"She Was The Lake"

Ed Calkins, Steward of Tara, sent me this lovely piece of "fan fiction" earlier this week, and I finally had time to read it on my birthday because I had the day off.

Ed has set this piece as after BeforeThe Blood. But as with all BryonySeries fiction, it's isn't necessary to read the other books to to follow and enjoy a particular story.

His idea is based on Bryony's bonding with Lake Munson in the fictional northern Michigan fishing vilage of Munsonville. Bryony bonds with the lake because the lake is central to the village, because her father is cold and distant, because her mother is dead.

She was the lake, and the lake was she.

From deep beyond deep, it called to her from depths, and her chest rose and fell its answer. Sometimes its waves were gentle and easy; sometimes they were short and choppy; sometimes they were rapid, harsh, and heaving with spume.

So - enjoy!

Dear MOMI,

Once again, I find myself stealing from you. Would it be OK to continue along is line with not only Susan, but Bryony as I can't seem to leave any of your characters in the graves you dig for them.

There were too many empty graves in Munsonville. Susan Betts had clawed her way through the dirt and grass, but she was not buried in the cemetery. The good Reverend would not allow the bodies of known damned planted in the same plot of earth as those just might have been saved.

“For all the good it did,” Susan thought bitterly.

If anyone wasn’t damned, it would be someone that didn’t live, someone that hadn’t died, or someone that never heard of Munsonville. You see, in that village, just like Hell itself, everyone was welcome. All the fires of Munsonville Hell lived below the streets, shops, shacks, boats, barns, and stables that proclaimed the village folk as too plain to be dangerous, too unremarkable to be monsters, too unimportant to be the hosts of Hell.

It was almost morning, and the full sun should melt her like candlewax. She didn’t care, but the heat was like the fire she had earned.

Susan.

Something called. It wasn’t him, but she ran down Blue Gill Road anyway. Anyway or anywhere, it made no difference, but she was scared and so she ran and kept running till anywhere became any road and anywhere was the mansion. She ran too fast for a lady. But now, she stood and stared at the hell that had come to her.

The Simons Mansion was not what it was. Instead it was everything it ever was. A plot of uncut trees; the scaffolds of its construction like a hundred little gallows; the palace where she labored as a servant of her friend, the old hulk of disrepair, decay, and death; The infernal scream of monstrous ruin on fire, the smoldering remains; and the empty plot of nothing; all transposed on the same spot. The greatest part of it was the empty plot, the least was its time as a palace.

This is where the bride got lost and found a locked door that she had no key for. This is where her friend left her in shame. This is where that terrible man…

Susan.

That call again! It was farther than it was at first.

“What!”

She heard her voice snap back impatiently as if she had a right to ever raise her voice.

Susan, run away. Away is lake.

Was it the trees that whispered now?

“I want to go back. I want to go to Fisher Farm. I want to be a summer sister again.”

No one lives there. Dead horses. No blood. Susan, come lake.

“Cowboy?”

Mr. Munson doesn’t ride. No one does. Come lake, Susan. Come me.

“But the Simons Mansion, why is it…”

No good, anymore. Vampires have parties there. Pain, lies, and death. Lake, Susan. Now.

“It was a palace. You were its queen.”

Someone else now. No good. Not her or him. What I am is where I am. Always is everywhere. Come now. Lake.

Knowledge pierced her undead mind.

“Bryony,” And she was there on her sandy shores. Now she could hear the voice of her former friend in full sentences as she spoke when she lived.

“Why did you leave me, Susan? Why, did you go and why did you kill yourself?”

“I never left.”

“You left before you went somewhere else. You never talked with me, not really. If you had, the whole thing would have been different. I lost you to shame and you were dead before you died. We should have stayed summer sisters. Failing that, I should have had you comb my hair instead of Trudi. Then, I would have also combed yours.”

“I am a dirty tramp, ma’am. Somebody tells me to do something, and I do it. That’s the way it is with a girl who lives and dies in bloody filth. Even you. You married a king, became a queen and I had to do what you say.”

“Don’t ma’am me!” Lake Munsonville darkens, threatening to storm.

But Susan was so far beyond caring.

“Ma’am because I worked for you. Ma’am because if you were my friend, you would have taken my baby instead of letting her go to the lowest bidder who was so desperate for a baby that she even could coup with the daughter of a filthy rag. If you’d have taken her, you wouldn’t have insisted on one of your own. You’d still be alive, Ma’am.”

“Fancy talk for Susan Betts,” the lake quipped. Then the waves calmed but the water darkened again. “He taught you.”

“He COMPELS me! I tried to stop him. I killed myself so he wouldn’t turn me, but somehow he did anyway. He said he couldn’t tolerate his blood whore sounding like an urban slut for the work he wants of me.”

“You don’t mean the twins, do you?”

“No. I was depressed. I was ashamed. But I would have lived despite the back and forth with the twins just to have my baby grow. But when he came to me, he made me evil. Do you know evil, Bryony? It’s not the twins’ they’re just hungry. Evil is when the only time it feels is when it hurts someone. Nothing else matters. That’s him. That’s what he’s going to make me when he finds where I’ve gone but I’ve nowhere to go. Kellen Wechsler is a powerful vampire and maybe the Devil himself, but now he’s my master. I can’t be friends with you Ma’am because I am to torment the son of his playthings. He wants your baby to punish John Simons for his disobedience and I have to obey.”

“To be fair, it was the King that refused your baby.”

“Because his husband master made him,” Susan mocked trying to hate the only friend she ever had.

“Perhaps, if you mean, John Simons but Henry Mathews is the father who is also his husband master. None of that worries me. The child was saved by all my many friends who fear nothing and are indifferent to the plans of vampires, ghosts, or devils. It was the trees that saved him, and you shall not harm him even if you must. You could forget all of that. You can forgive me for what I did as Bryony, and I shall forgive all you’ve done as Susan. But will you forgive what I do as Lake Munsonville?”

“What will you do as a lake that’s so terrible?”

“Drown all of the men.”

“You were Bryony then. You were as sad as I was.”

“Susan Betts, put your back to me and tell me what Munsonville looks like.”

Susan tried to comply but once her back was to the water, all she could see was the changing; the same thing she saw when she looked to the mansion.

“It’s always changing. It’s the same, but it’s always different. I don’t know.”

“And now look at me. Am I not always changing too.”

Of course she was, but always there was a limit and regularity to the change. The lake swelled and retreated, froze over and melted, grow choppy and calmed.

“I was once not Bryony, then I was but I was still the lake. One day, I shall wash the sins of the village and drowned everything that is not forest. I do not feel sad when I drown people. I bring them to where they live in my belly. Come inside me, Susan. Your master will never find you and I will never give you up.”

“What about the men that live in your belly, do they have to do what you say?”

“They don’t do anything at all, nor do the fish or the weeds. They just are, Susan. In my belly you will not call me Ma’am and of the men that still fish on top of me, you can whisper to me who I should take and who I should spare. We can be friends again. We shall be indifferent to the place that didn’t love you enough.”

“But you’re cold and I’ll drown.”

“You don’t have to breath anymore. You’ll like the cold once you get used to it. Vampires hide in deep water all the time. Come, Susan. I can’t comb your hair, but I can wash you clean. You’ll never feel ashamed in my belly. Just swim to my center and I’ll pull you in. Stay with me, Susan.”

And for the first hundred years as a vampire, that’s what Susan Betts did.