The house crouched above the stagnant lake on warped stilts, tilted as though it was peering at its own reflection in the murky water. There are plenty of stories about that house - from the old folklore that it was built by witches who cast spells onto the lake that caused hundreds of shipwrecks to the more modern and much kinder assumption that it was simply an abandoned fishing hut.
To tell the truth, the house was as much of a predator as the aquatic terrors that patrolled the lake though the house was far more patient. It knew that people would always choose to explore something that looked familiar and vaguely safe over diving through murky waters any day. The sand beneath those stilts can't be seen for all the bones piled around it.
Though the shoreline reeds were full of the clicking and twittering of all the vibrant life that a lake is meant to have, their nests are long abandoned. Nothing moved into the old nests and nothing made new ones for fear of disturbing the otherwise unnatural placidity of the lake.
Occasionally the perfect stillness of the water was interrupted by a lone jagged fin that circled anything unfortunate enough to have decided to land there and dragging it below in the blink of an eye. The only visible life aside from that fin is the incessant buzzing of flies that tend to swarm around moving, living things as though they know death will strike them down soon.
They never have to wait for long. While the shores may smell like death from time to time, the bodies rarely last longer than a day and human bodies generally wind up somewhere in the depths before even the flies can get to them. They rest where the current takes them, some four hundred feet below where even the fin doesn't dare to venture.
Where the bodies don't rot and the dead whisper among themselves about better days and kinder shores.
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