Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  “What was that all about?”

  He moved past Heather without saying a word, heading back into the living room where he had knocked out a section of drywall. Within, vines had collected around the two-by-fours like spools of wire. It had taken the better part of the morning to cut them all away. They sat in a trash bag beneath the jagged gaping wound in the wall.

  “Alan,” Heather said, coming up behind him. “I asked you a question.”

  He summoned his best lie. “They heard I was doing some work in the house. Sheriff just wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything I’d need a permit for.”

  His wife barked laughter but didn’t ask any further questions. When Alan finally looked over his shoulder, she was gone.

  He thought then of Owen Moreland … and the sheer fact that he thought of him caused him to panic. There were no parallels between Owen Moreland and himself. Were there? So what had caused him to think of him at that particular moment?

  It’s the town, he convinced himself. They’ve got me paranoid. They’ve got me thinking of every disgusting nightmare my mind is capable of summoning. Shuddering, he recalled the night he’d awoken to find his hands around his wife’s neck. And not all of them are nightmares. They’re driving me insane, goddamn it.

  Gotta protect your family, boyo, said Jimmy Carmichael. Gotta keep on marching down them happy trails.

  Trails.

  Indeed.

  Outside, Alan emptied the bag of vines into the ceramic flowerpot, squirted some lighter fluid on them, and set them ablaze with the drop of a single match. The smell was caustic, the smoke as black as the ace of spades. He pulled his sweatshirt up over his nose so he didn’t have to breathe the fumes.

  Behind him, something released a bloodcurdling wail.

  He spun around to find one of the buzzards perched on a low tree branch in the yard. It was so heavy it was causing the bough to bend, the top of it nearly brushing the ground.

  “Filthy fucker,” he muttered.

  When the fire had died out, leaving nothing but powdered ash at the bottom of the flowerpot, he returned to the house—

  And froze in the middle of the living room.

  A single, threadlike vine had grown straight out of the floor in the center of the room.

  How had he missed this one? How long had it been here growing without either him or Heather noticing?

  She’s noticed the others but hasn’t said anything before, he told himself. She sees them but doesn’t say anything, doesn’t care. Almost as if she wants them here.

  He went to the vine and knelt before it. This close, he could see the spacing between the floorboards where the vine had managed to work its way up. It was too young to have sprouted thorns; Alan wrapped it around one finger and tugged it free.

  He burned that one in the yard, too.

  A house with blood on its walls—names and symbols painted with blood. Carvings etched on stone.

  The shuddering, feathery gasp of giant wings …

  “I dreamt of your arrival for six moons without break,” says the old Indian beside the smoldering fire pit. “Since then, I have been coming out here to the valley and the Devil’s Stone, guided under the protection of the warrior Tsul Kalu, waiting for the day of your arrival. I’m glad it is today.” Grimaces. “I’m tired and the summer days are long.”

  And his eyes flipped open, a scream caught in his throat.

  Literally caught.

  Alan couldn’t breathe. Air could just barely whistle through his restricted esophagus. And when he tried to sit up, he felt something tighten about his neck, digging into the flesh and squeezing his windpipe.

  He gripped his neck. He felt the indentation where something sliced into him, choking him, cutting off his air. It was pulled taut and he could not get his fingers underneath it to pry it off.

  Tried to gasp for air.

  Couldn’t.

  His legs pinwheeling in the air, he kicked the blankets off him, the bed jouncing and groaning beneath him. He twisted from side to side, then thrashed, even though the strength of such movement caused the garrote to cut farther into his flesh. His fingers, still trying to grab a hold of the thing around his neck, became slick with his own blood.

  Bright spangles of light exploded before his eyes. He knew without a doubt that his vision was fading.

  Somehow he calmed himself for a moment. He managed to think. And in doing so, he sucked in his throat and slipped two fingers underneath the item that was strangling him. It was as strong as piano wire. He tugged at it, and it bit into the soft pads of his fingertips like barbed wire.

  God—

  Then he slid a second set of fingers underneath—and he pulled.

  It snapped apart like a length of elastic, and he felt wetness spatter on his neck, chest, and the left side of his face. His first thought was Blood, my blood, and he sat up quickly, panting and gasping and wheezing and rubbing the tender strip of flesh at his neck with both hands. His fingers were sticky, tacky, but it didn’t necessarily feel like blood.

  He clicked on the lamp beside the bed.

  A coiled vine lay in his lap, bleeding its syrupy fluid onto the mattress.

  Repulsed, he brushed it off the mattress and onto the floor. Then he looked at his hands. There was some blood, but it was mostly the juice that bled from the vine. He rolled over and looked behind the headboard. There were no visible traces of the vine. Though upon closer inspection, he could see a sliver of space between the molding and the wall behind his side of the bed.

  That didn’t just happen. No way that just happened.

  With all his thrashing about, he was shocked to find that Heather was sleeping soundly. If it wasn’t for the unlabored sounds of her respiration, he might have thought—

  (she died)

  —the worst. She was on her side, her back toward him, the cool M of her form just barely hinted at beneath the heavy cotton nightgown.

  Out in the hallway, the floorboards creaked.

  Alan froze.

  A second creaking floorboard … and then he was up, snatching the baseball bat from beneath the bed and storming into the hallway.

  He stood there in the semidarkness, his breath still wheezing out of him, making him sound like an accordion, the bat poised over one shoulder. Naked, he felt both foolish and vulnerable.

  From what he could see, the hallway was empty.

  Then something moved at the end of the hallway—a shifting of shadows low to the floor, perceptible only in the puddle of moonlight that spilled in from the foyer windows.

  Alan’s heart stopped in his chest.

  Slowly, he moved down the hall, unable to get a firm grip on the bat due to the blood and the fluid from the vine on his hands. When he reached the end of the hallway, he flipped on the lights and winced. He was alone; the hallway and foyer were empty. Opposite the foyer, the entrance to the kitchen was a dark rectangular maw. Anything, Alan knew, could be hiding in that inky darkness …

  “Someone in here?” But there was hardly any strength to his voice.

  Again, his mind returned to Owen Moreland.

  No. Stop it.

  His face blown apart from a self-inflicted shotgun blast, the nearly headless corpse of his wife propped beside him on a mattress sodden with blood—

  Stop it!

  Alan turned on the kitchen lights and stood trembling in the doorway, not moving. It took several seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light. When they did, he found nothing out of the ordinary—no cupboards disturbed, no drawers opened, no evidence of any late night visitors whatsoever.

  He felt instantly foolish, standing there in the nude with a baseball bat propped against one shoulder, his genitals dangling like a pendulum. It was an old house. Old houses settled. Old houses made noise when they settled. Was he really racing around in the middle of the night with a baseball bat because he heard some goddamn creaking—?

  From the bedroom, Heather moaned.

  Alan raced down the hall,
images of that sliver of vine having somehow made its way onto the bed and around Heather’s neck—

  But when he got there, he could clearly see the vine on the floor where he’d flung it.

  On the bed, Heather rolled onto her back fitfully but still asleep.

  He watched her, listening to the low rumble at the back of her throat.

  Something beneath her nightgown moved.

  Something inside her.

  Heather’s own voice rushed at him from a week or so ago: Alan, honey, there is someone else in the house with us.

  He remained in the doorway and watched the soft rise of his wife’s stomach, anticipating further movement. He waited for several minutes. Then, when he was satisfied it wasn’t going to happen again—or perhaps that it had all been in his head to begin with—he gathered up the length of vine off the floor, carried it to the bathroom, and flushed it down the toilet. (Yet the moment he did so, he questioned his method, able to visualize all too clearly the vine snaking up through the pipes and wrapping it around him one day as he sat there unawares.)

  He went over to the bathroom mirror and examined his neck. There was a red ring of flesh just below the Adam’s apple and a few places where the skin had broken open. His fingertips, too, had been serrated. He washed his hands beneath the faucet, scrubbing furiously. He wondered if the vines themselves carried infection.

  Fuck it, he thought. Doesn’t matter.

  Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of Heather’s water from the jug in the refrigerator. He drank some, which immediately soothed his abraded throat, then he dipped two fingers into the glass. The cuts on his fingers stopped throbbing. With those same fingers, he massaged the wound at his neck. It was like applying aloe on a burn.

  Alan stayed awake all night, too fearful to go back to sleep. And when he did find sleep, the sun was already coming in through the windows. He called the college and had his classes cancelled for the day, then slept on the living room couch until dinnertime. Exhausted, he dreamt of many things in all those hours, though he remembered very little once he later awoke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The day before Christmas Eve, Heather refused to go to her scheduled appointment with Dr. Crawford.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of reading,” she explained to Alan, “and some doctors actually say that it’s unhealthy to bring your unborn child into places like that. All that electrical equipment and radiation in the X-rays.”

  “Nobody’s getting X-rays,” he told her.

  “But it’s all there. In the building.” She was sitting cross-legged on the couch, a ball of pale green yarn in her lap. The past few days she had actually taken up knitting—something Alan would have never pictured her doing in a million years—and she had made decent headway with a tiny blanket, which was splayed out over one thigh.

  “I thought Dr. Crawford said not to read all those books? That she would give you reading material if you wanted to keep up on things.”

  “This is from her reading material.”

  “Hon, you can’t skip your appointments. We’re not, like, Amish.”

  “Don’t be a fool.” She would not look up from her knitting. Across the room the TV was on, some banal sitcom looping through reruns. Their artificial Christmas tree was propped up in one corner, meticulously decorated with colored lights, tinsel, glass balls. Heather had done it herself, struck this year by the Christmas spirit. She had even purchased a tiny stocking for their unborn child, which now hung from the stone hearth. “I’m not skipping every appointment. But these random checkups aren’t necessary. Even Dr. Crawford said we could move them around.”

  “Yes. We can move them around, not cancel them altogether.”

  She paused in her knitting and looked up at him with big brown doe eyes. “I feel fine. I feel fantastic. And I know what’s best.” She reached out and touched his arm. Her hands were horribly cold. “I don’t want to argue with you, baby, but I’m not going to the appointment. In fact, I’ve already cancelled it.”

  Alan didn’t hound her about it further. Truth was, he had been uncomfortable about going back to Dr. Crawford’s office since their last visit when he thought he’d glimpsed the profile of a monster in his wife’s womb. If Heather didn’t want to go and it wasn’t necessary, he certainly wasn’t going to force the issue.

  She went back to her knitting, and he retreated to the master bedroom, where he’d pried away the molding that ran the length of the walls and sealed up all the cracks in the wood and drywall. He resisted the urge to tear down the walls and search for more vines since the weather had grown considerably colder over the past couple of days and the plants in the yard had already started to die, the trees now completely barren of leaves. He couldn’t imagine the vines beneath the house, beneath the ground, still going strong in such unreasonable weather.

  He finished spackling the cracks in the wood and dry-wall, then hammered the pieces of molding back into place. He’d worked up a nice sweat but felt invigorated by the effort. He stood, swiping a forearm across his sweat-peppered brow and, glancing out one of the windows, happened to catch sight of a police car across the street.

  It wasn’t directly across the street but down the block a bit, partially obscured by a stand of evergreens on the opposite curb. It wasn’t Landry—the cruiser didn’t possess the sheriff’s emblem on the door—but one of his deputies. Even at this distance and despite the impeding pines, he thought he could make out the shape of a head and a pair of shoulders slumped behind the wheel.

  They were watching him.

  Keeping tabs.

  He thought about Landry’s last visit to the house and his not-so-veiled threat that there were other ways to take care of their little problem. Was spying on him around the clock part of that solution? Did the local sheriff’s department seriously have nothing better to do than stake out his house?

  Not for the first time, Alan wondered just how far Landry would go to protect his town’s precious secret. Images of masked vigilantes climbing in his windows, strapping him and Heather down while Landry made off with their infant child like a wolf in the night, ran on a continuous loop in Alan’s mind. Would the sheriff go that far to teach him a lesson? Would Hank Gerski and Don Probst and Gary Jones and the rest of his prying neighbors conspire against him and take his child?

  They had no right. He’d already lost a mermaid and a sailor. They had no right to take this one from him.

  “Nobody’s taking nothing,” he muttered at the window-pane, fogging up the glass with his breath.

  “Alan!” Heather shouted from the living room. “Come quick!”

  He took off in a sprint, expecting the worst. When he arrived to find Heather still seated calmly on the couch, he was holding his crowbar as if ready to bludgeon someone. “What is it?”

  She had both hands pressed to her belly. “I felt it move!”

  He just stood there, stared at her.

  “Come, come, come!” She waved him over. “It was a definite movement. And not just on the inside, but I could feel it pushing against my stomach. Here—give me your hand.”

  He knelt down before her and extended his free hand. She placed it against the swollen left side of her abdomen. Her fingers on top of his, she moved his hand around as if to locate the appropriate spot.

  “Isn’t it a bit early to feel it kicking?”

  “Shhhh,” she responded, as if the sound of his voice might scare the little thing inside her into motionlessness. She was smiling widely, her eyes distant and unfocused, perhaps trained on some motherly subuniverse Alan himself could not see.

  “Heather, honey, I don’t think—”

  He felt it.

  An echoing thump on the other side of Heather’s stomach. Inside her body. The sensation reverberated against Alan’s palm.

  Had her hand not been pressed against his, he would have recoiled.

  Something’s wrong. It was the first thought that came to him. Something is not right in the
re.

  “Ha-ha!” Heather crooned. “Did you feel that? Isn’t that something? Isn’t that amazing?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, wow. That’s in me.”

  “Yes,” he repeated … and managed to slide his hand out from under hers.

  That night, lying in bed together, Alan was afraid to fall asleep. His dreams had become more and more erratic; upon waking in the middle of the night, he would wonder if they were really so abstract and piecemeal, or if he was just remembering pieces of a larger whole. Either way, he didn’t like what he remembered.

  Beside him, Heather said, “Lydia invited us over for Christmas dinner. She said she knew you and Hank had some sort of falling-out, but she wanted to help mend things. I told her we wouldn’t go.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to go. The weather’s getting colder and it’s flu season. I don’t feel comfortable taking the baby out of the house, bringing him around other people.”

  “Him?”

  “Oh. Or her.”

  “Mother’s intuition? Is there something I should know?”

  “No. Freudian slip, I guess.”

  He hadn’t realized Heather was aware of the “falling-out” between him and Hank and was a bit surprised that she didn’t ask about it. He waited for her to bring it up, but after a few minutes of silence between them, her respiration grew deeper and she was quickly asleep.

  Eventually, sleep found Alan, too, and he was racing up a midnight hillside toward the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, his feet on fire as he cruised at breakneck speed. When a deep gorge threatened to suck him down into the earth, he leapt and cleared it as confidently as a bird. In the gorge below, large animals moved about in tempered lethargy, some of them the size of tractor trailers.

  There came a point where he was aware of both his dream state and the real world, that indistinct plateau that overlooks both worlds, and he began talking to someone from one realm or the other. He responded in hushed dream tones, but the other person shouted shrill, birdlike cries into the ether. The sound of the person’s shrieks hurt his ears.