Jessica had never seen such rain. “We must get out of this.”
“Where?”
“Look!” Jessica pointed to a small wooden cabin which stood alone and exposed on the hillside.
The two women ran towards it, down and up the intervening fold in the hills.
The windows were boarded up, but there were the remains of a primitive verandah. The two women pressed themselves against the black dilapidated woodwork while the rain beat at them. It was darkening all the time with the premature-seeming darkness of Christmas Day.
Suddenly Jessica noticed that the door of the hut was open. Standing in it was a very large elderly woman with grey hair drawn back into a bun, and strong bony features. She was muffled in a vague, navy-blue wrapper, and appeared indifferent, perhaps habituated, to the weather. She was looking at the two land girls from grey commanding eyes.
“I should come in if I were you.” She spoke in the accents of the district, but with much self-possession.
They entered. The cabin, small though it was, appeared to be divided into at least three compartments by partitions of dark wood. The outer door led into a centre section; from which other doors opened on either side. The windows being boarded up, the tiny chamber was lighted, it was to be presumed at all times, by a single oil lamp hanging from the roof. The lamp was cheap, crude and old; its chimney grimed; its illumination wavering.
“I should take off your coats and sit down.”
Although the room seemed unheated, they removed their heavy waterproof. The only place to sit was on planks, unusually dark and roughly hewn, which stretched between trestles on the far side of the room. Jessica expected the planks to bow when they sat on them, but in fact they remained as firm as the trunk from which they had been cut. Jessica now perceived that the table which filled the rest of the room was a carpenter’s bench. It was deep in dust.
“I should have some tea.”
“We couldn’t possibly trouble you on Christmas Day,” said Jessica.
But Bunty’s knee struck her sharply; and in any case the elderly woman had disappeared through the door on the right.
“I’m dead,” said Bunty. She looked around. “Do you think she lives here permanently?”
Jessica, faithful to the habits of a lifetime, was combing her wet hair. She found it impossible to see in her little mirror. She said nothing but “God knows”.
“I wonder if she’s good for an egg,” continued Bunty. “I could use an egg.”
“No hens,” said Jessica, trying to smarten her tie.
In a moment the elderly woman was laying tea on the dusty carpenter’s bench. The cheap white china was chipped and cracked; the teapot spout jagged as a broken tooth. The genteel penny bazaar knives were serrated and rusty.
“I should start.”
Jessica lifted the pot to pour. Immediately she realised that it was empty. Plainly, also, there was no food of any kind. Even the sugar basin contained only a discoloured slime.
The elderly woman was silently watching them from her grey commanding eyes.
Jessica perceived that she could prevent them from working round the heavy carpenter’s bench and reaching the door. For a moment she thought; then she put down the teapot.
“I’m so sorry. My friend and I both take milk.”
The elderly woman nodded and retired.
“Come away,” said Jessica, more softly than a mouse. “Bring your mackintosh.”
But Bunty was tightening her belt, and this delayed them, so that before they could reach the door the woman was back. Bunty screamed sharply. The woman had discarded her navy blue wrapper and was dressed in the uniform of an old-fash¬ioned policewoman, with tunic and long skirt. Jessica associated the costume with the previous world war.
“I shouldn’t try any funny business.”
She had her back to the door. In the heavy clothes she looked more massive than ever. Her voice was sharply menacing.
“When my father passed away, his job became mine. I’m the only village policewoman in England. You didn’t know that, did you?”
Jessica could only shake her head; but she was trying to think. She noticed that Bunty was very pale, and seemed as if under a spell.
“Mr. Honeyman!”
At the elderly woman’s call, the remaining door in the room opened for the first time and disclosed a small bent figure in working clothes. Occasional long grey locks hung from under his black cloth cap and his trousers were strapped beneath the knees. His face was old and yellow, but he was smiling like Mr. Punch. His hands were shiny with beeswax. He nodded affably to each of the land girls in turn, then beckoned.
“I should have a look,” advised the elderly woman.
Neither of the girls moved.
“I don’t want to have to use the darbies.” Jessica saw that she held two pairs of heavy handcuffs.
The old man beckoned again. “Easy does it,” he said in a voice like a small cracked bell. They went in.
The inner room was lighted by four tallow candles, the bases of which had been liquefied and stuck on the floor. Placed so that there was a candle on each side of them, were two open coffins. They seemed made of the same dark wood as the rest of the place, and they were deeply and newly padded with glossy, blood-red satin. Set upright behind them stood their tops, each with a polished and engraved silver plate, which reflected rectangles of light from the candles on to the wooden walls of the room. The elderly woman was again in the doorway behind the two land girls.
“Do you know what this is?” Mr. Honeyman was holding out a very long, very thin knife which conjured the reflections on the walls to harlequin activity. “This is a coffin maker’s knife. There’s only one place I know where you can get them.”
“Shall I prepare them, Mr. Honeyman?” enquired the elderly woman.
“I’m quite agreeable, Hagan,” said Mr. Honeyman. “After all, I only work on Christmas Day.”
It was beginning to thunder.
“Look at this,” cried Mr. Honeyman in his cracked triumphant voice. He had laid down the knife and was bringing up a wheeled object from the dusky corner of the little room. It was heavily though tastelessly carved in the same dark wood.
“You don’t see a thing like that every day.”
He was standing behind the cabinet, so that only his head and yellow face appeared above it.
“It’s full of live silkworms. They’re necessary in my business.”
As he spoke he was unrolling a bale of soft white silk.
The two land girls were clinging together.
“I should take off your ties,” suggested the elderly woman. Jessica saw that she had put down the handcuffs, and held in one hand a tiny piece of thin red string, such as chemists use for small parcels.
Still as if spellbound, Bunty began to comply. She took off her tie, and unbuttoned her shirt to the waist.
Suddenly Jessica’s hands, rough from the fields, were round the old man’s throat. In a moment the long thin knife was hers.
Instantly the elderly woman was blowing her police whistle. She blew rendingly, mercilessly, until it seemed that the elements outside the tiny dark cabin picked up the alarum. There was a screaming, cleaving crash and a bright white light. The storm had struck the exposed hut. Or perhaps it had not been thunder but guns.
Jessica awoke in what she took to be a hospital. Certainly there was a nurse standing by her bed.
“Where’s Bunty?”
“I should rest, if I were you.”
Jessica was not in pain, but, on the contrary, felt wholly and completely numb. Outside they were faintly singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Perhaps it was New Year’s Eve.
“Where have I got to?”
“You’ll soon learn.”
The woman, Jessica reflected drowsily, must be not a nurse but a sister, as she was middle-aged and wore a dark blue dress buttoned to the chin. She held a hypodermic syringe, larger then Jessica had ever seen; but it appeared to be empty.
DANIEL MILLS
THE LAKE
DANIEL MILLS is the author of Revenants: A Dream of New England (Chômu Press, 2011), The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance Books, 2014) and of the forthcoming Moriah (ChiZine Publications, 2017). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Nightscript and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. ‘The Lake’ marks his third appearance in Best New Horror.
“I first encountered the work of Robert Aickman in my high school library (of all places),” recalls Mills. “I was fifteen or sixteen and happened upon a Book Club edition of Cold Hand in Mine which some enterprising librarian had thought to purchase back in the 1970s. In hindsight it seems an unlikely acquisition for a high school in Vermont, but the fact remains that it was there and I was drawn to it instantly on account of the Edward Gorey cover.
“The contents, of course, proved every bit as arresting, but I believe I was most struck by ‘Niemandswasser’ with its haunting depiction of Lake Constance and the Bodensee as a ‘thin place’ or borderland between the real and the unreal, waking and dream.
“Inevitably I was reminded of the lake just five miles from my house, a freshwater reservoir shared between three adjacent towns with the boundary lines running somewhere in the water. I had fond memories of swimming there as a child, most often at the old dam and, in the years after reading ‘Niemandswasser’, there came to be a sense of abiding mystery about the lake itself. Of particular relevance, perhaps, is a night when I was eighteen and walked up to the lake from a friend’s house. I remember we saw the stars and Milky Way reflected on the water, shining back with such clarity as to conceal the lake-bottom.
“Even then I was conscious of a certain parallel with childhood and with the nature of memory, generally. In remembering we see ourselves plainly, but reversed, and the glass hides at least as much as it reveals—through a glass darkly and all that. Childhood, then, must remain essentially mysterious. There are moments which can never be reclaimed, wrongs which can never be righted. In looking back, we see only the surface of the lake: we cannot guess at what might lie beneath.”
AUGUST, 1997.
Samuel is twelve. He despises himself: his thin limbs, his hairless body. His friend Jason is thirteen but looks older. Jason is a Boy Scout and natural athlete, pitcher for the town’s Little League team. The boys have known each other for years.
Samuel’s house is less than a mile from the lake. Most evenings the boys ride bikes to the dam, but tonight they will walk, because Nick is coming with them.
They met Nick in July at church camp where Samuel’s father was pastor. Nick lives with his father in the next town and attends a different middle school. He is pale, heavy, asthmatic. He wheezes when he runs, breasts bouncing in the shirts he wears to swim.
It is early evening, not yet suppertime. Samuel and Jason watch for Nick from the living room window. His father’s truck pulls up short of the house. Its red body gleams, the hubcaps like silver sunbursts. The driver is visible through the windshield, the dark glasses that hide his eyes. His skin is shockingly pale, hands white where they grip the wheel.
Nick dismounts from the cabin and totters up the lawn. His father pulls out, the engine roaring as it gathers speed.
The boys pelt outside, anxious to swim. They meet Nick on the porch and set off with him, following the road along the lakeshore, its floating docks and ranks of summer cottages. Samuel and Jason go first, nearly running, while Nick trails behind, panting, pleading with them to slow down, to wait. They do not.
Eventually, they reach the dam. It is long disused: the sluices blocked with rust, the concrete chipped and pitted. The boys remove their shoes and socks. They scale the hemlock which overhangs the dam and lower themselves to the ledge.
Jason goes first, then Samuel, then Nick, who trembles as he releases his grip on the hemlock and stands unsupported on the dam. A motor boat passes, startling the gulls from a nearby thicket. The noise of the engine tails off to a drone then silence though the waves continue to move in its absence, spreading over the lake’s surface like the cracks in a mirror.
The ledge is slick, wet with spray from the lake five feet below. Samuel, cautious, steps carefully over the dam, hooking his toes in the crumbling concrete. He goes from pockmark to crater, listening all the while for Nick’s breath behind him: the catch in the other boy’s throat, the occasional wheeze.
Jason is far ahead of them. Confident of his footing, he walks the ledge with an acrobat’s grace, slowing only as he nears the centre of the dam. Samuel has not been out so far, has never dared, but Nick is behind him and he does not want to appear afraid and so says nothing.
They reach the dam’s centre. The ledge is highest here. Behind them an old streambed runs downhill past a cottage shuttered for season’s end then bends out of sight beyond a stand of hemlocks. The dark trees shimmer. The day’s rain webs their foliage, hangs from branch and needle. The lake is calm, all waves dissipated. Samuel looks down at his reflection far below.
Jason strips off his shirt. The muscles show in his arms and shoulders as he raises his hands, joining them together over his head. He turns his wrists one against the other and stretches, bending himself from side to side.
Samuel asks: “What are you doing?”
“Limbering up.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to dive.”
“Here? It’s too high.”
“Ten feet, maybe. No more than that. Same as the diving board at the Y.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t dive, then. I’ll do it alone.”
Jason drops to a squat. His legs tense. He straightens, readying himself for the jump.
Nick says: “Wait.”
Samuel wheels around. He watches dumbly as Nick snorts from his inhaler and shuffles forward past him. The fat bunches at his elbows. His nipples show through his T-shirt.
He says: “I’ll jump with you.”
Jason grins. “Okay, then,” he says.
Samuel reddens and retreats down the ledge. He turns his back on the others, faces the boarded-up cottage. The windows are shut, the doors padlocked.
Behind him Jason and Nick line up at the edge of the dam. He hears them, their breathing. Jason counting down from three. “One.”
They jump. Samuel glances behind him, sees Jason fall with his back curved in upon itself and hands thrust out even as Nick steps forward timidly and drops from the ledge feet-first.
The air rushes up toward Nick, unbalancing him as he falls and flipping him onto his back. His T-shirt inflates, rides up, revealing his chest: the breasts like lumps of dough, the lines of yellow bruising near the waistband of his trunks. He strikes the water and plunges toward the bottom. Samuel’s reflection unravels with the impact, shattered in the whorl of rising bubbles.
Jason breaches the water. He is some distance from the dam and making for the lake’s centre. His strokes are perfect: he cleaves the water with the ease of a boat’s prow, his wake rippling behind him.
Samuel waits. Nick does not resurface.
The water re-knits itself, becoming smooth as glass. Samuel’s face floats within it, a perfect image: the lines round his mouth, the lips wide as he yells for help. His throat yawns before him, black with the shadow from a dying eddy.
His voice is broken, shrill. It is enough. Jason hears him and turns round. He swims back toward the dam, shouting to Samuel as he draws near. He urges Samuel to jump in, to help, but Samuel cannot. His legs refuse to move, his eyes to close.
Jason dives, surfaces. There are weeds in his hair, water streaming down his face.
“Where is he?” he demands. “Can you see him?”
But the lake is a mirror, obscuring all save Samuel’s own pinched face, the tongue flapping uselessly against the dark of his throat. Jasons swears and forces himself under again—longer this time though he comes up gasping, alone. He treads water briefly, breathing hard. Two deep
breaths and he submerges himself for a third time, disappearing behind Samuel’s reflection.
At last he resurfaces, Nick’s head lolling on his shoulder. The other boy is limp in his arms, pressed close to his chest as he holds him up, kicking them both toward shore.
Samuel runs to meet them. He sheds his paralysis and sprints along the dam, forgetting his earlier caution. His bare feet sting as they slap the concrete.
Jason reaches the rocks near the end of the dam and pulls himself from the water. He drags himself forward with one hand then turns to hauls up Nick behind him.
There is blood in the boy’s scalp and his T-shirt hangs loosely from his neck. His exposed chest appears soft, rubbery, white but for the bruises at his waist. They form a mottled line, purple and yellow, which disappears into his underwear.
Samuel sees them first, then Jason.
They look at each other, look away.
Jason takes Nick’s wrist in hand and listens for the pulse. He cradles the boy’s neck between his legs and leans forward, covering Nick’s lips with his mouth.
He breathes in, out.
Nick startles and coughs. Jason exhales heavily, falling back. The strength drains from Samuel’s legs, and he drops to his knees.
The coughing subsides. Nick’s eyelids flutter and open.
His eyes are bulging, wild and white.
Samuel tells no one what happened that day. Jason, too, is silent but only because Samuel begs him not to tell. His fear still eats at him, his shame or something more.
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