“Did he age?” Andy inquired. “The new one?”
“He didn’t have much of a chance,” Kerri said, “because in nineteen forty-nine that happened.”
She pointed to bow, and Andy turned her head again to the looming isle and the backlit, mutilated shape of Deboën Mansion.
The boat and the shadow of the isle had finally met, and under its shelter the colors of the landmass could be told apart, trees from buildings. Andy soon realized that the house, much like the lake, was immune to rediscovery shrinkage. It was grand. Disturbingly big, as overgrown fungi and beetles are—the size something growing by itself in the woods should never reach.
In the area where Kerri was pointing, the top section of the east wing was bitten off, wooden beams torn like blades of grass, the gaping hole covered by brambles like blood platelets containing a hemorrhage.
Kerri again looked through her binoculars. “Did we bring a rope? There isn’t one on the dock.”
“It’s okay, I’ll pull us into the shore,” Andy said.
“I’ll help.”
“No, you can’t.” Andy chin-pointed at her suede boots. “You always did overdress for camping.”
—
Andy jumped a few yards out and sank only to her knees. Tim followed and swiftly paddled to the surface, again becoming the first of the party to land on a new setting.
Andy was still dragging the boat to land when she noticed tracks in the mud under her feet. She checked her soles.
“These footprints are fresh.”
Kerri and Nate disembarked and checked the area. There were deep, fresh prints of a large-sized shoe.
“Funny how they lead away from the water,” Nate said.
Everyone looked up at the mansion after that remark. In front of them, beyond depressed willows and hunchbacked oaks, the house rose, vast and overdetailed with windows and balustrades and balconies and towers and chimneys, unfolding in odd symmetries, jagged by dormer windows, crawling with salamanders of stone and live ones too. Ivy crept all over it, from the mold-scarred foundations to the shingles, covering up the riot of ruins in the east wing, peering through the glass, exploring the columned porch. Weeds brimmed over the stone chalices. Rotting acorns carpeted the stairs. Firs stood like sentinels far above the tallest roof, guarding it, hailing the darkness.
Tim’s human entourage followed the dog into the growth, striding over some fallen boughs and onto the disregarded clearing in front of the porch. He nose-scanned the mold on the right pillar as the other three squinted at the high-reaching crown of the building.
“Just the way we left it,” Andy said almost through a resigned sigh. “I kinda hoped someone would’ve knocked it down.”
“Yeah. And put a 7-Eleven in its place,” Nate seconded.
“Never too late,” Kerri thirded.
Andy breathed in and stepped forward before anyone could stop her. The dog’s obliviousness to dramatic shots had inspired her. The sudden bravado took her up the stairs, acorns popping under her soles, and up to the front door.
“We aren’t going in, right?” she heard Kerri ask.
“No,” she whispered, staring at the chain and padlock around the double door’s handles. Cruised by snails, the half-digested remnants of an irreverently yellow sticker babbled something about a safety hazard. “The place’s been locked,” she informed the others. “For many years, I think.”
“Maybe they didn’t want any more kids fooling around,” Kerri said.
“But the footprints. Someone’s been here recently. Maybe still is.”
Kerri gave it a thought and found no rational argument against yelling out: “Hello! Is anyone there?”
A crow fluttered away, its complaints fading quickly into a not-so-great distance. Then a hush fell over like a deflating balloon. Tim sneezed somewhere.
“If they were still here, there’d be a boat,” Nate reasoned.
“Or there were two people, and someone rowed back.”
Andy hurried downstairs again, feeling the porch frown behind her back.
Tim sneezed again, then puffed twice, shaking his head vigorously.
“Tim? Please don’t tell me you inhaled a slug again.” Kerri knelt beside him, but Tim didn’t linger about, busy trying to clear his nasal conduct. Instead, Kerri noticed something on the ground. The dirt was humid and black, difficult to find under several autumnfuls of leaves, but a few scattered spots of neon yellow stood out.
Kerri took a pinch of dust, smelled it, wiped her fingers and nose. “Sulfur.”
“So…Satan’s been here?” Andy wondered.
“No. Elemental sulfur is used as a fungicide in gardening.”
Nate glanced around. He could almost feel the mildew inside his nostrils. “Not doing a very good job.”
“This has been here awhile,” Kerri said. “It seems to follow a line.”
The trail, not so much a dotted line as a vague row of spots of less enthusiastic undergrowth, led them away from the house, as away as the isle allowed: the westernmost tip stretched only some sixty yards from the building. Some feet short of the water they faced one monumental tree. It was a fir. The trunk, too thick to embrace, exhibited a large, oozing ulcer in front, slightly above their line of sight, exposing a large cavity in the wood.
This distracted them at first from the symbol painted over the wound. It appeared to be a monogram of sorts, more complex than a letter, somewhat simpler than an advanced Chinese character, though it resembled the latter in the way it had been drawn, a convoluted glyph broken down to simple strokes. In red.
“Is that…?”
“Paint,” Kerri assured Andy.
Nate swallowed what felt like a tennis ball in his throat.
“I’ve seen this symbol before.”
Andy turned to find him iceberg white, eyes fixed on the red mark. “You mean here, thirteen years ago?” she prompted.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Man, you all right?”
Nate blinked out of the trance, seemingly surprised to be welcomed by Andy on the other side. “Yeah. Fine.”
“Fine,” she echoed. “Let’s follow the sulfur trail the other way. Kerri?”
Kerri was standing in front of the tree watching the tiny maggots feeding on the edges of the gash.
“Kerri, what’s up?”
It took her a little time to gather the grit to raise her arm and reach into the hole. Her fingers dipped in a pool of sticky resin. Then something grassy. A plump black beetle came scuttling down her arm.
“Ew,” Andy contributed.
Kerri grasped something, then retracted her hand, shaking the bugs off, and looked at the tiny bundle of straws and twigs in her palm—a sort of spherical bird nest.
Gently, she unwrapped it. At last her face surrendered to a grimace.
“Fuck.”
“Oh, God,” Andy groaned. “Is it human?”
They all leaned over the small treasure in Kerri’s hands. It was a tooth—a little too small for a human molar, Kerri considered, but too big for a burrowing animal or anything a bird would prey on.
“What does it mean?” Andy asked.
“I don’t know.” Kerri returned the tooth to the nest and tossed it into the tree hole.
“You’re putting it back?”
“Why not?”
“It’s a clue.”
“I don’t wanna carry a tooth around, and I have no way of telling where it comes from. If we happen to need it again, we know where we left it, right?”
“Yeah. I guess,” Andy slowly assented. “There’s more of that sulfur that way and that way. Let’s follow the trails.”
They tried, but the lines proved too blurry to follow, and in both cases they seemed to lead straight to the water. However, upon following the first trail in the opposite direction, they found another two monograms in red.
One was painted on a tree stump on the south side, facing inland, lurking over a parapet of bony shrubs. It was as inex
tricable as the first, but definitely different.
From there, they made out another line leading to the east, past the beach where they had landed. A decrepit willow, veiled by a curtain of its own drooping branches, slouched there, leaning suicidally over the water. Andy pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the vault. Inside it, a smooth marble slab, once white, now marred with mud and weeds, lay forever sheltered from sunlight.
“Daniel Deboën’s grave,” Kerri captioned. “Killed in the fire in ’forty-nine and buried here on his isle according to his will.”
“I remember this,” Andy said.
“I don’t think we saw this, though,” Nate said, pointing at the third monogram painted on the trunk. Again, in red.
“These marks look old,” Kerri observed. “Maybe they were here last time, but it was too dark to find them?” She was addressing Nate now. “Where else could you have seen them?”
“A book,” he said, a fingernail scratching the paint. And then, focusing on Kerri, he added: “My kind of book. Not yours.”
Andy tried to dispel the gloom and let the curtain of branches fall. They drifted away from the willow like they would from an old man offering candy.
Kerri stayed near the shore, making sure the boat didn’t move until Andy decided it was time to go. Nate spent some time copying down the monograms on a piece of paper.
Andy borrowed Kerri’s binoculars for a last tour around the house. With the doors padlocked and the first-story windows barred and shuttered, there was not much left to explore. Still, the isle had its own exclaves. A row of small, sharp rocks lay scattered beyond the contour of the mainland. A solitary shape swam stranded some sixty yards off the northern shore. Night was falling too quickly, but with the help of the binoculars Andy made out a buoy.
“Hey, Nate. Check this out.”
Nate stood facing the house, seemingly studying the rear façade. More specifically, the round window atop the house.
“Nate. You okay?”
What made her queasy was not that he didn’t stop looking. It was that Tim was right next to him, looking up too.
“Nate!”
“Yeah,” the boy said as he clicked back. “Sorry. I remember that room.”
“Me too,” she joined in, reminiscing. “It’s where we set the booby trap with the serving cart and the fishing net. The ‘Lake Creature Phony Express,’ wasn’t it?”
“That was a good trap,” Peter rated, standing between them. “Simple mechanics, flashy results. Instant classic. Also, catchy name.”
“Too bad it caught the wrong guy,” Nate said to Peter’s face, but instead he found himself confronting Andy.
She gave him the kind of concerned, furrowed squint that mental patients often complain about getting from strangers in group therapy.
Tim had lost interest in the house and padded off to join Kerri by the pier.
“Hey, check out that thing on the water,” Andy said. She walked Nate to the shore and gave him the binoculars.
“Yeah, it’s a buoy,” he quickly concluded. “Maybe it signals a reef or something that can be a danger to boats.”
He didn’t try to make it sound convincing, but Andy didn’t come up with anything better.
“It’s called Necronomicon.”
“Nec-what?” Andy frowned. “What is?”
“The book. The one the symbols come from. It’s a grimoire.” He caught her second frown, rephrased: “A book of spells, a witchcraft manual, written a thousand years ago; almost all copies were burned; most people don’t even think it’s real, but it is. There was a copy in the house, in the attic.”
Andy made sure to process all the information, rogered it with a nod.
“Don’t tell Kerri about this,” Nate added.
“What? Why? I don’t want to complimentalize information.”
“Compartmentalize.”
“Yeah, that. It’s important we don’t keep things from each other; we should all be on the same page.”
“Look, Kerri is on the ecovillain page now. She’s not ready to accept something unnatural is going on here, but there is. There always was. The…creature. The hanged corpses. Whatever capsized our boat that night.”
“Nate, how many times did we think we were chasing, or being chased by, ghouls and monsters? And every time it was a guy in a mask.”
“Yes, I know, we were kids. But Damian Deboën was real. That book was real. And the symbols and the sulfur and the tooth are not props meant to scare children away. They are signs of a very old science. Not the kind Kerri took in college.”
Andy gazed back at the round attic window on top of the mansion. The dark, resilient glass returned her tough, jail-inmate glare.
“Okay,” she said, appeasing him. “Point taken. Let’s go back; it’s getting late.”
—
A couple of raccoons had approached the tent in their absence and were keenly admiring the product of human craftsmanship when the detectives returned. Tim took no small pleasure in shooing them away. It was still twilight, but the sun had taken all the warmth with it. Priorities such as finding kindling for the fire and preparing dinner kept them busy.
The night was cold but gentle like an X-rated metaphor. It was crowded too—with owls and fireflies and distant galaxies. Except for the latter, all of those things kept Tim alert for most of the meal, until he decided there were too many living things to chase and settled for not letting any of them steal his food, the same way the humans ate their baked beans in silence. Andy, who had lived on nonperishables for longer periods than some apocalypse survivors in Nate’s sci-fi novels, was amazed to corroborate that beans never tasted better than when cooked in Kerri’s portable aluminum pots. Those Colonel Mustards in England sure knew their shit.
“So,” she chose as the first word in almost an hour, still chomping through the last of her meal. “Not bad for day one. We have some clues to follow.”
Kerri and Nate munched a little slower and said nothing.
“Maybe it was a little late in the day to go to the isle, but I think it was a good move anyway, to prove to ourselves there is no imminent threat. We can go back tomorrow when it’s light and keep searching. Or the owner of the boat might appear and he may have some info to share.”
Kerri side-glanced at her, mouth full, and nodded.
“So what do you think?” Andy invited. “What’s the best piece of intelligence we gathered today?”
Nate put down his plate and fork, wiped his mouth, and carefully considered the question. “That Joey Krantz had a girlfriend?”
Kerri made sure to swallow first, then laughed gently. Nate popped a last bit of bacon in his mouth. “I mean, it’s not a shock, but it kinda hurts. Makes you lose faith in humanity, doesn’t it?”
Andy smiled and mentally dismissed the meeting. It had been a good first day.
—
A malicious wind rose from the lake soon after dinner and the party chose to relinquish the fire and move to shelter. The tent was bound to be warm enough, especially considering it was designed to fit two kids and now had to lodge three adults and a Weimaraner. In the old days, Peter used to bring his own tent to Blyton Hills, thus providing separate housing for the boys. Fortunately, Aunt Margo had kept the extra sleeping bags and Sean’s old blanket. Tim lay on it now, nursing his plastic penguin and whispering into its ear what a dangerous world there was outside the kerosene-lit tent.
KERRI: Come on, you start.
ANDY: Okay. Uh…F.
NATE: (Quickly.) F.
KERRI: F.
ANDY: (Stares at her.) Three Fs? Fuck off!
NATE: (Processing that.) Hey, very good.
(Andy smiles, realizing.)
KERRI: It was actually “fluffy,” but whatever, that deserves winning. (Slipping into her bag and removing her sweater.) Nate, your turn.
NATE: Okay. B.
ANDY: “Boobs.”
(Hush.)
NATE: (Staring, mind blown.) How the hell…That w
as uncanny!
KERRI: (To Andy.) It wasn’t even your turn! (To Nate.) Why are you thinking boobs, you perv? We’re family!
NATE: Look, I was in the boys’ ward at Arkham until just a week ago, okay? I’m rediscovering the amenities of coed, what can I say? It’s cozy, it smells good, I’m all positive thoughts. I don’t know why you’d ever want to sleep in the boys’ tent.
ANDY: I never wanted to sleep in the boys’ tent!
KERRI: Okay, whatever; lights off before Nate decides to start a royal dynasty with me.
NATE: (Slipping into his bag as well.) Yeah, yeah. Don’t come rubbing on to me for body heat later.
KERRI: If you feel that happening, that would be Tim. (She turns down the Coleman lantern; the dark takes over.) Good night.
NATE: Night.
Andy mouthed good night, zipped her bag up, and closed her eyes.
—
She was only halfway to sleep when she felt the rustling in Kerri’s bag. The clarity surprised her: she was able to discern the silhouettes of everybody in the tent against the blue canvas—all smooth, streamlined shapes, except for the infinitely complex fractal pattern of Kerri’s hair.
“Hey,” Andy whispered. Her head and Kerri’s were very close. “Can’t sleep?”
She heard a smile.
“I’ll never have a warm night again,” Kerri said.
A zipper slid a few teeth back. Andy couldn’t really see it in the dark, but somehow she felt one of Kerri’s hands moving into her line of sight. It stopped there, lying on the tent mat, inches short of her face. Andy stuck out her own hand to meet hers. Fingers clasped gently like plants coiling around each other.
Andy closed her eyes. Kerri’s hand was warm and white and so rarely soft like one of the only three species of flowers native to Antarctica.
“It’s all gonna be okay,” she murmured. And the sound wave from her rosé lips flew like a leaf in the wind across an ocean twelve inches wide, over the island of clasped trees, right into Kerri’s ear, with no one else in the whole universe noticing.
—
The next time Andy opened her eyes, she knew within a second that things were not okay.
If her hand had still been holding Kerri’s up to that point, she failed to notice; she was already sitting up by the time she thought about it. The light outside the tent was white, though it was not exactly light. Light shines; this just hung there like stagnant water. The thought occurred to Andy that the whole tent had been dropped into the lake, which would also explain the solid silence. Tim was up, and so were his ears, to the best of their ability, radaring for insects, birds, wind. In vain.
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