KRIS OPENED THE driver’s-side door and stepped out.
The air was warm and smelled of earth, as if each invisible breath left a thin coating of dirt on everything it touched. It made Kris feel immediately unclean. She rubbed a hand across the back of her neck and felt minute granules of dirt mixed with the moist warmth of sweat.
This is not our house, her mind insisted.
But it was. It was not the way it existed in her idyllic childhood memories, but it was without a doubt the lake house her father had bought when Kris was a pale green-eyed child and her mother was healthy and happy. Yet unlike her memories, the house had not been preserved by fondness and nostalgia. Time had stripped the flesh from its bones like a vulture tearing at the fetid meat of carrion on some forgotten back road.
The area in front of the house, once separated from the rest of the clearing by its subtle landscaping, was a twisted jumble of countless plants, like the matted mess of a child’s unwashed hair. A thick layer of dirt and dead leaves filled the birdbath’s bowl. The stone bluebirds on its lip no longer appeared to be the friendly harbingers of summer joy that had greeted little Krissy and her parents each June. The larger of the birds still had its beak wide open in what had once appeared to be an exultation of carefree joy. But now the bird seemed to be shrieking in terror as the invasive vines reached hungrily for its plump body. The second bluebird was missing its head entirely.
The vines and weeds had worked their dark magic on the brick path as well, pushing them up from their beds so that the straight shot to the porch became an obstacle course of uneven rectangles. In several places, the bushes had become so overgrown, they left only a few empty inches for passage.
Along the foundation of the house, the mortar between the stacked stones had turned to powder. Several of the fieldstones sat loose enough to pull free. A few flakes of white paint still clung to the wooden sides of the house, but the majority of it had peeled away after decades of scorching summers and frigid winters. The clapboard siding was now a sickly grayish-brown, the wood splintered and rough. Cracked red paint trimmed the windows like smears of drying blood.
The house looked like a crumbling headstone on a forgotten grave.
A door hinge creaked behind Kris.
Sadie was out of her booster and standing in the open doorway of the back seat. She stared out at the lake house with wide, unblinking eyes.
“It’s fine,” Kris said, answering a question her daughter had not asked. Glancing back at the house, she tried to conjure up an explanation. “I guess not that many people have rented it or else someone would have …” She let her words drift away, suddenly afraid of the logic trail down which she found herself traveling: or else someone would have maintained the house. But no one comes here anymore. This is a forgotten place.
She turned to Sadie. For one brief moment, Kris had the odd sensation that she was staring back at herself as a child. There she was, a little girl again, her bright, fiery hair curling down around freckled cheeks, the green irises of her eyes igniting into yellow sunbursts just before they reached the all-consuming blackness of her pupils.
Kris held out an open hand.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see what it’s like on the inside.”
Sadie paused, unsure, and then she slipped her delicate fingers into her mother’s palm and allowed her feet to drop to the ground.
Kris led Sadie through the overgrowth. Grasshoppers buzzed by on wings of ancient papyrus. With her free hand, Kris parted a cluster of waist-high weeds, sending leafhoppers, no bigger than the heads of pins, scattering in all directions. Suddenly the ground wobbled beneath their weight, and Kris realized they were on the pathway leading to the porch. It was a world without humans, one reclaimed by the countryside.
“Watch your step,” Kris warned her daughter.
Slowly, carefully, she made her way down the path, Sadie just a step behind her. Thorny branches reached out from a shrub that seemed to have exploded from the earth. Kris could feel the tips of bushes and weeds tugging at her clothes. And then the untamed plants fell away, and they were moving up the brittle planks of the front steps.
Like everything around them, the years and the elements had taken their toll on the porch. The trunks rising up from the stone columns were ringed with zigzagging canals where termites had gnawed passage through the wood. Overhead, long, sticky lines of spiderweb wound through the rafter beams, thickening into clumps dotted with the dried corpses of dead bugs.
Sadie’s grip tightened on Kris’s hand. Kris glanced back. The unease in her daughter’s expression had evolved into fear. She glanced slowly around as if she expected something to leap out of the shadows at any moment.
Kris forced a smile and offered in a reassuring tone, “We’ll get some bug spray later when we go into town. I’m sure these spiders are harmless but, you know, just in case.”
Sadie did not appear to register her mother’s words. Her eyes remained on the darkest corners of the porch and the things she imagined crawling there, staring with black, bulbous eyes.
The front door looked as if it had been sliced from the center of a massive tree. Kris ran a finger down its smooth surface and was relieved to find that its varnish had held, preserving it while the rest of the house fell into ruin.
She grasped the tarnished brass doorknob. Its sides were decorated with wavy grooves meant to simulate rays of sunlight bursting from a comically surprised face on the front of the knob. She twisted it. The knob turned an inch and then stopped. Locked.
“Mr. Hargrove said he would leave a key under a pot …”
There were several ceramic planters of various sizes, each containing a withered brown plant drooping above bone-dry soil. The first two pots that she tipped over revealed only a few scurrying bugs—earwigs and millipedes and slower, clumsy roly-polies.
A breath caught in her throat. Hargrove had forgotten. Or, worse, he had refused to leave the key. For whatever reason, he had seemed hesitant to let her stay at this house, despite the fact that it was hers. He was going to force her to drive into town, storm into his office, and demand that he open up the house. He had no right. He—
There it was, under the third pot, a shiny silver key on a simple steel loop.
Kris let out a breath.
She slipped the key into the silver lock just above that ridiculous grinning doorknob and turned it. The dead bolt retracted.
Kris twisted the knob and pushed. The summer heat had caused the wooden door to swell in its frame, and at first the door did not budge.
“Shit,” she cursed softly, hoping Sadie did not hear.
She twisted the knob again and this time put her full weight into the attempt.
There was just enough time for that timid voice in her mind to offer hopefully, It’ll be better on the inside, and the dark voice, Shadow Kris, to purr, It’s rotten, even there, you’ll see …
There was the faint screech of wood on wood, and then the door swung open.
The smell was like something decaying beneath wet leaves. It was not overwhelming, but it was there at the end of every inhalation.
Kris glanced down at her daughter. Sadie gave no indication of noticing the foul odor. She appeared to have retreated to the place she had been for the past two weeks, her eyes staring but not seeing, always looking inward, always trying to make sense of the impossible.
Kris stepped into air heavy with dust. She was standing in a tight entryway. To her right was a mirror clouded with smudges and grime. To her left, a row of small antlers mounted on the wall provided hooks for hanging hats and coats. The soles of her boots brushed across something coarse, like horsehair, and she looked down to find an old doormat beneath her feet. Kris instantly recognized it. Two arrows pointed back toward the threshold. Between these were words in a stenciled font: “Please Leave Problems at Door.” Her father had bought this doormat the year before their last summer together, one last defiant laugh to share with his wife.
“I’ll try, Dad,” Kris whispered to the ground.
She brushed the rubber soles of her boots across the top of the doormat and went to take another step, but Sadie remained in place like an anchor behind her. The little girl’s eyes glistened in the dim light. Her eyebrows were arched to a point, questioning.
“Come on,” Kris said. She tried to sound reassuring.
For a moment, Sadie did not move. And then she allowed her mother’s hand to pull her forward, into the lake house.
The entryway led to a very simple—and very dated—kitchen. The height of style when the house was built in the late 1950s, the kitchen now looked like an old photograph fading away in a family album. The once vibrant yellow tile countertops had dulled to the color of dried mustard. The cherry cabinets had long ago lost their rich gleam. The cabinet doors, both above and below the countertop, were all slightly askew, giving the appearance of a grinning mouth full of crooked teeth. An aged white refrigerator sat in the corner. It emitted a soft, irregular buzz as if filled with hundreds of thousands of confused bees.
Next to the white ceramic sink, several empty beer cans sat with their sides dented in. A layer of dust had settled on these, just as it had settled on everything in the lake house.
Kris slowly drew a breath in through her nose, desperate for scents she knew could no longer be there—the buttery sweetness of banana pancakes bubbling on a skillet, the savory bite of a ham-and-cheese omelet browning in a pan as her mother and father worked in tandem to whip up breakfast. But there was only the foul odor of dust and decay.
Kris felt Sadie press up close to her side.
“It kind of stinks in here, doesn’t it?” Kris asked.
Sadie did not reply.
Hargrove didn’t even bother coming in, Kris realized. If he had, he would have noticed this stench. He left the key beneath the planter and drove the hell away. He hasn’t been inside this place in months. Maybe years.
At the far end of the kitchen, just past a small breakfast nook nestled under a long row of narrow windows, a rectangular archway opened into the great room. The plaster ceiling of the kitchen abruptly vanished, replaced by a cathedral ceiling ribbed with walnut beams that spanned the width of the room and disappeared into shadowed corners. Spiderwebs hovered there, thick as spun sugar, like pale ghosts in the darkness.
Kris held out a flattened palm to Sadie. “Stay here.”
True to its name, the great room was as massive as the front entryway was constricting. A brown leather couch—its cushions sinking, its hide cracked—faced a fireplace constructed from the same fieldstones that made up the house’s crumbling foundation. The firebox was wide and deep and stained black from decades of soot. Above a mantel made from a halved cedar trunk, the chimney rose like a guard standing at attention, its stone face disappearing through the exposed planks of the ceiling high above.
Flanking the leather couch were two chairs, one a bare-bones mission-style glider fashioned from solid oak where young Krissy had spent many summer evenings cuddled up to her mother’s chest, the other an armchair with cushions upholstered in a busy print featuring fishermen pulling bass the size of Atlantic salmon into a steel canoe. This chair had been her father’s favorite, and Kris could still see him sitting there with his morning coffee, steam curling up around the rough patch of stubble he called his “summer beard.”
Mounted over the fireplace mantel was an antique hickory fishing rod complete with a Western’s winding casting reel. Kris reached up and tapped the handle hard enough that it spun one full rotation, pulling in a length of invisible line.
The far end of the room was all glass, composed entirely of four narrow windows stretching from floor to ceiling. They narrowed at the top, following the upward slant of the roof until they met at the peak. The panes glowed a warm yellow, but the light did not appear to penetrate any farther. It was held back by layers of dirt.
Kris stared up at the illuminated monoliths towering over her.
You’ve been here before.
Of course, she had. Her father had brought her and her mother to the lake house every summer until that last summer when her mother—
Not here, Kris realized. Not these windows, but ones just like them.
A church.
Holy Cross Catholic Church in Blantonville, Kansas. The sanctuary hot and musty. The priest in his violet vestment. The sound of sniffling and choked voices echoing from the ornate Gothic ceiling high above.
There was Krissy, ten years old, sitting beside her father in the first pew, his body rigid and straight, his sweaty hands clasped so tightly that the tips of his fingers were bloodless and white. She kept her head bowed, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone for fear they would feel compelled to speak to her, to say those things that meant little and changed nothing: I’m so sorry, it’s going to get better, God has a plan for us all, she is at peace now, she is in heaven, God has called her home.
Called her home.
And she went, little Krissy Barlow thought bitterly. He called and she left us.
She remembered the casket at the front of the sanctuary. Its black, glossy surface glistened like the curved back of a beetle. In there was the fleshy shell that had once contained her mother. Now it was empty. The mortician had done his best to preserve it, applying too much makeup to the withered, sunken face in an effort to make the cheeks look less like shadowed valleys between bone, the eyes less like sinkholes, the lips less like dried, cracked strips of meat. But even at her young age, Krissy had known the thing in the coffin was a husk.
She was called home, and the rest of them were left behind to bear the weight of her absence.
The smell was worse in the hallway.
Kris stood at the edge of the entryway and stared down the dim corridor. There were no windows. The first two doors—one to her left and another a little farther down on her right—were closed tight. At the far end, a third door was open just an inch or two, and except for the soft glow of light from within this room and a slanted shaft of sunshine drifting down from an unseen staircase across from it, the hall was dark.
She stepped into the gloom, scanning the wall as she went. There had to be a light switch somewhere. The shadows grew thicker around her, as did that odor of rot and decay. Whatever was causing the nauseating scent was in the hallway with her. It was too dim to see, but it was there, she knew it, just as she knew the light switch was there. She imagined kneeling down and reaching into the deepest shadows that swirled like black mist at the base of the wall, her fingers grazing matted fur, her fingertips sinking in to touch damp, spongy flesh writhing with ravenous maggots.
And then the shadows were peeling away, stripped from her and the hall around her by the yellowish-white glow of sunlight. She had reached the third door. She shoved it lightly, and it swung open a few more inches on angry hinges. As it did, the swath of light in the hall expanded, forcing the shadows farther into retreat.
Slowly, Kris turned. Across from her, the hall cut a sharp right angle, continuing for another fifteen feet before coming to a dead end. To the right, a steep staircase sliced the hallway in half. The steps rose up to a landing lit by golden sunshine from a small, square window.
Kris drew a short breath in through her nose. The stench was down here with her. There was no mistaking it.
She guided herself into that narrow passageway to the left of the stairs. The underside of the staircase was completely exposed, each step mirrored in a strange upside-down ascension.
Something was piled in a heap in the corner, something black and jagged, as if the shadows beneath the stairs had shattered into pieces like glass. This was the source of the smell. Whatever that thing was, it was rotting into the floorboards like a fly dissolving in the gullet of a pitcher plant.
Kris pulled up the neck of her T-shirt to cover her mouth and nose as she stepped closer to the object in the corner. Bits of it were scattered about like fallen leaves, the pieces long and slender with bristled edges.
Feathers, she realized.
She glanced to the thing in the corner. It was splayed out like a poorly drawn star. For a moment, she stared at it, trying to make sense of its odd dimensions.
A wing. Frozen in full extension. Talons curled as if around an invisible branch. Another wing folded unnaturally in half. A black pupil set against a yellow eye like a moon dwarfed by the enormity of its sun.
A bird.
She could not be sure of the species. It was smaller than a crow. A grackle perhaps. In this light—or lack of it—it was impossible to determine if the creature had a grackle’s trademark purple hood.
Does it matter? Kris asked herself. It’s a dead bird, and it’s stinking up the house.
But was that possible? The stench had been revolting from the moment she opened the front door. Could this small, pathetic beast be the cause of that?
Maybe there are more, the voice from the back of her mind—the voice of Shadow Kris—whispered. Or maybe there are other dead things here. Hiding. Waiting to be found.
Kris clenched her teeth and forced this voice away.
Gripping the tips of its toes between her fingers, she lifted the bird. There was a soft ripping sound, like packaging tape being pulled free, as its remaining feathers released their hold on the wood floor. Its body dangled limply, that one wing still outstretched in a mockery of flight.
Now what?
She wasn’t entirely sure. She had to find a way of disposing of the body without Sadie seeing it.
The window. At the top of the stairs.
Kris had learned long ago not to trust in the power of prayer, but in that moment, she allowed herself the futility of hoping that the window still opened after all these years.
Loose feathers billowed from the floor as she moved quickly out from under the stairs. If there wasn’t one in the house already, she would have to get a broom to sweep up this mess. For now, disposing of the bird was enough.
She swung around the newel post and moved lightly up the stairs. The bird swung beneath her fingertips like the pendulum of an obscene clock.
The latch on the square window at the top of the stairs was stubborn, but with a little force, it twisted. With her free hand, Kris slid the window open. A gust of summer air puffed in her face like hot breath. After the stale stench of decomposing flesh, she was thankful for the reprieve. She could smell the world on that air—the sweetness of honeysuckle, the perfume of lavender, the green bitterness of leaves, all of these scents riding on the crisp breeze blowing over the crystal waters of Lost Lake.
She closed her eyes and took another few seconds to enjoy the moment, and then she lifted the dead bird by its feet up to the window. She meant to swing it back for momentum and then heave it away, hopefully over the edge of the porch roof and into the thick of a bush where it would remain hidden until insects and small creatures had time to break it down into bone.
But something made her pause.
She was staring directly across the bird’s beak and into its yellow eyes, even though its back and the curve of its tail also faced her.
Its neck was broken.
Trying to get out, she told herself. Hitting the underside of the stairs. That’s why all the feathers were on the floor. It panicked. It broke its neck trying to find a way out.
It would have made sense had it not been for one thing.
As she gently swung the bird’s body beneath her fingers, she noticed the rips in its neck, the places where ligaments stretched between tufts of feathers.
The bird’s head had been twisted around so many times, it would have already fallen off had it not been for those last few lengths of desperate sinew.
In one fluid motion, Kris flung the bird’s body outside and slammed the window shut. She did not bother to watch where it landed.
Sadie was no longer in the kitchen.
Kris stood in the great room, her back to the hallway, and stared at the spot where she had left her daughter waiting. She was nowhere to be found by the dated appliances or at the island that created an artificial border between the kitchen and the dining area. Nor was she at the breakfast nook. The two chairs on either side of the table and the bench along the wall were empty. Shafts of dusty sunshine fell in from the windows above the bench, laying squares of light across the table like golden place settings.
A soft knocking got her attention.
The French doors were wide open, cutting a rectangle into the center of the four towering windows along the south wall. One of doors swayed slightly in the breeze. Its white frame bumped against the rusted arm of a wrought-iron porch chair every time the wind drew it back.
Sadie was there, standing at the edge of the deck and staring out at the sparkling waters of Lost Lake. The breeze lifted her scarlet locks into the air and then set them gently back onto her shoulders.
Kris stepped through the open doorway and onto the deck. Redwood slats ran at a forty-five-degree angle away from the house and toward a steel railing around the perimeter. Even from here, Kris could tell that the railing was loose. It tilted slightly toward the backyard and the slope leading down to the water. Orange flakes of rust peeled up from the twisted steel balusters and along the top of the handrail like burned skin.
She felt the planks sag just a bit under her weight as she crossed the deck. The wood was weathered—it was a safe bet that it had been decades since it was last sealed—but with the exception of the loose rail, the structure seemed safe.
She slipped a hand across Sadie’s back and around the curve of her arm.
“I didn’t know you were out here.”
Sadie did not respond. She was, Kris assumed, still trying to make sense of their accommodations.
Say something, Kris thought, attempting to will her words into her daughter’s mind. Say you hate it. Say you can’t stay here. Yell at me for bringing you here. Anything.
Sadie showed no reaction, her back to her mother, her eyes trained straight ahead over the deck railing.
Any hope that the backyard was in better shape than the front was dashed as Kris glanced around the lot. The weeds and wildflowers had invaded, turning what had once been a trimmed patch of wild grass behind the deck into another waving stretch of Kansas prairie.
Just past the deck, which ran along three quarters of the house, the yard opened up even wider to make room for a small garden. Chunky railroad ties bordered it, but any other evidence of the garden was long gone. Years ago, it had been home to her mother’s carefully pruned tomato plants; now it was nothing more than random weeds and a thick patch of sunflowers. Their blank, brown faces peered out dumbly in all directions.
Kris could still see her mother there in her old blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat, a red-and-black plaid bandana tied around her neck, the damp dirt staining her knees as she pulled up the weeds that had sprouted up over the spring. But her mother was no longer there to tend to her garden, and the man in town had decided, for whatever piss-poor fucking reason, to let nature reclaim it all.
Because he’s lazy. Because this place means nothing to him. Not when Dad was alive and definitely not now that Dad is dead.
But they were all dead, weren’t they? The two people who gave them life, and the one whose passing drove them back to this place.
Everyone Kris had ever allowed into her heart was dead.
Not Sadie, that timid yet infinitely hopeful voice spoke up in her mind. Not your baby girl.
And not you, Kris reminded herself. She was alive, and so was her daughter, the other half of her soul. She could fix this place. She had to fix it. Coming here had been her idea. And it had been a good idea, she was sure of it. At home, there was no way to escape the constant reminders of Jonah’s death. The framed photographs displayed all around their house. The pity on the faces of friends and co-workers. For Sadie, her friends were off to camp. But there would be no camp for Sadie this summer. Kris could not bear the thought of sending her daughter to a place where every look from every boy or girl would say, “Sorry about your daddy.”
The lake house had helped Kris get through one of the most awful summers of her life. It could do the same for Sadie. But not like this. It had to be the place she had promised Sadie. They needed the fairy tale, just until August, and then they would return to whatever reality awaited them back home.
Kris drew in a breath and pushed her shoulders back so that she stood straight and tall. She let her eyes drift away from the old garden, which surely only needed a good pruning and some fresh plants. She scanned the yard until her gaze fell upon the crooked skeleton of a long-abandoned swing set. The ends of its metal frame slanted like poorly drawn A’s. Vines twisted up from clusters of grass to curl around its legs. The splintered wooden seats of two swings hung from chains caked with rust and dirt. One of the swings, the one hanging slightly lower than the other, was cocked at an irritatingly uneven angle, each of its chains set to a different link.
Kris nodded, accepting the challenge. A few new bolts, nice and tight. A good sanding for the seats. An overnight vinegar bath for the rusty chains.
What else you got?
Behind the deck, tallgrass rippled like the tails of irritated cats.
A weed whacker. Yes, she thought, imagining the catharsis she would feel slicing through the tallgrass like the grim reaper.
She imagined it all cut down, and in her mind, the backyard revealed itself. At the bottom of the back steps, a line of stones wove a crooked path away from the house and through the overgrowth until they disappeared over the slope’s edge. The stones became stairs, carved into the side of the slope, making for an easy descent down to the shore. The white sliver of a wood dock stretched out over the water. She remembered sitting on the shore as a child and watching her father, shirtless in ripped jean shorts, as he sank the first piling.
And then it became more than a memory. She could see it. The place beyond the weeds. An expanse of sun-kissed water.
The lake.
Or at least their section of it. Their lake house was perched on a bluff overlooking one of several coves pressed like thumbprints into the earth around the outer edge of Lost Lake. It was easy to think this was the entirety of the lake; this cove alone was nearly a quarter of a mile across and twice that in length. But a glance to the far end of the cove revealed an even greater body of water stretching out for what seemed like forever. The tiny gray dots of fishing boats bobbed out there, disturbed periodically by an arrogant speedboat pulling a water-skier behind it.
“We should go into town,” she realized suddenly. “We need groceries.” She nodded toward an ancient charcoal grill in one corner of the deck. Silky strands of spiderweb zigzagged between its grimy legs. “We can get some things to grill.”
Sadie shot a look at the grill.
Kris smiled and gave Sadie’s shoulder a gentle pinch. “We’ll clean it first. We’ll clean everything.”