Wait by the lake's edge

Yet again your mind scream for you to take action: Hide, run, call out to the specter before you, but you are frozen in your stance. Your gaze upon the hooded figure will not break, your legs will not move, and your trembling lips will not utter a challenge as your eyes irresistibly lock on to the lakeman's darken visage.

Without pause the raft makes landfall and the menacing fiend moves onto the shore. Beads of cold sweat break out and roll down your brow. It is as if something supernatural is holding you in place as sure as if your arms and legs were lashed down by cold iron chains. The lake man digs his oar pommel deeply into the silt with each dragging step. His face is a void of blackness shrouded from the moonlight by his thick woolen hood. The imagined iron chains pull down upon you heavier with every breath as the lakeman closes the gap between you.

The pulling weight start to become unbearable as a drowsiness infects your mind. Your desire to flee competes with the need to rest. Fear itself begins to rescind as you feel your eyes become lead. The notion of laying down your weary body, to sleep, to dream even becomes a longed for paradise.

You didn't even realize that you had closed your eyes when they are snapped open at the sound of a high nasally whine behind you. The lakeman, now faced to face with you, snarls unearly as he looks over your shoulder. The gaze broken, you feel the fog lift slightly from your consciousness. Stumbling backwards as he stretches marble white fingers towards you, you catch a glimpse of the fawn. Returned from the forest path, the chocolate colored deer cries a sickly whine as it stamps its hooves into the dirt. You feel bony ice cold fingers grasp your wrist; knife sharp fingernails dig into your skin as you wrench your arm from the demon lakeman.