Dream Lake

By Andrew Charles Fischer

Alex goes up north to visit his sick uncle who lives in a cabin near a lake. Once there, his uncle tells him that people who swim in the lake have intense, lifelike lucid dreams that night when they sleep. Alex experiences this, and soon other people begin to show up at the cabin. That's where things get interesting...and messy. Rooted in themes of love, loss, violence, and deceit, Dream Lake is the heartpounding debut thriller novel from Andrew Charles Fischer.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Charles Fischer
• Release date: Oct 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393496564

Book preview

Dream Lake

By: Andrew Charles Fischer

1

He took one hand off the steering wheel as he peered out the window of his four-door compact. The road was long and straight, and there was nothing but trees to his right and more of the same to his left. Alex was alone, driving north, to a place he’d never been before. It was June in the Midwest, the best month of the year, weather-wise, and though the roads this time of year were usually filled with motorists making various summer trips, the two-lane road split by a dashed yellow dividing line was nearly deserted. Every few minutes a car would pass Alex on the opposite side of the road, and he would continue hurtling onward.

He was on his way to see his great uncle Lenny, a man whom he’d met only a few times and who was a mysterious fellow. Lenny had no wife, no children and was pretty religious. He’d been in the service and worked his whole life, investing along the way so that one day he would be able to retire, buy a plot of land set away from the rest of society and live out the rest of his natural life in peace. He’d worked and he’d saved, and one day in his late fifties he’d gone up north to see about some land. It was a forty-acre plot that included a lake and a cabin. Most of the land was old forests that had been cut down in the not-too-distant past. A good deal of trees remained when he bought the land, and a good deal would remain there when he left it. Some of the tree stumps had been pulled, but most hadn’t. He got a great deal on the land, almost unable to believe his fortune, and the man who sold it to him felt the same. Old Uncle Lenny had gone and put his two weeks’ notice in at his old job (it was believed he was a federal agent, but no one really knew for sure) and moved Up North to his cabin. In this part of the Midwest, Up North was a term most people used for the northern part of the state that was sparsely populated and very, very cold during the winter. It was breathtakingly beautiful during the spring and summer months, with everything that lay dormant over the long frigid winter coming alive once more in miraculous bursts of color. Lenny had wanted to retire early so he would be strong enough to work the land on his own. That’s what he did, pulling stumps, cutting grass, chopping trees, pulling weeds, tilling soil, you name it he did it. It took him a few years to get the land to a satisfactory place, but he was able to do it. And, like the saying it’s easier to stay in shape than to get in shape, Lenny thought the same applied to his land, it’s easier to keep land than to transform it. Many people thought that Lenny must be lonely, living up north on forty acres of old forest land in a cabin all by himself. There were times that he felt that way of course, but he had worked his whole life to be able to live this way, in the wilderness, on his own terms, and goddamn it he enjoyed it.

He had a cell phone, internet and cable TV, (this isn’t the Unabomber we’re talking about), but he rarely used those things. He had those amenities for emergency purposes and to stave off the inevitable boredom that a solitary man in the woods may feel. He’d call his relatives once in a while just to chat, but that was usually over the holidays. What he really liked to do was read and write. He would read a vast variety of books. In addition to reading the Bible on a daily basis, Lenny would read horror novels, fantasy novels about wizards and magic, nonfiction books about inventors, serial killers, con men, athletes, coaches, cities and more. An evening with some scotch, an enthralling book and warm fire from his fireplace was the perfect night for Uncle Lenny. His love of reading begat his love for writing. That was because each different book he read became a de facto author study. He saw how the great (and not so great) writers put together words, sentences and ideas. He loved to write. He preferred writing short stories, poems, journal entries, and he’d also catalog his dreams. Lenny had written suicide notes too.

Just because Lenny didn’t have kids, it didn’t mean he didn’t like them. He enjoyed other people’s kids, because he got to spend some time with them, but he didn’t have to deal with their bullshit when things went sideways at home. He didn’t have to deal with hormonal teenagers rebelling against him. He started hand-writing letters to Alex and his family right around the time he moved up north. Since the nearest post office was nearly an hour away, Lenny would only go once a week. He would send a letter, return in a week to receive the response, and then come back the next week to send out his response to that letter. And so, the cycle went.

There was inherent value to actually putting pen to paper and physically writing something that mattered to you to someone you cared about. There were numerous things one could glean from a child’s hand-written letter. Their penmanship, their spelling, and the way they strung together sentences all interested Lenny. He didn’t have to ask the children how they were doing in school (though he often did anyway), because the letters told him. They also held more weight. When talking on the phone, or in person, often people just say whatever comes into their mind. When handwriting a letter, a person really had to think about what they wanted to say, and how they wanted to say it. The lack of communicative immediacy provided greater communicative clarity, at least according to Lenny. And it was through these letters that Alex had gotten to know his great uncle Lenny. And it was why Alex zipped north on a well-worn two-lane road as the sun began to sink on another uniformly unforgettable Midwest June day.

Alex looked at his phone on the empty passenger seat and debated internally whether he should call Uncle Lenny or not. He started to reach for it; then stopped. As he was bringing his eyes back up to the road he noticed a small gray spider the size of a dime scurrying across his dashboard a few inches at a time, and stopping intermittently, similar to how a robin hops along the ground. Alex tried to keep his eyes on the road as he drove, but his gaze inevitably fell back to the spider. It was crawling forward now towards the windshield and the vents in the dashboard. Suddenly, it disappeared from view. Alex gazed out the window to his right and noticed huge brown and cream-colored limestone deposits. The deposits were tiered and arranged in disorganized sections and resembled a stack of magazines that was thrown together haphazardly, with the corners poking out in all directions. He admired the intricate rock formations, as he figured that was the most exciting that the roadside scenery was going to get. Finally, he grabbed his cell phone in his hand and went to recent calls. He tapped Uncle Lenny, put the phone on speaker and nestled it into the holder mounted on his car’s air vent. It rang multiple times and he quietly urged Uncle Lenny to pick up the phone. He was just about to hang up when he heard a voice that sounded tired and far away respond, Hello?

Hi Uncle Lenny, it’s Alex. I’m on my way up, navigation says I only have 20 more minutes to go. Are there any landmarks I should look for in order to find your property?

Lenny took a deep breath and feebly replied Just look for a gravel road with one thin tree to the left of it. Take the gravel road for about a half mile and you should be right here.

Ok, that sounds good...Are you doing all right Uncle Lenny? You don’t sound too good.

Coughing, Lenny replied, Not particularly, no. But we’ll..., he coughed, ...talk more about that when you get here.

Do you want me to call someone? A doctor? A priest?

"No, no, no don’t do any of that. Just get here as soon as you can," wheezed Lenny.

Ok I’ll be right there. Don’t you go dying on me, you hear?

I won’t. At least not yet.

Alex was about to reply with a goodbye, but his phone beeped three times, indicating that the call had been ended.

Alex now started to wonder what he had gotten himself into. He had had an inkling that this wasn’t just going to be some run of the mill weeklong vacation hangout on his uncle’s land, but now he was wondering whether he would be the last one to see his Uncle Lenny off. This might have bothered most people, but it didn’t bother Alex. It unsettled him a little bit, sure, but it didn’t bother him. For as long as he could remember, Alex had a realistic, matter-of-fact view of death.  He didn’t remember the time when he found out that everyone died, because it felt like it was something, he somehow instinctively always knew. People were born, they lived their lives either long or short, and then they died. Everyone did. And it could happen at any time. Life expectancy was around 77 years old, but Alex was quick to remind people, that was an average. Some people lived to be 90, and some died at 54. Some lived until 110 and some passed away at 34. So, in his few decades of life, Alex had lost people that he loved, that he cared about, grandparents, aunts, uncles, dogs...but he never really mourned them, because it wasn’t a sad thing that they died. They had just met their end, like everyone that came before him, and everyone will that comes after him.

The analogy that Alex liked to use was that of the snake handler. For a person whose job it is to handle snakes, seeing a snake in the wild when they are hiking through the woods isn’t a big deal, because they know snakes, they are used to snakes, they’ve probably been bit by snakes and they can quite literally handle snakes. Alex was like that, but instead of snakes, it was death. He thought about death a lot. On a daily basis even. He was hyper-aware of the fragility of life. He’d had a handful of his high school classmates die either when he was in school, or shortly after graduation. He made it a point to realize that every single day, every hour, and every moment was a gift, and that tomorrow was never promised to anyone. Also, there were many times over the past dozen or so years of his life that he wished he really were dead. He had been suffering from depression for over a decade and anxiety all his life. So, because he was so aware of death, because it was always at the forefront of his mind, when someone died, his response wasn’t oh my god how could this happen it was more like, yeah that’s what happens, people are born, they live, and then they die. He wasn’t frightened by this serpent of death, because he’d become quite familiar with it after handling it daily for over 10 years now, and he was used to it, acquainted with it even. Now, that isn’t to say that he didn’t understand why other people were broken up over the loss of loved ones. He got that. For example, if anything ever happened to his mother, he would have an extremely difficult time dealing with it.

As Alex meditated on life, death, and everything in between, he turned onto the dirt road his phone’s navigation told him to and a few minutes later came upon the gravel driveway with the single thin tree to its left that Uncle Lenny had described to him. His car trundled slowly over the gravel, and all Alex could think about was how he didn’t want to have to bury his uncle all by himself.

2

The gravel driveway to Uncle Lenny’s cabin was circuitous and winding. It snaked in and out of scattered clusters of pine trees that were thick in some places and thin in others. Alex’s car finally emerged into a vast, open clearing, and he came upon his uncle’s cabin. It was much larger than he thought it would be, forming a C shape. The outside was light brown, with a wine-colored roof, and a massive stone chimney in the middle of the C. As Alex approached, he noticed a cement slab with a firepit on the near side of the house, and he could barely catch a glimpse of the lake beyond. He assumed correctly that there was a dock on the far side of the house leading right up to the lake. Alex let his car roll to a stop outside a three-car garage and was unsure of where to enter the house, so he walked around to the side opposite the lake and rang the bell. It’s open! he heard faintly, and he opened the outer glass door and turned the knob and entered.

Alex was amazed as soon as he opened the door. The ceilings went on forever and everything was made of the same shade of wood as the exterior of the house. He took a few steps inside and looked to