place. That made me loosen up for a second. Other people had come this way.

  Then I remembered Troy McGovern’s story about the teenagers partying in the woods. The fishing line through my heart started tugging again. We might have stumbled onto the scene of Machete Mike’s massacre.

  Danny sat down in the tire and spun himself around. I wandered over to a tree trunk that was all carved up. It was the usual, dopey teenage graffiti. “John + Wendy,” written inside a heart, with a “T,” “L,” and “F” overlapping into one letter. I pivoted around the other side of the tree, and my flashlight passed over other things slashed into the bark.

  “Welcome to Hell.”

  Then,

  “Kids died here.”

  Then,

  “Mike Lives.”

  I scooted back over to Danny. “I think we’ve come far enough.”

  Danny looked at me funny. “What about finding the pond?”

  A few spins on that old tire swing, and he was suddenly ready to settle into the place for the night. Meanwhile, I had hornets swarming inside my chest. Something evil had happened in the place. I could just feel it. I was about to explain it to Danny.

  Then we heard the sound.

  It was a moan that started real low then got louder. That was no trick of the wind unless two branches rubbing together could make a noise like a grown man who’d had an arrow shot through his head. I swung around, shining the flashlight in all directions. I couldn’t spot anything in the spaces between the trees.

  The sounds closed in on us. Danny climbed down from the swing, and we stood shoulder to shoulder, eyes following the flashlight’s beam. The moans came more like growls. Whatever was coming our way was hungry. I wanted to make a break for it back to the street, but I couldn’t move my legs.

  Something rustled through the brush. My hand trembled something wicked, but I managed to point my flashlight at it. From twenty yards away, it looked like a bear coming out of the woods. From ten yards, I could see two arms reaching out like a zombie. At ten feet, it lifted up its head, pale as milk. It didn’t have a face.

  My legs came back to life. I bolted in the other direction. Danny screamed. The thing must’ve got him.

  I halted while my mind worked at light speed trying to sort out the pro’s and con’s of trying to rescue my best friend from a psychopathic killer. Before I could decide, something came at me and tackled me to the ground.

  The flashlight fell out of my hands. I wrestled my way out from under my attacker, and I slid back on my elbows and feet. I wasn’t about to fight whatever creature-brought-back-from-the-dead had got me, but sidestepping a bigger competitor was a skill I’d honed over the years living with Shawn. There was also the option of screaming my lungs out for help.

  My shadowy attacker shuffled toward me. I dragged myself away from it, and backed up against a tree—a dead end. I scrunched up with my knees against my chest. I was a second away from begging for my life. The phantom towered over me, and then it hunched down and started laughing. The flashlight blared into my eyes.

  “What a bunch of pussies!”

  That was Shawn’s voice. I took a moment to register what had happened, and then I uncurled from my pitiful position on the ground. Shawn passed the flashlight over his face, and I could see he had pulled back his hockey goalie’s mask up on his head and had a firm grip on Danny’s shirt collar.

  Danny and I exchanged a quick glance to confirm how bad it was. In the diffuse light, I saw that it had been Shawn’s friend Dave Kimball who had tackled me while Shawn had wrestled down Danny. Dave was wearing a black t-shirt and camouflage pants.

  Dave smiled at me, mouth full of braces, and he reached out his hand to help me get up on my feet. Sixteen years old, he was built like an Olympic swimmer, could play the guitar solo to “Freebird,” and was pretty much everything I ever wanted to be in life. I tried not to look like an idiot.

  “What’s wrong, dweeb? Did you wet your pants?” Shawn said.

  I dusted some of the dirt off the back of my knapsack and the seat of my shorts. “Fuck you, Shawn. That wasn’t funny.”

  Shawn shot the light over me and Danny. “The look on your faces was pretty goddamn funny.”