Cradle Lake (28 page)

Another time, just moments after Alan had arrived home from work, he had seen Landry park his cruiser at Hank's house. Alan watched from the kitchen windows, suddenly on edge. Landry got out of the car, looking like a grizzly bear in his winter parka with the faux fur collar. Hank came out the front door and met Landry midway down the front lawn. They talked for a few moments, their faces almost intimately close to one another, plumes of vapor wafting from their mouths. Then Landry nodded and clapped Hank on the shoulder. Alan expected Landry to make his way over to his house, but the sheriff simply got back into his car, kicked it over, and motored on down the street. Hank had vanished inside his house without so much as a glance over his shoulder.

Conspiring against me,
Alan had thought.
The whole messy lot of them.

Yet despite his anger towards Hank, one thing the man had said to him Thanksgiving Day had lodged in Alan's mind. Something he couldn't readily shake because, at some point prior, he had started to think it, too. It was about how strange it was his uncle had left him this house after being absent for the bulk of his life, particularly when the old man had two very capable adult children. What exactly had Hank said?
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.

Of course, on the surface, the notion was preposterous. The “land” hadn't written his uncle's goddamned will. And anyway, what logic was there in trying to scrutinize the actions of an ailing old man in the last throes of his life? Maybe Uncle Phillip had become estranged from his kids. Or maybe he hadn't wanted to burden them with the responsibility of the place.

Maybe it seeks out people who need it and uses them in return …

Was there something to that?

And each night, whether Alan found his hand halfway inside his wife or not while she slept, he would awake with the sudden and irrefutable conviction that someone else was in the house with them. He started sleeping with an old Louisville beside the bed, and he would creep like a lone warrior through the darkened house each night, searching for an intruder he knew was there but continued to somehow remain elusive. And every morning, though no evidence of the intruder could be found, he would notice
fresh twists of vine spooling out of the wainscoting or from between floorboards. He tugged them out angrily and, at first, tossed them in the trash. Soon, however, he bought a bottle of lighter fluid and began burning them in a ceramic flowerpot in the yard.

It was December, goddamn it. How were the vines still growing?

One Saturday afternoon, Heather arrived home from Christmas shopping to discover that Alan had taken a hammer and broken through a section of drywall in the main hallway, between their bedroom and the bathroom. She stopped dead in her tracks, her arms laden with packages and shopping bags, and stared at Alan who was covered in fine white powder, his shirt off, his chest heaving with each exhausted exhalation.

“Jesus Christ. What are you doing?”

Alan reached into the wall and yanked out a tangle of knotted vines. “They're everywhere.” He didn't tell her he had started hearing them move in the walls at night.
Intruders,
he thought.

“What
are
they?”

“Vines, I think.” He considered. “I don't know.”

“What's all over your chest?”

He looked down. Some of the purplish fluid had squirted onto him. Against the white powder from the dry-wall, it looked like blood.

“Vine juice, I suppose,” he said eventually, and for some reason that very phrase made him want to bray laughter. But by that point Heather had already moved down the hall and into the kitchen.

If Heather had picked up on the things that were bothering him, he couldn't tell. In fact, she seemed to be oblivious to his plight; moreover, her mood seemed to become better and better as her pregnancy progressed. She bought things for the nursery and things for the baby. She sang in the shower and rubbed her augmented belly while they sat on the sofa at night, watching television.

She didn't even make any more comments about the section of wall Alan had cracked open in the hallway, which he eventually repaired at his leisure. And when he noticed vines sprouting up from other parts of the house and he took a hammer to those walls as well, Heather didn't so much as bat an eyelash.

Dinner one night. Soup and sandwiches. Something quick. The both of them.

“Can I ask you something?”

Heather looked up from her tomato soup. “Sure.”

They were eating at the kitchen table, something they had started doing midway through the first trimester of the pregnancy. Heather had said it was important to start having meals at the table and not in front of the television for when the baby arrived.

“At night,” Alan said. “Do you have … strange dreams?”

“Oh,” she said. “They say that's normal.”

He looked hard at her. “Normal?”

“It's my body going through chemical changes. There's really nothing out of the ordinary about it.”

“What kind of dreams are they?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you dream about?”

She shrugged. “I can't really remember. Why?”

It was his turn to try and sound casual. He didn't know if he did such a good job. “Do you ever dream that someone else is in the house with us?”

Heather laughed. The sound caused the hairs on the back of Alan's neck to stand at attention.

“What's so funny?” he said.

“Alan, honey,” Heather said, setting her spoon down in her soup and running one hand over the mound of her belly, “there
is
someone else in the house with us.”

And the notion rattled him. He'd been thinking of intruders and of vines snaking in through the cracks and crevices. He'd never considered the baby …

In his mind, Heather's voice, as ephemeral as a ghost's, rose and found him through the ether of his gray matter:
The first one was a mermaid. This one will be a sailor.

“You look gloomy,” his wife said, frighteningly matter-of-fact.

“I feel funny,” he intoned, no longer hungry.

Heather smiled and began to sing, causing the cold finger of dread to trace down Alan's spine. “Hush, little baby, don't say a word … Mama's gonna buy you a big black bird …”

He told her to stop singing.

“Mama's gonna buy you a big black bird, Alan,” she sang, then laughed again.

“Cut it out.”

But Heather just kept laughing.

Later that night when Alan awoke with that same sensation of violation upon him—of the unseen intruder in his home—he first looked over to his wife.

And was terrified to find his hands around her throat as she slept.

“Making a few home improvements?” Landry said.

For some stupid reason, Alan had answered the front door without checking to see who it was on the other side.

Now, Sheriff Landry stood with his hands wedged into his too-tight khaki pants, looking twice his normal girth within his parka. Behind the sheriff on the porch steps stood Hank, looking uncomfortable and out of place. Despite the gray afternoon, he had on reflective sunglasses and was sporting a fresh haircut.

Alan blinked and momentarily forgot he was standing in the doorway covered in drywall dust and holding a hammer. “Oh, sure,” he said after a moment. He shot his gaze past Landry to Hank, but he couldn't tell where Hank was looking behind those sunglasses.

Landry took a step toward the door. “Mind if we come in, have us a little chat?”

“This about Bart's paper on
War and Peace?”
It was
meant to be humorous, but the words fell from his mouth and shattered like pottery on the ground.

Landry's and Hank's expressionless faces in the wake of his attempt at humor quickly conveyed to him the gravity of the situation.

“Actually,” he quickly amended as Landry took another shuffling step toward the open door, “I'm in the middle of something. What is it you guys want?”

Landry chewed on the inside of his cheek. Then he said, “Okay. Maybe you can come out, then?”

“Like I said …”

“Yeah. In the middle of something.” The sheriff's gaze shot past Alan's shoulder and into the house. The action made Alan uncomfortable. “Wife at home?”

“She is, yeah.”

“That baby coming along okay?” The tone of Landry's voice suggested he could have been talking about a loaf of bread baking in the oven.

“Sure enough.” Subconsciously, he tightened his grip on the hammer.

“See,” Landry said, and Hank shifted disconcertingly behind him, “I thought we had an understanding, Hammerstun. About the lake? You get me?”

“I'm not letting you in my house,” he told them, though he was still looking past Landry and at Hank. “I'm not coming out, either. I don't have to talk to either one of you.”

“Alan,” Hank said. There was a tremor in his voice that made him sound almost childlike.

“You can't bully me.”

“No one's trying to bully nobody,” Landry said, his
voice taking on a surprisingly placating tone. “Way I see it, this whole thing's my fault. I should have been more direct when talking with you about all this. You see what I'm saying?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Landry smiled his shark's grin—the same one he had used that day in the community college faculty parking lot. “Then maybe you can come out here and I'll explain it to you.”

For the first time, Alan noticed a second police car in the street in front of his house, parked beside the sheriff's cruiser. He could make out the silhouettes of two men sitting in the front seat.

“I want you off my property now,” Alan told them. “The both of you.”

“Jesus, Alan,” Hank pleaded, his voice rising an octave. He sounded even more childlike than he had just a moment ago. “Can't you see we're trying to help you, man?”

“No. You're trying to bully me and keep me away from something you have no right to. This is harassment. I want you all to leave me and my family alone.”

“There are other ways we can go about this,” Landry suggested, and there was little room for misunderstanding his intentions.

Infuriated, it was all Alan could do not to grind his teeth into powder. “So you go from harassing me to threatening me?” He jerked his chin toward the street. “Get the hell out of here.”

Again, Landry chewed at the inside of his cheek. He seemed to be assessing his options as he shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. Beneath him, the
porch creaked and groaned. Then he smiled. “All right, son. Suit yourself.” He nodded and, looking past Alan, tipped his wide-brimmed hat. “Ma'am.”

Alan whirled around to find Heather standing behind him.

Sheriff Landry and Hank walked away almost in slow motion, like two men being led to their executions.

Alan stood in the doorway and watched them until Landry and his two deputies drove off and Hank had entered his own house. He expected to see the curtains whoosh aside in one of the front windows, but that didn't happen. Finally, he closed the door, aware that he was squeezing the hammer hard enough to leave an impression on the palm of his hand.

“What was that all about?”

He moved past Heather without saying a word, heading back into the living room where he had knocked out a section of drywall. Within, vines had collected around the two-by-fours like spools of wire. It had taken the better part of the morning to cut them all away. They sat in a trash bag beneath the jagged gaping wound in the wall.

“Alan,” Heather said, coming up behind him. “I asked you a question.”

He summoned his best lie. “They heard I was doing some work in the house. Sheriff just wanted to make sure it wasn't anything I'd need a permit for.”

His wife barked laughter but didn't ask any further questions. When Alan finally looked over his shoulder, she was gone.

He thought then of Owen Moreland … and the sheer fact that he thought of him caused him to panic. There were no parallels between Owen Moreland and himself. Were
there? So what had caused him to think of him at that particular moment?

It's the town,
he convinced himself.
They've got me paranoid. They've got me thinking of every disgusting nightmare my mind is capable of summoning.
Shuddering, he recalled the night he'd awoken to find his hands around his wife's neck.
And not all of them are nightmares. They're driving me insane, goddamn it.

Gotta protect your family, boyo,
said Jimmy Carmichael.
Gotta keep on marching down them happy trails.

Trails.

Indeed.

Outside, Alan emptied the bag of vines into the ceramic flowerpot, squirted some lighter fluid on them, and set them ablaze with the drop of a single match. The smell was caustic, the smoke as black as the ace of spades. He pulled his sweatshirt up over his nose so he didn't have to breathe the fumes.