Latham's Landing

by Tara Fox Hall

  “It’s a bedroom?”

  “It’s a bedroom, and nothing else, really, but there’s nothing written about it. Just that she asked him to build it for her, and he did. I added that in about how she wanted to be closer to the water.”

  “Well, doesn’t the lake flood that place when the snow melts in spring? It seems like it would be underwater, not just close to it. The bridge can’t be more than five feet above the water.”

  “This is a man-made lake, made by Latham. And he made sure it wasn’t going to flood, not unless he wanted it to.”

  Before I could ask her what she meant by that, she got to her feet. “Come on, let’s go. It’s way past lunch.” Her tone turned teasing. “And we wouldn’t want to worry Fred!”

  I laughed with her, following her back through the door.

  That’s where the trouble began.

  When we went back inside, we were faced with a hallway with one door. When we followed it and went through the door, we came out on another balcony, instead of back to the main bedroom and central staircase. This balcony had a view of the left side of the lake. I was surprised to see a few trees near the base of the house, but otherwise only water, gently lapping a foot below the house’s base

  We both laughed, and went back the way we’d come, saying we’d been idiots to pick the wrong way. This time we climbed a flight of stairs, then descended one, and ended up on the northern end of the house, on a very small balcony. This one showed us a slightly closer version of the sheep we’d been admiring. What it did not do was lead us back the way we’d come.

  I was starting to panic again, but Sandra retraced our steps until finally we were standing on the original balcony.

  “My fault,” she said apologetically. “I went in the wrong door. There are doors on either end of this main balcony. It should’ve been the left one, not the right one.”

  We went through the left door, on the left side of the balcony, and sure enough, we came out where we were supposed to be. Whew.

  We went downstairs to the main floor. Again, something was different.

  “I don’t remember there being a door over there,” Sandy said curiously.

  Before I could stop her, she was through it. I bolted after her, and then smacked into her, stopped only a step inside.

  “This is the kitchen,” she whispered. “This is where it happened!”

  I looked around, seeing a large table in the center, an old cast iron stove, and a ton of cabinets. On the table was a small pile of plates, all mismatched.

  The table was covered with a heavy layer of dust, as was the floor. The plates were not covered with any dust at all.

  I looked at her, she looked at me, and we ran for the exit. We both slipped in the dust, tripping over our own feet, and made it out the front door, shrieking to each other to move faster.

  “We should lock the front door!” I yelled as we ran across the lawn.

  “Fuck it, we’ll be back tomorrow!” she yelled, not looking back. “I want to get out of here before it gets dark!”

  I slowed to a walk and cracked a smile, about to tell her that it was only six at most. When I glanced down at my watch, my mouth fell open. It was eight-thirty. In addition, by the gloom falling over everything, darkness was almost on us.

  We made it to the raft, and waded into the water, forgetting to take our shoes off. The water was ice cold. Sandra and I jumped in quickly. She started the engine, and we roared out of the harbor breathing sighs of relief.

  The journey back seemed to take forever. We had the boat motor at full throttle, but it seemed as if no matter how far we went, we weren’t getting any closer to land. The sun dipped lower and lower on the horizon. We gave each other panicked looks in the deepening darkness, wondering if we’d be able to see the dock or if we’d run aground on the rocks. I remembered Fred’s spotlight and brought it out, though it wasn’t full dark yet. We made it to the dock just as the sun dipped below the horizon. Fred was there to greet us.

  “Damn fool women! Didn’t I tell you to start for home before dark?”

  “We did,” Sandy replied grumpily. “It took us over an hour to get back. It took only a half-hour to get there this morning.”

  “The tides are like that,” Fred said, nodding as he stowed the raft. “You can’t trust ‘em.”

  “Thanks for waiting for us,” I said with relief.

  “All I could do,” Fred said, with a shrug. “I don’t go on that island except in the daytime. So if you hadn’t come back, I‘d have waited as long as I could and then left a light on here for you.”

  Sandy and I walked wearily up to the bed and breakfast. Of course, the kitchen was closed for the night.

  So we drove into the nearest town, about fifteen minutes away. The diner there was closed, too. But there was a bar there that was alive, if not hopping.

  “God, it’s good to eat!” I said, stuffing my mouth with French fries. “I’m starving!”

  “I don’t get how we lost track of time so badly,” Sandy said musingly, sipping her beer. “Sure, we mixed up the doors. But that took us what, a half-hour at most to find the right one? We lost three hours somehow, Tina!”

  I knew one thing. “It’s a sign,” I said with surety. “We’ve seen enough, Sandy. Let’s cut this trip short and head back upstate. We can find a place with a pool near a mall and shop, watch movies, and lay in the sun for the rest of the week. Let’s have a real holiday vacation. Enough ghost hunting.”

  “I’m not hunting ghosts,” She said irritably. “I wanted to see with my own eyes what was out here. And I’m not going until we’ve seen that other island, the sea room.”

  “Fine, but that’s it, one more day,” I said vehemently. “I’ll go out with you tomorrow morning, and we’ll check it out. But I want to be on the road before dinner, okay? We can stop somewhere on the way.”

  Sandy looked at me for a moment and then nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

  About ten am, we again got in the raft. Fred left us a note to be careful, that he’d be gone for the day, but just to leave the raft when we got back, and he’d stow it that night.

  Soon, we were back near Latham’s Landing. This time we continued around the house, not stopping at the harbor. As we motored past, it was easy to see that part of the house was actually submerged. The lower floor had a row of windows that were right above the water, and the bottom part of the house was under lapping waves.

  “Did the water rise overnight?” I said in wonder to Sandy. “What the hell?”

  “Latham did it,” Sandy replied. “His wife died somehow, but I gathered it was some kind of tragic accident.”

  “Did he kill her?” If she said yes, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “No, because he went crazy afterward with grief. Then he raised the water in his lake and flooded the house’s first floor, most of it just guest bedrooms and sitting rooms. Yet he continued to live here. Some said that he would go out to his little island place and meet with her ghost at night. Lights were seen sometimes through the years at night at his main house by locals. And the Sea Room sometimes was said to be so bright it looked like it was burning—”

  I turned to her, suddenly angry. “Sandra, out with it. You seem to know a hell of a lot more about this house than I saw in the short blurb in the picture book we both looked at yesterday morning. And that museum that was supposed to give us info closed down more than a year ago. So how do you know all this?”

  “My aunt told me a lot. She said she hired a private investigator, after my cousin disappeared. He talked to a lot of the locals, and after more than a little money he came back to her with no explanation, just a lot of these old stories.”

  Great. “Have other people disappeared here?”

  “Henry’s the only one that’s documented. But a lot of people died here, Tina.”

  I gaped at her. “Who? Fred said no one has died out here—”

  “Latham killed himself here. His wife died somewhere in or on her way to
the sea room—”

  “What happened?”

  “It was night time, that’s the only thing known for sure. Some stories say she was meeting a lover to run off, and they both drowned when their boat sank in a sudden storm. Some say she was pregnant, and she went into labor and died in childbirth, along with the baby. And the most horrible story says she had already birthed the baby—that it was some kind of monster, and so she killed it and then flung herself off the bridge.”

  “Who else died out here?”

  “Some tourist had a heart attack here, not long after they first opened it to the public. He died on his way to the mainland. A young girl fell off the docks and almost drowned, but she was saved. But one of the men who jumped in to save her hit his head on a rock and drowned. That’s all.”

  That was plenty. “You sure you want to do this?” I said seriously. “We both thought it was weird, what happened yesterday.”

  “I’m not going to be scared because I saw some dishes. Come on, Tina.”

  We tied up the raft, again getting our feet wet. Today, for some reason, the water was cold again, even though the sun was as bright and hot as yesterday. Must be those tides Fred had mentioned…

  We walked up a series of granite steps to a small shed. To my surprise, there was a small car there. I turned to Sandy, who’d produced a key.

  “Why is there a car here on this island? There’s not even an acre of land above water.”

  “It’s faster than walking to the Sea Room,” she said, as she got in and started the engine. “We’d take two hours walking that stone bridge, round trip. I still don’t know why Latham made it so long. It must have cost a fortune to make.”

  “Latham didn’t have a car here, did he?”

  “I can’t say. Fred handed me the key last night and told me to be sure to use the car when we went to the Sea Room. I asked him why, when the bridge wasn’t that long.” She paused. “He told me that a round trip to the Sea Room by foot is four hours, repeating that stuff about time passing differently out here.”

  “But how did the car get here?” I persisted.

  “He asked the historical society to donate one a couple years ago, when he got to be seventy. As he’s the only person that will agree to come out here to check on the place, they caved and got him this little Beetle.” Sandra looked at the bridge and the shed, then out into the water. “A bigger boat must have delivered it and craned it up here somehow.”

  I watched her start the car, worried. What if it didn’t start for us on the way back? I wanted more and more to be gone from this place with every passing minute.

  She noticed my hesitation. “Get in. The quicker we get there, the sooner we’ll be done.”

  I swore but got in the car.

  The ride there seemed to take only a few minutes. As we rode, I wondered, again, why a man would build a place for him and his bride so far away from his house. Maybe because rich people were never alone, because they always had servants around? Maybe because they liked the water?

  Maybe because he didn’t want anyone to hear her scream? Shudder.

  I blinked, then turned to Sandra. “You never answered me yesterday. How did you get permission to come here?”

  “I lied,” she said, her eyes on the road.

  “Tell,” I said flatly. “Now.”

  “I bribed the bed and breakfast woman,” Sandra said defensively. “That’s why she only made a token effort to stop us coming out here. I don’t know what she told Fred—”

  “How—?”

  “Some money I’d saved for grad school,” Sandra admitted. “The woman didn’t need a lot. She’s desperate. They don’t get a lot of visitors here since the tours stopped, and the island became off limits—”

  “Why?”

  “I have to know,” Sandra said stubbornly, stopping the car. “Come on.”

  As we walked up to the door, I stopped, glancing back at the car. I considered asking Sandy to turn it around, so it was facing back toward the main house, but irrationally feared that we’d come out and find it facing back the other way.

  God, I was losing my nerve! Sandy was right. This was just an old house…

  “Tina, come on!”

  I went through the door. There wasn’t much here, the basement-like first floor composed of a walk-in coat closet, some stored broken furniture and not much else.

  I followed Sandra up some stairs, and then saw why Latham’s wife had loved it so much. The Sea Room was made almost entirely of glass and some kind of mirrors, and it was in an oval shape, with a rounded ceiling like a half globe. We were surrounded by water. The sun was shining on the water, making reflections, the wraparound windows holding the light in a prison of prisms. Even on this blustery windy day, the air in here seemed warm and inviting.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said in wonder.

  “Apparently some mainland kids think so, too,” Sandy said sarcastically. She nudged a bottle of soda with her foot. “Look at this mess!”

  She was right. There were two stained mattresses on the floor, and some debris here and there. Some of it was odd debris. Why would anyone leave a flashlight here switched on? Why leave a book that looked almost new, or a pair of shoes and socks?

  “I’m calling the bed and breakfast. They should know about this.” Sandy grabbed a wall phone and began dialing.

  As I watched her, I realized the phone she held looked familiar. I looked down at my feet. There on the side of one of the mattresses was a similar phone. No, not similar. Identical.

  “I’m getting a busy signal,” she said, exasperated. “Damn it, Fred said that the phones out here would work, even if cells didn’t!”

  The phone was busy, something not uncommon. Yet my gut was telling me that it was busy because that phone at my feet was off the hook, that someone or several someones had come out here looking to have some fun and found something more than they bargained for. Before they could call for help or use the flashlight to find their way out, something had happened to them. Something bad.

  I looked over at the edge of the mattress. There was something there…

  “Tina, I’m going to check outside. Maybe a wire came loose—”

  I picked up the object. What was it? It was so familiar, yet my mind wasn’t giving me any information.

  “Wait here, okay?” Sandy said.

  Oh shit, this was a…

  “Let’s go!” I said loudly, letting the cool piece of metal fall from my hands. I ran over to her and began propelling her toward the door. “Forget the damned phone!”

  We went back to the car, me shoving her and her protesting. When we were on route back, I told her.

  “You can’t have found a filling, Tina. The windows in there were soldered together, some of them. It must have been a bit of lead—”

  “I know solder and lead, and this was neither, this was silver. And there was a little tooth chunk stuck to it!”

  “So some kids were fighting, and one of them got in a lucky punch. It’s nothing.”

  “I don’t care!” I shot back. “I’m leaving!”

  We rode the next half-hour in silence back to the landing, relief washing through me when the little house of glass faded from view. When Sandy pulled up to the garage, I hopped out, and opened the overhead door, hurrying down to the raft. I began untying it, as Sandy parked the car and shut the garage door.

  She was just walking down the granite steps to me, and I was imagining how good a hamburger was going to taste when she stopped.

  “I heard something,” she said, turning to look back at the main house.

  “I heard nothing, Sandy. Let’s get going.”

  “Hey, what if some of those kids are here, Tina? That soda bottle wasn’t that old. This is a historical site.”

  “They can wander around then!” I shouted. “I’m not going to chase after them!”

  “We left the door open yesterday!” she shouted back. “What if the kids light the house on fire or something? It’l
l be my fault! I had to sign a paper to get the key!”

  “We’ll go back and get Fred! He can come look for them!”

  “He’s gone until tonight! He won’t be able to look until morning! And we’re right here.”

  “Fuck it, I’m leaving! You can stay here if you want!”

  “After all Fred’s done for us, I’m not going to leave here without checking it out.”

  She turned and bolted up the stairs, running for the entrance.

  Fuck! I retied the boat and ran after her. When I got to the entrance, Sandy was nowhere in sight.

  I got inside and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. By my watch, either we’d lost time again, or the time we’d spent at the Sea Room had taken longer than I’d thought. It was about two pm.

  I walked the first floor, the second floor, and the third floor, following Sandy’s steps and my own from yesterday. I didn’t see anyone or any signs of anyone being there but us.

  I walked back downstairs, wondering if I should check outside, when I heard a noise. I turned, and out of the corner of my eye, reflected in a broken hall mirror, I swore I got a glimpse of a young man in a red plaid shirt and jeans, his arms flailing wildly as he shouted soundlessly. But when I whipped around, there was no one there. Darting a look back at the mirror, I expected to see nothing. Instead, I saw the man there, looking back at me from the mirror, grinning at me, his eyes tinted yellow.

  I let out a shriek and ran for the front door. I got as far as the stairs, then stopped with a whimper.

  There was a young boy on the stairs in front of me.

  “Father, I’m so glad to see you,” he said gratefully, his innocent face breaking into a smile. “I looked for you, and couldn’t find you!”

  “I’m not your father,” I whispered.

  The boy came closer, his light blue eyes shining. “I’m so glad you’re here. It seemed like such a long time I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Where is my friend?” I grated out, making myself get closer. “What are you?”

  The boy tilted his head and studied me, but didn’t reply.

  I took another step closer. “Get out of my way.”

  “Stay,” the boy said, his voice no longer grateful.