Lake story

Nobody knows when it started. But there is a legend, according to some, a myth, according to some other, which is now called the lake story.

Have they not been told, these white hatted tourists may not be watching them pass by, like floating coconuts as they wade through the lake on a slow boat. Even now, once in a while, there is a lady or a gentleman that faints, shrieks or at the least gasps at the sight of the scene.

Floating heads is not a thing our world has come to believe to exist. Even if they try to, they cannot do so without attributing it to some dark magic or sorcery. What makes it more interesting is that their faces. All the heads have the same face. It's an unsettling feeling to see such a sight.

The locals, no more try to rest on the lakefront after a tiring day, wishing to enjoy the pleasant view their ancestors used to enjoy a few centuries ago.

Things have changed since the lake story.

Today, it exists in multiple versions that people don't know which one is true or simply don't care of its origin or authenticity. That's what happens when something is passed on for centuries through word of mouth. It branches into multiple versions, each  branch containing a taste of its narrator's creative juice, gets polluted with exaggerations, omissions, inventions and pure magic without which the younger minds would readily object and then dissect every word of it to prove it all a fantasy tale.

The lake that sees and is seen by at least a hundred tourists today, once had a single log floating on it. It was said to have been washed in by a flood that has suspiciously not revisited this land for more than nearly seven hundred years now. The flood, that replaced the land, lives and everything on this patch of Earth and thus became a lake. Here, on the log was the body of a woman, still having enough life and will to breathe but not move. The bump of belly was not hidden as was her whole self. Was she wearing leaves or was she wearing clothes woven with cotton, no clue could suggest. Nothing would have been so imperishable as her to withstand such strong force of nature.

On this very lake, the log and the pregnant woman were afloat with no direction to follow, no word to utter, no land to reach, no friend or foe come looking for; absolutely forgotten by land and all the lives on it.

A week from that day was seen the first head.

That of a new born child.

There was no body, no sign of mutilation, no wound or aperture of any kind but a perfectly round ending neck. One cannot say it was severed from a body. White, rough skin was covering the bottom of the neck as any human's feet, like it was how a human child would naturally have been born, with only the head and a round feet in place of the neck, with no toes.

Within days, there were about five heads, all alike.

Nobody dared to touch them, till today.

As days passed on, the faces start to change.

It started to grow. Grow older, and older every month. But, all the faces that were seen at any time were alike. Vacant and expressionless like a mannequin but as real as yours and mine.

Every month the faces started to age, by one year and every fifth year, they all start to decay. For a month the whole city is abandoned to escape the stench that's said to have killed a whole village in the past. A month following that, anyone looking at this lake would find it no different from any other on Earth. It looks more ordinary than any lake, until the head of another baby slowly floats to the surface, wobbling this way and that.

Tourists dare themselves to come and witness this gruesome phenomenon while the local population is slowly dwindling away.

Such is the story of the lake, as I've heard.