The Year's Best Horror Stories 9 by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed.)

trips had been one of the best parts of his childhood with Uncle Will and Aunt Ida. He had a feeling that Bill felt much the same. Uncle Will was ordinarily the most taciturn of men, but once he had the boat positioned to his liking, some sixty or seventy yards offshore, lines set and bobbers floating on the water, he would crack a beer for himself and one for Hal (who rarely drank more than half of the one can Uncle Will would allow, always with the ritual admonition from Uncle Will that Aunt Ida must never be told because “she’d shoot me for a stranger if she knew I was givin you boys beer, don’t you know”), and wax expansive. He would tell stories, answer questions, rebait Hal’s hook when it needed rebaiting; and the boat would drift where the wind and the mild current wanted it to be.
    “How come you never go right out to the middle, Uncle Will?” Hal had asked once.
    “Look over the side there, Hal,” Uncle Will had answered.
    Hal did. He saw blue water and his fish line going down into black.
    “You’re looking into the deepest part of Crystal Lake,” Uncle Will said, crunching his empty beer can in one hand and selecting a fresh one with the other. “A hundred feet if she’s an inch. Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker is down there somewhere. Damn fool took it out on the lake one early December, before the ice was made. Lucky to get out of it alive, he was. They’ll never get that Studebaker out, nor see it until Judgment Trump blows. Lake’s one deep son of a whore right here, it is. Big ones are right here, Hal. No need to go out no further. Let’s see how your worm looks. Reel that son of a whore right in.”
    Hal did, and while Uncle Will put a fresh crawler from the old Crisco tin that served as his bait box on his hook, he stared into the water, fascinated, trying to see Amos Culligan’s old Studebaker, all rust and waterweed drifting out of the open driver’s side window through which Amos had escaped at the absolute last moment, waterweed festooning the steering wheel like a rotting necklace, waterweed dangling from the rearview mirror and drifting back and forth in the currents like some strange rosary. But he could see only blue shading to black, and there was the shape of Uncle Will’s nightcrawler, the hook hidden inside its knots, hung up there in the middle of things, its own sun-shafted version of reality. Hal had a brief, dizzying vision of being suspended over a mighty gulf, and he had closed his eyes for a moment until the vertigo passed. That day, he seemed to recollect, he had drunk his entire can of beer.
    . . . the deepest part of Crystal Lake . . . a hundred feet if she’s an inch .

    He paused a moment, panting, and looked up at Petey, still watching anxiously. “You want some help, Daddy?”
    “In a minute.”
    He had his breath again, and now he pulled the rowboat across the narrow strip of sand to the water, leaving a groove. The paint had peeled, but the boat had been kept under cover and it looked sound.
    When he and Uncle Will went out, Uncle Will would pull the boat down the ramp, and when the bow was afloat, he would clamber in, grab an oar to push with, and say: “Push me off, Hal . . . this is where you earn your truss!”
    “Hand that bag in, Petey, and then give me a push,” he said. And, smiling a little, he added: “This is where you earn your truss.”
    Petey didn’t smile back. “Am I coming, Daddy?”
    “Not this time. Another time I’ll take you out fishing, but . . . not this time.”
    Petey hesitated. The wind tumbled his brown hair and a few yellow leaves, crisp and dry, wheeled past his shoulders and landed at the edge of the water, bobbing like boats themselves.
    “You should have muffled them,” he said, low.
    “What?” But he thought he understood what Petey had meant.
    “Put cotton over the cymbals. Taped it on. So it couldn’t . . . make that noise.”
    Hal suddenly remembered Daisy coming toward him—not walking but