People of the Lake

by Nick Scorza

  “I saw the statue in the square,” I said, shuddering as I remembered the cruel expression on its face. “Is that really the same family?”

  “Yeah, they go way back.”

  Neil looked really nervous while he said this, his eyes wandering back to the door.

  “I can’t say I blame them for wanting privacy, I’m just surprised. It would probably be a goldmine.”

  “Well, from what I hear, they have plenty of money already,” Neil said.

  The chime on the door rang, and Neil jumped up and ran back to serve a middle-aged couple that wandered in. He greeted them by name, and they seemed happy to see him, but they each gave me a suspicious stare. Neil turned and mouthed the word sorry to me while he poured their iced coffees. When I finished the last foamy sip of my cappuccino, I waved goodbye and walked out.

  I had taken two steps out the door when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I whirled, ready to punch someone if I had to—city instincts—but it was just Neil.

  “I’m sorry about that. People will be nicer once they know your father lives here.”

  “Is this whole town members-only or something?”

  “It might as well be,” he said. “Though I can’t think why anyone would want to join. Listen, I hope you’ll come back. Don’t let them keep you away.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” I said, giving it more of a Queens accent than I actually had.

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “See you later.”

  He was definitely odd, but he was nice, and that went a long way.

  I walked around the rest of the town for a while. I didn’t feel like heading home just yet. There wasn’t much to see. A few of the other shops were still closed, and I wondered if they ever opened. Just off the square was a shop with some old maps in the window called Farley’s Consignment. It was dark enough I thought it was also closed, but there was a prominent OPEN sign in the window.

  Old things were piled everywhere—stacks of chairs, cupboards full of mismatched cups, display cases stuffed with little figurines of chubby kids in lederhosen. It took me a minute to notice the owner sitting behind a pile of ancient appliance parts stacked on the counter. His shoulders were stooped, and he had a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, so it was hard to tell how old he was. He was watching a miniature TV set behind the counter. His eyes flicked up from it briefly to give me a suspicious stare when I walked in.

  “Not from here.”

  It wasn’t a question. What was wrong with people here? Not another one, I could imagine Zoe whispering. I’d say we fill his store with spiders, too, but it probably already is.

  He didn’t say anything else, or look up from his TV, so I started looking through the old stuff. There was a globe so old I was surprised it didn’t show a flat Earth, a bunch of old medicine bottles in blue and green glass, and a lot of other old stuff. Normally I liked antiques, but so far this town was rubbing me the wrong way, and it all seemed to add up to a history I wasn’t part of—even if my dad was from here.

  Then I noticed an old wire birdcage with a cloth covering it near the back of the store. Did this guy have a pet bird? I knew I should probably leave it alone, but the covered cage made me curious—with everything else in the store strewn around haphazardly, this was the one thing that felt carefully placed.

  The owner wasn’t paying any attention to me, and what harm was a look anyway? I came closer to the cage. I couldn’t hear anything moving underneath. Slowly, I lifted a corner of the cloth.

  I could barely make sense of what I saw underneath. It was a statue or figurine, made of a sinuous stone that looked somehow wet or oily. Looking at it made me feel a little queasy, like it was some sort of optical illusion. I couldn’t even tell if it was supposed to represent anything.

  Then, suddenly, the owner was beside me, pulling down the cloth cover with a force that shocked me.

  “That’s not for you,” he said. His eyes said the rest—get the hell out of my store. I was more than happy to leave on my own. My nausea went away almost instantly when he covered the statue, or whatever the hell it was, and I turned and walked out. As I opened the door, I turned around one last time to see him still watching me.

  “Won’t last long here if you go acting like that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I fixed him with a hard stare, but he didn’t answer, just kept glaring back. I couldn’t tell from his voice if he was actually worried about me, or hoping I’d meet some sort of bad end. Finally, I shook my head and walked out the door.

  Dad was still hard at work when I got home, so I pulled a few of the folklore and history books from the shelf to entertain myself. Anything to forget my experience at that shop. I learned all sorts of interesting things about the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. They had a matrilineal system of inheritance, and a democratic government that some historians thought had inspired Jefferson and Washington—though no sense of gratitude or obligation had stopped the United States from stealing their land.

  If Zoe were here, we’d probably spend all afternoon coming up with pranks to take all the rude villagers down a peg. We used to spend hours concocting brilliant schemes that would shock and humiliate anyone who dared be mean to either of us—from forged love letters to buckets of eels dropped from above, each scenario more baroque and impossible than the last. We filled entire notebooks with plots and skullduggery, but in Zoe’s short life, we never got to try any of it.

  I don’t think Zoe would have wanted to anyway. At her heart, she was too nice. I think she only helped me plan all those pranks because she knew it made me feel better. After she was gone, plenty of people were still mean to me, worse even, but I didn’t care. Nothing they said could be as bad as what I lived with every day as half of myself.

  Oroco was our word for deep water. It could mean an ocean or a lake, anywhere that was dark and too deep to stand. Sometimes I still had to stop and tell myself to use the English words for things, because the words in our secret language were still the first ones that came to mind. Oroco came to me again last night in my sleep, as I dreamed of the still waters of Redmarch lake.

  III.

  The next day, I went back to the café. Neil was talking to someone when I came in, another boy our age. He was even skinnier than Neil, with a mop of jet black hair and a hint of stubble on his chin. He gave me a curt nod and a cocky smile, then looked at Neil, who looked overjoyed to see me.

  “Oh, hey! Clara, this is Hector, he’s from out of town, too. I can feel this place opening up already.”

  “I’ve lived here two years, man,” Hector said.

  “Right, of course.”

  Neil nodded, though he didn’t seem to think it made much of a difference. Hector said he had to run and take care of some errands for his parents. He and Neil clasped hands, and he gave me another brief nod coupled with a suspicious stare before walking out the door.

  “What’s his deal?” I said. “I thought only the locals were unfriendly.”

  “Hector’s not unfriendly, just . . . living here makes him a bit defensive. I can’t say I blame him. Can I get you another cappuccino?”

  I nodded. As much as I hated to admit it, Hector’s smirk had made me wish he’d liked me more—but I didn’t want to think of that right now.

  Neil still seemed afraid the rudeness of the town would make me bolt at any moment. He really needed to visit the city—he’d stop worrying about that pretty quick.

  “Poor guy,” said Neil. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here two years or twenty if you weren’t born here.”

  While he made my coffee, Neil talked about how bad he wanted to get out of Redmarch Lake when he was done with high school.

  “I know there’s a spot for me at the quarry, but my grades are decent. I want to go to college, if I can swing the loans and stuff. My folks don’t have much money.”

  “Come to New York,” I said. “People there are still rude, but at least there you know it’s nothi
ng personal.”

  Midway through my coffee, Rayna texted me a picture of Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with the caption Meet any cute guys in the country? I chuckled, which made poor Neil jump. I finished my coffee while he helped the few locals that came in through the morning. I was happy I’d at least found this place, and I hoped it would be enough to sustain me through a long and boring summer.

  “Hey, there’s gonna be a party tonight, if you’re interested,” Neil said when I brought my cup up to the counter. “There’s a spot we go to out in the woods.”

  My eyes narrowed. He suddenly realized how that came off.

  “It’s nothing weird, I swear. Just a bunch of kids from the high school and some beer. Hector and I will both be there. Look, the easiest way to get there is to park by the church. There’s a trail head and you can usually follow the music from there.”

  He wrote the address on a napkin for me.

  “Come if you feel like it. It’ll be fun, I promise.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “Oh, and one more thing. Stay on the trail. If you do decide to come, I mean.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t step off the trail. It’s easy to get lost in the woods out here, but you should be fine as long as you follow it.”

  “I heard the woods around here are dangerous.”

  Neil nodded.

  “They are, but it’s fine as long as you stay on the path. We go to this spot all the time. Just—if you come—be sure to stay on the path.”

  He was deathly serious as he said this. When I nodded, his big smile was back again and he waved as I left. I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing. Neil weirded me out a bit, but he seemed to be the only nice person from this town who wasn’t related to me. Who knew what the other kids were like?

  Just got invited to a party, I texted Rayna. Wait till the county fair. I’ll be crowned Corn Queen.

  Haha, more like Children of the Corn Queen, Rayna wrote back.

  I missed the girls already: Rayna, Maddie, Amaya, and Hannah. Our little band of misfits, gathered at the edge of the school cafeteria, or meeting up at coffee shops in Astoria or Thai places in Elmhurst, laughing at stuff no one else did—pretending we were too cool for everything, mostly because everyone else ignored us anyway. I didn’t care. I was convinced life was better at a meta-level—I learned a long time ago that any other way meant hurting.

  Even with those girls, though, I had never felt like I belonged. I couldn’t shake the feeling that by spending time with them, I was betraying Zoe. It was stupid; she was dead and I was still here, but I felt it just the same. I wished they could all meet her, or even that they’d known knew her when she was alive.

  I never had friends when I was younger. With a twin sister, I never needed them. It was like having a built-in best friend who already knew you better than anyone else ever could, even your parents. The other kids at school must have thought we were so spooky—like the ghost twins from The Shining—but I never cared until after Zoe died, when they all avoided me like tragedy was contagious, or whispered things behind my back I was glad I couldn’t hear. I might as well have been a genuine ghost—I almost was.

  That year after losing Zoe was hard for me to think about, even now. I barely survived it. Moving to the city and making friends with Rayna was the only thing that helped me not feel loneliness crushing me like deep sea pressure. Even now, I caught myself wondering why I still felt cut off from everything without Zoe—half of me living in the world and the other half lost in a fog of grief. Would it be this way my whole life?

  By the end of the day, I had decided to go to the party. If it was sketchy, I’d back out right away. Hell, even if all the kids in this town were weirdos, it would at least be something to do.

  When dinnertime rolled around, dad suggested we go to the diner. I was glad to get him out of the house. I had been hoping for one of those old-fashioned places gleaming with chrome and neon, but the Lakeview Diner seemed even older than that—all wood paneling and once-plush booth seats now almost dangerously saggy. There were stuffed deer heads and a trophy bass on the wall. I wondered if it came from the lake—somehow I couldn’t imagine it.

  My burger was good, delicious even, though the waitress went out of her way to use as few words as possible when she took our order, like she couldn’t wait to get away from us. Neil was definitely right about this place.

  “How’s school?” Dad said.

  I frowned. I’d spent most of my academic career living in fear of the time it stopped being easy and I’d have to start applying myself (I always hated that phrase—like I was lip gloss or adhesive). I thought a second-tier high school like Queens Academy for Inhumanity would give me more of a grace period. Still, it turned out sophomore year was that long-awaited time of dread. My grades took a dive, which meant constant fights with Mom. It was hard to believe she and the Woodchuck were hitting it off like a goddamn rom-com at the same time.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “Tell me about your book.”

  “Like I said, it’s just about the history of the town. Not many people will find it as interesting as I do.”

  “Because you grew up here?”

  Whatever had been bothering my father, he clearly enjoyed talking about the book. He lit up as soon as I mentioned it. I wondered if he had the same reaction when people asked him about his daughter.

  There was something else, though—it clearly made him nervous. As soon as I spoke, he made a subtle quiet down gesture, and he kept looking over his shoulder. I wondered about his mood. Maybe being back in this unfriendly town was starting to turn him paranoid. Before we’d left the house, I’d used the bathroom and snuck a quick look at his medicine cabinet. He had quite a few prescriptions, including some I’d also taken in my long process of recovery after losing Zoe. Seeing them brought back a lot of bad memories.

  “It’s not just that I grew up here. My whole family is from here—half your roots—going back to after the Revolutionary War. There have been Morrises in Redmarch Lake for as long as it’s been a town.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  I couldn’t believe I was just learning this now. How had my father never brought it up when I was younger? Again, I tried to think of him telling me something about this town even once, and I couldn’t think of anything. It was really starting to bother me.

  “I have a complicated history with this place,” he said. “The whole town has a complicated history.”

  “Maybe the townsfolk will be a little nicer if they know I have roots here,” I said, thinking of the woman who’d thrown me out of her secondhand store the previous morning. My father frowned.

  “Don’t count on it. Sad to say, they’re not a friendly bunch. Never have been.”

  Was my father writing a big book of revenge about everyone who had been a jerk to him in high school? I could see that becoming a family tradition. It still didn’t explain his collection of paranormal studies tracts, though.

  “So what about all the fairies and aliens and ‘world of the unknown’ stuff?”

  My father was quiet for a moment, staring at his hamburger as if he’d just noticed it for the first time. He looked around to see if anyone was watching us, then he went on.

  “There’s something in the air out here,” he said. “It’s subtle, but it goes way back. The modern spiritualist movement began not far from here. Seances, talking boards, automatic writing, past life regression, it used to be all the rage. There were two sisters near here, in the nineteenth century, the Fox sisters, who said they could communicate with a spirit they called Mr. Splitfoot. It would answer their questions by knocking.”

  My father gave the table two sharp taps with his knuckles. The sound echoed through the diner. Some of the other customers turned to give us hard, disapproving stares, just like the waitress and the lady in the vintage shop. My father ignored them.

  “They say both sisters had lea
rned how to crack the bones in their feet to make the sound. They signed a confession saying they had faked the whole thing, then years later they took it back and claimed it had all been real.”

  I couldn’t help but think of Zoe and me, up late at night daring each other to say Bloody Mary three times in the mirror and shrieking with terror and delight. I tried to change the subject to something not involving sisters, or at least something that wouldn’t earn us any more evil eyes from the townsfolk. I was out of options—I asked my father about his day job and tried harder than ever to understand the world of electronic database architecture.

  I’d been debating whether to tell him about the party. Finally, after an action-packed evening learning the finer points of database design, I figured I’d better ask if I really wanted to go. I waited until we were on the ride home.

  “So, some of the local kids are throwing a party tonight at the church,” I said. He didn’t need to know it was in the woods.

  “You got popular quick,” he said, smiling. Then he clenched his jaw—shifting gears into father mode. “You’re not going, though.”

  “Why not? I’ll be careful. I won’t stay out past eleven.”

  “You don’t know these people,” he said. “You’re not going.”

  “What’s wrong with them? You think I don’t deal with weirdos in the city? I know how to take care of myself.”

  “This is different.”

  I’d never seen my father so dead set about anything, and it unnerved me. What did he know about the people here that he wasn’t sharing? It was almost enough to make me want to stay home.

  “Different how, Dad? I can’t understand unless you tell me. I’m starting to feel like I barely know you.”

  My father winced like he’d been struck. I instantly felt bad. I hadn’t meant to hurt him—still, I realized it was true as soon as I said it. Why else was I just hearing about our family’s roots here?