Chapter Twenty-One

There was no question she’d fired the weapon.

There was also no question she’d hit something.

Ghosts don’t bleed.

Still, she could not be certain exactly what she’d shot just seconds before, yet something deep within her suggested it was better that way. Better to not know, it told her, better to let the darkness have its mysteries on this cold, lonely, snowy night.

The blast still rang in her ears, and Barney had bolted from the room at a speed Katherine hadn’t known he possessed until that moment. She’d felt the gun kick, lunge back into her chest like she’d been shoved by someone much larger and stronger than she was, and her body still ached from the impact.

Katherine didn’t remember dropping the shotgun, but apparently she had, as when she looked down she saw it a few feet from her on the floor. It was still smoking.

What remained of the sliders did little to shield her from the storm beyond. Snow spit through the opening the blast had made, as only the lower portion of the glass remained intact, and that too was badly cracked. Blood, snow and glass lay scattered about the floor, and beyond it, the night watched her silently through the falling snow. So deceptively beautiful, she thought, another lie in the endless string that was her life.

The dripping sound and odd smell returned.

“Stay away from the window for a moment,” James whispered from somewhere behind her, lake water slurring his speech as it spewed from his lungs and gurgled past his lips. “They can see us.”

“Stop this, James,” she said, her voice exhausted and drawn. “Please stop this.”

“Do you think any of this is easy for me?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

“It’s not all a lie, Katherine,” he slurred. “The love is real. My love…is real.”

“This isn’t love, James.”

“But it is. It’s a greater love that sometimes leaves us no choice but to abandon even those things we love.”

Ah, the artist and his demons. Hardly original, my love, but often accurate, the concept of the artist confronted with his or her own artistic manifestations.

“It’s the nature of the beast,” he told her, “my nature.”

“Characters in some demented play, is that all we are to you?” she asked. “Is that all I am to you?”

Rather than answer, a piece of paper blown in with the wind floated across the room and landed within Katherine’s reach. With shaking hands, she retrieved it. It was a page torn from one of James’s poetry collections on which a single poem had been written.

 

SKELETAL REMAINS

 

Deceived by hungry, ravenous compulsion

Distracted by the maddening pitter-patter

Of raindrops tickling awnings on an unseen roof.

 

Summoned to thunderstorms

Rolling to boiling points beneath skin

Like delicate crystal

Concealed in costumes of arrogance and haste

My armor a futile disguise

Useless

As all I know to be unclean 

Beckons, strips me to the bone.

 

There is nothing beyond the fog

But for illusions in the mind’s eye

Cheap parlor tricks

Performed on an ancient dusty stage

By demons grinning with deceit

My pallid skeletal remains just out of reach

As footlights flicker and burst, showering my soul

With sparks and the putrid sweet stench of charred flesh

Signaling the beginning of a new torment

And the end of one

Not yet ripe.

 

“Words,” she said, crumpling the paper and tossing it aside with what little strength she still had. “Empty words.”

“Truth, Katherine. Those words are truth.”

“It’s all perception and perspective, remember?”

“You’re angry because you thought I left you,” he said through what sounded like a rush of water spilling from his mouth. “Anger is a part of loss, and loss is a part of love. It’s the price we pay for it. Even children know there are consequences to love, Katherine.”

“Even your children, James?”

“My children even more than others.”

“Is it the lake?” she asked hopelessly.

“The lake is only metaphor, my love. Like the snake, it exists as a vehicle, a tool, but as I tried to explain to you once before not so long ago, people are haunted, not places and things.”

“Why should I believe you now when so much of everything else has been a lie?”

“Because I’m telling you the truth,” he gurgled, “and my truth is the only truth you can ever know.”

“And the others?” she asked.

“The same.”

She realized then that she could hear him—actually hear him—the sound of his voice was not in her head.

Katherine closed her eyes, remembered swimming in the lake. Not with James, but alone, on a cool summer night. The moon had been more full and luminous than normal that night, providing an unusual amount of light. She remembered moving, gliding through the water, swimming from one end of the lake to the other and then back again, feeling alive and refreshed and happy. Hadn’t she felt happy?

Yes, my love. Very happy is how I remember it too.

She remembered reaching the dock and pulling herself up, and how the water fell free of her, trickling away in steady streams. As she held tight to the edge of the dock, an enormous moon hung in the otherwise dark sky behind her, so perfect it looked as if it had been painted there.

In the not so far distance she saw the house. The tourist season would begin in less than a week, but for now, the cabins remained dark and vacant. In the house James had left a few lights on, and she could see him sitting in an easy chair with a book in his lap. Across the back of the chair sat Barney, gazing down at him lovingly.

Katherine let go, pushed away from the dock and slowly sank beneath the surface.

She tried to remember what had filled her dreams that night, but couldn’t.

Perhaps it was better not to remember. Perhaps it was better instead to remember that sometimes there was hope in places one never expected to find it. Sometimes there was even hope in the uncertainty of a still summer night, in the howling winds of a winter blizzard, or even in the psychotic darkness of another’s nightmare.

Because there is beauty even in the darkest art.

Katherine…

She opened her eyes and looked to what remained of the sliders and those gathered on the other side, staring at her with dead poetic eyes, chapped mouths opening and closing like hungry baby birds, small fingers scratching the already broken glass.

Children of the lake, all. James’s children.

She would see them in more than just dreams now.

Katherine would’ve screamed, had she thought it might make a difference. But it no longer mattered, no one could hear. In the morning they would all be gone—she along with them—and amidst the buildings, snowdrifts and deserted cabins, only the lake, and madness unseen would remain.