A House at the Bottom of a Lake

27

No wet suits this time.

Just the masks, the flippers, the tanks.

And their bodies. Pale despite all the time spent on the lake. Pale because they spent their days below.

Below.

Today.

James and Amelia got ready on the raft. They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t say, Today’s the day. No questions, no jokes, no assurances. James watched Amelia finish up, feeling almost hungry, watching her body move. Amelia watched James, too. The same hands that adjusted his mask would be holding her soon.

Below.

Beyond the edge of the raft, beneath the blue rippling surface of the water, the place of the coronation waited.

The house.

(Home.)

“All right,” Amelia said, giving James a thumbs-up, a gesture she would have been embarrassed by only weeks before, when they first paddled out upon the lakes. “Ready.”

She bent at the knee and dragged a toe across the surface of the water. It was warmer than most days. Welcoming.

“You look beautiful,” James said.

Amelia shrugged and nodded, a weird thank-you, then crouched at the edge of the raft.

But James jumped in first. His body broke the surface cleanly, creating sparkling ripples that reached for the logs and vanished quietly beneath them.

Amelia followed.

In truth, the water was colder without the wet suits. But the shock of it woke them up a second time, and they clasped hands above the roof.

Then they plunged together, heads down, toward the half front door. At the muddy bottom their flippers sank and James climbed the mossy, slick step first. He held the half door open for her.

Amelia swam inside.

In the foyer they embraced. They couldn’t kiss but that didn’t stop them from running their hands over each other’s bodies, frantic, mad, thirsty. Amelia gripped James’s hard penis and pulled him toward her, pressing him against her belly, her thighs, her hips. They tumbled down the hall, horizontal to the floor, into the dining room, groping, crazed, hungry. Above the dining room table, but beneath the chandelier, they let go of their flashlights and the beams traced random patterns on the walls, exposing the room piecemeal: the glass cabinets, the vases like bookends on either side of the buffet, and their bathing suits, too, as they drifted from their now naked bodies.

The flashlights sank to the table and there they remained, one trained upon the hall through which they’d come, the other upon the ceiling, a spotlight it seemed, mere inches from where they moved.

Floating, Amelia guided James inside her.

It wasn’t easy. There was an art to this that neither of them knew.

And yet… artless as it had to be, their clumsiness was perhaps most thrilling of all.

Entered for the first time, Amelia gasped, into her mask, and felt James tighten up. She relaxed him, rubbing her fingers against his shoulders, his back, his chest.

They made love in the darkness.

James’s eyes were closed as he climaxed and Amelia felt him pull out, at the last moment, as he came.

In the beam of light beside them, they both saw the white cloud rise from the head of his penis, then spread, taken by unseen billows toward the ceiling, toward the walls, beyond the reach of the beam.

Amelia looked to James, his face partially lit by the fallen flashlight. She expected to see him wide-eyed, happy, deep love behind his mask. But James was looking up to the ceiling.

Slowly, Amelia reached for his chin, to turn his face toward hers, to connect. But without looking at her, he swiped her hand away and placed a single finger to his mask, telling her to be silent.

With his other hand he pointed to the ceiling.

Amelia looked up.

Then she heard it, too.

A ceiling creak. The unmistakable sound of footsteps above.

Like everything else in the house, the sound was distorted, the creaking was expanded to twice its natural width, and the feet Amelia imagined on the floor upstairs were not ones she wanted to see.

Then, laughter. Cackles moved easily through the house, as if each syllable could swim.

James shook his head no.

It was the breaking point, the only thing more impossible than the existence of the house, than the items that clung to the counters, the walls, the floors.

They’d agreed never to ask how or why.

But neither had thought to ask who?

James grabbed Amelia by the wrist. He pulled her out from above the dining room table, into the hall, then the foyer, as the creaking continued above them, perhaps approaching the stairs.

And the androgynous laughter continued, too. Thick globules of sexless cheer.

Out through the half front door, James no longer pulled Amelia as she passed him, swimming fast, without their lights, climbing toward the surface of the lake.

Near the surface, James thought he heard a different kind of creaking. The unmistakable rasp of a (crypt) front door opening for the first time in forever.

He didn’t look to the windows they passed. He didn’t look down.

They broke the surface far from the raft, far from the roof, and swam for the logs fast.

Hurry, James thought, sensing something rising from below.

Amelia reached the raft first and she quickly pulled herself up.

James was seconds behind her. As his feet exited the water, a bubble burst behind him, a deep, tarred sound, and James told himself it was only (laughter followed you up!) a fish.

He tore his mask from his face. Amelia’s mask already lay on the logs beside her.

“There’s somebody in there,” James said, pointing a shaking finger at the roof. Then he was on his knees, pulling the canoe to the raft.

“There’s somebody in there,” Amelia repeated, standing, staring into the water, leaning away from it, away from the house.

She stood that way, rooted, for as long as it took James to untie the canoe. She wiped the water from her pale skin. As if the droplets were alive.

“Come on,” James said.

They were both afraid.

For the first time.

Afraid of the house.

“What do we do?’ Amelia asked, still staring into the deep, to the roof of the house.

“We go,” James said. “We go now.”