 Arrowhead Lake, the ideal and picturesque image of an all-American man-made lake. It's vast, it's waters fresh, yet rarely cold, and brimming with fish. Like the other big man-made lakes such as Norman, Harrington, or Thunderbird, Arrowhead had developed somewhat of a colorful cultural superstition. Man-eating leeches with underbellies covered in fangs capable of toppling over canoes. Two catfish who grow to enormous size due to radiation leaking out from the nearby plant. Then there's the ghost, the bargain bin big foot rip-off and the occasional flying saucer, but none of these things have ever held any place in my mind. Being your typical conservative raised athletic type who loved fishing on the lake, I was immune to the fears and warnings from the locals. I'd scoff whenever I'd hear old Mrs. Cutler telling people how her dog was snatched from the shoreline by the giant man-eating leech with an underbelly covered in teeth. Furthermore, I made it my mission to humiliate and ridicule my peers who had a tale about a cousin who was eaten or drowned by something under the surface. In other words, I was a bit of an ass. In my defense, I'd never seen anything to suggest my version of the world was wrong. I'd lived on the lake when fishing with my grandpa throughout my childhood before his boating accident, and I'd become convinced that there wasn't anything to be afraid of. I was wrong. There is something in that lake. In truth, it's the reason I'm writing this up, partly to see if anyone else encountered what I saw, partly to warn people to stay away, and also partly as a form of therapy to help me come to terms with what I experienced. Firstly, we need some context for my encounter, and I think it all began after high school. You see, growing up on that lake, there were few jobs for those of us who dived out of school with barely any idea of what to do next. It was either work in the power plant or work on the lake, so I combined the two and made it my mission to get some more grades and more training under my belt, and then come back to work as an underwater engineer. I was excited at the thought of fixing the dam and repairing the plant's coolant tunnels where the lake's water was pulled in and used to keep the reactors safe. Mostly, I was just curious to see what was actually down there, below the still surface of Arrowhead. The first person I told was my grandpa, but uncharacteristically, he was far from enthusiastic and made a point of telling me in a tone I'd never known he possessed to stay out of the lake. Naturally, I laughed it off, telling him I was shocked he believed Mrs. Cutler's old fish wives tale of man-eating leeches and child-drowning catfish. He rolled his sleeves and began to show me various scars from the fish he encountered on the lake and elsewhere. But one set he never spoke of, a peculiar arrangement of deep cuts running up his arm. I asked him how he got them, and his face went pale. He told me that unlike the others, these wounds weren't from catfish, alligators or eels, but rather from his boating accident. Never before had he discussed what actually happened that day out on the lake, and he still refused to tell me much. Instead, he diverted the conversation back to the lake's folklorist tales. He told me of the Arrowhead 3, a group of divers in the 80s who went down to fix something on the dam and never came back. It was a story I was familiar with. Five went down, only two of them came back up, and the other three vanished without a trace. They were ruled as accidental drownings caused by malfunctioning equipment. They didn't find their bodies, though, and so they too became part of the local lake lore of Arrowhead. My response to this was to do a childish, ooo scary, something my grandfather didn't take kindly to. He snapped at me and exclaimed that he knew the lads who survived. One of them was found swinging, the other drank himself to death. Grandpa asserted that one night when he was sat in the company of the man drowning his liver in beer and whiskey chasers, the man told him what he remembered. He spoke of dark serpents, things emerging out of thin air and scratching them one by one, dragging them into the unknown. When I laughed this off and said aloud, I didn't expect my grandpa, a weather beaten old fisherman, an ex-naval officer, to be so superstitious, his face became a scowl and his gruff voice spoke to me. Them's bad waters. I've seen things I wish I hadn't, things that would strike you dead of fright. You young ins, think you know the world, think you've seen it from behind your screens, but you haven't. Stay out of them waters and especially keep away from that plant. Grandpa commanded. Sadly, that was one of the last things I remember of him. As whilst I went out of state for training, he passed away. Still, I thought the best way to honor him and his memory would be to totally disregard his warnings and worries and to get to work on the lake as soon as I qualified. So, once the training was completed, I returned home, got a job with a power plant as an engineer. And since I was one of a handful of people qualified for underwater repair jobs, I became somewhat invaluable. I mean, the jobs weren't flying in and in some ways that was reassuring. I mean, no one wants to be working at a power plant that regularly has power failures or structural damage. However, I couldn't help feeling I'd wasted some of my time training for underwater repair. When most of the time I was just sorting out maintenance and basic repairs around the plant. Perhaps some sadistic God out there sensed my disappointment in not being given a chance to dive. Because out of the blue, one of the higher ups approached me and asked if I'd be willing to help sort out a problem. According to him, one of the two cooling tunnels had stopped working properly. The consensus was that there may have been damage to the tunnel and it had partially collapsed. But the higher ups wanted to assess the damage first. And then if it was a simple unclogging or a relatively straightforward repair, we'd get to fixing it. So me and another guy suited up for a dive. Eddie, the guy joining me was a sweet guy, always eagerly trying to reassure me, since this was my first proper dive. On a little motorized raft, we made our way to the area just above the underwater tunnels. There we disembarked and slipped off from the security of a small raft and sank into the water. Being that he was a bit older than me, he made a point prior to us entering the water of saying to just stick with him. He told me that it gets quite murky down there and add in the fact it was night time and it was a recipe for your mind to play tricks. He wasn't wrong either, because I remember feeling an overwhelming dread after only a few minutes into the dive. The kind of dread one feels when you feel like you're being watched or when you're alone in the house and think you hear someone irrational dread. That's what I told myself, just my body reacting to the fact I could barely see anything in front of my face. So on I swam, trying my best to ignore the anxiety rising in me and focus on the task at hand. Soon though, my mind was backed to observing my surroundings in an over vigilant manner. I remember the water getting warmer, the deeper we swam, and it got more and more cloudy as we descended. Though it was dark and murky, my torch occasionally caught glimpses of catfish that were large enough to make me feel even more uncomfortable. But I tried to keep my nerve, plenty of food, warmth and depth, what fish wouldn't thrive in such conditions, I told myself. Besides, I never saw a catfish that I can honestly say was capable of man eating or drowning me. And that was somewhat reassuring. Then suddenly, they scattered all of them, the big ones in the small, thrashing their way past me and Eddie, as they shot out from their hiding places. That should have been the only warning we needed. But we foolishly thought we had disturbed them. How were we to know that we were about to come face to face with the truth? We were at the cooling tunnels. When things took a turn, Eddie went about looking at the one on the right, shining his torch into it whilst I inspected the left. My one appeared to be working fine, sucking in water, churning it up into the power plant basin, where presumably it spat it back out onto the other side. In the short time it took for me to inspect the tunnel, something happened. Having looked away for just a moment, I was shocked when I turned to find Eddie had vanished. Frantically, I spun my head around. But there was no sign of him, not a trace of Eddie existed in the gloom. If it had been a joke, or he was messing with me, I would have at least expected to have seen some debris kicked up from his frantic swimming, as he dived out of my line of sight. And yet there was nothing. I paused for a time, waiting for him to suddenly jump out of the opaque surroundings and scare the life out of me. That would have been a welcome terror. But fate was not kind and Eddie did not reappear or reveal himself. Truthfully, my heart began pounding a little faster. The minute I saw he was gone, for in the isolation, all I could think of was my grandpa's words. Them be bad waters. They repeated and repeated, thundering through my head, almost as fast as my heart thundered in my chest. It was in these moments of fear. I spotted it. The faint yellow glow shining below and drifting deeper and deeper. Eddie. It was his torch I could see in the mist below. He must have been playing a prank on me after all, or maybe he dropped his welding tool. Relief washed over me and I swam down to meet him. But as I kicked frantically, my eyes began to see more clearly. The light ahead of me was his torch. That much was true. But Eddie wasn't holding it. Instead, it was just sinking down to the depths of the lake, adrift and abandoned, not unlike myself. Concerned for my colleague's safety, I swam back up to the tunnels. I started worrying that maybe he was clearing out the debris in the block tunnel and somehow it turned on and he got sucked in. I turned my torch on the tunnel entrance. It was wide, wide enough to fit a truck through it and its gaping maw was dark and empty. Strange, because there didn't seem to be any structural damage, no sign of a blockage at all. It was just a void, a black void, so dark that even my torch's light couldn't penetrate it. Primal dread filled me as I looked into the silent and still shadows filling the opening. My courage and confidence were devoured by the darkness. It was all consuming. I felt more lost than I'd ever felt before as I floated in front of that coolant tunnel, staring into the abyss hoping to see Eddie emerge from the void unharmed. Only, it wasn't a void at all and it was far from empty. For as my torch shined across the night-coloured surface, it shimmered, stirred, squirmed even. Then to my utter disbelief, an eye blinked open, an eye the size of a car tire. Fear struck me and sent me scrambling back for a second and between the mist of panicked bubbles streaming up around my goggles, I saw the enormous thing slowly shifting in the tunnel. Great, thick, black-backed tentacles unfolded around the large phosphorous eye with each limb displaying red rings of light that pulsed and moved across the dark skin of the beast, growing ever quicker in their motion as the glowing blue eye focused its horizontal slit-shaped pupil on me. And as it saw me, I too saw it. Saw the thing for what it was and though my mind could not process the reality, I was sure of it. The thing in the tunnel, the blockage, was in enormous cephalopod. A giant octopus, a kraken of monstrous dimensions, a creature clever enough to conceal itself as the shadow inside a tunnel and evade the sights of a bustling lakeside community. It was evident from this and from its appearance that the creature was far from ordinary. Beneath each black tendril running under it were fangs and toothy hooks which retracted and extended in and out of red flesh. These appendages clasped the exterior and the rim of the tunnel slithering outwards in a serpentine manner. I froze in place. In my mind raced back to the wounds upon my grandfather's arms, the strange toothed patterns running up sleeves. They could have been caused by such an appendage. Then, worse still, I came to understand those fish wives tales of black-backed the leech with its underbelly of fangs. The stories I dismissed in my arrogance were true. Only it wasn't a man-eating leech. It was a tentacle, one of many tentacles that were about to reach out and snatch me as they'd done the arrowhead three. I knew what was about to happen and I swam for my life, rushing to the surface as hard as I could. I looked back down to see if the thing was giving chase or following, but it wasn't. There was nothing beneath me or around me, just total absence. My mind immediately realized it was still there, hidden, camouflaged, and around the time it took for me to realize that, it was too late. A toothy tentacle emerged from the gloom, shifting from the grimy green murky color of the water around me as it grasped hold of my back. I fumbled and wrestled, desperately trying to wriggle free, but it was no use as more and more of the tentacles reached around me and their hooks piercing my suit and skin. I screamed and cried out, but beneath the water, my voice was silenced. Then it pulled me in close towards what can only be described as a pit of tusks and gnashing jaws stuffed with broken fangs. It was like the mouth of hell, an inescapable grinder acting on total impulse and instinct, just desperate to crush, skewer, and maul me into shreds. Before it could devour me, like I presumed it had devoured Eddie, I remembered I was far from unarmed and in a frantic motion, I scrambled for my welding tool and turned it on. White and blue punctured and burned into one of the tentacles holding me, and instantly it untangled away from me. Like a torpedo, it shot back, recoiling into opaque walls around me, disappearing once more as it shifted and became invisible to my eyes. I knew it was still there, and so without a moment of hesitation, I began swimming for the surface, sure that the nightmarish amorphous thing was right behind my every kick. Desperate to survive, I unclipped my harness and let the oxygen tank sink below me, trying to remove as much weight from me as I possibly could. In the moment I let go, I saw it. A vast black writhing nest of tooth-covered appendages, grasped hold of the tank, and dragged it into the depths below. With one final surge of adrenaline, I thrashed my way back to the surface and onto the boat. Let me tell you, it didn't make me any safer being on that tiny raft, knowing that beneath me, there was a monster-sized octopus more than capable of dragging me and the boat down to its sinking nether realm. And even after speeding the boat onto the shoreline, I couldn't expel the imagined images of that thing clamoring ashore to get me. I told the higher-ups what I saw and explained what I believed had happened to Eddie, but as you can imagine, no one believed me. Eddie became just another tragic event on the lake, an oxygen tank malfunction which killed him. A conclusion that the authorities reached without an autopsy or even a body. The wounding I'd suffered, nothing more than self-inflicted, according to the power plant's first aider, a side effect of nitrogen narcosis. I quit and stopped going out fishing in my spare time, but I continued to warn people to tell them of what I saw in the lake. Just as I'd been skeptical of the tales of Blackback the man-eating leech, now others were skeptical of my tale of an old one-sized octopus living in the coolant tunnels of the power plant. I've had experts and Facebook critics alike telling me how there are no freshwater octopuses, that it's impossible for them to get to the size I described. And to them, I have this to say, as my grandpa told me, Lake Arrowhead is bad water. And should they dive beneath its surface with the same skepticism that I had, they will be met with the truth. There is something in that lake. I don't know how or why or what it is exactly, but it's there and it's hungry.