Джош Малерман - A House at the Bottom of a Lake

This vision of her white body breaking the surface, herself as the one shimmering object in all this darkness, a beacon for whatever called the lake home, the lamp that the moths must get to.

She didn’t like it.

Why not? Stop it. You’re not scared. You love it here.

A stronger wave arrived and the canoe rocked audibly, tethered three feet away. She knelt at the edge of the raft and reached for the rope that held it. Then she drew it in, hand over hand.

As the canoe came closer, as its silhouette looked something like a dorsal fin, she realized fully that she was planning to check if their things were still in it. Clothes. The cooler. Books. As if they’d left their car unlocked outside a shopping mall, and not here in the middle of an otherwise uninhabited lake.

The canoe came the rest of the way too quick and banged hard against the raft. The sound of it made her jump.

You’re not scared.

Amelia pulled the canoe broadside and reached in and felt for the cooler, their towels, their bags, their tanks, masks, and flippers.

She found the flashlights.

That’s what you were looking for the whole time, wasn’t it? Light.

She lifted one out of the canoe and turned it on.

She did not scan the canoe, James, or that starless patch of black that seemed to float above the house. Rather, she immediately trained the beam on the end of the raft, to where she believed she’d heard the sound that woke her.

“Fuck.”

Beads of water shone at the foot of the logs, beyond James’s feet and close to where her toes must have been when she was still asleep. She crawled to them, her hair hanging inches above the raft’s edge.

In the light, they looked like tiny puddles. Proof that something had recently stood there.

Stood there?

Amelia didn’t like the thought so she stopped thinking it.

You’re not scared. You’re sleeping on a raft in the middle of a lake. Things are going to get wet.

And yet…

She bent her arm in a way so that she could come at the droplets from the lake’s side of the edge. She dipped her fingertips into the tiny puddles. Then she laid her hand flat upon them. In a way, it fit. As if Amelia had made the watermarks herself. Or like someone had been holding on to the side of the raft, their legs dangling in the dark below.

Amelia inched away from the edge of the raft.

Stop it. You are not scared.

She’d heard of people, adults usually, intentionally turning a good thing into a bad thing. When things were going good, adults liked to ruin them. Her own mom called it a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you did it to prove to yourself that it wasn’t so good to begin with.

All this, the lake, James, the house… this was a good thing.

So why was Amelia trying to ruin it?

She inched back to the mattress pad, sat, held her knees to her chest, scanned the shoreline. She turned the flashlight off, like she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, didn’t want to be the only thing lit up in all this darkness.

Night upon night. Darkness within. Darkness without.

The raft rose on a small wave and settled, tethered to a buried house.

“James?” she whispered, reaching into the shadows and tapping his shoulder.

James stirred.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“James, what are these?”

“What are what?”

She shone the light on the edge of the raft. For a crazed beat she imagined someone might be there, a pair of wet eyes where the wood ended and the lake began.

James sat up.

“Those?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s water,” he said.

“But how’d it get there?”

James thought about it. He wasn’t scared. Amelia needed that.

“The canoe must’ve drifted. Hit the raft. Splashed it a little.”

Amelia nodded.

“A lot of water out here,” James said.

“Yes.”

James got on his back again and fell immediately asleep. But Amelia stayed up, listening to the sound of the unseen waves lapping against the raft. Trying not to imagine them as fingers, or heads even, something with hands that hovered by the wood, waiting for her to sleep again, waiting for the darkness within her to match the darkness without.

Following Amelia through the house, the flippers propelling, James thought: She’s the coolest girl you’ve ever met.

More than the bravery it took to explore the house was the fact that they were now spending nights on the raft.

Behind his mask, James smiled. He shone his beam in a circle around her until it looked like she was swimming through a ring of fire. She was performing for him; weaving through the halls, the rooms, up the stairs and down, through the attic, the bedrooms, and even sometimes above the seaweed gardens outside.

He owed a lot to this house. It’d given him something incredible to show her.

Still following her, he thought of her half-naked body and the dozens of times he’d seen it. How soft her breasts felt in his hands, how sweet she tasted, the weight of her pressed upon him on the raft.

Could today be the day they lost their virginity in the house? And was it up to him to bring it up?

Maybe…

Ahead, Amelia took a sudden left, entering the thin hall that connected the study to the kitchen, the vast magnificent kitchen with not one but two marble islands, where knives remained in their holders, the stove looked ready to use, and the cupboards were stocked with dishes, glasses, serving plates, and bowls.

All of it stationary. As if found in the kitchen of any dry home.

Glue? James asked himself. Rope?

But no hows. No whys.

Because of their one rule, their clubhouse guideline, James hadn’t examined the dishes close enough to know what held them in place. In his father’s hardware store, they stocked sixteen types of glue. There was Glasgow wood glue strong enough to hold a cabin together. But you couldn’t even hang a child’s drawing on your wall with Duncle’s. And the store had everything in between. In fact, James’s dad would have so much to explain down here, his head might explode from the excitement.

But would the pieces of his head fall to the floor… or scatter freely about the house?

No hows. No whys.

Amelia said the house was kind of like the Garden of Eden. Neither of them gave a hoot about religion, but the analogy was spot-on.

Don’t eat the apple. Not down here.

But at seventeen years old, James was curious. He was far from the age when childhood’s magic might return, far from being an old man who didn’t want to ask questions, who happily accepted the unknown and all mysteries.

Probably it was because he spent most days talking to people about how things are put together, the best way to build, the best wood, tools, rubber, and glue.

His father’s hardware store constantly asked how and why.

It’s how it survived. It’s why it existed.

Home improvement.

Home.

And how one stays together.

Ahead, Amelia exited the kitchen by way of a spiral staircase that led to one of the bedrooms upstairs.

James didn’t follow her.

Bringing his arms and legs up, he pushed himself to a stop. Bubbles rose from his face mask. He treaded above the two kitchen islands for a full minute. He thought about Eden. Then he lowered himself to the tiled kitchen floor.

On the counter was a small porcelain beaver. The three small holes on its back told James it was a pepper shaker.

Why isn’t it floating? What’s holding it down?

Training his light on the animal’s teeth, James could sense the darkness behind him. It felt as if the entire house of darkness fanned out from this one point, this pepper shaker that somehow stayed put on the kitchen counter.