 
The lake house boy Page | 165

## the lake house boy

Author: James William Penson

Copyright 2013 James William Penson

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

#### Foreword

#### This book is dedicated to my mother, who spent an entire summer reading me Huckleberry Finn after lunch every day, and who gave me the love of a good ghost story.

# The House

The moon was orange and low, newly risen through the pines like a sick, over-ripe fruit hanging forgotten from a limb. Owls, the first night callers, muttered to each other in the deep woods. The loons made the last of their twilight calls, sounding of madness, as if announcing that all the rules of the day – all that seemed right and true and just and real and safe – were gone with the sun. The night was insane.

The house was not as old as it looked. Ambitious builders had envisioned a two story shuttered salt box, but had done the house in unfinished cedar which, after only the short span of 40 years or so, had weathered a bleached grey lending it the appearance of every child's image of what a haunted house should look like. It sat on a small outcrop of land on the far side of the lake – the side almost unreachable by anything but logging road, and those were chained closed most of the year. There were almost no houses on this side of the lake, and most of the activity had to do with a scout camp that was only used about 2 months a year. It was Wisconsin forested lake wilderness on this side. Ancient glaciers had dragged their rocky, icy skirts over Wisconsin in prehistory, leaving it pockmarked with deep, clear, cold lakes; so many lakes that were there still some that had no name. In parts of the country where lakes were not numerous, summer vacationers swarmed to lakes, but not so here. There were vacationers, mostly Illinoisans who left their flat cornfields to come fish for a week at a time each summer, but even they often didn't find the smaller lakes like these. In the high summer, it was unusual to see more than a half dozen boats on the entire lake, despite an abundance of walleye and pike.

So the house sat and aged, forgotten for some reason before even being completed. It was not an abandoned house once lived in. It was a house abandoned in the building process, like the fake façade of a dark house ride at some cheap carnival, shipped from one shopping center parking lot to another on the back of a flatbed trailer. It was a deception.

It was quite alone on its side of the lake. The coves surrounding it were too wild, shores too steep, too densely wooded. Beautiful, but not inviting. Primitive to the point of being almost prehistoric. And yet someone had half built a house here. There were walls of wood studs with no sheetrock or plaster, stairs with no railings, windows that never knew a shutter or a blind, and a porch that looked as if it would collapse on itself at any moment. Moss grew on its North side. Rats had tunneled through the cedar, the remnants of broken plumbing lines spoke of a jerry rigged attempt to give the house indoor facilities, but there was no bathroom, at least not one with a commode or tub. It was a fake house with nothing but a skeleton inside to hold it up. And yet, these ambitious builders had taken some pleasure from it. Over a hearth, not completed, and a fireplace of raw stone that had never seen a fire, but that housed only the skeletons of unlucky birds who'd fallen down the flue, hung a framed photo of a boy of about 14, or 12? Maybe 10- an indeterminate age - holding a string of fish aloft and grinning for the camera. Ancient water skis rested in one corner, so unused and dust covered that they, too, seemed to be devoured by the decay of the house. Two old metal fishing poles with rusted baitcasting reels leaned in one corner with line on them so old it had rotted and fallen in scraps on the floor – from the time before monofilament line, when fishing line was actually more like fine braided string. The rats had used it for nesting material, no doubt.

One table sat in the middle of the one room on the first floor. With only studs for walls, it was as if the whole house was one room, or many spectral rooms. At this table sat three chairs, cane backs and seats rotted from years of damp and dry, cold and heat. On this table sat a deck of cards, open; a partial hand dealt for four players. Perhaps hearts, or gin rummy, or even poker. A few face cards showed. Even these were buried in dust. An ancient aluminum ash tray, garish anodized pink, held two cigarette butts turned to dusty powder save for the filters. It was as if one night over a game of cards, the four parties involved in the building of the house had just decided it wasn't going to work, slowly stood up, stubbed out their cigarettes, and left, never to return. Two "No Trespassing" signs had been nailed to the outside of the building, signs so old that even they seemed pointless and meaningless, faded almost to bare metal. Whoever had posted them had long since stopped caring about trespassers, and from the appearance of the place, they were probably never necessary in the first place. No one came here. No one knew about the place.

The last shafts of red sun blurred the distant shore while the house settled into the dark. With no walls and no curtains, it was an oddly transparent house. Passing it slowly by boat (somewhat tricky as several downed trees lay in the water as obstacles to landing), even if one were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it through the thick pines, they would see straight through the house as two windows lined up on one side and the other. In the day time this was startling enough, but just at sunset, as those last reddish rays lay down across the lake and lit those windows, the house looked for a few brief minutes, quite alive. Orange glowed through the windows. The new darkness hid the rot and decay and softened the appearance. It looked as if a brightly lit, but quite silent, party was going on. And then the effect was gone, and the darkness of the windows became profound, and the house retreated into the blackness of the pines around it, almost invisible. It was a deception.

And on nights when high Wisconsin summer moons made for a brightness that you could almost read a book by, and the lake took on the inky blackness of unguessed, unsounded depths, beams of silver light shot through second story windows, filtering through holes in the top floor where decking had never been laid, and illuminated the boy on the hearth with the fish, grinning forever in the summer sun. A gap toothed grin forced for the camera that, by the nature of the blue moonlight, looked more like a grimace than a smile, or perhaps even a sneer. The moonlight made the eyes, squinting at the sun in the photo, look half closed, almost leering, and jet black, of unsoundable depth, darkness and depravity. The night was insane, and so was this house.

# Jen

Jen was chilled. The oncoming night brought air that felt good and clean. It never seemed to cool down at night in the city in the summer time, but the air cooled by the pines and clear water of Lake Potawamish always called for a light jacket or sweater, very often covering sunburn from the heat of the same day. Her dad loved this, and usually made a small bonfire in the evenings around which they would sit and make up ghost stories, or talk derisively about crazy relatives and neighbors they were glad to get away from for a while.

Wisconsin in the summer was the dream of the Germans who came here seeking a place that felt like home. Deep glens and valleys, dense pines, deep, clear, spring fed lakes. It looked like Germany and so they came here, bringing their names and customs, creating a mix of German city names cheek by jowl with names taken from local Indian culture. Reigelheim sat next to Sangamon, which sat next to Oshtowatami, Berglmen next to Onquashto, and so on. Children grew up blonde and tall, with thick, strong shoulders, and the rich soil that provided generations of German farmers with abundant crops and dairy pastures caused prosperity and growth.

Not much of this was known to Jen, and what was didn't matter much. She was seventeen, sick to death of spending summers with her family at the lake, and bored. Her name was Isabel, which she hated. She had gone by an abbreviation of her last name, Jensen, since childhood. Even her parents called her Jen, much to her Grandmother (and namesake's) dismay.

Jen sat at the end of the pier. The end of the pier represented hope. All journeys, going back to her German forebears, started at the end of a dock. Jen hoped for change. For something. For excitement. Their lake house, which provided her parents with seemingly endless relief from the daily pressures of suburban life, was not as nice or comfortable as their home in the suburbs. She missed her room painted with astrological symbols by her best friend one night when they'd been given a bottle of Thunderbird after a football game by a boy who'd hoped to gain advantage with the state of inebriation it provided, but which instead inspired the artist in Trisha. The two of them stayed up until nearly dawn; drunken, giggling mystic artists with Day-Glo paints. Her mother had been mortified. Her father was amused. She loved it. She missed Trisha. They were out of cell range, so the almost constant flow of text messages and calls had ceased for this interminable period of weeks. She stared at the flat moon reflecting like a wobbling drunk on the surface of the lake. A loon gave its final call of the day, and a fish jumped at the last dragonfly before night took over entirely.

The lake house had bunk beds everywhere. Even when there weren't people to fill all of them, they stood row on row in the main sleeping room, except for the "master" bedroom, if indeed you could call it that, with its one queen sized bed. Some nights she slept on top of a bunk staring at the ceiling, others on the bottom staring at the slats of the top bed feeling more like an inmate than a vacationer.

It was OK, but it wasn't home. There was no town nearby, at least not one large enough to hold anything but bars and bait shops. It seemed that all the people did around here was hunt, fish, and drink. Sometimes at night she could hear gun fire through the trees and shouts of drunken glee as idiots with rifles and six packs shot at anything that came into their headlights on the winding roads that knit the woods together.

She looked down into the blue-black water. When she swam, she never touched the bottom, making sure to dive off far enough from the end of the dock to wind up in deeper water, always shocked at its coldness even in high summer. When her father had caught a 28 inch Northern Pike just off the dock casting late one afternoon, she'd looked at its gruesome teeth and considered never swimming again. But her bonehead brother did all the time. It was pure and cleansing in the high heat of July when she did forget the fish and dive in.

July was just far enough into the summer to still carry with it the relief from school, but also just far enough to start tweaking the sensitive social fibers of a 17 year old. Jen wanted something to happen. And it didn't look like this pier was the beginning of that something. Just graying wood jutting sleepily from the deep bluegrass lawn, waiting for boats that never came nor went save for her dad's pathetic little 14 foot aluminum flat bottom with the 5 horse outboard on back that started only after her father had sworn at it for about 20 minutes and worked himself into a lather pulling at the starter cord. Sometimes she got to take it out, just to have something to do, but she was afraid she'd pass some other kids in bigger boats – expensive Bayliners and Nautique ski boats – boats that held the progeny of probate lawyers and orthodontists. Her dad was an artist. So she putt-putted the aluminum boat slowly in and out of coves, hugging the shoreline lest she be spotted.

Jen was a "strawberry blonde" with skin that tanned well, but still revealed a light patchwork of freckles on her shoulders, face and upper chest. She never much liked her freckles except when they were tan. Everything looked better tan. Her long thin legs, muscular from 3 years of high school volleyball, looked good, she thought. She thought herself somewhat pretty. More "cute" than beautiful, yet when she was tan, she saw her green eyes glow from the smooth lines of her tanned face, framed by lightened reddish blonde hair. She hated her lips, which she thought were too thin, but other than that, she had to admit to herself that she was not ugly.

Chase was horrid. Well, most of the time at least in Jen's eyes, he was. Chase was actually her little brother (who hated being called that), a thin, tallish boy of 11 with the sort of angularity of face that made for awkward looks now but that would eventually become handsome, probably. Chase was horrid not because of the things he did, but because of the very fact that he was tied to her like an anchor, especially at the lake house, where he was seen as not being old enough yet to watch out for himself. This actually served simply as a ruse to get Jen to take him everywhere with her because he had nothing to do, and her parents knew that she would be extremely limited in her social activities with a younger brother in tow. Not that she really had much else to do, but she chose to do nothing without him rather than with him. Besides, he had no life. Video gaming and writing computer programs that seemed to have no meaningful use to Jen composed his entire existence. Taking him to a lake house in the woods was like taking a fish to the desert. Thank God for laptops, she thought, although her parents restricted his use so that he would benefit from the nature experience, which of course he didn't. He became a pathetic, sullen barnacle clinging to Jen simply because he had nothing else very relevant to cling to. She at least enjoyed the sun and, of course, always the odd chance of seeing guys in ski boats, with their thin waists, tan, strong upper bodies, lightly bleached hair from the sun. However, except for the big holiday weekends, like Memorial Day and the 4th of July, these were about as elusive as her father's "big honkin' walleyes". When spotted, she only hoped they had binoculars to notice how her tan was coming along.

# Tanner

"Wake up, for the love of God, Tanner! It's 2 pm!"

Tanner heard this through half dream sleep, and it pissed him off. He'd heard approximately the same thing at eleven, noon, and one o'clock. It's summer, for goddsake, he thought. If you can't sleep late now, when can you? But by now his bladder was about to burst from last night's clandestine beers, and besides, it was about "tanning time". Tanning time was the time of day when the girls started laying out on the various docks and beaches. He spent less time skiing with his boat than he did cruising, really, although it was a hot ski boat; old, but with a huge V-8 engine and plenty of power. Hunger beckoned, as well, so he rolled out of his bed and into the early afternoon.

"What exactly do you plan to eat when you wake up in the middle of the afternoon?" his mother asked

"It's not the middle of the afternoon..."

"Well, 2 o'clock is a bit early for dinner, and pretty late for breakfast or lunch!"

As she said this, Tanner half listened as he filled a bowl with half a box of Raisin Bran, dowsing it in milk.

"Breakfast of champions" his mother said, giving up the fight, carrying a load of laundry to the back porch where an aging washer and dryer behind screen wire announced to the world that they were good solid middle class folk.

Tanner was tall and lean, but muscular. The high school he went to was famous for turning out state championship gymnasts. A couple had even gone on to Junior Olympic teams. His strength was the pommel horse, an event which required both massive arm strength, balance and leg strength. His physique was perfect for it, and after almost 7 years at it, he was a state contender. It made him very popular in a school that favored gymnasts, which helped to overcome the fact that his parents were very blue collar. It also whispered of scholarships, a very welcome term in a blue collar household. A kind uncle had gone in "partners" with him to restore a '69 Ford F-150 pickup – his uncle footing most of the bill – or he wouldn't have wheels at all. The boat was a loaner from a team mate whose parents had three. Still, cool truck, star status, good looks and build, and the West side girls (the area of town where the wealthy families lived), still looked through him. Their boyfriends drove new cars. Cars that cost more than the house Tanner lived in.

With breakfast out of the way, Tanner announced he was going to take his boat out.

"Please be home by dinner, OK? That's about 3 hours from now, so take a watch, and make sure you wear your life preserver. Just having them on the boat isn't good enough. If you hit a stump..."

"Mom... " Tanner interrupted. "I've heard this speech at least 3 times this week. Don't worry, OK?" His mom shot him a look that combined frustration, dismay, and love at once, and Tanner left to walk to the dock where his boat lay tethered.

# The Boat

Jen lay drying in the high sun. She could feel the small hairs on her arms prickling, then blowing free in the light wind as her arms dried. The lake was warming somewhat, but still held the chill of the night. She'd felt somewhat groggy – probably allergies – after breakfast and had decided to swim before lying out. The water, cold as if holding some memory of its glacial past, washed all the grogginess out. She felt fully alive now.

Occasionally boys would swoop past on their boats close enough to check her out. When they didn't slow, she figured (wrongly) that they didn't like what they saw. Sometimes they slowed, and occasionally went to a full idle, just going fast enough far enough off shore so as not to be seen as gawking, but close enough to get their message across. It was to these boys that she gave a small wave and smile, lifting her head long enough to let them know she acknowledged the attention and returned it to some small degree. Coy, but not too.

Tanner's boat was running rough. In fact, the reason he was hoving close to the shore was to make sure he was close enough to swim, pull the boat, or call for help if it died altogether. It was a friend's boat, and although it was a good ski boat with a big motor, it was not new, and probably needed to be gone over thoroughly. Its inboard V-8 was running very rich, smoking more than usual, and he tried various throttle speeds to mitigate the roughness.

He didn't in fact even notice Jen until he'd almost passed her. Finally, about to gun the engine in frustration, he looked up squinting into the sun and saw a girl on the grass near a dock; long golden legs, light reddish blonde hair, thick as a horse's tail, stacked on top of her head to allow the sun to get at her neck, leaning up on her elbows. She had been watching him, apparently, and was still watching him. And it was easy to understand why. While messing with the engine, staring at the tachometer, the engine mostly out of gear, the light wind had drifted him to within perhaps 30 yards of her dock. Instinctively, he looked at the lake house behind her, unconsciously checking to see if she was a "rich" girl or not, noting its modest appearance, and then back to her. She waved and mouthed the word "Hi". His heart went up a few beats per minute. He cut the engine off.

"Hey!" he said, loudly enough to be heard, but not too loud as the sudden silence drew into focus the fact that he was really very close to trespassing. "What's up?"

"Having engine trouble?" she said. She had a high "girly" voice. He loved voices like this. But it had a smart edge to it, too. Like "I'm sexy, but not a bimbo".

"Yeah, I guess." He responded, suddenly somewhat embarrassed at the condition of his boat. A girl like this would probably think he was some lake bum. "It's running rough. I don't know what the deal is. Sorry I came in so close. I wasn't paying attention, and the wind blew me in."

"I know. I was watching".

She was watching. He liked the way that sounded. The door was open a crack, but not too far. But it was open. She added "Can I help?"

"Well, I wish you could, but I don't know what's wrong with it. You know anything about V-8s? I think the carb is fouled." To his surprise she replied saying "Did you try carb cleaner?" " _What_?", he thought? She wasn't butch looking – not by a long ways – but he was a bit put back by her engine knowledge.

"No, I sure haven't. Do you have a can?" he said, laughing, expecting her to laugh, too, as if a girl like her would have a spray can of carb cleaner handy.

"I'm sure my dad does. Let me go check. Be right back." She said rising, swinging her long legs under her first, then her full weight to her arms, leaning forward, then to a crouch, then standing fully, quickly grabbing with her thumbs the back of her suit bottom to make sure they covered her cheeks. Tanner was gawking and didn't care who knew it.

Two minutes went by and fleeting thoughts that he was the brunt of a rather clever practical joke – one in which she never came back out, at least until he'd taken his beat-up boat out of sight - went through his mind, when she appeared around the carport side of the house with a spray can in one hand, looking at the ground as she walked to make sure she didn't step on anything barefoot, walking tiptoed a little, throwing the weight onto the balls of her feet, tightening up her calf muscles. Tanner was really nervous by now. She was hot.

"I don't think I can throw it that far." She shouted. "Can you come in a little closer?" He fired the engine, which, although still rough, took only about 15 seconds of power to glide the boat gently near the dock.

"Just throw me the rope." Jen said, putting the can down and holding her hands out, ready to catch. God, she was cute, he thought. She held her arms out with the palms of her hands facing up and outwards slightly, almost childlike. He was close enough now to see the freckles and the eyes. Iridescent golden green in the sun. He'd been cruising the lake for almost two weeks checking out girls, trying not to look like he was checking out girls, and then this falls out of nowhere. He must be living right, he thought. He quickly, almost stumbling, reached under the console for a rope, tied one end off to a cleat on the side of the boat and coiled the other end to throw to her. He looked at her, making eye contact really for the first time, to see if she was ready. She smiled lightly. Oh, she was so pretty, he thought. The green irises of her eyes literally danced in the sun.

"You ready?"

"I think so..." she said, with just a twinge of "uncertain little girl" in her voice that echoed vulnerability, but not too much. Just enough to be cuter than hell.

"Ok. Here you go." He threw the rope, and she easily caught it. As she pulled the boat gently up to the dock, he noted her athleticism. Strong, but still very feminine. Extremely. The boat gently bumped up to the dock. He extended his hand to shake hers, and said "Hi". Misinterpreting this as him reaching for the can, she handed it to him. He quickly put it down, lifted his hand again and said "Hi. I'm Tanner."

"Oh, Sorry! Hi. I'm Jen". She gave a full, somewhat embarrassed smile. So did he. His blue eyes shown under his brown swept forward hair. He was profoundly tan, Jen thought. When his shirtless arm reached towards hers, she could almost count the muscles. Very, very nice, she thought. Thick, strong hands. Very nice. But those eyes. Bluer than the sky around them. She thought "Thank you, God!"

Jen bent down to get the can, handing it to him, but the boat had drifted up against the dock which meant they were virtually standing next to each other, although one was on a dock and the other in a boat. Awkwardly, they looked at each other, smiled, said "Hi!" again, and laughed embarrassedly. They were already friends.

Jen sat on the back of the passenger seat watching the muscles in Tanner's back as he lifted the engine cover. The engine died the first two times he sprayed the cleaner in, but eventually began to level out, smoke less, and run smoothly. Not top form, but well enough for a ride.

"Wanna ride?" he asked, after rehearsing how he was going to say it in his head for about the last two attempts to restart the engine.

"Yeah! I mean, I'd love to, but I've got to check with my dad."

This was a feat made easier by the fact that her suspicious dad had by now found some excuse to come down to the dock.

"You guys need any help?" he asked with a look in his eyes that really said "Why is that boat here and why are you in it?" to Jen.

Tanner jumped in before Jen had a chance to respond.

"Hi, sir. I'm Tanner Chastain. Sorry to use your dock, but my engine was giving me trouble."  
"He just needed some carb cleaner." Jen said, hoping that both statements would serve to defuse the "This guy's after my daughter" radar that was fully deployed in her father by now.

In fifteen minutes, however, Tanner's natural grace and personality, combined with two guys working on an engine, had broken down all barriers. But, just to make sure, Jen had slipped into the house on the excuse to get some ice tea and slipped on a little cover-up wrap. She could feel her dad's voice relax as he noticed his comparatively fully clothed daughter arriving with cold tea.

A good cleaning of plug contacts, some cleaning out of the distributor cap, and a couple of hastily put together ham sandwiches, and Tanner was almost a son. Asking if she could go for a ride with him was a slam dunk.

"Sure, just make sure you watch for the warden, and no beers, ok?" her Dad said.

"Oh, for sure, Mr. Jensen." Tanner said, without a trace of forced sincerity in his voice. Jen was actually a little let down. She thought a cold one on a cruise for an hour with this new godsend sounded OK. But her mom would smell the hops on her breath when she got home anyway. Her mom could smell contraband on the breath of a teenager from across a parking lot.

The day was designed for a ride. The lake was glass smooth, few boats, as it was a weekday, and the sun was high with only a few small clouds floating around. The rumbling V-8 and some good tunes on the radio made small talk impossible, which left them to be near each other, having fun, getting to know each other without words. Pure physical presence. It worked just fine.

The boat cooperated largely, although about halfway across the backside of the lake, it started to chug a little bit. Tanner throttled back, let the wake catch up with them, and popped the lid again for the rest of the can of carb cleaner.

"Sorry. Thought we had it there. Maybe some more will work."

"That's cool, no hurry here." Jen said. As the boat rocked gently, Tanner bent over the engine, she reclined the seat a little to get more sun and scanned the shoreline.

They were about 75 yards from shore. The lake was so still that waves didn't even break there. Just the occasional wake wash from a passing boat leaving the ghost of its energy long after its passing. Despite her annual vacation boredom, she really did love the woods. She didn't get to see this side of the lake hardly ever, in her little john boat with the outboard, so this was a treat. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" she thought, thinking of the Frost poem every high school kid memorized at some point. These were truly lovely. And dark and deep. She could barely see 20 feet in under full, high, early afternoon sun. Just deep blue green and shadows. Here and there a single branch would sway just enough to put the scene in motion, pushed by a small wind off the lake. The lines of the trees were mostly regular, straight upwards, but not perfectly straight. Nothing in nature was ever perfectly anything. No perfect circles or straight lines she thought as she squinted lazily. Her skin was heating up as they sat there, and the glow felt good. She hoped she looked as good as she felt. He was way too cute to screw this up.

Deep in the trees she saw a deer leap. It startled her just a bit. She wondered why it fled. Perhaps it had been watching them, trying to determine whether they were a threat or not and had finally decided that they were. But this caught her eye for only a moment. She saw, just visible in the deep gloom, straight lines. At first, her eyes tried to make them be pine trees, but they refused.

They were walls.

If someone had built a house to hide in the woods, camouflaged to be almost part of the woods, they couldn't have done better than this. Its state of decay made it blend in with the rough bark of the pines around it almost perfectly. She didn't really think that she ever would have noticed it were it not for the deer moving. It was obviously old and vacant, and she wondered if anyone ever went there, or if people even knew about it.

"Tanner?"

"Yeah?" He said, turning from the engine hold to squint at her. What a cute squint! She thought.

"Can you see that house in there" She pointed to the near shore. With some scanning and "No, the other way", and "I think you're looking too far left. No, your other left..." He finally saw it. His reaction was similar. Surprise combined with a sort of awe. Awe? That seemed odd.

She watched the muscles in his back tense and wondered at the reaction.

# The House

Tanner killed the engine and allowed the momentum of the boat with its following wake to glide them near the shore. It was so quiet here. They were almost 30 yards from the shore, and another 15 or so from the house. Jen suddenly knew exactly what had spooked the deer. It hadn't been their boat. The animal part of her brain was responding the same way. Too still. Too quiet.

"What a creepy house!" she said.

"Yeah, no shit!" Tanner said, then catching himself "Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to swear."

"Tanner, it's ok to swear. I actually swear, too." They both laughed, surprised at just a hint of nervousness in their voices.

"If I were here with a couple of guys, I'd check the place out, but somehow I don't think your dad would approve."

"As far as I remember, we left him back at the dock."

Tanner looked at her.

"You sure?"

Her tight-lipped smile was his answer.

"Ok. Hang tight. I'm going to run her up on the shore."

The boat made a slight sliding noise as it brushed the lake bottom, slowed then stopped, gently coming to rest on the thin wash of sand at the water's edge that gave way to a rock breakfront. From the front of the boat they could almost step straight into the forest. Jen felt the temperature drop, realized it was the natural cooling of the pines, but it felt like something more. Tanner reached for her hand and she noticed his forearm had goose bumps. He helped her jump down, not by holding her arm, but by grabbing her waist which put them in pretty close proximity; Quick, somewhat embarrassed eye contact. Jen had never had a man help her down like this, other than her father when she was little, and it was decidedly pleasurable. He smelled like summer boy – deep tanned skin with a trace of man smell from sweating, clean hair wet from lake spray, faint deodorant smell, but mainly just man-smell. She hoped she smelled one fifth as good to him as he did to her.

Taking her hand was as natural as holding his niece's hand when they went to church. Tanner had walked two or three paces towards the house, noticing everything he could; smells, sights, sounds. He found himself on full alert before suddenly realizing they were holding hands. Hers was warm and soft; petite, yet strong. Delicate, and pressing gently back. Not forced, or feigned; just real, and soft, and natural. It belonged there, he thought.

They got to the porch by walking through piles of dead pine needles interspersed with patches of moss. The pine smell of the dark, cold trees combined with the light whisper that pines make in even the slightest breeze to make him feel that he was completely in nature. Not just near it or looking at it, but "in" it. His senses were heightened. He could feel his pulse in her hand – or was that her pulse? No matter, one or both of them were running their hearts at about 100 beats per minute. He was so glad she was with him, not just because he thought she was beautiful and cool, but because he knew, down in the well of his not-so-long-ago little boy heart, that he wouldn't be doing this if he were here alone.

Why this feeling? He wondered to himself. It's just an old lake house. What was so unnerving about this place? Was it the location? This side of the lake was as devoid of human impact as it could be save for the occasionally very distant boat motor. No cars, no voices, just the occasional bird chirp, and even these seemed short, abbreviated, nervous, hurried. There was a tension here that he couldn't identify, but it was so strong that he felt a twinge of nausea. There was a sense of something stored up; something about to happen, or something that could happen. And not a good something, either.

Tanner's hand was delicious. It was twice the size of hers. She couldn't wait to sit next to him and play with the big squishy man-veins on the back of his dark man hands. He was delicious. She could feel his physical strength run through his arm to his hand to hers with every step they took leading gently upwards to the porch. It was like the tension one felt when placing your hand on a grand piano while it is being played. Perfect strength and harmony. Perfect.

They reached the porch. What was left of three steps leading up to it looked nowhere near stable enough to hold her, much less him. Tanner put a testing foot on the porch itself, then, placing his full weight forward and springing easily, he was up. Jen had watched this closely. He moved like a cat; like a feral cat. He reached down to her and again a moment's eye contact took place. Oh, they were so blue. She remembered reading that it was not the color of fair eyes that make them universally desirable. It was the fairness surrounded by a contrasting dark ring of the same color. His eyes were china blue surrounded by a ring of silvery dark blue Sapphire. Exquisite. This time he pulled her up by her hand, and she felt the gentle yet firm touch, as if he would have been able to lift her with one arm. She'd better start paying attention to what they were doing, she thought.

Looking down with each step they inched towards the nearest window. The relative gloom of the pines was multiplied by the dark porch overhang, and it was hard to imagine a lake with full afternoon sun on it not more than 20 yards away. The windows were equally grimed within as without. Dust grayed the view from within and years of weather stained the glass from without. They peered in, but at first saw nothing. Then, with faces pressed close to the glass, what they thought were at first reflections from the brightly lit lake were actually patches of floor, countertop, or wall illuminated by sunlight. Instinctively, they both looked up to see the corresponding holes in the ceiling, surprised to find only rafters and patches of plywood serving as a second story. Like the place was never finished, they both thought. The resulting effect was like small spotlights illuminating random items in the house. Here, a tableau of fishing rod and ancient ball cap. There, a gaudy pink ashtray on some kind of table or counter. Over there, a license plate leaned up against a stone fireplace. Everything else resided in gloom, as if waiting behind the curtain for its cue to enter the spotlight. But nothing moved. The place was as dead as a mausoleum.

"Let's try to get in." Jen surprised herself by saying.

"Uh. Ok. I guess." Tanner was reading the "No Trespassing" signs that had weathered to nearly illegible over some long span of time, and which hung crookedly outside.

"I don't think anyone's been here in a very long time." Jen said, looking in again, face pressed against the glass.

Tanner was trying the doors, one in front, one in back, and circling the house. Jen followed, but the brush was heavier in back, and it was even darker and gloomier, so she hovered a few feet behind, trying not to act too "girly girl". Tanner was trying windows too, and although a couple had broken panes, most were intact, and well closed and locked. Save for one. Close to the house some poison ivy had grown up substantially near the back West corner. Tanner could tell by looking at it that the vine was leaning inwards at an angle impossible were the window closed. He looked around on the ground and found a longish pine bough, which he then used to pull and prod the mass of vine out of the aperture. Once open, he peered at the opening, judging how hard it would be to get in without touching the wood, covered with poison ivy toxin.

"It's OK to get it on you as long as you wash thoroughly with soap within 12 hours" she said. "Here I'll go first."

Tanner looked at her mostly exposed body and said "Nah, why don't you let me go in. I'll open the door for you.

"I'm smaller. I bet I can get in without touching anything."

She could and she did. Tanner noticed her smooth athleticism. Had it not been such a creepy setting he would just have drooled on himself. A snapping sound followed by some metal latches releasing and the back door was open.

"Welcome home, honey!" She braved the jest. He felt a little wimpy at not having been "the man" and gone in first, but having her greet him at the door drove all those thoughts out of his head. She had – jokingly, yes – called him "honey". He liked that very much. Very much.

Once inside, their eyes adjusted to the relative darkness. It was truly a strange place. Jen began to experience a low level headache; very unusual for her. Dust and mold didn't usually bother her. If it did, she'd have had problems with their rentals which had an abundance of both. This was different. It felt like pressure, as if the atmosphere were somehow condensed.

"I feel like we just went back in time about 40 years." Tanner said.

"At least. Look at the kitchen. There are still plates in the sink." An ancient bottle of dish soap, its contents long since turned to a whitish solid sat next to a sink with plates in it, the water long gone, and any food left on the plates certainly eaten by rats or mice.

A table sat near the center of the front "room". There really weren't rooms, at least not rooms with walls. Here and there a sheet of paneling helped to define the skeletal outline of a room made of studs, a door hanging open in ridiculous parody. You could walk through all the walls in at least one place. The nice thing about this, especially here in the semi-darkness, was that there weren't very many places you could hide. Looking upwards, even most of the second floor was visible. Tanner was climbing the stairs.

"You sure they're ok? I'm lighter." Jen said.

"No way I'm letting you try this. If you fell, and I had to take you back to your dad hurt, he'd have my skin on the wall.

"What if you fall? I couldn't carry you to the boat, and probably couldn't drive the thing anyway."

"I won't fall. Promise."

"Please be careful?" she said pleading just slightly in a just slightly girly voice. It worked. Tanner looked at her. Eye contact again, and part of his heart melted. He'd be careful.

He helped his uncle part of the summer and weekends during the year frame houses, and knew how to walk up a set of unstable steps. Put your feet near the ends of the risers, not the middle, never put your full weight on one foot, and always partially support your weight with your arms with whatever was available. And, the cardinal rule of wall framing. "Never fall. Jump." He could hear his uncle's words: "You fall, Sir Isaac Newton is in control of your fate. Jump and you can choose your landing area." Jen watched attentively. Mostly his calves as he climbed, which looked like they belonged on a statue.

Tanner reached the landing, such as it was, and looked around. The upstairs was really unsafe. Missing floorboards, patchwork overlays of plywood, dangerously rotting. Not good. The only real room in the whole house was up here, though. It was a closet and it had two full walls which, wedged in a corner, made for a room with a door. It was all the way on the other side of the upstairs from the landing, and Tanner regarded it, assessing the risk involved with crossing.

"Don't think about it." Jen said, sternly. Then, softening, "Please?" Girly again. Her head was really starting to pound, the headache becoming a very unwelcome guest.

Tanner looked at her, at the closet, back at her and smiled.

"Probably nothing in there anyway." He said, trying to sound confident. He spent a few more moments surveying the upstairs. The walls had never held paneling or sheetrock, and as far as he could tell, this floor had never been used. The flooring had probably been an attempt to finish out the upstairs, and the plywood probably thrown down so they could store things up there. He turned and descended the stairs, looking first to where he could jump if he had to. Jen was reaching for his hand when he got down. And she didn't let go once he got down. They were going to explore the rest of the gloomy house hand in hand. It was as natural as breathing for them. She hated this headache, which was busily encroaching on an otherwise very pleasant experience.

The ground floor was just odd. It appeared that the house was used, but not much, and in fact, hardly even usable. There was an absolute minimum of lake house essentials – from cooking implements to furniture – but that could have been moved out long ago. The overall impression was one of someone having attempted to set up a lake house, then realizing they had no idea how to go about it, just giving up in disgrace or embarrassment. It had an overwhelming sense of failure about it. There was also an almost palpable sense of something about to happen. At first, Jen thought that it was because of that childhood notion that the owners should "come home" and catch them, but it wasn't that. It was a sense of something about to happen here. Something already here. Jen shuddered, partly from the chill on her tanned skin, partly from something else. The house was obviously very empty – had been so for decades – and yet still had a sense of occupancy to it.

"This is weird. They've got a couple of like ancient bait casting reels over here, but they have spinning reels on them."

"And that's a bad thing?" Jen quipped.

"Well, it's an "I don't know the first thing about fishing" thing." Tanner said. Jen laughed through her headache.

"What's with the table? There are still cards on it. Man, did these folks leave in a hurry, or what."

Tanner walked to the table as he spoke. Three hands, 4 cards down, all the way around. "Poker. Five card stud, I think." The truth was he knew little about poker, but he figured she wouldn't know the difference, and he wanted it to sound a little macho.

"Five card draw, I think." She said, pulling up the four down cards nearest her. She looked at these because they were in front of the only thing in the place that appeared to be upset. The chair had been turned backwards, and lay on the floor.

"Dead man's hand." She said.

"What's that?" He'd given up on the macho thing.

"Two pair, Aces over Eights. It's what Wild Bill Hickock held in his hand when he was shot in the back in a saloon. In South Dakota, I think."

Tanner was impressed, and a little embarrassed. He instinctively looked at the other hands.

"The two pair would have won."

"Maybe he did."

About this time the sun, seemingly a distant irrelevant object to their current situation, ducked behind a cloud. The result was that combined with the gloom under the pines, within the house it was almost as if night had fallen. They both looked up from the table and scanned the first floor, as if the whole house had changed. In a way it had. Now there were no spot lit items. Everything lay in gloom. Everything save one thing. Through some trick of the light – perhaps a tree limb blew out of the way for a few moments and allowed the only direct light available to find a window, slant inwards through the top floor onto a picture over the mantle.

"Wow. It's like a spot light on the picture. Wonder who it is?" Jen said.

Tanner and Jen walked to the fireplace and looked side by side – still hand in hand – at a yellowed and faded photo of a boy – a young man, perhaps - holding up a stringer of smallish pike, with an eerie, almost garish smile on his face, as if he'd taken pleasure watching the fish die.

"Creepy kid!" Tanner said.

"It's hard to say whether he's a kid or not. The light shifts and he looks like he's our age." Jen said, squinting hard at the face. Then, as suddenly as it had gone, the sun-spotlights shown in again, and the room seemed relatively well lit compared to the momentary gloom of a moment before. The picture, by contrast, disappeared into the grey semi-dark above the mantle.

"We better go. It's getting late, I think". Tanner said.

"Yeah." Jen said, looking at her watch. She was ready to take something for this headache, too.

"What time did we leave?" she asked.

"I think it was about 2." Tanner said "Why"

"When do you think we got here?"  
"Oh, probably about 3:15, 3:30. Why?"

"It's quarter to six, that's why!" she said looking at him wide eyed. His eyes widened too. They looked around.

"Let's go." They said in unison, leaving through the back door, closing it unlatched on the inside. They walked around the front, crossing over the porch to avoid the undergrowth. Jen peered in one last time through a window, hands cupped around her face. She saw an odd old shoe in one of the chance sunlit spotlights now. A loafer with a penny stuck in the tongue. A penny loafer.

"I don't remember seeing a shoe in there." She said.

"I don't either." Tanner responded.

She turned to Tanner, about to tell him to come look, but he was already pressing his face against the glass.

"What shoe?" he said

"Right there..." she started, but, looking at the same spot, there was only bare floor surrounded by darkness.

"I guess the light moved." he said.

"I guess..." she said. Backing away from the window. She backed all the way off the porch and jogged back to the boat.

"Hey! Wait up!" Tanner said as he jogged behind.

They were soon off for the opposite, brightly lit, summery late afternoon shore. It looked real and right. Jen did not look behind her as they pulled away and was grateful to the healthy sounding, beefy V8 as it roared to life. Tanner was in a hurry, and that was alright with her. He didn't look back either, until they'd reached the middle of the lake. When he did, he was almost relieved to note that the house had gone back into hiding again in the dense pines of the far shore, almost as if it hadn't existed, as if the last few hours hadn't elapsed. Jen's headache faded as the evening sun lowered and her distance from the house and the day's adventure lengthened.

# Delcie

The accursed clouds moved in almost every day at the same time. Prime tanning time, about 2 pm. Delcie cursed, not loud enough to be heard over the radio, but loud enough to register her disdain. God, this sucked, she thought. Why am I tanning? By the time we get back home it will be time to go back to her summer job for just long enough before summer ended and school started to completely lose the glow. Delcie was dark skinned to begin with. Dark eyed, dark haired, olive skinned, her heritage was half Mediterranean, with a Greek father and an Irish mother. Mom contributed some telltale freckles and a Celtic nose and eyes, but other than that, she could almost pass for Indian. When she was younger, she'd hated this and wanted to look like all the Barbies she collected – blonde, tall, thin, statuesque. She had to settle for petite, curvy and dark, but it seemed to work. She was aware of the fact by the 8th grade that she could date any boy she wanted. By age 16 she was modeling for a large department store chain.

Her real name, Dulcinea, was banned from household use. When asked what her real name was the response was almost always a sarcastic "Isn't Delcie real enough for you?", unless it was a cute guy whom she had yet to date. Then it was "Just Delcie. My parents were hippies". Actually her parents were professors, and she was forced to read "Don Quixote" by her mother one summer simply so she would get the significance of her name. She skimmed, searched for synopses on the web and kept the book long enough so that she could reasonably have been expected to finish it. She was named for a woman who didn't even exist, not even within the fiction of the book, any more than the windmills Quixote tilted at.

She was an only child, and one of privilege. Her folks did OK as college profs, but their real wealth came from her mother's side. Her maternal grandfather had been a Glidden, one of the inventors of barb wire. There was an awful lot of barb wire in the world, she'd learned as a child. Privilege was fine with her. Having no siblings was, too, after the first 5 years or so of her life where she began to think that her childhood would consist of playing tea with bored Hispanic nannies. Now she had close friends, but they were all "summering" at Lake Geneva with their privileged families on huge three storied yachts, while her desperately earthy parents insisted on this godforsaken cabin on this godforsaken lake in the middle of the godforsaken woods. She threatened not to come at all this year, and was willing to follow through on it, but was trapped, to some degree, in her old annual lie – which she was "summering" at some chic lakeside community. Having told this to all her friends, she had to go somewhere, so this was it.

Delcie wore Shannon's class ring. Shannon wasn't so much a boyfriend as he was a good career decision. He was, as the captain of her school's lacrosse team, class president, and one of the cutest guys around, the best political choice for the role of Delcie's boyfriend, although a bit dull and self-centered, a position she filled with as much scrutiny and research as a corporation hiring a six figure CEO.

But here she was, trapped for two weeks watching her parents attempt to fly fish, or make homemade bread or some such crap. God, what a horrid summer, she thought.

# In Town

"Delcie, you know you won't use that here. Why can't you just wait until we get home to buy makeup?"

Delcie looked disgustedly at her mother. She loved her but she was really getting on her nerves. She'd wanted to come to town by herself, but her mother (trying to run interference on Delcie with the "townies" as she called them; the local boys, far beneath "their station." It was crappy makeup anyway, Delcie thought.

She really hated coming to town. It reminded her of what a hick, hillbilly little armpit this place was. She missed her mall. She missed her little Asian fingernail salon, even though it was kind of divey. Best French polish in town.

She missed Shannon, sort of. She missed the sex, for sure. He was going to get one hell of a coming home present when this annual nightmare in the woods was over. And she kind of missed his warmth, and smile. It wasn't love, but it would do. There was actually a boy in Shannon's chemistry class that was way cuter, but he was a not a jock, and she had to think of appearances.

"I'm just getting some eyeliner, Mom." She said with a light salt of sarcasm. Five dollars, already. You'll survive, she thought. They wandered the hopelessly dusty and grey aisles of the store and eventually went through checkout where some dim little towny with no smile ritually checked them out, never once making eye contact. When they left, Delcie made a point of saying "Thank you!" as loudly and sarcastically as she could to the checkout lady. But to her, Delcie no longer even existed, and perhaps hadn't in the first place. She was checking out the next customer, a towny mother with two brats in a cart, and gave them the same exact degree of warmth as they had with Delcie and her mom. Screw her, Delcie thought. Then chuckled to herself. "Probably exactly what she needs!"

"I want to stop by the library for a few minutes, Delse." Her mother said.

"Do I HAVE to go?!" she said with great drama.

"No, that's fine. Just don't wander off. I'll meet you at the car in 30 minutes.

Wander off? Where? Into the woods? Believe me, if there were somewhere to wander off to, she'd be headed there already.

It was sunny, and she thought about the valuable tan time she was losing, and unconsciously looked at her flat little tummy to check for tan. Fading, she thought. Then she remembered being out of baby oil, which she lathered on herself to tan. She turned on her heels and headed back to the small department store where the bored towny stared blankly out the front window as she entered. She combed the sad little baby products aisle, finally finding a small dusty bottle of baby oil. She picked it up as if it were contaminated with radiation, holding it gingerly in her thumb and forefinger. Yeeww. Don't they ever clean here?

A boy stood at the end of the aisle as she turned to head to the front of the store. He had apparently entered the aisle after she had, although she hadn't heard him. A little startled at first, she walked towards him, slowly, noticing as she got closer that he was kind of cute. Scruffy kind of grunge hair, tawny freckled skin. The boy turned and smiled at her.  
"Hey!" he said in a low voice, as their eyes met.

"Hey!' she said back in a semi-cute voice. Not too "come on-y" but just a note of enticement in case he turned out not to be some local hoodlum.

The boy smiled, broke the gaze and looked back at the box he held in his hands.

Ok. She thought. I won't pursue. He's not that cute.

"Hey, check this out." The boy said as she passed. She was mildly surprised at the surprising familiarity, but turned anyway, smiling still. The boy stood holding his hands out towards her, still smiling. She was surprised to find that he held the bud of a single white rose in his hands; it's petals as delicate and fresh as if it had just been pulled from its stem. There were even droplets of moisture on it. It was as if he had pulled off some small sleight of hand.

"That's so pretty! Where'd you find it?" she said with enough flirty in her voice to keep him on the line, but not too much.

"It's for you." Was all he said, holding it forth again. She took it from his hands, which were surprisingly wet as well. Damp, as if he had just come from a dew strewn morning garden. It was real, and very pretty.

"Thank you!" she said. "My name's Delcie." He looked down, now embarrassed at his forwardness, she guessed. How cute! She thought.

"Maybe I'll see you around?" he glanced up through bangs, piercing brown eyes fixing hers.

"Yeah, for sure!" she said as the boy lowered his head and walked past her. He's so cute, and really shy! She thought. Not faking it at all. She took her dirty bottle of oil and newly received flower to the checkout and put them on the moving belt as the robotic grey faced woman checker ran the belt towards her, already punching in some keys. This time she stopped, though. Hesitating first, then looking up at Delcie.

"Did you find this in the aisle?" she asked with a wrinkled frown on her face. Delcie shot her back a nasty look before looking down at her purchases. The dusty bottle of baby oil sat next to a dusty, dead, greyish dried rose.

# Uncle Jay

Tanner was always surprised to see his uncle. Not because of any infrequency of visits, but by how much his father and Uncle Jay looked so different. His father was tall and thin. Rangy shoulders, like Tanner, but not much meat on them. Uncle Jay was nothing but meat. Hugging him was like hugging a 90-gallon oil drum. It wasn't fat, either. His dad had told him that Uncle Jay had been second team all-State in football in high school and had a couple of scholarships to play center on some small state schools. He'd opted for a bigger school, one with a good medical school. His dad had become happily settled into a very middle class occupation, but Jay, on sheer smarts alone, and a couple of educational scholarships, had graduated second in his class undergraduate, first in medical school. He did his residency at some flea-bitten inner city hospital, earning him some real street cred as well as professional esteem once he came home to their town's hospital. Refusing to specialize in something high paying, he stayed in general practice, in true Uncle Jay altruistic form, but still made a pretty good bit of money, mostly from books he'd written that were now used as texts in medical schools he could never have afforded to go to.

His dad and Jay had grown up near here. It was why they came here to vacation in the summer. It was really the only place they could come. Jay owned the cabin they stayed in each year. His dad have moved to Illinois for work as a young man, but Jay had returned, seeing the need for health care in the area. He could tell that it bothered his dad to have to rely on his own brother to be able to afford a vacation, but it didn't bother Tanner. And it sure didn't bother Jay.

Uncle Jay loved Tanner. It was obvious. Tanner was the son he would have had if he'd had married and had kids. Tanner was easy to love. Good, clean, healthy, smart, honest, and best of all, kind. Good heart, good mind.

"Why don't you get a better set of tools, Uncle Jay?"

"These work fine." Jay said, bent over the engine compartment of the boat. Tanner had pulled the boat out of the water the night he'd met Jen and towed it back to town with his pickup for Jay to help him work the crap out with. Jay could easily afford the finest tools made, but was quite content to use the same old set of Craftsman tools he'd had since he was hot rodding Camaros in high school. Tanner thought he was the second smartest man in the world. His dad, for all his shortcomings, was the first.

"You need to run this motor, bud. I mean blow the shit out of it sometime. It's never going to idle smooth with his lopey cam in it anyway. This motor wasn't built to idle."

"I get into to it from time to time, but this time of year there are so many guys out on water skis..."

"I know what you mean. If you're cutting along at 60 miles an hour and some bonehead decides to make a blind right turn in front of you, there isn't a boat made with a brake."

"Yeah. I take it to the shallow end of the lake where they swim, and you can't open it up, so I go to the deep end, and that's where all of the fisherman are."

Jay laughed to himself. He was too nice a kid. Any other teen age jackass with a 400 horse inboard ski boat would be shooting rooster tails over the fishing boats and laughing while he did it.

Tanner was soaking carburetor parts in solvent. The venturis had become gummed from running too rich. He looked at the baffles and flues and jets and wondered how the hell the thing would ever work in the first place.

"We found this weird lake house."

"Who's we?"

Tanner hesitated. Now he had to tell about Jen.

"She's a girl."

"I should hope "she" would be!"

"I mean, I met a girl. She's really nice, and, well..."

"Hot?"

"Um, yeah. I guess..."

"What lake house?"

"You know how the deep side of Chetawkwee, you know, the back side, is pretty unsettled."

"Yeah. There's not much access back there. Gets pretty close to the state park, too, and I think the state would frown on cutting a swath through those deep pines just to put in some lake houses."

"We were trying to get the boat to smooth out, kind of idling along the back there and she saw this deer."

"In the water?" Jay said, jokingly.

"On the shore, At the edge of the deep pines."

"OK. Then what?"

"While she watched it run away, she saw this house that was almost hidden it was so packed into the woods. It looked like it was really old, but it just never got finished, and the raw wood just looks like the trees around it."

"I didn't think there were any houses back there. I don't know how you'd get to it without cutting some logging road chains."

"Well, there's a house out there, and it's a strange one. It's like somebody gave a shot at a lake house and gave up. Not like they moved out, or anything. More like they just, I don't know. Stopped coming. Or maybe. I don't know..."

"Vanished?" his uncle said. Tanner turned to look at him. The large man had tilted his head up from his work. Tanner met his gaze.

"Yeah! I guess. It was a weird place, man..." Tanner thought about how to describe the place. He didn't have to.

"It's an old faded barn looking house, right?" Jay said.

"Wah? Have you been there?"

"Are you kidding? I grew up around here, remember? A couple of families shared it or something like that. They just never finished the place, or kept it up, and eventually just left it. Hell, it looked haunted when they owned it! But then, over time it got really run down and vacant looking, so every high school kid in this county went out there to scare the hell out of each other at one time or another. Or at least they'd get up to the porch, come back, and tell everybody they'd been inside. It's falling apart and very dangerous."

"Will you promise me something, Tanner?" Uncle Jay never called him by his name. It was always "Bud" or "T". It caught his attention.

"What?"

"Don't go back there, ok?"

"Sure." His uncle's tone said – gently, but firmly – that the conversation was over.

They set back to work, Tanner reassembling the parts of the four-barrel, and his uncle bolting down the intake manifold. They didn't talk again for a good while.

# The Walk

Jen just felt like going out, but her mom had taken the car into town. Her dad and brother were both asleep. A lot of naps occurred during the day at the lake house. So Jen just put her Nikes on and stuck her hands in her pockets, and started walking. She walked for a while, down familiar roads that led to town, but decided to head down a logging road, passing the chained gate with the sign stating "No admittance- State use only". She figured that meant only cars. It's not like she was going to do any recreational logging.

The trees changed almost immediately, as if they were less timid of the road, pressing in on it, crowding over it. At first, it felt kind of like being in a tall cathedral, green stained glass light flowing down from the canopy. After a while, as the light got darker and darker green, the feeling was less spiritual; more claustrophobic. She didn't know why she didn't turn back. It wasn't that she hadn't been out long enough. She just kept walking, wondering why she kept walking. Not a sense of freedom or adventure. More of purpose.

She started to shoot sidelong glances into the trees on either side. Shadows started to stretch out from her, deeper into the woods as if the giant old pines were crowding around to get a better look at her. She felt watched. It was very quiet, and at first this calmed her but soon she found herself wondering why there was NO sound. No birds, no bugs, nothing. None of the summer sounds that permeated the ears almost day and night at the lake. In fact, she expected to be able to hear the sounds of the lake – distant boats, drunken shouts from boaters – but nothing. Finally, she forced herself to stop walking, just to see if she could. The stillness was interrupted only by her heartbeat. She turned to look behind her, wondering if indeed it was time to turn and head back and was quite surprised. The road behind her looked different. It didn't look like the road she had just been on. Two minutes ago, not more than fifty yards behind her, she'd crossed a fallen pine, rotting on the road. There was none in sight, although the road stretched straight for some time. And even that was strange. The road HADN'T been straight. It had woven around the larger, older trees, but now it lay very straight behind her. Now she could really hear her heart beat. She turned, despite her doubts and started back, keeping her head down for a little while as if not looking at the surroundings for a while would make them appear more normal.

When she looked up she was surprised to see a jeep sitting in the middle of the road not more than forty yards away. That's odd, she thought. She didn't hear anything approaching. She hadn't heard a sound. Sitting at the steering wheel was a boy or man. He looked young, but it was hard to tell at that distance. He was waving at her in a familiar way, and she strained to recognize who it might be. Despite the predicament she'd found herself in, she found it very hard to walk towards the jeep, even though it appeared to be a way out of this. What if he was dangerous? Why did she suddenly have a headache? Slight at first, but building as the moments went by. Still, she walked forwards.

The boy waved. It was a boy after all, of indeterminate age. She was close enough to be sure. And he was smiling.

"Hey, are you lost?" the boy asked.

"Not really. Just headed back." She felt reluctant to tell him where she'd been or where she was going.

"Where were you headed?" he asked. This caused her to get defensive for some reason. She found herself instinctively making up a lie.

"I was just headed for town, but I guess I took a wrong turn"

"I can give you a lift." He said. She really didn't know why she'd said this until after she'd accepted the ride and climbed into the old jeep. She felt an instinctive need to be around other people. Why?

"Thanks." She said. "I'm Jen."

"Nice to meet you. You live around here?" he asked instead of offering his name. This also set her radar off. For some reason she didn't press him on this, either.

"My folks have a place on the lake, but they're in town. I was going to meet them there."

"Well, I can give a ride home if you'd rather head that way.

"No, town's good, if you can do that..." she said. Some little voice of safety in her head told her to go to where people were. He nodded, his tussle of auburn hair flopping against the light freckles on his forehead. He was kind of cute, but she felt the need to keep her eyes on him. Every nerve in her body was on high alert. She guessed it had to be about the weird changing terrain, but there was something about this boy. He smiled as he drove. She pretended to be looking over his shoulder at the trees, as if trying to understand the strange effect she'd experienced, and yet kept him in her peripheral vision at all times. Suddenly the terrain seemed completely familiar. The trees were thinner, the gloom lifted, dark green light became bright, vivid summer green, and she felt herself relax. It wasn't until they had driven to about where the turnoff from the main road onto the logging road should have been that she suddenly wondered why this boy was on this road, and how he'd gotten around the locked gate.

"How did you get in here?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"The gate was locked when I walked in here." She realized suddenly that he would have had to cut the lock. The boy just smiled by way of responding.

She realized that she had revealed her hand somewhat in admitting that she'd taken a logging road "on the way to town". The boy didn't seem concerned about this, but merely grinned as he continued to drive. Why was her head pounding?

They reached the gate. The boy kicked the wheel to the right, and the old Jeep – not as wide as a car – eased past the pole holding the gate on one side, and the trees nearest it. He turned his head to her and said "No sweat." As the noisy Jeep strained onto the main road to town. Once at highway speed, the noise of the old engine and the wind from the open top made conversation impossible.

As they approached the edge of town, the boy slowed the jeep, coming to a full stop just before the first cross street.  
"How's this?" he said, still smiling.

"Thanks, this is great." She said, although she wondered why they'd stopped short of driving to the small square of shops. She climbed down and turned to thank him again, but the boy, still smiling, was already shifting into gear. She watched as he turned the jeep and drove back in the direction they'd come.

# Delcie and Jen

Delcie didn't feel like going into the stupid library, especially now that she was more than a little shook up. She was pissed. She'd obviously been the brunt of some local jackass's prank, and she was not accustomed to being treated like this.

"Delcie! Over here." She heard her mom's voice behind her.

"I thought you were going to the library."

"I was, honey. I got through in a minute and was heading back to get you." Her mother said as she walked up to her tan young daughter.

"I'm glad you didn't go back to the store, like I did!" Delcie said, then thought better about telling her mother what had happened. For some reason, she thought she'd keep it to herself. Still, she was pissed.

"Can we go home now?" she said, her voice sighing in sarcastic singsong.

"Yes, honey. What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Let's just go."

As they were pulling out of the parallel parking slot, they heard a knock on the rear side passenger window. Both turning, they saw a young, tan, strawberry blonde girl in shorts and tank top looking in at them, saying something they couldn't hear. Delcie's mom rolled down the back windows.

"Hi! Hey, are you headed back to the lake?" the girl said, tossing her head back towards the county road that cut back along the east side of the lake.

"Sure are. You need a ride?" her mom said cheerfully. The girl got in the back.

"Thank you so much. I'm Jen. I walked all the way in and was going to walk home, but it looks like it might rain."

Delcie was delighted to meet one of her own kind – teen, pretty, smart, probably from a family with money, obviously not a "towny".

"Hey! I'm Delcie."

"Hey! Nice to meetcha." Jen said, and they shook hands. Jen thought she seemed a little pretentious at first, but she was so happy to be in a car with normal people, headed back down her normal road to her normal lake house, she didn't give it much thought. Delcie spoke:

"Are you here for the summer?" she asked, assuming Jen was.

"Yeah. My folks have a cabin on Webb cove."

"Oh, we're just two coves away on Dittweiler road." Delcie's mom said, at which Delcie shot her a look for giving away their obviously not upscale address. She guessed it was ok, though since there weren't any homes on Webb cove to brag about, either. She looked back at Jen, though, smiling.

Jen liked her. She saw – or perceived, somehow – that, despite the pretension – she was good. Her eyes were "good". They smiled at each other.

"Where are you from?" Jen said, assuming Delcie was just summering there as well. Delcie noted this and was appreciative. Especially since she now got to brag about their year round address.

"Oakland Heights. I go to Princewood." Delcie said. This was both a statement of entitlement and a query to see if Jen was upscale enough to even know of her private school.

"Oh, cool. I'm from DeKalb. I just go to public school there. I'm a senior this year."

"Me, too." Said Delcie, the pretension no longer necessary now that she knew she was the richest kid in the car. Also, just a bit of childlike glee at finally becoming a senior herself.

"Delcie has an aunt that lives in DeKalb. Penny Leigheit. Do you know her?" Delcie's mom asked.

"Of course she doesn't, Mom. DeKalb is, like, a big city now." Delcie said. In one of those strange things that just seem to happen to Jen, it turned out that she did know Penny Leigheit. She had been her Girl Scout den mother and told them so.

"No way!" Delcie said, with mostly genuine surprise.

"Yeah! She's great. I loved Scouts back then. Seems like a long time ago."

"Oh, she's still a den mom." Delcie's mom said. Penny was her husband's sister, and although she didn't really like her at all, she tolerated her. She always felt as if her husband's sister hadn't thought that he'd married a bit "beneath" them.

"Where are you going to go to school?" Delcie asked, playing another trump card, knowing that she'd already been accepted at Minot, the best Liberal Arts college in the state.

"Minot. I just got the acceptance letter before we came up here." Jen said, deflating Delcie just a bit, but Delcie felt a connection with Jen, too, and was genuinely excited, saying "Me, too!"

The two talked about this and were pretty good friends by the time they got to the dam side of the lake, announcing the upcoming cove roads. A light afternoon rain had begun to fall from scattered clouds, despite mostly blue sky.

"Mom, can Jen and I take the car and get something to eat in town tonight?" Delcie asked, knowing full well that her mom would never say No in front of a relative stranger.

"I suppose. Where will you eat?"

"Does it matter?" Delcie said, in a slightly prissy little voice. Jen could still see through this, though. Despite the attitude, she could tell that Delcie was not only nice, but smart. And that Delcie probably either didn't know this, or, if she did, think it was any sort of thing to be proud of.

"I suppose not. You'll have to check with your dad, though." Her mom said, playing the only strategic card she had. If anyone said No to Delcie it was Edward, her husband, and that was a rare occasion.

"Oh, he won't care..." Delcie said, turning back to Jen.

"I just need to check with my folks first." Jen said. She sincerely doubted that they'd be anything but surprised that she'd found a friend to go to dinner with.

They pulled into the gravel circle drive in front of Jen's lake house. She felt a little embarrassed at the humble façade. Delcie was relieved to know that Jen's was no better than theirs.

"Come on in, Delcie. I'll introduce you to my parents."

"Cool!" Delcie said, and the two hopped out and walked towards the house.

"I am SO glad I found someone to talk to!" They said almost in unison hoarse stage whispers, then fell to laughing, leaning against each other as they walked.

# Delcie Tells Her Story

"Sorry the car is so trashed." Delcie said. The car was anything but trashed. It was a brand spanking new BMW SUV and Jen didn't even think it had time to get dusty yet, much less grubby.

"Are you kidding? We're driving an old minivan around up here." Jen said. She knew enough about Delcie now to know that she would lose at a game of "whose family is more upscale?" anyway, so she addressed it directly. She was very middle class, and Delcie may as well know it. Besides, she hoped that it would serve to tone Delcie's attitude down a little. It did.

"Oh, this is my dad's company car. He writes it off as a tax thingy..." Delcie said. "Anyway, I can't believe they let me take it!" which was of course, not true. She knew they would. Jen knew this, too.

"Yeah! I am so sick of staring at my little brother over the linoleum top kitchen table!" Jen said.

"I'm an only kid, but that doesn't make it any better up here." She said. "I'd give anything to have somebody to talk to most days. Booooorrrrring! Especially if it were a cute guy..."

"I met one today, kind of." Jen said.

"No way! Not a towny, was he?"

"I don't think so. I don't know. It was kind of strange."

"I met a towny today in that creepy little department store. He was cute in a weird sort of way. What's weird is that he gave me a dead rose. At least, I think it was a dead rose. It looked OK when he gave it to me. It was very weird..." Delcie said.

"What did he look like?" Jen asked.

"Oh, fairly tall, but not too. Dark, red, bushy hair. Freckles." Jen felt the skin on the back of her neck go up. She had just gotten rid of the headache. It had lasted for quite a while after he dropped her off at the edge of town.

"Dark eyes?" Jen asked

"Yes! Really dark. Kind of spooky. Too dark maybe"

"What was he wearing?" Jen asked, already suspecting the answer.

"I don't remember much except that everything looked like it was way too small on him. Like he was wearing clothes he'd had for a long time, or that he'd stolen from his little brother or something."

"I think I met him too." Jen said, tight lipped.

"You did? Where? Delcie asked. Now Jen had to figure out how much she was willing to divulge about this afternoon's walk.

"I think I got a ride from the same guy. I was just taking a walk this morning, and, well, I got kind of lost. It was weird. I was walking down a logging road, and it was like I was going into some forest that was so dense you couldn't see into it, so I decided to turn around, and he was just kind of there. In a jeep. Waiting for me."

"How did he get there?"

"I think he just drove around the gate to get in, but I'm not sure. It was just really weird that he was there at all. Like he expected to find me there. Then he takes me into town and won't drop me off in town, but about a quarter mile or so away. I thought it was weird, and kind of rude, but he just kept smiling – smiling all the time – and turned around and drove back. I ran into you guys not too long after that. I was still a little rattled. I never took my eyes off of him. It was an old beat up jeep, like from World War two. It was open, with no top, and I thought if he did anything weird, I'd just jump out, but..." Jen stopped herself. She was sounding kind of paranoid. Really, the only weird thing that happened was the trees, and she supposed she could come up with a rational explanation of that. Her mind kept trying to tell herself that everything was normal, but some patient little voice way back in her head kept saying "No, it wasn't."

"OK, check this out. I'm in Maples. You know, that greasy little department store? This kind of cute guy just appears on the aisle I'm on. He's got to be the same guy. T-shirt old and way too small, pants too small, but still had the legs rolled up weird. And weird old shoes with pennies in the front, like loafers or something."

Jen remembered the shoe in the shaft of light at the house. Her head was throbbing again and she felt pale.

"That's him."

"Well, as I'm walking by, I'm kind of checking him out a little, and he's smiling looking at what he has in his hand, and as I pass him, he gives it to me. It's this beautiful white rose blossom. He just gives it too me, and I take it up to the checkout but by the time I got there, it was all dead and dried. Not like it wilted, but like it had been there a long, long time. And I look back in the store and he's nowhere. I mean that store is not big enough to hide in, and he's just not there. I left to go find my mom, and watched the front door to the store for a while, and nobody came out."

Jen sat in silence for a moment. "That's not all. I mean about the boy. I think he was at this house I went to the other day. A house I went to with a guy I met. Another guy. Normal guy. Cute guy."

"What's his name?" Delcie said, sounding just a little more predatory than Jen liked.

"Oh, Tanner. He's nice. I just met him. We went out in his boat. And we wound up at this very strange lake house."

"What do you mean?"

Jen found that she didn't really have the words to describe what she and Tanner had experienced. It's not that she didn't think Delcie would believe her. It was that no matter how she thought about it, there wasn't a good way to describe how she'd felt there.

"I think maybe the boy was there. I don't know. It's hard to explain. You ever go someplace where you just feel really uncomfortable? Really creeped out for no reason whatsoever?"

"Yeah. The library." Delcie said. Jen laughed a little between throbs of her headache.

"Right. You know what I mean. Just a really bad feeling like you want to leave as soon as possible. This place was like that. It was dark in the middle of the day." Jen said. Delcie had a quizzical look on her face.

"Let's go there. Then I'll know what you mean." she said, with an adventurous light coming into her eyes. Jen thought for a moment.

"I want Tanner with us." She said. Delcie looked a little put off.

"We have to have a guy with us?" she jabbed at Jen. Jen looked at her. Delcie could be a little "high maintenance" she was beginning to think, but Jen still saw the good glow in her eyes; a persistent, somewhat self-focused, but genuine character shone there. She smiled back at her.

"Nah! Who needs 'em?" She joked. "Except I don't know how to get there. It's all the way across the lake."

"Can't we drive there?" Delcie said.

"I don't think so. If you can, I don't know how. I mean, it's like 10 minutes away across the lake in a boat, but miles by road, even if you knew what road to take..."

"Well, I've got a car, a full tank of gas. Let's get some food and go!" Delcie said, thrilled to have something to do and somebody to do it with.

Jen thought for a moment, then grinned. The creepiness of the afternoon had worn off, dusk was falling, and the world seemed so safe inside the big Volvo. Her headache was even easing up a bit.

"Let's eat, then we'll check it out, ok?"

"Yes!" Delcie said, as they pulled into the only drive-in in town. Jen had a huge greasy cheeseburger and root beer float and was ready for a challenge, and an adventure with a new friend.

# The House at Night

"It's got to be this road." Delcie said, and Jen wondered how she would know, especially at night. The sun set quickly amidst the deep pines. Twilight was brief, and full darkness came down surprisingly quickly. She thought that Delcie just wanted to cruise around, which was fine with her. She wasn't particularly thrilled with the notion of going to the lake house at night.

Delcie eased the SUV around the logging road gate. The sign said "Closed to thru traffic". Jen wasn't nuts about getting on another logging road. She checked to make sure the door was locked. She was pretty sure this would just wind up being a ride in the woods at night. She couldn't imagine a lake house as remote as this one would be easily found by road.

They drove for a while without much change in the road which continued to snake around in the dense forest. Eventually, small patches of pine needles blown onto the road in clumps gave way to larger clumps, until finally Delcie found herself slowing as the road was almost entirely covered with pine needles. No cars had been here recently, or if they had, in such small numbers as to leave the pine detritus almost untouched on the road. It was eerily quiet, the pine needles completely muffling the sound of the tires on the road. Delcie rolled the windows down. The cool pine scent and gentle breeze wafted through the car. Jen looked out her window in the gloom, more than just a little apprehensively. She feared that they were actually on the right road.

The woods at night are always a little strange. Even a small patch of trees can take on ominous dark shapes at night, and the deep tall pines of Northern Wisconsin became almost like a scene from another planet. Occasional ghostly white birches almost seemed to leap out into the headlights. Jen didn't feel like she had any business being there. During the day, the woods belonged to people. At night, they belonged to the night and the things that go by night. Delcie giggled and cut the headlights off and let the car coast under the shafts of high moonlight. Jen shivered just a little and both girls giggled despite the thrill. Delcie let the car coast to a stop, braking gently.

"Spooky!" she laughed. The night sky was starry and moonless, a dark blue just barely lighter than the dense black of the trees that obscured it.

"Hope there aren't any bears around!" Jen said. Delcie looked at her as if to say "You mean there really are bears around here?" The windows went back up in a few seconds as Delcie cut the lights back on.

There, with the headlights feebly illuminating the coarse wood siding, stood the house

Both girls drew deep breaths and sat silently staring. There was no need for Jen to identify the house. Delcie was pretty sure this was it. . It's straight vertical lines peeked from behind black pines, a ghostly grey, dimly luminescent from the weak light of the stars. It seemed so utterly abandoned and remote that imagining anyone ever living there seemed impossible. Dead black windows surely never shown with light. Sounds surely never swelled from open doors. Smoke surely never curled from a chimney that seemed to tilt dangerously at them, menacing.

"We don't have any flashlights or anything, do we?" asked Jen.

"Umm. Actually I think there is one in the glove box." Delcie said, almost as if she regretted admitting it, now more than a bit hesitant to go house exploring. Jen fished it out and tried it; an expensive anodized aluminum light that shone as bright at the headlights.

"Well...?" Jen said, looking at Delcie. Delcie looked at her as if maybe this wasn't such a good idea. The house already had an effect on her she couldn't identify.

"I guess. You sure it's safe?"

"Define safe..." Jen said, popping her door open. She'd already made a deal with herself. The first shoe she saw – anywhere – and she was back in the car and out of there, Delcie or no Delcie.

Instinctively, they grabbed each other's hand. Delcie handed the flashlight to Jen.

"You lead the way, ok?'

"The porch is really rotten. Let's walk around back." Jen said, remembering the open window. However, on turning the corner, the light shone on a back wall with closed windows, none broken or open.

"No way!" Jen harsh-whispered.

"What?!"

"When we were here, Tanner went in right through that window, which was not just open, but broken out completely!" she whispered, pointing the light to the same window. It was now not only whole and complete, but also completely fastened and secure despite its dilapidated state. She simply stared at it in the light's glare waiting for it to make sense. For a moment she entertained the thought that perhaps this was not the same house. This only lasted a moment, though. Then she thought someone had been there and fixed the window. But the grey weathered wood and dusty dirty glass implied it had been there for a long time.

"Are you sure?" Delcie asked.

"As sure as I'm standing next to you!" Jen said, not willing to walk forward without some understanding of what was happening. She stood silently as if an explanation would come to her somehow. Gradually she worked up the nerve to shine the light in at the nearest window, but this she did with both of them at some distance, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder.

The light panned slowly and erratically through the filmed grimy windowpanes, alternately illuminating spots on the walls, a countertop, the front door and its knob, an ancient fishing pole, an old license plate. Nothing terribly unusual. When she was confident that she'd illuminated most of the interior, at least what she could from where she stood, only then did she walk to the window, Delcie glued to her hip.

"God, this place looks like it's 200 years old!" Delcie said.

"I know! The wood never got painted, I guess, and it just weathered really badly. I don't think it's all that old. That license plate is from 1956."

"That's old enough!" Delcie said.

"I agree." Jen said, without really considering it. She was intent on filling every corner of that room with some light before even thinking about trying the back door. Slowly edging towards the window, she slowly pressed her face against the glass, at the same time fishing the light beam as tight as she could into the corners. She wiped at the glass with the heel of her hand to clear the grime as best she could. Delcie was huddled so close to her behind she could have been in her back pocket.

"Don't push!" Jen whispered.

"Sorry! See anything?"

"It's too dark. This window is too dirty, too. I can't make anything..." Just as she said the words, a glint of light caught the corner of her eye. She stared harder into the darkness. There it was again. Then Delcie screamed. Jen whipped around. What she thought was movement inside was a reflection in the window. Dark shape. Dark shapes. And they were moving behind them.

"Holy shit..." Jen said.

As they whipped around, Jen slashed the beam of light like a sword. There, circling, just in view in the dense pines, shot with starlight as they ducked in and out, occasionally being caught by the flashlight beam, but wincing and retreating from its light, circling them, circling the house, were animals. They looked at first like dogs, but then not. Something like dogs, but not quite – lowering their heads and penning them in, pushing them towards the house; the relative safety of the house. Each movement from each animal brought them slightly closer. Dogs? Their paws – if paws they were – were long. Were those fingers? No, they couldn't be. Long necks which led to dog-like heads, but the faces had no snouts. Just glowing circles in faces that looked like a child's deranged cartoon version of a human face. And they were muttering. Delcie saw them first, and started sobbing quietly, whimpering.

"Oh, my God, they're talking! What the hell are they saying?! Oh, God, Jen!"

The things circled, arching their backs, looking to one another, muttering, looking at them. The dead, grey lights in their eyes were more horrible than anything Jen had ever seen in her life. They had wandered right into a nightmare.

They backed up, not looking, seeking to do anything to get away from the things, and Delcie, in back, hit the door first. It was not locked or latched, and the two nearly fell over each other is they backed through it. Jen sprung forward, dropping the light as she latched the door behind them. Delcie huddled with her back to the door. Jen retrieved the light and shone it out the through the window.

They were gone.

Whatever had been there now gave way to stippled black green shots of moonlit pine limbs and undergrowth. It was impossible for them to all have disappeared so quickly.

"It's OK. They're gone. I think." Jen said.

"No, it's not OK! What the hell was that?"

"Maybe they were wolves?" Jen said, knowing the neither she nor Delcie thought for one instant that they were anything like wolves.

They stared for a long time out at the darkness, making sure there was no movement. It was so quiet and dark in the house. Only the occasional moonbeam shot through the odd window and briefly lit spots here and there. Jen shone the light around but didn't want to follow it with her eyes. She feared a shoe would turn up in the spotlight. She felt no safer in here than she did on the porch. Her head was throbbing so hard she could hear the blood pulsing in her ears. She sat, crouching next to Delcie against the door, seeking her closeness. They were suddenly two frightened little girls who had just wanted to do something fun but had wandered off. She was going to have to start listening to this headache, it occurred to her. It comes when bad things happen.

Delcie was first to hear the crying. It came from everywhere at once, it seemed. No; More like from under the floorboards. No, the stairs. No, no, it was coming from outside. It was definitely coming from outside. They didn't want to look. They could not bring themselves to raise their eyes to see whatever now walked around the house next to the windows, quickly walking, crying while walking, from window to window, from the sounds of the crying, slowing, pausing to look in at each window before moving to the next. It sounded like a child's crying, but it came from too high. Out of her peripheral vision, Jen could see the tall shape as it blocked the light at each window. The tall, too-tall-for-a-child thing that cried like a child, sobbing, heartbroken. She would not look directly at the window. She knew somehow that it is what it wanted her to do. To look at it and accept its existence. She would not, and she held Delcie's face towards her to prevent her from doing the same.

"Oh, Jesus, it wants us in here. We have to get back to the car. We have to get out of here back to the car." She said. She was afraid it would come in. Delcie lowered her head."

"I don't think I can move! Who is it!? Why is it crying?! It sounds like a little boy!" Delcie said.

"Yes, you can, Delcie! You can move! And it's not a boy. This is bullshit, and we're getting out of here. Somehow..." Her own rising anger emboldened her. She was pissed, and she welcomed the anger, knowing that it was her survival instinct taking over. She shot the beam of light at the window now occupied by the shape, and then she screamed. And the screaming frightened Delcie, and they rose. Both fearing each other's screams, they rose and they jerked the door nearly off the hinges, and ran to the car.

They ran, with the sound of crunching pine needles coming from behind them, crunching under the weight of something crying like a child but weighing as much as a football player, they ran. Delcie hurt herself slamming her head in the door in her rush to close it. She floored the Volvo in reverse before Jen could close the door, and the weight of the door flung it wide open, nearly within the reach of the large thing that was so sad and cried so pitifully and terribly. Jen nearly hit three trees in reverse before daring to whip the SUV around, into drive and spinning clouds of pine needles behind them, cutting on the headlights, taillights illuminating the pursuing thing that neither would look at.

In the moonlight, as they left, the shape wept and stopped chasing them. It cried because it wanted them, but it was afraid, too. It – He – wept tears from his black, dead eyes. Sightless, depthless eyes. The things in the trees with their dead light eyes retreated from it. They feared him.

# The Ride Home

Delcie cried. Jen would have cried, too, but her headache made her too angry. It was easing now, though. The farther they got from the house, the better it got. She grabbed Delcie's hand.

"It's OK, sweetie. It's OK."

" **No, it's not. Oh, God, no, it's not!** I hate this. What just happened??"

"I don't know." Jen said, and she too began to cry. When back on the main road to town, after tearing over the pine needle covered logging road, swerving wildly around the chained entrance, Delcie pulled the car to the curb and both girls cried hard for a few minutes. It was not even that late yet, but she wanted to go home. She wanted to be around her normal family in their normal, boring lake house, playing a normal, boring game of Monopoly while eating a normal, boring bowl of popcorn. But she couldn't go home like this. She began shaking uncontrollably. Delcie's hand was trembling and cold as ice.

"I don't understand! Where the hell were we? What was that place? What were those things?!"

"Delcie, I'm sorry. I didn't think we'd... I, I guess I thought if we went out there, it would be all normal and I could prove to myself that there was nothing wrong with the place. And I dragged you right into it. I'm sorry, Delcie." Delcie stared at her, all attempts at posturing or pretension gone. Jen's look of apology was sincere and Delcie's response was equally genuine.

"It's OK. I'm glad nobody got hurt. Imagine if you went there by yourself!" Jen thought for a moment, then realized she could never have been so strong by herself.

"Thank you, Delcie. Thank you for going along, even though it turned out bad." They hugged, and started crying and laughing at the same time. The fear dissipated and gave way to humor, the only way the girls could deal with the surreal quality of the experience.

"Were those freaking dogs, or what the hell were they!?" Delcie laughed, tears running down her face.

"Remind me to take a few shock collars next time!" Jen laughed

"Somebody hasn't had their shots!"

"They need a little obedience training!"

"We'll take the dog whisperer next time!!!" Delcie was beside herself crying and laughing. Jen thought she might wet her pants if she laughed any harder. This was necessary catharsis.

"Oh. God! I can't take it! Stop!" Jen laughed. Then she thought about the crying child – man – boy outside. Her blood chilled and the laughter left her. Delcie continued to laugh, but her laughter began to dissipate as well.

"Jen?"

"Yes?"

"Why was he crying?"

"I don't know, sweetie. I don't know." They sat in the new silence. Jen thought of the huge shadow; too large for child tears, and the sound of a child's broken heart coming from a monstrous shadow.

"Jen, was that the boy from town?"

"I think so, but I don't know..."

"So, what really did happen when you and Tanner went there?"

Jen told her everything. From the frightened deer to the shoe in the light. The picture over the fireplace especially stuck in her mind. She realized that it might be the boy himself. Why would he haunt the shack? What did he want? Jen suddenly felt angry again. This was a sick man, nothing more. Not a ghost. No, that couldn't be. She was denying her senses, her experience. But it still pissed her off. She wanted to go back to the house with a freaking flame thrower.

"If it is the same boy, why did he appear to us in town, and why was he so nice?" Delcie asked after a few moments of silence.

"Was he so nice? I mean, really. A dead flower? It sounds more like a threat to me." Jen said, looking at Delcie.

"Yeah, I guess not." Delcie said, looking a little dejected. She wasn't used to any kind of mistreatment from a boy, Jen could tell.

"I just kept an eye on him in the jeep when he was driving me into town. I didn't trust him at all. I get a huge headache when I'm anywhere near him, apparently. I think the message was that he could find me any time, and take me anywhere. I don't get the feeling that saying No to a ride was going to be an acceptable answer, now that I think about it. I mean, I was ready to jump out of the jeep if necessary, even though I really didn't think that at the time." Jen said.

"He seemed so nice in the store, at first, but, I don't know. He smiled too much, and then gave me that weird flower..." Delcie said. "He was cute..." she added as if he had ceased to be, or at least ceased to be a prospect. She still wasn't sure that they were talking about the same boy, and if they were, if that is who – or what - they had encountered that night.

Jen knew. If her headache weren't telling her, she still knew. She had seen the boy, spent time with him, even talked with him a little bit. He was evil and he was powerful, and she feared him.

"I need to get home, Delcie." She said. She really wanted to go home and call Tanner, but she left that out.

"Yeah, I suppose I should get the car home, too. We were supposed to only be getting something to eat. My mom's having a cow, I'm sure." Delcie said, rolling her bright brown eyes backwards.

Jen popped out of the SUV after the two exchanged phone numbers and addresses in the driveway of her parent's cabin. She liked Delcie, and besides- they were bonded now. They shared a long look at each other, hugged and said goodbye. They would talk soon, and they both knew it. No one else would believe them.

# Jen calls Tanner

Jen called Tanner's cell. She was oddly nervous at first, then realized that it was because she was bound to get a parent on the phone. It was kind of late, but not too late.

"I'll get him. He just got back from his uncle's. This isn't the pretty young girl he met today, is it sweetie?" Tanner's mom said. Jen was flattered and embarrassed in equal parts.

"Well, um, I hope so!" she said and they both laughed. Tanner's mom called for him and after a few bumping sounds, some muttered words about not tying up the line too long, he picked up the phone."

"Hello, Jen?"

"Yes! Hi!" she said, glad that he hadn't said some other girl's name.

"What's up? I mean, I'm glad you called..."

"Oh, sorry. I know it's kind of late, but something happened." Jen said, suddenly realizing that she was going to get in trouble when she told him she had gone to the house.

"That's OK. I'm glad you called. Uh, I already said that, didn't I? Sorry..."

"Oh, no problem! I was just, well, we just got back; back from there. From the house, that is..." Long silence.

"Uh, who's "us"?" Tanner said slowly.

"Oh, I met this girl today. She's really nice. Delcie. Kind of a rich chick, but still nice. "

"Hey, you promised me you wouldn't go back there without me." Tanner said. He wasn't so much angry as relieved, and a little let down that he hadn't been included.

"I'm sorry. A lot of things have happened. Can you talk for a while?"

"This sounds serious, Jen. You sure you're OK?"

"I will be if I can see you and talk to you face to face..." Tanner's heart picked up a beat.

"Can you sneak out?" Tanner said.

"Sure. Everybody here goes to bed with the sun. It's like a nursing home."

"Yeah. I know what you mean. In tune with the rhythms of nature."

"That and there's nothing to do after sundown!"

"True! Ok. Where and when."

"My truck is kind of loud. I'll cut the engine about half a block from your house. Can you watch for me?"

"Sure. Flash your lights or something and I'll watch out the window."

Just as planned, about 15 minutes later an older model GM pickup could be heard rumbling up the road, then, with its engine cut, gliding quietly up to the drive, the only sound the crunching of gravel under the tires. The lights flashed. Jen handled the screen door with extreme caution. It had the ability of sounding like a small caliber rifle when allowed to swing close of its own accord. Jen snuck into the passenger seat of the truck and closed the door as quietly as she could. The house remained dark and quiet.

"Hey. You sure you're ok?" Tanner said, checking Jen over for obvious signs of distress.

"Yeah. Look, I'm sorry I went without you. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing. Delcie and I had, well, similar experiences. We both met this boy. We think it's the same boy. I think we saw him at the house, or something like him..."

"A boy?" Tanner asked.

"Yes. At least I think so. It's hard to tell how old he is. Or what he is..." her voice trailed off.

She shuddered as she wondered who – or what – had been driving the jeep earlier today. Jen climbed in the old truck. It was old, but immaculately clean. She could tell he took good care of it. She told Tanner what had happened to them. He sat silently listening. There was neither a look of disbelief or judgment on his face. He merely listened. When she paused for his reaction, he simply put the transmission in neutral and let the truck coast backwards down the slight hill leading to the house, only starting the engine when they'd gotten a good ways from the house. They rode through the night, staring into the birches and pines, ghostly trunks lit by the headlights as they glided through the Wisconsin cool summer night. Jen felt she was in a strange dream. Two days ago, boredom, sunbathing and distant boats on a lake were her whole summer life. Now, she rode through the night half expecting the rotting, living corpse of some deranged boy to jump out from behind any tree. Tanner reached out and touched her hand on the seat, sensing her distress. They linked fingers, wordlessly, exchanging a knowing and compassionate glance.

"I think it's the boy with the jeep. The same boy that Delcie saw. I don't' think he's a boy at all. Or at least not anymore." Jen said, in a very small, somewhat childlike voice. She was afraid, and she didn't want to hide it from Tanner. He sensed this, squeezed her fingers gently, and smiled.

"Yeah. That's a good question. What's real? I mean, is he a real person? A real ghost?"

"You know that shoe I saw in the house? In the beam of light?" she said.

"Yeah?"

"It was a penny loafer. When was the last time you saw a penny loafer?"

"On my dad about 10 years ago..."

"I saw two today."

"Where did you see the other one?'

"In the jeep..."

It was quiet for a while. Jen noticed they were about to turn onto the logging road.

# Back to the House at Night

Tanner felt secure in his good, big, solid pickup. He wondered why this mattered. Did he feel physically threatened? Should he? He pointed the truck at the ditch next to the locked gate to the logging road, the truck brushing pine boughs as it passed around the blocked entrance.

"Are we going there?" Jen asked.

"I don't know. I guess I'm kind of headed that way."

"Please don't. Please don't, Tanner. Not at night!"

Tanner realized that he was angry. Someone or something had threatened Jen and he wanted to hurt them.

"I just want to check this out. It's not that I don't believe you. I do. That's why I want to go there. I want to find out who this is."

"It's not something to mess with at night. Please, Tanner." Her voice was low, serious, but still showed her fear. He pulled the truck to the side of the logging road and sat for a moment staring out the window. Jen could see the tension in his jaw. A vein throbbed in his temple. He looked at her, his bright eyes shining even in the dark.

"I guess I feel the need to do something macho to stick up for you. Sorry. I'm still having a hard time with all this. I mean, part of me wants to believe that there's nothing supernatural going on at all, but some punk messing around."

Jen started to insist, but paused. She found herself questioning her own experience. Then she remembered the things that rose from the ground. The dog-things. And the giant crying boy. Her blood ran cold.

"I can't go one foot closer to that house tonight, Tanner. I'm sorry." Her headache was returning.

Tanner realized this before she said it and was already backing the truck around.

"I'm sorry Jen. I wasn't thinking about you." He squeezed her hand, soft, but firm. She felt the strength even through the softness. Tender and strong. She scooted closer to him and put her head on his shoulder. Tanner could feel the gentle sobs coming from her as she clutched his upper arm. He reached up with his right arm and pulled her head close enough to kiss the top of it.

The soft pine needles, damp with the night dew, were even quieter than they'd been during the day. Were it not for the rumble of the truck's exhaust, there would be no sound at all, like gliding on ice. It was a pleasant feeling, especially now that they were pointed away from the house. Shafts of moonlight occasionally striped the road, dappling it in shades of dark greenish grey. The truck's old headlights pierced the darkness, but not like Delcie's big halogen beams had. The overall effect would have been romantic were it not for the location.

As they approached the exit to the main road, the truck's light shafts shone on the back of the gate, still locked. Where there had been only rusting white paint on the logging road sign, something now stood out in stark contrast. Words, written large in black paint, or something that looked like black paint, stretched the length of the sign.

COME BACK GURLEE. I DAER YOO!

Tanner stopped the truck and the two of them stared in amazement. Tanner flushed hot with anger, and slammed the truck into gear, taching out the V8, and dumping the clutch. The big front bumper sent the chain gate with the sign on it flying into the ditch across the road. But this time Jen was glad. She was as angry as Tanner, despite her sobs.

# At the Police Station

"We've got to do this right." Jen said when she'd calmed down on the ride back to her house.

"What do you mean?"

"Go to the police. Tell them."

"Tell them I just ripped one of the logging road signs down?" Tanner half laughed.

"Well, sort of. I mean, the sign may not have anything to do with me. It might be about Delcie. Hell, it might not have anything to do with any of us!"

Tanner looked at her as if to ask "Do you really believe that? Jen, I'm pretty sure that writing wasn't even on the sign when we pulled in here. I looked at the gate on the way through to make sure we cleared it, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed that! Somebody is messing with you – with us."

"And that's why the police should know."

"Do you know the sheriff here?" Tanner looked at her and asked.

"No."

"My dad went to high school with him. Two kinds of people come out of towns like this. Those who have half a brain and go away, and the others who stay because this is about the best they can do. He falls into the second category."

"We still need to do this right."

"What are we going to tell him? We saw a scary shoe, some dogs barked at you, and a kid was crying and chasing you? The first thing he'll do is ask you why you were trespassing. Believe me, I know Red Collins, and he's about as useless as they get. Every time he comes up for re-election, the only reason he gets the spot is because no one else wants it. He won last time with 27 votes, and most of those were probably his family!"

Jen sat thinking. She was rehearsing in her head how she would tell some local yokel about what she'd seen. It didn't sound good. '

"Still, even if he doesn't believe us, he's got to file a report. That way, if something happens, he'll already know there's a problem."

Tanner wondered about this, but assumed she was right.

"Tanner, you believe me, right?"

He stopped the truck, pulling onto the sloping shoulder only a mile or so from her house.

"As much as I believe the sun will come up tomorrow. I believe you, Jen. What I am having a hard time with is this whole thing. Part of me wants to disbelieve my own eyes. But I believe you, Jen." He said this and their eyes locked. The two shared a long look, then their first kiss.

# Lunch with Tanner

"Jen, it's for you!" her little brother screamed from the breakfast room.

Jen struggled to one elbow, and squinted into the bright light filtering through her curtained bedroom window. The sun looked pretty high already, and she wondered how late she'd slept. Glancing at her watch on the bed table, she was surprised to see it was already 11 am. She was going to scream back telling her brother to take a number, but she knew he wouldn't hear. She popped a big tee-shirt over her head and emerged into the hallway.

"It's some guy!" her brother said, waiting to see her response. She gave him none, simply taking the phone from him.

"Hello?" she said, hoping it was Tanner.

"Good morning, sunshine!" his voiced beamed into the phone. She was nowhere near as awake as him, and decided not to try to convince him she was.

"Mornin'" she drawled sleepily.

"Did I wake you up? I'm sorry!"

"'Sokay. I slept too late anyway." She said brushing the hair out of her eyes.

"You sound cute when you wake up." He said in a low voice. Jen simply mumbled back to him, a sort of cute moan that made his heart beat a little faster.

"Are you awake enough for some news?" he said after a moment of simply silently appreciating the delicious warmth of her purr.

"I am now." She said, more awake by the moment. She'd been thinking about his hands for some reason, and got a little sidetracked.

"OK. I talked to my dad this morning. This is going to blow you away. My dad knew this kid!"

"You say "knew" as in past tense – like he's dead."

"Oh, he's dead. Very dead!" Tanner said. "He died in 1963! There was a murder. A multiple homicide."

Jen stared at Tanner, her mind spinning. To her surprise, she was not surprised. In fact, some part of her knew this. On some unconscious level, she knew that there was death involved.

"Well, that pretty much throws us into the supernatural side of things, I guess!"

"Oh, it gets even worse. Way worse. When can we talk? Can I see you today, I mean?"

"I hope so!" Jen said, fully awake and enthusiastic about the idea.

"When can I come by?"

"Can you come by for lunch? It won't be much, but mom will make something."

"OK, sure. What time? "

"About an hour?" That would give her time to make herself look good, fully wake up, and put her mom on notice to serve something other than hot dogs.

"I'll be there!"

Tanner's truck pulled up in the driveway just about the time her Dad was pulling the hot dogs off the grill. Jen was waiting on the porch.

"Hey!" he said, climbing out into the midday sun.

"Hi, cutie" she risked. Actually, not much of a risk, as she knew how it would be received. A totally cute glance of the blue eyes up through tussled hair was her response, and it was plenty. Their eyes met and they both knew that a long kiss on the front porch at high noon before eating with her family, no matter how desirous they were of it, was probably out of the question. Still, they took each other's hand as if they had been greeting one another in just that manner for 20 years.

"Nice to see you smiling. You OK today?" he said. Jen noticed that just inside the circle of dark blue around his pupils, which served to set off the crystal blue within, were flecks of silver and green. She wanted to just stand on the porch and stare into them for an hour or so. But they had to go in and do the family thing. Besides, with no breakfast on board, the hot dogs were beginning to smell pretty good even to her.

"You, too! I didn't sleep much, but when I did, I passed out."

"Me, too. I just kept thinking you were in danger. I almost parked out front last night, but I'm pretty sure your dad would have gotten the wrong idea."

The thought of him parking his car outside her house, keeping a watch over her through the whole night made her sleepy and warm inside. She wished she had met him summers ago.

"Yeah, I supposed it would, but it's awful sweet." She gave him a quick peck on the cheek just before shuffling him into the breakfast area where the table was laid. He bent down to receive it and blushed a little.

"Mom, this is Tanner. I don't think you met him the other day."

"Hello, Tanner. It's nice to meet you." Her mother responded, smiling broadly.

"You remember Dad..." Jen said.

"Of course." Tanner said, nodding slightly and shaking her dad's hand. She could tell from his smile that he thoroughly approved of Tanner.

"Have a seat! It's just hot dogs, but they're good Wisconsin all-meat links!" Jen felt her appetite slip a little. Her dad was not good at chitchat.

"That's good, Dad. They'll be fine. This is my little brother Chase." She said smiling at Tanner who had seated himself next to her.

"Hey, man! What's up?" Tanner said, smiling at Chase, who, out of shyness simply said "Hey" and sat down.

"Tanner, I understand you've spent a great deal of time on the lake growing up." Jen's mom said.

"Yes, ma'am. My dad grew up here. I've spent my summer's here since I can remember. It's a great town and a great lake."

"Jen also tells me you have quite a boat." She continued.

"Well, yeah, when it's running, I guess. It's an older boat, but my Uncle helps me keep it running."

Small talk like this ruled the dinner conversation but Tanner saw the weariness in Jen's eyes, and just a trace of fear, still visibly shaken from last night. It was clear she wanted to get out of there and talk.

"Mom, Dad, Tanner's going to take me into town, ok?' she asked when the last of the watermelon was gone. Tanner had eaten his share, and she wondered how anyone could eat like that and have a flat stomach. She wanted to get out of there, and she wanted him to be with her. She needed to able to talk about last night, and it wasn't time to bring her parents into the deal yet. At the first opportunity, they slipped out the side screen door, Tanner once again thanking her mom for lunch.

"It was just hot dogs..." she teased.

"Yeah, but they were good." He replied. Someone had taught him courtesy early and well. They hopped into his truck, and Jen slid near him with no hesitation this time. It felt as natural to both of them as if she had been doing it all her life.

"Well, I thought about it all night until I went to sleep, and still don't know what to do. I stared at the window in my room for a couple of hours waiting for some person's – or something's – head to pop up. I don't know why they make lake houses with no drapes. I'm putting some blinds of some kind in that window tonight, even if it's just a T shirt."

"Jen, I think you're in danger. Probably your friend, too."

# The Newspaper Office

Jen thought about this, and knew this was true although she hadn't formed the thought in her head yet. The primitive part of her brain that was responsible for safety was too busy reacting to the situation for the conscious part of her brain to get involved in the process.

"From him? I mean, what can he do? I was more afraid of those things in the trees, around the house. I mean, physically afraid. Whatever was walking around the house and crying was scary as hell, but I didn't really feel physically threatened. But those dogs or wolves or whatever the hell they were..."

"I don't know, and that's the part that scares me the most. We need to find out more about this. Before we talk to the police, let's see if we can dig up anything about that house and the murder. I'm betting that's where this happened. There's a newspaper office in Sangamon. It's just ten minutes from here. There has to be some record of this happening in the paper. Reighelheim doesn't have a paper, but the Sangamon paper covers stuff here. I can get onto our neighbor's wifi connection sometimes at night. They don't have it password protected. I did some googling around, looking for any news items from this area. I didn't find much, but there was one thing. An article from a Madison paper in 1963 that talked about an unsolved murder in Reigelheim. Some men were killed in a house that bordered on the forest preserve. Wanna drive over there?"

"Sure." Jen said.

Tanner and Jen cruised the county road that led to the county seat of Sangamon in Tanner's truck.

"I don't know where the newspaper office is, but I'm sure it's on the square, or near it." Tanner said. Jen had never been to Sangamon, and merely shrugged her shoulders.

"Is it a lot bigger than Reigelheim?" Jen asked.

"Some, but it's still pretty small. Almost all the businesses are right downtown."

Sangamon appeared through the thick pines some 20 minutes later, old stone and brick buildings built by the early German settlers still sitting sensibly and strong, lining neat streets shaded by pines and sycamores. Tanner eased the truck onto the circle that surrounded the obligatory German band shell park where summer picnics and holiday concerts were held.

"There it is." Tanner said, pointing at a red brick building near the West corner of the circle. Carved in stone above the front door were the words "Sangamon Tribune – 1905".

"They'll have papers going back far enough for our research, that's for sure." Jen said

"Yeah. I just hope they kept up with Reigelheim all along." Tanner replied.

Once inside, a pale middle aged woman with an extremely bored expression greeted them, reluctantly. She was ensconced behind a tall desk type podium, and peered down at them imperiously.

"Do you have your back issues on microfiche?" Tanner asked.

The woman looked at him as if he had asked if she had the Titanic in a tub in back.

"No."

"Nothing? No back issues?"

"Oh, we have plenty of back issues, just no micro fiche. They're all downstairs. Just ask Ted back there at the card catalogue to let you down there, and he'll show you where to go." She seemed helpful, but her gaze was questioning. They got the feeling she knew every teenager in Sangamon, and knew they were "out of towners." Jen also imagined that people don't often wander in off the street wanting to view back issues of the newspaper.

Ted proved to be a very bored student age summer worker who was more than happy to leave his filing duties for a trip to the basement. He led them to the back of the racks of books to a dusty, apparently very little used staircase. Flipping on an ancient light switch, dim yellow light showed a steep set of steps leading down into darkness. Descending, they heard the ancient wood creak beneath them, as if complaining. "Folks don't come down here much, do they, Ted?" Tanner said. Ted turned to him and smiled, saying "Just me, really."

The steps led out into a corridor lined with old wooden doors with glass windows and transoms over them. Ted hit a light switch that lit bare bulbs hanging in a procession down the hall, and led them to the third door on the left, a double door. Opening it, he hit another light switch that caused a few more old bare bulbs to shed light on rows of stacks of boxes. The smell of dust mingled with another smell that both teenagers recognized pretty quickly.

"Hey, you guys want to blow one?" Ted asked, preferring a fat joint from his shirt pocket.

"Uh, no, actually, dude, it's like 10 in the morning, so we'll pass. I'd really appreciate it if you didn't, either, inasmuch as it's like illegal, and we're here to find some newspapers, not get arrested, ok, Ted?" Tanner said. Tanner, a head taller than the intern had just enough "man" tone in his voice so that Ted's little friend went quickly back in his pocket.

"No problem, man! Just a thought. So, what years do you need to look at?" Ted asked motioning with his head at a wall of the basement that was sectioned off with a thin chain. "They're all in there, starting at 1909. There's some really exciting stuff in there, let me tell you!" Judging by Ted's expression and the musty smell of old marijuana smoke, they guessed that Ted spent a good bit of his day "researching" old issues of the paper.

"What we're looking for is anything having to do with a lake house that was built around the back side of Potowamish around 1940 or 50."

"Not much news about the Reigelheim area, for the most part. Some stuff about the lake, though. They used to have these big 4th of July boat parades out there. Boats lined the lake, man. I can show you pictures..." Ted started for the gated entrance to the stacks area.

"Actually, that's OK. Ted. I'm sure that was quite a sight. We're really looking for information about a house there. About, maybe, something happening at a house. Something bad..." Jen said.

Ted looked perplexed. "Like some kind of mass murder, or suicide or something?!" he said, eyes lighting at the thought of some real juicy news.

"I don't think anything that drastic. Really don't know what we're looking for. Just something unusual. Something that would have made the paper." Jen said.

"Hmmm." Ted said. "Don't know where to start. I remember somebody painted their boat house pink and the neighbors got pissed and burned it down; that was the rumor, anyway. Pretty sure that was on Potowamish."

"We're thinking more along the lines of some kind of police investigation. The house is still there, but it's been empty forever. It's one of the few houses on the back side of the lake – the forest side." Tanner added.

"Nothing but logging roads back there." Ted said. "Not much news comes out of there."

"Does the Forest Service keep any kind of records?" Jen asked.

"I suppose. You could probably check with them over in Leinenstern." Ted said.

"But, if a crime happened over there, wouldn't it be in the paper?" Tanner asked.

"Oh, for sure. This rag doesn't miss a beat. I can tell you what Mrs. Samuelsen served Pastor Deiner on the Sunday following Lent 41 years ago this Sunday, if you want."

"What about child abuse?" Jen asked. Ted and Tanner both shot their glances at her.

"Do they report that kind of stuff around here? I mean, did they, back then?" she continued.

"Yeah, sort of. They didn't much call it that, but that sort of thing did turn up from time to time. The term back then was "child battering". I'd remember something like that, though." Ted said.

"You've read all of these?" Jen asked, amazed.

"No, not really. I mean not all the articles, but it's a 7 page paper, or at least it was up until about 1970, and it doesn't take long to skim one. I came across three murders in almost one hundred years of papers. The old folks around here say that there's never been a murder in Sangamon, which is true, I think, but if you include surrounding areas, not true! A guy came back from World War One all goofed up from shell shock or something and killed his father in a fight over a pig, if you can believe that."

"Around here, I can." Tanner said.

"There was a family or something that got killed. Some bodies were found. I think that might have been back that way." Ted said, matter of factly, pointing vaguely in the direction of Reigelheim.

"What!?" Jen and Tanner said in unison.

"Yeah. They were from out of state. Came here for summers." Ted was digging through stacks of yellow newspaper, looking for dates. "1963, I think. It happened out in the woods around here somewhere." Ted pulled a stack of about 15 papers from where he must have assumed the summer months from 1963 would be, and threw them on a table.

"Here it is. Big headline for 1963!" He laid the June 15th issue of the paper on the table, page one facing up.

### Bodies Found in Reigelheim Forest Preserve

Jen and Tanner both grabbed for the paper, Jen reading aloud:

" _Police responded to a report from Forest Service personnel of bodies found near Big Chetek Creek. The victims were Maurice Jaunders from Moline, Illinois, and Harold Lightsey, from Hinckley, Illinois. A third man, whose identity has yet to be determined, was also found dead. A juvenile male was found dead at the scene, as well. The bodies were discovered buried in shallow graves near a cabin belonging to two of the men._

Initial reports indicate no gunshots, but battering wounds and gouging wounds to all five. Details are being withheld pending the notification of relatives in Illinois."

"Where's Big Chetek Creek?" Jen asked.

"It runs on the other side of town, but I don't know where it comes down from." Tanner said.

"Here." Ted said. "Here's the local fishing report map. Shows Potawamish and tributaries. There's Big Chetek. It looks like it runs down from the Forest Preserve side of the lake. The bodies must have been up in there off one of those logging roads. That's why Forest Service guys found them, probably."

Jen and Tanner looked at each other.

"Write the names down on something..." Jen said to herself as she scrambled for a piece of paper and pen.

# The Police Department

"Where are we going next?" Tanner asked as they circled the band shell pointing the truck in the direction of the highway leading back to Reigelheim.

"Don't you think the local cops would have records of this? I mean in Reigelheim?" Jen said.

"Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's a murder for goddsake."

"A multiple murder." Jen said.

"That side of the lake isn't really even Reigelheim, although you'd think that kind of news would travel like wildfire." A thought had crept into Tanner's mind. Would Jay know about this?

"Yeah. And if it didn't why not?" Jen said.

They drove on in silence for a while, watching the deep green pines slide by lining the county road leading back into Reigelheim. Occasionally they'd pass a locked gate on the North side of the road indicating a barred logging road. Jen peered down each of these, deep into the green gloom present even at high noon in the summer.

They pulled up in front of Reigelheim's tiny police station. It was next to, almost part of, the Post Office. Tanner killed the engine but didn't get out of the truck right away.

"I grew up around here, for the most part, Jen. I'm finding it pretty hard to believe that I don't know about this. It seems odd. I just don't know why everybody doesn't talk about something like this."  
"Maybe they just didn't talk about stuff like this back then." Jen said.

"Yeah. I guess." Tanner looked into Jen's eyes. The high sun made them green as summer. She smiled.

"Wanna go in now?" She said. She actually wanted to kiss him, but somehow the visitor's slot in front of the police station didn't seem the right place.

The police station smelled of Pinesol and urine. It served as a the jail, too, and although it was mostly just a holding place for drunks and occasional criminals prior to transfer to county, enough of them had stayed here and pissed on the floor to make sure it smelled like a jail as well as a police department. The serious looking woman at the desk seemed to know this and resent it in her attitude. She didn't look up as she spoke.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Hi, Janet – I mean Officer Littlehorse."

The officer looked quickly towards the pair, her demeanor changing, softening somewhat, recognizing Tanner's voice.

"Hi, Tanner. Thanks for respecting my rank. Better than I get from most around here..."

This part of Wisconsin, once fully populated by American Indians; Chippewa, Ojibwa mostly, now contained almost none, and those who remained were mostly "bloods" like Janet Littlehorse – a person of mixed blood background; Indian and non-Indian parents - although to look at Janet, she seemed to be full blood Chippewa. Her proud, high cheekbones and jet black eyes and hair told the story. Her mother had been an Irish "blood" herself, with an Irish father and Ojibwa mother, and the only trace of this were faint freckles high on her cheeks. Her father was full Ojibwa. She was somewhat stern looking, but with an unvarnished beauty that was completely natural and timeless. She could be 20 or 50.

Janet had known Tanner since he was old enough to ride a bike. In fact, she had known him since the very day he learned how to. Tanner's dad had just launched him on his maiden solo journey without the aid of training wheels that took him straight into a normally empty road and the path of Officer Littlehorse's car. She was a rookie cop and gave his dad a full chewing out, but gently. His father had responded to the episode by sending the rookie officer a gift of flowers the following day, grateful for her having not run over his son, but also for not having written him a ticket. The "reds" as the few remaining natives were referred to around there, didn't get much respect from white folks. Later, she'd become something of a family friend, almost an Aunt to Tanner. She was at all his gymnastic events.

"How's business?" Tanner asked, smiling. Janet returned a half smile.

"Mrs. Post wants to arrest her neighbor's dog for barking, that crazy old coot over on Hollowroot road can't keep his pants on in public, and my back is killing me, but other than that, things are great. How 'bout you?"

Jen noticed that beneath the stern exterior, there was warmth in her eye towards Tanner, and almost since she'd walked in the door with him, Jen was aware that she was being "appraised"; small sideways glances that were almost unnoticeable but that also seemed to be giving the sharp eyed officer the information she needed.

"Janet – I mean Officer Littlehorse..."

"Janet's fine, honey. Nobody's here but the three of us." Janet interrupted. "The sherrif's bound to be in the poker room at the back of the Red Spot by now."

"This is Jen." Tanner continued. Janet turned to her partially rose and shook her hand, looking deep into her eyes.

"Girlfriend?" she simply said to Jen.

Jen blushed, then quickly said "Yes!"

"Did you lose a bet?" Janet quipped just as quickly, adding a brief wink.

"No – I won one!" Jen shot back. Janet smiled her first real smile. Jen had passed a test.

"She's a doll. Don't screw it up." She said to Tanner.

"Oh, I won't!" he said, very sincerely.

"What's up? What are two young, great looking kids like you doing in a dark smelly police station on a summer day like this?" Officer Littlehorse asked.

"Janet, do you remember anything about a multiple murder around here, years ago? 1963?"

The officer's smile disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. "Well, seeing as that's the year I was born, I don't recall much, but I do know what you're talking about. It happened across the lake on one of those logging roads. Three men and a kid, something like that."

"Do you have any records about it? I mean, we know the names from the Sangamon newspaper, and dates and stuff, but were there any charges? I mean, what happened?"

Janet fixed a long gaze at both of them.

" _Why_?" she said, slowly and very seriously.

Jen and Tanner looked at each. Jen's eyes simply asking " _How well do you know this woman?"_

Tanner looked back at Janet. "It's really just the three of us here?"

"Yes. Sit down. I can tell I've got a story coming. You guys want some coffee?" The officer said, reaching back the pot behind her, topping off her mug. The teens sat in old heavy oak chairs, the seats having been polished to gloss by the backsides of a thousand locals.

"There's this boy..." Tanner began, while Janet listened impassively. "He just started showing up. He's not from around here. I mean, I've never seen him, and I know everybody our age."

"He's red haired, bushy, kind of, It's hard to say how old he is, really. He looks too tall to be a kid, but there's something about him that, well, just doesn't look right." Jen took over. Janet remained impassive. "A friend of mine and I have both had an – experience – with him." Officer Littlehorse's eyes widened perceptibly.

"What sort of experience?" she asked.

Jen went on to detail her experience as well as Delcie's while the officer listened. Jen omitted the part about the trip to the house with Delcie. Hell, she wasn't 100% sure Tanner believed her on that, much less a police officer she'd just met.

"What's this got to do with a 40 year old murder?" the police woman said after a moment's silence had passed. Tanner looked at Jen, his eyes asking her how much she felt comfortable saying.

"We think maybe we saw the boy at the house. Or... something like the boy. At the house." Jen's voice trailed off. The officer's brow furrowed a little

"Why did you go to the house?" the officer said, her voice just on the edge of admonishment. "You know that's trespassing." She said this knowing full well that neither she, the two teens, or the owners of the house, whoever that may be these 40 years later, cared in the least bit about trespassing on the abandoned house.

"I don't know." Tanner said. "Same reason every other idiot kid on this lake does at some time or other, I guess. But Jen said she saw something. A deer. Or at least she thought it was a deer. We were out in my boat, cruising on that side of the lake. We just wanted to check it out. I mean, I know it's trespassing, but you know I wouldn't do anything, Janet." Tanner said. He was talking about their visit on the first day, and Jen held her tongue, wondering how long she could keep quiet about her trip there with Delcie.

"Doesn't excuse trespassing, T." she said, locking his eyes in her coal black gaze. He looked down.

"I know you wouldn't do anything. Sometimes people put signs like that up to make sure nobody hurts their stuff. Sometimes they put them up to make sure nobody gets hurt there. I don't' care much about the house, but I do care about kids getting hurt." Janet continued.

"You mean get hurt and sue the owners?"

"Hell, I don't think you could find clear title on that house much less get anyone to admit they own it after all these years. It would take you three days at the court house just to find a name associated with it. Just don't go there, is all. That's all. I'm a public safety officer, right? You two are my public." These last words were said just slightly louder than the rest of the woman's calm even tone. Jen noticed that the irises in her jet eyes widened as she said them.

"Janet, we want to know what happened there." Tanner said, flatly, waiting for a response from the officer.

" _Why_?" The officer said, again.

"We want to know about the boy. We think he's still here. I think we saw him there."

# Delcie, Redux

Delcie was sticking her feet out the window of her bedroom so that her freshly painted toenails could just barely reach the sun's beams that were crawling up the wall as the midday moved towards afternoon. She had tried to call Jen twice but her geeky brother had told her both times she wasn't home and he didn't know when she'd get back. Delcie didn't tolerate waiting any better than she tolerated boredom, so she acted.

"Mom, I'm going to take the car, OK?" she said as she clipped through the kitchen, catching the car keys off the counter without even slowing down for a response.

"I need to grocery shop later, so don't be long, alright?" her mother said.

Delcie knew this was a bluff. Her mother had just grocery shopped yesterday and she never went into town to shop for anything late in the afternoon, which it was going to be by the time she got back.

She pulled out of the cove onto the main blacktop leading to town and rolled the windows down. She secretly liked the outdoors, although she wouldn't admit it to many people as it didn't jive with her suburban princess status.

"God, is there one straight road in the entire state of Wisconsin?" she thought out loud as she continually had to brake going into turn after turn. The state flag should just be a crooked arrow on a yellow background, she thought.

As she neared town the roads straightened a little, just in time for the speed limit to drop. She didn't make it two blocks into town before she heard her name called.

"Delcie! Hey!" It was Jen, standing by the police station with a guy. Cute guy. Way cute guy. She pulled into an open slot.

"Hey, girl! Delcie shouted as she rolled the window down. Jen approached the car with Tanner just behind.

"Hey. Glad to see you." Jen said.

"You, too!" Delcie said, looking past Jen at Tanner.

"Oh. This is Tanner. Tanner this is Delcie."

Tanner reached around Jen and shook Delcie's hand. Delcie gave her warmest smile.

"Hi, there!"

Jen suddenly felt Tanner's hands come lightly to rest on her hips. Delcie noticed, and Jen felt better about introducing the two. She leaned back against her boyfriend, who responded by putting his chin on top of her head.

"Well, what are you two doing in town?" Delcie asked, smiling broadly.

"We need to talk." Jen's smile had disappeared. Delcie's did, too.

There was a small diner that just about closed at midday, but they were able to wrangle some soft drinks from the sleepy waitress who watched a small TV behind the counter while filling saltshakers.

Jen began, looking around to make sure they wouldn't be overheard, even by sleepy waitresses.

"Delcie, we know some more about the boy."

Delcie looked at Tanner. Tanner nodded slightly.

"Have you seen him?" she asked.

"No. Not yet." Tanner said with just a trace of anger in his voice. Delcie looked at Jen, entreating.

"Did you tell him about the dead rose?" Delcie asked Jen.

"He knows everything." Jen said.

"You don't think we're crazy?" Delcie asked Tanner.

"No."

Delcie looked into her drink glass and frowned a little. She had managed to somehow put aside the incident from the other evening. Not exactly forgetting it, but just putting it aside. But it kept reinserting itself into her thinking, mostly at night, sometimes in the form of nightmares. She felt safe from the event, but still very much in danger, and her sense of reality had shifted. That was what bothered her more than anything.

"We talked to the police." Jen began. Delcie snapped to attention. Half laughing, she asked what they'd told them, and Tanner explained his relationship to Janet Littlehorse.

"We told her as much as we needed to, to make sure that she would believe us." Jen said, "But not so much that we'd lose her."

"Well, how'd she take it?" Delcie asked.

Jen and Tanner looked at each other. Tanner spoke.

"She's known me most of my life. Let's just say she didn't say we were crazy. We found out a lot about what happened there, though. It's not exactly a secret, but it's not the sort of thing you want passed around a town that makes a lot of its money off summer tourism. Two families went in on the house with the idea that one would have it for a month or so, and then the other, splitting the time. They were related, though, and wound up spending some time there together, or at least some of them did. The boy's name was Curtis. He was "mentally ill". Or at least that's what the reports said. Mental illness wasn't something people talked about much then, though. It also covered a lot of things, so nobody's really sure what the deal was. Just that he was "different", and a problem."

"What kind of problem?" Delcie asked.

"Well, he was violent, from what Janet said. He got kicked out of school so much they just stopped sending him. One of the families decided to keep him at the lake house, where he wouldn't be around other kids. This is where it gets really vague. The two families had some kind of falling out. They don't know if it was about the kid or not, but when they all turned up dead, there were no clues pointing to anybody. There wasn't exactly a "CSI: Reigelheim" back then. Not much like it today, either, but for sure back then, nobody much cared or looked into it. No killer was "at large". Anyway, all the bodies weren't found outside. The boy was found with his head smashed in, but here's the weird part. He was chained to the wall!

"How old was the kid?" Delcie asked, her face ashen.

"He was 11 years old. He was unusually tall and strong for his age, according to the reports."

"But this kid – this guy – we've been seeing in town is not 11 years old. No way!" Delcie said.

"I agree totally." Said Jen. "That's what's weird about this. Don't ghosts continue to show up looking as old as they were when they died?" She had allowed the word "ghost" to come out of her mouth for the first time, although it had been going through her mind since the incidents at the house.

"Yeah, I suppose." Said Tanner. "But again, are we sure we're talking about a ghost? And are we really even sure we're talking about the same kid? Hell, do you believe in ghosts??" he asked, his voice rising a little, and his glance shooting from one girl to the other. He was pretty sure he didn't, but he was also pretty sure the girls didn't, either. Or, at least he wanted to hear them say otherwise.

There was a long silence while the three stared at their soft drinks.

# Abraham Lincoln

Chase sat watching TV. Jen sat near him on the sofa but her mind was miles away. Occasionally something on TV would grab her attention, and just now it was some bit about Lincoln not fitting in the bed at the boarding house across the street from Ford Theatre where he was taken after Booth shot him because he was so tall, or how many pairs of gloves Mary Todd Lincoln was said to have. Chase brought her out of her reverie.

"Man, I wish I had Marfan's Syndrome!"

Jen fixed a gaze on him and wondered what on earth Marfan's Syndrome was and why her pimply little brother wished he had it. Perhaps it was a disease that made you invisible, she hoped.

"What is Marfan's Syndrome?" she asked, almost wishing she hadn't. He was really an OK kid. Way smart, but lacking social skills, and she kind of pitied him in a sisterly way for this, and loved him despite his annoying qualities.

"It's where you grow unusually strong, especially in the extremities. Long arms and hands. They suspect Lincoln may have had it." He said.

"Why?"

"You know how tall and skinny he was, right? Hardly the wrestler type, for sure, and yet he won all these county wrestling matches and rail splitting contests. He was supposedly never beaten in a wrestling match. But look at him! He doesn't look like he could wrestle his way out of a paper bag. There's an old daguerreotype of him – That's an old type of photograph..."

"I know what a daguerreotype is..." Jen said in a low voice.

"You know how film was so slow back then, just glass plates, not film at all, really, and they had to leave the shutters open for a long time to get enough light on the plate. Well, in this one picture, Lincoln is sitting cross legged, but you can see that his foot is moving during the photograph because it's blurred."

"OK, I'll bite. What on earth does that have to do with wrestling?"

"It's a symptom of Marfan's! They just didn't know about it at the time because Marfan, the guy who it's named after didn't identify this disease until 1896, 30 years after Lincoln's death.

Jen was in the process of filing this bit of knowledge somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind when an image of the boy – THE boy – came to mind. Long, lanky. Unusually tall and long limbed for his age. Unusually strong? Jen remembered the boy's ankles protruding out of his pant legs, and suddenly had an image of his spidery-long fingers wrapped around the steering wheel of the Jeep. She was on the phone to Tanner in two minutes.

"I want to go back to the house." She said.

"Why? Are you crazy? Every person we've talked to so far has said that we are absolutely not to do that very thing!" his tone was not scolding, but concerned. Concern for her.

"I want to look at that picture over the fireplace".

Later, in Tanner's truck, she relayed the information about Marfan's Syndrome and President Lincoln.

"So suppose the picture shows the kid. Or the boy as a kid. And suppose he has unusually long legs for his age. How are we going to know how old he is in the picture?"

"I'm not looking for that. I'm looking for how his clothes fit him. I'm guessing that his shirts and pants were too short all the time not because he family was poor but because he kept outgrowing everything. That would show up in the picture."

'First of all," Tanner began, "we don't even know if the kid in the picture is the boy that's chasing you guys around."

"Oh, I know!" Jen said, looking at Tanner with a grave, determination.

"OK, but even if it is, and you're able to prove this, what about the dog ghosts, or werewolves, and whatever else that was you encountered out there? Do you seriously think I'm going to subject you to that?!"? Tanner said.

"That was at night. Remember, we were there in broad daylight and nothing happened. I don't think we're in danger in the daylight."

"Buy you and Delcie have both seen him in the daylight!" Tanner replied.

"True. But I don't think he had any _power_ in the daylight. I mean, other than to turn flowers dead and write on signs. No power to hurt us. I think he was just trying to scare us off. Or just scare us. I don't know. I don't know why he's after girls, or high school girls. Maybe he's a ghost going through puberty."

'If he's a ghost at all..." Tanner added.

"Right, but assuming that what happened that night to Delcie and me was supernatural, and that he was involved, then he's supernatural and has supernatural powers. Maybe he's like a vampire and they just don't work during the day?" she said.

Or maybe he's just limited to parlor tricks during the day – dead flowers, magic writing, sleight of hand..." Tanner said. Jen popped him on the shoulder.

"Look, I know this is all crazy bullshit. We're trying to figure it out. But we know one thing for sure." He asked.

"You're cute as shit!" she said and quickly grabbed his chin and planted a huge kiss on his cheek. He blushed and smiled.

"Let's go get Delcie..." Jen said.

# The House in Daylight

Delcie was still asleep when they stopped by. Nobody's cell phones worked up here, so they couldn't call. She came to the door though.

"Give me 10 minutes." She said squinting at the daylight.

In five she was back, looking remarkably alert for someone who'd just awakened.

"OK, why are we going back? We didn't give the crazy monkey werewolf beasts a good enough chance to catch us last time?" Delcie said, wide-eyed, guzzling a can of Red Bull to caffeinate herself awake.

"She wants to look at the picture." Tanner said.

"I want to know if his clothes don't fit in the picture." Jen said.

"Oh. That's important. I was just wondering about that last night. Maybe we could stop off at Reigelheim's men store and pick him up some jeans." Delcie said, sarcasm dripping from the corners of her mouth.

Jen told her about Marfan's Syndrome and Delcie scowled for a while until she remembered a detail about the day at the store where he'd given her the flower. He was taller than her by quite a bit, but looked younger than her. And his pants were way short. He looked like he was wearing some little kid's clothes.

"I mean, Marfan's or not, we're still talking about a ghost, or demon or something here, aren't we?" Delcie continued.

"You're right." Tanner said. "Either way, we know one thing and that's that he's dangerous. Jen thinks he's only dangerous at night. "

"Let's hope you're right, girlfriend!" Delcie said.

Tanner slowed as he approached the logging road. "I want to check something out before we go in." he said, getting out of the truck.

"Where are you going? Please be careful! This is how the guy gets killed in slasher movies!" Delcie shouted. Tanner turned and grinned at her, and in so doing revealed his full profile, from flat stomach to bulging chest muscles. Delcie was appreciative of this, and Jen's good fortune.

But Tanner didn't much leave the area of the car. Instead, he got down almost on his knees and crouched his way forward to the gravel area surrounding the gate, and checked out both grassy areas either side of it, his face no more than a foot off the ground.

"He's looking for tire tracks." Jen said, guessing.

"What did you see?" Delcie asked as Tanner got back in.

"No tracks of any kind. No tire tracks, foot prints, nothing. That's loose gravel and wet grass there. It rained early this morning. Nobody's been here since then, anyway, either coming or going."

"Is that good?" Delcie asked.

Tanner thought a moment, and was about to speak, but Jen did instead.

"It means he's either in there and has been so since yesterday, or – hopefully – he's not in there."

"Exactly. That is, if he's even bound by the laws of nature at all..." Tanner said.

Tanner eased the truck around the left side of the gate and back on to the road. He drove a few yards then stopped after looking in his rear view mirror. His pupils were dilated, Jen noticed.

"I think we're expected". He said.

Turning, both girls saw scrawled in the same childish script on the back of the gate:

" _Wellcome back izabell and dulsinayuh!"_

The girls stared at the sign wide-eyed. Tanner sat quietly looking forward. No one spoke. They each peered as deeply into the gloom of the under story formed by the giant pines as they could, squinting to see something – anything. The road ran only a dozen yards or so before cutting to the left, so it was an exercise in futility.

Delcie spoke slowly, a slight tremble of anger as much as fear in her voice. " _It knows our names_. How the fuck does it know our names! Our real names that _nobody_ knows!?" Her voice rose at the end, and there was true fear in it.

Tanner reached under his seat. "I borrowed this from my dad." He said, pulling out a jet-black shotgun, cut off short at the barrel.

"Oh, Tanner! I hate guns! Please put it back. Please?"  
Tanner looked at her.

"I do, too, Jen. But I also believe in staying alive – and keeping you safe." He grabbed her hand.

Delcie didn't seem to have the same problem. "What's it loaded with?"

"Deer slugs, with the magazine fixed to allow 12 shells. It's all business."

"12 gauge tactical, looks like a Remington 870, yes?" she said. Jen turned and looked at her with a look of amazement.

"Know your guns, don't ya?" she said.

"My daddy collects "fowling pieces". I think he's got an Italian side-by-side grouse gun that he paid 12 grand for. We all had to learn how to shoot. It's kind of fun, really."

"Still waters!" Tanner said, looking somewhat puzzled at Delcie. She shrugged and looked out the windshield.

He pushed the shifter into first and eased along the road.

"Let's split this up. I'll look dead ahead, Jen you look over my shoulder out the left window, and Delcie, you out the right, ok?"

"Velma, you and Scooby take the old abandoned mine shaft..." Jen joked, though no one laughed.

"I just want to make sure nobody sneaks up on us from any direction." Tanner said.

The sun, leaning towards evening, still held a couple of hours of daylight out on the lake, but in the deep pines, the height and density of the trees brought twilight on prematurely. It was never terribly bright in the deep woods, but late afternoon become evening very quickly, followed even more quickly by night.

They rolled along the winding road slowly, each of them jumping at shadows, the occasional squirrel, even a young raccoon. The silence, profound, combined with cool temperatures in the trees, making for an almost tomb-like atmosphere.  
"Why don't these woods look pretty and green like normal trees?" Delcie asked

"I don't know. I'd like to know how they move around..." Jen added.

"It's like we're being watched, all the time." Tanner said, voicing the feelings of all three of them.

The quiet slushing noise made by the tires crunching the pine needles which nearly covered the road was the only sound save for the low rumble of the truck's engine.

"I don't remember how far back it is." Delcie said.

"It seems like it kind of jumped out at us in a hurry that night. But time is weird here. Time and distance." Jen added. Tanner said nothing but stared ahead. He could just make out a slightly lighter green patch in the wood ahead indicating they were nearing the lake's edge, or a clearing, and he peered through it searching for signs of the house. They had nearly passed it when Jen shouted "There it is!" pointing over the steering wheel out Tanner's window.

Just barely visible through dense greenery was the dilapidated clapboard siding. The forest seemed to try to hide it, and even as they watched, branches of smaller under story trees blew across to block any view of the house.

"It's playing hide and seek." Delcie said.

"I don't remember the back of the house being like this at all." Tanner said. "That day we came out here by boat you could walk all the way around the house. Now it looks like it would take a machete just to get at it."

He stopped and backed up a little looking for any trace of a driveway leading to the property, but there was none. He nudged the truck slightly to the side of the road and killed the engine. The three sat just listening. No one seemed anxious to get out.

"Well, here we are." Tanner said, popping the door open.

"God. I don't want to get out of the car." Jen said, her voice sounding small and childlike to her own ears. Her head began the familiar low throb.

The house looked so different – so hidden. Tanner looked at them, saw the fear and looked back at the house. He grabbed the sawed off Remington. Neither girl objected to the weapon now.

The three approached the rear of the house, Tanner first, then Jen, then Delcie, very slowly as they had to push lush thick green weeds and brush out of the way with almost every step.

"God, I've never even seen this weed before!" Tanner said, brushing the clinging stems aside. "Where did this stuff come from?" It was a sickly, thick, lush green, the color of the scum on a stagnant pond, and it smelled like a combination of burned wood and rotten eggs.

Eventually they did make it to the back of the house, which - despite the mysterious lush growth - looked much like Tanner had seen it last time. There was the window and the door just as he remembered them. He approached the door, but turned first to see both girls nearly in tears they were so frightened.

"I think we're good. It's full light still, and I've got enough lead in this thing to cut down a tree." Tanner said. This didn't seem to have much of a calming effect on the girls, but they did follow slowly.

"I don't know if guns are of much use here..." Jen said quietly.

Tanner tried the door. It was pulled to, but not latched. It took only a slight push to open it. He entered shotgun first, followed by Jen, then Delcie, who was looking behind her expecting the horrible shapes from the previous night to spring out at any minute.

Sun streamed in through the holes in the roof and second story windows, creating shafts of light, illuminating spots here and there, but generally the building was well lit, not foreboding. In fact, each of them – although they didn't say it to one another – felt somewhat relieved to be inside. The house was just as Tanner and Jen had left it. Delcie was seeing most of it for the first time, and her wide brown eyes swept the rooms, the skeletal walls, table, chairs, and the stairs leading to nothing but the framework of a second floor.

"Has anyone _ever_ lived here?" Delcie asked. "

"I don't think permanently, but for weeks at a time, yeah, I think so." Tanner said. "At least that's what Janet said. A weekend place, kind of."

Tanner walked towards the fireplace. Everything looked as if it had been coated with grey paint – a dull steel toned patina blurring all detail. Delcie stood at the table, looking at the playing cards lying there. Jen walked up behind Tanner, looking over his shoulder as he approached the mantle. The pictures lay half in shadow, half in light. Light trailed in shafts, wavering over the picture. Here was an arm, then a hand, some fish on a stringer. There a wisp of tussled hair. Then a hand holding a fishing pole. Then a stray beam across a boyish face. Dark eyes. Concealed eyes. A smile, the goofy grin that a child makes when told to smile for the camera, but there was something wrong. This child was not a child's size. The arms were too long. The legs protruded too far from the pant legs. The grin was wrong too. The face – the grin when fully illuminated in combination with the eyes were wrong. Dead. Not happy, not mirthful at all. Not there. There was no one behind the eyes. It was him. In some form, at some age hard to guess, it was him. Jen took a step back at about the very same time that they heard the chains.

# Terror in the Daytime

Tanner spun on his heels. Delcie and Jen grabbed each other. At the top of the stairs, the slight rustle of metal clinking was followed by a dusty wooden sound. Time stood still. Jen's heart beat was the only thing she could hear as she struggled to make out the light clinking sound. They could see nothing in the gloom at the top of the stairs at first, but as the background shadows shifted slightly, something moved. Then, the sound again, slightly louder. Then a shape, a human-like form appeared, mostly hidden, but emerging slowly into shafts of light. A pant leg, an arm, a bare ankle, then a shoe. Then a loop of chain swung slowly into view. It draped from the waist of the figure looming slowly into view at the top of the stairs. It was the boy. A boy, but not – something more. A boy-man, leering, grinning at them as the face came sickly into view. Half real, half the boy that Delcie had seen in the store, that Jen had ridden with in the Jeep, but half something else. Something of the darkness. Something of the night. It was a thing of rot, of decay. The grin, or the leering expression on its face that passed for a grin, faded slowly. Its power was growing in the gloom. It was twilight outside. The pines brought darkness quickly.

"Oh, my God. It's him!" Jen hissed. Tanner stood transfixed, arms limp at his side. An eternity of moments seemingly passed. Tanner spoke.

"What the hell do you want!"? He had become angry. He realized the thing at the top of the stairs was the "boy" who had menaced Jen. In a half second he had raised the shotgun, advanced a shell into the chamber and thumbed the safety off. A voice issued from it, dusty as a tomb, dry as sandpaper, throttled and gravelly. Sepulchral.

" _Hi, girlies._ "

It had advanced downwards a step. Not walking, just descending – gliding. Hideous, soundless gliding, floating. Delcie made a pitiful sound in her throat; The sound of a frightened child near tears. One more step descended and it crossed a beam of light. Now it was revealed as half human. A shaft of light shone through a hole in its half rotten jaw. Its face was not entirely there. Jen stifled a moan of horror. One more step – now it was the form of a child – a gangly, long limbed child, nothing more, but with an unspeakably sad look on its face. Still descending, now in near darkness. The shape shifted again. Something too large, too long, hulking. Hollow dead white light emanated from where its eyes should be. Delcie screamed, and it shook them into action. Tanner jerked the shotgun to his shoulder. The figure continued gliding. Darkness gathered even as it descended. Night was falling unnaturally quickly in the forest surrounding them. This house embraced the darkness like a desperate lover. Jen grabbed Tanner by the waist and Delcie by the arm, and she pulled as hard as she could for the door. Delcie was sobbing. Tanner seemed frozen, ready to fire, but unable to. He seemed rooted to the spot. "It's only a child!" some voice said deep within his consciousness. Jen jumped in front of him, forcing his eyes to hers.

" _Don't shoot_!" she screamed. She knew that the gun was useless somehow, but she also knew something else. As tears streamed down her face, she felt pity; an awful, sick pity, and she knew it would be as wrong to shoot at the thing as it was futile. Tanner stared at her as if she was a stranger, then snapped to the present. His eyes went wide, and he turned, one last glance at the figure near the bottom of the stairs now, and the three of them were out the door.

The darkness in the house had been some trick of the light. Outside, although afternoon had lengthened the light's rays and lowered them through the pine limbs, all was still green and glowing. The lush green sick-weeds that seemed to choke the path were gone. They could see the truck from the back of the house and made for it on a dead run. Once there, Tanner swung the gun behind him, turning to make a stand at the truck if need be but nothing had followed them. A dust devil whirled in the low rays of the sun, and the house looked as dead and empty as a tomb. The girls screamed almost simultaneously. Something moved in the gloom of the low brush in the trees around them. Some things moved, and the things approached in darkness and silence.

"Get in the truck!"

Tanner jumped, turned the key and the huge V-8 jumped to life. Thrashing the truck in a semi-circle backwards, then throwing it into first, pine needles flying, they roared away. The girls turned to watch for a pursuer but there was none. The truck negotiated the turns viciously, dangerously sliding on the pine needles until Tanner calmed himself somewhat, pulling his foot off the accelerator.

By the time they got to the gate they were silently staring ahead, calm but quiet. Shocked. Lost in their own thoughts. Not one of them even spoke when they saw scrawled on the back of the gate:

Chickanshit hawhaw

Tanner slammed on the brakes. Jen looked at him and saw a vein in his neck pulsing as the tendons beneath it ran taut like piano wire. He was pissed. His crystal blue eyes seemed about to melt the windshield.

"It's OK, baby. It's OK! He just wants us to come back. We can't play his game on his turf. Please!"

Tanner was breathing hard. Then he swallowed, relaxed and looked down at Jen and Delcie.

"You're not thinking about turning around are you?" Jen asked him, reading his face.

"No. At least not now. We don't know what that thing is. It's not a boy. It's not a man. I don't even think it's alive. I mean, it's not real! It can't be! My entire view of reality has changed, and I'm trying to figure out what to do about it." Tanner answered, struggling to control a quaver in his voice.

"Same here!" Said Delcie. "For all we know, a shot gun might not do anything!"

"For all we know, we might kill someone." Jen said flatly. They both looked at her. "We really don't know what it is, and that means we don't know what it's NOT either. I mean, is this magic? The occult? Demons? Ghosts? I'd hate to shoot some guy who's just really good at magic tricks!"

"You don't really think that's human, do you?" Tanner asked, gesturing behind them with a tilt of his head.

"I just don't know what it is. That's all. Until I do, I don't think we should do anything. At least not without police or something."

"My thoughts exactly. I want to bring Janet out here. Officer Littlehorse, that is..." he said to Delcie.

"Do you seriously think she'd come?" Jen asked. "She was pretty doubtful of our story, I think."

"I know Janet really well. If we'd walked into the police station with the ghost on a leash, she'd have reacted the same way. I also know her well enough to know that if she thought we were full of crap, she wouldn't have even listened to our story. It's time to get her involved."

They returned to town, Tanner gunning the engine to get around the gate. Jen thought for a second he was going straight through it.

# Janet Littlehorse

Janet was sleepily sipping coffee when the kids entered the dingy police station.

"I'm off duty." She said to Tanner before he had a chance to speak.

"Janet, we.." he began

"You went out there didn't you. The three of you look like owls, for goddsake. Your eyes are the size of saucers. Tanner, I told you. There's nothing there that needs doing. You just leave things alone and things will be fine like they have been. Have any of you actually been threatened?"

The girls both started to blurt out versions of their encounters, but Janet stopped them.

"Is a dead flower threatening? A ride in a Jeep? Has anyone been assaulted, threatened?"

Tanner was about to tell her about the writing on the back of the gate – the new writing – but he realized it would come to nothing.

"Why won't you just go out there with us, Janet? We just watched something dead and rotten float down a set of stairs at us. Isn't that threatening enough?"

"Sounds like the last time I went through the haunted house ride at the fair."

"But this was real!" All three chimed in.

"Yeah. So was that. But real what? Real supernatural? Or real tricks?" Janet answered.

Tanner looked at the floor, giving up. Janet continued.

"Look. Here's the deal. The first time you see this kid in town, you come get me and I'll talk to him. If, in the meantime, any of you get a threatening call, or he threatens you directly, something I can act on, I swear I'll be on it in a heartbeat, but we've got nothing here! And going out there is nothing but plain old trespassing. Now I'm going home to feed my family, if my husband hasn't given up on me by now. See you later, OK? And be careful?" She said as she left.

The three left, too, standing by Delcie's car. She had to get it home soon or her mom would have a cow, she said.  
"She's right, I guess. I mean, what would have happened had we stayed there? Who knows? I wasn't going to stand there and wait to shake hands with it, I know that much. And what's Janet going to do? Put it in handcuffs?"

"Just call if anything happens, or you hear or see anything." Jen said to Delcie as she got in her car to leave.

"OK. Call me tomorrow, ok?" she replied, put the SUV in reverse and pulled out. Jen and Tanner hugged for a few seconds before getting in the truck.

Had they watched Delcie as she drove off in the new dusk, they would have seen the second profile in the car, a profile that rose from the back seat as Delcie accelerated.

Janet Littlehorse thought of calling Jay Atherton at that moment. It was late; too late for a phone call, but she knew he'd answer. That's not what kept her from calling. She wanted to talk to him, but she wanted to look in his eyes when she did. Tomorrow, she'd find an excuse to pay a visit.

# The Passenger

Delcie looked around nervously at the gathering darkness as she drove. Being alone brought the fear back. Talking about all this in the brightly lit police station was one thing, but alone in the car on a dark Wisconsin country road at night – a road that passes the very road they just left – was another thing. She should have waited for them; followed Tanner and Jen.

Now fully dark, shadows spread through the car as she left the range of the town's streetlights. Dull green glowed from the car's dashboard lights. She forced her hands to release their tight grip on the wheel.

"Relax, Delcie." She told herself.

The figure in the back seat merely hovered in the darkness, a dull green light glowing from the eye sockets. The outline was that of a boy, but the size was wrong, and the outline was wrong. Not fully there, somehow. The figure floated a few inches off the seat. The sickly glowing green eyes focused nowhere, but the face was pointed at the back of Delcie's head. It spoke.

" _How 'bout another flower?"_ it hissed, as if fully formed vocal cords no longer existed in its throat. Delcie's reaction was instant and horrible. She screamed, spun in the seat, releasing the steering wheel. The thing in the back seat smiled at her. She heard the dim sound of chains moving as it hovered forward, quickly, towards her.

Delcie felt the jolt as the SUV hit the shoulder of the road, causing it to shoot wildly left. It threw her to the right into the passenger seat. The second jolt, when the SUV hit the pine tree, happened before she had time to do anything else. Time froze, and somehow she was aware that the figure in the backseat was no longer there. Then she remembered nothing more.

# The Hospital

The light was intrusive, white and florescent when she gained consciousness.

"Hey!" She opened her eyes. "Can you hear me, sweetheart?!" her mother's anxious tone shook her further into consciousness, making her aware of her pain. Every part of her body seemed on fire, but it was a dull fire that she felt through a blurry film. As she looked for her mother's face, her vision lit first on the morphine drip running into her arm. Her voice came out of her mouth fuzzy and thick, slow.

"Hi, Mom. I'm OK."

Her mother was sobbing, and her father appeared with two nurses who immediately took over, asking her too many questions, getting her to move parts of her body. Although the pain was muted, it was still universally present when she moved anything, but to her relief, and everyone else's in the room, everything did move. She felt the slow syrupy warmth of morphine coursing through her. Her mother sobbed and kept trying to grab her face and kiss her, but checking herself, knowing the pain it would cause. Her daughter's face was swollen almost to ridiculous proportions, but the deep brown eyes were there, and they were awake and aware, if a little glassy.

"How bad am I?" she said, slurring, feeling tears sting down the side of her face. A nurse dabbed at them with gauze, trying to keep the scratches dry.

"You were bumped up pretty badly, sweetie." The older nurse said, smiling at her. "But nothing's broken and everything works. You're just going to be in pain for a while." Delcie wanted to sob, but the morphine seemed to make it unnecessary. She already loved the smiling black nurse who seemed to care so much for her, and whose voice was so soothing. She was aware of her mother's hand in hers, and squeezed it. Then her dad's face loomed into view.

"Honey, God, you scared us to death!" he said.

"You think you're scared?!" she mumbled to her dad. He smiled and grabbed her other hand.

"Do you remember what happened, honey?" her mother asked.

Delcie thought for a moment. The morphine made her want to close her eyes again, to just go away, not feel, not think, and she fought it. She really didn't remember anything much more than falling over into the seat for a second, but then the image of the figure in the back seat hit her, and she felt suddenly cold. She shivered, visibly.

"That's ok." The friendly nurse said. "That's the morphine. I'll get some blankets."

"Are you cold, honey?" her mother asked.

She wasn't. She was terrified. The second nurse, more serious and businesslike noticed the spike in the heart monitor, and looked at her.

"Don't push yourself to remember, Dulcinea." She said, then turning to the parents, "She's tired. We can't push her for too much." Delcie didn't hear this, and could only think of the thing in the car with her.

"Was he there? Where is he?! Is he here!?" she moaned, just before slipping softly back into the morphine. She was asleep again when Jen and Tanner arrived.

# Recovery

A week had gone by and Delcie lay looking out the window at the sun she was missing. Her swelling had gone down, and the only persistent pain she had was a throbbing in her ribs when she breathed or moved too much, a result of hitting the steering wheel. She had coughed once, and thought she would black out from the pain. The passenger seat side air bag had saved her life. Tanner and Jen sat quietly watching her from chairs in the hospital room.

"All I can think about is what would have happened if I _hadn't_ hit the tree." She said, still looking out the window.

"I really don't think it – _he -_ would have hurt you. I think the goal was to get you to run into the tree." Tanner said, then, after a pause, continued. "I don't think we should be alone anymore. Any of us"

These words hit Jen and jolted her back to the present. She'd been replaying her ride in the jeep with the "boy". The reality, necessity, and gravity of what Tanner said hit her, and she realized, really for the first time, that they were all in very real danger. She shivered.

"How are we going to do that?" she asked, to no one in particular, looking at the floor as she spoke.

"Well, we'll start by making sure one of us is here at all times." Tanner said, nodding at Delcie.

"That's just not possible. I mean, our parents wouldn't allow it." Jen said.

"I'm safe in here." Delcie said.

"How do we know that?" Tanner said. "If he can show up in your car, what's going to keep him from showing up here? One of us needs to be here!"

"To do what? Help me scream?" Delcie laughed sarcastically, clutching at her ribs. It was the first time she'd tried to laugh since the accident, and it hurt. "I mean, it's not like we can sneak your shotgun in here."

"He'd have a hard time getting past me, anyway." Tanner said, tightness in his voice. Jen saw the tendons in his neck go hard. She imagined the thing floating into the room. Or would it just show up as the boy with tussled hair? Walk right in past all the hospital staff? He had the complete ability to appear normal, it seemed, or some semblance of normal. Holding Tanner's hand loosely, she squeezed it.

"I think between your mom and dad, and the two of us, we're going to be here most of the time, anyway. I think we're in danger only when we're alone – isolated. I don't think it would do anything, for some reason. I mean, it's never done anything to us when other people were around, or when we were in public. The only reason it appeared to all of us that night was because we were in its home." He found that using the word "it" to describe the boy thing chilled him, giving "it" a supernatural importance that he was still uncomfortable with.

Jen looked at him, half-smiling. "I don't think he'd put himself in that situation. I think he's got certain power only at times. Like when it's dark, or he's on his own turf – or near it, like the woods near the house. And of course, in the house."

Tanner had been thinking about sneaking out there without Jen and setting fire to the place. He knew she wouldn't approve of him going by himself, and he damn sure wasn't taking her back there again. He thought about going to his uncle Jay, and getting him to go along, but he knew what Jay would say about him going out there in the first place, much less to do arson. He'd go out there at high noon, under full sun, and he'd have the gun. That, and about 5 gallons of gasoline. He kept this plan close to his chest for now. Fire cleanses, he thought. It purifies, sanitizes.

Delcie rolled over to face them. "While it's daylight, and you guys are here, this isn't bad. I don't feel too bad. But at night, when it's quiet in here, it gets cold, and the lights are dimmed so patients can sleep. Mom or Dad – one of them – is asleep in that chair" she said, pointing to the chair Jen sat in "But the window is so black. Just jet-black. That's when I'm scared. I feel like he's everywhere. If he can turn up in a car anytime, I feel like he can anywhere, anytime."

"Do you remember if you left the car unlocked that night?" Jen asked.

She didn't, and said so. "No, but the doors locks when you start the motor. I don't remember unlocking it when I got in, though."

They sat in silence for a few moments, then Tanner spoke.

"We don't know what the limits of his – its – powers are."

"Or even, really, if he has any powers." Jen added. They looked at her, questioningly.

"Well, really, has he hurt anyone yet? I mean, Janet's right about that. Sure, the wreck was horrible, but as far as you remember, he didn't touch you or the steering wheel, right?" she continued, looking at Delcie.

Delcie thought for a moment. The truth was she remembered very little of the last few moments before the crash. They told her this was common in trauma cases. "Retrograde amnesia." The doctor said. The mind's attempt to protect itself from pain historically.

"I don't remember a lot, but I know that he was just sitting back there. It was what he was about to do that scares me. It might have been the best thing in the world that what happened, happened."

Jen thought about the jeep ride, the writing on the gate, the horrible things at the house, but in all of them, no one was ever harmed. Just about to be harmed. But she was never more afraid of being harmed in her life.

"Well, we've got to get you better, and until then, one of us needs to be here all the time, if only at night." Jen said. Delcie smiled at both of them, her eyes moistening.

"Thank you, guys!" she said, her voice breaking a little, tears forming in her eyes. The morphine aided the emotion. Jen rose and stood by her, taking her hand. Delcie looked at their hands.

"We're losing our tans." She said, smiling.

"I know! I hate that. We've got to get this done so we can get back to the important things in life!" Jen said, laughing and squeezing her hand.

The three were quiet for a long moment. Then Jen, looking down, then back at Delcie reached behind her for something.

"Delcie, the state patrol gave your parents these." Jen said, producing a small plastic bag. "I wasn't going to tell you, or show you, but you deserve to know. I didn't say anything to your folks..." she continued, reaching forward towards the bed with the bag. Delcie saw that inside the clear plastic bag, what first appeared to be random bits of torn paper were in fact dried and withered rose petals.  
"They were in the back seat, sweetie." Jen said, apologetically, taking the girl's shaking hand as Delcie began to weep.

Later that night, Tanner sat in his pickup truck in the hospital parking lot staring at the window to Delcie's room. He'd sneaked out of the house and would sit until near daybreak watching the window, the shotgun across his lap.

# Gasoline

Tanner rode in the bright sun, steering his rumbling truck down the county road. He kept replaying the fantasy in his head. He saw himself pulling up to the house, cutting the engine early, coasting up noiselessly. He'd jump out quickly, not waiting to see if anything or anyone was there, and quickly splash the side of the house with gas. The wood, baked dry from many Wisconsin high summer suns, would catch quickly. Flames would leap up as he drove away. By the time he hit the county road again it would be totally engulfed in flames. He feared getting caught after watching many TV shows in which accelerant was detected by high tech crime scene investigators, but he knew nothing like that existed around here. Just a dry old summerhouse caught on fire. Bad wiring, maybe.

Then he came to his senses. No matter how angry or secretly afraid he was, he knew he couldn't do this. Arson was not in his makeup, and he knew it. He pounded the heel of his palm on the steering wheel. On an impulse, he turned the truck around, pointing it back to the blacktop turnoff that led to his uncle's house. In times of crisis, that's where he'd always gone. Jay would know what to do, but first he had to convince him that something needed to be done.

Tanner braked his old truck, turned it and headed in the direction of Jay's place.

# Jen at home

She tried Tanner's cell phone again. He kept it on all the time, but sometimes he couldn't hear it ring over the sound of his truck. 'He's probably driving somewhere', she thought. He usually notices when she tries to call and calls her back pretty quickly. She'd tried twice about 10 minutes apart. Maybe he's busy, she thought.

Jen was sitting on the deck sunning her back. She let her mind drift to Tanner, then Delcie in the hospital, then to the boy. Her mind wanted to "bounce off" this last topic, roosting only long enough to register in her consciousness, but then to take flight almost instantly to something less frightening. This time, though, she forced herself to stay on it. She felt action needed to be taken, but had no idea what to do. On a gut level, she felt that the best defense would be a good offense here, but she didn't think that going back to the lake house without a concrete plan was any kind of idea. She thought of books, movies she'd read and seen. Did they need an exorcism? A ghost buster? This seemed so preposterous, here sitting in the full high Wisconsin summer sun watching skiers and fisherman glide across the lake, their whining motors ringing in the distance, silver images streaming across the glassy green blue surface. She couldn't see the house from here. That side of the lake, distant, seemed to be made of nothing but impenetrable forest. It was just as well that she couldn't. She had a hard enough time blocking the sight of it out of her head without having to see it there each time she walked down to the dock. Then she remembered how hard it was to see even when they'd been within a few hundred yards that day in Tanner's boat. Like it was hiding, or camouflaged. "Hiding from what?" she thought. It's past – a dark past of long since forgotten murder – was hidden well enough by the passing of time. It hid from the sun, she thought. Hid from the light. The darkness was its power. These words came almost fully formed to her mind. If this were a lake surrounded by deciduous trees shedding their leaves each fall, it would be detectable in winter; A dark rectangular box jutting out among tree trunks. But the evergreens kept their secret well hidden even in winter. She imagined snowfall even increased the hidden nature of the house, and could almost see it capped with a white frosting.

When would the next challenge come? Her rational mind told her that it had all been some kind of freakish coincidence with some as yet undiscovered but rational explanation. There could therefore be no more threat. But part of her, a little quiet voice back in her head said otherwise. She felt a chill and goose bumps raised on her tanned skin as a light breeze blew across her arm. She felt suddenly very small and weak. A cloud passed over the sun for a few seconds, casting a midday gloom that seemed to mirror her thoughts. She thought of Tanner again and re-dialed. No answer. She wasn't alarmed. At least not yet.

Jen rose and walked to the end of the dock, gazing out over the nearly flat water of the lake. Her cell phone brought her out of her reverie signaling an incoming text message. It was from Tanner. One word...

### HELP

# Tanner captive

Tanner's head throbbed when he came to. If he moved his eyes in his head too far to either side, pain seared through his skull. He could barely move his head from side to side.

Slowly, the memory returned. He'd parked his truck near his uncle's garage, walked to the house, heard a noise behind him, tried to turn, then nothing. A loud thud seemed to overtake his entire consciousness, followed by absolute blackness. Then he was here, now. He looked down and saw the ropes around his ankles. His heart started beating faster which caused the pain in his head to magnify to the point where he couldn't repress a moan. But he didn't want to make sound. He knew somehow that he had to be quiet, but not why.

The room was dark, or nearly so. The long rays of the sun, diffuse from the deep pines outside showed little but shadow. Still, the rays entering through the holes in the roof slanted at a telling angle. Full dark was coming quickly.

The ropes bit into his ankles. He wasn't going anywhere. His heart raced again. His head pounded. He felt the back of his head and found a huge bump, but no blood. He was bent in the corner, wedged between the walls, nearly falling over. The struggle to right himself brought nearly blinding pain and tears to his eyes, but he had to get up, He had to do something to protect himself. Bringing himself to a sitting position took a monumental effort – his head nearly burst with a throbbing pain - but once up, he felt better able to defend himself. His eyes swept the room, then the view out the window as best he could. He groped his pockets for his cell phone. Finding it, but not able to get the phone near his head to speak, he instead texted message to Jen for help. He was able only to type in "help" before the door opened slowly, grating on its rusted hinges. A dark form filled the doorway. He pressed Send and moaned, feeling his eyes fill with tears.

# Jen to the Rescue

Jen didn't even ask for the keys to the car. She was on the county road going as fast as she dared before it even occurred to her to ask. Her heart raced as she negotiated the tight turns, tires squealing. She felt the adrenaline rush through her like a fast wind. She choked back the fear as she slowed, seeing the entrance to the fire road ahead. The gate stood open. For some reason this troubled her almost as much as the frantic call. Who was here? Maybe just state workers doing maintenance. Maybe. Maybe someone else. Maybe she was expected. Or, had Tanner opened it? The car became hushed as the roadbed turned to pine needles, and her heart went to her throat as she got close to the house. Tears streamed down her face. She had tried several times to call Tanner after receiving the text message, but no answer. This was bad. Almost as bad as the message itself. She was furious and terrified in equal parts, and she felt tears slip down her cheeks. He must have come here, alone. This made her furious and terrified in equal parts.

The house, as it had done before, sprang suddenly out of the pines. It always seemed as if it were laying in wait, to spring out suddenly; to shock. She cut the motor and sat for a moment looking at the silent, still house. She considered things briefly, then decided stealth was called for. Starting the engine, she pulled past the cabin, farther down the road, as if she had intended to drive by. Finding a thin spot in the undergrowth out of sight of the cabin, she pulled the car in far enough so as not to be seen either from the road or the cabin, and cut the engine, listening for a moment to the silence around her. Easing out of the car, her eyes flashed around for any movement in the trees. Sensing none, she approached the house slowly, quietly. She felt nauseous, and was shaking, and the low, dull headache returned.

Once the cabin was in view, her eyes shot from window to window, looking for movement, then to the door, which stood almost closed, but not quite. She scanned the trees for signs of the dog things, but saw nothing. Rather than let her fear back her out of the situation, she unthinkingly thrust herself towards the door, hoping perhaps that violently opening the door would perhaps take whoever was imperiling Tanner by surprise. But the surprise was hers as she rushed into the main downstairs room.

The building was entirely empty.

# The Dead Man's Hand

Roy sat back in the chair pulling deeply on his Swisher Sweet. His wife would not allow him to smoke in the house, so the cabin was about the only place he could go.

"If you're going to smoke cigars, get some better shit than that, would you, for chrissake?!" a dark skinned, thin man, prematurely wrinkled glared at him, cigarette pursed in his lips.

Lightning ripped outside cracking the air with painful slaps. Rain punished the cheap windows of the cabin.

"I thought we had this goddam place dried in!" Roy shouted over his shoulder.

"It is, dammit! This is blowing in under the shingles! I didn't build the place to weather a goddamn hurricane!" a third man shouted over the storm.

The house barely separated them from the storm, and the men's emotions were as tied to it as they were to the poker game. The men's nostrils flared, their pupils dilated. The card game had lost any semblance of pleasure or pastime, turning instead to a heated competition for nothing other than winning.

Outside the late afternoon was being torn open by a huge thunderhead passing over, it's trademark anvil flat across the top, occasionally revealed by flashes of lightning from within the massive rain making machine. It was enormous; a force of sheer, unadulterated nature. Bursts of blue, purple, yellow, and white ripped through the clouds as muffled lightning flashed within. The ground strikes were terrible. Trees ripped and split, and the earth shook. Smoke indicated the start of a possible fire in the distance. It was a night for being indoors, and the house barely gave them a sense of this. Fear was a smell on them as strong as the fish from earlier in the day.

The tension amongst the players was palpable. Poker and drunkenness was the order of the evening. The stocky man, silent. The fat man, holding forth on all things from fishing to photography, and the short, thin, dark man served as the fat man's foil at times, and at others as his nemesis of sorts. Last card down and dirty. All three men were silent as they surveyed their lots. The thin dark man felt confident, although his last card hadn't helped. He'd been hoping for a full house, but would settle for two pair; aces and eights. He chuckled to himself.

In the corner, huddled in a chair, sat a boy with his legs drawn up so his knees nearly covered his freckled face. His hair, a shock of auburn thick as horsehair, stood up matted and greasy. His face was smudged with food and dirt. His dark eyes, a gloss cobalt, glowed bright with fear. Each peel of thunder sent a shudder through him that shook him from the ends of his hair to the tips of his fingers that were dug into his thighs where they served to help his arms bind his legs to his body in a seated fetal position. His eyes shown at the men. Sometimes they looked down only to shoot up to lock onto one of the men who happened to speak. The clothing he wore was not dirty or even very old, but was too small for him. Seated like this, the pant legs were at mid-calf, and couldn't have come anywhere near the floor if he was standing. His tee shirt was tight, bound around his boy frame and the arms rode up nearly to his spare shoulders. The men seemed to be completely unaware of his presence.

Lightning struck a tall pine not 40 yards from the house. The instinctively hunched their shoulders and leaned forwards as if ducking from an angry hornet. The air crackled first, a hideous sparking sound like giant angry hornets about to strike, then a crack that shook the house like a cat shakes a mouse to death. The light and the sound hit at the same time, spanking them and the house like an angry tyrant punishing a truant child. Blinding light filled the house. One of the men - the fat, red faced one - jumped up from the table, as if being angry at the weather would blow it down, his drunkenness emboldening him.

"God damn this place!"

The drunkest of the three, a thin, dark angry man with tobacco at the corners of his mouth, laughed, rolled his head back.

"I think he already has."

A knock on the door jerked the three men's attention away from the game and their dispute.

"Who is it?" the thin man asked, squinting at the window near the door. The rain clouds had moved in, and it was nearly as dark outside as within. "Who the hell is out in this?"

"How the hell should I know?" the fat man responded, rising and going to the door. Opening it, he saw two boys in their late teens, clothes soaked from the rain.

"Yeah?" the fat man said, more a statement of annoyance than a question of any sorts.

"We're having engine trouble. Do you have any gas?" the tallest of the boys asked.

"Does this look like a goddamn gas station?!" the fat man leered at the boy. The largest boy's eyes, dark brown, did not blink.

"Get the hell out of here." The man said dismissively, swinging the door to. The boy's foot stopped the door from closing. Turning the man saw the door open again.

Chuck Neigless knew well enough that his larger, older friend Jay would not react well to this. Whether it was the weather, the bad luck with the boat, the beer, or a combination of all of the above, something set the older boy off in ways that even Chuck did not expect. The older boy's eyes dead set black holes, he lunged forward with a palm to the fat man's nose, producing a sick, dull crunch as most of the bone of the nose pushed wetly into his brain. The man's eyes rolled back and he dropped to the floor. The skinny man, seeing this, leapt to his feet, but not before the enraged teen was on him. In one swift movement, he'd picked up a baseball bat near the door and swung it deftly through the air at the man's head. Missing, he struck his neck at the base of his skull, and a sharp crack sounded as the man's neck broke. He lay gurgling on the ground in another instant. The large teen jumped over the table at the other man who had tried to rush to his friend's defense, but was no match for the youth's speed and strength. Two blows to the head left the man's skull crushed. Meanwhile, the boy, screaming wildly jumped at him like an animal. The teen simply held him off for a second, shocked at the strength and speed of the boy, and nearly bettered by it. But within two seconds, he had the boy face down on the floor, twisting his arms up behind him.

"Help me, goddamn it!" The oldest boy screamed at the other. Chuck Neigless was transfixed, rooted to the spot in horror.

"Goddamnit!" The large teen began, but the boy had taken advantage of his having turned his attention for a moment away from him, and rolled with almost supernatural speed and strength under him and locked his long fingers on his throat. The teen choked, then lurched and somehow got two horrible blows in on the boy's head with his fists. The boy moaned, breathed sharply, then fell unconscious or dead. The hulking teen turned a baleful look at Neiglress and spoke with a terrifying calm.

"Get those chains over there and bring 'em here..." Chuck Neigless obeyed. In horror, he watched as the maddened teen lashed the boy's ankles with the chains, then nailed the other ends to the wall studs with huge dock nails laying on the counter. Suddenly, with deadly speed, the boy regained consciousness and lunged at the nearest of them. Then, suddenly calm, almost composed, he swung the bat at the boy's head, producing a sound that would ring in Chuck Neigless's ears for the rest of his life. With hideous calm, the larger teen turned to his terrified companion and said "We have some burying to do..."

Chuck Neigless then saw for the first time the dead place behind his long time friend's eyes; a place that remained hidden, but only just. He would never forget those eyes. Shaking, he backed away.

Outside, rain sought to bury the house, surround it in water and mist, seal it in, lightning illuminated the tableau, and thunder sought to drown out the noise of shovels and bodies being moved.

# Jay

Tanner felt his eyes fill with tears as the figure came into view. His uncle Jay stood looking at him impassively. This was a nightmare. His uncle had a length of hose in this right hand, gripped tightly.

"I'm sorry, man, but I tried to warn you off." Jay said as he stood in the doorway, his voice calm, almost sympathetic. "You already know way too much." His face was sad, but his eyes looked as they never have looked before to Tanner. Wider, almost with an appearance of surprise. The pupils gaped, revealing deep holes into a dead soul. Tanner saw a man in there that he had never seen before. Jay lowered his head and smiled, very slowly, laughing very quietly to himself.

"It's almost over, bud. I promise I'll make it quick."

Tanner struggled to speak, to shout, but a rough cloth tied around his head had gagged him. Jay reacted strangely, covering his ears. Tanner's muffled shouting seemed to hurt his ears, as he covered them, backing away momentarily, dropping a length of garden hose which hit the floor with a strange heavy thud. Tanner saw that it was taped off on both ends. Tanner stared at it in disbelief. Jay recovered his composure almost immediately, and a new calm seemed to pass over him.

"Why did you have to go there, Tanner? That house has been there asleep for decades. Everything that ever happened there has been lost, gone and forgotten, and you have to take your damn girlfriend there. You had to know, didn't you?"

"I had to kill them! Kill them!" Jay shouted, crouching, picking up the heavy length of hose, slapping it down hard on the floor with a loud crack and thud. God, it must be full of rocks, Jay thought. His head throbbed as if in answer.

Jay stood and walked to the window. He looked out as if the setting were unfamiliar. Jay saw him blink at the sun a couple of times, and shake his head as if he were hearing something. He turned, looking coolly at Tanner.

"As soon as it's full dark, we're going for a little ride." He said, quietly, almost distracted, barely even looking at Tanner. Tanner looked around and out the window, too, at his uncle's familiar back porch, outbuildings, circular drive. He was in a room at the back of the house that he'd never been in. He'd always assumed it was a bedroom, but it looked more like another office with desk and chairs. He looked down at the chains, pulling on them. His uncle, hearing the noise, turned to face him.

"You want to know about the house? You're going to learn all about the house."

Jay lifted two heavy cans of gasoline and carried them to his car.

# Jen Returns to the House

Jen's heart stuck in her throat as her head raced. Where the hell was he? Was this a joke? Hardly. Tanner would never do anything like that, at least not at a time like this. She felt her eyes brimming with tears, and a small animal like whimper came from her throat. Think! Think, damnit! Where could he be? She started looking around her, double checking the space, then thought of looking outside, around the building. Dark was approaching, but that didn't even occur to her. Dark always seemed to be approaching in this part of the woods.

It was still as death outside as she looked out one of the grimy front windows. She could just make out the shoreline through the trees as her eyes raced to take in as much information as they could as quickly as possible. She heard her pulse beating in her ears, and wished it would shut up so she could hear better. Every fiber of her being was intent on hearing and seeing. But there was nothing to be heard or seen.

And then, a noise.

A small noise at first, no more than a mouse would make scurrying along a baseboard. Then, it built slowly, growing stronger, clearer. Still, she could not pinpoint it, or identify it. Her head whipped around the building's interior, seeing nothing, but then turning towards the fireplace, a brief movement caught the edge of her vision. The painting above the fireplace was different somehow. A faint glow seemed to emanate from it, but that may have been a trick of the light. That is not what caught her eye. It moved. Or something in it moved. And it was where the noise was coming from.

The high sun of that long ago Wisconsin summer day once again stirred the pine boughs in the background. Waves, frozen in place for decades, rippled slowly in the light breeze. The boy, if boy he was, moved, ever so slightly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, causing the stringer of fish to move, swaying, very slightly. She could even hear, although faint, the sound of the wind in the pines, and the waves lapping the shore.

And the face, the grinning face, grinned at her, and it moved.

Jen was caught dead frozen in place, rooted like a tree, eyes fixed on the picture, her brain trying in vain to make sense of something that would not make sense. The boy in the picture moved. He took a step. In the horrible dead black and white two dimensions of the frame, he walked, one step then another, towards her. She involuntarily moved a step backwards, the low whimper in her throat gaining strength. Closer, inexorably, slowly, menacingly, the boy in the picture neared the foreground as if the frame were some kind of impossible window in space and time. He did not appear two dimensional now in the quickly failing light. His hair blew tussled lightly in the wind of another time, locked in the picture. He stopped. Then, to her horror, he reached forward, leaning and leering at her, as his head jutted out of the frame, then one hand, the arm, and the shoulder. He became three dimensional as he emerged. He was climbing up some unseen step in his netherworld, and was about to enter hers. She heard the mantle creak under his weight has his upper body passed impossibly out of the frame and onto the hearth. As he did so, his appearance changed from that of a black and white boy from the days of Polaroid Land cameras, and into that of the living corpse that he had become. In the light of the real world, he became a boy-man-child, but in the shadows, here in the gloom of his prison, his form showed itself as it was - a long dead thing animated by pure hatred.

And revenge.

# Tanner in the Trunk

Jay manhandled Tanner to get him in the trunk of his car. Tanner was strong, but Jay was stronger. In the back of his head, Tanner had already begun to plan. With his legs bound this way, he couldn't run or do anything with his arms, but lying in the trunk with his back against the floor, he could kick with both legs with a great deal of force. When Jay came to get him out of the trunk, he would strike. One kick. That's all he'd get the chance for. It's all he would need if he caught his uncle right. It made him sick thinking of this, imagining the cracking sound as Jay's ribs broke under the force, but he had snapped out of his denial, his disbelief, and the part of his brain that was responsible for keeping him alive was kicking in. He could feel the adrenaline pumping his muscles taught as he lay there, jostled by the bumps in the road. By the amount of time elapsed, the movement of the car, and the resulting sound and vibration from the road, he knew only too clearly where Jay was taking him and what the purpose of the gasoline was. It made his blood run cold but kicked his survival instinct into gear. Jay would never get the chance to set a fire, unless he could do so with a caved in chest.

The car came to a sharp stop. He guessed from the amount of time they'd been on the pine needle hushed fire road that they were there. He heard the door open and not close. Then, crunching gravel as his uncle walked towards the rear of the car. Tanner coiled his legs and a strange calm came over him, allowing him to focus entirely on the moment; on the action to come. Thoughts of right and wrong, necessary and unnecessary did not enter his mind. It was only the doing that remained. He waited. He heard the key enter the lock, then the dull metallic click of the trunk latch releasing, followed by a nearly blinding crack of light. His eyes, accustomed to the pitch dark of the trunk, fought to adjust to the rush of remaining daylight that entered as the lid silently rose. His legs, although bound together, were coiled, and he was ready.

The trunk now fully open, his uncle's hands raised holding it up, there came a loud noise from the cabin, startling his uncle, who shot erect, and took a step away from the car, a split second before Tanner was about to crush his ribs. He was so startled he didn't even seem to notice Tanner's coiled up prone posture. His eyes like saucers, he stared at the darkening building, straining to hear another sound.

# Jen's Horror

Jen felt sheer terror as the thing approached her. She felt faint and fought blacking out. She instinctively backed towards the corner, realizing as she did so that she was cutting off her own escape, and whipped her head around looking for options. None presented themselves, save the rickety stairs. The animal instinct in her – the primitive tree dwelling hominid ancestor part of her brain - told her to climb, and she did, backing up one creaking, mushy, rotten step at a time, slowly upwards, not daring to take her eyes off the abomination that followed her, no more than ten feet away. Her hand groped along the wall to her left to steady herself just in time to catch her weight as her left foot, seeking a stair tread that no longer existed, landed on nothing, forcing her to lurch down and to the left. Partly falling, and jumping up and back, trying in vain to reach the next step, her left leg sunk into the stairwell up to her thigh, bringing her ascent to a sudden, terrifying halt. She fought terribly to climb out, but her struggles caused her only to sink further into the rotting staircase. She was trapped and in pain, half her body wedged at an impossible angle, as she struggled to free herself.

The thing ascended almost soundlessly, as Jen saw to her horror that it needed neither staircase nor railing to rise up the stairs. It glided, like a horrid party balloon, the only noise the dull rustle of rusted chains sliding one stair at a time beneath it. Its rotting face leered victoriously.

A shape blocked the light of the doorway. It was Tanner's uncle.

"Oh, God! Jay! Please help me! God, help me!" she screamed. The thing turned its head slowly, jerkily to face the door. The leering grin disappeared, then re-appeared. It smiled with sick recognition.

Tanner's uncle lurched forward then backwards, his mouth open in mute horror, filled with a silent scream. His eyes flashed in terror and his arms flew up in front of him. A dull, pained roar sprung from his throat as he backed into the door jam. The thing at the stairs turned and faced him.

" _I knew you'd come back_..." its voice rattled, muffled and hollow, like that of something speaking from a sarcophagus. Tattered remnants of vocal chords fought to make sound as dry corpse breath rushed past them.

Jay backed into the doorframe, eyes wide with horror. The shambling abomination on the stairs had stopped ascending, turning, gliding downwards with hideous stealth, towards the shaking man.

" _It can't be! You're dead, God Damn it!"_ Jay screamed, throwing a can of gas at the thing, missing widely as gas burst from the can, saturating the bone-dry floor wood. Jay looked around frantically, and seeing the gas seep into the floor, plunged his hands in his pockets quickly producing a pack of matches. His hands shook violently as he fumbled for matches. As he backed away, Jen's glance jumped frantically from him to the deepening shadows encroaching on the porch. Figures moved there. At first she hoped that it would be Tanner, then that it would not be him. She had to act.

Jay screamed, swinging widely, dropping the matches.

The dog-like creatures circled the porch, in the deep shade of the trees, slavering.

# Janet's Father

Janet Littlehorse strained to see with tired eyes in the dim light of the desk lamp. Darkness was setting in and the lighting in the police station was not good at night. The yellowed police report before her was hard to read, ink faded with decades of aging.

" _Officers reported blunt force trauma to all bodies. Victim's ages range from mid 30s to early 40s. Identities indicate three adults and one juvenile. Bodies in advanced state of decay when found, buried in shallow graves behind lake house. Boy's body found chained to a wall."_

Janet put the paper down at looked through the front door at the neon light just coming on across the street announcing free shots for girls on football night at the Red Spot.

"It's time to talk to talk to Chuck Neigless". She said, with finality, standing and reaching for her service revolver and holster as she felt for her patrol car's keys on her utility belt.

Janet Littlehorse had known Jay most of his life. He was a couple of years older. Chuck Neigless was her age. She knew both of them, having grown up and gone to school with them. Chuck had been a quiet kid, shy, and not very well thought of by his peers. He'd been befriended by the older Jay after a bullying incident that she barely recalled. Jay had been a protector, and had interceded in a fight between Chuck and a few kids closer to Jay's age. Jay had been seen as a hero in the episode, but there was a lot of talk about the somewhat shocking amount of brutality he'd displayed in defending Neigless. That soon quieted down, though, and the two were seldom seen not in the company of one another.

Jay had always "set off her radar", as she told herself while driving to the nursing home at the outskirts of town. There are some people who, on the surface, seem to be kind and gentle, even almost reserved, but that do so in a way that the surface of a swift moving stream may hide its currents. Jay was one of these people. He had grown to be a physically imposing figure, well over six feet tall, and sturdily built. His prominence in the community as a doctor gave him something of an air of importance that, while he did his best to not come off this way, still shown through. He was the type of person for whom the phrase "does not suffer fools gladly" seems to have been coined. The sort of person whom you instantly like and felt a personal warmth from, but once drawn to this warmth, you are very soon aware that it may actually be masking a second layer that the person has become very skilled at hiding, but that our most primitive animal instincts can detect. Jay was this person, and Janet had always sensed it.

Chuck's "breakdown", if indeed that's what it was, was ancient history. He'd been forced to drop out of school for "medical" reasons that were kept very secret, even in this little town where everyone knew everyone else. The term "nervous breakdown" was thrown around, but no one really knew what that meant. But that was decades ago, when no one spoke openly about mental illness. It was shameful and as such, to be hidden. Chuck had remained "hidden" all of his adult life, and now lived in the nursing home she was driving to.

There had been an incident dating all the way back to her Freshman year in high school. They – Jay and Chuck – had gotten into some kind of trouble. Jay's father, also a doctor, was a prominent figure in the area, and had made it "go away", so to speak. Jay was soon back in school as if nothing had happened, but Chuck was simply the stuff of rumors ever after that. There was even a rumor that Jay had killed him spread by gossipy high school kids. But that radar, or instinct, kept this from ever reaching Jay's ears. No one dared approach him. He was too well loved, respected, and perhaps even feared for that.

Janet's father, a proud Objiwa elder, was also a hopeless alcoholic. It was largely what got Janet interested in the law in the first place. From his frequent scrapes with local law enforcement, she had taken the notion of becoming a lawyer – perhaps to "rescue" her father. Instead, she settled on law enforcement, largely as a result of seeing how poorly her father was treated at their hands. One night, returning home drunk after being gone for nearly two days "at an tribal council" (bar), her father had sat at the kitchen table rambling on about "some killings." Janet had half listened to him, knowing that in his current state, he could hardly be counted on for accurate information. Still, what her father had said stuck with her for all these years, for reasons she was never really able to understand. He'd been wandering off in the woods that evening, something he often did on particularly drunken nights. He'd been off in the woods on the other side of the lake, and had come across a lake house.

"They don't trust no indian!" he had said. "I seen it with my own two goddam eyes, though!" He'd cast his gaze around the room as if expecting someone to question his veracity. No one said anything, or really much listened, being much accustomed to his late night drunken ramblings.

"They was buryin' folks, I tell ya! I seen it with own two eyes. I snuck up on 'em and watched, but they never knew I was there. Them white boys couldn't find an Indian like me in the woods at night with a spotlight. They was buryin' folks!"

Her long suffering mother had simply asked after a pause "Who were they burying, Gene?"

"Hell, I don't know... Dead people." Janet could tell from his admission that he hadn't even given thought to who was dead.

"They was two high school boys doin' it, tho. And one of 'em was that doctor's boy!" This caused Janet to listen a little closer. That her father was capable of completely fabricating this story, or of having been so drunk that he mistook someone for doing some late night gardening with a murder cover-up was well known, but she thought it odd that he would single out who he saw, and if he'd made this up, why would he have picked such a random person as Jay for targeting his accusation?

"People think I don't know or see, but I do! Some of them white folks think they can get away with anything just 'cuz their daddy's a doctor. Hell... I seen 'em, and I'll tell the sheriff, too!"

Janet knew he wouldn't do any such thing. Even if he were able to remember this all the next day, the sheriff wouldn't give the drunken old indian the time of day, much less listen to cock and bull like this. The next day, her father, hung over and eating a little before wandering into town to start drinking all over again, had no memory of last night's escapade, or if he did, he didn't say a word about it, and they certainly weren't going to encourage him. Only once, years later as his health began to fail, had she been fishing with him, the last time ever she did so before his death, did he ever mention anything about this again. By then, Janet had forgotten all about the story, but her father apparently hadn't.

"You're studyin' to be a lawyer and all. Tell me this." He said, staring into the water. "What if a fella saw a murder happen and he never said anything about it? Would he get in trouble?" Janet couldn't remember what she'd said in response to this, but she sure could remember what he said next, and would probably never forget it.

"You do me a favor, ok, little moonbeam?" (A name he hadn't called her since she was little.)

"You stay real clear of that Atherton boy, ok?"

# The Nursing Home

The Sun Valley nursing home lay on the outskirts of town. Almost everyone there was at least 75 years old – many much older – but some were there because they were not really old, but were in some way mentally impaired, but not severely enough to require institutionalization at the state hospital. Of these, Chuck Neigless was perhaps the least visible. He seldom talked, and when he did it was so low and quiet that attendants had to lean close to him to hear what he was saying. He was pale and tired looking, and slept most of the day and night. He had been taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills for so long that his whole life was made of sleep and drowsy glimpses of the world around him.

Janet Littlehorse stood quietly at the desk waiting for Eileen Noblonsky to finish her phone call. Janet knew her, but not well; A local girl who married soon after high school and had been working at the nursing home since then. She was a few years younger, and their paths hadn't crossed in school.

Eileen looked up from her desk when she'd put the phone in the cradle.

"Well, hello, Janet!" She said with the sort of long rehearsed pleasantness that Janet imagined was about as real as her hair color which had become supernaturally red since the last time she'd seen her; the sort of shade that can only be found in the animal kingdom or on the hair color isle of the drug store.

"Hi, there, Eileen. It's good to see you. How've you been?" Janet said, amiably.

"Oh, same as the weather! Nothing much knew to report!" she responded. "What are you doing out this way? Official business?"

"Yes, I am." Janet said, mostly truthfully. "Is Chuck Neigless still living here?"

The receptionist paused imperceptibly, face almost breaking out of the professional friendliness.

"Yes, he sure is." She said, her voice just a notch quieter than it had formerly been. "He's in the adult dissociative wing. He's been there for longer than I've worked her. I guess he'll always be here." She paused again. "I can say that in the 27 years I've worked here, you are the first and only person to ever come ask for him."

Janet thought about this for a half moment. There was just a hint of challenge to the assertion. It had the slight connotation of "and that's the way we like it here" to it.

"Yeah, I don't think he ever had any family here. His parents died early, and I think he was living with his aunt until... Until he came to live here."

"Yes, I think that's right." Eileen said, not taking her eyes off the officer.

"Eileen, is it possible to talk to him?" Janet asked, leaning forward slightly, lowering her voice. It was as if everything about this man required quiet; secrecy.

"Janet, I've never heard him talk..." the receptionist said. Her pleasant demeanor had turned in to one of professional respect, and little else.

"Anybody ever talk to him?" Janet asked, locking eyes on the red-haired woman, unblinking. The woman lowered her gaze from the jet eyes to her police badge, seeming to remind herself that Janet wasn't just asking to pass time. And she probably couldn't say no, either.

"Well, they talk to him every time they go in to see him. Ask him how he's doing, if he's feeling ok, that sort of stuff."

"But nothing more than pleasantries, I bet. The sort of questions you wouldn't really need to answer, right?" Janet said, still fixing her gaze on the woman.

"Well, people don't really expect him to respond..." she began, but the officer quickly intercepted her.

"Mind if I try?" she asked, in a tone that was more of an announcement of intent than a question. The receptionist paused, meeting her gaze again, and seeing the resolution there responded.

"I guess not. No harm in trying, right?" in a tone that said anything but that.

Five minutes later, two attendants had led Officer Littlehorse to the adult dissociative wing, which had a surprising amount of security in place. All doors were deadbolt key locked. No getting in or out without a key. A sign on the inside of the double doors through which she'd passed said "Elopement risk" in bold black marker.

"They put that up when somebody's acting up – trying to get out. No danger, though." One of the attendants said, looking back at the officer who said nothing.

The day room area of the wing was heavily populated by quiet people on this sunny day, most not even taking notice of the officer's presence, but the attendants led Officer Littlehorse past it down one of the side corridors that looked very much like a hospital with neat doors lined up on either sides. The smell was similar to a hospital, and the silence was unbroken by all save the occasional strains of a TV or radio coming from inside one of the rooms. Janet glanced into the rooms when they chanced to pass one open to the hall, where grey and silent men and women sat reading or nodding. When the attendants stopped at a door on the right near the end of the wing, Janet noticed the small sign on the door, which simply said "Neigless, Charles". The attendant seeming to be in charge looked briefly at her before knocking and opening the door.

"Mr. Neigless? You have a visitor." The attendant said in a flat monotone, more like a formality than a question or announcement. The room appeared to be empty at first, and no answer came from within, but as Janet followed the two attendants into the room, she noticed a disheveled heap of blankets near the far side of the single bed in the corner of the room. A graying head partially peaked out of the sheets, faced turned to the wall. No movement came from the figure, and the stillness and quiet of the room was so profound that Janet's first instinct was that the figure was lifeless. Slowly, though, the head turned to face the room, and Janet saw a very sad grey face, deeply lined with time and memory.

The attendant repeated the announcement mechanically, but neither the figure on the bed nor Janet paid attention, both registering each other and locking eyes. Janet spoke.

"Can you leave us to talk for a while?" she said to the two. The leader paused and replied that it would be all right for a little while, but to push the call button if she needed any help, leaving her to wonder what she would need help for. The emaciated shell of a man lying there looked as if he wouldn't' be able to rise up out of the bed, much less pose a threat to anyone. The two left, leaving the door ajar. After a few moments in which is became apparent they were standing just outside, Janet rose and closed it quietly, then sat slowly in a chair near the TV at the foot of the bed. She noticed the TV was covered in dust, the remote control lying on top of it.

"Mr. Neigless, I'm officer Littlehorse. Can I talk to you for a few minutes?" The man continued his gaze, head turned, but still facing the wall in what looked to be an uncomfortable position, as if she were a nuisance that he expected to leave momentarily, like a fly come in through the window that would soon fly out leaving him to his sleep again. His eyes were clear, though. Deep blue, ringed by wrinkled grey skin, but clear and piercing. He did not speak.

"I'm here to talk about something that happened a long time ago, to find out if you can help me with some information." She continued. She tried to keep her voice level and flat as if she fully expected to get a response, but secretly fearing the man's lips would not move. She continued.

"Can I call you Chuck?" she said, leaning forward slightly, trying to connect with the silent man. No response. Janet thought a moment, then tried a different tact.

"I'm here because some kids are in trouble." She began, watching the expressionless face for any change. A slight dilation of the pupils – nothing more. But it was a start. Janet figured that if she kept eye contact she still had a chance. If he turned his face back the wall, she'd probably lost. He continued to stare at her.

"I'm afraid that they might get hurt if I don't do something, but I have to know some things first..." she continued quietly. The grey face simply stared at her, eyes wide.

"Chuck, if you know anything about what happened in that lake house back then, I really, really need to know. You could be saving lives by helping me." Janet knew that she could try the legal route to get him to talk, but doubted that would get anything but resolute silence. The eyes blinked, but nothing more.

"I want to talk about Jay Atherton." She said, playing a card she'd been planning on holding. She feared losing any chance of getting anything out of him, and knew it was time to show her hand.

"Did he hurt you, Chuck." A single drop of sweat that had been forming on the man's forehead unnoticed by the officer slid silently down the grey, prematurely wrinkled forehead. This was a gamble. She didn't really have anything but her gut instinct to indicate that Tanner's uncle knew more than Tanner said, but the gamble paid off, and the grey man spoke in a dry quiet, oddly high pitched voice.

"He'll kill me."

Janet struggled to hide her surprise and excitement, feeling her pulse quickening. She'd cracked the door open but knew it could still slam shut.

"Why, Chuck? Why are you afraid of him?"

There was a long quiet moment while it became obvious that the decrepit man was struggling with the urge to say something.

"He's a killer, Janet. I know. I was there!" came out in a hissing whisper.

Janet pulled her chair closer to the bed and said

"Talk to me, Chuck."

# Littlehorse to the Rescue

Janet had visited Jay Atherton that morning, and found him just leaving for his office in town. He'd told her that he didn't have much time as he had to check in his practice then head to the county hospital for rounds. The message was intended to back her off her questioning, but she'd said that what she wanted to talk about wouldn't take much time.

"What's it about?" he'd said, half way into his car.

She'd thought about how to answer this before she even got to Jay's farm. As a police officer in full uniform, merely stating to someone that you wanted to talk to them put them on full guard. Jay was no exception.

"It's nothing, Jay. Just some kids have been having a little trouble with somebody in town. I don't know who it is. It's a kid, or a young adult. I thought I knew everbody in this county, but not this kid. I'll catch up with you later today."

The doctor had responded to this in an unusual manner.

"What are you asking me for?" he'd said, with more than an edge of defiance in his voice. Janet thought about how cold and dark his eyes looked.

"Oh, just thought you might know something, Jay." She'd said.

He said nothing more, only closing his car door and starting his engine. He kept eye contact, though – those cold dark eyes. Janet felt a little chill, but would not break eye contact with him. She'd definitely catch up with him later, somehow.

Janet Littlehorse pushed her cruiser to the limit the pine-needled road would allow. The old county fire road was not as abandoned as it seemed. Fresh tracks clearly stood out in the beams of her headlight. Night was coming on. Tanner wasn't home or answering his cell. Delcie knew nothing. Jen wasn't home either. And most importantly, Jay was gone and so was his car. On a hunch, she'd driven out to his road and got close enough to the house to notice his car gone, risking having him see her squad car. She reached to her hip for her service revolver, glancing at the riot gun strapped in front of her. She did a mental check. Both guns were loaded.

She had not been able to find Jay Atherton the rest of the day. She'd checked his practice, the emergency clinic, and even called the county hospital, finally driving past his farm a final time. She hadn't ever been to the lake house, and only had a rough idea which fire road it was on. Instinct drove her to try to find it, though. She'd had her life saved a couple of times by her intuition, so she'd learned to listen to it. It told her to find this house.

The house came into view much as she expected it – suddenly seeming to leap out of the woods as if it had laid in wait, intending to surprise; to catch you off guard. The officer cruised as silently as possible to the side of the road, 20 yards from the house. She probably didn't have much of an element of surprise, but she hoped to maximize this.

The house was pretty much as she'd imagined it; derelict, decrepit – a fire hazard. She'd be doing the county a favor by setting fire to it, but for the chance of it catching the pines that surrounded it. It was choked with brushy vines that covered the porch and windows in thick, serpentine twists of a sickly green. It was still light out, but a combination of the encircling trees and an oppressive haze that seemed to cling to the place made it seem darker and more sinister than it should have. The closer she got to the house, the more aware of this she became. The forest around her pressed in on her, it seemed, and the air seemed pressurized. The stillness was unnatural. "Where are the birds sounds?" She thought. There were no sounds. It was as the woods and the house itself were watching, on guard, expecting.

She heard screaming. It was not a girl's voice, nor was it that of a young man's. It was the scream of a mature male. She rushed to the only door she could get to because of the vines; a door standing open at the back of the house, seeing first the large figure of Jay Atherton backing across the room, face lit with terror, screams pouring from his mouth, and then the thing that followed him, pressing him into a corner. It was an abomination that Janet had no preparation for. For the first time in her professional career, she froze dead on the spot. To the last of her days, she would remember this moment and shudder.

The thing was gliding; hovering. It was dead and not. It was child and man. It was corpse and rot. It was a thing of nightmares, and it was talking.

" _I knew you'd come. You have to die now. Dead. Like me_." Its voice came in a dragging gravelly grave sound, like dead earth sliding across a rusty shovel. Oh, God, she had to do something, but what? Her legs were molten lead, pouring slowly into the earth around her, rooting her to the spot. Then she saw Jen. The sight of the terrified girl sparked her into action. Janet ran to the girl, still trapped in the rotting staircase.

Jay stumbled backwards, eyes wide with disbelief and horror. It was only then that Janet heard Jen shouting from the stairs. Janet saw this as her first and most important task – get the girl to safety – and ran to her.

"God, Janet, please help me!" Jen shrieked, still staring at the thing in the middle of the room. Janet grabbed the girl under the arms, lifting with strength she didn't know she had, while hearing a small frightened sound come out of her own throat. This was a new kind of fear for Janet Littlehorse. She'd stared down drunks waving guns at her before. She'd gone into bar fights between two men a foot taller than her, but that sort of fear was manageable because it was _known_. This was entirely unknown. The teen age girl came out of the stairs only a little scratched up, and together they stumbled backwards towards the door. Once outside, Janet began to master her fear just a bit; enough to know that she had to get the girl to safety and do something – God only knows what – about the situation inside.

"Get in the squad car and lock the doors!" She told Jen after a quick look over to make sure the girl wasn't badly bleeding. Just then, both of them heard shouting from the back of Jay's car. The trunk stood open, and Tanner could be seen struggling to get out. He was bound in some restraints and struggled against them. Jen ran to him as Janet stood staring at the car. She followed Jen, and both of them were able to lift Tanner out. He was bound and gagged, but the officer soon had the restraints off him, and had removed the gag from his mouth.

"You ok?" she asked, still out of breath.

"Yeah, I'm OK. What the hell is going on in there?" Tanner pointed to the building. Janet didn't answer, and barely heard the question. She knew she had to act, but was still fighting with her own disbelief.

Janet Littlehorse stood for a moment – only a moment – staring at the house. Jay's screaming sounded dully through the walls. Overhead, night was falling giving the scene an increased sense of ominous dread. She had to act and soon. She drew her service revolver and approached the open doorway slowly peering into the gathering darkness attempting to make out shapes. It was if a spell had dropped on the entire scene. It was too dark for the time of day, but it wasn't merely darkness that prevented her from seeing. A sort of dirty blackish grey pall hung on everything as if she was watching a deteriorating old black and white movie. Even the sounds that came from the house had an unreal quality to them, suspended too long in the air, ringing flatly against the walls and the trees around the house. Her head throbbed, and her ears started to ring. The atmosphere was somehow increased and electric. Her hands shook as she approached. She had no idea what she was going to do, but she was going to do it.

In later years she would have trouble remembering exactly what happened next, partly because it was painful to remember, but also because the memories tried to hide from her, burying their tracks behind them. Time was changed somehow. Distance, space, light, all things in nature seemed to have been shifted from their normal predictable states. Living things seemed dead, and dead things seemed alive. The house itself seemed to be alive. Rooms, angles, doorways, all were distorted slightly, producing a dizzying, nauseating effect. Reality bent in a way that it was just better to not remember, and so much of it faded soon after the event.

She saw, as she entered, the thing from the back. It was solid and real enough, but it seemed to be caught up in the unnatural pall cast on everything, or perhaps it was the source of the distortions of light, sound, time, space. She stopped and leveled her service revolver at the back of the thing's head and spoke, or tried to.

"Stop and turn facing me, hands in the air." But the words seem to fall around her in the dust. To her own ears, her voice sounded like that of a frightened child calling from the bottom of a well; pitiful, forlorn, abandoned and hopeless. She felt weak, and almost dropped to the floor as she spoke the words. Her gun arm dropped slowly to her side, and she felt tears of helplessness fill her eyes. She no longer felt anger at all, the adrenaline having been drained from her entirely. She felt her feet shuffle beneath her as she backed into a corner.

The thing, if it had heard her words, made no reaction. By now, Jay had stopped screaming. His expression went from horror to one of wonder, like a child watching dangerous lions in a circus perform tricks. His jaw was slack in wonder. Tears ran down his cheeks freely. The thing's dreadful arms that were at once both decayed and powerful in appearance reached for him, and a sound that shook the house emanated from its mouth. It was a howl and a scream and a cry of both anger and terror all at once. It was the sound of other worlds peeking into ours – insane worlds where the rules were very different. Where madness was sanity and life was meaningless. Janet felt herself slip slowly into unconsciousness as the walls of the house reverberated with the sound.

Jay screamed one last time before falling to the floor, paralyzed with fear. He was transfixed, unable to move, to resist, as the thing, reaching down, grabbed him by the ankle, smiling all the while; a dead, grey horrible rictus. It began dragging him to the door leading to the deep woods behind the house. Frozen with fear, Jay was just coherent enough to notice a deep, freshly dug hole in the rich black forest floor as he was roughly dragged over the threshold. Some primitive animal instinct for survival kicked in for a moment, and he struggled to reach the clawing dead hands holding his legs. The thing turned, it's eyes lit with the fire of hell, and descended on him with a horrible ferocity. He knew nothing more in this life. Limp and lifeless, his body fell into the hole. Horrid shapes emerged from the woods, slavering maws, green sick eyes, moaning, whispering to one another, on all fours like dogs, but not dogs. They started digging at the mound of loose earth, filling the hole and covering the lifeless man's body.

Janet came to, and felt strength return. She saw the nightmare transpiring around her, and ran in terror. She'd dropped her service revolver when she swooned, and it was lost to the unnatural darkness of the house. She had to get out. She had to get those kids out of there.

Once outside, the pall cast over the house lifted almost immediately, and Janet Littlehorse, police officer, kicked back into gear. She saw Jen struggling to free Tanner from the ropes he'd been bound in and ran to the two, just as a flash of lightning lit the scene, followed by the sizzling electric noise that preceded a lightning strike. A bolt struck a pine nearby that shuddered from the force. The sound was deafening. Then another, and another. The woods were under attack from the heavens, but the lightning was unnatural, garishly green stripes of light smashing against the pines. The wind, too, had picked up, and was building in intensity. The greenish flashes of light saw Janet in a dead run towards the two teens who stood stock still in terror.

"Get in the car!" she shouted as she piled into the front and fired up the big V6 in the cruiser. She tore the road up speeding off as pine needles whipped in the wind.

# A knock on the door

It was a late summer afternoon thunderstorm, the sort that seemed to plagued the small lake community that summer back in 1961. Two young, drunken boys approached the dilapidated lake house. The smell of thick cigarette smoke wafted out of the windows, and voices emanated from within.

"Come on." Jay said, motioning to his companion to follow him. Chuck Neigless, three fourths drunk himself, followed.

Once, when they were little, Chuck had sided with another boy in an argument Jay had had over a girl in the school cafeteria. That afternoon when he went to his bike to leave, Jay was waiting for him. A dark, black look had come over him. He didn't seem angry, but he stood there, looking at Chuck with a set of bolt cutters in his hand. Looking down, Chuck saw that he'd cut every spoke on both wheels of the bike. Looking at him, he'd only said "I thought you were my friend." with a dead, cold stare. Chuck had secretly feared him ever since that day. Today, that fear would come home to roost.

Jay knocked on the door. The lightning caused the wet boards of the lake house siding to glow, despite their lack of paint. Thunder cracked. A fat, drunken man with a sneer and a cigarette answered the door.

"Yeah?" the fat man said, more a statement of annoyance than a question of any sorts.

"We're having engine trouble. Do you have any gas?" the tallest of the boys asked...

# Janet tells Jay story

The early evening gloaming had settled on the town. Streetlights came on and spilled light lazily through the cheap blinds in the window that looked out of the small police station onto the main drag. An occasional car drove past slowly, and a woman with her child in tow talked loudly on a cell phone as she passed, while her child tried to get her attention. Janet had taken them to the station where she could make phone calls, clean the kids up, get them some water, coffee; to bring some normal back to their world, and to hers. The officer was a whirlwind of activity, jumping from the phone, to the dispatch radio, attempting to contact police from neighboring Sangamon, and the State office in Madison. Then she stopped, looking quietly at the floor for a moment, and in a low voice simply said "What do I tell them?" She looked up at the two shaken teens who stared at her from across the desk. "What do I tell them?" To Tanner, Janet seemed vulnerable in a way he'd never even imagined her capable of. She seemed lost, questioning.

No one spoke for a full minute. Variations of the same thoughts, the same questions went through all three minds. Then Janet said quietly, "For Chrisake, I just ran from a crime scene."

Tanner stared hard at her. "No you didn't, Janet. We ran from a nightmare like any sane person would." Janet thought about this for a few moments, then cast her gaze down.

"I have to go back out there. A man is in danger."  
Tanner spoke. "He's not in danger anymore. He's dead."

They all knew this, of course. They knew that if they went out there, a man's body would be found in a shallow grave, probably still guarded by things that looked like dogs, but weren't. Things out of a nightmare. And a boy who was not a boy who was dead, but not really.

"It's still a crime scene." She said, looking at Tanner. She didn't need much convincing.

"And it will still be there when the state troopers get here." Jen said, surprised at the strength in her own voice. Janet sat quietly for a while, staring at the floor at her feet. Then she looked up and said "I can't drink on duty, so coffee will have to do." She rose and poured cups for all of them.

The traffic died down outside, what little there had been. Only a few locals straggling into town to go to one or the other of the two bars that drew the only traffic past sunset on the square. The three sat drinking coffee in silence for some time. Jen found herself crying and she didn't fight to stop it. Tanner pulled her head onto his shoulder. Janet watched silently, and then spoke:

"Tanner, there was a lot to your uncle that very few people knew about, and those people weren't much talking. Sometimes people can have a part of themselves so hidden that even they sometimes forget it's there. This hidden part of your uncle terrified people, and it probably terrified him, too. That's why he kept it so hidden. Some people have two parts to them. The bad part that they hide from the world, and the good part that makes up for the bad, or at least tries to. This was Jay." Janet paused for a moment and looked at the cup of coffee in front of her, lost in thought. The teens said nothing, waiting for her to continue.

"My father warned me about Jay years ago, and that warning never left me. My dad may have been a drunk, but he was no liar. I don't think there's enough whiskey in the world to make somebody see what he saw, and he was shook up about it, and really mad that no one believed him. Part of me didn't either, but I never forgot it." Janet looked deeply into Tanner's tired eyes, her dark piercing gaze inquiring, looking to see if the young man was ready to hear what she was about to say.

"If he is to be believed, and I'm pretty sure he is, my dad witnessed your uncle trying to bury bodies up there at that cabin."

Janet told about visiting Chuck Neigless at the nursing home, while the two teens stared at her. Tanner fought back sobs, Jen sat motionless, enthralled, holding tight to Tanner's arm.

"I'm so sorry, T. You never want to think something so bad about somebody you've known to be a good man all your life. Your uncle was a good man. He just had something broken inside him, and it came out that day. He spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it, and hide from it."

The two teens were speechless. Jen thought about how close she'd come to losing Tanner, and how much Tanner must hurt at the loss of his beloved uncle whom he'd looked up to all his life. Tanner spoke in halting words.

"Janet, how will the law handle this?"

Janet sat quietly squinting out the window, the gaze from her dark eyes a thousand miles away.

"It's all got to come out, Tanner." She said, turning briefly to make eye contact with the young man. She looked now like a caring, loving aunt more than an on-duty officer.

"It will all come out. I want you to both see a doctor." She said.

"I'm fine, Janet – I mean officer." Tanner replied.

Janet Littlehorse looked at him fixedly.

"It wasn't a request, Tanner." She said calmly. Tanner understood and nodded.

"I'll call both of your folks to meet us at the hospital. That's the first step. Then I have to follow up with the state buys. This is an old murder case, and it may even cross state lines, so our lives may get busy in the next few days.

# Finis

Tanner and Jen stood hand in hand, their tan arms touching, light afternoon breeze flowing through their hair. Neither spoke. Their faces were expressionless. The bright green of late Wisconsin summer pines was deeper here in the woods at the far side of the lake. Delcie stood at some remove, leaning quietly on the tailgate of Tanner's truck, head on her forearm. After a few moments Tanner dropped Jen's hand and walked nearer to the building, kneeling setting a small flame to the wet pine needles, the smell of smoke jumping to his nose, then rising and backing away.

"What do we do with the gas cans?" Jen asked casually.

"Put them back in the truck." Tanner said quietly.

"Isn't that evidence?" Delcie asked.

"They were in the back of the truck before today, and they'll be there tomorrow..." Tanner responded.

The flames shot to the dusty old building, licking up the sides with fervor. It had taken very little gasoline to start the process of consumption. The house was empty now, and they both knew this. This act was merely the closing curtain of a play that had reached its end. There was nothing and no one inside. The police tape had been collected earlier that week, the investigation having come to a conclusion. It was just an old, tired, sad looking lake house now. The woods no longer tried to hide it. The heat soon pushed them back. One last look and the three climbed in the truck and drove away, leaving the building to the fire. As they drove off, the deep green pines swallowed the scene, hiding it from view.

"Somebody should come out here afterwards and sow the ground with salt..." Jen said quietly as the truck rolled off on the hush of the pine needles.

Fire cleanses, they thought. It purifies, sanitizes.

###

## About the author

James William Penson makes his living as a technical writer and bluegrass musician in north Texas. He is the father of four, ranging in age from 14 to 30.

You can contact the author at jamespenson@tx.rr.com.

James W Penson is also on Facebook and Twitter as banjoist123

The lake house boyjames william penson 2013
