A House at the Bottom of a Lake

21

Amelia woke to the sound of splashing. But not quite splashing. More the sound of someone or something emerging, pulling itself out of the water.

Her left arm was asleep. She’d been lying on it. This always happened when she fell into a deep sleep. So she rubbed her arm, shook it, tried to bring it back to life. James snored lightly on his back. She could see the tip of his nose in the moonlight. The rest of him was in shadow.

Amelia sat up. The water’s surface was partially twinkling with scant moonlight. She could hear gentle waves lapping against the raft.

James rolled onto his side and fully vanished from sight. Like he’d wrapped himself up in the shadows, cold without them.

Amelia scanned the shoreline.

What woke her?

A fish, no doubt, just like the fish they’d seen leap near the raft after spotting its eye below the surface. Just a fish (no doubt). Except maybe a little doubt. A drop at least. Because it sounded like someone had either gotten out of the water or lowered themselves back in.

She watched for movement.

She listened.

She looked over James, beyond the edge of the raft, to where she knew the house to be.

Tethered, they hadn’t drifted, couldn’t drift anymore.

But there was no sparkle of moonlight, no light at all over where the house must be, and Amelia saw nothing.

She reached for her wet suit and paused.

What was she thinking of doing? Diving at night? And if so… would she tell James?

I just wanna know what made that sound. That’s all.

But it was a strange motivation. What were the chances that the same fish that had woken her would be swimming through the halls of the house?

The vision of herself below, buried by all that moonless black, alternately thrilled and worried her. She wasn’t sure why this should bother her at all. It wasn’t any lighter inside the house during the day. Their flashlights provided 100 percent of the light they used. So… what was the difference between diving at noon and diving at night?

Possibly, Amelia thought, it was knowing that the world above was as dark as it was below, two layers of blindness, night upon night.

Endless black.

And yet… the stars. Not as bright as she would’ve liked, but they certainly gave her something.

She looked to the edge of the raft, beyond her bare feet. She looked to shore. She looked to the surface of the lake, to the large area of impenetrable black that seemed to hover above the house (our house) like it was made of something more than water.

What was it about the stars that, no matter how they lit up the night sky, they couldn’t remove the night?

Amelia stood up, carefully, aware that she could lose her balance, could misjudge the boundaries of the raft, could slip into the water.

This vision of her white body breaking the surface, herself as the one shimmering object in all this darkness, a beacon for whatever called the lake home, the lamp that the moths must get to.

She didn’t like it.

Why not? Stop it. You’re not scared. You love it here.

A stronger wave arrived and the canoe rocked audibly, tethered three feet away. She knelt at the edge of the raft and reached for the rope that held it. Then she drew it in, hand over hand.

As the canoe came closer, as its silhouette looked something like a dorsal fin, she realized fully that she was planning to check if their things were still in it. Clothes. The cooler. Books. As if they’d left their car unlocked outside a shopping mall, and not here in the middle of an otherwise uninhabited lake.

The canoe came the rest of the way too quick and banged hard against the raft. The sound of it made her jump.

You’re not scared.

Amelia pulled the canoe broadside and reached in and felt for the cooler, their towels, their bags, their tanks, masks, and flippers.

She found the flashlights.

That’s what you were looking for the whole time, wasn’t it? Light.

She lifted one out of the canoe and turned it on.

She did not scan the canoe, James, or that starless patch of black that seemed to float above the house. Rather, she immediately trained the beam on the end of the raft, to where she believed she’d heard the sound that woke her.

“Fuck.”

Beads of water shone at the foot of the logs, beyond James’s feet and close to where her toes must have been when she was still asleep. She crawled to them, her hair hanging inches above the raft’s edge.

In the light, they looked like tiny puddles. Proof that something had recently stood there.

Stood there?

Amelia didn’t like the thought so she stopped thinking it.

You’re not scared. You’re sleeping on a raft in the middle of a lake. Things are going to get wet.

And yet…

She bent her arm in a way so that she could come at the droplets from the lake’s side of the edge. She dipped her fingertips into the tiny puddles. Then she laid her hand flat upon them. In a way, it fit. As if Amelia had made the watermarks herself. Or like someone had been holding on to the side of the raft, their legs dangling in the dark below.

Amelia inched away from the edge of the raft.

Stop it. You are not scared.

She’d heard of people, adults usually, intentionally turning a good thing into a bad thing. When things were going good, adults liked to ruin them. Her own mom called it a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you did it to prove to yourself that it wasn’t so good to begin with.

All this, the lake, James, the house… this was a good thing.

So why was Amelia trying to ruin it?

She inched back to the mattress pad, sat, held her knees to her chest, scanned the shoreline. She turned the flashlight off, like she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, didn’t want to be the only thing lit up in all this darkness.

Night upon night. Darkness within. Darkness without.

The raft rose on a small wave and settled, tethered to a buried house.

“James?” she whispered, reaching into the shadows and tapping his shoulder.

James stirred.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“James, what are these?”

“What are what?”

She shone the light on the edge of the raft. For a crazed beat she imagined someone might be there, a pair of wet eyes where the wood ended and the lake began.

James sat up.

“Those?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s water,” he said.

“But how’d it get there?”

James thought about it. He wasn’t scared. Amelia needed that.

“The canoe must’ve drifted. Hit the raft. Splashed it a little.”

Amelia nodded.

“A lot of water out here,” James said.

“Yes.”

James got on his back again and fell immediately asleep. But Amelia stayed up, listening to the sound of the unseen waves lapping against the raft. Trying not to imagine them as fingers, or heads even, something with hands that hovered by the wood, waiting for her to sleep again, waiting for the darkness within her to match the darkness without.