7. The Devil Calls
The Devil Calls
Cunt sore. Hips aching. Marlowe felt everything more sharply as Pike’s venom wore off in slow, warm waves. They’d brought Marlowe back to shore, pushing her up the bank before splashing back into the lake.
Marlowe’s fingers prickled and stung and her mind cleared from the post-sex fog enough to struggle onto her knees and sink back on her heels. A groan left her at the soreness in her body, but the muggy night blanketed her and soothed the ache.
Marlowe shook off the warmth like breaking a fevered haze. Pike was gone. Pike was gone after calling her here, and distracting her from what mattered: killing Heather.
Anger flushed hot through Marlowe’s cheeks and she spread her trembling hand. The mark was nothing but puckered scars.
Pike drifted offshore, watching her. She seemed disinterested, as if Marlowe was another pond creature, as if she hadn’t taken control and Marlowe hadn’t let her.
Marlowe crawled to Pike. Venom-heavy limbs dug into silt and the jagged edge of a mussel shell carved into her palm. Algae-slick rocks bruised her knees. Still, she crawled.
Dripping blood into the water, Marlowe thrust her hand out. “Get rid of it.”
Pike flicked her tail and eddies of pond scum swirled away.
“Fucking get rid of it! I had to come back, for this? I had—”
Pike hissed and her hand shot out, gripping Marlowe’s face. She squeezed, and the bones in her jaw grated together. Marlowe stayed perfectly still, words she almost spat dying in her throat.
Leaning in, Pike pinched together the sides of Marlowe’s lips. A high sound piped through her gills. It took Marlowe a moment to understand, searching those golden eyes, her jaw aching.
The whistle.
An attempt at mimicry.
Stop.
“I brought you food,” Marlowe rasped. “My deal is done. Get rid of it.”
Her teeth clicked together as Pike released her with a snarl and plunged their hand in the muck, then in the creaking bulrushes, emerging with a snail shell and a fish. Scales flaked away from its decayed body.
Pike shoved the snail shell at Marlowe. Frustration beat in Marlowe’s chest, but she tamped it down. “Me?”
Pike gestured sharply at the fish.
“You,” she said slowly.
Prying open the fish’s mouth, Pike stuffed the snail inside and threw it on the ground between them. She stared at Marlowe.
Marlowe stared back. Her voice pitched low in a growl. “I don’t know what the fuck that means. You want to kill me? Eat me?”
Pike’s lips peeled back and a faint, familiar sound trilled from her throat.
Yes.
Marlowe was acutely aware of the water lapping at her knees. Of Pike’s needle teeth, bared at her. She swallowed, her throat dry, and didn’t move.
But Pike hadn’t killed her yet. “Is killing me the only way to get rid of it?” She felt her out for a loophole to this absolutely medieval fucking curse she’d gotten tangled in.
Pike’s gaze flicked from the fish back to her.
It could be a bluff. But the itch of her hand as it leaked strings of algae over her bathroom floor was fresh in her mind.
Monthly calls she always answered from Heather, giving her an address Marlowe always found even if she hated herself for it, seemed inconsequential to being summoned by a lake creature.
Marlowe’s jaw clenched. “And if I never come back?”
Pike snatched up the decayed fish. Snail shells cracked as she slammed it in the mud. A sliver of driftwood speared the fish to the shoreline.
Trapped.
Marlowe had spent the last 9 years trying to leave this town.
First her parents were gone, then Heather was the only thing keeping her here, and when she thought she might rid herself of the last fucking thing, Heather had fucked that over too, by never shutting the fuck up before they’d been attacked by a lake monster.
A lake monster, as if the earth itself were against her.
Marlowe was willing to bet even if she could get the biggest fucking fishing pole and haul Pike out of this miserable little lake, whatever she’d done to her went deeper than a desperate pull between them.
If Pike died, Marlowe could die, and if Marlowe died, Heather would be alive, and she didn’t deserve to live. Heather deserved to be gone.
All the broken things in Marlowe’s life had rotted because of Heather.
“If I”—Marlowe’s mouth went dry and she licked her lips and again shoved her hand, palm up, at Pike—“if I bring you someone else, can you get rid of it?”
Pike tilted her head, lips stretching greedily. A soft trilling noise hung between them.
Yes.
A sudden, unwanted image flashed in Marlowe’s mind: Heather, sweetly talking to Pike, bleeding-heart pajamas folded on the shoreline, Heather’s hands on Pike’s tail, slipping along the curve of her scales, her tongue in her throat—
They always believed Heather. Everyone always listened to Heather.
Marlowe scrambled to her feet, stomach heaving. Pike hissed, tendrils snapping around her face.
The uneaten lobster carcass had washed up on shore next to the corpse of the swan, tattered caution tape still hanging from its neck, and its dead eyes bored into Marlowe.
Heather wouldn’t come back to Pike’s Lake willingly. She might come to her apartment willingly if Marlowe was careful. That’s why she had the plan, the acid burning in her tub like the burning at the back of Marlowe’s throat.
“I’ll bring someone.” The words wheezed from her like she was being strangled. “I’ll bring someone, and you’ll let me go.”
Pike’s lips stretched wide. Taunting, almost, like this was a challenge. Then ripples on the lake marked where she’d been a moment before.
Heather, sweet-talking, cunning, dangerous Heather, couldn’t die here. Marlowe would find another way. The acid, her hands clamped too long around her throat, something, anything but bringing her back to Pike’s Lake.
If a creature could hear, Heather would worm into their brain until she consumed it. The same would happen to Pike. And if it didn’t—
The alternative turned Marlowe’s stomach and she stumbled to her truck, keys clattering as she stretched and snatched them off the wheel well in the box.
Heather, mouth dangling open, blood staining the backseat; Heather, flesh cold under her hands, slipping underwater; Heather, bloated, snails sliding over her teeth, her tongue, leeches burrowing into her ears.
Heather, finally dead.
Marlowe couldn’t.
She would get Pike a different body. Free herself from the mark. Take care of Heather so her body would dissolve before the memory of her could brand itself into Marlowe’s mind.
Marlowe wasn’t a killer, she thought that night, as she considered who to bring as a sacrifice for the creature at Pike’s Lake.
Marlowe wasn’t thinking about the creature at all, she told herself, as she suffocated into sweaty sheets, rutting against the mark on her hand.
Lake-rot melted into her finish, and the room smelled like Pike’s mouth.
Exhaustion followed her home from another work day.
Mercy Hospital had turned away another sallow-skinned young man, and when Marlowe hauled out the trash she found him stifling a cough by the overflowing dumpsters.
Marlowe could only offer a cigarette and a nurse’s phone number who had been fired a few months back for reasons cited as ‘not upholding the values of the organization’.
Marlowe knew she’d still be looking for work—rural religious hospitals kept small circles, and gossip about a lesbian caregiver traveled fast.
When Marlowe’s break was up, after sitting in silence on the concrete curb, the young man slipped her note in his pocket and gave her a thin-lipped smile. She only hoped it wasn’t too late for both of them to get out of this town.
Wood paneling sapped away Marlowe’s remaining energy and she sprawled on the paisley couch after a shower, staring at the smoke stains on her ceiling and pressing a napkin to her hand that had begun to ooze again.
The phone on her wall rang.
A shrill, battering sound against her already achy head, and Marlowe groaned, unmoving. She’d gotten home barely an hour ago. The hospital could wait. No fucking way was she going back in tonight.
Again, rattling slightly against the receiver.
With a tinny click, the answering machine picked up.
Silence.
Marlowe barely breathed.
Quiet rustling filtered through the receiver like someone was deciding to leave a message.
Then a voice, fragile and metallic.
“Hey, sorry, it’s Heather.”
Marlowe’s headache dug a blinding spike into her skull.
“Your truck was gone from the lake…I guess you made it out, even if you’re not picking up. You always used to pick up for me.”
Heather’s voice grated open a fresh wound in raw, deliberate strokes.
“I called Fish and Wildlife—they’ll be stopping by soon. Whatever we saw that night…” Heather sighed on the other end of the line, “…it doesn’t matter, Marlowe. If you get this, call me. I found a new place for us to…talk. Thanks.”
The answering machine whirred to a stop.
Smoke stains morphed into Heather’s blood spattered across Marlowe’s ceiling.