A House at the Bottom of a Lake

by Josh Malerman

  “It’s not so bad,” she said, wanting to remain positive. “If this was the first lake we saw today, I don’t think it’d look so dismal.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s all about comparisons.”

  “I think I’d’ve felt the same.”

  “Even if we hadn’t seen the other two?”

  “But we did see the other two.”

  “We did.”

  It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t huge, either; about half the size of the first lake and two-thirds that of the second. There were fewer trees at the shoreline, and they could see where the mountains slipped coldly into the water. They were paddling toward them.

  Unvisited.

  The word seemed to float up and out of the water, slip wet into Amelia’s mind.

  “Are you hungry still?” James asked. “We didn’t really finish our lunch.”

  The question was jarring, Amelia thought. Out of place. But why?

  Because you guys were eating lunch on the second lake. This is the third lake now. Things are different here.

  She looked over the edge of the canoe. A fish floated on its side, a foot below the surface.

  Dead, Amelia thought.

  But it was more like the fish was looking up, looking at her.

  “I’m okay,” she said, but the fish unnerved her. Was something wrong with the water? Dead fish in a lake was, of course, natural. But it was more about the look in the fish’s eye, like they’d made actual eye contact, fish and girl.

  “I’m always hungry,” James said. “As a kid I used to eat two…holy shit!”

  Amelia looked quickly to James. She’d been thinking of the fish when he yelled. Was he yelling about the fish?

  “What?” Amelia asked. Scared. “What?”

  He lifted his paddle out of the water and Amelia did the same.

  James was staring at the lake’s surface, wide-eyed, too wide-eyed.

  Amelia looked.

  She saw it, too.

  A roof.

  “Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

  They drifted past it, over it, a small bird in its sky, a tiny airplane for two.

  “Was that a…” James started but couldn’t finish.

  “Yes,” Amelia said. “That was a house.”

  It was true then; they’d both seen it. A house. Submerged. A rooftop beneath the surface. And yet it was so dark down there…

  James snapped back first, jammed his paddle into the water, and started paddling in the opposite direction, driving the canoe in reverse. Amelia did the same.

  Then they drifted.

  Over the house again.

  The house.

  Underwater.

  Without speaking, they gripped the edge of the canoe at the same time, their fingertips touching the chipped paint. Sunlight tap-danced across the surface, a glittering curtain, a welcoming, a reveal.

  But not much of one.

  “Oh my God,” Amelia said again.

  It’s all she could think to say.

  “It’s huge,” James said.

  If the shingled roof was any indication, it was a big house.

  Beneath them.

  Underwater.

  They looked at each other at the same time and it was stated silently that they were going to check it out. They were going to go into the water. No self-respecting seventeen-year-olds on a first date could paddle away from this.

  But first, for a minute or two, for now…they just stared.

  8

  “We’ve got a ladder,” James said, shaking it loose from the life jackets and towels on the floor of the canoe.

  “So we can get back in,” Amelia said. This was not a question. This was her accepting the turn the afternoon had taken.

  The roof rippled with waves unseen, undulations beneath the surface.

  Amelia started laughing. What else was there to do? Unless the roof was floating, there had to be a house beneath it. James joined her in laughing.

  What else was there to do?

  “It’s a fucking house!” she said. Then she squealed because she was on a first date and they’d discovered something crazy enough to call magic.

  James draped the ladder over the canoe’s edge. When the rungs clacked against the chipped paint, he felt a twinge of guilt. Uncle Bob. Did Uncle Bob know about this roof?

  Still smiling, feeling the charge of discovery, Amelia looked across the lake to the entrance of the tunnel. A half-hole from here. Cartoonish, too. Like someone had painted it on a dip in the mountains.

  It’s not a real entrance, she thought. It’s a solid wall. Then she shook the silly thought aside but couldn’t shake a truer one.

  The tunnel makes for a slow getaway.

  She looked back to the submerged roof. James was shaking his head slowly side-to-side. He looked at her and they laughed again, lightly, in the way something uncanny can make someone laugh. Not funny. Impossible.

  “All right,” James said, gripping the rope ladder. “Who’s going first?”

  The individual rung looked like kindling in his hands. Amelia had a vision of the ladder erupting into flames. No easy way back into the canoe then, either.

  But what unnecessary dark thoughts to have.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. No wet blanket today.

  James looked surprised.

  “Really? Shouldn’t I?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Fine. You go first.”

  “No. You go first.”

  “No, no. Really.”

  “I think I need a minute to get used to the idea,” she said. She was excited, but she was scared. There was more than just a tip-of-the-iceberg quality to the roof. Who knew the size and scope beneath it? “But we definitely both have to do it.”

  “I’m so glad you’re saying that,” James said. “We could just as easily paddle away and pretend this never happened, too.”

  “Could we?”

  “Well, I…”

  No, he thought, looking into her bright eyes. Just then she looked very dry to him.

  James scanned the shoreline. There was no sign of life. No angry old man to holler at them. No resident in sight to tell his uncle Bob what he and the girl had been up to. It felt to James like they were in the center of a silent room. A room of their own.

  He checked the surface of the water. He was looking for snapping turtles. Snakes. The bubbles of something breathing below.

  What a terrible turn the date would take if James were to dive in and get bitten by a moccasin. But the longer he stared at the surface, the more the rippling roof looked like a painting. Oils. Like diving into that, into its false reality, would prove to be much worse than anything a snake could deliver.

  “Amelia,” he said, and he discovered he liked saying her name. Amelia. She was looking back at him, waiting for him to say whatever he was going to say. Her body looked smooth, pure, against the red of her bathing suit. He suddenly felt like he hadn’t been looking at her enough. Her body. The curves, the slopes, the skin. “How do you think it got down there?”

  “God’s dollhouse.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sounded like a movie title.”

  “Haha. Thank you.”

  “I think it was built down there.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Had to be.”

  “I don’t think so. I think it broke the ice.”

  “Ice?”

  “Yeah. Someone tried to move it across the lake.”

  “Wow. That’s interesting. But these lakes never ice over.”

  “Well, see. Someone should’ve told
them that.”

  James smiled.

  The canoe had shifted its position, and the submerged rooftop was nearer the back now. On his knees, James used his paddle to bring them back to where they were. Amelia thought again of Uncle Bob’s warning about tipping.

  “Are you scared?” she asked.

  “Um…”

  “Be honest.”

  “I’m always honest.”

  “Are you?”

  “I mean…yeah.”

  “Are you scared?”

  She was smiling. The arched-eyebrows smile friends give each other before they enter the house of horrors at the county fair or press play on a particularly frightening movie.

  Ready or not…here we go.

  “Yeah, sure. But not enough not to do it.”

  “Okay. Same here.”

  And what was there to be afraid of? In fact, after having spoken it, Amelia felt almost no fear at all. It was a submerged house, for crying out loud. It was cool was what it was.

  Yet looking at it, the house, the shingles seemed to move uniformly, as if it wasn’t the surface of the water that created the illusion but something beneath the roof, rolling along its distance. Fish, perhaps. Or mice. As the roof sloped, its edges vanished into the murky shadows. Not only was Amelia unsure how large the house was, she wasn’t even sure how big the roof was. Those same shadows continued, merged with the darkness that was the rest of the lake. She looked up, out, across the lake, and realized how big this third lake actually was. When you imagined yourself slipping into the water, imagined your tiny body engulfed by it, the lake looked a lot bigger.

  “Is there anything in there that can bite us?”

  “In the house?”

  “No. The water.”

  “I really don’t know. That’s a bad answer, I know. If either of us should know, it’s me. But…I don’t.”

  “It’s okay. There’s probably not. It’s just a lake. It’s not the ocean.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Here we go then.”

  He rose, suddenly, and Amelia’s heart thudded bunnylike in her chest.

  Here we go then.

  “It’ll be amazing,” she said, trying to send some confidence his way.

  James smiled at her. He was standing up. Balancing. When he removed his shirt, Amelia noticed how soft his chest looked. His white arms shone against the dark-blue backdrop of the lake.

  Then he dove in.

  Amelia gripped the sides of the rocking canoe and looked over the edge.

  As he sank, the ripples created a blurry wall of white foam and bubbles. For a three-count Amelia couldn’t see him.

  It swallowed him, she thought.

  James popped back up, his hair plastered wet to his head.

  “Wow,” he said, teeth chattering, treading. “It’s really fucking cold.”

  Amelia didn’t want to tell him how small he looked, treading the surface with the huge roof looming beneath him. She didn’t want to tell him that he’d added scale to the sight.

  “How long can you hold your breath?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. How long can someone hold their breath?”

  “A minute or two I think.”

  James dunked his head under the water.

  He looked at it. Looked at the house.

  He came back up.

  “Wow,” he said. “This is a house.”

  “It really is.”

  They stared at each other, James in the water, Amelia at the edge of the green canoe. Something passed between them. Unspoken. Something like Be careful. But like they both said it to each other. As in Be careful now, yes, but let’s be careful in everything that follows, too.

  James took a deep breath.

  And went under.

  9

  Murky, James thought, swimming head down, his hair floating above his head like short seaweed. He couldn’t see much, not yet. Just the roof that seemed to vanish at the edges, drift off into the darkness of the deep.

  He swam to it.

  Far above him, in a place he could not see, a cloud moved from in front of the sun and some light crested the lake, warming Amelia and revealing, for James, a piece of the house itself. Not quite like curtains parting, but as if a magician’s naked hand pulled aside to show him a window it’d been hiding.

  James looked down to the glass and felt the vertigo of being high up, like looking down into the courtyard of the mall, or the pause at the top of the Demon Drop at Cedar Point. How big was the house? How many stories?

  He swam toward the glass. More details emerged.

  Siding. Brick. A windowsill.

  The flashlight was tied to the elastic band of his swim trunks. Treading by the side of the house, then planting his toes to the bricks for support, he untied the flashlight and brought it to the glass. He pressed his nose to the window.

  Space, he thought. As if the word counted for many other words. Room. Bedroom. The Unknown.

  It was much too dark to see anything and really the flashlight just reflected hard off the glass, becoming a second glowing circle on the window.

  He pushed off and swam deeper.

  Another window, a story lower than the first.

  Two stories. A two-story home at the bottom of the lake.

  He looked up, hoping to see Amelia’s face through the surface. But it was all an unintelligible impression up there. Strong solid colors rippling. For a moment it looked like he could see her, could see someone, a giant’s head, a head as large as the surface of the lake, peering down into the water at him. Then the impressions faded out at the edges, and James couldn’t make out anything up top.

  Without knowing it was coming, he reached the bottom of the lake and felt his feet sink into thick, soft mud. He was standing next to the house, impossible as it sounded. He reached out, into the darkness, into the murk, and flattened his hand against the bricks.

  It was real. There was no doubting that.

  A rush of cold water passed over his back, hugged him, nudged his fingertips off the bricks and onto glass.

  Another window. A first-floor window. James shone his light at it.

  Blackness. Couldn’t see a thing in there.

  He had a sudden vision of someone talking to Amelia up top. Telling her they had to leave. Explaining the house, cracking the mystery, flattening the mystery whole.

  A maritime police officer, perhaps. A fisherman.

  What do you mean you were curious, miss? What is there to be curious about? There’s a two-story home at the bottom of every lake in the United States!

  But there wasn’t a home at the bottom of every lake. As much as the idea suddenly comforted him.

  He cupped his hands and pressed them against the glass.

  Nothing. Couldn’t make anything out. Looked like the possible outlines of furniture. But that was impossible.

  Right?

  Beginning to feel the tightness of holding his breath for too long, James shone his light up, taking in, for the first time, the full scope of the house.

  A big one. Bigger than James had ever lived in.

  Suddenly he imagined Amelia lying in a bed in a second-story bedroom. He imagined swimming up to the glass, treading outside, knocking on the glass, waking her.

  Let me in?

  Then he thought of waterlogged mattresses. Fabric about to burst with fish bones and muck.

  He shone his light to the left of him and saw the edge of the house and knew that, if there was a front door—of course there’s a front door, it’s a house, James—it was around that corner.

  His lungs told him to get up top. Go see Amelia.

  Instead, he walked, astronautlike, toward the brick edge of the house.

  A thought occ
urred to him, natural as it was: If the front door was open, why not step inside?

  At the corner of the house (the house!) he looked over his shoulder, into the blackness, the rest of the lake.

  There was no sense of being watched, not exactly, it was something much less focused than that. As if all that blackness was one dumb eye, pointed in his direction, capable of simply observing the small teenage boy at the base of the house, with no brain to transmit the news to.

  Not watched. But seen.

  James took the turn, shining his light ahead, and saw another window. A front window. A simple thing anybody would see if they were pulling up to the front of the house in a car.

  His chest constricted, his head starting to throb, James continued past a garden of seaweed below the windowsill. The mud was getting softer, and he trained the light at his feet. The shadows of the fluttering seaweed fooled him into thinking he saw fingers draw back into the folds.

  Then James stepped on something much harder than the lake’s mushy bottom.

  It was a single stone step. Maybe more of them were buried.

  He looked up.

  James was looking at the front door of the house.

  He gasped, if such a thing can be done underwater, and the bubble that escaped his throat was perhaps the last one he had left.

  It wasn’t a full front door. It was half of one; the left half, still hinged, swaying in unseen waves, pulses Amelia couldn’t feel above. There was no right half of the door and James thought it looked like the wood had been intentionally replaced with darkness.

  Come, it all seemed to say, the left half swaying. Come in.

  He made to move, made to come in.

  Then stopped.

  He needed to breathe. Needed to breathe now.

  Using the mossy, slick step as a springboard, he bent at the knees and sprang up.

  As he cut through the water he had a terrible vision of himself dying on the way up: a corpse by the time he broke the surface, Amelia screaming as a decayed and flaking James bobbed in the water less than two feet from the green canoe.

  He closed his eyes. Almost felt the change occurring; life to death. Dying while moving. The quick wrinkling of his skin. The shrinking of his lungs, his bladder, his heart.

  Then he actually did feel something.

  Something like thick noodles along the full side of his body, from his chest to his toes.