A House at the Bottom of a Lake

8

“We’ve got a ladder,” James said, shaking it loose from the life jackets and towels on the floor of the canoe.

“So we can get back in,” Amelia said. This was not a question. This was her accepting the turn the afternoon had taken.

The roof rippled with waves unseen, undulations beneath the surface.

Amelia started laughing. What else was there to do? Unless the roof was floating, there had to be a house beneath it. James joined her in laughing.

What else was there to do?

“It’s a fucking house!” she said. Then she squealed because she was on a first date and they’d discovered something crazy enough to call magic.

James draped the ladder over the canoe’s edge. When the rungs clacked against the chipped paint, he felt a twinge of guilt. Uncle Bob. Did Uncle Bob know about this roof?

Still smiling, feeling the charge of discovery, Amelia looked across the lake to the entrance of the tunnel. A half-hole from here. Cartoonish, too. Like someone had painted it on a dip in the mountains.

It’s not a real entrance, she thought. It’s a solid wall. Then she shook the silly thought aside but couldn’t shake a truer one.

The tunnel makes for a slow getaway.

She looked back to the submerged roof. James was shaking his head slowly side-to-side. He looked at her and they laughed again, lightly, in the way something uncanny can make someone laugh. Not funny. Impossible.

“All right,” James said, gripping the rope ladder. “Who’s going first?”

The individual rung looked like kindling in his hands. Amelia had a vision of the ladder erupting into flames. No easy way back into the canoe then, either.

But what unnecessary dark thoughts to have.

“I’ll do it,” she said. No wet blanket today.

James looked surprised.

“Really? Shouldn’t I?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Fine. You go first.”

“No. You go first.”

“No, no. Really.”

“I think I need a minute to get used to the idea,” she said. She was excited, but she was scared. There was more than just a tip-of-the-iceberg quality to the roof. Who knew the size and scope beneath it? “But we definitely both have to do it.”

“I’m so glad you’re saying that,” James said. “We could just as easily paddle away and pretend this never happened, too.”

“Could we?”

“Well, I…”

No, he thought, looking into her bright eyes. Just then she looked very dry to him.

James scanned the shoreline. There was no sign of life. No angry old man to holler at them. No resident in sight to tell his uncle Bob what he and the girl had been up to. It felt to James like they were in the center of a silent room. A room of their own.

He checked the surface of the water. He was looking for snapping turtles. Snakes. The bubbles of something breathing below.

What a terrible turn the date would take if James were to dive in and get bitten by a moccasin. But the longer he stared at the surface, the more the rippling roof looked like a painting. Oils. Like diving into that, into its false reality, would prove to be much worse than anything a snake could deliver.

“Amelia,” he said, and he discovered he liked saying her name. Amelia. She was looking back at him, waiting for him to say whatever he was going to say. Her body looked smooth, pure, against the red of her bathing suit. He suddenly felt like he hadn’t been looking at her enough. Her body. The curves, the slopes, the skin. “How do you think it got down there?”

“God’s dollhouse.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you just make that up?”

“Yeah.”

“Sounded like a movie title.”

“Haha. Thank you.”

“I think it was built down there.”

“Probably not.”

“Had to be.”

“I don’t think so. I think it broke the ice.”

“Ice?”

“Yeah. Someone tried to move it across the lake.”

“Wow. That’s interesting. But these lakes never ice over.”

“Well, see. Someone should’ve told them that.”

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.