Gingerbread Man

into the lake. It’s probably allergies. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. Normal.
    Scratch, scratch, scratch.
    Nothing could make the scratching stop except killing. And it was getting so the rat demanded to be fed more and more often. It was growing, that rat. It was almost too big to stay behind the wall at all anymore.
    But he told himself, as he always did, that was not the case.
He
was in charge, not the rat. He was patching that hole for the last time. He wouldn’t let the rodent chew through it again. Not again. He was done with this. He was not going to kill any more pretty, lanky young men with brown hair that hung a little too long. He could beat this. He knew he could.
    Nodding hard, Eric dipped his oars into the green-brown water and pushed the boat into motion. The sun was rising now over the pine forested eastern shoreline. It warmed the surface, drawing misty spirals and pillars upward from the water. They twisted higher, heading for the light like the spirits of Eric’s beloved dead. He watched them rising, growing thinner, vanishing altogether, while he rowed in the opposite direction, west, toward the dock, the cabin.
    A loon sang its heartbroken song. Tall black trees rose up out of the water without a leaf or a limb. Weak and rotting. Lily pads clustered thicker the closer he got to the shore, until it was as if he was rowing through a lake made of the waxy green leaves. There were lotus blossoms, too, mostly white, a few bright pink ones, just starting to open up as the sunbeams reached them. Bullfrogs croaked, and the birds in the forests surrounding the lake chorused louder and louder. Their morning choir. All around him, as the sun climbed higher, the Adirondack Mountains changed their character entirely. By night they were a dark world that seemed perfect for someone like him. A place where death and decay were just a normal part of the whole process, and where killing was everywhere. It was accepted. It was normal.
    But when the sun took over, the mountains changed. The lake water that had been murky and green, sparkled and danced in the morning light. The forest came to life, no longer deep and foreboding, but green and lush, the ground beneath the trees, dappled in light and shadow.
    He no longer fit, he with his rat-infested walls. And by the light of day it was always clear that he never really had.
    He rowed the boat up to the long wooden dock. Today he hadn’t even taken a life preserver or any fishing gear, the way he usually did, figuring that would make him look normal if he were noticed by some fish and game officer. Not that he ever had been. The lake was isolated. He’d never seen anyone when he’d been out doing his grim work. This time he hadn’t even bothered to take those precautions. He’d just been eager to get it over with. To be done with it. That was how determined he was to stop killing. That was how sure he was that this would be the last time he would row out across Stillwater Lake in the predawn chill to lay a young man to rest at the bottom.
    Looping the rope around a post, he climbed out of the boat, pulled himself up onto the old wooden dock, and realized that it was getting harder. He’d been putting on weight. His joints ached. Thirty-eight. He shouldn’t feel this bad at thirty-eight.
    He walked toward the cabin, past the tire swing that dangled from the giant maple tree at the water’s edge. He and his kid brother used to swing out on that tire and try to see who could land farther out in the lake. He smiled as he remembered. They’d had a lot of fun here as kids. His own boys played the same game. Or used to. He hadn’t had the heart to bring them up here in a long, long time.
    He’d polluted the water with the blood of his victims. He should have found a different place to put them to rest. Hell, he should have done a lot of things differently. But he was broken, and he didn’t know why. He only knew that he had to find a way to fix himself. To keep the rat sealed behind the wall, keep it there until this time it starved to death.
    He walked past the cabin, not going inside. His pickup was parked in front. The hammer, already washed and dried, was hanging back in its spot in the toolshed. There was nothing more to do. And if he could just hold onto his willpower, there never would be. He got into his white F-150 and drove. He needed to be home with his family and to forget about this morning’s task. Forget, if he could, about all