Джош Малерман - A House at the Bottom of a Lake

Amelia entered the dressing room. She saw the color red as it came floating toward her. She ducked, allowing the red fabric to pass over her, the red dress, a curtain parting to reveal the stage, the space before the opened wardrobe doors.

A woman.

No.

A form.

Naked.

How old?

Couldn’t see its face; its back was to Amelia.

No.

Could see its face. Reflected in a mirror hanging inside the wardrobe door.

No face.

Amelia floated toward the thing, propelled by unseen waves.

Wax.

The word felt silly, a foolish way to describe what stood before her and yet, it did look made of wax.

Like when you melt wax and then dip it in water.

No face. No hair. No bones. Only undefined mounds of pink, thick molds of galvanized spit.

Yet it was moving, raising ( a wax stump ) an arm, raising it in such a way that Amelia understood it had to be facing her after all, that the expressionless bumps and folds were its face.

Amelia cried out. She tried to stop her forward motion.

But the unseen waves propelled her.

How old?

Forever.

How old?

Never.

The shapeless thing raised its lumped arm high enough for Amelia to see that it held ( no hands ) a black dress. As though Amelia had entered, had violated the privacy of someone getting dressed.

It can’t see you, Amelia thought, with sudden clarity. Turn around, Amelia! It doesn’t know you’re here!

Amelia recalled the dining room. Reheard the creaking, the stretched ( wax ) footsteps from above.

It heard us. Couldn’t see us. Heard us.

The thing slid the billowing black fabric over its formless arms. Amelia imagined it in bed, asleep, as she and James lost their virginity below. She imagined it rising from its bed after hearing what sounded like love somewhere in the house.

We should introduce ourselves.

Yes. Still. Do it.

Because not to do it meant to leave the house and not come back.

Amelia floated toward it.

Yes, she thought. Tell it you’re here. Tell it you live here now, too.

When she was within reach, Amelia touched the thing’s shoulder.

“I’m Amelia,” she said. “Who are—”

And the lights went out.

Everywhere.

In the staggering darkness, Amelia reached for the wardrobe but found nothing there. She lowered herself, stretching a flipper to the floor, but found nothing there.

She swam lower, deeper, but found nothing there.

And yet… a light far beneath her. A single small light, rising, growing larger, coming toward her until she understood that she was the object of that light, the very thing being sought.

Where are the stairs? Where is the floor?

The beam revealed ( it’s gone, all of it, gone ) nothing.

No walls. No wood. No rugs, no windows, no chairs.

No more.

As James’s light grew larger, brighter, Amelia looked everywhere for a sign of the house. A sign of the thing that lived there.

No more.

When James reached her, Amelia took his light and swam, spun, trying to find the house, their clubhouse, (their Potscrubber, James thought) their home.

When she trained the light back on James he was shaking his head no.

It’s gone, he mouthed.

And it was.

Gone.

Just two teenagers now, swimming in the center of a very dark lake.

The house. No more.

It was wax, Amelia thought. We could have shaped it into anything we wanted it to be.

Amelia at home. On the couch. Thinking.

She thought a lot in the days following the final events at the house. She believed she knew what happened and why. But that was part of the problem: She was sick of asking why.

On one particularly motivated morning, she actually looked into it. Tried to find some information about the house. About the lake. A house at the bottom of a lake, she believed, must have a trail. Yet there was nothing. No images, no stories, no rumors. And with every dead end she met, she experienced a little relief. If nobody else had a story about the house… didn’t that mean that, in a way, it still belonged to Amelia and James? And if they never talked about it with anybody else, if they forever kept their secret, wouldn’t it always remain theirs and theirs alone?

But that was the thing. One of the things. Many things. She wanted to talk about it with everybody she spoke to. Wanted to tell her parents. Tell her friends that she hadn’t been seen all summer because she was stuck on a boy, stuck on a raft tethered to a house in a lake. Stuck. Snagged. Trapped. She had to physically hold her mouth shut when her childhood friend Karrie called to ask how she’d been. Karrie knew something was amiss. Amelia could hear it in Karrie’s questions. But there was no way Karrie could guess what it was, and so Amelia wasn’t afraid. A drug addict might sniff. An alcoholic might smack her dry lips into the phone. But what did somebody who was stuck on a house sound like?

As long as nobody knew what it was, nobody could take it from her.

All this, Amelia believed, was too much thinking. Way too much thinking. And yet what else was she supposed to do? The house had vanished, leaving her and James floating in an empty lake, no more magical than any other lake in the world, except this one had been different; this one once harbored a house and in that house…

What?

Amelia closed her eyes.

James.

How was James?

They spoke in the few days following the final event at the house but it wasn’t easy stuff. Both of them sounded dazed. There was too much space between their words. Long pauses at the end of their sentences. As if something was slowing them down, stretching their syllables, muting their meaning.

As if they were still talking underwater.

Amelia didn’t tell James that she’d been hearing that same muted elongation everywhere. And that the doors in her house took longer to close than they should. Some seemed to sway shut on their own.

She opened her eyes.

James.

How was James?

They stopped talking after the first few days because it was just too weird. How many times could they say that was incredible, that was insane, what do we do now, what do we do now, what do we do now that we’ve experienced the apex of adventure and now have to face boring life ever after?

And how many times could they skirt the real issue, how freaky it had been, how unbelievably scary ?

They didn’t hang out. No spontaneous trips to the third lake. No scuba classes. No kisses. No firsts in a fully furnished house underwater.

How long had it been?

Ten days? Two weeks?

Amelia wasn’t sure.

She checked her phone and saw nobody had called. Nobody had texted. Good. That way she didn’t have to hold her mouth shut, didn’t have to swallow the words that crawled up her throat, a description of the house, a recounting of the wonder that almost swallowed her whole.

We found a dangerously magic place. A place to fall in love.

She stared at the end of the couch, where she thought she saw the cushions ripple, for a moment, blurred by a mask she wasn’t wearing, bubbles she didn’t breathe.

But we lost it. And we don’t know where it went.

Amelia shook these words out of her head. She turned on the television and felt sick with every image she saw. It all felt so practiced, so dry compared with what she and James had found.