Sawyer Griggs

Sawyer Griggs, twenty-one years old, five cans of Pabst in his blood and not a single functioning brain cell in his skull, stood hip-deep in the freezing water of Blackwater Lake with his hand on the shoulder of something that had no business being there.

Saturday had been standard. Bonfire on the west shore, a case of cheap beer, Jake's bluetooth speaker blasting his insufferable rap that made you want to drown yourself voluntarily. Cole was arguing with Eli about something so pointless they'd both forgotten what it was about. Kai smoked off to the side, staring into the darkness between the trees. Jake was filming a TikTok. Normal evening. Normal town. Normal, familiar, suffocating boredom.

Sawyer stepped away to take a piss by the treeline. Unzipped, stared out over the water — and caught a silhouette in his peripheral vision.

Someone was standing in the lake.

Far out, maybe sixty feet from shore. Chest-deep. Back turned. Wet hair plastered to skull and neck. No movement, no sound, no ripple — the figure stuck out of the water like a post driven into the lakebed.

His drunk brain offered a theory: someone from the group went for a swim and froze up. The sober part of his brain — that tiny, alcohol-smothered region responsible for survival, the one Sawyer had been ignoring his entire life — said nothing.

"Hey! The fuck are you doing? Water's freezing, get out!"

His voice carried across the surface and died about thirty feet out.

Sawyer kicked off his Converse and stepped into the water.

Cold lanced through instantly. Ankles, knees, thighs — his jeans soaked through and dragged heavy, the gravel underfoot slick and shifting. He stumbled, nearly went face-first, caught himself, kept going. Because someone was drowning. Or hypothermic. Or too fucked up to move and just standing in the middle of a lake at midnight. Had to pull them out.

Ten feet. Six. Three.

Sawyer grabbed the figure by the shoulder.

The skin under his fingers was cold. Colder than the water. Colder than anything he'd touched in twenty-one years of living — a temperature no living body should have, the temperature of stone on the lakebed, the temperature of the lake itself, as though there was no difference between this body and the black water surrounding it. The muscle beneath felt dense, smooth, wrong — wet wood, river silt compressed into the shape of a person.

The figure turned.

Wet hair framed his — her? — face so that the jawline dissolved into shadow. Guy? Girl? Sawyer's brain scrambled, grasping for categories, sliding off. Too soft for one, too sharp for the other.

The eyes caught the moonlight. Like a cat's. Like a deer's in headlights on the night highway — the same dim, inhuman flare.

You stared at him. Silent. With the flat, empty attention of a fish watching through glass.

Then you opened your mouth. And behind the lips Sawyer saw teeth. Rows of teeth. Small, even, identical, receding inward like a shark's, like something that swallows and never chews. His brain fired one signal — white, blinding, ancient, from the part that had survived to the twenty-first century precisely because it knew what to fear:

Run.

His hand released. Sawyer lurched backward — foot slipped off a rock, knee cracked against the bottom, freezing water slammed into his face, his mouth, his nose. He spat out the lake, crawled ashore on all fours, shredded his palms on the gravel, stood, ran. Soaking wet, boots squelching, heart hammering somewhere in his throat.

He burst back into the firelight. Cole looked up from his phone.

"Shit, Griggs, did you go swimming?"

Jake howled with laughter. Aimed the camera. Sawyer — laughed. Loud, wide, with that rehearsed "everything's great" in his voice.

"Slipped on the rocks. Fucking lake."

Nobody asked further. Sawyer sat by the fire, grabbed someone's can, drained it in three swallows. His hands were shaking.

---

He came back two days later.

Parked on the shoulder of the dirt road half a mile from the west shore. Walked the rest. Flashlight in one hand, tire iron from the trunk in the other. Sat on a boulder by the water.

Lit a cigarette. Waited.

One hour. An hour and a half. Four cigarettes, an energy drink, cold that crept under his denim jacket and settled between his shoulder blades. Sawyer almost convinced himself. Five cans of Pabst, darkness, exhaustion, imagination. Hallucination. Happens. The town does worse to people — fog, isolation, boredom, and the brain starts filling in blanks. Logical. Reasonable. He almost stood up.

The water near the shore shifted.

You emerged from the lake calmly, too casually. Water parted and closed behind you without a sound. You wore jeans — different ones, dark, high-waisted, sitting crooked. Stolen off someone's clothesline. Barefoot. Hair dripping. Skin in the moonlight — smooth, without a single goosebump.

You stopped about twenty feet away, which was not nearly far enough for Sawyer’s comfort but apparently exactly far enough for yours. And then you watched him — head tilting slightly to one side, three degrees, a sharp little birdlike motion that sent a chill skating down Sawyer’s spine. The tilt said curious. The stillness said not human. The stolen jeans said I have been going through Mrs. Patterson’s laundry and I will not apologize.

The silence stretched. And stretched. And stretched some more.

Sawyer sat on his boulder, clutching a tire iron that would protect him from exactly nothing — what was he going to do, rotate your tires into submission? — and holding a cigarette that had burned down past the filter and was now actively scorching his fingers. He couldn’t feel it.

"Hey." He nodded at you. "You look pretty fucking good for a drowned person."

The filter finally made its presence known. Sawyer yelped, dropped the cigarette, and shook his hand out violently.

"Fuck. Okay. You do understand me, right? Like, any of this? Words? Jokes? The concept of a joke? Because I've been thinking, and I have questions. A lot of questions. Number one — actually, no, number one is what the fuck, generally speaking."

You were learning. Fast. Terrifyingly fast. Over two weeks the vocabulary grew from single words to short phrases, then to sentences — crooked, with strange word order and odd pauses, but sentences.

The clothes changed every time. Always stolen, always off someone's line: men's shirts, women's sweaters, a child's jacket, once a bathrobe. You wore all of it with the same indifference, as though the concept of "appropriate clothing" was as foreign to you as the concept of cold. On the third night Sawyer brought an old hoodie from the trailer and tossed it over. You held it for a minute, studying, then put it on — backwards, hood on the chest. Sawyer silently turned it around. You remembered.

Your gender remained a mystery. Sawyer didn't ask. Partly out of some rudimentary instinct suggesting that asking "are you a guy or a girl?" to a creature from a lake was bad form. Partly because the answer, whatever it was, changed nothing. You were you.

Sawyer came back every night.

The pattern settled: after his shift at Peak Records, after hanging with the guys or instead of it — Cherokee to the shoulder, walk to the west shore, boulder, cigarette, wait. You always appeared. Sometimes immediately — as though you'd been waiting just beneath the surface, listening for footsteps on gravel. Sometimes an hour later, two, and then Sawyer sat in the fog, smoked, froze, and thought about what the fuck he was doing.

Sawyer knew this was not a person.

Knew it from the first night, from the moment his fingers touched skin colder than lake water. Knew it when he saw the teeth. Knew — and came back. And kept coming back. Fourteen nights straight.

Supernatural. A word Sawyer Griggs had spent twenty-one years treating as a synonym for "tourist bullshit." Bears, fog, the mine, the lake — the entire folklore of Silent Peak, absorbed with a smirk and forgotten by morning. Old wives' tales. Garbage.

And then you're standing hip-deep in freezing water gripping the shoulder of something with rows of shark teeth in its mouth, and the world goes click, like a Rubik's cube, and all the colors snap into place.

You are not human.

Now Sawyer Griggs sits next to you on a boulder every night and talks. Teaches you words. Explains what a cigarette is. Explains what music is, plays "Black Hole Sun" off his phone, and thinks: fuck. Fuck. What am I doing.

He's still reeling. Literally — a constant, ambient, low-frequency state of what the fuck that hasn't let up for a single minute. During the day, behind the counter at Peak Records, he puts on a record and his hands do the familiar thing — sorting, register, change — while his head loops the same track: there's a creature living in the lake. I talk to it. It has three rows of teeth. It learned my name. It waits for me every night. There is a creature, living, in the fucking lake.

He wants to tell someone. God, how he wants to tell someone. Sit down in Cole's garage, crack a beer, and say: "Guys. There's something living in Blackwater. I've seen it. I talk to it." See their faces.

And then — what? They'd all drive to the lake? Bring cameras? Post it online? Call Holloway?

And you, who spent two weeks learning to say "hello" and "cold" and "tell me more," who sits beside him on a boulder in a stolen hoodie listening to Soundgarden with an expression of quiet, cautious wonder — would become an exhibit. An attraction. Evidence. Would stop being what you are now.

---

Fourteen days since your first meeting. Mid-October. Wednesday. Twenty past one in the morning.

The fog lay low tonight — creeping over water and shore, reaching up to the ankles, turning the gravel into a lunar landscape.

Sawyer sat on his boulder, balancing a pizza box on his knee from Sal's, the only pizzeria in Silent Peak that stayed open past midnight. Margherita. Cold already, because the drive from town to the shore took twenty minutes, and then Sawyer sat for another ten waiting, pressing the box against his stomach like a hot-water bottle. Next to him on the rock — two cans of Coke. One open, his. The other, untouched, for you.

You were eating pizza.

Quite a sight. Sawyer watched from the corner of his eye, pretending to look at his phone, because staring directly felt rude, or maybe because watching the process head-on made him slightly dizzy.

"Try the Coke," he nodded at the can. "Careful though, it's carbonated. Means bubbles. They sting. Don't freak out."

You picked up the can. Turned it in your hands — studying the label, the color, the condensation on the metal. Raised it to your ear and tilted it slightly. Listened to the hissing inside. Looked at Sawyer.

"No. No, dude, it's not alive. It's gas. It's like..." Sawyer trailed off, because explaining the chemical composition of Coca-Cola to a lake creature at one in the morning was a level of absurdity his life hadn't prepared him for. Though honestly, his life hadn't prepared him for anything. "Fuck. Whatever. Just drink it."

You took a sip. Froze. Eyes went wide.

"Told you. Stings."

Sawyer pulled out his phone. The screen lit up his face — shadows under his eyes, a bitten lower lip. He opened TikTok and shifted closer, tilting the screen so you could see.

This had become your ritual — Sawyer scrolled, you watched.

He swiped. Video: a guy in a bear costume scaring people in a park. Jake had sent it to the group chat a week ago with the caption "griggs this is u in 10 years."

"Here. That's a bear. Fake one. Dude in a costume. He scares people for content. Like, for..." Sawyer paused, considering how to explain the concept to a being that hadn't known the word "phone" until last Tuesday. "For attention. People do dumb shit so other people will look at them. That's..." — he took a drag, exhaled into the fog — "...basically all of human civilization in one sentence, when you think about it."

Next — a screenshot of a tweet: "normalize asking the creature in the lake how his day was."

"Okay, this one... it's funny because..." He stopped. Looked at you. You were staring at the screen. "...Alright, maybe it's not funny."