Page 37 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
I need to get inside. I’m worried about these footprints… and so I’m just going to stand here and tumble into memories while someone might be lurking on the property?
I’m turning away from the lake when something rises from the water. I freeze, my breath stopping.
What I’d spotted out there earlier hadn’t been an otter or a fish. I knew that. Now I’m seeing it again, maybe twenty feet away. A dark semicircle, like the top of a head.
A human head? Is that really what I’m saying? That there’s a person out there?
It looks like a seal or sea lion, but we don’t have those in the Great Lakes.
Debris? Some kind of container? Maybe a small beer keg? No, it looks like the top of a head.
My gut tells me to run, but I find myself rooted there, squinting, wanting a logical explanation. Needing one. Knowing there is one. Theremustbe.
The object starts to move my way, stopping me short, my heart rate accelerating.
That’s not debris. And it isn’t moving in the current. It’s swimming, ripples flowing out on either side. But I can still only see what looks like the top of its head. Whatever it is can breathe underwater.
A memory rises. My grandmother telling me she’d once seen a seal here, on one of the first visits with my grandfather. Everyone had told her she was imagining things—my grandfather had teased her mercilessly. But then someone said harbor seals have been spotted in Lake Ontario, having come in from the St. Lawrence River.
The head rises, and I exhale in relief. It’s a seal. I can see the dark cap over a lighter face, with huge liquid eyes and—
I step back. My brain keeps trying to arrange what I see into a seal’s features. A furred head, dark on top, lighter below, small dark snout. Even as part of me screams that it doesn’t look right, that logic center keeps reassuring me it fits.
Then I see shoulders. Human shoulders and a human neck and a human head. Dark short hair frames a thin, pale face. Only something’s wrong with the face. The eyes are huge liquid pools, like a seal’s. And there’s a dark patch where the nose should be, like a hole gaping into a dark and lipless mouth.
Bone. I see bone through that hole. More bone on the cheeks, patches where the flesh is gone. Gray skin. The skin of the drowned.
I slowly back up as my brain screams that I’m wrong. I’m exhausted. I’m freaked out. I’m seeing things.
The figure continues to rise from the water, its naked pale body covered in gaping but bloodless wounds. My gaze flies back to the face and—
My heart stops.
I know that face.
It turns my way, and those eyes, those huge, liquid eyes burn with hate, a hate I know as well at that face, and before I can stop myself, I whisper, “Austin?”
Austin Vandergriff. I am seeing Austin Vandergriff. The boy my father murdered.
I turn and run. I run as fast as I can, brain screaming for me to stop, that this isn’t Austin, cannot be Austin. But I keep going. I race up the steps and onto the porch and into the house, slamming the door behind me and locking it.
Then I run to the window and look out.
Nothing.
I see an empty stretch of land from here to the lake.
No sign of the figure that rose from the water.
No sign of Austin Vandergriff.
Because it wasn’t him. Could not be him. Even if my fevered brain could imagine him drowned and returning from the lake, coming for me, always coming for—
Stop.
I rub my hands over my face, glasses tumbling to the floor.
Austin didn’t drown. He didn’t vanish into the lake. My father tried to bury him, but his body was found and given a proper burial. I know all this.
