“Oh Alison! But — you can’t do this!”
Alison shakes her head slowly, unyielding. Then Lorraine feels the hand with the missing digit on her shoulder. She glances at it. Not an old man’s juiceless spidery spotted claw, the skin is smooth, unblemished, large, strong: strong enough to grind her bones. Even with a finger gone.
“Alison — God — it’s wrong — listen to me!”
Alison in a quiet kind of huff shuts the door in her face and is gone.
Big Boy bears down and Lorraine screams. He pulls her slowly around to face him. He smiles fondly at Lorraine.
“You don’t want to go yet,” he says. “It’s storytime.”
Gene Wolfe
Hunter Lake
Gene Wolfe was born in New York City and raised in Houston, Texas. He began writing in 1956, and his first sale was “The Dead Man” to Sir magazine in 1965.
The author of hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels, including The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Devil in a Forest, Free Live Free, There Are Doors, Castleview, Pandora by Holly Hollander, the World Fantasy Award, Nebula Award and British Science Fiction Award-winning “Book of the New Sun” sequence, “The Long Sun” tetralogy and “The Short Sun” trilogy, his story “The Death of Doctor Island” (collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories) also won the Nebula, his novel Peace won the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award and “The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps” was awarded the Rhysling Award for SF poetry. He is also a recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Wolfe has recently published The Knight and The Wizard, a two-part novel under the umbrella title “The Wizard Knight”. Innocents Aboard is a new collection with another, Starwater Strains, forthcoming. Also due are the novels Pirate Freedom and The Soldier of Sidon, the latter the third book in the “Soldier” series (after Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete).
He writes five pages each day, often rising at 5:00 or 5:30 a.m. to work before breakfast, and sometimes completing the fifth page around midnight. Every page of his stories receives at least three drafts and some go through ten or more.
As Wolfe reveals: “I had written a story called ‘My Name is Nancy Wood’ in which I attempted a female narrator; I liked the result, and wanted to try another in which most of the characters were women or girls.
“I combined that ambition with a dream — a sort of mild nightmare — involving my own mother, and wrote ‘ Hunter Lake ’. The old farmhouse recurs in my dreams with some frequency. In part it is surely my grandmother Wolfe’s house, which she inherited and which predated the American Civil War. The other elements are (I think) drawn from houses I visited as a child. England may well be the most haunted country on Earth, but the US is not far behind — New England and the old Confederacy particularly.”
“You’ll get arthritic eyes,” Susan declared, “if you keep watching that thing. Turn it off and listen a minute.”
Ettie pressed MUTE.
“Off!”
Obediently, Ettie pressed the red button. The screen went dark.
“You know what Kate told us. There’s a lake here — a beautiful lake that isn’t on anybody’s map.”
“I did the Internet search, Mom. Remember?”
“And you sit watching an old TV with rabbit ears in a rented cabin.” Susan was not to be distracted. “You know what your father says — people who get eyeball arthritis see only what they’re supposed to see, like that TV screen. Their eyes stiffen-”
Ettie brought out the artillery. “If Dad’s so smart and such a good father, why did you divorce him?”
“I didn’t say he was a good husband. Come on! Get your coat. Don’t you want to look for a haunted lake?”
Thinking it over, Ettie decided she did not. For one thing, she did not care for ghosts. For another, she was pretty sure this was a dream, and it might easily turn into a bad one. A haunted lake would give it entirely too much help. Aloud she said, “You’re going to write a magazine article and get paid. What’s in it for me?”
“I’ll take pictures, too,” Susan declared. “Lots of pictures. It’s supposed to be very scenic. If a ghost shows up in one of my pictures, the sale will be a…”
“Snap,” Ettie supplied.
“Foregone conclusion.”
The car door slammed, and the car pulled smoothly away from the one-room log cabin that had been their temporary home. Ettie wondered whether she had left the TV on and decided she had. Would Nancy Drew have remembered to turn it off? Absolutely.
“The Indians performed unspeakable rites there,” Susan continued. Studying Ettie from the corner of her eye, she concluded that more selling was in order. “They tortured their white prisoners, gouging out their eyes and scalping them while they were still alive. Isn’t that exciting?”
“Native Americans never did anything like that.” Ettie sounded positive, even to herself.
“Oh yes, they did! A hunter found the lake hundreds of years afterward, and took his family there for a picnic because it was so pretty. His little daughter wandered away and was never seen again.”
“I knew I wasn’t going to like this.”
“Her spirit haunts it, walking over the water and moaning,” Susan declared with relish.
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“It’s what everybody says, Kate says. So today we’ll find it — you and me, Ettie — and we’ll stay out there all night and take lots and lots of pictures. Then I can write about how a sudden chill descended at midnight, a chill our struggling little fire could not dispel, seeming to rise from the very waters that-”
“Mother!”
“Harbor the ghosts of hundreds of Mohicans massacred by the Iroquois and thousands — no, innumerable — Iroquois massacred by white settlers, waters said to harbor pike of enormous size, fattened for centuries upon-Ah! There’s the farmhouse.”
It looked horrible, Ettie decided. “Burning that down would be an improvement.”
“They’re old and poor. It’s not polite to make fun of old people. Or poverty.” A wrench at the wheel sent the car gliding into a farmyard from which no chicken fled in terror.
“They’re dead, if you ask me.” Ettie pointed toward the little cemetery that should have been the front yard. Its cast-iron fence was rusting to pieces, and its thin limestone monuments leaned crazily.
Susan took her key from the ignition. “Just a private burying-ground, Ettie. Lots of old farms have them.”
“Right in front of the house?”
“I think that’s touching. They cared about their dead.” They were climbing broken steps to a ramshackle porch innocent of paint. “Probably they sat out here on rockers and talked to them.”
“Cozy.”
“It is, really. The dead are nearer the living than you know, Ettie.”
You’re dead yourself, Ettie thought rebelliously, and ohmyGod how I miss you.
Susan knocked. The knocks echoed inside the old farmhouse. There was no other sound.
“Let’s go,” Ettie suggested.
“I’m right here, dear.”
“I know you are,” Ettie said. “I’m scared anyway. Let’s go. Please?”
“Kate says there’s an old man here who knows precisely where Hunter’s Lake is. I’m going to question him and tape everything he says. I’m going to take his picture, and take pictures of this house.”