A House at the Bottom of a Lake

17

No doors along the hall and it started to feel as though Amelia was being shuffled toward the only door, the one at the far end. Felt like a gentle but wide wave was nudging her, from behind, guiding her there.

She bounded, slowly, past mirrors, looking just long enough to see the various expressions on her face behind the bubble helmet. The flashlight reflected harsh off the glass, the water distorted things, and Amelia hardly recognized herself at all.

The door was arched at the top, the kind of door Amelia always wanted for her bedroom as a child. It looked partially functional and partially pure fiction. The sort of door that asked a person to open it.

Amelia put a gloved hand on the doorknob, and the door moved with no more movement than that.

“James,” she said. “You want to take it from here?”

She didn’t want to think these words. She wanted to say them. Because nobody would speak out loud if they were scared. If Amelia was scared she wouldn’t want to make a sound, wouldn’t want to attract a mother fish or a who-knows-what buried on the second story of a house at the bottom of a lake. If Amelia was scared she wouldn’t walk with such confidence. She’d worry about the breathing tube, about the pressure inside the helmet. She’d be sweating, trembling, too clumsy to guide the hose alongside her. She’d be crying, retreating, curling up into a ball, sitting down wherever she was, floating, letting the water take her. If Amelia was scared she wouldn’t have climbed the steps, wouldn’t be standing at an impossible (and open) door that should have disintegrated a long time ago.

She swallowed once, hard, and thought she could hear its echo, the whole lake swallowing with her.

A movement, subtle, but everywhere.

A breath.

Amelia crossed the threshold and entered the room upstairs.

“Oh!”

A yellow dress floated across the room toward her. Floating horizontal, it looked as though someone were wearing it.

Seven feet above the floor.

Amelia ducked. It was a silly thing to do, as the yellow dress rode an unseen current.

When you opened the door, you caused a wave—

“Say the words out loud!” she demanded of herself. “You’re not scared!”

The dress folded in on itself and rose to the ceiling in a corner of the room.

Amelia stepped farther into the room and kept the beam on the dress, studying its yellow fabric, the tiny frills at the shoulder ends. She could imagine the creamy, pale skin those frills once lay upon, could imagine the form of a pretty woman filling the dress, before the woman took it off and released it… letting it float from her fingertips, deeper into the dark room.

Amelia felt the presence of something to her right and turned fast.

She brought a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp but her fingers clunked against the glass and she stared at a second dress, a red one, floating, too, but as if standing up, as if on a hanger, suspended, perfectly upright.

Amelia stepped back and found herself against the door.

It was closed now.

How?

“No hows!”

But her voice was small, so small in the glass helmet.

In the beam, it looked like the red dress could take a step toward her if it wanted to, could approach her, quicker than she herself could move.

Then the water took it, folding it at the waist.

Behind it, an open wardrobe was revealed.

Empty wooden hangers within.

Slowly, Amelia went to it. She fingered the hangers, her gloved hands too clumsy to do anything but fumble.

She trained the light up and saw a gray dress flat to the ceiling. If a woman were inside it, that woman would be facing her.

To her left a mauve dress floated toward her, level enough to look occupied, as if someone were limping in it, drunk perhaps, the water filling the fabric in such a way as to make it look curvy, embodied, in use, worn by somebody who was not quite right, somebody who was…

“Deformed,” Amelia said. Because she didn’t want to just think it.

When the dress reached her, Amelia held out her gloved hands and the fabric folded limply over them. Gently, she let it fall away and saw behind it a fourth dress.

This one was black, positioned near the floor, as if sitting up, watching Amelia directly.

Amelia shone the light everywhere. She counted three more dresses. Floating in the corners, where the floors met the walls and the walls met each other, too.

At either side of the room she saw sets of twin doors, doors that should, if Amelia had her bearings, lead eventually back toward the staircase. She understood that there must be bedrooms through these doors, other rooms, rooms with windows, at least one of which she and James had seen from the canoe.

She stepped toward the doors to her right, to the side of the house James floated above.

She reached for the doors, saw they were open, and pressed a bulky gold palm against them.

A blue dress emerged from the opened space and floated over her helmet, into the darkness behind her.

She tracked it with the flashlight, back across the room, where it sank, momentarily, to the floor, at the hem of the black dress.

“Not scared,” she said.

Breathing deeply, she passed through the twin open doors.