Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant by Ramsey Campbell, Peter Rawlik, Mary Pletsch, Jerrod Balzer, John Goodrich, Scott Colbert, John Claude Smith, Ken Goldman, Doug Blakeslee

actually there: a cloud lake.
    Sitting on the veranda in the swing-chair where her grandfather had once sat, the long-dead lake filling her view, she asked Rob why the lake and the others like it in the region had dried up.
    He looked up from his bottle of beer and said, “Well, that’s hard to say ...”
    “Don’t you know?”
    He laughed. “I don’t think anybody knows, not for certain. I guess the climate just got drier. I read that it’s dry out here because of the mountains back east, so maybe the lakes were here before the mountains. I have heard folks say that there was a great drought or some disaster that just dried them up. Your grandfather used to say there were cities out on their shores that died when the lakes died, but I can’t say I credit it. Although there were some odd towers, like enormous termites might have built, out by where they were doing the tests. They looked a bit like buildings, I guess. But, really, they were just natural outcroppings. Maybe those were what he was thinking of.”
    “Seeing it like this, I could imagine there is a city on the far shore.” Cammie paused, staring intently for a while. “It almost looks as if there is one out there, as if I can see lights. I guess the moon is reflecting off something.”
    Rob’s only reply was a snore and, then, the sound of his bottle slipping from his fingers to roll across the floorboards and out onto the sand.
    Cammie gave a little laugh to realise that he was sleeping. She supposed he found her notions silly and boring; Rob was not the sort of person to view the world romantically. He was practical to the core. Appreciating the unusualness of these conditions was about as far as he was likely to go. She couldn’t see him imagining cities in the desert night.
    Only, the strange thing was that, the more she looked out across the lake, the more she got the impression that there were buildings out there with lights in their windows. She even thought she could hear the distant sounds of nocturnal city life echoing through the silence across the lakebed.
    “It can’t be real,” she murmured to herself. The problem was that denial only served to crystallise her doubts about what she was seeing. It really did look like there was a city out there, regardless of how impossible it seemed. It had to be a trick of the light, or maybe she was asleep, too, and dreaming.
    Yes, there were definitely lights out there across the lake. There was a house, a large house.
    There wasn’t one there, not really, she was certain of that, had walked all around the fossil shores of the lakebed and seen no other buildings anywhere in the area.
    Nonetheless, she could see one now. Could it be a reflection of the mansion on the mist? Maybe. That made the most sense. More so than some ghostly building. Yet, the longer she stared, the more solid it seemed, the more real.
    Then, she realised that she was no longer sitting on the veranda, but standing on a quayside, beside a lake with cloudy breakers bursting mistily against the shore. The building opposite had to be the mansion itself; the more she looked out across the foamy lake, the clearer she could see it. The peculiar outline was unmistaken. How had she got over here; over to this place that didn’t exist? She had to be dreaming!
    Slowly, Cammie became aware that she stood in a city beside the lake of clouds. Was this place Alchera? She recalled Rob using that word when talking about the lake, but couldn’t recall the context. Was this a memory or a dream? It seemed more real than her dreams usually were, yet had a numinous quality that reality lacked. She couldn’t recall an experience quite like this. It was strange and intoxicating.
    “What is this place?” she asked herself.
    “This is Carcosa, the greatest city in the world,” a voice replied and she turned in surprise to see a young woman in a flowing yellow robe of some diaphanous material, also staring out across the lake.
    “How did I get