Mystery Lake

[12] Hidden

The fact that the whole group didn't explode into confused, incoherent questions seemed like a small miracle to Roxanne. They were probably too stunned. That was how she felt. Duncan didn't doubt that the folklore of the lake involved a permanent transformation. Spiritual awakening and shit. Admittedly, she should have known something like folklore wasn't that reliable.

Awkwardly, Layla scooted her way back into the seat. SpongeBob was wrinkled and distorted across her body like a deflated balloon, though her returned breasts helped out a little bit. It was still dipping precipitously for the middle of a restaurant. The flannel pants were struggling to hold on, but she wiggled them up underneath enough to be decent.

None of the others said anything, clearly still trying to process what they were seeing. Ross blinked with a nervous wiggle of his head and his arms planted on the table. Chiara helped Layla sit up. Once settled, she dove for the replenished sausage as if it were her only lifeline for survival on a stormy sea. More soon vanished after it with her voracious appetite until the refill plates were empty. All the while, her cheeks bulged to chipmunk size, and her jaw worked tirelessly. She clearly noticed that they were all looking at her.

Her simple answer was, "I have no idea. Though my tummy feels bigger again. Ready for more."

Ross pressed a hand to his forehead and quietly wondered. "Is it the food? The water? Why did you change? It doesn't make any sense."

Miranda leaned over to Layla and asked, "What happened just before? Why were you under the table?"

Layla rubbed the edge of one plate with her fingers and thought about those questions before answering, "I thought maybe I dropped a fork. I went looking for it, and while I was down there, my tummy felt a little bloated, and I wished that I had my regular one. Then it started to feel better and not so crampy, but I was back to myself. It just happened." Jake pushed up his glasses and squeezed a hand to his lips.

Ross hissed bitterly, "It's not fair. Was it just temporary? Why did you turn back? You went in right before me. Something should have happened to Chiara first, then everyone else in order."

Miranda gulped and nervously chirped in a reserved, quiet voice, "I'm sorry. It's my fault. I got my own hopes up and obviously made assumptions. It's temporary, I guess. We'll have to do something about the clothing situation before it gets even weirder... Layla's regular clothes should be in the car. Maybe… Jake, do you know where?" Chiara's eyes darted around at everyone's uncertain words but didn't settle on anything away from the table.

She seemed especially nervous and worried to Roxanne, but she could discern the faintest glimmer of relief in her girlish expression, the kind that Barry often displayed at the end of a particularly social dinner session in the college cafeteria, where he had to give the overall impression that he wasn't mortified by every word that came out of his mouth and was heard by any stray girls who joined their group. Although he was getting better around Jess.

This experience would be good for Barry, Roxanne resolved. He lived as a completely different person for a few hours. Granted, his exposure to social stuff in this Chiara skin was limited to a few grumpy small-town folks and overworked waitresses, aside from them and those 'people' in black suits. But every little bit helped. It might be enough to motivate Barry to understand that girls weren't quite as much of a separate species as he sometimes feared. Although Alyssa did make Joel wonder.

Might as well go back to thinking in their birth names, Joel conceded. She adjusted her top, said an internal sayonara to the girls, awaited her own reversion, and decided to take on another slice of French toast to bolster the energy for her male self. Jake seemed to come to a similar conclusion, but with more uncertainty, fussing with his clothes and making sure everything was secured so as not to cause any wardrobe accidents. He paid particular attention to the top, where his boobs would eventually pop out again.

Miranda's reaction was the most pensive, with tense wrinkles along her brow. Joel wished she could give her another hug, but it seemed that the time for hugs was quickly coming to an end. Although she admitted that he could probably afford to be a little gentler with Barry in some ways. As for Ross, he was still firmly on the denial side of things, with a sharpened gaze searching for some small detail in Layla's reappearance that would discount the obvious conclusion and rule this all out as a trick.

They had tried to keep the peculiar aspects of their conversation down to vague mentions and careful whispers, but considering that they had the potential to pop back into the opposite sex with clothes that no longer fit them, being circumspect about their situation seemed practically impossible. Still, it would probably be easier to have Layla duck down under the table again whenever one of the waitresses came back over to their side.

There would be questions, of course, but Layla wasn't too far removed from Brock with boobs. She and her alter ego had some definite differences but also a decent amount of similarities that the older waitress might not notice between them. Hiding still sounded like the safest option.

Before Joel could suggest this to Layla, she vanished, like an instant cut in an invisible film between her blinks, only to be replaced by her male self, as if he blipped in at the same moment. It wasn't a crude jump like in an old movie, but rather a seamless, swift shift, though without the perfect smoothness of a morph. Brock's clothes now appeared slightly disheveled and probably stressed, if they had any awareness of the back and forth they were being subjected to and hadn't signed up for. Joel could relate.

With a strangled hiss, Ross crackled, "What the fuck is going on?!" The last few words had to drop precipitously in volume as the waitress who had been taking care of them alongside Sherry returned to cheerfully follow up and remark with a chuckle that the big boy was really putting away the all-you-can-eat breakfast. Brock, however, looked a little on the green side, clearly queasy and pressing a hand against his mouth. That didn't stop him from replenishing his meat quotient with two more plates.

The waitress paused after taking down the refills and asked if they wanted their drinks topped off. Then she commented, "You folks are real energetic. Never seen the like in these parts for a good while. Thought y'all would've had more of an appetite. You alright? I hope the meals are to your liking. Wouldn't want to make any of you sick now."

Joel… Although maybe Roxanne was here to stay for a bit... found her tone odd. It activated the little hairs on the back of her head—the ones that remained. Nothing about this waitress was unsettling; she was a diminutive lady with glasses and graying hair pulled back about the same as the others. Her folksy concentration seemed a little bit high, but that didn't bother Joel much.

Some people liked to play a certain personality and character, and others just acted that way because that's how they were. It wasn't that. There was something that rubbed her the wrong way, just like that Agent Cerberus. In fact, what made her uncomfortable this time felt much worse than that other encounter. The best way she could describe it was like a phantom finger sneaking around to touch you where you didn't wanna be touched, but with words.

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Maybe it was a side effect of the lake. Chiara got random hallucinations. Joel got stress paranoia. And Layla was stuck shifting back and forth between boy and girl, getting all queasy. She really hoped that Miranda and Jake weren't hit with similar symptoms or worse.

Ross took it upon himself to be the one to answer this time and replied, "Thank you very much; no, no, it's fine. We're just college students, so we're used to subsisting on a little bit of ramen and some leftover snacks, so this kind of meal is a surprise. A very pleasant surprise. Some of us have bigger appetites than others. But that doesn't mean the food isn't good. It's very good."

The waitress paused noticeably before responding, "College students, you say? You must think we don't get many of your kind around here, huh? College students." Her smile was pleasant, but something felt off about that response. Roxanne didn't know what it meant, but the words seemed to linger in her mind longer than usual. Ross grimaced, his jaw clenched, cleared his throat, and answered meekly, "I didn't mean just suggest anything. I'm sorry."

The waitress raised her chin slightly and replied with a slow, deliberate pace, "I'm glad to hear it. Don't you worry now. No hard feelings. Glad y'all are having fun." She turned back towards the kitchen and vanished through the door.

Roxanne looked around the table. Ross looked like he was the one feigning a headache now, his hands pressed together on his forehead. Probably a real one was coming on. Miranda had her hands folded in front of her face, almost in prayer, and her eyes tightened into concerned slits. Chiara looked flushed, as if she had caught a fever.

Her eyes were downcast as she continued to just nibble at the massive egg creation in front of her. The most alarming shift was in Brock. Still a man, but the playful glow and carefree attitude that had persisted through so many challenges were gone. His eyes were so tight and fixed that they might as well have been carved into his face. The soft playfulness, like a dancing ocean wave, around his jaw had become unyielding and sullen. Jake was tense and twisted, his muscles flexed to the point that they trembled slightly. Joel knew that his Jess probably couldn't do much with those guns, but having him beside her and doing her best meant everything. She kissed him softly on the cheek, and he barely even noticed.

"What on Earth is going on?" Miranda asked in a guarded whisper, not expecting any answers soon.

To put it all together, Roxanne reflected that one of their waitresses was serial killer creepy, this place was rather unwelcoming, and strange stuff was happening to them. Swiftly moseying along sure seemed like a good idea. She pitched the idea to the group that the next time that woman or anyone else came to their table, they should ask for the check and the boxes so they could leave.

Layla looked down at her empty plates thoughtfully and wore a disappointed expression, but nodded for Roxanne with certainty. Ross couldn't even mount a snippy protest; he just nodded and started to push together everything left on his plate for easy packing. Miranda did the same with her food but also pulled out her cell phone to check the signal strength. There wasn't any—not even a flicker of a single bar that occasionally popped up like it had earlier down the road. It was the same for the rest of them as they checked their phones. The offline resources provided a brief distraction, but no one wanted to look away from the diner for long, not even Chiara.

The colors of the place didn't seem quite as vivid as they had when they first arrived. A subtle fuzziness, almost like an inescapable haze, lingered between the seats, as if the glasses Roxanne didn't have had to be cleaned to resolve it. Most alarmingly, the same haziness extended out the window, as if the world beyond their booth had been reduced to the blurred colors and shadows of a child's painting. It wasn't fog or even the smoke from last year's Canadian forest fires. It was something else, something unnatural.

They should've run; they should've realized something sooner. When had they last looked outside? How quickly had it changed? Where was the car? Why did the parking lot seem both desolately empty and packed with a confusing array of vehicles that looked like theirs but weren't? They were all missing some crucial detail.

When had the other customers vanished? Why did it seem like that wasn't quite the right word for it? Where had all the lights gone? Was it always this dark here? Why had she only noticed this now?

"Guys? What...?" That was as far as Miranda could get. She looked down and noticed that there were still plates in front of them, but they weren't filled with a wide variety of breakfast foods but rather dark clumps of moss, like something torn from the deepest shadows of a garden. Feeling around in their mouths, their teeth and tongues were covered with gritty dirt and crushed grasses. It tasted sour in their mouths but also had the musty smell of damp earth, mold, and decaying leaves from a forest floor after the snow had melted. They had been chewing and swallowing this stuff for who knows how long.

Roxanne wanted to throw up, and the others didn't look much better. Poor Brock cradled his tummy and looked at all the empty plates in front of him. Chiara flailed and struggled to hack up every bit of what she had swallowed, which admittedly was a lot less than they had consumed. Did she know? Was that why she was so reluctant to eat? Jake searched for something—anything he could use to clean out his mouth. The edge of his sleeve would have to do. Ross trembled wildly as Miranda struggled to help him, but the boy practically threw her off as he tried to get every trace of what she thought were chocolate pancakes out of her throat.

"So energetic. You love to see that in young people. It's wonderful. It's sooo tasty..."

The waitress stood over by the lunch counter—only it wasn't really a lunch counter anymore, but rather a decrepit, burned-out, mostly destroyed surface that might have once been a counter. And the waitress didn't look anything like she had. Her flesh was glossy, oily pitch-black, with wild, sprawling dark hair, as if she'd violently attacked it with a comb and a razor blade. Her teeth were big, so desperately horrifying big. She had large, yellowy, torn, ugly wings looming above her shoulders. And she wasn't alone.

Next to her stood another waitress who looked almost exactly the same, except her hair was twisted and knotted as if it hadn't been washed in decades. Sherry was also there, as could be seen by the torn, blackened, but still visible name card on her lapel. She had no head, as Chiara said.

What was left of her looked human enough, but it was a human abandoned in the forest for a long time and somehow preserved well enough to still look human, but with a pervasive, rotten disease of the flesh. Over her headless shoulders peered what looked like a lumpy, shaved rat with wings like spiky, shattered glass, gnarled teeth, and dirty claws. Blank, sightless white eyes watched them.

"And I'm afraid you can't leave until breakfast is finished..."