The Rift of the Damned
Chateaugay Lake, ancient, restless, never sleeping—swirls of mist curl like fingers around the black water’s edge. The expedition arrives, weary souls already caught in the tremors of some unseen thing, not yet known, but felt. Felt in the bones, a sickness deep inside, something twisting like old roots under earth too thick for the shovel.
Breathe…I remind myself as the boat sways. Water slapping against wood, a language we’ve forgotten to listen to. But there’s something in that rhythm, something pulling us to this place, this cursed lake, a knot in time, a place where the land buckles, warps under the weight of…of what?
Magnetic anomalies, they told us. That’s the lie we’ve been sold. Not just a rift in the air—it’s the ground beneath, it’s the way the trees lean away from the shore as if they know. They remember. But we don’t. Or we don’t want to. I see the others—their faces drawn, eyes darting to shadows too early for dusk. All this gear, the tech, the tools, useless in the face of what’s been waiting here, waiting for us to come. Like it knew we would.
Dr. Erol, with his wild hair, spectacles always askew, talks of energy fields, of pulses, of readings going haywire, like the earth’s heart beating out of time. But his words bounce off us, barely sinking in. We’re all too distracted by something else—the hum, low and constant, beneath the water. Something old, slumbering, starting to stir.
I drift back, mind wandering like smoke in the wind, back to the campfire last night. M’zouqué, the St. Regis guide, silent as always, staring into the flames like they could answer the questions his lips won’t form. He knows the legends. He knows the stories. Of the Wendigo, the flesh-starved spirits that hunger with a bottomless, gnashing greed. Of the Trickster, bending reality like light through water, making fools of us all.
But this isn’t legend anymore. This is real.
The air shifts—electric, sharp. A crack in the sky. We felt it before we saw it. The sound, a tearing, like the world itself is being ripped open, split at the seams. My stomach lurches. Don’t look. Don’t look. But how could you not? The Rift, not just a hole, but a wound, raw and bleeding light, black and white, color and void all at once. It screams—but only in my head. Or is it out loud?
Suddenly everything’s louder—footsteps, breaths, even the beating of my heart, hammering too fast, too hard. And then they come. First, a shadow. Then many. Shapes, limbs that don’t bend right, eyes like pinpricks in the dark, flickering like embers about to die out. Wendigo. Hunger. Endless. Their forms… they shift, bodies mutating with every breath they take in this world—elongating, twisting. Flesh turning to bone, bone to smoke.
“They’ve crossed over,” someone whispers—maybe Kate, maybe Erol, maybe it’s me. The Trickster’s laugh is there, somewhere in the chaos, rising above it all, a sound that mocks us, taunts us, pulls us deeper into the madness. Everything blurs, warps, bends. We’re not just at the lake anymore—we’re nowhere, everywhere, caught in the Trickster’s game. Rules? There are none. And yet, we play.
I can’t remember when the blood started flowing, but it does, seeping into the earth, into the water, feeding the lake like it’s part of the ritual, part of the price we’re paying. I see Erol fall, his screams swallowed by the night. M’zouqué stands motionless, eyes reflecting the Rift’s glow like he’s staring into a void only he can understand.
“Close it,” someone says. A voice that sounds like it’s coming from inside my skull. “Before they take everything.”
But how? How do you close a wound that’s been festering since before time had a name? How do you shut a door that was never meant to be opened?
The Trickster’s laugh curls around me again, and I see it now—this is his game. This is the play. We were never here to study anything. We were called. Summoned. By the lake. By him. By it. *The Rift*.
And the Wendigo? They’re just the beginning. A taste. We haven’t seen the true face of what lies on the other side.
M’zouqué turns to me, finally. His lips curl into something between a smile and a grimace, a mask that hides nothing, and yet, everything. “There’s only one way,” he says, voice steady, but his eyes wild, reflecting a madness that’s been waiting to escape. “We have to become them. To fight them, we become them.”
Mutation. Transformation.
The words ripple through me, twisting like vines around my thoughts. There’s no logic here, no sense. But maybe sense is the illusion. Maybe the Trickster’s been showing us that all along. And now, we have a choice: to fight, or to become what we fear. To use their power against them. To transform, to change, to bend the rules the way they do.
The Rift pulses, growing, swallowing the sky, the earth. The Wendigo move closer, their eyes—empty, infinite, like they know us already, like they remember.
I step forward, feel the pull in my chest, the way my skin itches, crawls, changes. I’m becoming. We all are.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?