I just had the most awful panic. I’ve mentioned before that every so often i set myself writing challenges, and that many months ago i got Google to generate twenty random words. Since then, as I reported a couple of days ago, I’ve written to each of those words, mostly short stories, some about real events imagined, some non-fiction, and at last I’m on to #18, Lake as I mentioned. Apart from this challenge, I’ve written a couple of other stories which involved lakes, one in particular was about a sinister body of water I called Crime Lake. In fact there is a perfectly pleasant body of water near Oldham called Crime Lake, but mine was completely imagined and completely different, dark and sinister.
I found it difficult to get going with this challenge of Lake, maybe with memories of Nevada Barr’s novel ‘A Superior Death’ intruding, but at least now I have started. In a way I’m embracing Nevada’s story, maybe informed or inspired by it, although mine will be very different. My stories usually take on a life of their own and go off in a way I never intended or originally imagined. So far, my main character, a young woman, maybe in her twenties, is with a group of others in a wagon going down through woodlands to a lake, where a launch awaits. They’re going out on the water, over to an island, where they will picnic, swim and have a wonderful day out.
There’s something creepy about the lake, I don’t like it. Maybe I have seen too many films where strange things happen by, on, or in lakes. I had a friend who had a strange terror of enclosed water – like between two lock gates on a canal, or even the canal itself as it was enclosed between the two banks – and ultimately between lock gates. She had a mortal fear of it, but a strange fascination at the same time. She often wrote about it,especially poems, and I believe, although I don’t know for a fact, that she dreamt of it. I sometimes feared she might one day drown herself in a lock, but no, no she didn’t – however she did, years later, take her own life in a small room in a locked house.
I’ve been to other lakes, been on other lakes in motor boats, little and bigger motor cruisers, I’ve paddled a canoe, been taken in a rowing boat on lakes, I’ve paddled and swum in lakes, but not this lake. We had turned off the forest road and driven down a sandy track which wound its way through the dark coniferous trees, down to a little inlet where a stream trickled its way into the larger body of water.
I guess I’d been happy and excited when the trip was planned, water is my element, by it and on it and in it, as Ratty said to Mole. But as we bumped round the last corner of the track and I saw the oily black expanse stretching out half a mile or so across to the opposite shore, I felt a lurch of horror and my throat clenched as if I was going to vomit. It felt like the vehicle had bucked and jumped as if it too was recoiling. The others called out – not in alarm but as we were jerked and lurched, and I may have screamed and the others laughed.
It doesn’t at the moment sound very original to me, but no doubt when more of it is down on paper, and more unexpected ideas pop into my head, then I’ll have something to work with. I hope!
Lois Elsden 