Page 36 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
After a minute, I ease open the door and walk onto the porch to properly enjoy the summer night—and calm my nerves from the unsettling dreams. I lean on the railing and lift my face to the sky. When I open my eyes, I’m gazing out at endless stars, and that makes me smile. Living in the city for so long, I’ve forgotten what the night sky looks like.
I’m standing on the porch, drinking it all in—the starry sky, the pine-scented air, the distant hoot of an owl—when lights appear under the water. I blink, certain it’s the aftereffect of looking at the stars. But even after a few blinks, the lights are still there, seemingly right below the surface.
I head down the steps. From here to the lake, it’s open land, kept clear, and I can walk easily across it in the moonlight. Soon I’m at the water’s edge. The lights are still there, three or four of them, bobbing under the surface. I squint, as if that will help me see better,but again, my out-of-date prescription means my vision is less than twenty-twenty.
I peer into the sky. While I do see bright stars—probably actually planets—they aren’t clustered the way these lights are.
It must be something bioluminescent. I meant to look that up and forgot. Maybe I could ask Ben. He’s lived here all his life.
Uh, no, I’m not asking Ben anything. I’ll ask Josie.
I’m turning to leave when I notice something off to my left. Marks in a patch of sand between the tufts of grass. They look like… footprints?
Earlier, we’d walked straight from the fire, which is to my right, and these are to my left.
I walk over and peer down. Bare footprints head inland, the sand slightly damp, as if someone was out swimming.
They’re roughly my size. Could they be mine from earlier? Gail and I had both been barefoot.
I put my bare foot down beside the print.
It’s about a half inch smaller and narrower.
Gail wears a size larger than me. I know that, because she grumbles that I’m able to borrow her footwear but she can’t squeeze into mine without getting blisters.
That print didn’t come from our feet.
And the prints are still wet.
I start to shiver. I’ve been trying so hard to explain what’s been happening. Someone in the shed? A dead animal on the steps? Lights under the water? Footprints on the beach? There are a dozen logical explanations, and none of them have anything to do with what happened here before, when my father killed a boy. A boy who…
I swallow and struggle to shake it off. What happened back then wasn’t strange or inexplicable. It was all too real and too human. And yet, seeing those strange and inexplicable footprints, I start to shake, and memories whisper up from the dark hole where I’ve stuffed them.
In the memory, it’s early morning, and I’ve snuck out to run down to the beach. On a TV show, I saw kids getting up early to look for beach shells, and I’m too young to realize that was the ocean, not a lake, so I race down at dawn… and see prints on the sand. Bare footprintsgoing into the water. I’m frowning at them, confused, when a hand lands on my shoulder.
“What are you doing out here?”
I look up, but that part of the memory is lost, and I don’t know who has me, fingers lightly gripping my shoulder. “Why are there footprints going into the water?”
“Come inside. You know you aren’t supposed to be out here at night.”
“It’s morning. Why are there footprints—”
“Someone must have been here. That’s why you never come out here alone. People think they can use our beach. People who might hurt you.”
People who might hurt you.
But it wasn’t those people who hurt me. It wasn’t those people who left mutilated small animals for me to find, who knocked me down and threatened to—
I step back sharply and take deep breaths.
I’m letting this place carry me away. Drag me into its darkest memories when the good memories outweighed them twenty to one.
But it doesn’t work like that—loading all your memories onto a scale and saying the good outweigh the bad.
What happened here, what I saw my father doing, wasn’t the kind of memory you can ever balance with good. Add in what happened before that…
My breath quickens.
