by Laird Barron
"Aunt Dolly died here. This is where they found her." Lourdes squinted at the dark water thirty or so yards from the porch of the cabin.
"That's great aunt to you." Bernice quickly pocketed her lighter and tried to figure how to beat a hasty retreat without appearing to flee the scene. "To be accurate, it probably happened closer to the western side. That's where they lived."
"But, she was the Lady of the Lake?"
"Aunt Dolly was Aunt Dolly. She died an awful death. Cue the violins."
"And the ghost stories."
"Those too. Nothing like enriching cultural heritage by giving the tavern drunks a cause celebre to flap their lips about."
"Doesn't it make you sad? Even a little?"
"I wasn't alive in 1938. Jeez-I never knew the gal personally. How old do you think I am, anyway?"
Lourdes brushed back her hair. She was straw blonde and lean, although she had her mother's eyes and mouth. Bernice had always wondered about the girl's fairness. On the maternal side, their great grandparents were a heavy mix of Spanish and Klallam-just about everybody in the immediate family was thick and dark. Bernice had inherited high cheekbones and bronze skin and black hair, now turning to iron. She owned a pair of moccasins she never wore, and a collection of beads handed down from her elders she kept locked in a box of similar trinkets.
A stretch of beach separated them and the lake. The lake was a scar one mile wide and ten miles long. The water splashed against the rocks, tossing reels of brown kelp. Clouds rolled across the sky. The sun was sinking and the water gleamed black with streaks of red. Night came early to the Peninsula in the fall. The terrain conspired with the dark. For the most part, one couldn't see a thing after sundown. The Douglas Fir and Western Redwoods rose like ancient towers, and beneath the canopy all was cool and dim. Out there, simple homes were scattered through the foothills of Storm King Mountain in a chain of dirt tracks that eventually linked to the highway junction. This was logging country, farm country; field and stream, and overgrown woods full of nothing but birds and deer, and the occasional lost camper.
An owl warbled and Bernice shivered. "Anyway. How'd this gnat get in your ear?"
"I read about it a long time ago in a newspaper clipping-I was helping Grandma sort through Grandpa's papers after he died. As we drove up here, I started thinking about the story. This place is so… forbidding. I mean, it's gorgeous, but beneath that, kind of stark. And… Dixie was telling me about it earlier when you were getting the key."
"That figures."
The younger woman pulled her shawl tight. "It's just so… awful."
"You said it, kid." Bernice called her niece "kid" even though Lourdes was seventeen and on her way to college in a couple of weeks. Depending upon the results of forthcoming exams, she'd train to be a magistrate, or at the least, a barrister. They grew up fast in Europe. Even so, the divide was too broad-Bernice was approaching fifty and she felt every mile in her bones. Chaperone to a sardonic, provocative little wiseacre seemed a hollow reward for another tough year at the office.
"There's another thing…I had a really bizarre dream about Aunt Dolly the other day. I was floating in a lake-not here, but somewhere warm- and she spoke to me. She was this white shape under the water. I knew it was her, though, and I heard her voice clearly."
"What did she say?"
"I don't remember. She was nice… except, something about the situation wasn't right, you know? Like she was trying to trick me. I woke in a sweat."
Bernice's flesh goose pimpled. Uncertain how to respond, she resisted the temptation to confide her own nightmares. "That is pretty weird, all right."
"I'm almost afraid to ask about the murder," Lourdes said.
"But not quite, eh?" They must be sharing a wavelength. What wavelength, though?
"I wish Mom had mentioned it."
"It's quite the campfire tale with your cousins. Grandpa Howard used to scare them with it every Halloween-"
"Way insensitive."
"Well, that's the other side of the family. Kissinger he isn't. Nancy never told you?"
"Frank discourages loose talk. He's a sensible fellow. Mom follows his lead." It was no secret Lourdes disliked her father. His name was Francois, but she called him Frank when talking to her friends. She'd pierced her navel and tattooed the US flag on the small of her back to spite him. Ironically, his stepsons John and Frank, thought Francois was the greatest thing since sliced baguettes.
Fair enough, if she hated him. Who knew what Nancy was thinking when she married the schmuck. Except, Bernice did indeed know what her sister had been thinking-Francois was a first rate civil engineer; one of the best in Paris. After Bill died, Nancy only cared about security. Her two boys were in middle school at the time and Bill had been under the weight of a crippling mortgage, the bills for his chemotherapy. Bernice suspected she only got herself pregnant with Lourdes to seal the deal. It shouldn't irk her that Nancy had made the smart choice. When Bernice lost Elmer, she'd gone the other direction-dug in and accepted the role of widow. Eleven years and she hadn't remarried, hadn't even gone on a date. It was wrong to begrudge Nancy, but Lord help her, she did, and maybe that was why she resented poor Lourdes just a tiny bit-and maybe she was envious because she and Elmer put off having their own children and now it was far too late.
Lourdes said, "That's why you brought us up here, right? To tell the tale and give everyone a good scare?"
Bernice laughed to cover her mounting unease. "It hadn't occurred to me. I brought a bag of books and sun block. We've got our evening cribbage tournaments. Hope you don't get too bored with us biddies."
"Dixie promised to go hiking with me tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?" Bernice detested hiking. The hills were steep, the bugs ravenous. She'd allowed her gym membership to lapse, and piled on almost fifteen pounds since spring. No, hiking wasn't a welcome prospect. And to think she wasn't even consulted in the change of program. Dixie's treachery would not go unremarked.
"Tomorrow afternoon. Then she's driving us into Port Angeles for dinner at the Red Devil."
"That's a bar. Your parents-"
"The place serves fish and chips. Dixie says it's the best cod ever. Besides, there's no drinking age in France."
"Cripes," Bernice said. Her desire for a cigarette was almost violent, but she restricted herself to a couple of Virginia Slims a day, and only in secret. Lights came on in the cabin. Dixie stuck her head out a window to say dinner was up.
3
Li-Hua made stir fry and egg rolls over the gas range. She preferred traditional southern Chinese cuisine. A tough, sinewy woman, she'd endured a stint in a tire factory during the Cultural Revolution before escaping to college, and eventually from Hainan to the United States where she earned her doctorate. For years, Karla nagged her to write a memoir that would make Amy Tan seem like a piker. Li-Hua smiled wisely and said she'd probably retire and open a restaurant instead.
They ate garlic bread on the side and drank plenty of red wine Karla and her husband Chuck had brought home from a recent tour of Wenatchee vineyards. Normally the couple spent summer vacation scuba diving in Puget Sound. As Karla explained, "We went to the wineries because I've gotten too fat to fit into my wetsuit."
After dinner, Dixie turned down the kerosene lanterns and the five gathered near the hearth-Bernice and Li-Hua in the musty leather seats; Karla, Dixie, and Lourdes on their sleeping bags. The AM transistor played soft, classical jazz. Karla quizzed Lourdes about her dreaded exams, the pros and cons of European track education versus the American scattershot approach.
Bernice half-listened to their conversation, wineglass balanced on her knee, as she lazily scrutinized the low, split beam rafters, the stuffed mallard and elk head trophies, and the dingy photographs of manly men posing beside hewn logs and mounds of slaughtered salmon. Darkness filled every window.
"You want to tell this?" Dixie said. "Your niece is pestering me."
"I know. She's been bugging the crap out
of me, too."
"Oh, be nice, would you?" Karla said. She stirred the coals with a poker.
"Yeah, be nice," Dixie said while Lourdes didn't try hard to cover a smirk. Her cheeks were flushed. Dixie and Karla had given her a few glasses of wine. "Hey, they do it in France!" Dixie said when confronted.
"Go for it, then." Bernice shook her head. She was too drowsy and worn down to protest. She always enjoyed Dixie's rendition of the tale. Her friend once wrote an off the cuff essay called Haunted Lake. It was subsequently published in the Daily Olympian and reprinted every couple of years around Halloween.
"If you insist."
"Hey, guys," Li-Hua said. "It may be bad luck to gossip about this so close to the sacred water."
"Come on," Dixie said.
Li-Hua frowned. "I'm serious. My feet got cold when you started talking. What if the spirits heard us and now they're watching? You don't know everything about these things. There are terrible mysteries."
"Whatever," Bernice said. She refused to admit the same chill creeping up her legs, as if dipped in a mist of dry ice. "Let nothing but fear…"
"Okie-dokie. What's so special about the lake?" Karla dropped the poker and leaned toward Dixie with an expression of dubious interest.
"She's cursed." Dixie was solemn.
"That's what I'm saying," Li-Hua said.
"I get the feeling you Northlanders brought a lot of superstitious baggage from the Old World," Karla said, indicating Dixie's pronounced Norwegian ancestry.
"It's more than white man superstition, though. In the winter, thunderstorms boil down the valley, set fire to the high timber, tear the roofs off houses, and flood a hundred draws from here to Port Townsend." Dixie nodded to herself and sipped her drink, beginning to get into her narrative. "The wind blows. It lays its hammer on the waters of the lake, beats her until she bares rows of whitecap teeth. She's old too, that one; a deep, dark Paleolithic well of glacial water. She was here an eon before the Klallam settled along the valley in their huts and longhouses. The tribes never liked her. According to legend, the Klallam refused to paddle their canoes across Lake Crescent. This goes back to the ancient days when the Klallam were paddling just about everywhere. They believed the lake was full of demons who would drag them to bottom for trespassing."
A gust rattled the windows and moaned in the chimney. Sparks flew around the grate and everybody but Dixie glanced into the shadowy corners of the room.
"Man, you're getting good at this," Bernice said dryly.
"Keep going!" Lourdes said. She'd pulled her sweater over her nose so that only her eyes were revealed.
"I'd be quiet," Li-Hua said.
Dixie chuckled and handed her glass to Li-Hua. Li-Hua poured her another three fingers of wine and passed it back. "Oh, the locals adore stories-the eerie ones, the true crime ones, the ones that poke at the unknowable; and they do love their gossip. Everybody, and I mean everybody, has a favorite. The most famous tale you'll hear about Lake Crescent concerns the murder of poor waitress Dolly Hanson. Of all the weird stories, the morbid campfire tales they tell the tourists on stormy nights around the hearth, The Lady of the Lake Murder is the one everybody remembers.
"A tawdry piece of business, that saga. In the mid-'30s, the bar had grown into a popular resort for the rich townies and renamed Lake Crescent Lodge, although most of the locals stubbornly referred to it as Singer's Tavern. A few still do. According to legend, Dolly, who was Bernice's aunt, of course, had just gotten divorced from her third husband Hank on account of his philandering ways-"
"-And the fact he beat her within an inch of her life whenever he got a snootful at the tavern," Bernice said.
"Yes, yes," Dixie said. "On the morning of the big Singer's Christmas party of 1938, he strangled Dolly, tied some blocks to her and dumped her in the middle of the lake. The jerk went about his way as the resident merry widower of Port Angeles until he eventually moved to California. People suspected, people whispered, but Hank claimed his wife ran off to Alaska with a salesman-or a sailor, depending on who's telling the tale- and no one could prove otherwise."
"Some fishermen found her in 1945, washed up directly below the lodge. That lake is deep and cold-there aren't any deeper or any colder in the continental US. The frigid alkaline water preserved Dolly pretty much fully intact. She'd turned to soap."
"Soap? Like a soap carving, a sculpture?"
"Yes indeed. The cold caused a chemical reaction that softens the body, yet keeps it intact to point. A weird sort of mummification."
"That's freaky," Lourdes said.
Dixie chuckled. "Say, Bernie-wasn't it Bob Hall, who identified her? Yeah…Hall. A barber by trade, and part time dentist, matched her dental records. The young lady's teeth were perfectly preserved, you see. That was curtains for old two-timing Hank. He was hanged in '49. That's just one incident. Plenty more where that came from."
"More murders? More soap mummies?" Karla said.
"I suppose there could be more corpses. Deep as she is, the lake would make a pretty convenient dump site. Folks are given to feuds here in the hills. A lot of people have disappeared from this end of the Peninsula over the years. Especially around the lake."
"Really? Like who?"
"All kinds. There was the married couple who bought a washing machine in Sequim and were last seen a mile or so from where we are right now. Those two vanished in 1955 and it's still a mystery where they went. Back in 2005, an amateur detective supposedly found the lid to the washer in two hundred feet of water near a swimming hole called The Devil's Punch Bowl. The kid got pretty excited about his find; he planned to come back with more equipment and volunteers, but he hasn't, and I doubt he will. It wouldn't matter anyway. Then there's Ambulance Point. An ambulance racing for the hospital crashed through a guardrail and went into the drink. The paramedics swam away from the wreck, but a logger strapped to a gurney in the back of the ambulance sure as hell didn't. Every year some diver uncovers the door handle to a Model A, the bumper from a Packard, the rims to something else. Bones? Undoubtedly, a reef of them exists somewhere in the deep. We won't find them, though. Like the old timers say: the mistress keeps those close to her heart. Some say the souls of those taken are imprisoned in the forms of animals-coyotes and loons. When a coyote howls or a loon screams, they're crying to their old selves, the loved ones they've lost."
Lourdes's eyes were wide and gleaming. "You actually wrote an essay about this?"
"Yep."
"You must email it to me when I get home!"
"You got it kiddo."
Bernice was getting ready to turn in for the night when Dixie laughed with Lourdes and said, "That's a great idea. Bernie, you in?"
"On what?"
"A seance."
"I've studied the occult," Lourdes said with a self-conscious flush. "I know how to do this."
"Black magic an elective across the pond, is it?"
"No, me and some friends just play around with it for fun."
"She looks so normal, too," Bernice said to Karla and Li-Hua.
Li-Hua shook her head. "Forget about it. No way."
"I'm game," Karla said. "I attended a couple of seances in college. It's harmless. What night could be better?"
"Think of the memories," Dixie said. "When's the last time we've done anything wild?"
"Yeah, but you go to El Salvador while we effete gentry glut ourselves and sail around on yachts during summer vacation," Karla said. "Don't the locals believe in ghosts and such? Surely you see funky goings on?"
"From a distance. I'm not exactly brave."
"Pshaw. No way I could stomach the dozen inoculations you've gotta get to enter those countries. Nope, I'm white bread to the core."
"Well, I'm with Li-Hua. I'm tired and it's silly anyway." Bernice stood and went out to the porch. The wind ripped across the water and roared through the trees. She shielded her eyes from a blast of leaves and pine needles. Her hair came free of its barrette and she wondered how crazy tha
t made her appear. Getting in a nightcap smoke was out of the question. She gave up, all but consumed with irritability. Her mood didn't improve when she slammed the door and threw the bolt and discovered Dixie, Karla, and Lourdes cross legged in a semicircle on the floor.
Li-Hua had crawled into her bunk and sat in shadow, her arms folded. She patted the covers. "Quick, over here. Don't bother with them."
Bernice joined her friend. The two shared a blanket as the fire had diminished to fading coals and the room was colder by the moment. "This is simply…" she struggled for words. On one hand, the whole seance idea was unutterably juvenile-yet juxtaposed with her recent bout of nerves, the ominous locale, and the sudden storm, it gained weight, a sinister gravity. Finally, she said, "This is foolish," and was immediately struck by the double meaning of the word.
Ultimately, the ritual proved anticlimactic. Lourdes invoked the spirits of Aunt Dolly and others who'd drowned in the lake, inviting them to signal their presence, which of course they may or may not have done as it was difficult to discern much over the clattering shutters and the wind screeching in the eaves. Dixie, head bowed, almost fell over as she nodded off, eliciting chuckles from all present.
Things began to wind down after that. The cabin was quite warm and cozy and the wine did it's trick to induce drowsiness. Again Bernice had decided not to mention her recent bad dreams that revolved around drowning and the ghost of her aunt bobbing to the surface of the lake like a bloated ice cube, then skating across the water, her face black as the occulted moon. Dixie would've laughed and said something about zombie ballerinas, while Karla raised an eyebrow and warned her to lay off the booze. Worst of all, Li-Hua was likely to take it seriously. So, you've returned to face your childhood demons. Good for you! No, no, no-far better to keep her mouth shut.
She fell asleep and dreamed of sinking into icy water, of drifting helplessly as a white figure crowned in a Medusa snarl of hair reached for her. In the instant before she snapped awake tearing at her blankets and gasping for air, she saw her sister's face.
