Latham's Landing

by Tara Fox Hall

  I lost it. I grabbed hold of him, expecting him to fade into smoke or disappear, but instead it was like reaching into ice water. I gasped in shock as my hands clasped onto bony arms, and the boy let loose a snarl, his eyes narrowing to red pinpricks as he bared his teeth and tried to sink them into my hand.

  I began to pray desperately to God, and the boy shrieked, trying harder to bite me. I threw him from me, out of my way, and he slammed into the wall and vanished, raising a puff of dust.

  I ran for the front door, threw it open, and let out another scream. A girl stood there who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She was swaying, her eyes crazy.

  “They’re gone,” she said in a singsong voice. “They’re all gone.”

  I led her outside, shut the door, and sat her down on the stairs. “Who are you? Who’s gone?”

  “They’re all gone.”

  “Who’s gone?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Try something else. “Can you show me where they went?”

  “They went into the house. And now they’re gone.”

  I let her go and looked toward the sun. It was still high, but clouds were rolling in now, and the waves were beginning to be choppy.

  “Can you show me where they went?”

  “They’re gone!” she shrieked loudly.

  I hauled off and slapped her hard, knocking her to the ground. “If anyone’s having hysterics, it’s going to be me.”

  She seemed a bit better after the slap, so I helped her up.

  “Now listen,” I said. “We have to go back in because the only boat is on the other side of the house. We’d have to swim otherwise, at least for part of it, and I don’t know how safe that is. If there’s an undertow out here, we’d be goners.”

  “I don’t w-w-want to go back in!” she stammered, tears leaking from her eyes.

  “Me neither,” I said heartily. “But we have to. So let’s get going before we decide we’re better off killing ourselves trying to walk back on those rocks.”

  She grabbed hold of my hand, and I followed her inside. I debated locking the door behind us, but the only lock was the padlock, and I didn’t see a way to do it.

  We stood at the base of the stairs. There was no trace of anyone, only my footsteps in the dust, and Sandy’s.

  “We came through there,” she whispered, pointing. I saw what seemed to be a porch with many windows off to one side of the house.

  “Can we get back that way?”

  “We walked over from the glass house,” she sniffled. “We couldn’t find Alice. And we saw a light on at the house—”

  “You were here at night—?” I abruptly cut off, remembering that the electric lights here didn’t work. Gulp.

  “We rowed over a few boats and a mattress last night. We didn’t know there was one already here. We tied up the boats, but a wind came up, and the ropes snapped. It was dark, and there was nothing we could do until morning. So we partied a little, smoked some grass, had a little sex, and fell asleep.”

  “Something woke us around midnight. That’s when we noticed Alice was gone. We were going to have to borrow a boat anyway to get home, or our parents were going to ground us for sure. When we saw the light on here, we figured Alice had gone over to the main house for some reason.”

  I gave her an incredulous look. Her lucidity came back instantly, anger flushing her face.

  “Don’t look at me like I’m an idiot! I know how that sounds! But we didn’t want to admit to ourselves that something had happened to her. It was even scarier to think someone had grabbed her to lead us to the main house. We couldn’t not look for her! What kind of friends would that make us?”

  I felt guilty, thinking of Sandy still in here somewhere. “Let’s look then, but we need to hurry, okay?”

  “I’m all for working fast,” she said worriedly.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Laura.”

  “I’m Tina. Let’s go.”

  I’d already checked all the rooms, but I checked them again, Laura in tow. There was nothing, except now there were so many footprints I couldn’t be sure which were mine, and which were Sandy’s.

  “No one’s here. Come on, Laura. There’s nothing we can do but go get help.”

  I walked with her back outside, heading toward the raft. To my relief the raft’s rope was still tied tightly. But my heart skipped a beat as the raft itself looked a little deflated.

  I ran down to it. A quick check revealed it was leaking air. The wind had shifted it against the granite rocks, slicing open a small gash in the sturdy rubber.

  I grabbed the emergency kit from inside it and took out the duct tape, plastering some over the hole. I didn’t have anything to re-inflate the raft and didn’t want to risk opening the air valve, in case more air got out. For all I knew, I needed a compressor to inflate a raft like this. Laura wasn’t going to be any help…

  I checked my watch. It was nearly six. Shit! Where had the day gone?

  “Stay here,” I said to her, thinking fast. “We’re going to have to go slowly, with the raft damaged, and we’re not going to get back before dark, most likely. We need some kind of light. I’m going to run up there to where the car is and check the shed.”

  “Okay,” she replied docilely, her eyes vacant.

  I sat her down near the raft and ran up the stone steps. I reached the garage and shuffled through the car, thankful that Sandy had left the door unlocked. There was no flashlight, but there were some flares and a few light sticks which I grabbed. I shut the door and ran back down to the raft to find Laura gone.

  Christ! I looked around and glimpsed her shadow near the rocks. She was near the base of the house, near a door I hadn’t seen before. I screamed out for her to stop, but she opened the door and went inside.

  I ran as fast as I could over to where she had been and opened the door.

  Water lapped at my feet. This must be the part of the house that had flooded.

  I couldn’t see well. I grabbed a light stick from my pocket and cracked it. Light revealed a hallway, maybe the hallway that Laura had showed me the doorway to at the other end of the house. It seemed very long, and there was a heavy gloom at the other end. At the far end, something seemed to move in the blackness.

  “Laura?” I called.

  There was a faint splash, then another.

  I looked to my right and let out a scream. Bodies were drifting in the water. I counted at least five, but it was hard to see, and they were tangled together. There looked to be three young women and two young men. One of the women had long black hair. Black hair like Laura’s.

  I ran to her side, splashing through the water and turned her over. “Laura!”

  Her eyes were open and unseeing, her mouth open in a scream. There were bruises on her throat from hands.

  I turned around and ran for the door, splashing through the water, cursing my stupidity. I got to the door in a few seconds, but it had somehow shut behind me and now it was stuck.

  I yanked at it frantically, pulling hard. Again, from behind me, there came a faint splash. And then another.

  Something was coming closer. Something from the end of that long hallway of watery darkness.

  I didn’t look. I just grabbed the door and pulled, praying to God the fucking thing would open. With a rusty creaking sound, it opened just a few inches.

  I wedged my body in the gap and pushed with my feet, sliding partway through. I flailed, pushing and pulling with my arms, still hearing that methodical splashing getting louder and louder. With a tearing of cloth, I shoved free of the door and got out into the sunlight, whimpering with relief.

  I turned to shut the door. There was a dark figure walking out of the shadows through the water. It seemed to be a tall man, but I only had a glimpse before I slammed the door shut. I grabbed the nearest rock, wedged it in front of the door and then backed away, breathing hard.

  I stood there for several minutes, calming myself, telling myself it
was okay, I was okay. The sun was out; there wasn’t any wind, really, so…

  A splash came from the other side of the door. Slowly, the knob began to turn.

  I let out a shriek and ran for the raft. I pushed it out into the water and started the motor, not caring that my socks and shoes were wet. Then I gunned the motor, not caring if I drowned, so long as I didn’t end up on that island as a ghost.

  The journey back took me almost two hours. Some of that was because I wasn’t used to the engine or steering a boat, and I couldn’t find a happy medium between stalling and top speed. Some of that was because the duct tape came off, and the air leaked out more and more, the closer I got to land.

  When I got a hundred yards out from the dock, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. A wind had come up, and it was forcing me back toward the island, even as my motor tried its best to propel me to shore.

  I finally steered into the west outcropping of the lake, where a stream diverted out. As the water finally came over the edges of the boat, I stepped into marshy stagnant water and staggered up on shore. I pulled the mostly deflated boat behind me and collapsed, praising God, and swearing never to set foot on a boat again.

  Several hours later, Fred found me. I had lit the flares, all of them, and he rode up on an ATV. Headlights had never looked so welcoming.

  He deflated and stowed the raft, saying he could fix it, then gave me a ride back to the dock. There in his office, over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, I told him everything.

  He just nodded afterwards. “Expected something like that.”

  “What should I do?” I said, shivering. “I feel like I should go back there, Fred. I abandoned her.”

  “Some people you can’t save,” he said, shrugging and pouring another glass. “You told her not to go back in there. As it is, you barely got out of there, girl.”

  “The police will want me to show them where I found the bodies—”

  “I’m telling you right now, you go to that island again, you won’t be coming back, no matter who is with you. Understand?”

  I swallowed and nodded.

  “You’re going to go in and have a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll go out and look for your friend.”

  “Why doesn’t it get you?” I asked shakily, taking a gulp of whiskey. “You’ve been going there for years!”

  “It needs me to look after it,” Fred said resentfully. “The damned house or whatever it is that lives there knows that, Tina, and so it leaves me alone. But the day I retire, I’ll never set foot there again. And I’m always careful, never going there after dark. It was the damn fool kids who stirred things up, or your friend, looking for her kin.”

  For a while, we just sipped our whiskey in silence.

  “She was a ghost, wasn’t she?” I whispered finally. “Laura was a ghost.”

  “I’d say so,” Fred said, nodding once. “She was sent to stop you long enough to trap you there, long enough for the raft to deflate, or something to sink its claws into your soul. It’s God’s truth I’d not be talking to you now, if you’d stayed there past nightfall.”

  The rest is a matter of public knowledge. You probably know it all, but I’ll go over the basics.

  Fred went out to the island early the next morning. He drove first to the Sea Room and found the mattresses, and other stuff, and hung up the phones, both of which he said were off the hook. But once he did, they worked just fine.

  He wasn’t able to find any fillings, he said, but he admitted he didn’t look that hard. He checked outside, and sure enough, there was some frayed rope tied to one of the bridge supports, but no boats.

  He drove back to the main house and searched it, top to bottom. There was no sign of Sandy. He said he looked for footprints, but saw only hers and mine.

  Last, he went to the bottom door I had told him about. He said that the rock was missing. Yet the place where it had been was obvious. The door bottom was broken, where some powerful force had been used to shove the door open over the rock, shattering the half-rotted wood.

  Inside, in the flooded part of the house, he found the bodies. The worst news was that Sandy’s was there, too.

  There was an investigation, of course. A team went to the island and went over every inch of it, probably much as they had twenty years ago for Sandy’s cousin Henry. But they found nothing. No fingerprints, except Sandy’s and mine. And the same was true for the Sea Room, except they did find the kids’ fingerprints there. All five of them.

  The flooded part of the house was too decayed to risk draining. Divers went in and looked around in the muck, hoping to find Henry, whose body had never been found.

  That led to more questions, when they brought out the old skeleton of a young woman. Speculation was that this was Latham’s wife, but nothing could be proven. And that was all they found.

  The house was boarded up, all its doors were locked, and notices put up that trespassing was prohibited. There was nothing more that could be done, or so the authorities said.

  Sandy’s Aunt Red told me that in a letter she wrote, telling me not to blame myself, that she blamed herself, for telling Sandy all she had of Latham’s Landing. She told me it wasn’t my fault.

  But Sandy wasn’t there in the water with Laura, Alice, and the rest, not when I was in that water-filled hallway. She was brought there later or her body was.

  I tell myself she was dead when I fled. I tell myself I searched for her the best I could, and I’d just be dead, too, if I’d stayed looking for her any longer.

  Yet I know in my guilty heart she wouldn’t have left me behind, if I’d been the one missing. She’d have stayed, even if it meant her life, or that we’d both be ghosts there forever. And that thought eats at my soul.

  The Origin of Fear

  “You’ll have fun, I promise,” Nikki said, her eyes sparkling.

  “This isn’t a trip to an amusement park,” Daryl replied curtly, leaning back in his chair. “We aren’t a bunch of teenagers out for a thrill. When I say no alcohol, I mean it.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Sam said, laughing. “Sure, you’re going for some kind of research for your thesis, but the rest of us are going because we think it’s exciting.” He signaled the waitress. “Check, please.”

  “I’m not sure,” Marie said uneasily, rooting in her purse. “Breaking into a house sounds like a bad idea to me.”

  “If they’d let us go there legally, we wouldn’t need to break in,” Daryl said irritably.

  “Like you told us, there have been some deaths out there,” Sam said with a shrug of his shoulders. “It makes sense the owners don’t want to risk any trouble for a little cash.”

  Daryl scowled. “Even that damn old man who runs the docks refused to cooperate. I offered him a hundred dollars. He turned me down cold.”

  “You shouldn’t blame him,” Marie said defensively. “He’s just doing his job.”

  Daryl grumbled something, then took the bill from the waitress.

  “We’re going to have a blast,” Nikki said excitedly, throwing her money down. “The best part is that it’ll be close to Halloween.”

  “We can’t do it that night,” Daryl warned. “They’ve got extra security on Halloween, because of past pranks. Police patrol in a boat on weekends regularly, or so the dock man informed me. It has to be a weeknight.”

  Nikki laughed. “Everyone wants to visit a haunted house on Halloween, especially a real one.”

  “Police have no sense of humour,” Sam muttered. “We can’t get caught, kids. If we do, we’re not going to get off with a warning.”

  “I told you, I can get a boat,” Marie interjected. “My brother’s got one he’ll loan me. It’s small, but it has a motor and can fit four. The bigger problem is the currents around Cairn Isle. We have to be careful—”

  “Cairn Isle?” Nikki laughed again. “You’ve never called it that before.”

  “That’s what the locals call it, because of all the deaths,” Marie said defensively. “Ca
rl Isle is its legal name. But no one calls it that.”

  “What do they call it?” Nikki asked.

  “Latham’s Landing,” Daryl said with relish, letting the name roll over his tongue. “It’s going to be crucial to my paper on the origin of fear for my psychology of mind class. With luck, I’m hoping to turn it into a dissertation.”

  “How did you ever hear of it?” Sam asked. “I never have.”

  “It’s not something the locals advertise,” Daryl replied. “They’re closemouthed about it, these farmers, and they don’t like strangers. Even the historical society that owns the house doesn’t promote it. Their website had almost nothing—”

  “What did it have?” Sam asked, interested.

  “Just that a man named Hans Latham got rich in the ship business, and that he built this home when he retired.”

  “So why go there?” Sam persisted.

  “Because it’s a focal point for so much intense fear,” Daryl explained. “Though the local sites didn’t have much to say, the haunted house sites had a ton on this place. Compared to the factories and monasteries those ghost hunters visit, this is the mother lode in term of attributed deaths—”

  “Attributed deaths?” Marie said, arching her brows. “People have died out there. I know one personally: my cousins’ first girlfriend and her brother. They just wanted to have a look by boat before joining up with some friends on the beach to the west. Instead they capsized and drowned.”

  “I didn’t mean that the fear wasn’t warranted,” Daryl said, placating. “I’m almost out of money, Marie, and I’ve got to graduate this spring. I need a thrilling and controversial paper if I’m going to get a good job offer. I don’t want to have to go back in the Army for another tour. Latham’s Landing is also relatively close by, which is good for my limited funds”

  “I guess we’re not going to stay at the bed and breakfast,” Nikki interjected.

  “We can’t,” Daryl replied. “We can’t question any of the locals, or go to the exhibit the bed and breakfast has, not yet. If we stay there, we’ll arouse suspicion.”