The landscape was turning a beautiful shade of golden pink as the last embers of daylight flickered into dusk. As usual there weren’t many people around on this warm May evening and the lake was still with a gentle mist blowing down from the mountains. His reflection stared back at him through the ripples. ‘Misthasa?’ asked Jack anxiously, but there was no reply. He waited there twenty minutes, but nothing happened. Dejectedly, he got in the car ready to head for home. Suddenly he found he couldn’t breathe. It was as if he was drowning, yet he was not under water. He gasped, but nothing came out. Rapidly his throat started to constrict and he felt his heart quickening. If he didn’t get help soon he would be dead. As he gradually lost consciousness, Jack looked back over the events that had led up to this fateful day.
Jack had come to Hallon in order to get away from a humdrum life in Barraville where he had unsuccessfully worked in several shops. He couldn’t stomach the hustle and bustle of the place. In his opinion its social scene comprised of bars full of people whom he couldn’t get on with. Unlike his gregarious friend, Kline, whom he had moved out to the countryside with, he had difficulty mixing with people. As he was given to introspection he preferred specialist hobbies such as stamp collecting and bird watching. Having a degree in foreign languages helped him pay the rent, as he worked from home by getting people to send him translation work. Nonetheless, what he lacked was company and he felt he was hardly likely to find suitable company even out here in Hallon.
One day he had been sitting by the lake, gazing morosely at his reflection. Jack had been visiting Lake Jollen everyday in the hope of meeting somebody new. Kline had told him that the lake was a magnet for attractive young females. ‘If you don’t believe me, ask Klara.’ Kline had said referring to his girlfriend, whom he had met at the lake. ‘We were both lonely and into nature and she told me that several of her friends had met their lovers here also.’ On a whim, Jack had decided to hang out at the lake more out of hope than anything else. ‘Stop looking so glum, mate!’ The voice had woken Jack from his reverie. He had glanced around looking for its source, but there had only been the gentle stirring of the wind in the branches nearby. ‘Down here, mate!’ he heard the voice say again and he quickly glanced down at his own reflection.
What he had seen had made him almost jump out of his skin. His reflection raised its left hand and waved at him! Jack had immediately thought, this isn’t possible! I must be going mad! ‘You look like you need a friend, pal. Lucky I found you, isn’t it? The name’s Pollion, by the way, Misthasa Pollion. What’s yours?’ After a brief silence, his reflection went on, ‘What’s up? Cat got your tongue?’ With great trepidation, Jack asked, ‘How are you able to do that and what are you?’ His reflection had replied, ‘Are you talking to me? Yes? Well, I am what you could call a water elemental. I have lived in this lake for five thousand years and whenever people were genuinely down and lonely, I would appear as their reflection to cheer them up. Now that’s me out of the way, what about you?’
Jack had decided to unburden his troubles onto this chirpy being. Besides this being couldn’t be that harmful, could he? Thus began a strange relationship with Jack starting to spend his evenings with the water elemental. He had needed someone to cheer him up, especially as Kline had been spending most of his time at Klara’s. Misthasa seemed to know a little bit about today’s society from conversing with people and observing the visitors to the lake, but was refreshingly not caught up in the concerns of the day. At first Jack had worried that people would notice him talking to his reflection, but they were so absorbed in their activities that they didn’t seem to care.
Jack had come back on that final evening, requiring Misthasa’s advice on an affair of the heart. Since speaking to the water elemental, he had been starting to really come out of himself more. He had even ventured down to the Frankfeld Arms to talk to some of the locals. It seemed that if you were easy going, they were easy going too. Jack had even been starting to attract the kind of attention of one of the local women, Geranla. He really fancied her, but couldn’t quite pluck up the courage to ask her out. Jack had felt certain that once Misthasa had put him in the right frame of mind then he’d have been able to confidently impress Geranla. All of a sudden, his constricting windpipe brought him back to the reality that none of that would be possible now. As he thrashed about, slowly choking to death, he reflected on how beautiful that final sunset was.
Gary Ligner ran as fast he could to Jack’s car. Using binoculars, he had been observing Jack’s movements from the nearby hillside over many days. He had read stories about suspected water elemental sightings at Lake Jollen. The damp, misty weather conditions were ideal for a water elemental to take over its host. If vapour containing the water elemental was inhaled on a sunny day the results would invariably be fatal. Furthermore, Ligner had seen that Jack was in trouble when he had started thrashing around in the driver’s seat. He knew that if he didn’t act quickly the water elemental would fuse itself with the liquid in Jack’s body and take it over completely.
Ligner had never fought with an elemental before, but had read of many who had. In one example from the eighteenth century, an occultist, Sir Horatio Hawkins, had seen someone conversing with a stream near Bromwich and had noticed the start of the convulsion associated with the water elemental’s takeover of their human host. He had quickly used a purging herbal mixture known to occultists, which caused victims to be violently sick thus literally expelling the elemental through the mouth. In this case the person had been sick into the stream and the fast flowing water had carried the elemental away before it could respond.
However in the case of Jack, he wasn’t anywhere near fast flowing water let alone the lake. Ligner however had brought an airtight container that could be easily sealed and hoped that would keep the elemental trapped until it could be dealt with. Opening the door, Ligner produced his poultice from a leather pouch. Forcing Jack’s mouth open, he made him swallow the foul mixture. At first it looked like he might have been too late as Jack did not seem to be taking the mixture into his throat, but once he saw the Adam’s apple move, Ligner quickly got his plastic container at the ready. Within an instant, Jack expelled the contents of his stomach into the plastic casing, while Ligner held his head to make sure nothing got away.
As he sealed the container shut, a horrible apparition assailed Ligner’s mind, like the maniacal scream of a condemned prisoner. In his mind’s eye he imagined he saw the red and black eyes of a fearsome demon that would easily consume hundreds if not thousands of hosts is given the chance. Ligner steadied himself and shut out the fury of the elemental. At first, he couldn’t think of anything pleasant to steel himself against being taken over by the creature himself. Then he remembered something his colleague and mentor Darnford Coltham had said. ‘You must remember that these creatures cannot harm anyone who is not easily led or wishing harm on them. If you only maintain a generosity of spirit neither desiring them to have control over you nor hoping that they would just curl up and die, then they will not be able to hurt you.’
At the memory of these words, Ligner calmed his mind and realised that the elemental was not really to blame for what it was doing. It had been imprisoned in the lake for many millennia and only wanted to get out and experience a different way of life. Having no form, it needed to get its hands on whatever it could even if that meant killing its host, but in reality it was no different from the humans it wanted to take over beset with emotions like anger, greed and desire. This realisation pacified the situation and allowed Ligner to slowly open his eyes. Outside he could hear the gentle lapping of waves and the distant breeze. He felt the plastic cutting into his fingers as he gripped the container tightly. Beside him Jack was starting to come round. Ligner breathed a sigh of relief.
Within the next hour, Ligner sped off to the sea to take care of the elemental. He had ensured that Jack was OK and having exchanged details had vowed that he would explain what had happened once the elemental had been dumped in the ocean. He knew that they had been very close to having a water elemental outbreak. Once Jack had been taken over then even the condensation of his breath would have been enough to spread the water elemental among the immediate public. It would be hard to say what would have happened then. More than likely there would have been an army of water elemental and human symbionts with the aim to continue multiplying until the entire planet was overrun. If Ligner hadn’t kept his hand on the lid, then it would have been likely that he would have become part of the water elemental’s plans. The possibility didn’t even bear thinking about.
Ligner was about to tip the elemental out of the plastic container and into the ocean, when he suddenly heard a voice in his head.
‘You’re not getting rid of me that easily, mate!’ Ligner ignored the voice and forcefully hurled the contents of the box out into the sea. ‘You may have disposed of my physical form, but I will stay in your head forever, Gary!’ Ligner couldn’t believe it, but it seemed that as he had made contact with the elemental in the car park, it would be forever one with his mind. He had a vision of its corporeal form being battered across the ocean and dispersed among the billions of water particles.
‘It’s just the cross you’re going to have to bear for the rest of your life, mate! I’ll never get out of here, but you’ll never get away from me either!’ said the disembodied voice of Pollion from somewhere inside Ligner’s head. Ligner put on his favourite Led Zeppelin CD at full blast and drove away as fast as he could. It was all he could do to keep from screaming out loud.
©03/08
