I spent most of September 2 screaming ‘fuck’.

Ms. Floros was ‘welcomed’ by the others with a bit more decorum. It took me a while to realize that they were waiting for me to calm down.

First, though, I needed to exercise myself into drunken oblivion. I didn’t care how many damn fish-gnomes were under the waves. Lake Simcoe’s shoreline was seething when I came to it after dusk on that long day of rambling, scrambling, seeing more red than anything else.

“Fucking Jim Crow bird … fishy midgets … sparkly booming birds … giant meme cats and the fucking … Deer bitch! And the pale bitch! Injun paleface midget cunt cocksuckers –” I punched their damn sacred lake and my fist came back out of the water with some freaky fish-thing with needle teeth clamped on the knuckles, less than a foot tall but quite ferocious. This just made me madder.

I tore it apart and ate it, bones and all. The waters before me frothed white, and shapes rose out like bobbing dead corpses, eyes wide and horridly white, jaws sunken open with rubbery batrachian lips and those needle-teeth that you see in freaky deep-sea fish. They were now aspiring to a height of four feet.

“Fucking frogmen! FUCKING FROGMEN! TRICK ME LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE OUT HERE! INNSMOUTH INBREDS! DAGON! COME OUT HERE YOU GIANT KERMIT COCKSUCKER!” 

The next critter from the lake to lunge for me in ankle-deep water as I marched off the beach into Lake Simcoe (somewhere east of Barrie, maybe Oro Beach, though all this is blurred) smashed against an invisible wall in front of me, its flabby body bending and flying and then recovering like a piece of stinky plastic. I was getting better at accidental spells. Hope and progress through science and technology be damned – anger and profanity was where my spellcasting power was at.

I wasn’t thinking of these fish-people as anything more than obstacles. I needed to do my exercise, and I’d been resting on the road for too long. And Raven had been good for one thing: telling me what part of it really mattered.

On land the guardians of Lake Simcoe were clumsy things, threatening only to small children and dogs; under the water even the smallest of them were as vicious as piranha in the movies. They were fast and able to turn on a dime, disappearing into the murk and lunging suddenly from another direction with needle-teeth bared and their white eyes flashing with putrid luminescence. I tore through them and down, all the way down, clawing my way deeper and deeper like a maddened mole, and I slammed into the lakebed hard enough to make a slow mushroom cloud of silt that pushed back the locals.

I folded both legs, screamed deliriously, feeling the pressure slamming down on me like a synchronized drumming of hammers, punching in and equalizing. Then I flexed as hard as I could.

An unlucky fish-man was directly overhead of me, under the waves. It tore apart into a starburst of quivering green jelly. I erupted out of water like a nuclear missile from a submarine, finding myself stranded and airborne. The inward pressure was just as bad as the outward pressure at the bottom.

Down again. I had to crawl even deeper. This particular bay was too limited, so I’d have to make do with many repetitions.

But Raven was right: I had no sense of my limits. Jumps two through four felt just as painful as the first one, a kind of pain that I could get used to, but the fifth time I hammered my way down into the infested depths the outward pressure pressing down on me made some new sounds. Cracking sounds all over, grinding sounds up and down my back. The pressure gradient was making a hundred different bleeds that were all going inward, the internal hemorrhage of St. Elmo’s fire not visible and when it wasn’t visible I wasn’t nearly so alert. Except for now, when I heard all these new sounds.

I hurled myself back up to the surface, and almost made it. I had webbed hands on my ankles. I had stupidly tried to rush to the surface as if the absolute pressure value was the problem, like a rube, when Raven had emphasized the gradient as the trouble – so I was hammered again from within, swelling and cracking anew.

But I … am not … getting finished off … by the fucking Black Lagoon Creature!

I folded and crunched, bringing my feet up and my head down to kiss that ugly fish-face and chomp into it as if it were a delicious steak. How helpful, that they fed themselves to me, these little puppy-and-baby-killers.

A barking dog in the night sounded off some time later, just before sunrise, as I crawled ashore, feeling about as strong as a wet newspaper, struggling on aching hands and knees for some brush that would hide me. The shoreline here was sparse cottages spaced far apart, the end of summer thankfully depopulating most of them, and I had hauled myself up on an island in the lake with a ring of cottages and nothing but forest inside, exactly what I needed.