Goreville -- Prelude

The frigid breeze swiftly lashed through the air, shifting the overcoat of powdered snow in between trees, and sending ripples over the mirror surface of the Bleak Lake. The heat of summer was gone and winter was overlapping it with glacial snowfall and skin ripping temperatures.

Every animal was in recluse.

Timothy was not. He was taking a walk, out of curiosity, down to the lake.

The Bleak Lake wasn't titled Bleak without reason. In 1999 there had been reports of screaming, but no one actually saw anything up close and personal. All anyone ever heard were the screams. Some people claimed to have sprinted down to the lake, finding nothing, after they had clearly heard the ululations beyond audibility. "I heard d'em children yellin'---I did. But I ain't saw nothin' " was the common thing to say---whether it was said in a hick accent or not. There were rumors spreading like the Black Plague about a killer kidnapping and drowning town folk in the lake for pleasure. No one could provide a speck of reasonable proof though.

Donovan Crowley, the town sheriff and the only man, at the time, willing to take a good look at the situation, strolled down to this lake in his acclaimed "tin-patrol-can" one day, parking along the side of the highway which branched east away from Stranded Line. After walking along a bike path he arrived and heard nothing except barking dogs from someone's backyard and the serene winds bending tree boughs. He wasn't surprised. Upon his return to the highway he found that his patrol car was gone---not even track marks from the tires lay imprinted in the snow.

Since 1999 there hadn't been much talk about the lake.

Eleven years later, in 2010, a small band of middle school kids came running from the lake at night, crying, saying that they actually saw a man maliciously grinding a saw through an elderly woman's face while she lay, half submerged in the black waters of the lake, howling in pain. A few nights previous an old woman had been reported missing from the psychiatric hospital in Olympia, no more than twenty five miles from Stranded Line. Many suspected this to be the woman the children saw. But no evidence could be found around the entire lake which would solidify the truthfulness of the incident. No blood. No shuffled dirt or forgotten murder instruments.

Timothy's knowledge of Bleak Lake came from his father, John Lockard, who told him everything there was to know about it. His curiosity would take him there. To the Bleak Lake.

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(It's only a prelude)