Stuart Woods - Under the Lake

Alfred bowed slightly. “I’m sure that will be just fine, Mr. Howell. I’ll convey your acceptance to Mr. Sutherland.” And he was gone.

Howell closed the door and tossed the card to Scotty. “Alfred is conveying my acceptance to Mr. Sutherland. Want to come?”

“Well,” she said, “it would be nice to see what the crumbs of the upper crust are like around here. All I’ve seen so far are the drunks and speeders.”

“You own a dress?”

“You betcha. How much of a shock shall I give old Mr. Sutherland?”

“None at all, please. I’ve still got a few weeks to go around here. This must be Sutherland’s annual bash. I heard something about it.”

“It is. Bo got his invitation this afternoon.”

“By hand?”

“Yep. Apparently, old man Sutherland doesn’t trust the post office.”

“Sort of courtly, that, hand-delivered invitations.”

“From what I hear, once a year is the most Eric Sutherland can manage courtly. He probably didn’t want to spend the money on the stamps.”

“Well, we’d better take advantage, hadn’t we?

Very late that night, he wasn’t sure quite how late, Howell came gently, fully awake. Scotty slept beside him, quietly, almost like a child. He had a curious sensation of unease; something seemed out of kilter. Then the silence came to him. There were no crickets.

He stopped himself from getting up immediately. He asked himself questions: was he really awake? Yes. Was he sober? Yes. He looked about the room, which seemed perfectly normal; he felt the sheet over him, rubbed it through his fingers; all senses working, performing normally. Finally, sure that he was in complete charge of himself, he got up and walked through the silence to the living room windows. Once again, the lake was not there, but another place; the house, tranquil in the moonlight, lay below him, and he heard the tune drifting toward him.

“Scotty!” he called out, afraid to take his eyes from the scene. “Scotty, come here quickly!”

“What?” her sleepy voice answered from the bedroom.

“Get out of bed and come here right now, goddamnit!” He heard the bed move and her bare feet on the living room floor. She came on the deck beside him.

“What? What is it?” She sounded fully awake and alarmed.

He reached out behind him for her hand, then stood her in front of him. “Look,” he said, taking her head in his hands and pointing her at what he could still see. “Tell me exactly what you see before you.”

He felt her go rigid.

“What’s happening?” she asked, her voice trembling. “What’s going on, Johnny?”

“What do you see?” he asked urgently. “Tell me exactly what you see.”

“A road, a house. It’s misty.”

“How many windows in the house?”

“Uh, two… three… four that I can see.”

“How many chimneys?”

“Two.”

“Do you hear anything?”

“Your hands are over my ears.”

He moved them. “Now?”

“A piano.”

“What’s it playing?”

“I… I don’t know. It sounds familiar, but…” She turned and buried her face in his chest. “I’m scared, Johnny.”

“It’s all right, nothing’s going to happen to us.” He lowered his head and kissed her hair, and, as he did, he heard the crickets. He looked up, and the lake looked back at him.

He showed her the lake, then put his arm about her and walked her into the living room. He sat her down on the piano bench and inserted a roll into the piano.

“What are you doing?”

“Listen.” He switched on the instrument; it began to play.

“That’s the song, the song I heard out there on the deck,” she said after a moment. Her voice was small and frightened. “Johnny, do you know what is happening here? Please tell me if you do.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t. But I know now that I’m not crazy.”

“Why?” she demanded. “What makes you so damned confident about that? You may be crazy, and I may be, too.”

“No, we’re not crazy, either of us.”

“Why not?”

“Because two people, even two crazy people, can’t have the same hallucination. What we saw was real.”

The morning after Scotty, too, had seen the vision, which is how Howell had come to think of it, Howell woke with an oddly pleasant feeling. It was mysterious, but faintly familiar, and it took him a couple of hours to bring it into focus. For a year, now, and perhaps for the better part of two, he now realized, he had been, more than anything else, bored. For all of his life, boredom had been foreign to him, and his work as a newspaperman had been boredom’s antithesis. Now, on this bright, cool August morning, in this most beautiful of places, in the throes of what could only be a classic, male-menopausal, midlife crisis, he was experiencing anew the intellectual and emotional condition which had always driven him: curiosity. He was once again, at long last, interested in something.

The fact of Scotty’s seeing the vision convinced him that he was not mad, not hallucinating. He was by no means convinced that what he had been experiencing had a supernatural basis. The experience was, in some sense, real; it had a rational, if unfamiliar basis, and he was a rational man. He would proceed rationally.

Scotty did not entirely share his view of the situation. “Listen, John, this place is screwy – haunted, or something.”

“Or something. Does it scare you?”

“Well, yeah, a little.” She cocked her head to one side and looked thoughtful. “I mean, I’m not terrified, no more than after the seance, but that didn’t seem quite as real.”

Howell had been about to tell her about the girl; but now he felt that the introduction into the situation of what Scotty might interpret as a ghost might disturb her too much, and he didn’t want her to panic on him, now. “Well, I think it all means something, and I want to find out what.”

“How do you figure on doing that?” she asked.

“I’m not sure exactly, but before I can proceed, there’s something I need.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve got it.”

Howell knew where to get it, too, he thought as he drove into Sutherland. He read the directory at the courthouse and bounded up the stairs two at a time. A young woman asked if she could help him.

“What a lovely dress,” he said, enthusiastically. She blushed. “Lovely. Uh, I’m interested in the local geography, and I wonder if I might see a survey map of the area?”

“Why, sure.” She was putty in his hands, now. “The whole county?”

“Oh, no, not the whole thing, just the town of Sutherland and the surrounding area.”

She reached under the counter and pulled out a sheet of typewriter paper with a map printed on it. “Here’s the official Chamber of Commerce map of the town, and that shows a little bit beyond the city limits.”

“Well, I really had something on a little larger scale in mind, something with a lot of detail.”

“How about a mile to the inch?”

“Perfect.”

She went to a wide-drawered cabinet, fished in a drawer, and pulled out a larger sheet. “There you are,” she said, spreading it on the counter before him.

And there he was. It took only a moment to find the crossroads and follow the road down to the cabin. True to life, the line of the road stopped at the lake’s edge. “Oh, that’s terrific,” he said, grinning at her and making her blush again. “Now, do you think you might have a map of the same area, on the same scale, before the lake?”

She wrinkled her brow and looked doubtfully around the room. “Gee, I don’t have the slightest idea where that would be. Just a minute, I’ll ask Mrs. O’Neal. She’s been here forever, and she’ll know just where to put her hand on it.”