Leave the Living (6 page)

He gained his bearings and realized his father was right. They always put the house on the edge of the drop-off, which was another fifty yards at least from the spot it sat now. The water couldn’t have been over seven feet here, not as prime as the border of deeper water where the larger fish liked to glide. He unzipped the small access and stepped inside.

The space within the house was a mere eight-foot square. An extension of the fabric that covered the rest of the frame layered the floor, giving way to a wide patch of exposed ice that was used to spear through. The ice was skimmed over but not more than an inch thick. Without thinking about it, Mick plucked the heavy ice chisel from where it rested against the wall and began to punch the hole open. In less than a minute, the block was free, and he pushed it beneath the ice, shoving it out of the way. The water was clear and cold. It radiated a chill even from a standing distance. He wondered what it would be like to fall into its biting embrace, how the sting of liquid would be so cold it might seem hot. The bottom was as close as he’d estimated, and he shook his head, wondering why his father would ever agree with Gary to move the house here.

Mick stood there and took inventory. Everything was present to begin spearing. The wind shoved at the hide of the house, and he considered just leaving it at its current location. It would be some work to move it the fifty yards to the better spot, not to mention cut the new hole. He could sit down right now, fire up the gas sunflower heater in the corner, drink his beer, and toast his father. The slanted writing on the sheet of paper still lying in the kitchen floated through his mind, the last chore not crossed off. What would he do with it when he climbed back to the house? Throw it away? Burn it? He imagined them both, hesitating for only a moment before turning toward the door to gather up the equipment.

Within a half hour, he had the house moved and the hole cut. A lone white pine that soared above the others lining the bank could still be seen through the haze of snow, and it was this that he used for a landmark to place the house. With a shove of the chisel, he pushed the much more considerable ice chunk down and out of the view of the lake bottom. The freezing water flooded the area for a moment, soaking into the snow and melting it away before beginning to solidify. When it had drained back, he situated the house properly and secured it down, throwing shovelfuls of snow against its sides to bank the structure solid. When he at last stepped inside, his face was numb and his fingers were beginning to tingle though the rest of his body was overly warm from the exertion. With a flick of a switch, the heater began to redden at its top, pouring heat into the little hut.

It was already dark inside and became like midnight when he zipped the door closed to the prodding weather. The open hole glowed and threw translucent light up onto the black walls as if he were somehow suspended upside down in a cave and it was the promise of escape seeping inside the oily gloom. Mick situated a small chair beside the open water and sat, picking up a pail of large potatoes. After a moment of searching, he came up with a folding knife in one of the coat’s pockets, most likely the object that had tapped against the beer bottle. He began to slice the potatoes into thin discs that he dropped, one after another, into the water. The bright flesh of the vegetable flashed and flipped over and over until it reached the muddy lake bottom where it rested, allowing him to see if a fish passed between him and where they lay, shining through the murk like huge cataract eyes.

The space was beginning to heat up, even as the wind punched the side of the house with the ferocity of a prizefighter, and he removed his jacket, sliding one of the nearly frozen beers from the pocket. Somehow the familiarity of where the fish house was now felt right, like he’d finished something much more important than the simple task. The space to his right, the place his father always sat when they fished together, was too empty. Mick raised his beer, holding it so that he could barely make out the shape of his hand and the bottle in the dark.

“To you, Dad. It’s freezing here, so I hope you’re somewhere warm where the beer’s cold.”

He blinked away the tears and poured two swallows of brew down his throat, washing away the lump that had formed there. He sat, staring into the lake’s depths, remembering. Images shuttered past in the darkroom of his mind. His father teaching him to ride his bike down their long driveway, the wheel wobbling while his dad tried to help him steer. The time they’d had a fight about what he’d wanted to pursue as a career, the bitter words slung with disregard until they stormed to opposite ends of the house to sit in acidic silence. Only later did his father come to his room to apologize, saying the only reason he’d disagreed was because he knew the schooling that was required wasn’t anywhere nearby.
I’m being selfish, Son,
he’d said.
I just don’t want you to leave. But I don’t want you to end up like me either, with nothing but my hands to rely on for a living. Follow your talent; you’ve got something that others don’t. Remember that.
Now he could see his dad in a tuxedo, standing beside him as his best man while Cambri walked toward them on the arm of her own father. The soft grip on his shoulder as his father leaned closer, whispering in his ear,
She’s a treasure; don’t ever lose her.

Mick sighed and leaned forward, resting his face in his palm. Don’t lose her. But he had. He’d lost her amongst his work, lost her within the pictures he saw everywhere that gave him new fire for his career. He’d lost her even though she was asking for help, not for herself but for their marriage and for Aaron. He’d lost them both. And just as she’d walked toward him all those years ago, she would do the same tomorrow afternoon, on the arm of her father once again, but toward another man. Someone better who was going to fill her life with the joy and love that he hadn’t seemed to be able to provide, at least not while they were married. And Aaron. Aaron would have a new father that wouldn’t be distracted most of the time, someone who would get the benefit of spending all week and several weekends a month with him. Someone who he would eventually call ‘dad.’

The beer bottle dropped from his hand and bounced hollowly on the icy floor. The remaining dregs pooled out of its mouth and slipped into the clear water, tainting it with the deep red hops that looked almost like blood. A small Perch darted into and then out of the hole’s view, a torsional twist of its striped body and it was gone. The propane heater guttered, spitting its remaining fuel out like that of the beer bottle and sputtered once before going silent.

Mick turned to look at its fading glow, and within the wires guarding the heating surface, he saw a face.

It was only the outline of a bald head with two burnt patches for eyes. Its mouth was a red rictus pulled back from a set of slanted teeth. It grinned at him, the waning heat from the burning propane giving it the illusion that it was sinking back into darkness, enveloped by the gravity of whatever abyss it had crawled from. It diminished until only the silhouettes of its soulless eyes remained, and then even they vanished into obscurity.

Mick stared at the afterimage that floated in his vision. The closest thing to a premonition he’d ever had was seeing the ghostly smile that resembled the Mona Lisa’s when he was just a child, and even that had seemed explainable to his mature mind when he’d discovered art and come up with the idea of creating it within everyday objects and surfaces. There had been no warnings or significance to the pictures he saw over the years, just random lines forming landscapes or the gentle curve of a figure where others only saw blotches of paint. But the face within the heating element stirred something inside him. It shifted there like a snake curling itself comfortable in the bowels of some dead thing.

All at once, the fish house walls were too close, the air too warm. He needed to get out, out of the cloistering space that darkness had set claim to. With trembling fingers, he found his father’s coat and shrugged it on, pausing only to button the first several snaps. He fumbled with the gloves and almost left them there when he dropped one, sure if he tarried much longer in the dark, the glow would return to the cooling element on its own, the face rising into life to stare out at him with unbridled malice. Mick struggled to find the zipper to the door and finally closed his fingers around it, tearing it upward in relief.

The air struck him and washed away the warmth like a cold douse of water. It peeled the heat from him and sent it sprawling away in the clutches of the wind. Even in the short time that he’d been inside the fish house, the day had drawn down even more, the light in the west barely a veiled glow of gray behind the skeletal trees. He made to take a step forward and stopped, gazing through the blowing snow at the encrusted ice.

The wind had washed his tracks into mere depressions like some bleached ocean licking at a pale beach. He could see his trail that spanned the gap between where he’d moved the house from its old location and to where it sat now. But that wasn’t what froze him where he stood as if the temperature had suddenly plummeted a hundred degrees.

A second set of tracks lay beside his own, much fresher and more distinct, as if whoever had walked there had done it only seconds ago. The prints came toward him and ended at the door of the fish house in two deeply set holes. There were no tracks leading away.

And it was only after the shock had receded of seeing the prints that he realized whoever had made them was barefoot.

11

The wind shoved at his face, trying to hold him back, to keep him on the lake. Mick struggled against it, his lungs burning, mouth open as he sucked the freezing air in.

The tracks followed alongside his own as if someone had walked next to him, unseen, the entire way. They didn’t deviate where he’d stopped and muddled the snow at the first location of the fish house but instead continued in a straight line to where the hut sat now. He told himself, as he hurried in the direction of the house, that no man could withstand the touch of snow and ice against his bare feet for the length that the tracks stretched. He had repeated this fact over and over as he traced their depressions, clearly seeing the individual toe marks in front of the sole. He had even stopped to call out several times into the frigid tempest, his voice lost in the whirling eddies of snow, drowned out by the storm’s overpowering scream. But when the steps became farther and farther apart, much longer than the stride any man could take, he began to run.

Mick tried not to look at the prints as he rushed toward the nearing bank, its trees emerging from the curtains of snow, their branches shushing in the wind, almost seeming to tell him to quiet his assumptions, to calm his fear, but it did nothing to slow his pace. He pelted onward, not looking down now and running like something pursued him. Maybe something did.

The trees loomed over him, and he jogged past their reaching branches, snow tossing up from his boots as he ran. The hill leading up to the house looked impossibly tall. Adverse to his impression of it when he’d arrived, the slope now seemed to go on forever and he was a child again, dwarfed by the monolithic summit that appeared insurmountable without the help of his father’s hand. Alone in the fury of the storm, childhood fears came rushing back, more powerful than the insistence of the wind. His father was gone, and now there was nothing to keep the monsters at bay anymore. They were free to find him and do with him what they would.

Mick struggled up the hill, cursing his imagination all the while his mind kept returning to the tracks and the inhuman lengths between them. His eyes shot to the side whenever another single track would appear, but their indentations were becoming less and less defined, as were his own boot prints. Soon all that was left were the ghosts of where he’d stepped, their craters barely recognizable beneath the constant worrying of the wind.

The Tahoe came into view and then the house behind it, appearing as if in a fever dream. The snow fell sideways, cutting against gravity and stinging like cold nettles on his exposed skin. He rushed up the last few yards and onto level ground, the endurance of his muscles finally reaching their limits. He slowed and stopped, turning to face the way he’d come, almost expecting to see something huge and indistinguishable rushing toward him.

Only the wind and snow met him as he rotated, searching the late afternoon for the shape of a man or any indication that someone was present besides himself.

There was nothing.

The urge to pile into the Tahoe and simply leave was overwhelming. But that would be giving in to hysteria, letting fear make his decisions. And how would he feel returning to the hotel empty-handed with nothing accomplished? Slowly he turned away from the lake, made his way to the house, and stepped inside.

The relief of being indoors was palpable. He shut the weather out with a snap of the door and leaned against it, his mind running at a frenetic pace to try and explain the footprints on the lake, the
length
between their strides.

“Someone’s messing with you,” he said, resting his forehead against the back of his hand and closing his eyes. “Some local shithead kids found out about dad and they’re playing a fucking sick joke.”

The explanation held only a small amount of water before collapsing completely. Kids? Playing games in this weather? Not a chance. But what was the alternative? He opened his eyes and stared at the wood grains on the heavy door’s surface. He was too close to see any pictures within their delicate lines, but if he stepped back, he was sure some would appear. Perhaps they would be images of straightjackets and padded rooms. Maybe wrist and ankle restraints or a hypodermic needle filled with something to calm him.