People are disappearing in northern Canada.

For the last 35 years, a lake in northern Canada has been the site of hundreds of suspected drownings. The location is in the middle of the Canadian tundra. There is nothing around. No food, no shelter. Just cold, inhospitable wilderness.

The lake is frozen eight months out of the year. Nothing happens then. But during the thaw, when we’re doing our flyovers, we’ll see clothes floating on the surface of the water.

Like we’ve always done, we’ll dispatch a team to investigate. They’ll bring back what they can recover, which will invariably be clothing and someone’s wallet or purse.

So far, we’ve never recovered a single body.

Had the lake been deep or veined with labyrinthine, subterranean caves, we wouldn’t think twice about not being able to recover a body. Same if the lake was full of fish who were big enough to eat and digest a body. But the lake’s 40 feet deep at its deepest point. It’s crystal clear; we can see the bottom from our helicopter just as clearly as a boater can from its surface.

Our watchpost has turned into an international notification service for missing people.

The Canadian government granted us the authority, along with the equipment, to research and contact anyone who might be familiar with the owners of the forms of identification. Each time contact is made, we learn the person had been reported missing.

There doesn’t appear to be any time limit on how long a person has to be missing before their clothing and IDs are found floating. Some can be missing for days, others for years. Any personal effects we’d recovered then get sent back to the families or loved ones.

While the situation is bizarre, I’ve never lost much sleep over it. It’s all too surreal; without any bodies or signs of violence, it’s easy to brush the darkest aspects of it aside. But this past spring, after the thaw and during the new recoveries, different reports started coming in.

Indigenous people within a 300 mile range have started showing up in hospitals. Unexplained burns have been found on their skin. Further, the cancer rate among the indigenous population has risen by 400%.

I haven’t been alone in noticing the new, blueish lights seen reflecting off low-hanging clouds. I had a hunch one night, and had our helicopter pilot fly us in the direction of the lake. Like I’d expected, the flashes of blue against the clouds intensified as we got closer.

Upon our arrival at the site, hovering approximately 100 feet above the lake, blue light would shine at irregular intervals from the bottom. The pilot, a former American military engineer, said it looked like Cherenkov radiation.

That alone wouldn’t be enough for me to write this. Unexplained natural phenomena is a fact of life. It seems like the more remote you are, the more inexplicable things you’ll encounter. The floating clothes concern me, but don’t frighten me. The flashing light fascinates me, but doesn’t disturb me. But there’s one last thing.

A geological expedition recently finished a topographical study of the surrounding area for an unrelated purpose. Their data, like all state research, was made available to us. Being moderately interested in geology and geological formations, I gave it a look. Something caught my eye.

I went to our database of the photographs we’d taken of the personal effects we’d recovered from the lake. I was looking for ID photos. Before long, I found what I was looking for. I checked it against the geological data I’d seen. Not really believing what I was looking at, I checked again with another ID photo. Same thing.

For 500 miles around the lake where people disappear, the topographical readouts show the vague, but unmistakable shapes of the faces of the missing people. And the faces are clearly screaming.

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3 Replies to “People are disappearing in northern Canada.”

  1. Gloria Ryan says:

    Can you post those pictures of faces?

    1. Its just a story.

  2. i think this is my favorite one from you yet! reminds me of junji ito. great build-up and had me grinning with delight at the end. (delight as in holy fuck what a good story)

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