Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  Once sleep fully claimed him, he was shuttled off to the depths of some black forest where the trees stood as tall as skyscrapers and large, indistinct behemoths trod in the periphery of his vision. The sounds of the trees breaking as these monstrous entities cleared the way were as loud as car crashes; they clashed like a tympani. In the night sky, sigils comprised of iridescent lights burned in the place of stars, like bastardizations of the zodiac. As he looked at them they seemed to shift and move slightly, almost imperceptibly. When they moved, their shapes changed. He thought he could almost recognize what they were trying to turn into, their shapes and forms and figures. Nonsense turned into secrets turned back into nonsense.

  Soon Alan was at the cusp of the lake. On the opposite shore, something large and unwieldy progressed through the trees. Thick trunks were felled, and birds took flight into a sky suddenly the color of a fading bruise. As the thing came out of the trees and approached the edge of the lake, Alan could see its hugeness … and he could actually feel how big it was as the air around him seemed to swell and waver in the creature’s presence.

  Panic overtook him, but his dream feet would not allow him to run. He stood at the cusp of the lake on his own side of the circular body of water, suddenly cognizant of the fact that he wasn’t wearing any clothes. He stared at the other side of the lake as the creature appeared in full form beneath the iridescent zodiac in the sky.

  It was tremendous, perhaps twenty stories high, and possessed the body of a moose capped with the S-shaped neck and tapered, hooked beak of a vulture. The neck was networked with thick vines—as thick as electrical cables, much thicker than the ones that had been plaguing the house all summer and fall—and they pulsed in synchronization with the massive creature’s heartbeat.

  And it was a heartbeat Alan could feel reverberating through the ground and up through the spongy black marrow of his bones.

  The great creature lowered its hook-shaped head until it was hovering above the lake’s surface. The giant beak was the size of a sailboat. The thing’s eyes were black pits, the centers of which were alive with the flames of living fire. The longer Alan stared into those flames, the more certain he was that he could see himself screaming in the midst of that inferno …

  At his feet, something snakelike sprouted from the wet soil and coiled speedily around his bare left ankle. Alan shrieked. He looked down and saw a vine like a garden hose winding up his thigh. Instead of thorns the vine sprouted tiny gray feathers. Dropping quickly to his knees, he groped for the vine … but the moment his hands struck it, the vine released him and retracted into the ground. For whatever reason, he felt a compulsion to go after it, and he dug one hand into the hole in the earth after the vine, straight down to his wrist. The soil beneath was moist and warm; feeling it caused something to snap at the base of his spine, and he felt his entire body shudder.

  Across the lake, the behemoth roared, and the sound was like a thousand lawn mowers.

  Then, suddenly, Alan was awake and back in bed. Only he wasn’t propped up on his pillow, his head by the headboard. He was curled into a fetal position at the foot of the bed, his knees pulled to his chest, his entire body shaking from the power of the lingering nightmare. He attempted to sit up, but a bolt of pain rocketed through his body, momentarily paralyzing him.

  His hand was still in the soil from his dream …

  He glanced up to see his right hand disappearing between the thatch of pubic hair at the center of his wife’s body, where her legs came together. It took him several seconds to discern exactly what he was looking at—exactly what he was doing—before he withdrew his hand in self-disgust. The sound of the withdrawal caused his stomach to lurch. He feared he might vomit.

  At the head of the bed, Heather moaned in her sleep, her naked body pale blue in the moonlight filtering through the part in the curtains. The swollen rise of her belly reminded him of—

  (something large moving through the trees)

  —an enormous pearl.

  Hastily, he sat upright. The fingers of his right hand were webbed with secreted fluid. Again, he thought he would retch, but he didn’t want to wake up his wife.

  Heather murmured beneath her breath and turned on her side. She did not seem aware of anything that had happened.

  And what, exactly, had happened?

  He didn’t know. Disgusted with himself, he rolled off the bed and, naked, scampered silently down the hallway to the bathroom. There, he flicked on the lights and was horrified to find that the tacky fluid on his right hand was pinkish.

  Blood.

  Christ, what had he done?

  Cranking the water on in the sink, he shoved both hands beneath the tepid stream and scrubbed them. When he glanced up at the ghost in the mirror, he could hardly recognize the cretin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It kept happening. On the third night, Alan couldn’t repress his disgust: he made it down the hallway at a quick enough pace to neatly expel that evening’s dinner into the toilet bowl. Even though Alan was careful to keep his retching noises as quiet as possible, he didn’t think Heather would wake up. And she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t seem bothered by the violation at all.

  After a week of such madness, he found himself needing to visit the lake daily, as he had done in the very beginning, because his lack of sleep and overall anxiety were weakening him. The water was even colder now with the drop in temperature, and by the second week of December, it was downright torturous. Yet he visited it religiously and filled Heather’s water jug twice a week. He felt stronger and healthier almost immediately, just as he had before, but the lake unfortunately did very little to assuage his anxiety.

  He hated going to work and couldn’t wait until Christmas break arrived. Any time he spent away from home, he was convinced that something horrible and invisible was sneaking in, coiling itself around the very heart of the house, and squeezing the life out of his family when they weren’t even there to protect themselves. And he was the husband, the father-to-be. It was his job to protect them all.

  His mind continued to return to the conversation he’d had with Hank on Thanksgiving Day. It was evident to him that Hank had been conspiring with Landry and God knew who else in town to keep him away from the lake.

  Twice since Thanksgiving Day, Hank had stood on Alan’s porch and knocked on the door for what seemed like an eternity. The second time, he hadn’t left until he’d called out that he knew Alan was in there and he wished he’d talk to him. (Alan had remained in the back bedroom and hadn’t responded; luckily, Heather had been in the shower at that point, otherwise he would have had some explaining to do.)

  Another time, just moments after Alan had arrived home from work, he had seen Landry park his cruiser at Hank’s house. Alan watched from the kitchen windows, suddenly on edge. Landry got out of the car, looking like a grizzly bear in his winter parka with the faux fur collar. Hank came out the front door and met Landry midway down the front lawn. They talked for a few moments, their faces almost intimately close to one another, plumes of vapor wafting from their mouths. Then Landry nodded and clapped Hank on the shoulder. Alan expected Landry to make his way over to his house, but the sheriff simply got back into his car, kicked it over, and motored on down the street. Hank had vanished inside his house without so much as a glance over his shoulder.

  Conspiring against me, Alan had thought. The whole messy lot of them.

  Yet despite his anger towards Hank, one thing the man had said to him Thanksgiving Day had lodged in Alan’s mind. Something he couldn’t readily shake because, at some point prior, he had started to think it, too. It was about how strange it was his uncle had left him this house after being absent for the bulk of his life, particularly when the old man had two very capable adult children. What exactly had Hank said? So I started wondering if maybe the land called you and your wife here. Maybe it seeks out people who need it and uses them in return.

  Of course, on the surface, the notion was preposterous. T
he “land” hadn’t written his uncle’s goddamned will. And anyway, what logic was there in trying to scrutinize the actions of an ailing old man in the last throes of his life? Maybe Uncle Phillip had become estranged from his kids. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to burden them with the responsibility of the place.

  Maybe it seeks out people who need it and uses them in return …

  Was there something to that?

  And each night, whether Alan found his hand halfway inside his wife or not while she slept, he would awake with the sudden and irrefutable conviction that someone else was in the house with them. He started sleeping with an old Louisville beside the bed, and he would creep like a lone warrior through the darkened house each night, searching for an intruder he knew was there but continued to somehow remain elusive. And every morning, though no evidence of the intruder could be found, he would notice fresh twists of vine spooling out of the wainscoting or from between floorboards. He tugged them out angrily and, at first, tossed them in the trash. Soon, however, he bought a bottle of lighter fluid and began burning them in a ceramic flowerpot in the yard.

  It was December, goddamn it. How were the vines still growing?

  One Saturday afternoon, Heather arrived home from Christmas shopping to discover that Alan had taken a hammer and broken through a section of drywall in the main hallway, between their bedroom and the bathroom. She stopped dead in her tracks, her arms laden with packages and shopping bags, and stared at Alan who was covered in fine white powder, his shirt off, his chest heaving with each exhausted exhalation.

  “Jesus Christ. What are you doing?”

  Alan reached into the wall and yanked out a tangle of knotted vines. “They’re everywhere.” He didn’t tell her he had started hearing them move in the walls at night. Intruders, he thought.

  “What are they?”

  “Vines, I think.” He considered. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s all over your chest?”

  He looked down. Some of the purplish fluid had squirted onto him. Against the white powder from the dry-wall, it looked like blood.

  “Vine juice, I suppose,” he said eventually, and for some reason that very phrase made him want to bray laughter. But by that point Heather had already moved down the hall and into the kitchen.

  If Heather had picked up on the things that were bothering him, he couldn’t tell. In fact, she seemed to be oblivious to his plight; moreover, her mood seemed to become better and better as her pregnancy progressed. She bought things for the nursery and things for the baby. She sang in the shower and rubbed her augmented belly while they sat on the sofa at night, watching television.

  She didn’t even make any more comments about the section of wall Alan had cracked open in the hallway, which he eventually repaired at his leisure. And when he noticed vines sprouting up from other parts of the house and he took a hammer to those walls as well, Heather didn’t so much as bat an eyelash.

  Dinner one night. Soup and sandwiches. Something quick. The both of them.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Heather looked up from her tomato soup. “Sure.”

  They were eating at the kitchen table, something they had started doing midway through the first trimester of the pregnancy. Heather had said it was important to start having meals at the table and not in front of the television for when the baby arrived.

  “At night,” Alan said. “Do you have … strange dreams?”

  “Oh,” she said. “They say that’s normal.”

  He looked hard at her. “Normal?”

  “It’s my body going through chemical changes. There’s really nothing out of the ordinary about it.”

  “What kind of dreams are they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you dream about?”

  She shrugged. “I can’t really remember. Why?”

  It was his turn to try and sound casual. He didn’t know if he did such a good job. “Do you ever dream that someone else is in the house with us?”

  Heather laughed. The sound caused the hairs on the back of Alan’s neck to stand at attention.

  “What’s so funny?” he said.

  “Alan, honey,” Heather said, setting her spoon down in her soup and running one hand over the mound of her belly, “there is someone else in the house with us.”

  And the notion rattled him. He’d been thinking of intruders and of vines snaking in through the cracks and crevices. He’d never considered the baby …

  In his mind, Heather’s voice, as ephemeral as a ghost’s, rose and found him through the ether of his gray matter: The first one was a mermaid. This one will be a sailor.

  “You look gloomy,” his wife said, frighteningly matter-of-fact.

  “I feel funny,” he intoned, no longer hungry.

  Heather smiled and began to sing, causing the cold finger of dread to trace down Alan’s spine. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word … Mama’s gonna buy you a big black bird …”

  He told her to stop singing.

  “Mama’s gonna buy you a big black bird, Alan,” she sang, then laughed again.

  “Cut it out.”

  But Heather just kept laughing.

  Later that night when Alan awoke with that same sensation of violation upon him—of the unseen intruder in his home—he first looked over to his wife.

  And was terrified to find his hands around her throat as she slept.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Making a few home improvements?” Landry said.

  For some stupid reason, Alan had answered the front door without checking to see who it was on the other side.

  Now, Sheriff Landry stood with his hands wedged into his too-tight khaki pants, looking twice his normal girth within his parka. Behind the sheriff on the porch steps stood Hank, looking uncomfortable and out of place. Despite the gray afternoon, he had on reflective sunglasses and was sporting a fresh haircut.

  Alan blinked and momentarily forgot he was standing in the doorway covered in drywall dust and holding a hammer. “Oh, sure,” he said after a moment. He shot his gaze past Landry to Hank, but he couldn’t tell where Hank was looking behind those sunglasses.

  Landry took a step toward the door. “Mind if we come in, have us a little chat?”

  “This about Bart’s paper on War and Peace?” It was meant to be humorous, but the words fell from his mouth and shattered like pottery on the ground.

  Landry’s and Hank’s expressionless faces in the wake of his attempt at humor quickly conveyed to him the gravity of the situation.

  “Actually,” he quickly amended as Landry took another shuffling step toward the open door, “I’m in the middle of something. What is it you guys want?”

  Landry chewed on the inside of his cheek. Then he said, “Okay. Maybe you can come out, then?”

  “Like I said …”

  “Yeah. In the middle of something.” The sheriff’s gaze shot past Alan’s shoulder and into the house. The action made Alan uncomfortable. “Wife at home?”

  “She is, yeah.”

  “That baby coming along okay?” The tone of Landry’s voice suggested he could have been talking about a loaf of bread baking in the oven.

  “Sure enough.” Subconsciously, he tightened his grip on the hammer.

  “See,” Landry said, and Hank shifted disconcertingly behind him, “I thought we had an understanding, Hammerstun. About the lake? You get me?”

  “I’m not letting you in my house,” he told them, though he was still looking past Landry and at Hank. “I’m not coming out, either. I don’t have to talk to either one of you.”

  “Alan,” Hank said. There was a tremor in his voice that made him sound almost childlike.

  “You can’t bully me.”

  “No one’s trying to bully nobody,” Landry said, his voice taking on a surprisingly placating tone. “Way I see it, this whole thing’s my fault. I should have been more direct when talking with you about all this. You see what I’m say
ing?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Landry smiled his shark’s grin—the same one he had used that day in the community college faculty parking lot. “Then maybe you can come out here and I’ll explain it to you.”

  For the first time, Alan noticed a second police car in the street in front of his house, parked beside the sheriff’s cruiser. He could make out the silhouettes of two men sitting in the front seat.

  “I want you off my property now,” Alan told them. “The both of you.”

  “Jesus, Alan,” Hank pleaded, his voice rising an octave. He sounded even more childlike than he had just a moment ago. “Can’t you see we’re trying to help you, man?”

  “No. You’re trying to bully me and keep me away from something you have no right to. This is harassment. I want you all to leave me and my family alone.”

  “There are other ways we can go about this,” Landry suggested, and there was little room for misunderstanding his intentions.

  Infuriated, it was all Alan could do not to grind his teeth into powder. “So you go from harassing me to threatening me?” He jerked his chin toward the street. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Again, Landry chewed at the inside of his cheek. He seemed to be assessing his options as he shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. Beneath him, the porch creaked and groaned. Then he smiled. “All right, son. Suit yourself.” He nodded and, looking past Alan, tipped his wide-brimmed hat. “Ma’am.”

  Alan whirled around to find Heather standing behind him.

  Sheriff Landry and Hank walked away almost in slow motion, like two men being led to their executions.

  Alan stood in the doorway and watched them until Landry and his two deputies drove off and Hank had entered his own house. He expected to see the curtains whoosh aside in one of the front windows, but that didn’t happen. Finally, he closed the door, aware that he was squeezing the hammer hard enough to leave an impression on the palm of his hand.