Джош Малерман - A House at the Bottom of a Lake

James smiled.

The canoe had shifted its position, and the submerged rooftop was nearer the back now. On his knees, James used his paddle to bring them back to where they were. Amelia thought again of Uncle Bob’s warning about tipping.

“Are you scared?” she asked.

“Um…”

“Be honest.”

“I’m always honest.”

“Are you?”

“I mean… yeah.”

“Are you scared?”

She was smiling. The arched-eyebrows smile friends give each other before they enter the house of horrors at the county fair or press play on a particularly frightening movie.

Ready or not… here we go.

“Yeah, sure. But not enough not to do it.”

“Okay. Same here.”

And what was there to be afraid of? In fact, after having spoken it, Amelia felt almost no fear at all. It was a submerged house, for crying out loud. It was cool was what it was.

Yet looking at it, the house, the shingles seemed to move uniformly, as if it wasn’t the surface of the water that created the illusion but something beneath the roof, rolling along its distance. Fish, perhaps. Or mice. As the roof sloped, its edges vanished into the murky shadows. Not only was Amelia unsure how large the house was, she wasn’t even sure how big the roof was. Those same shadows continued, merged with the darkness that was the rest of the lake. She looked up, out, across the lake, and realized how big this third lake actually was. When you imagined yourself slipping into the water, imagined your tiny body engulfed by it, the lake looked a lot bigger.

“Is there anything in there that can bite us?”

“In the house?”

“No. The water.”

“I really don’t know. That’s a bad answer, I know. If either of us should know, it’s me. But… I don’t.”

“It’s okay. There’s probably not. It’s just a lake. It’s not the ocean.”

“Right.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Here we go then.”

He rose, suddenly, and Amelia’s heart thudded bunnylike in her chest.

Here we go then.

“It’ll be amazing,” she said, trying to send some confidence his way.

James smiled at her. He was standing up. Balancing. When he removed his shirt, Amelia noticed how soft his chest looked. His white arms shone against the dark-blue backdrop of the lake.

Then he dove in.

Amelia gripped the sides of the rocking canoe and looked over the edge.

As he sank, the ripples created a blurry wall of white foam and bubbles. For a three-count Amelia couldn’t see him.

It swallowed him, she thought.

James popped back up, his hair plastered wet to his head.

“Wow,” he said, teeth chattering, treading. “It’s really fucking cold.”

Amelia didn’t want to tell him how small he looked, treading the surface with the huge roof looming beneath him. She didn’t want to tell him that he’d added scale to the sight.

“How long can you hold your breath?” she asked.

“I don’t know. How long can someone hold their breath?”

“A minute or two I think.”

James dunked his head under the water.

He looked at it. Looked at the house.

He came back up.

“Wow,” he said. “This is a house.”

“It really is.”

They stared at each other, James in the water, Amelia at the edge of the green canoe. Something passed between them. Unspoken. Something like Be careful. But like they both said it to each other. As in Be careful now, yes, but let’s be careful in everything that follows, too.

James took a deep breath.

And went under.

Murky, James thought, swimming head down, his hair floating above his head like short seaweed. He couldn’t see much, not yet. Just the roof that seemed to vanish at the edges, drift off into the darkness of the deep.

He swam to it.

Far above him, in a place he could not see, a cloud moved from in front of the sun and some light crested the lake, warming Amelia and revealing, for James, a piece of the house itself. Not quite like curtains parting, but as if a magician’s naked hand pulled aside to show him a window it’d been hiding.

James looked down to the glass and felt the vertigo of being high up, like looking down into the courtyard of the mall, or the pause at the top of the Demon Drop at Cedar Point. How big was the house? How many stories?

He swam toward the glass. More details emerged.

Siding. Brick. A windowsill.

The flashlight was tied to the elastic band of his swim trunks. Treading by the side of the house, then planting his toes to the bricks for support, he untied the flashlight and brought it to the glass. He pressed his nose to the window.

Space, he thought. As if the word counted for many other words. Room. Bedroom. The Unknown.

It was much too dark to see anything and really the flashlight just reflected hard off the glass, becoming a second glowing circle on the window.

He pushed off and swam deeper.

Another window, a story lower than the first.

Two stories. A two-story home at the bottom of the lake.

He looked up, hoping to see Amelia’s face through the surface. But it was all an unintelligible impression up there. Strong solid colors rippling. For a moment it looked like he could see her, could see someone, a giant’s head, a head as large as the surface of the lake, peering down into the water at him. Then the impressions faded out at the edges, and James couldn’t make out anything up top.

Without knowing it was coming, he reached the bottom of the lake and felt his feet sink into thick, soft mud. He was standing next to the house, impossible as it sounded. He reached out, into the darkness, into the murk, and flattened his hand against the bricks.

It was real. There was no doubting that.

A rush of cold water passed over his back, hugged him, nudged his fingertips off the bricks and onto glass.

Another window. A first-floor window. James shone his light at it.

Blackness. Couldn’t see a thing in there.

He had a sudden vision of someone talking to Amelia up top. Telling her they had to leave. Explaining the house, cracking the mystery, flattening the mystery whole.

A maritime police officer, perhaps. A fisherman.

What do you mean you were curious, miss? What is there to be curious about? There’s a two-story home at the bottom of every lake in the United States!

But there wasn’t a home at the bottom of every lake. As much as the idea suddenly comforted him.

He cupped his hands and pressed them against the glass.

Nothing. Couldn’t make anything out. Looked like the possible outlines of furniture. But that was impossible.

Right?

Beginning to feel the tightness of holding his breath for too long, James shone his light up, taking in, for the first time, the full scope of the house.

A big one. Bigger than James had ever lived in.

Suddenly he imagined Amelia lying in a bed in a second-story bedroom. He imagined swimming up to the glass, treading outside, knocking on the glass, waking her.

Let me in?

Then he thought of waterlogged mattresses. Fabric about to burst with fish bones and muck.

He shone his light to the left of him and saw the edge of the house and knew that, if there was a front door— of course there’s a front door, it’s a house, James —it was around that corner.

His lungs told him to get up top. Go see Amelia.

Instead, he walked, astronautlike, toward the brick edge of the house.

A thought occurred to him, natural as it was: If the front door was open, why not step inside?

At the corner of the house ( the house! ) he looked over his shoulder, into the blackness, the rest of the lake.