Page 70 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
I slide into a chair and let her fuss, too brain-numb to object.
I thought I’d snap out of it with that hot food and caffeine. I don’t. My mood only sags, and I can’t even rouse myself enough to feel guilty about Josie being left on babysitting duty.
I don’t think. I don’t feel. I just exist, in some numb bubble.
Naturally, Josie tries to help. Do I want to go for a walk? Build a midday fire and toast marshmallows? Talk? Whatever I need, she’s there. I appreciate that, but mostly, I just don’t want the obligation of having to be roused from this grief-laden funk. In the end, I say I have to work, and she lets me do that while working on her own laptop.
The afternoon passes. Sheriff Smits arrives with dinner and a non-update. No sign of Gail. No word on Caleb. He’s been unable to contact my cousin or uncle or aunt, but also, no one in town has seen them. While he’s asked people to be on the lookout for any strangers, it’s still late summer in a lakeside town. At least a quarter of the population are strangers.
Ben arrives at some point. He doesn’t check in. Just parks his pickup and disappears. I glance out to see him trudging into the forest. Doing “Ben stuff,” I guess. Neither Josie nor her father seems surprised—or even annoyed—that he doesn’t make contact. He’s there, which means he’s on Sam duty, and after dropping off dinner and that non-update, Smits leaves with Josie, both promising to see me in the morning.
Once I’m alone, I relax for the first time all day. And apparently relaxing means crying. I don’t need to worry about Ben walking in to check on me. He’ll do “Ben stuff” until nightfall and retreat to his tent, and I appreciate that because it means I’m free to grieve without anyone telling me that it’s okay, that we don’t know what happened to Gail, that she might be fine.
Last night, I told myself the same thing.
I had an explanation, and she was fine.
That’s a lie. I know it is. She’s dead, drowned, and whatever I saw last night wasn’t her, but in some ways, it feels as if my fears manifested into that blurry photo. As if I projected that fear so strongly it burned the image onto a picture.
I know that isn’t possible, but it’s what I feel.
Gail is gone.
My aunt. My friend. The only family I had left.
Of course, as soon as I think that, guilt reminds me that my mother is alive, which launches into a fresh round of grief for the twilight nothingness that is our relationship these days, where I only catch glimpses of the mother I knew, and the rest feels like trying to provide the best end-of-life care I can. As if she’s already in hospice.
I’ve told the nurses a bit about my situation this month. Not the truth, which is too bizarre and would sound like the flimsiest of excuses. I said that I had the chance to go away for a month and earn enough to cover her care, which is true, even if at least one of them nervously asked whether I was doing anything “extreme.” I think her mind went to sex work. Which in the end, is not far off. I am selling myself for money—selling my sanity and my peace of mind.
And maybe selling my aunt. What if she’s dead because she came—
Can’t think of that.
I’d asked the nurses to text me if Mom is in good enough shape for a video call. I haven’t heard back. In other words, at no time in the past four days has she been lucid enough to recognize me.
I can’t deal with that tonight either. The grief will pull me under and drown me. Instead, I pick up that book I grabbed from the basement. I’d been seeing it on the counter all afternoon, feeling the tug of it but knowing I couldn’t read it in front of Josie. She’d have leapt on the chance to have a little fun, immersing ourselves in superstitious old stories, and right now, that is not what I want.
So whatdoI want? I ask that as I settle on the sofa. Answers? Do I expect to open the moldy cover and find an entry on “Headless man riding a drowned horse”?
No. But I’m pulled to it nonetheless.
The book is self-published. I recognize that now. As a child, I wouldn’t have known or understood the difference. In small towns like this, there are always self-published—or small-press—books in the general store. Local interest by local writers. This one seems to have been published in the sixties, and a quick internet check shows it’s long out of print, with one copy available on eBay for a few hundred dollars.
Just because it’s local interest and self-published doesn’t mean it’s the work of an amateur. The writer is a long-dead professor and local historian with an interest in folklore and a string of journal publications to her name. But a book like this wouldn’t have a wide appeal. It’s stories told by those living around the lakes, passing on legends from their families. Worse, it specifically omits the one topic that would make it marketable: ghosts. No haunted ships or forlorn white ladies. Also, the language is far too scholarly to appeal to a wide audience, and I’m shocked that I even managed to read it as a kid.
I flip through stories of lake serpents, deadly fogs, and sunken ships. Then I hit one that stops me.
The book is divided into two sections. The first is legends specific to the lake region. They’re tethered to things that early settlers experienced living near massive freshwater lakes, surrounded by wilderness and indigenous people. Some of them are obviously ways to explain their unique environment, while others seem like skewed interpretations of native lore, like the Seneca’s lake serpent, Gaasyendietha. The second section relates stories that white settlers brought with them. The folklore of their homelands transposed to this new world. That’s where I stop. At a chapter about water horses.
Water-horse folklore is popular in the British Isles and parts of Europe, which is where most of the local white settlers came from. The one I’m familiar with is the Celtic kelpie. I remember it as a horse that lured children to the water. They’d climb on its back, get stuck there, and be drowned. With my adult science-leaning brain, I recognize the myth as an explanation for water-related accidents. A child drowns, and no one wants to admit the adults weren’t paying attention, so they dream up monsters that lured the children in. If adults are the victims, then it relieves the drowned of responsibility. They didn’t do anything as foolish as go swimming alone. They were lured in by something otherworldly.
As I read, old memories surface, memories of poring over this chapter, fascinated by it. I might have only remembered kelpies, but the other names now ring with familiarity. The Welshceffyl dwr.The Norwegianbäckahästen.The Icelandicnykur.
My grandfather had mentioned thenykur.Something about itsconnection to the headless horseman legend. In my memory, it was a fairy horse that blurred with the Wild Hunt, but here it seems to be a form of water horse, like the kelpie.
A bit of online research doesn’t get me far. It confirms thenykuras water-horse folklore, but there’s not much more. Wikipedia includes it on a page with humanoid water creatures called nixie, which includes a Dutch form known asnikkerornekker.
I divert to the Wild Hunt, which again, I only know in the vaguest terms. It’s more British Isles and northern European folklore, which does include horses, but mostly as steeds in a hunting party, where the riders collect the souls of the dead.
