A MACABRE ACCOUNT OF LAKE-BORN VENGEANCE!
By Mordecai Vilecreek, Special Correspondent
Unseen horrors prowl beneath Chateaugay Lake! The toe-nippers play their tricks, but something far darker slithers forth—ancient cryptids with crueler appetites. Beware the midnight ripples.
FISH THIEVES TURNED TO CHUM! MYSTERIOUS LAKE HORRORS STRIKE BACK!
The Gang of Vagrants Who Plagued Honest Fishermen Have Vanished—A Great Evil Now Walks the Night!
CHAPTER 65
Somewhere out there, under the dark and churning waters of Chateaugay Lake, Berenice was watching. She was always watching. The boys knew this because they had seen her before—just the long, sinuous suggestion of her, winding under the skiff, rippling beneath the canoe. A shadow too vast to be a fish, too knowing to be a trick of the waves.
And the toe-nippers? Those scaly little devils had a taste for blood and a love for trouble. They’d latched onto more than a few unwary toes over the years—an unsuspecting codger taking his morning dip, a wide-eyed heiress from Manhattan visiting to “take in the air” only to leave minus a stocking and a piece of her dignity. The Merrill boys figured it was time to put the little rascals to work.
The French-Canadian gang had gone too far—net-cutting, deer-poaching, trying to run the natives off their lake. The boys weren’t going to take it. Not this time. And neither, it seemed, was Berenice.
The message was whispered in the reeds, slipped between the currents. Berenice’s Brood slithered out, tongues flicking, eyes glittering in the starlight. It didn’t take long for word to spread, carried by underground passageways known only to the old things that had been here before the trappers, before the railroad, before the first iron was dragged from Lyon Mountain’s gut.
That’s how the others got wind of it.
The ones the boys had never heard of.
The gang was at Rock Camp that night, their laughter cutting through the mist like the edge of a rusted blade. They had taken their fill, their nets heavy with stolen fish, their bellies fat with whiskey.
Then the lake turned.
A ripple where no ripple should be. A splash too heavy for a fish.
A silence that swallowed even the wind.
They saw the first one rise from the shallows—a writhing black figure with eyes like lantern-light, a gaping mouth lined with teeth like iron nails. One of the Frenchmen reached for his rifle, but the thing was already on him, dragging him down with a sound that was part scream, part gurgle, and then—nothing at all.
The others scrambled for their boats, but the lake was moving. It rolled beneath them, a tide of scales and slick, glistening coils. Berenice’s Brood snapped at their fingers as they clawed at the gunwales. Then the bigger ones came. The ones that hadn’t been called, but had come anyway.
The lake’s secret keepers.
The things that knew how to slip through cracks in the earth, how to vanish and return where they pleased.
By morning, Rock Camp was empty. No sign of the men—only their boats, bobbing against the shore, torn open like tin cans. No blood. No bodies. Just the knowing, silent water.
For three nights after, the lake howled.
Something had changed.
First, a trapper named Bill O’Doul—gone without a trace, his cabin door ripped clean off the hinges, his dog left cowering under the floorboards, whining like a kicked cur.
Then, a party of summer tourists from Plattsburgh, up for a little fishing—found wandering the trails in their underclothes, eyes wide, mouths working without words.
And then the miners at Lyon Mountain—men who were no strangers to the dark, who had seen things in the deep places of the earth that would stop the heart of a weaker man. But not this. They wouldn’t talk about what happened in the midnight hours between shifts, only that one of their number—a brute of a man called Callahan—was found the next morning with his hands buried in the dirt, as if trying to claw his way to safety. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t home.
The boys stayed off the water. They weren’t stupid.
They had wanted revenge, and they had gotten it.
But something else had taken notice.
Something older.
Something that didn’t care about petty feuds or rightful claims.
The lake had remembered its power.
And it wasn’t done yet.
NEXT WEEK IN THE STEAMBOAT DISPATCH:
A SCIENTIST CLAIMS HE CAN TRANSLATE THE LANGUAGE OF THE BROOD—WILL WE FINALLY HEAR WHAT THE LAKE HAS BEEN WHISPERING?
Printed on reclaimed bone, May 1910. The Steamboat Dispatch Co. assumes no liability for any messages received after midnight. If you hear it speak—do not answer.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?