Something like hair.
Still rising, James opened his eyes and saw he was passing the dark square of an upper-story window, just as a new cloud covered the sun again, and any more visibility was taken.
When he broke the surface he breathed huge, and saw the canoe was much farther from him than he thought it would be.
Amelia was sitting in the middle of it, staring at him without speaking. A figurine, James thought, fashioned to look desperately investigative.
“We need scuba gear,” James called, swimming toward her.
“What?”
“Scuba gear. We need to take lessons.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going back down there,” James said. “And we’re gonna wanna stay down there longer than we can hold our breath.”
“We are?”
“The front door is open. Half a door. Hard to explain.” He reached the canoe and held tight to the ladder. He was breathing hard. “It’s a little freaky,” he said. “But man…it’s awesome.”
Amelia felt a chill.
The front door is open.
James climbed the ladder.
“Go on,” he said. He unhooked the flashlight from his waist and tossed it to her. “See for yourself.”
10
Half a front door. Hard to explain.
But that pretty much explained it.
Amelia didn’t like being down here one bit. Didn’t like the world of open black behind her (like a bloated, gibbering madman planted the house to draw you and James in, a carrot for the teenage donkeys, a madman that’s gonna suddenly explode from that darkness, his slobber floating up to gather about the canoe, as he grips you by the hair and drags you inside his house, HIS house, Amelia), didn’t like the open half of the door, the way she could swim right in with no resistance at all.
It was impossible not to imagine something living inside: a watery creature, undiscovered, unlisted, nesting.
This is insane, she thought.
But wasn’t it fun, too? Wasn’t it also the most thrilling thing she’d ever seen?
Knowing her time below was short, she’d swum straight for the front door James had told her about. She didn’t stop at any windows, didn’t try to look inside. So, standing on the stone step, handrails (handrails!) on either side of the small stone porch, she had more air to spare than James did when he arrived at the same spot.
Shining the light along the four rectangular sides of the half door, as though to somehow symbolically create a passage through light, Amelia did not hesitate to enter the house. Scared or not, this was thrilling.
By her bare toes she sprang up from the stone step and swam into the house.
Using her arms in a kind of breaststroke, the flashlight showed her the door frame, then a piece of a wall, then nothing, because the light was behind her. She thought for a moment that it was no different from entering an abandoned house on the side of Chauncey Road. She’d done that once with a good friend named Marla. Together they took photos, believing they were capturing the truest essence of living and life.
Emptiness.
But when she brought her arms forward again, with a mind to propel herself deeper into the house, the light showed her something that caused her to do something she’d never done before in her life.
Amelia screamed underwater.
It was a coatrack, nothing more, and there wasn’t even a coat hanging to make her think she’d seen a person. And yet…
It didn’t belong here, she knew. Certainly didn’t belong here the way it was, standing, erect, as though ignorant of the thousands of pounds of water and waves enveloping it.
It’s not bobbing, she thought, shining the light to the floor where the base of the coatrack was firmly flat to the wooden boards. It’s not bobbing or floating or even leaning.
She was in a foyer, this much was clear. Beside the coatrack was a small table, the place someone would perhaps place their keys when they returned from town.
There was even a glass bowl on the table. The exact place for keys, Amelia thought.
Her lungs felt tight from the lack of air.
Why isn’t the bowl floating? she wanted to know. Why isn’t everything?
She shone the light behind her, to the half door, absurdly frightened of seeing a face there, the homeowner, a man in an overcoat perhaps, standing on the mossy front step.
Who let you in?
She swam a foot deeper into the foyer, saw the table wasn’t so small after all. It was more of a credenza; a gorgeous piece of Victorian woodwork that didn’t look waterlogged, didn’t look bad at all for being at the bottom of a lake. In fact, Amelia believed it looked usable, as she ran her fingers along its surface, then the rim of the glass bowl.
Because she had expected to find nothing in this house, nothing but fish and rotten wood, the reality of touching the glass confused her. In a way, the contact removed any veil of magic.
This is impossible, she thought. All of this. Impossible.
She looked to the ceiling, expecting to see clutter above, small rocks or dead fish obeying the laws of physics, flat to the plaster.
But the ceiling was bare.
But not bare.
A lightbulb.
She shone her own light ahead. A hallway. From the foyer to the rest of the house.
Despite the fact that she needed to breathe, soon, Amelia crossed the foyer. Her mostly naked body was very cold, and getting colder the deeper she traveled into the house. But she badly wanted to see one more thing before leaving. One more piece of verification before she swam up to the canoe.
Before she reached any larger room, her light showed her a mirror on the hall wall.
Don’t look into it.
It was the first thought that came to mind. Just like when she’d told herself not to look in the mirror at home when she had a feeling she looked like shit.
Just like it, but not just like.
Don’t look into it.
Of course the space (the whole house, the lake, too) surrounding her beam of light was a blackness as dark as burial. And the objects that were revealed, in the beam, rippled unnaturally. Yes, an underwater mirror in a pitch-black house might have been a bad idea.
But Amelia couldn’t resist.
Bubbles erupted from between her lips as she gasped, mutely, catching sight of her face in the glass.
Medusa.
But not Medusa. Just Amelia. Not a wrinkled gray Gorgon who turned you to stone, but rather a distorted representation of a young woman, her skin as pale as the drapes in a morgue, her hair floating like seaweed (snakes) above her frightened but curious face. It was such an everyday task, looking in the mirror, that she’d instinctively expected to see her everyday face. But this woman, this her, this Amelia had rippling skin, cheeks half an inch higher than they normally were. Lips curled up at their ends in a false smile.
Even her eyes looked different. Unfocused. As if Amelia were privy to the one sight no person truly wanted to see: This is what she might look like dead.
Found dead.
One day.
Found drowned.
Drowned.
Amelia needed to get back to the top. Needed to get air.
She shone the light once more, deeper into the house. A pair of matching bubbles escaped her nostrils.
Then she swam from the mirror, back to the foyer, toward the half front door.
You’re not gonna make it and James is gonna call the police and they’re gonna find you floating down here. Or maybe not floating…maybe they’ll find you flat on the floor, like that coatrack, disobeying the laws of a lake.
She crossed the threshold and tried not to think about what it would feel like: drowning. Was this it? The earliest stages? The last few moments before a person understood
there would be no getting back up?
Would she see stars first? Would she black out before or after the pain of it became unbearable?
James. Swim toward James.
Amelia exited the house and foolishly thought about turning back, to close the door, as if she’d been rude for leaving it open. But there was no door to close and her arms and legs were already propelling her up. Up.
Up?
She couldn’t see the surface above and for one insane second she thought maybe she was swimming down.
She was starting to believe she was going to die.
Curiosity killed the cat and the snooping seventeen-year-old girl.
James would mistake her floating body for a living one. He’d think she was joking.
First dates. And whom would he tell about this date? Just as he’d told Amelia about the girl who broke her arm bowling, who would hear about the girl that went diving and popped out of the water as a bloated, veined corpse?
But death hadn’t happened yet.
No blackout. No stars.
She swam harder, pulling herself up, as if the water had rungs of its own.
The last thing she saw before breaking the surface was the second-story window, partially shadowed by the roof.
Is there a dresser up there? she wondered, absurdly, too close to passing out. A nightstand and a wardrobe, too?
Then she broke the surface and all her terrible imaginings dissipated into the air she desperately breathed.
Part horror, part triumph, the sound echoed across the third lake and chilled James cold.
“Hey!” he called, gripping the canoe’s side. “Holy shit! Are you okay?”
Amelia wiped snot from her nose and lips.
“We need scuba gear,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s what I—”
“It’s furnished, James.”
They locked eyes. James in the canoe. Amelia treading water four feet from the ladder.
“It’s what?”
“It’s furnished.”
11
Amelia didn’t recognize how claustrophobic the third lake made her feel until they set out to leave it. Then the word struck her like a slap.
Claustrophobic.
She was afraid the canoe wouldn’t squeeze out the way it squeezed in. Afraid they’d be stuck there, on the third lake, with the house, forever.
It was silly, of course. They could just swim through the tunnel, could walk on shore, a dozen different ways to leave. But still, she’d felt it.
Panic.
But the canoe made it out just the way it’d come in. Only now there were even more paint flakes in the water, more of a dent in the canoe.
“Uncle Bob’s got a good long hose,” James said as they reached shore at last: the short stretch of sand that constituted Uncle Bob’s little beach.
“We keep coming back to hoses,” Amelia said.
“We do. I guess that’s our spirit animal?”
But Amelia thought of the dead fish floating a foot below the surface of the third lake.
James got out of the canoe.
“It won’t work,” Amelia said. “The hose.”
“It won’t?”
“No. I tried it before. It doesn’t work like a straw.”
James looked thoughtful. He looked out across the first lake but Amelia knew he was actually looking farther than that.
“Does your uncle have scuba gear?”
“He might.”
“Would you know how to use it?”
“No.” He looked ponderous again. “My cousin has diving gear.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. I’ll get it from him tonight.”
Clipped syllables. Short sentences. Amelia knew why.
They were planning on returning to the third lake.
Without discussing the idea, they were going back.
This meant something.
“Tomorrow then,” James said.
“Yes. Wait…no. I work tomorrow.”
“What time?”
“During the day.”
“Where do you work?”
“Darlene’s Grocery.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah.”
“All right.”
“The next day,” Amelia said.
James nodded.
“All right.”
They looked into each other’s eyes. Something quiet passed. They’d been given a teaser, a foyer, a hall with a mirror, and they wanted to see more.
You’d go back with or without her, James thought. But the idea felt ugly.
They nodded at the same time, both pretending they were agreeing to a second date in two days. But really both were saying, Yes, yes I’d go back alone.
I’d go back this second if I could.
12
Darlene’s Grocery featured twelve aisles of everything a family could need. From food to toilet paper, Amelia’s co-worker Marcy liked to say. We’ve got both ends covered. And it was true. All ends, in fact. Including the flippers and snorkels and masks that made up the small, but popular, water aisle.
Working the next day’s shift, Amelia passed those bathing suits and water wings and thought about the house countless times.
What is it?
Specifically she thought about the coatrack and the glass bowl, neither of which should have stayed put in an environment like that. And the more she thought about it, the more the pristine state of the wood walls bothered her, too, the more the string hanging straight down from the lightbulb in the foyer confused her.
What is it?
These three words made a bigger racket than the more obvious four:
Why is it there?
She stocked shelves with paper towels and cereal and helped Marcy void an order. She talked briefly to the delivery guys from Saxon Foods about the apples and why some of them were bad and one of them asked her if she could do him a favor and keep quiet about the state of the apples? They were fine when they left Saxon, he said. He must’ve gone too fast over a bump. Boss would be angry. Amelia inspected the apples, found they were good enough, and told him it would be their little secret.
Our little secret.
But no fully furnished house at the bottom of a lake was anybody’s little secret. Somebody had to know about it.
Who?
She bagged groceries, careful with the eggs, and made small talk with the regulars. She passed the mirror in the employee hall twice and both times noted the fixed details of herself in the glass. She swept aisles. She aligned the labels on the soup cans so the customers could read the flavors. And yet despite all these distractions, somebody had to know about the house.
It almost made her feel like she was being watched. Watched at work. Spies in the parking lot outside Darlene’s waiting to ask her if she touched anything down there, prepared to search her car for wet spots.
Watched. But not quite watched. More like seen.
Uncle Bob?
Did he know about it? Amelia thought he had to. How could you own a home on the first lake and never think to check out the graffitied tunnel on the second? Never pass over the house James and Amelia had seen on their very first turn in the canoe?
It was covered up, Amelia reminded herself. Yes, the brush. Kinda made it hard to see the tunnel. The bright graffiti. The drawings of dicks and tits.
She wanted to ask Bob herself. Maybe James already had. Standing alone at register two, she checked her phone for any texts. There were none.
No Bob knows or Bob says it’s a movie set or anything from James at all.
So…had James talked to his uncle about it? And why did that idea make her feel so…bad inside
?
What is it?
Marcy finished bagging a customer’s meats at register one and continued the “perpetual conversation,” the way some co-workers have of picking up a story exactly where they left off, even if that was two days past.
“So Tommy thinks it’s safe,” she said. Then she winked.
Amelia wasn’t sure who Tommy was or what was safe. She winked back.
She thought of the house.
In her mind’s eye, the half door was swinging smoothly on unseen waves. In her vision, the sun must have been directly above the lake because Amelia saw details in the wood of that door she hadn’t seen yesterday in person. And through the dark open half, she imagined a friendly face, barely distinguishable, perhaps her own reflection distorted in the hall mirror, and a voice, too.
Come back anytime, Amelia. Annnnnyyyyy tiiiiiimmmmmeeeeee.
“Oh boy,” Marcy said, half a finger jammed up her nose, another pointing to the front doors.
Amelia looked up.
“James?”
It was James. Walking toward the registers. And he was carrying something straight out of a science-fiction movie set. Or maybe something from the bottom of a fish tank.
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry to stalk you.”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
Relief. Together again. As if his presence alone denoted they were already on their way back to the third lake.
“Look,” he said, half lifting the monstrosity in his arms.
“Scuba,” Amelia said.
But it wasn’t scuba. It was an enormous moon helmet and the gold breathing tube that went with it.
“My cousin’s,” James said.
“Did you tell him what you needed it for?”
They exchanged a glance then, a knowing one. Amelia may as well have asked, Did you tell anybody about it?
“No. I just told him I wanted to go diving.”
He hadn’t told anybody about the house, Amelia could tell. She felt a second wave of relief. This one was peppered with a little shame. A little self-examination. But why not keep something to yourself?
Why not keep a secret?
“Uncle Bob knew about the third lake,” James said.
A House at the Bottom of a Lake Page 4
