Джош Малерман - A House at the Bottom of a Lake

Don’t break your helmet, man. What are you thinking?

He let his arms fall by his sides. No light.

He stared into the darkness ahead, felt the cold of the darkness behind. Without light, he could be anywhere in the house. Upstairs, downstairs. Outside. In. The house might not exist at all. Why, he could be standing on the bottom of an empty lake. Could be sleeping. Could be awake.

James tried to smile, tried to stay calm, but it was very hard to do in the dark.

“Hi, Amelia,” he said, thinking a pretend-communication with her might help. It didn’t. And he wished he hadn’t. It made him feel more alone. Made her seem farther away. Or like he was leaving her name down here.

Like he was delivering Amelia’s name to the darkness.

He tried the flashlight again.

On/off.

It worked.

Light.

Ahead, not twenty feet from where he stood rooted, was a staircase. A wide one. Two could walk it, side by side.

Amelia, he thought. The light didn’t work for a second and man, I thought I was gonna shit the suit.

A red runner lined the stairs, molded to each step.

James held the light fixed at the top for a long time.

He wanted to climb the stairs, wanted to see what the second floor had to offer. But he’d had enough. For now.

He exited the way he’d come, not pausing to examine a single item. Through the lounge, the study, the dining room, the foyer, and the half front door.

Swimming up, he felt bulkier than ever. The house seemed to sink in slow motion beside him. And when he broke the surface, Amelia’s smiling face was as welcome as any he’d ever seen.

James bobbed for a moment, treading six feet from the canoe.

Amelia called out.

“How’d it go?”

Back in the canoe, he told her. And with each detail, her wonder grew wider.

“So you made it to the bottom of the stairs?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“So I should probably climb them.”

James paused before answering.

“Sure. If you want to.”

“In the name of exploring,” Amelia said, “I need to go farther than you did, right?”

“Sure. Yes.”

Amelia clapped her hands together.

“Help me get the helmet on.”

“The flashlight was acting up on me,” he said.

“It was?”

“Yeah.”

Amelia took it from him and tried it out.

“It’s working now.”

“Yeah. But, you know, it went out for a minute.”

Amelia looked over the edge, to the roof in the murky shadows.

“If it goes out,” she said, “I’ll just feel my way back.”

James laughed. He tried to recall exactly how scared he’d been, but now that he was safe, it was hard.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

While she got into the suit, she thought about being in the dark down there alone. She repeated phrases like It’s worth it and Nobody ever did anything great by being too scared to do it.

These helped.

Before she slipped her arms into the sleeves, James reached out and touched her arm.

“What did you do that for?”

But the look in James’s eyes told her that he didn’t quite know. That he’d seen her pale soft skin and had wanted to touch her. And that was all it was.

“Sorry,” he said. He could feel himself turning red.

“Don’t be,” Amelia said. She considered foolishly reaching out and touching him, too. To make him feel better. And because she wanted to.

Then she slipped her arms into the sleeves. Her hands into the huge gold gloves.

Once she got in the water, James tapped on the helmet’s glass.

She looked up at him, breathing steady, inquisitive. James thought she looked like a kid, a small girl in that big suit.

“Careful of the hose,” James said. “It could get snagged on something. Doorways. Tables.”

Amelia gave him a gloved thumbs-up.

Then she went under.

James watched her sinking past the roof, into the shadows. Soon she was only a tube, a thin line swallowed by the darkness.

Then James saw an eye, looking at him from the upstairs window.

“Amelia!” he yelled. He went to grab the hose, to yank on it, to pull her back up. But the eye moved and James saw it was a fish.

Only a fish in the upstairs window. As natural as anything could be in a lake.

Only a fish.

The flashlight was acting up on me.

Amelia stood at the bottom of the staircase, shining the flashlight in question up to the top of the stairs.

Maybe she should’ve heeded James’s warning. Maybe they should have gone and bought another one.

But she’d wanted to look adventurous. And she was feeling adventurous. And when she was still up on the sunny surface it didn’t sound so bad if the lights went out below. Dark and cold. It was just underwater, after all. What was dark but the absence of light? And what was cold but a temperature? Night in winter. Amelia had experienced it all before.

Still…

She was kneeling, studying the runner that lined the stairs. The hose’s slack was delicately piled beside her. She didn’t know the first thing about water damage or what ought to happen to a rug that’s been underwater for this long, but she could guess that it shouldn’t look as fine as it did.

It looked new.

Kind of.

In a classic sort of way.

She looked to the top of the stairs, the light still focused on the highest step. It was black up there. Impenetrable. No light came through a second-story window. Probably blocked by the roof. Or maybe all the doors were closed up there.

All the doors.

“Here we go,” Amelia said, talking to James just like he talked to her. No actual communication between them.

She got up and used the banister to balance herself.

The flashlight was acting up on me.

It didn’t sound so shameful now, so unadventurous to go and get a better light. The square at the top of the stairs, the gateway to the second story, reminded Amelia of the sort of hole you chance upon in a forest floor, then step widely around.

Amelia took the first stair up. Then the next.

Quick now, she was halfway there and thinking how James hadn’t been this far, how maybe nobody had been this far in the whole wide world.

She moon-stepped the next stair. Then the next.

Ahead, the light didn’t reveal much more than the beginning of a hallway.

“Well, James, here we are. Dating. Is this our second date? No. This would probably be our third. Two dates underwater. One up above. Good for us. We’re insane.”

She took the next step.

“Some people go to the movies, some people make out in their cars, parked behind schools.”

Another step.

“Some people meet for coffee. Some for drinks. Men and women meet for drinks. Happens all the time.”

Another.

“But us? We’re taking turns in a crazy place.”

She liked that. Taking turns in a crazy place. Sounded like… like love.

Two steps from the top and she stopped.

Far ahead the light showed her a door.

“It’d be a bad time for the flashlight to break,” she said.

A single door. At the end of a long wood-paneled hallway. Floating between her and the door were a few fish. All of them dead.

“They swim on their sides,” she pretended to tell James. “That’s all. Side swimmers.”

Darkness and cold water split by the beam.

She understood that she wished she had less slack. She understood, clearly, that she’d like a reason to turn back.

“No,” she said, shaking her head inside the helmet. “Let’s explore.”

The fear ebbed, leaving only the adrenaline of exploration to play with.

Amelia began walking, plodding, astronaut-esque, toward the door at the end of the hall in the house at the bottom of a lake.