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Long before they arrived at the cliff, Granger Madsen felt uneasy. It was the wind. All night it wheezed down the mountain, through the trees, and across the lake. It broke at dawn with a final haunting sigh, like an animal taking its last breath—only to resurrect itself midday. It always seemed to be windy around the reservoir. Even on calm days, rouge gusts flew around corners, scurrying through the shrubs, fitfully tossing leaves and dirt into the air. It seemed inescapable. Even indoors, the wind hunted, rattling windows and shaking the vents like the Big Bad Wolf. Little Pig, Little Pig, let me in.
The afternoon was fading when the Madsen brothers' canoe crossed in front of the dam. The air was wet and biting, slipping chilled teeth under the long shadows of a tepid sun. The cresting whitecaps summoned by the wind climbed over the low sides of the craft, soaking their feet.
Regardless of the conditions on the reservoir, it was the last weekend of summer, and it was the ritual of the local teens to meet in the cove. Their friends were already there, jumping from the narrow band of granite cliffs that twisted down the mountain like the giant tail of a stone dragon. It was rumored that the Native Americans, the Uintah, and the Ouray tribes buried their dead in the cavernous holes in the white rock. Although, if it were true, looters had long since picked the graves clean.
The Madsen boys were late, delayed by the overbearing will of their dad. The cord of wood Granger had spent the morning chopping and stacking had not met Iron Ian Madsen's acrid approval, and Granger was forced to rebuild it while his younger brother Rory waited. Being late only added to Granger's anxiousness as he navigated their red canoe into the flock of boats bobbing in their moorings in the deadfall of graying logs wedged between the rocks.
The white bands of past water lines came in at eye level. Fear bristled up the fine hairs on his neck. In all his seventeen years, he didn't think he had ever seen the water so low. A few years ago, Samantha Neilson died cliff jumping. She was the daughter of the Mayor of Promise, the little town that sprouted into existence in the 1960s after the reservoir filled. It sat a mile below the Mayhap dam, nursing its green fields and gardens on the water seeping through the spillways.
Rory had been too young to go that summer, but Granger was there. He witnessed Samantha jump. The way Granger recalled the impact, it was as if the lake had become solid when Samantha hit the surface. Then it liquified and swallowed her.
Once the Park Rangers were on the scene, her body eerily bobbed to the surface—something about ruptured organs spilling gas inside her abdominal cavity. The coroner ruled that she died from the impact of a broken neck. It was called a tragic fluke, but Granger still had nightmares. In his dreams, the water formed an enormous fist that met Samantha on her way down. Colliding with her body, it flung her like a rag doll so violently that her head snapped from her spine. He'd wake with the horrible feeling he was holding her decapitated head, only to discover a wad of blankets or a discarded sweatshirt between his trembling hands.
Granger told Rory to wait while he double-checked the safety of the landing. Slipping over the side of the canoe, he dived deep, searching for any hidden hazards below the cliff. His best friend Abel Burbage nearly took him out in a cannonball. Abel popped up laughing, shaking his dark hair and sending a rainbow of water droplets into Granger's face.
The landing appeared safe enough, and Granger knew high water could contain as many hazards as low water. This did nothing to slow the queasiness dining on the lining of his gut. It wasn't that Granger was a nervous kid. He was intuitive. He could anticipate the phone ringing or the doorbell chiming a split second before they sounded. His dreams often held information that was eerily foretelling in a Delphian way. He possessed a strange ability to know when a deer was about to dart from the woods onto the road. He always seemed to know when to leave a party before it got busted and when to stash the old copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang that he and Rory shared inside his History textbook seconds before his dad entered the kitchen.
He knew other things too. The day Samantha died, she had turned and looked at Granger. He hardly knew her. Still, the look she gave him was that of naked terror. Not the terror of a trapped animal but the dread of an already dead one. It was as if they both knew she was about to die, but neither could stop it.
"I was worried you weren't coming," Abel said, spitting out a mouthful of lake water. His lips and the skin around his wide mouth were blue from the chill. The ashen pallor enhanced the spray of brown freckles covering his sunburnt skin stretched over his abnormally long face.
"My dad." It was all that needed saying. They had been friends since Kindergarten. Abel knew how hard Granger's dad was on him.
Together they swam back to Rory, and the three climbed the rocks falling into the jumbled line of jumpers. Someone was playing music from a radio stashed in a pile of discarded clothing. A few older kids were huddled in a pool of thick sunlight, drinking stolen cans of cheap beer and smoking cigarettes. The wind chopped and remixed the music and the laughter into a sicken funhouse of noise.
When they finally reached the top of the cliff, Rory leaned over the edge. His rigid joints cast his fourteen-year-old thin shoulders in unnaturally wild angles. The glaring light encapsulated his pale skin and shockingly white hair. He appeared to melt into the sallow clouds floating on the cadaverous horizon. He was scared.
It was likely that Rory, with his diminished hearing, couldn't hear the goading from the others growing increasingly clamant. Scanning the line behind them, Granger's blue eyes landed on the body of Abel's girlfriend, Lena Jones. Her waterlogged sneakers sloshed on the rocks as she fidgeted and shivered in her faded suit and cutoff shorts. She smiled at him, and suddenly Granger felt a new sense of urgency.
Standing wet in the wind, he was too cold to uncross his arms, so he nudged Rory with his elbow. "Jump."
"I don't know, Grang. That looks really far," Rory said, stepping back from the ledge.
Granger moved forward, taking his brother's place on the ledge. He eyed the water and understood what had scared Rory. The high September sun was glinting off the surface, making the waves look like the blades of a saw churring. With the water so low, it had to be a thirty-five-foot plunge.
"We could go at the same time?" Granger offered to his younger brother.
Rory nodded.
Granger turned to see if Abel wanted to jump with them, but Abel had stepped out of line to wait for Lena. A shadow crossed the sky. Granger looked up into a massive gust of wind. Something touched his back, and then he was falling.
The laughter echoed off the rocks as Granger hit the water hard. It felt like he had fallen through a pane of glass. It stung his skin and rushed through his ears and nose in razor-sharp shards. The water should have slowed his momentum, but it felt like he was speeding it up—like a rope around his waist was pulling him down to the bottom of the lake.
It took Granger a few seconds to react. He spread his arms and kicked his legs, but it did nothing. He was trapped in some kind of undertow. Was he being pulled into the dam? Again he tried to swim but with the same aught result. He was far too deep. It'd be a hell of a swim to the surface.
Starting to panic, he thrashed his limbs, demanding his body rise. Despite his efforts, he continued to descend. Then his feet collided with something with so much force his jaw chipped at his teeth, his ribs compressed, and his hips and knees folded. Pain shot up his leg, electrifying his spine. Kicking furiously, he tried to swim away. The effort shot bottle rockets of pain up his leg.
Granger realized he was trapped. His foot was wedged in whatever he had landed on. His eyes popped open. What he saw through the murky, green water didn't make sense. His foot had punched through the roof of a house.
Like all the kids raised around the reservoir, he had heard the stories about the ill-fated town of Mayhap. The mountain hamlet on the foothills of the Uinta Mountains had been dying from the moment it was conceived. It was settled by pioneer families sent east from Salt Lake to claim more territory for the LDS church. It stepped well over the boundary of the newly designated Tabeguache Reservation. Yet, the local tribes offered no objections to the new white settlers.
At its crest, two hundred souls lived in Mayhap, but the winters were harsh, the snow deep, the wind relentless, and the nearest gristmill too far—not to mention all the strange deaths. In the 1960s, when government checks were issued to build a reservoir, the number had dwindled to twenty-three individuals. Those who had not already moved to the higher ground took the money and fled without a fight.
Historians took photographs and commented on how remarkable it was that none of the remaining townspersons objected to the government buyout. The state surveyors mark each building with black plaques, numbering them like toe tags in a morgue. Because the state was in a hurry for the water, they didn't bother to waste diesel bulldozing the town. Mayhap was left as they found it except for the soil sites dug up for the earth-filled dam.
With the path of the rivers and tributaries blocked, the rising water consumed the valley. The streets flooded. Doorsteps were breached. Windows filled and burst while roofs and chimneys were swallowed whole. The church steeple was the last to disappear. It took two years for the condemned buildings and all their secrets to slip below the body of the new Mayhap Reservoir.
In drought years, if the wind was dead and the water on the reservoir was calm, one could see the stone foundations glowing through the lake's depths. Occasionally, rotting boards with rusting nails break loose and float to the surface, washed up on shore. Children chasing minions would find the odd abandoned item lodged in the rocks, bedsprings, tin cans, and leather shoes. But for the most part, Mayhap was reduced to a campfire ghost story.
The water was so low Granger had landed on one of the houses. His torn flesh and fragmented bones were locked in the teeth of the rotting trusses of the roof. Grabbing his thigh, he pulled on his leg. The green, moss-riddled shingles groaned and buckled, releasing a swirling cloud of debris that enveloped him. Slowly, out of the murky depth, a brumous face appeared. Pearly and gray, its orifices gaped like the flesh of a rotting fish. The face sprouted a neck and shoulders. A hand reached for Granger with its gnarled fingers spread wide.
Granger screamed. His mouth and lungs filled with silt and water. Pounding the heel of his unbound foot on the roof, Granger finally tore through the rotten wood, releasing his trapped leg. Granger aimed for the slight glow over his head, but he collided with something flat and square. It was a brick wall. Through the strange underwater current, he had been swimming the wrong way.
His lungs felt like they might burst in his chest. Granger pushed against the wall. It crumbled in a cloud of sediment. Terrified and out of breath, Granger stopped struggling. Suddenly a hand grabbed his neck and then his arm, dragging him up. He and Lena exploded together through the surface into the barking waves. He tried inhaling a breath, but it hit a wall of water in his chest, pushing it deeper into his lungs. He began violently convulsing.
Voices around them told Granger that others had entered the water to help. Eric Miller, the strongest and oldest boy, was sent in a kayak for help. The girls were whaling in high-pitch gasps that echoed around the rocky cove. Granger had no control over his body. Coughing and retching, he was towed like a rotten log onto the rocks. His foot was nearly cleaved in half. The big toe hung by a shredded mass of bone and glistening blood-splattered tendons. Shards of white pierced the skin like broken threads in a hemline; each one created a dimple of dark blood.
Someone rolled him onto his side. Aiming his face at the horizon, he was forced to lay helplessly, layered under the clothing of the others meant to stop the violent shivering rocking his body. Over the pink froth bubbling out of his mouth and nose, he could see the gray waves like wolves nipping at the sky, attempting to bring it down.
Beneath his ear, a sound was forming. A gravely rumbled that seemed to roll straight out of the depths. The lake was laughing at him.
"Lena, where's Rory?" Abel shouted from behind Granger.
"I don't know. I can't find him!" Lena was crying as she drew another breath and went under to look again.