This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/JLGoodwin1990 on 2024-10-20 06:16:27+00:00.
Okay, so I’m not sure if any of you here have heard anything about this, but to be completely honest, the people who live around the lake here, myself included are beyond terrified, even if we don’t say it outright. It’s not a new occurrence; stories about it have circulated at least since I was a small boy, and according to the old timers who still remain, perhaps even longer. But the last year or so, and especially the last six months, it’s really gotten bad.
For anyone unfamiliar with the area, and contrary to its name, the Salton Sea isn’t an actual ocean, but a large saltwater lake located in southern California. Millions of years ago, there used to periodically be a giant lake here which would swallow the whole valley up, but the Salton Sea as it’s known today was created by a dam bursting on the Colorado River over a century ago. It once was touted as a “Miracle in the desert” and attracted tourists and vacationers from everywhere to swim, boat and fish in its waters. But thanks to a number of disasters, both natural and man-made, by the ‘70s and ‘80s it had been reduced to a shell of its former self. Only those too stubborn or too sentimental to leave remained, and in the following decades, other people soon came to live on the shores of the lake; those who saw it as an artistic refuge from the outside world, or those who weren’t in the best financial situation. Nowadays its biggest claims to fame are an early 2000s movie starring Val Kilmer, and having a fictional version of it in a very famous video game.
Like I said, though, if you ask the real old-timers, the few who still live here who were around during the Sea’s glory days, they’ll tell you that it’s always been here. Living beneath the water’s surface. Nobody ever bothered to give it a name; in those days, the year round residents feared that word might get around and scare away the tourists. They couldn’t risk the lifeblood of the five towns that rest on both sides of the lake disappearing into the ether. And so, whenever somebody went missing, be it a tourist who just so happened to never come up after diving under the water or who’s empty boat was found floating abandoned far from shore, a fishing rod still in the holder and a smear of blood on the gunwale, they would cover it up. Eventually, they would all end up as files in the unsolved Cold Cases department of the police station. And since the disappearances were seldom; birds seemed to what disappeared the majority of the time, nobody outside of the community ever bothered to dig deeper.
As I was born decades later, I didn’t hear about it until I was a little kid, growing up in what was left of Bombay Beach in the early ‘90s. It was a stern warning my mother and father always told me. “Now you get your behind back here before dark Jim, and stay away from the water’s edge on your way home” When I asked them why, they refused to say anymore, only remained adamant for me to stay away. Naturally, as I was a rebellious ten year old boy, the first chance I ever got, I ignored their rules and stood by the water’s edge as the sun lowered on the horizon.
That was the first time I ever saw it.
I had been watching a heron fly over the water’s edge when my attention was caught by a ripple about twenty feet from shore. At first, I thought it was just one of the last remaining fish still in the lake, or more likely a trick of the fading light, but when it came again, closer this time, I focused completely on it. A third ripple, this time more violent came from less than fifteen feet from where I stood, and almost like precognition, I suddenly felt an almost sickening sense of dread and terror overtake me. Goosebumps rose on my arms, and even in the sweltering heat, I felt a chill shudder through me. I began backing away from the lapping water, feeling very much like the worm on the end of a hook that has just seen the fish which will end its existence approach. And then its head broke the water’s surface.
In the last rays of sunlight that preceded the beginning of night, I couldn’t make out it’s features that well, but if you want a general idea of what it looked like, take the monsters from the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Humanoids from the Deep movies, splice them together, and then imagine that hell itself took a few extra minutes effort and spat out the amalgamation. The biggest thing I can remember was its eyes. Two glowing yellow eyes that seemed to pierce right into your very soul, attempting to root you to the spot and unable to flee. I felt myself begin to tremble as I watched it study me, the same way a shark eyes a young seal pup. And had it not been for what happened next, I doubt I would be here today.
As I watched it begin to stand up, still unable to move, the sudden loud explosion of what I can only assume was a firework of some sort, likely set off by one of the bored and rowdy teens that lived a little ways down from me pierced the air. The sound froze the creature in place, and I saw it’s head swivel around to try and locate its source. At the same time, it finally seemed to break the spell, and without another look to see what it was doing, I turned and ran towards home. Screaming. When I burst through the front door, I saw my mother and father spin around to face me. I saw my mother’s face go pale as she saw the terrified expression on my face, and my father was a blur of motion in an instant, sprinting past me to lock the door and slam the windows shut. Mom knelt down beside me, wrapping me in the tightest hug she ever gave me; I could feel the hot tears dripping down onto my cheek.
I never again disobeyed my parents.
As the years went by, and the dawn of the new millennium rounded the corner, the stories of it kept making the rounds around us locals. After my 21st birthday, I would hear them the most in the Ski Inn, one of the two bars in town, spoken in hushed, drunken whispers so as not to attract the attention of the occasional out-of-towner who happened to wander in. My father died of cancer in 2004, and my mother, seeming to give up on life without him by her side, went just four years later. For a time, I seriously thought about selling our home and simply moving somewhere else. Between what my parents had left me and the money I made working construction on a casino that had recently opened nearby, I had enough to take my belongings and start anew somewhere else. Somewhere where there was less crime, less dead fish, and most importantly, without the looming specter that dwelled below the surface. But, whether it was a stupid sense of loyalty to the memories that lingered in the house, fear of leaving the only place I’d ever known, or even defiance, a refusal to allow it to make me turn tail and run, I stayed. Just like the old timers, and the others who slowly moved in to take their place when they died. And things continued on as normal as they could.
Until rather recently, that is.
You see, without the Colorado River replenishing it, and with farmers conserving more water, not allowing it to runoff like before, the Salton Sea is beginning to shrink. Slowly, but steadily. There are efforts to try and save it, if nothing else but for the birds which still live on its shores and to keep the toxic dust clouds from filtering up from the bottom of the lake from blowing over the towns and into the nearby cities like Los Angeles. But it hasn’t stopped it completely.
And that seems to have made the creature far more aggressive.
The last couple of years, the rate of people disappearing around the sea has increased exponentially. What once used to be only one or two every five or six years has multiplied exponentially. They’re never dug into too deeply, as many decades ago before. After all, with the reputation the area has, most assume that they were victims of either drug violence or robberies gone wrong, and they were buried somewhere out in the desert. Things like gun shots are ignored by people out here at this point. As much as we wish we could get help, everyone here knows that nobody would believe any of us. It would be written off as the hallucinations of a drug addict or alcoholic, or simply the fantasies of someone with too much free time on their hands. And because it was hushed up for so long, as horrible as I know it is to say, many simply find it easier to continue the cycle than to break it. The same way some towns never spoke up when cults moved into them.
But I can no longer keep quiet. Not after what happened to Old Fred.
Old Fred was a vagrant, albeit a friendly and polite one who wandered around the Salton Sea for as long as I can remember. He was in his seventies, at least, with white hair that stuck out like Doc Brown’s from Back to the Future, and eyes that held the same wildness as a Mustang. Every few months, I’d see him roll into town on his usual circular path. Usually, he would find one of the abandoned buildings to hole up in for the night. I never asked him if he’d heard the stories or seen the creature himself; I can only assume he did. That’s why, one extremely hot summer night a few months ago, as I lay in bed with the fan on full blast, trying to wrestle sleep from the grasp of the Sandman, I sat bolt upright as I heard his drunken shouts coming from outside. I couldn’t be sure, but from the sounds of things, he was down near the far end of town.
Down near the water.
“Oh, you’ve gotta be *shitt...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1g7sdd3/something_horrifying_lives_in_the_salton_sea/