My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(3)

He slips in almost without a sound, just one gulp and gone.

Alone on the canoe now, Lotte stands unsteadily, the back of her hand coming instantly up to her nose, her mouth—the smell from whatever stringy grossness Sven dragged in over the side.

She dry heaves, falls to her knees from it.

They’ve drifted into… what? A mat of algae? Lake scum?

At this altitude, snow still in the ditches?

“Sven!” she calls to the blackness encroaching from all sides now.

She covers herself with her arms, sits on her heels as best she can.

No Sven.

And now she knows what that smell has to be: fish guts.

Some men from the town gutted a big haul of them over the side of their boat, the intestines and non-meaty parts adhering together with the congealing blood to make a gooey floating scab.

She coughs again, has to close her eyes to keep from throwing up.

Or maybe it wasn’t a whole net of fish—they can’t do that here in inland America, can they?—but one or two of the really big fish, pulled up from the very bottom of the lake.

Sturgeon, pike, catfish?

Sven will know. His uncle is a fisherman.

“Sven!” she calls again, not liking this game.

Not necessarily in response to her call, probably more to do with his lung capacity, Sven surfaces maybe twenty feet to Lotte’s left.

“Gevonden—got it!” he’s yelling.

What he’s waving over his head is the bright white lid of the little cooler.

“Come back!” Lotte calls to him. “I don’t want to see the giant fireflies anymore!”

“Mastodons!” Sven yells back, clapping the lid on the water, the sound almost unbearably loud to Lotte, like drawing attention they don’t want. She looks to the lights on the far shore to see if they’re all turning this way.

She gathers her phone-balloon, shakes the camera so it’s facing her, and says into it in perfect English, “I hate you, Sven. I’m cold and scared and when you’re asking yourself what you did wrong, why you didn’t get any in the big state of Idaho, you can play this and you can know.”

Then she wedges the phone backwards half under the canoe’s bow deck, up against the stem—the pointy hidden corner at the front where you can stuff a ziplock baggie you’ve blown up and hidden a phone inside.

“Come to me!” Sven says. “I don’t want to touch that… that hair again!”

“It’s not hair!” Lotte calls back. “It’s fish gut—”

What stops her from finishing is the distinct sense that someone was just standing behind her. Which would be impossible, of course, since behind her there’s only the lake.

Still, she whips around to the other end of the boat, certain there was a shadow there, just in her peripheral vision, already gone.

“It is kelp?” Sven’s asking now. “Is that how you say it in Engels?”

“English,” Lotte corrects, losing patience with this.

“Fuck English!” Sven says back. “Het is haar! ”

It’s not hair, though.

If it were hair, that would mean that… Lotte doesn’t know: would it mean that a moose or a bear or a cowboy horse had died out here, or floated out here while dead and bloated, then burst in the heat of the day, geysering blood and gore up in a chunky fountain?

The canoe thunking into something where there should be nothing tells her that’s just what it has to be.

She shrieks, can feel sudden tears on her face, her breath the kind of deep she’s about to lose control of.

“Sven! ” she screams, holding hard to the side of the canoe, and now, instead of another thunk, what she hears, fast like little footsteps, is a series of… not quite splashes, but some disturbance on the surface of the water. Fish in a line, jumping? A formation of bats snatching insects from the top of the lake? A rock someone skipped in the daytime, still making it across to the other shore?

She pushes away from whatever it is.

“Sven, Sven, Sven!” she’s saying, less loud each time, because it feels like her voice is putting a bullseye on her back.

They never should have come to America. This isn’t some big adventure.

Lotte looks back to the pier, to the light she knows is real, and right when she looks is when it blinks off then on again— no, no, it didn’t go off, something passed between her and it.

Seconds later, a profanely intimate sound squelches across the water to the canoe, like a wet ripping. From where Sven was? Is she even still in the same place in relation to him?

Lotte stands, feels more exposed than she ever has, even though she can’t see her own arms.

She falls back, almost over the side, when Sven starts screaming. In Dutch, in English, in human, except more primal —the way you only ever scream once, Lotte knows.

All Lotte can make out is “Wat is er mis met haar mond? ”

before his voice gargles down, stops abruptly.

Lotte reaches in to paddle back, away, she’s sorry, Sven, she’s sorry, she’s sorry to America too, they shouldn’t have violated her at night, they should have driven all the way around Idaho, she’ll tell everybody, she’ll warn them all away if she can just— Her arm is up to the elbow in the mat of hair and rot and guts, it’s stringing off her, draping into the canoe, wrapping around her but she doesn’t care, she’s lying on her stomach now to pull harder for the shore, her fingertips pushing down to where the water’s even colder.