A House at the Bottom of a Lake

16

The flashlight was acting up on me.

Amelia stood at the bottom of the staircase, shining the flashlight in question up to the top of the stairs.

Maybe she should’ve heeded James’s warning. Maybe they should have gone and bought another one.

But she’d wanted to look adventurous. And she was feeling adventurous. And when she was still up on the sunny surface it didn’t sound so bad if the lights went out below. Dark and cold. It was just underwater, after all. What was dark but the absence of light? And what was cold but a temperature? Night in winter. Amelia had experienced it all before.

Still…

She was kneeling, studying the runner that lined the stairs. The hose’s slack was delicately piled beside her. She didn’t know the first thing about water damage or what ought to happen to a rug that’s been underwater for this long, but she could guess that it shouldn’t look as fine as it did.

It looked new.

Kind of.

In a classic sort of way.

She looked to the top of the stairs, the light still focused on the highest step. It was black up there. Impenetrable. No light came through a second-story window. Probably blocked by the roof. Or maybe all the doors were closed up there.

All the doors.

“Here we go,” Amelia said, talking to James just like he talked to her. No actual communication between them.

She got up and used the banister to balance herself.

The flashlight was acting up on me.

It didn’t sound so shameful now, so unadventurous to go and get a better light. The square at the top of the stairs, the gateway to the second story, reminded Amelia of the sort of hole you chance upon in a forest floor, then step widely around.

Amelia took the first stair up. Then the next.

Quick now, she was halfway there and thinking how James hadn’t been this far, how maybe nobody had been this far in the whole wide world.

She moon-stepped the next stair. Then the next.

Ahead, the light didn’t reveal much more than the beginning of a hallway.

“Well, James, here we are. Dating. Is this our second date? No. This would probably be our third. Two dates underwater. One up above. Good for us. We’re insane.”

She took the next step.

“Some people go to the movies, some people make out in their cars, parked behind schools.”

Another step.

“Some people meet for coffee. Some for drinks. Men and women meet for drinks. Happens all the time.”

Another.

“But us? We’re taking turns in a crazy place.”

She liked that. Taking turns in a crazy place. Sounded like… like love.

Two steps from the top and she stopped.

Far ahead the light showed her a door.

“It’d be a bad time for the flashlight to break,” she said.

A single door. At the end of a long wood-paneled hallway. Floating between her and the door were a few fish. All of them dead.

“They swim on their sides,” she pretended to tell James. “That’s all. Side swimmers.”

Darkness and cold water split by the beam.

She understood that she wished she had less slack. She understood, clearly, that she’d like a reason to turn back.

“No,” she said, shaking her head inside the helmet. “Let’s explore.”

The fear ebbed, leaving only the adrenaline of exploration to play with.

Amelia began walking, plodding, astronaut-esque, toward the door at the end of the hall in the house at the bottom of a lake.