Cradle Lake (31 page)

He turned the flashlight toward the center of the crawl space, and his breath caught instantly in his throat.

His first thought was,
It's alive.

His second thought was,
That's the goddamn heart.

In fact, the entire assemblage was suggestive of the inner workings of a living creature—all the organs and veins and arteries and bands of musculature accounted for. The heart was at the center, a pulsating, gel-coated muscle approximately the size of a grown man's head, dangling like an immense hornet's nest from the beams at the center of the crawl space. As he watched, the thing actually appeared to respire like a single lung taking in and releasing air. Branching off from the heart was a network of intertwined veins, crisscrossing the beams in the ceiling of the crawl space and
burying themselves into the soft soil. The veins themselves were as thick as power lines, layered with rows of thorns that looked more like the teeth of a deep-sea behemoth.

The veins were vines, hundreds of them, and they weren't diving
into
the ground but sprouting
out
of it. The heart at the epicenter was not actually a heart—not in the traditional sense, anyway—but some strange purplish plant. What Alan had at first mistaken for respiration was in fact the curled fingers of tricornered leaves rustling in the breeze coming in through the open crawl space door.

Nonetheless, the sight was horrifying.

We can't live here. This house is poisoned by those things.

Like the voice of a ghost, George Young Calf Ribs spoke up in the center of Alan's head:
The lake is like a magnet. Your house is the closest thing to it. It's too close to the forest and sits on the soured land. Your house rots with you and your wife in it. Rots like carrion. Vines keep it tethered to the soil like a balloon. They are channels, conduits, for the transfer of power. You can cut them away but they grow back. They come up through the earth. They are the lifeblood, the beating veins, of that house now.

Twenty minutes later, armed with an electric saw and an entire box of Glad trash bags, Alan went back beneath the house and began cutting. The vines were thick and stubborn, and they bled their juices on him. He tried to uproot them from the soil, but many of them seemed to pull farther down into the earth before he could grab them. When he took the electric saw to the dangling mass of tissue-like fruit that looked so much like a heart, it cracked down the center like an overripe watermelon smashed against a rock.
It vomited greenish gunk onto the ground and spattered Alan's clothes with it. Its insides reeked like fecal matter, and twice Alan had to climb out of the crawl space for fresh air.

It took him much of the afternoon to cut the vines down. When he was finished, he had filled five extra-large trash bags with the foliage. He was exhausted, his muscles strained and weakened, and his mind was already returning to a quick dip in the lake as he dragged the trash bags out to the curb.

This time, Hearn Landry was across the street, leaning against his parked cruiser and smoking a cigarillo.

Alan froze, glaring at the man, his hands balled into fists around the plastic pull straps of the trash bags.

Casual as could be, Landry raised a hand in Alan's direction. He looked like a lazy sheriff in an old western.

Fucking cliché,
Alan thought, practically snarling.

He continued carrying the bags to the curb, ignoring the sheriff as best he could. A number of buzzards had alighted on the trees at the opposite end of the property toward the street. They weren't as big as the ones Alan had been seeing lately, but their presence was no less daunting. This was the closest he'd seen them to the road since he'd moved into the house; something about their nearness to civilization—to the other houses on the street—carried with it the sensation of impending doom.

He wiped his hands on his pants, surveying the crowded trees. He counted five birds weighing down the boughs.

Hearn Landry glanced up at the buzzards. Then he tipped his hand down over his eyes and zipped up his parka.

After he'd finished with the trash bags, he went back
inside and tugged off his smelly pullover and dungarees while still standing in the foyer. The muck from the podlike plant had dried to a vomit-brown crust on the front of his pants and pullover.

Heather was asleep on the couch. She had a book opened on her chest,
Everything a Mommy Needs to Know (and a Few Things More),
and she looked almost childlike in her stretchy maternity pants that were still too big for her. A band of white belly flesh protruded between her pants and loose-fitting blouse. At that moment, Alan was overcome by the sheer love he had for this woman and temporarily forgot about Hearn Landry, Hank Gerski, and even the lake at the end of the wooded path through the woods. It was just the two of them again, young and in love, having each other's backs, and they couldn't be touched by the world. Couldn't.

The band of exposed flesh rippled. Something was moving beneath the skin.

The baby.

A bitter taste flooded his mouth. As he watched, a distinct handprint stretched the skin of his wife's stomach, tiny yet perfectly and hideously detailed, all five fingers—

(biohazard bag)

—accounted for.

A second hand, its little fingers splayed, pressed against the inside of Heather's womb. The skin stretched like putty. Both tiny hands pushing out. Alan imagined a seam appearing at the center of his wife's stomach, a vertical mouth that gushed blood and amniotic fluid onto the couch cushions, and it widened as those two hands conspired to tear out of Heather's womb.

Heather was right but she didn't know it,
he thought, too
terrified to move.
You are the intruder. You are the violator. You are the thing I sense moving about the house at night. We are not alone because you are here with us. I just didn't know it at the time. But I do now. I do now.

The litter of Doberman pups. What had Hank Gerski said?
They came out wrong.

They came out wrong.

Between the two handprints, a face appeared. He could make out no other details other than the convex shape of a smallish skull identifiable by the nub of a nose at its center.

In her sleep, Heather moaned.

“Leave her alone.” It was his voice, but he did not think he'd spoken.

The face moved from side to side, as if shaking its head in slow motion. Each time it turned to afford him its profile pressed up against his wife's flesh, he could see the suggestion of a sharp little cheekbone.

“… me …” Heather groaned from the couch.

He wanted to rush to her but didn't want to
touch
her.

The face retreated. One of the hands pulled away, too. The first hand lingered a bit longer, its fingers working individually against the tautness of Heather's flesh.

Alan recalled a memory from his early childhood when he'd been at a birthday party and he and some of the other boys had gone around stomping all the balloons. They'd picked up the broken flaps of rubber and, pulling them taut across their faces, made funny noises into the rubber and stuck their tongues out and pressed down their noses …

The hand retreated, leaving the band of navel flesh undisturbed.

On the couch, Heather rolled onto her side. The book
fell on the floor, but she didn't wake up.

Alan stood above her for a very long time, waiting to see what would happen—waiting to see if she would come suddenly awake, screaming in pain. But nothing happened.

He threw up in the toilet, then showered.

Alan did not fall asleep that night. Nor the following night. He found time during the day to catch quick naps on the couch, but his lack of sleep was making him lethargic and was evident in his face and around his eyes. Soon he prayed for winter break to be over so he could get back to school and give himself some time to settle, to rest, and to be away from the house.
And Heather.
He quickly chased the thought away. That wasn't what he wanted. They were finally a family again. Finally. What was he thinking?

Heather quit her job at the art gallery. Alan wasn't sure when it had happened, exactly. She hadn't told him when she'd done it, and he only found out about it when he asked her why she hadn't been going to work.

“It's over,” she said simply. “It's done.”

“Heather, you love that job. Why would you quit?”

“Germs,” she told him. She was doing some pregnant woman style of yoga on the living room floor, glancing
occasionally at an open textbook with diagrams beside her. She had one of the classical music CDs playing low on the stereo, convinced that it was turning their baby into a genius with each passing minute. “There are germs everywhere. Also, have you seen all the cats in the neighborhood?”

“Cats?” He thought of Patsy the Cat for the first time in a long while. How it had hissed when Cory Morris had picked it up and how Alan had found it sometime later out in his yard, torn apart. He'd dumped it in the woods that afternoon. “What do you mean?”

“Cat feces can cause toxoplasmosis. It can make him retarded. Do you want your kid to be retarded?”

“No, of course not. And you're still calling it ‘him.' Did you open the envelope Dr. Crawford gave us?”

“It's just what I call him. I don't like saying ‘it.' You shouldn't, either.”

He shook his head. “What's wrong with you?”

Heather laughed sharply. The sound resonated in his marrow. “Me? What's wrong with you? You've been acting like a fucking head case lately.”

He frowned. “Real nice. You play all that classical music hoping to make this kid into the next Albert Einstein, yet you'll toss around the F-bomb like a baseball. Real classy.”

“Leave me alone. Don't make me upset. It's not good for the baby to get my heart rate up. You'd know that if you read any of the books.”

He turned to leave the room.

“And get some sleep, will you?” she called after him. “You look like hell.”

In the kitchen, Alan went to the fridge and took out the plastic jug of lake water. There was very little left in it, but it was enough. He popped the cap and drank it all. Almost instantly he felt his throat open up, his capillaries breathe, his body lighten. He hadn't realized his ulcer had been acting up until the pain in his stomach quelled. Then he threw the jug into the recycling pail.

He didn't like what that water was doing to Heather now, anyway.

That night, he tried to stay awake by sitting up in bed with headphones on while reading a Jack Ketchum book beneath the light of the bedside lamp. But he was working on days of sleeplessness now and, even having finished the water in the jug, his body needed rest. Soon his eyelids grew heavy. He got up at one point and walked through the house, already confident that he would not find an intruder, because he knew where the sensation was coming from. The wellspring was in his wife's womb. The baby. The baby was the intruder. It was the baby he'd been sensing all along.

Standing in his pajama bottoms and a sleeveless T-shirt, he stood wavering at the end of the hallway, breathing deeply, listening to the sounds the house made all around him.

He was on edge. Maybe he would never sleep again.

But he did as soon as he climbed back into bed beside his wife. His exhaustion carried him down like a weight, sinking to the ocean floor of his dreams. Massive shapes moved through his subconscious. He found himself blinking, freezing, and standing out beside the road that ran
in front of his house. Cory Morris was across the street, dressed all in black and wearing white greasepaint, cradling something in his arms.

—Mistakes have been made,
the boy said, though Alan could not see his mouth moving.
Mistakes have been made and they need to be rectified.

The thing in the boy's arms was Patsy, his dead cat. The lifeless creature was draped over one of Cory's arms. It bled black blood down the front of the boy's hooded sweatshirt.

When Alan opened his eyes, he was temporarily disoriented. It took him several moments to realize he was in bed beside his wife and in his new house and that he had fallen asleep. He sat up and listened in the darkness. Only Heather's breathing returned to him; the house was otherwise silent.

But still … the creeping sensation that—

Something moved down the hallway. He heard it. The sound was like someone dragging a chair across the hardwood floor.

He sprung out of bed and rushed into the hallway, moving so quickly and reactionary this time that he forgot his baseball bat. The hallway seemed to cant to one side. He fumbled along the wall for the light switch and flipped it on, bathing the tilting hallway in yellowish light.

At the end of the hallway, something was banging around in the kitchen. Someone—or something—was going through the cupboards, moving things around, making a racket.