Story Draft

 I grew up in a tiny little town on the Oregon coast. As expected the majority of business involves the port and just about everyone owned a boat. As tends to happen with unwanted things, a lot of the old ones piled up in strange places. The most notable was the huge freighter that had been permanently docked in one of the small inlets but there were others just as interesting all over town. One, a small rowboat, had been cut in half and turned into lawn art and sprouted tulips in the spring. Another was half buried in the gully behind the golf course and a lot of kids used it for various innocent, and not as innocent, activities. And as it happened, a friend of mine owned one of these curiosities, and it was right in her backyard.
   Her dad kept us out of it with warnings about the black widow infestation and that was plenty enough reason for me to avoid it but I wouldn’t have gone in anyway. There was something wrong with it. Something about the paint, or the windows that had been show out with her brothers BB gun, or the way the grass had grown way up the sides the same way it did around the stones in the graveyard by the school. Swinging on the creaky plastic seat with the sticky rubber-coated chain in my hands I wondered whether the boat missed water. In the winter when the brush died back it would have had a clear view across town to the ocean had it not been facing the house. Had they done that on purpose? One of the large front panes was missing, so the boat was one-eyed. Maybe it wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway.
   My complicated feelings for the boat meant I never touched it or attempted to climb up the splintery hull to the deck, much less go inside. The wood was rotten up all over, her dad had cautioned, and we could fall through into nests of spiders or snakes. Her brother, either unaware or ignorant of that warning, climbed up the splintery side occasionally and taunted us with firecrackers or his unloaded BB gun. No amount of pleading or threats would coax him off the boat and more than once I wrote him off as dead when he ran across the deck in order to get a good running start for his leap to the trampoline. But through luck or coincidence he never fell through, so the mystery of what was inside was left tantalizingly unsolved. I’d asked before, of course, but wasn’t satisfied with the answer of ‘nothing’. Nothing valuable, yes, but I greedily imagined stacks of old books, blank journals, rolls of dusty fragrant leather. Frayed canvas backpacks full of pens, pencils, erasers. I tried peeking in the windows but couldn’t make out even my own reflection.
   Then one night I had a dream.
   In the dream I was walking through the gate into the backyard. I rounded the corner of the deck and could see the shape of it but it was like I’d come from somewhere very bright. The grass was very wet and cold under my bare feet but as I padded closer to the boat I noticed a strange vibration in the ground. It was so fine, so close to my own inner workings that I mistook it for warmth at first but the closer I got the stronger it became. I had the discomforting sense of some inaudible sound ceasing. Something was wrong with the moon, the shape wasn’t right. There were no stars. The grass was lit strongly and where the lights of town should have been I sensed a great body of water, maybe all the water there ever had been or would be. I could feel the vibrations somewhere in me that didn’t have a name and now there was something else, something far under me. I reached the side of the boat and began to climb up the side in a trance. Splinters caught under my nails and were forced down to the quick. I felt it, but I had no choice and I kept climbing. For a second time I had the sensation of a sudden cessation. My hands wrapped around the railing and I hauled myself over. I landed hard and heard my knee explode but I walked on grinding joints across the deck to the cabin door. The spiders her father had warned us had amassed in greater numbers than even he could have imagined and the sickly moonlight sent them scurrying across their webs and into the walls. I felt them in my hair, crawling down the neck of my nightshirt. There were needlepoints of searing pain where several were crushed under my feet. But I kept walking to the back of the cabin, down three steps. Even when I crashed through the middle step and felt the skin on my shin rip open, I kept going until I reached what had probably been an engine room but was now something else, something alive and immeasurably sad. The vibrations pulsed out from this tiny room and the closer I got the more it drowned out the venom and loss of blood, replacing it with something hollow and cold and so much like death that for a moment panic drowned everything out. I saw that the floor of the space was gone. The floor had been gouged out by something huge. Somehow the moonlight filtered in and illuminated enough of the tunnel to allow me to appreciate fully the scope of the boat’s work. Alone, the boat had been busy. So much sadness, so much anger had given birth to something that dug beneath the earth. Heading underground, searching for water. I stood at the edge and leaned over. I could hear it down there. Pulsing. I must have made a sound. The digging stopped and from far down there was a rumble. Frozen to the spot I listened powerlessly, staring down into the dark as the vibration joined with the rumbling into one cacophonous sound that shook even the moonlight. It was massive, so much bigger than me, and it was coming, faster now, and I knew it would kill me but I couldn’t move, I could only stare down into the dark which was beginning to bubble upward and from far far below me was a flash of diseased light, light that had never seen the darkness above ground and I reached my hands up to claw the scream out of my throat and-
   That was the end. I woke up inconsolable and didn’t sleep well again for weeks. About a month later, in the middle of the night, the boat caught fire and burned to the ground. The house wasn’t affected, but my friend’s dad never felt as safe afterward and they moved out. An investigation concluded that it was probable arson, but it could never be proved conclusively as all evidence pointed to the fire having started from beneath the boat itself. Impossible, of course. The grass grew back, and according to the new owners it’s like nothing ever happened. The only sign that anything was there is the slight indentation in the earth. A side effect of the heat of the fire, according to the report. I never dreamed of the boat again.