January Tale 2021

New year, new stories!

I'm back with a new set of monthly questions for 2021, so there will (should) again be a story up on the last day of every month of the year.

If you're new here, here's how this works: I asked a question. I got answers from people. I took one of those answers and wrote a short story based on it. This is that story.

Also, due to popular demand (aka three people said would be cool, because that's what counts as popular demand here), I'm trying a new thing. There is now also an audio version of the story below here, if you'd rather listen than read. Am I a good person to read stories into audio format? Probably not. But I'm all I've got.

Anyway, if you do listen to it, and like that it exists, let me know. I haven't decided if I'm going to make an audio version of any stories in future, but if no one cares it's there, then I probably won't bother.

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What's the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in January?

San Gregorio de Polanco. It is in Uruguay. Forest mixed with beach. (Answer from Camilo)

The girl was leading me down a path, through a frosty forest. The morning sun was shining brightly and making the trees around us glitter, the frozen leaves on the path crunching beneath our boots. We had been walking for twenty minutes out of town, and we hadn’t seen anyone for ten of them after we left the last houses behind. So I was surprised as the forest parted a bit and revealed old buildings, ones that clearly hadn’t been used in a long while.

She noticed me looking at the buildings.

“Granny told me that when they first built the dam, people wanted to come live by the lake,” she told me. “Before anyone realised there was a monster in there.”

“So now no one lives any closer than where the town is?”

The girl shook her head.

“Lake monsters can’t get very far from the water, though,” I mused, more thinking out loud than actually trying to convince the girl of any point. “And if this one is as big as I’ve heard I doubt it comes very close to the shallows either. The danger is in the lake, not right next to the lake.”

The girl thought about it for a moment.

“Maybe,” she admitted. “But would you live on the shore of a lake with a monster in it?”

Yes. Yes I would. Absolutely. No question. But I didn’t bother telling the girl that. It wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other.

The forest gave way to an equally frosty beach, the sand going for another hundred meters before hitting the lake covered in perfect, black ice stretching out until it reached the mountains on the other side of what once upon a time had been a valley. The girl stopped and shifted uncomfortably.

“I don’t want to go farther,” she said.

“You don’t have to. I’m pretty sure I can find my way to the lake from here,” I assured her, and she laughed. “Thank you for being my guide.”

I headed out onto the sand, expecting the girl to simply turn back, but her voice called after me.

“Are you really going out on the ice?”

I turned to look back at her. Awe and fear battled on her face.

“That’s the plan,” I said.

“I’ve been to the waterline,” she said. “Once. But that was during summer.”

“Is summer safer?” The girl nodded. This bit of information hadn’t made its way all the way to me with the other rumors.

“In the summer, there’s lots of food. And there’s lots of life. The monster won’t notice if you go and walk in the very shallow parts for a bit,” she told me very seriously. “But in the winter it’s all cold and dark and there’s not much to eat in the lake. It can hear you moving on the ice, and it will want to eat you, and it will come for you through the ice.”

It was always a good sign when the locals truly believed in the stories. Significantly increased the likelihood I hadn’t traveled all the way here for nothing. Not that the local stories were trustworthy, exactly. The monster in the woods was surprisingly often the village idiot or a bear or something that had been mistaken for something else once by a drunk guy, and from there the story grew. But equally surprisingly often the monster in the woods really was a monster in the woods.

“Well, if it wants to eat me, it’ll have to catch me first.” I held up my skates for the girl to see. I hadn’t been sure if they were going to be of any use to me, but now that I could see the lake it was clear it was an excellent place for skating. “I’m a very good skater. The monster might be bigger, but I’m faster.”

The girl looked at the skates for a moment, then nodded. I turned again and headed out to the lake. The girl didn’t call out after me a second time, but I didn’t check if she left. I didn’t mind if she stayed, as long as she stuck to the shore, which she surely would. Besides, if she was right about the monster, there was about to be a great show for anyone around to see.

I sat down where the sand met the ice and pulled on my skates, leaving my boots to wait for me on the shore. And then I was off, just me and my camera, packed securely in its waterproof bag on my back. The ice was perfect under my skates. I didn’t know how thick it was, other than thick, but it was almost unbelievably evenly frozen, forming a lake-sized window into the black depths beneath. There were hardly any bubbles clouding the view. I didn’t even know natural ice could look like this. Courtesy of an odd place where there isn’t much wind, very little rainfall, and cold winters.

It didn’t take long until I was far out on the lake. There I curved my path into a big circle. I didn’t want to get too far, to avoid getting lost on an unfamiliar lake, but I wanted to keep moving. How else was the monster going to hear me on the ice and come for me? So I curved left, wondering how long it would take for the monster to find me. Or if it could even hear me. It was a big lake, after all. Maybe it was too far away right now to hear me sliding along the surface. Then again, this was the part of the lake where the stories of its existence seemed most prevalent, most ingrained in the population. So maybe it liked this part of the lake, and here would be the most likely place to find it.

Or maybe it didn’t exist at all, and I had wasted my time and money coming here. Though honestly, skating on this ice alone almost made it worth the trip. Gods, I love skating on a good ice.

I had been out there for almost twenty minutes when I thought I heard something. The kind of low sound you feel more than hear, and if it’s faint you can’t be sure if it was really there or if you imagined it. I stopped to listen, to feel, but it was already gone, if it ever was there at all. So I sped up again, continuing in my circle and just enjoying myself. And it wasn’t just the ice. The weather was perfect: the sun was shining, there was no wind to speak of, and it wasn’t as cold as I had feared.

After a few minutes I heard the sound again. This time it was definitely a sound, and definitely a lot closer than last time. I smiled to myself. I wasn’t sure exactly what the sound was, or how it was produced, but it was certainly made by something big. And then I saw it. Well, I saw something. A change in the color beneath the ice, a hundred meters away, towards the center of the lake from me. It was there one instant, gone the next. I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t been facing that way.

In moments it appeared again, this time directly under me, gliding effortlessly beneath the ice. I hate to admit it, but for a few seconds I was simply stunned. I’ve seen a lot of monsters in my life, but few of them have been as huge as this. I couldn’t make out much detail, only that as our paths crossed its body kept going for much longer that I had expected.

I never stopped. As the last of it went past I did a sharp turn and sped after it. For a few heartbeats I thought it might stay close to the ice, where it was easy to see and easy to follow, but no such luck. It dove almost directly down and disappeared into the deep.

I turned into a tight circle atop the place it had disappeared, wondering what I should do next. I now knew the monster existed, or at least that something huge existed in the lake that was probably what the villagers called the monster, whether or not it was dangerous. What I now wanted was a good look at it. A good picture of it. I had a reputation to keep as someone who actually provided proper evidence for their monster claims. The ice was clear, but no ice is clear enough to get a detailed, undistorted view of something through it. I could make out that the thing had a long body and tentacles, but it hadn’t quite looked like a squid. I dug out my camera anyway, to have it ready in case I needed to get a picture in a hurry.

Right now it didn’t seem like I was getting much of a picture, in a hurry or not. I was weighing my options, none of which seemed good enough, when the thing appeared again. Directly underneath. Speeding up from the depths. I only had a blink of an eye to react, to kick myself to enough speed that it just missed me as ice and water burst from the exact spot I had been in seconds ago. Icy water splashed me as I sped away.

I didn’t turn to look back until I was what I hoped was well out of the thing’s reach. I caught a glimpse of the last tentacles disappearing back into the massive hole in the ice. I cursed softly to myself.

Well then. Not only was there a monster in the lake, it really did come at you through the ice. Through thick ice. Good to know.

For now it had disappeared, no doubt going back to the depths to gather the momentum to crash through the ice again. So I kept moving, keeping my eyes down. After only a moment it appeared in my sight, coming up towards me. But this time I knew what it was doing. I easily avoided it as it came through the thirty centimeters thick ice, and managed to get a much better view of it. And a bad picture or two.

It really was enormous. Its body rose meters out of the water, and I didn’t think I’d seen most of it. Not to mention the tentacles that probably had a reach of tens of meters out from the body. They snapped in the air and slapped against the ice in an attempt to catch me, but I was already too far away.

It came after me again, and again, and again, each time leaving the ice with another huge hole and me with another couple of not nearly good enough pictures. A part of me mourned for the ruined perfection of the ice, but a much more loud part was merely excited that there really was a monster. By the fourth try it had learned that I was moving. It sped towards the ice, but corrected its course at the last moment and came through a lot closer to me than I was comfortable with. I changed my skating pattern after that.

It was smart and fast, but I was smarter and faster. I flew across the ice, and it followed me, water and massive chunks of ice spraying into the air every time it blasted through.

I flipped so I was moving backwards, to get a proper look of it right as it came through. It slowed me down a little, but not so much it would catch me. And it paid off. The next time it came through I got a marvelous look.

There were a lot of hypotheses on where the monster had come from. It had appeared in the lake after the dam was built, and the explanations were everything from it always lived in the river to various guesses where it appeared in the dammed-off lake one magical way or another. I hadn’t had an opinion on which the true one was until now. Something this huge had to have come from the sea. It could not have been native to the river. It must have come up the river, for some bizarre reason, and been blocked away from its route back home when the dam was built. How a saltwater species survived in the freshwater river was completely beyond me, though.

It disappeared into the hole again, and I realised I had been too distracted looking at it to immortalise the marvelous look into a marvelous picture. I sighed. No way but to do it again. Luckily the creature didn’t seem like it was about to give up any time soon. So I continued my backward loop and waited the couple of minutes it took for it to dive deep, speed up and burst through the ice again.

This time I was ready with my camera. I took three dozen pictures in quick succession as it came through, ice and water flying, lifted most of itself out the water, and went crashing back down. I didn’t stop to check the pictures, but some of them must be good. At this point I had also seen it enough times that I could do a good drawing of the whole thing, even if only parts of it show in any given picture. I prided myself in not only my monster photos, but my drawings too.

Ok, one more time. One more set of pictures, I decided. Then return to the shore. As the shape became visible through the ice again, I readied my camera. And fell. Going backwards, focusing on the shape beneath the ice, I hadn’t seen where I was going, and my skate had hit the one crack in the otherwise perfect ice. I had been going fast, and now found myself sliding along almost equally fast, but quickly slowing down. It only took me a split second to realise I couldn’t slow. The monster would get me.

Still sliding I managed to get one skate beneath me, then the other. And kicked hard. Almost fell again. The ice exploded right behind me, the icy water splashing all over my back. I kicked harder.

I got lucky, that’s all I can say. I’m sure the monster could have reached me, if it had reached in the right direction. One of the chunks of ice could have easily hit me, coming down.

Instead I managed to get away, though only barely. The girl was waiting for me, half-way between the forest and the ice, her eyes wide. I grinned at her as I shouldered the skates and the camera and we headed back to town.