Cradle Lake (30 page)

“Shhhh,” she responded, as if the sound of his voice might scare the little thing inside her into motionlessness. She was smiling widely, her eyes distant and unfocused, perhaps trained on some motherly subuniverse Alan himself could not see.

“Heather, honey, I don't think—”

He felt it.

An echoing thump on the other side of Heather's stomach. Inside her body. The sensation reverberated against Alan's palm.

Had her hand not been pressed against his, he would have recoiled.

Something's wrong.
It was the first thought that came to him.
Something is not right in there.

“Ha-ha!” Heather crooned. “Did you feel that? Isn't that something? Isn't that
amazing?”

He nodded.

“Oh, wow. That's
in
me.”

“Yes,” he repeated … and managed to slide his hand out from under hers.

That night, lying in bed together, Alan was afraid to fall asleep. His dreams had become more and more erratic; upon waking in the middle of the night, he would wonder if they were really so abstract and piecemeal, or if he was just remembering pieces of a larger whole. Either way, he didn't like what he remembered.

Beside him, Heather said, “Lydia invited us over for Christmas dinner. She said she knew you and Hank had some sort of falling-out, but she wanted to help mend things. I told her we wouldn't go.”

“Are you okay with that?”

“Yes. I don't want to go. The weather's getting colder and it's flu season. I don't feel comfortable taking the baby out of the house, bringing him around other people.”

“Him?”

“Oh. Or her.”

“Mother's intuition? Is there something I should know?”

“No. Freudian slip, I guess.”

He hadn't realized Heather was aware of the “falling-out” between him and Hank and was a bit surprised that she didn't ask about it. He waited for her to bring it up, but after a few minutes of silence between them, her respiration grew deeper and she was quickly asleep.

Eventually, sleep found Alan, too, and he was racing up a midnight hillside toward the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, his feet on fire as he cruised at breakneck speed. When a deep gorge threatened to suck him down into the earth, he leapt and cleared it as confidently as a bird. In the gorge below, large animals moved about in tempered lethargy, some of them the size of tractor trailers.

There came a point where he was aware of both his dream state and the real world, that indistinct plateau that overlooks both worlds, and he began talking to someone from one realm or the other. He responded in hushed dream tones, but the other person shouted shrill, birdlike cries into the ether. The sound of the person's shrieks hurt his ears.

Something burned the side of his face.

He opened his eyes. Heather's fingernails were clawing at his right cheek, strong enough to draw blood. Her other arm flailed, and her hips bucked against the mattress.

Alan sat up—and found he had one hand pressed over her nose and mouth.

He pulled his arm away, and Heather immediately gasped for air. He went to her, attempting to comfort and cradle, but she instinctively shoved him away. He backed off, too afraid to approach her again and upset her further,
too afraid and distrustful of himself at that moment. “Baby …”

“I'm okay,” she wheezed. “Just … give me a minute.”

“Fuck, hon, I'm sorry.”

“It's all right.” She sat up against the headboard and allowed her breathing to regain its normal, regulated pattern. “You must have been having one fucked-up dream, brother.”

“I … I don't remember …”

Heather tittered like a schoolgirl. Pulling her knees up to her belly, she cradled herself and rocked slightly against the headboard.

“Honey, I'm so sorry. I don't know what the hell happened. Are you okay?”

She swung her legs off the bed. “I have to pee.”

While she was in the bathroom, Alan got up and inspected the house. The tingling sensation of the intruder still lingered in that ancient, reptilian part of his brain. But as usual, the house was empty.

When he returned to the bedroom, Heather was already asleep, the blankets tucked underneath her. As he watched, he initially thought the movement beneath the blankets was her leg … but then he realized it was occurring at the center of her body. Something was moving on her stomach beneath the blankets.

Or
inside
her …

He flipped the blankets off her without waking her. She was wearing her cotton nightgown, but it had grown tight as her pregnancy progressed, and he could clearly make out the smoothness of her belly beneath the fabric. As he stood over her, he saw something
move
beneath the fabric, as if someone were slowly running a finger across the other side
of her nightgown. He watched the bump circumvent the swell of his wife's belly until it vanished completely down the opposite side.

For the first time since his initial conversation with Hank about the lake, all those many months ago, he remembered something Hank had said about some woman who had backed over her Doberman with her car, breaking its hip:
She carried it to the lake and the hip was healed. But later that winter, the dog gave birth to a litter of puppies that all came out… well, they came out wrong.

His heart was beating too fast in his chest.

(they came out wrong)

He spent the rest of the night sitting up in bed, not sleeping.

Christmas morning, they exchanged gifts while Christmas music lilted out of the stereo. Afterwards, Heather retreated to the kitchen to prepare a large breakfast—scrambled eggs, sausage patties and bacon, sliced fruit, heavily buttered toast.

While she cooked, the smells of the food wafting throughout the house, Alan went out onto the porch. He smoked a cigarette, chilly in his sweatpants and hooded sweatshirt, and saw Landry's cruiser parked down the block. Was the son of a bitch actually keeping tabs on the house on Christmas fucking morning?

Just seeing the sheriff's car made him angry. His ulcer began to flare up. It had been several days since he'd been to the lake, and he knew he wouldn't be able to hold out much longer. Also, Heather's water jug was getting low. It was nearly time for a refill.

By the time he finished his cigarette and went back inside, Heather had laid out breakfast on the kitchen table.
They ate together, Alan in predominant silence, Heather humming along with the Christmas tunes coming in from the living room.

When she got up to refill Alan's coffee, she stood beside him, her protruding belly at his eye level. “Do you want to sing to your kid?”

He cupped his hands around his mouth and placed them against the front of Heather's stomach. “Hello-ello-ello …”

Heather laughed.

He took the coffee, then told her to go soak in the tub and that he would take care of the dishes.

“Can't argue with that,” she said, already heading down the hallway. “Merry Christmas to me.”

He cleared the table, dumping the leftover food in the trash and stacking the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, all the while keeping one eye on the windows that faced the street. Landry's car hadn't moved.

“Cocksucker,” Alan growled.

He returned to the living room and lowered the volume on the stereo—weeks of Christmas music was beginning to grate on him—and proceeded to gather up the torn and crumpled balls of wrapping paper he and Heather had left strewn about the floor. He was halfway done cleaning the mess when he picked up a ball of red and green paper to find a single tiny vine beneath it, growing straight up out of the floor.

It was as if he'd been stung by an electric cattle prod.

Son of a bitch …

It was late December, and though the weather wasn't as cold as the winters up north in the city, it was surely too cold for goddamn
vines
to grow, wasn't it?

It was sprouting from the same place he'd seen it last time: right up through the narrow slit between two floorboards. But this time something new occurred to him, and it was because he also noticed (for the first time) the faint blond grooves in the floorboards that had been made months ago by Jerry Lee. It had been this exact spot that had so agitated the old golden retriever. Even now, Alan could recall the dog's steadfast determination in digging up … well,
something…
from that particular spot on the floor. At the time, both he and Heather had found it somewhat peculiar, even somewhat amusing, but had never truly given it much thought. Now, however, the memory caused a nonspecific unease to course through Alan's body, chilling his blood to ice.

As he'd done before, he wrapped his finger around it and gave it a sturdy tug. The sound of it breaking free was akin to plucking a taut rubber band. He went out back with his cigarette lighter and lit the end of the vine like the fuse on a stick of dynamite. The vine was dry enough to burn freely, and Alan held it by one end until he couldn't hold it any longer without getting burned. He dropped the charred bit into the grass where it hissed as it hit the frost.

Again, he looked out across the street at Landry's police car.

There are other ways we can go about this,
Landry had said.

“We'll see,” Alan muttered into the atmosphere.

He hurried across the street toward Landry's police car, half-expecting the sheriff to step out of the car before he ever reached it. But there was no movement from within, and as Alan approached, he began to doubt if the car was even occupied.

It wasn't.

He stood there peering in through the windshield at
the vacant police cruiser and suddenly felt like a goddamn imbecile.

They were playing with him.

They were making him out to be a fool.

Of course the son of a bitch wasn't sitting out here on some ridiculous stakeout on Christmas morning. No. Hearn Landry, county sheriff, was at home celebrating Christmas morning with his wife and boneheaded kid. The bastard had just parked his car here to make Alan
think
he was being watched. Oh, that clever motherfucker …

Alan couldn't help it. He laughed in spite of himself.

Then he kicked a dent in the driver's side door before heading back inside.

That night Alan dreamt—or thought he dreamt—that tiny wet hands were on him. They poked and pinched and snatched up fistfuls of his pubic hair. At one point, he imagined he could feel the little creature on his stomach, wet and warm and sticky with odorless fluid. It slid down between his legs and snaked beneath the bulb of his testicles. More tiny, clawlike fingers—poking, prodding, pinching.

Seeking entry.

He awoke as always, terrified and disoriented, and spent much of the night searching the house for invisible monsters.

Heather found Alan early the next morning, naked and asleep on the floor in the living room beside the sliding glass patio doors. She prodded him with her toes, and he snapped awake so quickly, it caused a kink in his neck.

“Sleepyhead,” she intoned, standing over him. “What are you doing on the floor?”

He looked around but had no answer for her. The last thing he could remember about last night was checking under the couch for more vines. The fucking vines, it seemed, were driving him crazy.

He stood up just as it occurred to him that he had been lying in the exact same spot where he had found Jerry Lee's corpse all those months ago. He recalled without difficulty the details of that morning … and how one of those horrible birds had been pecking at the glass door, a blazing hunger in its soulless black eyes.

Alan showered, still thinking of Jerry Lee and that
spot on the floor where the dog had dragged its claws and how that one single vine kept reappearing. Cold weather be damned, those goddamn vines were determined. By the time he dressed—black dungarees, long-sleeved T-shirt, pullover—and had a cigarette on the front porch, he was already contemplating tearing up the living room floor.

No need for that.
Alan remembered something he'd seen when he'd first moved into the house and began cutting the vines away from the siding. He hopped off the porch and went around to the side of the house that faced the woods, crouching until he could see the semicircle divot in the earth and the tiny wooden door against the house's foundation.

The crawl space.

Dropping to his knees, he leaned forward and brushed dead twigs and leaves aside, scooping more dead leaves and brambles out of the divot. It dropped down about two feet. The door looked much too small to accommodate an adult male, but when he got up close to it he figured it would indeed be possible for him to wiggle through it and gain access to the underside of the house.

But did he want to?

He shivered, and it was only partially due to the cold.

There was a latch on the little wooden door, a hooked handle threaded through a rusty eyelet. Alan undid the latch and pried the door open. It squealed on rusted hinges. A smell like rotting vegetation rushed up and accosted his nose, strong enough to make his eyes water. There was a deeper smell from within, too—the danker, headier scent of rotting meat.

Realizing he would need a flashlight, he hurried into the house and got one out of the pantry, then hustled outside before he lost his courage.

Bending down before the opening beneath the house, Alan clicked on the flashlight and shined the light into the square doorway.

Dust clouded the beam of light, falling like confetti in a snow globe.

Either I'm doing this or I'm not.

He counted to ten in his head, then swung his legs down into the hole and pushed his feet through the opening.

Indeed, it was a tight squeeze. His shoulders barely cleared the doorway, and for one horrifying moment, he feared he might get stuck. But he managed to climb all the way through and soon found himself crouching beneath the house in a space that was maybe three feet high.