All blonde and blue, like sun on water.
He hadn’t thought anymore about the alleged ghost until the old-timers started stopping by. He’d laughed, shrugged, been too busy with the business end to listen to old people’s tales of nameless fears. Horror meant, after all, wondering how to pay the mortgage on the property in the winter months when there was no income, hoping his summer savings from all those boat rentals to tourists would stretch till spring. But if the oldsters had been right about one thing perhaps they could be right about two, for today Peter didn’t just feel the spiraling sense of dusty, empty mystery he’d gotten used to and learned to enjoy, but something new and a little menacing.
The always present sense of mystery had acquired an extra tone, emanating, Peter was suddenly sure, from the kitchen he’d just left, more specifically from an institutionally painted green kitchen cupboard that he saw through the open door. But he didn’t go into the kitchen, not yet, rather just glancing down the hall and through the door, at the cupboard, its door hanging ever so slightly ajar.
Making fun of himself, distancing his own fear, Peter went through the remaining rooms, looking at all the stuff the previous owners had left behind, which, in seven years he’d never brought himself to get rid of. It helped him think, he always told himself, when he was looking for a new angle on how to make a go of things. Objects from before, belonging to strangers, things that retained this alien sensibility of another life, someone’s life beyond his own, unknowable, unreachable, yet here, made concrete by abandoned items: huge bags of pesticide, fertilizer; the previous owners grew corn and tomatoes to sell to the cottage folk in addition to running the marina.
Peter looked at the gargantuan, heavy bags leaning in a corner, too heavy to lift, really, even shove aside. What to do with the herbicides, the 5-5-5? He knew he could unload them on local farmers who’d be glad for the stuff, but the thought of it running into the ditches bordering his own land, contaminating his own well water, the well water of his children-yet-to-come, elicited a profound distaste. He composted religiously, had a heap the size of a small shed. The neighbours were covetous, but Peter, who didn’t grow a thing, was saving it for the wife.
The newly strange kitchen still called, and so he went back, if only to see there was nothing there. A sink, a hotplate, no refrigerator; he’d taken that up to the main house when the compressor on his own had fried.
“Kitchen cupboards, panelling, click-handle latches that lock and pinch your fingers. Kitchen cupboards that have never belonged to a family, never been tamed by children. The moment suddenly framed and put in a late-night movie where it’s difficult to breathe, or maybe like you’re under water. You open that door. Your rational mind tells you there’s no danger but your instincts tell you otherwise; you can feel your heart pounding, pumping adrenalin. You’d shut it except you’ve already started opening it, can’t stop now. Somehow you have to complete the motion, as though, now, you are in one of those dreams where everything is hyper-real. Open the door. Hand goes in. Hmm. A paperback book.”
Late winter and he was talking to himself: suggestible, susceptible, cabin fever taking a wrong turn. He shut up, acutely aware that should anyone walk in on him, which no one would, not in a million years, they’d think him barmy. As if everyone didn’t already, a little, simply for buying the place.
But what about Marti? What would she think, if she chose this moment to return?
Peter took the book out of the cupboard. It was called The King in Yellow, and Peter remembered Marti reading it. She hadn’t brought it with her; she’d found it here. It was strange, she said, like nothing else she’d ever read, but she couldn’t stop—maybe he’d like to read it too? He hadn’t given it another thought. Every cottage on the lake was lined with musty paperbacks after all, but then she’d disappeared, leaving the book here and not in the shelf under the window with the one-dollar used copies of Agatha Christie and Stephen King and John Grisham.
What could it possibly mean? He turned it over and over, unable to let it go in spite of the fact the book elicited a profound terror, a kind of childhood nightmare panic. His hand shaking, he at last replaced it gingerly, as though he’d been caught going through someone else’s cupboards, which in a way he had; he couldn’t remember ever cleaning them out in any methodical way. He glimpsed a few plates: green plastic, a tinfoil pie plate, some loose spoons. But it wasn’t those objects that gave him the creeps, only the book. Being terrified of a book was even worse than talking to yourself. Thankfully he had no audience unless he included the broken aluminum coffee percolators on the counter, the black-capped chickadees in the cedar outside the little window above the sink.
He left the room, bewildered. It was only a book. He could go back and get it, throw it into the middle of the lake, put it in the trash, use it for kindling in his wood stove. There were a million ways to dispose of it. But he didn’t. On the one hand it was too ridiculous, and on the other, he was afraid to touch it again. They’d come and find him, dead of heart failure in the spring, his body frozen. It would be a balm to whoever discovered him; decomposition wouldn’t have set in, or at least not much.
Peter sat down behind the heavy, scarred oak desk, made doodles of ducks and frogs on the unused memo pad, waiting for his hand to stop shaking, his heart to settle down. Because of a book. He thought of the warnings of gap-toothed, patched together oldsters dropping by the last few summers, never spending a penny, just wanting to yarn. They told him all the lake’s old stories, stories he’d shared with his tourists. Probably some of them kept coming back because of it. Hearing the stories, they’d feel part of something.
And then inevitably, just before the old guys left, they’d ask some version of, “Have you felt it yet?” A knowing grin. “It gets everyone sooner or later; you’ve just held out longer than most.” But Myrtle had never said anything about it getting her, although perhaps she’d been too embarrassed to admit it. Maybe for Myrtle it hadn’t been the book but something else. The percolator parts, perhaps, or the tin spoons.
It had certainly gotten Peter, whatever it even was. He drew another duck, another frog. He’d forgotten how intrinsically inescapable fear could be, how impervious to the ministrations of the rational mind. He’d have to remember that when the children came. Night terrors came at age three or four. How did he know that? Had he really spent the winter skimming copies of Today’s Parent he’d surreptitiously swiped from his GP’s office?
He would’ve liked to leave, to walk down to the marsh bordering the lake west of the beach, say hello to the real frogs, following his usual spring patrol, but it was too early in the year; the spring peepers wouldn’t be awake yet. Tiny dogwood-climbing frogs with suction cups for toes. In two months he’d wish he could shut them up, calling for a mate all through the night. And so, without frog songs to keep him company, it was once again back to the kitchen; at least his breathing was normal now. On the cracked and chipped counter there were three bent aluminum coffee percolators, but there wasn’t one whole, usable one among them. While the coffee basket that was missing in one was there in another, of course it didn’t fit.
For the hundredth time Peter played with the percolators. If he had a stem for the one with the coffee basket that fit, and a lid for it, instead of the twisted, non-fitting mess he held aloft, distastefully, between finger and thumb, he could make coffee, actually work down here instead of up at the house. And then if Marti snuck back through for old times’ sake, he’d be there. She wouldn’t come to the house, she’d come here, drawn to the bags of 5-5-5, where they’d done it, in great haste, before the boaters returned at sundown. And he’d talk to her, just as now he’d already started talking to himself again, not even aware of it.