Ghastly Lagoon
By: Justin Mckeon
Tags: Fiction, Thriller, Horror, Love, Beach

A sandcastle stood in the center of the beach with a stick covered in seaweed poking out of the top; a green, plastic bucket laid beside it, and a five-inch ravine filled with the ocean’s babies. Every Sunday night, Rivera and I would walk ankle-deep in the “Ghastly Lagoon,” as she liked to call it, listening to Petula Clark’s Downtown on the mucky, damp sand with two pristine bottles of Pellegrino. Whenever I brushed her hair, clumps of crusty sand came raining off her scalp, and returned back into the terrain.

The first time I saw her, resting her perfectly round head on a cold towel, with one knee raised above the other, absorbing the sun like a perfect dandelion, I couldn’t move my eyes away from her. An angel whose golden halo is visible all around her body. Like a never-ending cycle, there was always a new sandcastle every time we came here. Different shapes and textures, sizes and thicknesses, warm sand or cold. However, there was always the green bucket that sat halfway dug into the swamp, like a famous artist signing his painting. It was always easy to distinguish the bright, sage in the midst of the dull sand.

Even though we called it our “Sunday Walks,” we spent most of our time sitting on an abandoned, dilapidated lifeguard stand that creaked every time we spoke. Staring far out, looking for incandescent buoys, and fishing boats we always thought would get eaten by sharks or demolished by whales. We would often talk about the future; where we would go to college, or how much smarter Rivera was than me (even though she’d never admit it). The ocean always smudged her glasses, due to the misty air, and I’d always gently rub them with her navy blue Yale sweatshirt. Her tiny legs would dangle over the lifeguard stand as they sway sprawled out like a magical ladybug learning to fly.

I didn’t know if I loved her until the summer of ’75 when we were going on one of our Sunday night walks. It was different. Instead of the orange and pink rays of sunlight dripping into the ocean, creating an infused bed of warmth, it was a gray and dusky smog, polluting the Ghastly Lagoon, creating a relentless, bitter demon. All the seagulls were dead; thousands of their bloody, grotesque bodies floating on top of the seabed. The usual mist of Poseidon’s spells no longer heal from Hades’ furnace. It’s now the rain — from God himself — that extinguishes the fire, creating sharp bullet holes that sink into the sand. But the one difference that made us know something was off wasn’t the darkness in the sky or the massacre of seagulls, but the missing sandcastle, and the missing green bucket of the anonymous virtuoso.

We stared at each other as the thunder cracked a purple frown. Rivera’s brown, frail skin coiled against my chest, hugging me as I hugged her back, staring at the treacherous ocean that could give you nightmares just by smelling the impure salt, and poisoned fish. But the evil that lurked solely on the surface was nothing compared to what slithered underneath on the bottom. Intrigued by the mysterious occurrences, I begged to go closer, like a kid who whined and yelled to go see the sharks at the zoo.

“Just a little closer. I’ll protect you, don’t worry,” I said as I eagerly grabbed her sweaty palm and dragged her forward.

“I’m not sure, Link. When’s the last time you’ve seen an ocean with more seagulls than fish?” Her eyes began to swell as I heard the trembling of fear in her voice. She started to take bigger breaths and quickly reached into her denim blue jeans and grabbed her inhaler.

“Hey calm down, okay? It’s gonna be okay. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. It was only a suggestion. I would never do anything to hurt or harm y — ” She suddenly stopped talking. Staring past me, her eyes froze and locked on to the ocean. The seagulls were gone; like they rose from the dead and flew away into the smokey clouds. Instead, there were millions of green, plastic buckets floating and jinking up and down. Up and down. Up and down. Rivera pushed me aside with a stern, strong shove, and walked towards the darkness.

The winds ran through blue garbage bins and threw away everything inside causing a tornado of tin Coca-Cola cans and aluminum foil. A gust of sand — along with the rain — slapped the back of my neck as I stared at Rivera, waist-deep into the ocean. The green buckets began switching instantly into red, purple, yellow, brown, gold, silver, blue, black; with each changing color, it dragged her closer and closer to the bottom of the ocean floor. Like she was possessed by a psychotic monster, her head began thrashing and dunking under the water, gargling up sea-blood and spitting out a grueling, muddy fish whose been swimming in the acidic stomach of a beautiful Devil. As I ran up to the shoreline, I screamed, crying whatever there was left to give for Rivera to just hear me. But she couldn’t. She wasn’t there. Just Him and me standing in the middle of a beach. But He was dressed inside of Rivera.

Facing towards the horizon, with His head only visible, He started to shake and twitch while the floating head slowly creaked to meet my eyes. However, His irises were gone, creating a solid, ivory void of intertwining veins. He began to grin, slowly raising His lips to see over five rows of brown, sharp teeth that dripped yellow, cold saliva which eventually oozed into an explosion of rotten, jade puss scraped off His tongue. His skin started to turn cracked and brittle like an old man trapped in a wheelchair as, suddenly, pieces of bone and flesh started to melt as if you took His body and smelted it in a furnace. The solid, omnipotent demon, which looked like a grotesque, dismantled version of Rivera, blended into the ocean’s body, like an ice cube that was forgotten out in the sun. He was gone. She was gone.

The only movement left at the beach was the crashing of my soul, which followed accordingly to the pattern of the waves. I stood there, lost and frozen as the sky still clapped for me, rubbing their hands together to create jolts of electrical sadness. I edged closer to the water subconsciously, in disbelief and shock as to what happened to her; to Him. With half my body submerged, the ocean began to change. The green buckets disappeared, and the water, rapidly, started constricting my chest as it started to turn from liquid to solid. Splashing and running furiously, trying to escape this awful prison, this hell. But the possessed beach trapped me, controlling me like a puppeteer, making me dance and howl at the impossible. My breaths began to sound like wheezing grasps for sanity, for I can feel Him entering my brain and eating my lungs. With only my head above the water, the frozen ice choked me as I gave the last words that would leave my now putrid mouth, growing rows of teeth, a two-foot long tongue, and losing my vision as the pupils of my eyes start to fade in the back of my head turning everything to a corrupt, dark world of everything around. The sand had turned into molten lava, the sky was an obsolete mess of ghouls and ghosts soaring around the mansion of supernatural anomalies, the water below belonged to the fifteen-foot eels with six eyes and legs as long as wolverine fangs, swarms of swordfish whose galvanized weapon was irony red with the blood of wounded piranhas. But the worst of all were the two tombstones that were plastered on the far end of the beach. In the sand, marked by two green plastic buckets, carved: “Rivera, 1963–1975, welcome to your new life” and: “Link, 1962–1975, I’m glad you could join us.” Within the bottom of the Earth, were our two obliterated bodies, shredded into pieces of tiny organs and bones. Our spirits floated above the grave, entering the sky with the other ghosts which welcomed us to the malevolent: “Ghastly Lagoon.”