Cradle Lake (27 page)

“Why are you talking to me about this?”

“Because now you're pregnant,” Hank said flatly. “And those scars on her wrists? They're not there anymore.”

Alan turned to go back inside. Hank snagged his arm, turned him back around. Instinctively, Alan swatted Hank's hand away, causing the man to take a step back and raise both hands in a show of surrender.

“I thought we were clear about the lake. What happened?”

This is it,
he thought.
This is the deception. This is what he's been gunning for all along. It's not his lake.

“I don't believe in your goddamn lake, and you have no right to stick your nose in my family's business,” Alan said. “You or anybody else in this town. Do you understand?”

Hank sighed. He looked suddenly miserable. “I'd hoped
you
would understand.”

“Who do you people think you are, anyway?”

“Alan …”

“No, tell me. What gives you the right to tell me what I can and can't do? What gives you permission to decide whether or not my wife and I have a child?”

“Please, man, it's not about anyone deciding anything. It's not about—”

“Oh, I know what it's about. It's about control. It's about keeping something for yourself and not wanting anyone else to benefit from it.” Alan leaned closer to Hank and swore he could smell fear coming off the man in waves, the way a shark smells blood in the water. “Tell me something. Is the power of the lake limited? Are you afraid it'll get used up if too many people know it's there?”

“That's not it at all. I've told you why before; you didn't listen to me. You have no concept of what the lake is capable of if it's misused. There's a power here, a certain strength. And it's not just in the lake but in the land itself. All around us.

“See, after I learned about what happened to you guys in New York, I began to wonder if your uncle left you that house for a reason. You once told me you were surprised he even remembered you. So I started wondering if maybe the land called you and your wife here. Maybe it seeks out people who need it and uses them in return.”

“That's insane,” Alan growled.

“Maybe you think you're using the lake, but really the lake is using you.”

“No.” Alan tossed the cigar on the ground, crushed it out. Far off in the woods, something howled. “For whatever reason, you're just trying to scare me off.”

“I wouldn't do that if there
wasn't
a reason.” And in truth, there seemed to be genuine concern in Hank's voice and in his eyes. “Remember what I said about the Morelands? I said it was possible they found the lake hiking through the woods or going on a goddamn picnic or something? But you were right—I didn't believe that then, and I don't believe it now. They were
summoned.
Just like you.”

“Cut it out. This isn't about the lake. This is about you and the town and your precious fucking secret. It's about you people wanting to feel superior to everyone else.”

“Come on.”

“I want you to leave my family alone.”

“People are meant to get sick and grow old and die. Your skin is supposed to die and slough off and you grow more. Part of life is having pieces of you fade away, and if you keep—”

“Is that the same train of thought you had when you were dragging your kid down to the lake?”

The silence that crashed down upon them was instantly deafening.

Hank eventually broke it with a level, even voice. “I'm telling you this as a friend. I don't want to see you hurt yourself or your fam—”

“No.”

Back inside the house, Alan called for Heather. She was
already seated at the dining room table, along with young Catherine. Lydia had set the turkey down in the center of the table and smiled at Alan. If the aggression on his face registered with her at all, she made no acknowledgment. She merely waved a hand at the empty seat beside Heather and, quite pleasantly, told Alan to sit down.

Hank came up behind him, put a tentative hand on his shoulder. Alan's initial reaction was to brush the man off, but he fought it, not wanting to cause a stir in front of the others.

“Let's have a seat and a nice meal,” Hank practically breathed into his ear. “We've got a lot to be thankful for this year, huh?”

Alan still recognized the undercurrent to Hank's words. He controlled the urge to shove the man out of his face. Instead, he claimed his seat beside Heather, who smiled warmly at him and didn't seem to notice that he was burning up inside. She looked pretty, radiant even. The pregnancy was good for her. In the back of his mind, he tried to recall whether or not he'd filled up her water jug recently … but then chased the thought away as Hank sat opposite him at the table.

He knew it was ridiculous, but he felt almost as if Hank were reading his thoughts.

They left immediately after dinner, not even waiting for dessert. Alan rose from the table and confessed to having a terrible migraine. He told them he needed to get home and go straight to bed. He then looked at Heather, not wanting to ask her to come with him in front of the others but giving her a look that suggested she do so. Thankfully, she picked
up on the look and stood as well. She apologized to Lydia until she and Alan were out the door.

One hand against the small of her back, he hurried her across the street toward their house. He looked over his shoulder and was not surprised in the least to see Hank watching them from one of the front windows.

Back home, he bolted the door and closed the curtains. Heather stood watching him from the foyer, her lightweight coat and shoes still on. When he zipped by her to peer out one of the windows she frowned and asked him what was wrong.

“I thought you had a headache,” she said.

“I do. I'm going to take a shower, then go to bed.”

“Do you want company?”

He caught his breath, counted silently to ten, and pried himself away from the window. When he turned to Heather, it took all the strength he had to summon a convincing smile. He kissed her cheek, then her mouth. She kissed him back and leaned forward into him. The soft mound of her belly pressed against him.

This is my family,
he thought.
I have to protect my family at all costs. No matter what.

No matter what.

“Let's skip the shower,” he said, “and go straight to bed.”

“Aw.” She stuck out her lower lip. “I was looking forward to the shower part.”

After lovemaking, they remained in bed as darkness pooled in through the bedroom windows. The smell of their sex hung like humidity in the air, and Alan could still taste his wife on his lips.

He was drifting off to sleep when Heather got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He heard the distant dream sounds of clanging glasses and a running tap. They could have been in someone else's world. Then she climbed back into bed beside him, snuggling up to him and wrapping an arm around his abdomen. Caught in the semiconscious state between sleep and wakefulness, he smiled and thought he could hear himself murmuring nonsense. The thrust of Heather's belly pressed gently against his right hip.

Once sleep fully claimed him, he was shuttled off to the depths of some black forest where the trees stood as tall as skyscrapers and large, indistinct behemoths trod in the periphery of his vision. The sounds of the trees breaking as these monstrous entities cleared the way were as loud as car crashes; they clashed like a tympani. In the night sky, sigils comprised of iridescent lights burned in the place of stars, like bastardizations of the zodiac. As he looked at them they seemed to shift and move slightly, almost imperceptibly. When they moved, their shapes changed. He thought he could almost recognize what they were trying to turn into, their shapes and forms and figures. Nonsense turned into secrets turned back into nonsense.

Soon Alan was at the cusp of the lake. On the opposite shore, something large and unwieldy progressed through the trees. Thick trunks were felled, and birds took flight into a sky suddenly the color of a fading bruise. As the thing came out of the trees and approached the edge of the lake, Alan could see its hugeness … and he could actually
feel
how big it was as the air around him seemed to swell and waver in the creature's presence.

Panic overtook him, but his dream feet would not allow him to run. He stood at the cusp of the lake on his own side of the circular body of water, suddenly cognizant of the fact that he wasn't wearing any clothes. He stared at the other side of the lake as the creature appeared in full form beneath the iridescent zodiac in the sky.

It was tremendous, perhaps twenty stories high, and possessed the body of a moose capped with the S-shaped neck and tapered, hooked beak of a vulture. The neck was networked with thick vines—as thick as electrical cables, much thicker than the ones that had been plaguing the house all summer and fall—and they pulsed in synchronization with the massive creature's heartbeat.

And it was a heartbeat Alan could feel reverberating through the ground and up through the spongy black marrow of his bones.

The great creature lowered its hook-shaped head until it was hovering above the lake's surface. The giant beak was the size of a sailboat. The thing's eyes were black pits, the centers of which were alive with the flames of living fire. The longer Alan stared into those flames, the more certain he was that he could see himself screaming in the midst of that inferno …

At his feet, something snakelike sprouted from the wet soil and coiled speedily around his bare left ankle. Alan shrieked. He looked down and saw a vine like a garden hose winding up his thigh. Instead of thorns the vine sprouted tiny gray feathers. Dropping quickly to his knees, he groped for the vine … but the moment his hands struck it, the vine released him and retracted into the ground. For whatever
reason, he felt a compulsion to go after it, and he dug one hand into the hole in the earth after the vine, straight down to his wrist. The soil beneath was moist and warm; feeling it caused something to snap at the base of his spine, and he felt his entire body shudder.

Across the lake, the behemoth roared, and the sound was like a thousand lawn mowers.

Then, suddenly, Alan was awake and back in bed. Only he wasn't propped up on his pillow, his head by the headboard. He was curled into a fetal position at the foot of the bed, his knees pulled to his chest, his entire body shaking from the power of the lingering nightmare. He attempted to sit up, but a bolt of pain rocketed through his body, momentarily paralyzing him.

His hand was still in the soil from his dream …

He glanced up to see his right hand disappearing between the thatch of pubic hair at the center of his wife's body, where her legs came together. It took him several seconds to discern exactly what he was looking at—exactly what he was doing—before he withdrew his hand in self-disgust. The sound of the withdrawal caused his stomach to lurch. He feared he might vomit.

At the head of the bed, Heather moaned in her sleep, her naked body pale blue in the moonlight filtering through the part in the curtains. The swollen rise of her belly reminded him of—

(something large moving through the trees)

—an enormous pearl.

Hastily, he sat upright. The fingers of his right hand were webbed with secreted fluid. Again, he thought he
would retch, but he didn't want to wake up his wife.

Heather murmured beneath her breath and turned on her side. She did not seem aware of anything that had happened.

And what, exactly, had happened?

He didn't know. Disgusted with himself, he rolled off the bed and, naked, scampered silently down the hallway to the bathroom. There, he flicked on the lights and was horrified to find that the tacky fluid on his right hand was pinkish.

Blood.

Christ, what had he done?

Cranking the water on in the sink, he shoved both hands beneath the tepid stream and scrubbed them. When he glanced up at the ghost in the mirror, he could hardly recognize the cretin.

It kept happening. On the third night, Alan couldn't repress his disgust: he made it down the hallway at a quick enough pace to neatly expel that evening's dinner into the toilet bowl. Even though Alan was careful to keep his retching noises as quiet as possible, he didn't think Heather would wake up. And she didn't. In fact, she didn't seem bothered by the violation at all.

After a week of such madness, he found himself needing to visit the lake daily, as he had done in the very beginning, because his lack of sleep and overall anxiety were weakening him. The water was even colder now with the drop in temperature, and by the second week of December, it was downright torturous. Yet he visited it religiously and filled Heather's water jug twice a week. He felt stronger and healthier almost immediately, just as he had before, but the lake unfortunately did very little to assuage his anxiety.

He hated going to work and couldn't wait until Christmas
break arrived. Any time he spent away from home, he was convinced that something horrible and invisible was sneaking in, coiling itself around the very heart of the house, and squeezing the life out of his family when they weren't even there to protect themselves. And he was the husband, the father-to-be. It was his job to protect them all.

His mind continued to return to the conversation he'd had with Hank on Thanksgiving Day. It was evident to him that Hank had been conspiring with Landry and God knew who else in town to keep him away from the lake.

Twice since Thanksgiving Day, Hank had stood on Alan's porch and knocked on the door for what seemed like an eternity. The second time, he hadn't left until he'd called out that he knew Alan was in there and he wished he'd talk to him. (Alan had remained in the back bedroom and hadn't responded; luckily, Heather had been in the shower at that point, otherwise he would have had some explaining to do.)