The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  A low rumbling came from beside her and she glanced down. Ash was standing as rigid as a statue, staring into the woods beyond. “What’s the matter, boy? Don’t like the smell of self-pity?” The fur of his neck bristled, his ears swivelled, but his focus didn’t shift. And then Sadie heard it too, far off in the distance. Ramsay, a bark—not of alarm, perhaps, but unusual all the same.

  An uncharacteristic maternal streak, vaguely disturbing, had come over Sadie since the dogs had adopted her, and when Ash gave another deep growl she capped her water bottle. “Come on then,” she said, tapping her thigh. “Let’s go find that brother of yours.”

  Her grandparents hadn’t had dogs when they’d lived in London; Ruth had been allergic. But after Ruth died and Bertie retired to Cornwall, he’d floundered. “I’m doing all right,” he’d told Sadie down the whistling phone line. “I like it here. I keep busy during the day. The nights are quiet, though; I find myself arguing with the telly. Worse, I have a strong suspicion I’m losing.”

  It had been an attempt to make light of things but Sadie had heard the crack in his voice. Her grandparents had fallen in love as teenagers. Ruth’s father had made deliveries to Bertie’s parents’ shop in Hackney, and they’d been inseparable ever since. Her grandfather’s grief was palpable and Sadie had wanted to say the perfect thing, to make it all better. Words had never been her strong suit, though, and so, instead, she’d suggested he might stand a better chance arguing with a labrador. He’d laughed and told her he’d think about it, and next day he’d gone down to the animal shelter. In typical Bertie fashion, he’d come home with not one but two dogs and a cranky cat in tow. From what she’d observed in the week since she arrived in Cornwall, they’d formed quite the contented family, the four of them, even if the cat spent most of his time hiding behind the sofa; her grandfather seemed happier than he had since before Ruth got sick. All the more reason Sadie wasn’t about to return home without his dogs.

  Ash’s pace picked up and Sadie had to hustle not to lose sight of him. The vegetation was changing, she noticed. The air was getting lighter. Beneath the thinning trees, the brambles had taken advantage of the brighter sun, multiplying and thickening gleefully. Branches grabbed and clutched at the hems of Sadie’s shorts as she pushed through their knots. If she’d been given to fancy she might have imagined they were trying to stop her.

  She scrambled up the steep sloping ground, avoiding large scattered rocks, until she reached the top and found herself at the edge of the woods. Sadie paused, surveying the landscape before her. She’d never come this far before. A field of long grass stretched ahead and in the distance she could just make out a fence and what appeared to be a lopsided gate. Beyond it was more of the same, another wide grassy space interrupted in places by huge trees with rich leafy foliage. Sadie drew breath. There was a child, a small girl, standing alone in the centre of the field, a silhouette, backlit, Sadie couldn’t see her face. She opened her mouth to call out but when she blinked the child disintegrated into little more than a patch of yellow-white glare.

  She shook her head. Her brain was tired. Her eyes were tired. She ought to get them checked for floaters.

  Ash, who’d bounded ahead, looked over his shoulder to check her progress, barking impatiently when he judged it insufficient. Sadie started across the field after him, pushing aside the vague unwelcome notion she was doing something she shouldn’t. The sensation was not a familiar one. As a rule, Sadie didn’t worry about that sort of thing, but the recent trouble at work had her spooked. She didn’t like being spooked. Spooked was a bit too close to vulnerable for Sadie’s liking and she’d decided years ago it was better to march straight up to trouble than have it sneak up behind her.

  The gate, she saw when she reached it, was made of timber: sun-bleached, splintered and hanging from its hinges with a deep sagging ennui that suggested it had been doing so for a very long time. A leafy climber with trumpeting purple flowers had tied itself in comprehensive knots around the posts, and Sadie had to climb through a gap between the pieces of bowing wood. Ash, reassured by this sign his mistress was following, let out a rousing bark and picked up speed, disappearing towards the horizon.

  Grass brushed Sadie’s bare knees, making them itch where her sweat had dried. Something niggled about this place. An odd feeling had come over her since she’d climbed through the gate, an inexplicable sense of things being not quite right. Sadie didn’t go in for presentiments—there was no need for a sixth sense when the other five were being properly employed—and sure enough, there was a rational explanation for the oddness. Sadie had been walking for ten minutes or so when she realised what it was. The field was empty. Not of trees and grass and birds, they were everywhere; it was all the rest that was missing. There were no tractors puttering over the fields, no farmers out mending fences, no animals grazing. In this part of the world that was unusual.

  Sadie glanced around, searching for something to prove her wrong. She could hear running water, not too far away, and a bird that might have been a raven was watching her from the branch of a nearby willow. She noted great stretches of long rustling grass and the occasional gnarled tree, but nothing human as far as the eye could see.

  A black gleam moved on the edge of her vision and Sadie flinched. The bird had launched itself from its perch and was cutting through the air in her direction. Sadie shifted sideways to avoid being hit and as she did her foot caught on something. She fell onto her hands and knees in a stretch of boggy mud beneath the massive willow. She glanced back accusingly and saw a mildewed piece of rope hooked over her left foot.

  Rope.

  Instinct, experience perhaps—a grisly melange of crime scenes from old investigations—made her look up. There, tied around the tree’s thickest bough, visible only as a nobbled ridge beneath the bark, was the rope’s frayed other end. There was another matching one beside it, dangling towards the ground where it trailed a damp plank of disintegrating wood. Not a noose then, but a swing.

  Sadie stood up, brushed off her muddied knees, and paced a slow circumference around the dangling rope. There was something mildly unsettling about the tattered remnant of childish activity in this lonely, empty place, but before she could give it further thought, Ash was off again, his brief concern for Sadie replaced by the urgent need to find his brother.

  With a last glance at the ropes, Sadie followed. This time, however, she began to notice things she’d missed before. A strip of unruly yew trees ahead now re-presented itself as a hedge, neglected and wild but a hedge nonetheless; on the northern horizon between two dense clumps of wildflowers, she could make out what appeared to be the span of a bridge; the broken gate she’d climbed through no longer seemed a rudimentary division between two natural spaces but an overrun border between civilisation and the wilderness. Which meant this plot of land she traversed wasn’t an uncultivated field, but a garden. At least, it had been once.

  A howl came from the other side of the yew hedge and Ash answered loudly before disappearing through a gap in the greenery. Sadie did the same, but stopped abruptly when she reached the other side. An ink-like mass of stagnant water lay before her, glassy in the still of the dense clearing. Willows made a ring around the water’s edge, and from its centre there rose a great muddy mound, an island of sorts. There were ducks everywhere, coots and moorhens, too, and the smell was rich and grubbily fertile. The feeling was uncanny, of avian eyes watching, dark and shiny.

  Ramsay howled again, and Sadie followed his call around the lake’s wet bank, decades of duck mess making it slimy underfoot. It was slippery and she went carefully beneath the trees. Ash was barking now too, standing on the far side of the lake on a wooden jetty, his nose raised skywards as he sounded the alarm.

  Sadie brushed aside the weeping fingers of a willow, leaning to avoid a peculiar glass dome hanging from a rusted length of chain. She passed another four orbs along the way, all similarly clouded with dirt, t
heir insides layered with generations of spidery web. She ran her hand lightly around the base of one, admiring its strange allure, wondering at its purpose. These were odd fruit hanging there amongst the leaves.

  When she reached the jetty, Sadie saw that one of Ramsay’s hind legs had broken through a hole in the rotting timber. He was panicking, and she picked her way quickly but carefully across the planks. She knelt, stroking his ears to calm him as she established there was no serious injury and considered the best way to get him out. In the end she could think of nothing better than to hold him in a clinch and heave. Ramsay was less than grateful, scrabbling his claws against the decking, barking with pained indignation. “I know, I know,” muttered Sadie. “Some of us just aren’t very good at being helped.”

  Finally she managed to extricate him, collapsing on her back to catch her breath as the dog, ruffled but evidently unhurt, leapt clear of the jetty. Sadie closed her eyes and laughed when Ash gave her neck an appreciative lick. A small voice warned that the boards might collapse at any moment but she was too exhausted to pay it any heed.

  The sun had risen now, high in the sky, and its warmth on her face was godly. Sadie had never been the meditating type, but in this moment she understood what people were on about. A sigh of contentment escaped her lips, even though contented was the last word she’d have chosen to describe herself of late. She could hear her own breaths, her pulse pumping beneath the thin skin of her temple, as loudly as if she held a conch shell to her ear to eavesdrop on the ocean.

  Without sight to get in the way of things, the whole world was suddenly alive with sound: the lapping of water as it washed around the posts below her, the splashing and skimming of ducks as they landed on the lake’s surface, the wooden planks stretching beneath the sun’s glare. As she listened, Sadie became aware of a thick blanketing hum behind it all, like hundreds of tiny motors whirring at once. It was a sound synonymous with summer, difficult to place at first, but then she realised. Insects, a hell of a lot of insects.

  Sadie sat up, blinking into the brightness. The world was briefly white before everything righted itself. Lily pads glistened, heart-shaped tiles on the water’s surface, flowers reaching for the sky like pretty, grasping hands. The air surrounding them was filled with hundreds of small winged creatures. She scrambled to her feet and was about to call for the dogs when something on the other side of the lake caught her attention.

  In the middle of a sunlit clearing stood a house. A brick house with twin gables and a front door tucked beneath a portico. Multiple chimneys rose from the tiled roof and three levels of leadlight windows winked conspiratorially in the sun. A climber, green-leafed and voracious, clung to the brick face of the building and small birds flew busily in and out of the fretwork of tendrils, creating an effect of constant movement. Sadie whistled under her breath. “What’s a grand old lady like you doing in a place like this?” She’d only spoken quietly but her voice was foreign and unwelcome, her humour forced, an intrusion on the profound natural exuberance of the garden.

  Sadie started around the lake towards the house; its pull was magnetic. The ducks and wild birds ignored her, their obliviousness combining somehow with the warmth of the day, the moist humidity of the lake, to feed the atmosphere of cloying enclosure.

  There was a path, she noted as she reached the other side, mostly grown over due to encroaching hawthorn, but leading all the way to the front door. She scuffed the toe of her running shoe against the surface. Stone. Probably pale pinkish-brown once, like the rest of the local stone in the village buildings, but time and neglect had tarred it black.

  The house, she saw as she drew nearer, had been as thoroughly forgotten as the garden. Tiles were missing from the roof, some of them lying shattered where they’d fallen, and one of the window panes on the top floor was broken. The remaining glass wore a thick render of bird droppings and white stalactites drooped from the sill, spilling onto the glossy leaves below.

  As if to lay claim to the impressive clumps, a small bird launched itself from behind the broken glass, diving in a direct line before correcting to swoop fast and close by Sadie’s ear. She flinched but stood her ground. They were everywhere, those little birds she’d glimpsed from the lake, darting in and out of the creeper’s dark spaces and calling to one another in urgent chirrups. Not just birds either; the foliage teemed with insects of all descriptions—butterflies, bees and others she couldn’t name, giving the building an appearance of constant animation at odds with its dilapidated state.

  It was tempting to assume the house was empty, but Sadie had been sent on call to enough homes of the elderly to know that the appearance of abandonment often masked a sorry story inside. A dull brass knocker shaped like a fox’s head hung lopsided from the chipped wooden door and she lifted a hand towards it before lowering it again. What would she say if someone answered? Sadie flexed her fingers one by one, considering. There was no reason she should be here today. No excuse she could give. A trespassing charge was the last thing she needed. But even as she thought it, Sadie knew she was speculating unnecessarily. The house before her was deserted. It was hard to put into words, but there was a look about it, an aura it gave off. She just knew.

  A panel of decorative glass had been set above the door, four figures in long robes, each depicted against a background representing a different season. It wasn’t a religious picture, as far as Sadie could tell, but the effect was similar. There was an earnestness to the design—a reverence, she supposed—that made her think of the stained-glass windows in churches. Sadie manoeuvred a large dirty planter closer to the door and climbed gingerly onto the rim.

  Through a largish piece of clear glass, she glimpsed an entrance hall with an oval table at its centre. A vase stood on the tabletop, a bulb-shaped china jug with flowers painted on its side and—she squinted—a faint gold pattern snaking up the handle. A few thin branches of something brittle, willow perhaps, were arranged haphazardly within and there were dry leaves scattered beneath. A chandelier—crystal, glass, something fancy—was suspended from a plaster rose on the ceiling and a wide flight of stairs with worn red carpet curled upwards and away at the back of the hall. There was a round mirror on the wall to the left, hanging by a closed door.

  Sadie jumped off the planter. A knotted garden ran along the front of the house beside the portico and she clambered through it, prickles catching her T-shirt as she picked a path through the brambles. There was a strong but not unpleasant smell—moist earth, decomposing leaf matter, new flowers beginning to catch the day’s sun—and great fat bumblebees were busy already collecting pollen from a profusion of small pink and white blooms. Blackberries: Sadie surprised herself by dredging up the knowledge. They were blackberry flowers, and in a few months’ time the bushes would be heavy with fruit.

  When she reached the window, Sadie noticed that something had been etched into the wooden frame, some letters, an A, maybe an E, crudely carved and dark green with mould. She traced her fingers along the deep grooves, wondering idly who had made them. A curled piece of iron jutted out from amid the thick overgrowth beneath the sill and Sadie pulled the branches aside to discover the rusted remnants of a garden seat. She glanced over her shoulder at the jungle she’d just traversed. Difficult to imagine that a person had once been able to sit here comfortably, looking out over what must then have been a well-kept garden.

  That strange, almost ominous, feeling was there again but Sadie shook it off. She dealt in facts, not feelings, and after recent events it was as well to remind herself of that. She steepled her hands against a glass pane and pressed her face to them, peering through the window.

  The room was dim, but as her eyes adjusted certain objects began to stand out from the gloom: a grand piano in the corner by the door, a sofa in the centre with a pair of armchairs turned to face it, a fireplace in the far wall. Sadie experienced the familiar, agreeable sensation of opening the lid on someone else’s life. She
considered such moments a perk of her job, even if she often saw ugly things; she’d always been fascinated by the way other people lived. And although this wasn’t a crime scene and she wasn’t a detective on duty, Sadie automatically started making mental notes.

  The walls were papered in a faded floral design, greyish-mauve, and covered with shelves that sagged beneath the weight of a thousand books. A large painted portrait stood sentinel above the fireplace, a woman with a fine nose and a secretive smile. A pair of French doors bordered by thick damask curtains were set in the adjacent wall. Presumably the doors had led once to a side garden, and sun had spilled through the glass on mornings like this to cast warm, bright squares on the carpet floor. But not anymore. A tenacious weave of ivy made sure of that, clinging to the glass and letting in only the merest specks of light. Beside the doors stood a narrow wooden table on which a photograph was displayed in a fancy frame. It was too dark to see the subject, and even if the light had been better an old-fashioned teacup and saucer blocked Sadie’s view.

  She sucked in her lips, considering. In some ways—the open piano lid, the sofa cushions askew, the teacup on the table—the room gave the impression that whoever had been there last had only just left and would be back any minute; yet at the same time there was an eerie, somehow permanent, stillness about the world on the other side of the glass. The room seemed frozen, its contents suspended, as if even the air, that most relentless of all elements, had been shut outside, as if it would be difficult to breathe inside. There was something else, too. Something that suggested the room had been that way for a long time. Sadie had thought at first it was her straining eyes, before she realised that the room’s dull glaze was actually caused by a thick layer of dust.