FICTION BY WILIAM J. DONAHUE

William J. Donahue writes horror and dark literary fiction. His published works include the recently released novel Only Monsters Remain, as well as two previous novels: Burn, Beautiful Soul and Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life. A full-time editor and feature writer, he lives in a small but well-guarded fortress in Pennsylvania, somewhere on the map between Philadelphia and Bethlehem.

You can find him here:
https://wjdonahue.com

THE WATER HAS TEETH
by William J. Donahue

“How much for an hour?” Christian asked.

“Take two hours at the least or don’t bother,” said the man behind the counter. A thick salt-and-pepper mustache overhung his mouth, his face dry and cracked like old cow hide. The name CLETE was stitched into the breast pocket of his stained, sleeveless button-down.

“If you ain’t never done it before,” Clete added, “you’ll need twenty minutes just to get comfortable, so you ain’t going to get nowhere good with the time you have left. You might as well stay here and keep your girlfriend from gettin’ wet.”

Christian saw Heather, the thirty-something brunette at his side, give a mischievous smile.

“We’re just friends,” Christian said, because he didn’t know how else to describe their relationship. He and Heather were basically strangers, having met eighteen hours earlier in a dive bar five miles down the road in Key West, the heart of Florida’s rum-soaked playground. Between rounds of drinks, she had offered to take him standup paddleboarding through the mangroves off Stock Island. She promised they would have fun, see a side of nature few get to see.

Although Christian had never set foot on a paddleboard, he had agreed because who knew where the day would lead? To a bedroom, he hoped, or at least a secluded beach where they could get horizontal and abuse each other in private. First, he had to get through the “adventure,” as she had termed it.

“What are the rules for renting a paddleboard?” he asked her. “I mean, we’ve both had a few.”

“They won’t care,” Heather responded. “They’re very relaxed around here. They’ll rent us the boards.”

A patchwork of terrifying images worried his mind. The worst: an eldritch beast using its hook-studded tentacles to snatch him from his board, and then drag him back to its den in the blackness of a thousand depths. The beast would lay eggs in his hollowed-out ribcage, and weeks later, the spawn would break through their leathery sacs and devour anything left of him that had not gone rotten.

Screw it, he thought. The divorce papers had come through less than a month earlier. He deserved some fun for a change, a little good fortune to replace every essential thing he’d lost during the year-long war with his former spouse. He forked over his credit card and ignored the safety instructions that might help keep him alive for the next two hours.

As the attendant wrapped up his sermon, Heather slapped Christian on the back and said, “Gotta use the loo, sunshine.” She made a beeline for the paint-stripped outbuilding that housed the toilets.

Christian waited until she was far enough away. “Level with me,” he said to the attendant. “Is there anything out there in the water that I should be worried about?”

With a dismissive wave, Clete muttered, “Big fella like you? No worries, Chief.”

“If I see an alligator in the water, I swear I’m going to curl up in a ball and die.”

“No gators ’round here. Can’t tolerate the salt water. Besides, they’re pussycats until they get past ten or twelve feet, and most of them have already been blasted between the eyes, degloved, and turned into belts and pocketbooks. Crocs, on the other hand, they’ll tear your stinkin’ head off and save it for later, but ain’t no crocs been around here since the sixties, probably. That’s what humans do with our monsters. If we can’t tame ’em or make money off ’em, we hunt ’em to the point of extinction.”

“You’re sure? No man-eating sharks out there? None of those monstrous pythons I keep hearing so much about?”

“Oh, you’ll see some sharks out there—baby nurse sharks and pocket-sized bonnetheads, but they ain’t going to bother you none. Only thing you got to worry about out there is the sun and the jellyfish. Oh, should you run into a houseboat out in the mangroves, best to steer clear. The folks who live on ’em—they’re harmless loners, mostly, but if they start jawing at you, just don’t say anything to set ’em off.”

“Like what?”

“You’ll know it when you say it. Listen: bar’s open if you need some liquid courage before you shove off.” Clete pointed his chin toward a small thatched-roof building surrounded by a dozen barstools. “Although I suspect you’ve already had a few.”

Christian eyed the mud-brown water, which seemed too cloudy, as if it were trying to hide something. He headed for the bar and took a seat beneath the thatched awning. A rail-thin bartender took a break from slicing limes and sidled over to ask her patron to pick his poison.

“Something with rum in it,” Christian said.

“You’re too trusting,” the bartender joked. She filled a snifter with rum, then doctored the pour with splashes of other liquors Christian could not make out. As she placed the drink in front of him, she added, “Fingers crossed you don’t go blind.”

He took a cautious sip. The tastes of coconut and pineapple overpowered the rum. He drank deeply and emptied half the glass before Heather reappeared.

“I guess one more drink won’t make a difference.” She rubbed her hands together, almost devilish. “Good thinking.”

Heather took the seat to his right and ordered a scotch neat, rocks on the side. She pinched an ice cube between her fingers and used it to gloss her lips.

“A toast,” Christian said. He waited for her to lift her drink. “To our conquests!”

As they finished their requisite sips, Christian joked that they should skip the paddleboarding altogether—just stay put, get plastered, and enjoy the breeze coming off the water. His eyes moved to a flash of color on her left thigh: ink.

“What do we have here?” His fingertips grazed the bare skin.

She peeled back the fabric of her board shorts to expose the coils of a tricolored serpent—black, red, and yellow.

“Coral snake,” she said. “American cobra.”

“How far up does the snake go?”

“You mean where does the tail end? A select few people know the answer to that mystery.”

“Lucky them.”

“That’s what I tell them.”

He considered the verb tense, tell versus told. The bud of jealousy flowered in his chest. In passing she had mentioned a boyfriend left behind in a landlocked part of North Carolina, a “dude” who chose to forgo Key West because he disliked sun, sand, and surf.

“How long have you and your fella been together?” Christian asked.

“Three years, if I had to put a number on it. He’s all right, I guess. Tall. Works with his hands. Drinks too much. Smokes too much. Doesn’t interact with the rest of the world too much.”

“So, he’s a placeholder.”

“We’ll probably get married…someday.” Her carefree air dissipated.

Christian had endured his marriage to Natalie for four mostly unhappy years, and the experience taught him to never again say yes to wasting any more of his life with someone he might describe as “all right.” Based on what he had learned about Heather so far, she seemed to exceed him in every way—intelligent, strong-minded, striking—so why would she stay with the wrong person when she most assuredly knew the affair would end in disappointment?

Because that’s what people do, he realized. Most people settled for less and hoped for the best.

Without prompting, Heather said, “I like how everyone down here is broken and they’re transparent about it. Like, they don’t even try to hide it.”

Her attempt to shift the conversation elsewhere seemed to him rather clumsy. “Not sure I’ve noticed.”

“Then you’re not paying attention. Everyone’s busted in their own way, but at least down here they let it all hang out.”

“Look at me,” he dared. He spread his arms wide as if to reveal himself. “I’m fine.”

“Please. I knew you were a mess within ten minutes of meeting you.”

“No more than you.”

“Touché. I could never be with someone who didn’t have a few screws loose. You wind up with someone who has no color to share—no crazy—someone’s going to get hurt bad.”

He thought of his wife—ex-wife, he corrected—and the bombs she had detonated in the flaming catastrophe of their marriage. During their first two years together, she had been quiet, unbothered, and compliant, until everything bothered her and she had sealed herself inside a perfect little world beneath a perfect little dome into which she let no one, especially him. By that point, they had nothing left to hold them together.

Of course, he’d dropped a few bombs on Natalie, too. He’d screwed up plenty. But at least they were both free to move on and make more mistakes with other people. Hopefully he’d make fewer next time.

Christian and Heather emptied their drinks and shared another—a concoction of rum, mint, and mango juice. The conversation flowed as the alcohol did its job, until she pushed him off his barstool and threatened to drag him “by the short hairs” back to the dock. She peeled off her board shorts and tank top while Clete prepared their paddleboards for launch. She seemed confident and content. Christian’s heart pounded.

When Clete told them to kneel on their boards with their backs to the swamp, Christian thought he might vomit. Heather launched first. He closed his eyes and waited. As the board jolted backward, cool water flooded the deck. He opened his eyes to find himself adrift in water too deep to see if it had a bottom. He fought the sudden urge to piss.

Heather, who was ahead of him by twenty yards, seemed eager to lead. She was on her feet and paddling toward a field of open water. To his eyes, she appeared as a black dot beneath an endless stretch of cloud-speckled sky. He dreaded the thought of having to kneel, and of having her watch him kneel, for two hours straight.

“It’s called a standup paddleboard, dum-dum.” Her voice seemed small, farther away than it should. “So stand up!”

Christian cursed her name under his breath. Holding the paddle in both hands, he placed his knuckles on the board’s spongy deck and pushed his way to his feet. The board shimmied beneath his weight, but he steadied himself easily enough.

“Finally,” she said. “Now come on, dum-dum.”

They left the primary channel and entered a broad bay that led to a mangrove forest. An empty Mountain Dew bottle floated past. Puffy clouds flecked miles of soft blue sky.

He followed Heather into the mangrove maze, which offered sights he knew he would remember: broken-down houseboats with overly friendly owners—misfits, outcasts, modern-day savages who told society to go piss up a rope; groves whose soft-bottomed pools bloomed with hundreds of palm-sized jellyfish and a pair of small mud-brown nurse sharks inevitably there to feed; a dead deer with its neck caught in the roots of a mangrove tree, two of its legs gone and large portions of its body torn away, shock-white morsels of tendon and organ being picked away by crabs above the waterline and diminutive black-and-white banded fish below.

The maze emptied into a tranquil expanse. The Gulf of Mexico loomed in the distance. Next stop, Cuba, out there somewhere. A single-engine Cessna roared overhead and faded into the distance. A broad smile creased Christian’s face. Sharing cocktails and an adventure with a drop-dead gorgeous woman he barely knew? Life could get no better.

The water was calm, peaceful, perfect—save for a line of ripples that seemed to zero in on Heather’s board. He adjusted his sunglasses, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

A gnarled head broke from the waterline. Fifteen feet behind, a reptilian tail ridged with triangular scales, like the teeth of a shark, swept east to west. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He could do nothing to stop what was about to happen.

Heather looked to her right. She had no time to scream.

The crocodile clamped its jaws onto her right calf. The monstrous head plucked her off the board as if she weighed nothing. The beast spun like a lumberjack’s log, over and over, Heather rolling along with it. Even from thirty feet away, Christian could hear the grotesque sounds of things popping and tearing, the unmistakable groans of bone and tendon coming undone. The water churned with pinkish foam.

Then, from the gurgling and thrashing, came silence…complete stillness.

Christian had an unobstructed view of the crocodile’s escape, its dragon-like back broader than the deck of his board. Heather’s limp body dangled from its jaws. Her lifeless limbs waved like tendrils of seaweed caught in the current.

“Heather,” he said, as if uttering those two syllables would somehow bring her back. He wished he had bothered to ask her last name.

The hot sun beat on Christian’s bare back. He looked toward the notion of shore. Solid ground was perhaps a mile away, through the maze of mangroves anchored lightly to the mud. He screamed for help, took a gulp of air, and then repeated his plea. The only replies came from the soft wind, the rustling of the mangroves’ waxy leaves, and the burble of gentle waves lapping his board’s starboard rail.

If that damned thing decided to come back, he would be as helpless as a baby bird waiting for a shadow to darken the nest. He imagined the crocodile gliding silently beneath the surface, gaining speed with every swipe of its massive tail, and then striking from below. The impact would hurl from his board and into the water. Just as he would come up for air, the dragon would clamp its jaws around his head. The last thing he would hear, apart from the thrashing and growling and cries of agony in his own voice, would be the sound of his skull being crushed.

His hands tightened around the shaft of his paddle. The blade carved two deep arcs into the water. Silt muddied the shallows as the board turned toward the direction from which they had come—toward the rental car that had delivered them to this damned place, toward the thatched-roof bar where they had shared drinks, and toward the old man with the wiry mustache who would be the first to hear his absurd story.

The unmistakable murmur of a surface breach sounded ten feet behind the stern, maybe fifteen…close. He figured it was another crocodile, or maybe it was indeed an eldritch beast using its hook-studded tentacles to snatch him from his board, and then drag him back to its den in the blackness of a thousand depths.

Whichever monster it was, it was coming for him.

Christian chose not to turn around to look. If the end came, when it came, he hoped it would be quick.