Love it… and it will love you back.
Another splash, bigger this time.
Graham’s throat quivered as he swallowed a few times, his Adam’s apple laboring. He slowly set the journal aside with trembling hands, yet was unable to move off the bed. He could feel his heartbeat at various points in his body, hear it thumping in his ears, in his head. Sweat beaded his brow as a flush of heat poured down through him, turning his skin tacky beneath his clothes.
More splashes, more calls for his attention, with an almostgood-humoredinsistence—like a child performing antics to entice a friend to play with them.
Graham crawled off the bed, his legs numbing beneath him as he moved stiffly to the window. Waves from the last splash rolled against the shore. As Graham looked out over the water,a small swell formed—less menacing than the previous night—barely a foot high, and drifted up to the dock, dissipated, then formed again.
It wants you to come outside… and play.
10
Graham stood on the porch,one arm wrapped around the weathered cedar pillar nearest the steps, his fingers digging into the rough grain where years of rain and sun had carved shallow furrows. The solid wood beneath his palm was a kind of anchor, the last physical tether keeping him grounded in the reality he'd always known—a world where lakes were just lakes and creatures existed only in stories. Once he let go and walked away, that reality would disintegrate—slipping through his fingers like sand, leaving nothing but the impossible truth rippling across the water's surface.
The old reality is already gone, no matter how long you stand here.
The truth of that thought was evident in the swells rising and falling on the lake. It was evident last night in the destruction of the pontoon boat—and in his ownrescue.
Releasing the pillar, Graham walked down the steps and onto the grass. The soft blades pricked between his toes with each step, damp from morning dew that left tiny crescents of moisture on his skin. The warm breeze tousled his short, chestnut-brown hair and rustled through his threadbare white T-shirt, the fabric clinging to the slight dampness of nervous sweat gathering between his shoulder blades. Graham’s faded jeans rode low on his slim hips, revealing the elastic black band of his boxer briefs and a sliver of pale skin that hadn’t seen the summer sun. The muscles in his lower back flexed tensely witheach step, creating shallow dimples on either side of his spine as he moved toward the water, which seemed to be waiting for him.
As he approached the short wooden dock, weathered gray and splintered by decades of summer storms, he paused as the water abruptly calmed. The choppy surface smoothed before his eyes, becoming a glassy midnight-blue sheen. Sunlight danced across it in a thousand pinpricks of white-gold light, like diamonds scattered across dark velvet.
Graham hesitated, his bare toes curling into the damp grass at the edge of the moss-covered gangplank. His hands flexed rhythmically at his sides, fingers spreading wide, then clenching into half-fists. Each heartbeat felt like a small explosion in his chest, the pulse visible at his throat as his breathing grew shallow and quick. Inside, cold fear and something warmer, more primal... mixed together, forming a cocktail of nervous anticipation that sent electric prickles across his skin and set loose a swarm of butterflies in the pit of his stomach.
Graham sucked in a lungful of pine-scented air, holding it until his chest burned, then released it in a slow stream between his teeth. His bare foot hovered for a moment before settling on the first weathered plank of the dock. The wood, bleached silver-gray from the sun of countless summers, creaked beneath his weight. Splinters, fine as cat’s whiskers, embedded in the tender flesh of his heel, but the pain registered only as distant pinpricks against the thundering of blood in his ears.
Each subsequent step came stiffer than the last, his knees barely bending, his toes curling defensively against the rough surface. With every inch forward, his pulse hammered against his ribs, and a damp heat spread across his lower back. Blood rushed into his ears with such force that he could barely hear the gentle lapping of water against the pilings below. Fear or excitement? The line between them blurred with each thundering heartbeat.
The water rippled gently as he neared the end of the dock. He paused at the very edge, his toes curling over the last board. For a long moment, he stared into the water, his throat working but silent. He thought he saw something move beneath the surface, but it could have been a trick of the sunlight. Yet something was down there, swirling the water, waiting… for what? What did it want from him?
Love it… and it will love you back.
Was thiscreaturereally the Lochlan from his grandfather’s journal? The “love” he spoke of before he passed away? How was that even possible? How could ahuman beingfall in love with anotherspecies?
Something passed beneath the dock, close enough to the surface to catch a glint of sunlight. A tentacle, about as wide as his forearm, its skin mottled bluish-green with a slick, almost opalescent sheen. Tiny phosphorescent nodules dotted its length. As it glided by, Graham could make out the gentle undulation of its movement, powerful yet graceful. He instinctively stepped back, and the weathered boards creaked beneath his sudden shift in weight.
If it wanted to hurt you, it would have done it last night... or the night before. It protected you—both nights.
It had done other things to him as well: the way those luminescent tendrils had slid across his bare skin like living silk, leaving trails of tingling heat that lingered for hours. The memory of those appendages wrapping around his thighs, his waist, exploring with an otherworldly curiosity that made his groin burn, and his breath catch. Even now, standing on the dock, he could feel phantom touches ghosting across his body, making his skin prickle with goosebumps despite the summer warmth. Maybe that’s what frightened him most: not the creature's alienness, but how desperately his body responded to it.
He let out a shaky breath and swallowed hard. “I…” His voice strained with a shaky rasp. “I don’t… I don’t know how to… wrap my mind around this. I-I don’t know how to…” He swallowed again. “… to believe in you. Are you even real?” He trembled. “Or am I… am I losing my mind?”
The strength left his legs, and he sank to his knees. His head dropped forward, and tears streamed down his face as a flood of emotions swept through him. Who was he talking to? The creature might be real, but why would he think it could understand him? Did he really believe his grandpa had a “relationship” with this thing? Maybe the journals were his grandfather’s imagination, evenfantasies, put down on paper—as writers do. What if his grandpa was just lonely… and had created a fantasy about a unique lover who understood him in ways no human ever had?
Graham raised his head, tears streaming. His mind felt fractured, like the splintered dock beneath his knees, each thought a jagged piece that wouldn’t fit. His throat constricted painfully as he looked down into the midnight-blue water, its surface now mirror-still, reflecting his broken expression. “Did you love him?” he whispered, his voice raw and threadbare. “The way he loved you? Was any of it real?” A shuddered breath tore from his lungs, wounded. He leaned forward until his reflection rippled on the water's surface, teardrops falling like tiny crystal meteors into the lake, each creating concentric rings that expanded outward. “Or was it all just… in his head?” His chin quivered uncontrollably as fresh, warm tears welled and spilled over, striking the water’s surface with audible plops. “He was everything to me, and I think… you were everything to him. I want to believe that you loved him, too… that you can love like that.”
Sinking forward onto his elbows, Graham buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
The water swirled below the dock.
Lifting his head, Graham looked down. A bluish-green phosphorescent glow shimmered below, like liquid starlight trapped beneath the surface. Dozens of delicate tendrils—each no thicker than a shoelace yet pulsing with luminescent life—swam upward in a synchronized ballet, their translucent heads crowned with tiny iridescent filaments peeking just above the water’s surface. Graham flattened onto his stomach, the rough wood of the dock pressing splinters into his chest, and tentatively reached his hands down, hesitating a few inches above the rippling surface.
The tendrils stretched higher, their tips quivering with apparent eagerness before brushing against his palms—cool and silky, like wet satin. A shiver of electricity raced up his arms as Graham lowered his hands slightly and splayed his fingers. The living filaments slipped between his fingers with deliberate precision, engulfing his hands in a living web of gentle pressure that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
A blinding white light exploded behind Graham's eyes, searing through his consciousness like a lightning strike. The intensity made his entire body jolt as if electrified. The sensation wasn't painful—more like plunging headfirst into icy water that somehow burned—leaving him gasping as the boundaries between his thoughts and something ancient and other dissolved.
Remember.
