Content Advisory: This account contains psychologically disturbing themes, body horror, invasive biological transformation, industrial contamination, aquatic dread, and existential terror. Readers may encounter descriptions of hallucination, mutation, and irreversible metamorphosis into unnatural forms.
Here is the first-person account written by Minta Thale, a.k.a. “The Origin of the Milfoil Queen”, discovered in a warped shoebox of moldy, waterlogged volumes, their spines furred with mildew, their pages swollen and warped—found by accident (or perhaps not) in the ruined attic of an abandoned camp along the Chateaugay Lake Narrows.
The text was transcribed, with as much fidelity as possible, by the staff of the Shatagee Woods Museum of Unnatural History, who noted that several passages were illegible, others blurred as if written underwater, and that a strange, persistent green-black stain seems to spread slowly across the paper, as though the journal were still… growing.
THE JOURNAL OF MINTA THALE
(Discovered 1937, catalogued S.W.M.U.H. Accession No. 3171.22-B)
“Something has happened to me.”
“I have not written Orin. I cannot. I do not dare.”
[Entry: Date Unclear — Possibly March, 1892]
It began long before I left for Malone. I see that now. I feel it in the back of my teeth, in the way my joints no longer creak like bone but slip, soft, as though lined with something… mucilaginous.
I think back often—too often—on those summers. Orin and I hauling the seines down by the shallows, our palms blistered from the rough tarred rope, the fish flickering silver as quicksilver in the nets. How we’d drag them ashore, lay them on the wet stones, and I—always I—was the one to crouch low, pluck the hook-lipped whitefish from the tangle, and snap their spines with thumb and knuckle.
I remember the water there. Always slick. The film over it—not oil exactly, not then. A sheen like breath on cold glass. Sometimes a smell—metal, sweet, coppery, and something deeper… sap? blood? fermentation?
I thought nothing of it. The men said it was the bog. Runoff from Standish. Or the kilns upstream belching their filth into the feeder creeks. The lake had always taken it. Why wouldn’t it?
How many times did I swallow that water? How many leeks did we pluck from the banks up by the South Inlet—those big ones, the ones with stems striped in dark iron, almost black—and call it good luck? How often did I lift the damp nets, bare-handed, thick with that slime—milfoil, mostly, yes… but sometimes stranger things. Things that curled when touched. Things that didn’t let go.
[Entry — Franklin Academy, Malone — April, 1892]
At first it was a numbness. My fingertips, some mornings, were soft. Puffy. The skin wrinkled in deep patterns long after I’d left the wash basin.
Then the dreams began.
Dreams of the inlet, but not as it is. The water was clear—not blue but glass. Beneath it, a lattice. Not roots. Not rock. Something… interlaced. Bronze? Bone? A meshwork of ribs and struts. Every time I dreamed it, I woke with the feeling that my hands were wet, though the sheets were dry.
I began to forget things. Classes. Meals. Whole days blurred. Father’s boyhood companion from his school-teaching days, now Mrs. Olive Hopewell, the Old Squire’s daughter from Bellmont, now teaching at the Academy, scolded me for wandering—though I had no memory of leaving campus. Once, she found me barefoot, down by the railway embankment, my hands full of moss. Or something like moss. Thick. Stringy. Pale as tendon.
I wrote Orin once—maybe twice. After that… I couldn’t. The words wouldn’t stay. Ink beaded on the page like water on wax. The pen slid wrong. I started the same sentence over and over:
“Something has happened to me.”
And then the boy.
You’d think I would have noticed him, standing there in the alley between Glazier’s and Eberhardt’s. But no. He was just there. As though he’d been waiting since before the alley existed.
He held the envelope—the red one. Smiled without teeth. Handed it to me. No words. Just stared. I opened it. The card—the nine of clubs—and the note:
“The Laughing Engine receives what is given. Return what was taken. Your father will understand.”
When I looked up—the boy was gone.
[Entry — The Encounter — April, 1892]
I don’t want to write this. I can’t… but the shape of it presses against the inside of my skull. If I don’t write it, I will become it.
The shop—Tallow Jack’s place—should not have existed in Malone. It wasn’t there the day before. Or the day after. I know that. I checked. Mercy me, I checked a dozen times.
Inside, the walls sweated. The clocks—there were no clocks, but the tick-tick-tick was constant. Measured. Heavy. As though the building itself had lungs, wheezing.
Jack was there. Thin. Too tall. Neck wrong—bent sideways, like a reed in current. His eyes were candle-stubs. No irises, only melted wax where pupils should be.
His voice didn’t pass through air. It went straight through skin.
“You are the child of the waterline. You are the ledger that was never balanced.”
… ?
Shaken, I asked what he meant. My voice didn’t work right. It came out in bubbles.
Then he showed me the daguerreotype.
I cannot—I cannot describe what was in it.
I saw… my father! Yes. And Orin. And behind them… something that should not exist in this world. A wheel. But not a wheel. A mouth. A ring of teeth where the horizon should be. A machine—but made of ribs. Of vertebrae. And woven through it—milfoil.
But milfoil… not as weed. As muscle. As nerve.
It had hands. Or something like hands.
And it was watching me.
[Entry — Date Illegible]
I think that was the moment. Not when it began. No. When it accelerated.
I left the shop and I could feel… roots. Inside me. No. Not roots. Threads. Threads like fishing line. Like net filament. Stretching out of me, into the gutters, into the puddles, down.
Every reflection showed it clearer. The patterns beneath my skin. The shimmer at the edges of my face. My hair… heavy when wet. And it never dried.
I dreamed the upper South Inlet spring again. Only now I was beneath it. Looking up. My arms… not arms. Fronds. Fingers unraveling into green, into silver strands. The world above warped by water’s skin.
I can feel the sediment now. It welcomes me. The lake remembers me. The silt has pores. The mud has lungs.
[Entry — Final]
I had to leave Malone. I didn’t tell anyone. I took the midnight train. Sat in the last car. No one else there. The conductor never looked at me. Or couldn’t.
I don’t remember getting off.
I remember… the sound of the water. I remember wading in. Walking out past where the bottom falls away, where the milfoil grows thickest.
It didn’t feel cold.
It felt like… coming home.
This journal ends here.
Its final page is soaked through with a green-black stain that resists all attempts at drying or chemical analysis. Museum staff report that the journal emits a faint smell of lakewater, even when sealed.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?