Bentley Little On a perhaps-drowned Arizona town By Bentley Little

Special for the Republic Jan. 21, 2001 Roosevelt Lake.

Even now, the name conjures up memories. Of summer: family picnics and sandy sandwiches; the smell of Coppertone; the seemingly interminable trip from Payson, with only Jake's Corner and Punkin Center to relieve the monotony of the drive; the feeling of hot vinyl car seats against bare backs and legs. We started going there when I was little, and I can never remember a time when the lake wasn't part of our summer weekends, when we didn't escape the blistering heat of June by swimming in the water and sitting in our folding chairs beneath the paltry shade of the low mesquite trees. The road was dirt back then, a single lane that wound endlessly along the irregular shoreline to the dam, and it kept a lot of people away from the northern half of the lake. More often than not, ours would be the only family we would see all day. While it's hard to imagine in these germ-phobic times, there were always cows in and around Roosevelt, wandering through the picnic areas, standing stupidly in the shallow silty water 5 or 6 feet offshore, and we never thought much about them. My brother, Judson, and I would paddle out past the animals on our inner tubes and blow-up rafts and take no more notice of the cows than we would a boulder or a tree stump or some other inanimate object. But the thing I remember most about Roosevelt Lake was the town. To this day, I don't even know if there was a town. Ten minutes in a local library or on the Internet and I could no doubt discover once and for all whether such a place ever existed. But the truth is, I don't really want to know. The story was that there was a community in the canyon, and that after the dam was built it was flooded, buried under the waters. Since then, it had been forgotten, unknown to all but a few, lying unseen hundreds of feet below the surface. Drifting on my raft during those hot summer days, I used to think about that town. What if not everyone got out in time? What if there had been people living their normal everyday lives who heard the thunderous rumble and looked up to see a solid wall of water bearing down upon them? They would have had no time to gather their belongings, no time to run, no time even to say goodbye to loved ones before they were engulfed and violently, horrifically drowned. Logically, of course, that made no sense. It probably took a long time to create the lake as the waters of the Salt River gradually built up behind the dam. But in my mind, the water was released from somewhere, a huge wave rushing in to fill the void and rolling over everything in sight: trees, horses, buildings, people. For some reason, I always saw the town remaining intact under this onslaught. I imagined living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens underwater, furniture preserved and in place, drapes stirred by the movement of undercurrents while the decomposing bodies of the dead floated amid the material possessions of their lives. I'm not sure where the story of the town originated. I heard it from Judson, who'd heard it from a friend, who'd heard it from a friend. . . . Who knows? Maybe it was just an urban legend (or rural legend), one of those baseless tales retold by generations of children. But I chose to believe it, and the thought of that underwater ghost town always lent an added air of excitement to our Roosevelt sojourns. Even in my 20s, cruising over the placid blue water on my brother's jet-powered ski, I would think about what was supposed to be at the bottom, and I would get chills as I sped over the middle of the lake. Those submerged buildings seemed a lot closer to me than the antlike figures of my family onshore, and I would invariably swing around in a large arc and maneuver the craft a little closer to civilization. The image of that town haunted me for years Finally, after 10 novels, I decided to write about it. I'm a horror writer, so naturally my take on the topic is a spooky one. I call the lake Wolf Canyon, and while I borrowed some geographic features from Lake Powell, the source of inspiration for my fictional body of water should be obvious to any Arizonan who has traveled the Apache Trail. In my novel, the town was flooded when the dam was built, and there were still people in the buildings, cemented to the floor by some mysterious force and unable to move. Now, decades later, individuals across the length and breadth of America are dying but not remaining still. Instead, the bodies begin walking, treading across the nation's highways to the lake. While the bulk of the novel takes place in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Cedar City, Utah, the climax occurs at my fictionalized version of Roosevelt Lake. One other thing: I had a scare while working on this book. Right after I had finished the novel, an Annette Bening/Robert Downey Jr. movie titled In Dreams was released. I literally looked up from the computer on which I was typing my last-minute revisions to see a commercial for a horror film featuring a submerged town at the bottom of a lake. I couldn't believe it! If I had written the novel a year or two earlier, I probably would have thought the filmmakers stole my idea. As it was, I thought, I would be the one accused of plagiarism. If I hadn't already completed the book, I would have scrapped it. Instead, I just prayed that I had not seen what I thought I'd seen. I never got around to watching the film in a theater (fear perhaps), but I finally caught it on cable a few months ago. Thankfully, the submerged town has almost nothing to do with the plot of the movie. It's a striking visual image, but it's a peripheral element, not important to the main thrust of the film. It's not a peripheral element in my novel, though. It's the center of the story. And I think I've finally exorcised the demons of Roosevelt Lake by writing this book, by concocting a tale of terror based on all those afternoons of idle speculation, when I lay on my raft peering down at the deep, deep water and wondering . . . what if?