Lake Thirteen (7 page)

I was startled back into the present when I heard Logan shouting. I looked ahead and I realized I couldn’t see them—they’d gotten far ahead of me while I was standing there looking at the split tree. With one last glance at it, I started hurrying along the path. It took another turn to the left after about twenty yards or so, and I kept walking as fast as I could, not wanting to run because the ground was still damp and slippery. I caught myself as the ground—and the path—began sloping sharply downward. I almost slipped, grabbing onto a branch to catch myself, and I took a deep breath.

Everything seemed so familiar.

I could see Rachel and Teresa ahead of me on the path, and they both waved me to come on. As I came closer to them, I realized that while the path itself continued to wind down, the ground to my left ended in a sharp cliff, and just beyond it, on a plateau or shelf where the ground leveled off into another big clearing, was something that looked like—

“Is that a roof?” I said as I caught up to them.

“It’s not a good idea to get separated from us in the woods,” Teresa replied with a frown. “And, yes, it’s some kind of building—a cabin.”

The small building had collapsed inward on itself at some point. It was made of wood, and in places where the building had collapsed the wood had split and splintered. The clearing wasn’t clear anymore—small young trees were growing everywhere, but so were rotten old gray stumps. “Carson and Logan went looking around,” Rachel said. “They told us to wait here for you.”

“You don’t think anyone lives there, do you?” I asked, feeling a weird sense of déjà vu,
like I’d been there before.

But it looked different now.

They both looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Well, unless the person who does doesn’t care about electricity or access to the road, I’d say no one lives there.” Teresa smiled at me, rolling her eyes a little bit. “No, it looks abandoned. It doesn’t look like anyone’s lived here in about a million years.”

“I meant like a hobo or a tramp.”

But as I looked at the wrecked cabin—and at the trees beyond, and heard the sound of water rushing—the sense of familiarity grew stronger and stronger. I walked past them and saw there were mossy round stones set out, leading from the path to what would have been the front door of the cabin at one point. A horsefly flew right past my face, and I swatted at it with a shudder as I pushed my way through the tree shoots and bushes that had grown up along the stone path. I saw the green baseball cap Logan was wearing over the collapsed building—he was looking around behind it. In the front of the wreckage were rosebushes gone wild, covered with dying and rotting blooms.

I froze and almost gagged.

The place smelled of
death.

There was another, smaller collapsed structure on the side far from me, rotting wood collapsed in a big heap.

It’s the well, for water.

The cabin or whatever it may have been at one time was small, far smaller than the cabin my family was staying in. If it had ever been painted at any point in its history, the paint had peeled away years ago. The wood was rotting, and from the angle the roof was sitting at it looked like it had probably collapsed under the weight of snow during a brutal winter sometime years ago. As I stood there, Logan and Carson moved into my sight—

—and everything changed.

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes.

I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing.

Was I losing my mind?

The cabin was no longer a ruin. It looked new, built from strong and sturdy wood, and I could almost smell the raw timber. The roof was solid. The well looked like any other working well would, a round brick base with a wooden cover and a wooden crossbeam, with a rope wrapped around it and a bucket hanging. Even the trees seemed different somehow—the smaller ones were nowhere to be seen, and the stumps looked raw, like the trees had only recently been chopped down. All of the underbrush was gone, and the rosebushes were short, maybe only a foot high, and the sweet smell of the recently bloomed red roses filled my nose.

It was a perfect little place to live.

As I stood there gaping, I heard someone coming down the path through the woods. I turned—there was no sign of either Rachel or Teresa anywhere, it was like they had simply vanished into thin air—and a young man came into view from the woods, coming down the path. He was wearing dark brown pants, and his dark reddish-brown hair hung loose and tangled to his shoulders. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the sun shone through the trees on his tanned, firm skin that glistened with sweat. His skin was covered in freckles, and he was smiling. He was carrying an ax, and once he reached the level of the clearing, he walked over to a woodpile behind the cabin that hadn’t been there just a moment before, when things had been different, passing so close to me I could have touched him if I hadn’t been too terrified to reach out and touch him, and I watched as he swung the ax and lodged it in the center of a big stump.

I’ve lost my mind,
I thought in horror.

He looked just like Marc.

This was just like my dream in the car yesterday, when I dozed off on our way up the mountain.
But I’m not dreaming now. What’s happening to me?

Logan and Carson were nowhere to be seen, either.

I felt a scream rising in my throat but I fought it down.

My heart started racing, and I put my hand against a tree to keep myself from falling as my knees buckled.

What the hell was happening?

As I leaned against the tree, the young man, whoever he was, started chopping wood, the muscles in his back flexing as he swung the ax and the wood splintered.

I felt drawn to him somehow, as though I should know who he was, and once the dizziness and panic passed, I felt an overwhelming sense of love.

Albert, I wonder if he’s Albert.

I don’t know how long I stood there, watching him, the gentle warm breezes of spring—
how do you know it’s spring—
bringing the scent of wildflowers and honeysuckle to my nose. Bees were buzzing as they flew from flower to flower, and the silence was encompassing, like a blanket wrapped around me. The only sound was the ax whistling through the air as he swung it, the sound of the wood splintering, and his grunts as he raised the ax and swung it again.

“Scotty? Are you all right?”

I shook my head again and was back in the present.

Teresa and Rachel were both staring at me, their faces concerned.

“I’m fine.” I ran my shaking hands through my hair.
I’m just losing my fucking mind, is all.
I took a deep breath and saw something out of the corner of my eye. Carson was kneeling next to the wreckage of the well, trying to see down inside it. He looked up at us.

“It’s been sealed.” He shrugged. “I guess it would be dangerous to leave it open.”

I couldn’t see Logan anywhere. I closed my eyes and could vividly see the young man in my mind as clearly as I had just a moment ago.

He looked so much like Marc…

“I’ve been talking to you for about five minutes now,” Teresa said in a hushed voice. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“You were like in a trance or something,” Rachel added. “Just staring off into space like we weren’t even here.” She licked her lips. “And your face…” Her voice trailed off. She was pale, her eyes wide.

She looks terrified, and for that matter, so does Teresa. What just happened here? How can I possibly explain what just happened without sounding completely insane?
How, when even I had no idea what it was?

“My mind just wandered.” I gave them what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “I got lost in thought, I guess. Sorry.”

“Uh-uh.” Teresa shook her head. “I’m not buying it. Maybe we should take you down to town to see a doctor. I’m sure there’s an emergency clinic or something—”

“Absolutely not!” I snapped, feeling a little queasy. I swallowed and took some deep breaths. “I told you, I’m fine. Forget about it, okay?”

I walked past them and over to where Logan was kneeling by the wreckage of the old well. “What are you looking for?” I asked when I reached him. He hadn’t moved since I—

lost my mind for just a minute before coming back to my senses?

—had reached the clearing. He was still kneeling there on the ground, staring down into the blackness through a hole in the wooden planks that had been nailed down to cover the hole. Even though the structure over the well had collapsed at some point in the past, the wreckage didn’t completely cover the planks. I frowned. In my vision or whatever the hell that had been, there had been a low brick wall forming the base of the well, but there was no sign of it now.

So it wasn’t a vision or anything, it was a weird daydream. Your mind just went somewhere else and created a whole scene from the reality of what your eyes were seeing. You invented a well like wells you’ve seen before, but there couldn’t have been a brick wall like you imagined because it would still be here, and if they took the bricks down they wouldn’t have left the rest of the structure here, covering it so haphazardly, it’s kind of dangerous the way it is, anyone could stumble or trip and fall down the well.

Great. I was convincing myself that I was going crazy.

And what about yesterday’s dream?

Logan looked up and smiled. “Not looking for anything, really.” He stood up and wiped his hands on the sides of his shorts. “I was just trying to see if I could tell how deep it was. I felt like…” He shrugged. “I just had this really weird sense about it, is all. It doesn’t make sense, I know.”

I stared at him, wondering. I turned to see Carson stepping over the threshold into the wrecked cabin—

And I remembered doing the same thing. The door was unpainted, and it was open. The windows were also open, and the plain white curtains danced in the soft breeze. The inside of the cabin was just one big open room. The floor was unvarnished, raw wood. In one corner was a fireplace and next to it was a wood-burning stove. Cast-iron pots and pans hung neatly on the wall next to the stove, and there were several iron buckets on the floor beneath them. There wasn’t much furniture. In a far corner of the room, a small pallet was made up as a sleeping area. A large wooden trunk with a flat lid had some books stacked on top of it. There was a table made from raw wood with two small chairs made from the same wood. A lantern sat in the center of the table. The place smelled masculine, of sweat and hard work, and slightly of sawdust…

“Carson Wolfe, are you completely
insane
?” Rachel shouted. “Come back out here right this minute!”

How can I be remembering any of this?
I rubbed my eyes and leaned against the trunk of a tree. I felt tired, maybe a little nauseous.

Carson stuck his head back out through the doorway, that I’m-up-to-something grin on his face, his eyebrows arched up almost all the way to his hairline. “This looks like a place kids come to party,” he said, tossing out a filthy whiskey bottle. “Lots of empty chip bags, beer cans, and liquor bottles.”

“I can’t imagine anyone coming to this place,” Rachel sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “Out in the middle of nowhere, and disgusting.”

“Out in the middle of nowhere is probably part of the appeal,” Logan pointed out. He stood back up, wiping his hands on his shorts. “No one would think of coming looking for kids here.” He pointed to a rock circle with long-dead embers in the center. “You come up here to camp out, build a fire right there—and hang out and get drunk all night long.”

“You’d think the Bartletts would notice the smoke,” Teresa said. She turned to me and said in a low whisper, “Are you okay, Scotty? You look kind of green.”

I closed my eyes and knelt down, taking some deep breaths. I didn’t feel very good, to be honest. The nausea was getting worse and coming in horrible waves, each wave progressing stronger than the one before. My eyes were burning, my head was starting to hurt, and my stomach was churning.

The well—it has everything to do with the well.

“I don’t—feel so hot,” I said out loud and got another flash of the shirtless man, standing in the doorway with a big smile on his face.

And as everything went dark, I heard the voice calling again.

“Berrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-tiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee.”

The black began to fade.

It was like being underwater, like I was at the bottom of a darkened swimming pool and I could look up and see the sunlight shining on the surface of the water. I started to make my way upward toward the light. The pressure in my lungs was building and I needed air, I was almost there, almost…

I opened my eyes and found myself staring up at four pale, wide-eyed faces.

Carson let out an explosive sigh, as their concerned faces all seemed to relax in relief. “Are you okay, man?” he asked, reaching down to touch my forehead with the back of his hand. “No fever—if anything, his skin feels cool.”

“I’m fine.” I could see the sky above them, through the tops of trees, clear blue and bright sunshine. “I don’t know what happened. Did I pass out?”

“Dude, you scared the shit out of us,” Logan said after a moment, the relief clearly showing in his face. “Your eyes just rolled up in the back of your head and you went down like a ton of bricks. Your skin looked
green
.” He peered down at me. “You’re getting your color back now.”

“Sorry—didn’t mean to scare you guys.” I tried to sit up, but everything started spinning and I got dizzy and a little nauseous. “Whoa, maybe I’d better lie here for a little bit more.” I lay back down, putting my hands behind my head. I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths.

“Here, drink some water,” Teresa said. I opened my eyes and she passed me her water bottle, her hand shaking slightly. I came up on my elbow and took the water from her, and took a drink. I was really thirsty, and I gulped down the water until the bottle was completely empty. “Sorry,” I handed it back to her. “Where’s mine? And my phone?”

“You dropped your water.” Rachel’s voice was faint and a little shaky. “But I picked up your phone.” She gave me a weak smile and handed me my phone.

I slipped the phone in my pocket, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up. I wasn’t dizzy anymore—the nausea and the headache were also gone. “Is there any more water?” I asked, and Carson handed me another half-empty plastic bottle. I took a long pull on the water and handed it back to him. “I feel a lot better now,” I said, smiling at them. I shivered, but then felt like my blood was flowing again. “Sorry if I scared you. I don’t know what happened, I really don’t. But I’m better now, really.”

They exchanged concerned glances, and Teresa gulped a bit.

“What is it?” I asked, looking at each one of them in turn, trying to read their facial expressions. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Carson cleared his throat. “Okay, um, while you were unconscious”—his voice broke, and he took another deep breath before he continued—“you were
talking
.”

“It was creepy,” Rachel said, shuddering. “Really creepy.”

“Talking?” A chill went down my spine, and I swallowed down the fear that was growing inside of me. “What do you mean, talking? I thought I passed out—how could I be talking if I was passed out?”

Teresa knelt down beside me and took my hand in both of hers. “Don’t get upset or freak out, okay? Just stay calm, will you promise me that?” When I nodded, she went on. “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened.” She looked at Carson, who nodded, and she turned back to me. “You just went down. I mean, Rachel and I were behind you, but you just collapsed and fell.” She shuddered as she remembered. “It was freaky, your phone and your water went flying. And you were lying there, moaning and crying, and you kept saying—” She took a deep breath. “Over and over, you kept saying
can’t be dead, can’t be dead, can’t be dead
.”

Can’t be dead, can’t be dead.

I shook my head, biting my lip. “What does that mean?” I could hear hysteria in my voice, and I closed my eyes again, taking some deep breaths.

I’m losing my mind, isn’t that what it means?

“The worst part was you screamed right before you opened your eyes.” Rachel’s voice was shaking. “Oh my God, it was the most awful thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Her eyes were full of tears, and she covered her face with her hands. “It was so loud…”

Teresa forced out a cold laugh. “Yeah, it echoed all through the forest, and you scared off all the birds. They really took off, got the hell out of Dodge.” She looked up and around. “It was really bloodcurdling,” she went on in a soft voice. “I’ve never heard anything like that—and I hope I never do again, no offense.”

Logan put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed, and she put her head down on his shoulder. “Do you remember anything at all that happened while you were passed out?” he asked gently.

I took a deep breath. “No. I don’t remember anything. But I remember”—I paused—“I felt like I was underwater, you know how you can go to the bottom of a pool and open your eyes and you can see the sun shining on the surface? It was—it was like that. And I had to get to the surface. And when I did, I woke up.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how else to explain it to you guys.”

“Something happened
before
you passed out, didn’t it?” Teresa said, peering down at my face. “Something’s been going on with you ever since we left the lodge this morning. Come on, Scotty, you have to tell us. We can’t help you if we don’t know what’s going on with you, and we want to help you.” When I didn’t answer, she turned to the others. “I saw his face before he went out. His eyes were glassy. He was looking at me, but through me, like I wasn’t there.” She shuddered. “I kept saying his name, and nothing—no reaction, no nothing. You saw it, didn’t you, Logan?”

Logan nodded.

“Scotty, what’s the last thing you remember before you passed out?” Rachel asked softly. “Dude, it was like you were in a trance.”

“I don’t…” I looked at each of their faces. “I don’t know how to explain it to you guys without sounding completely insane.”

“Scotty, you’re not crazy.” Carson whispered. “We were all there in the cemetery last night, okay? And you dreamed about coming into the woods last night, remember? You heard a voice calling Bertie—and we all heard it just now, before you passed out.”

“You…you heard it, too?” I stared at him, completely shocked. He nodded, and as I looked at each one of them in turn, they all nodded, too.

“It was…awful.” Rachel shuddered. “It was just like you described it this morning. Hollow and sad and mournful. It didn’t really scare me—it just made me feel, I don’t know, really sad. Like you said you felt in the cemetery last night.”

“There’s something going on,” Carson went on. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s something paranormal.” He didn’t seem triumphant or smug to be proven right. “But now we’ve all experienced it in some way. And right after the voice, that was when you passed out. The voice was the last of it, though.” He rubbed his head. “When you got down to the clearing, I could see you from where I was, on the side of the cabin here.” He gestured to the ruins. “You froze. Completely froze, like the girls said. Your eyes were all glassy, and they were talking to you, but you weren’t there.” He licked his lips. “And then you seemed to come out of it, and you walked over to where Logan was, next to the well…and then we heard the voice and you went out.”

“Do you remember anything at all?” Teresa whispered.

What the hell, if I can’t trust them who can I trust?
I took a deep breath. “It’s like I was there, but I wasn’t. I know that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense to me. One minute I was walking down the path”—I looked over at the path—“and the next thing I knew, I was still there, but I wasn’t
there
, everything was different. The well, for one thing, it wasn’t broken down the way it is now, it looked like a well, you know, with a round brick base and the little roof and the crossbeam with the rope, and the cabin…” I explained, slowly and carefully, everything I’d seen.

But something told me not to tell them the young man looked like Marc, so I didn’t. Or that I’d dreamed it all before. That was too much.

When I finished, I shrugged. “So, what do you think? Am I going crazy?”

“No, you’re not going crazy,” Carson said quickly before anyone else could respond. “I think…we encountered something like this on the show.”

“Here we go,” Rachel muttered, rolling her eyes.

“Just because you don’t believe doesn’t mean it’s not possible or true,” Carson retorted angrily. “So you’d rather just believe Scotty’s going crazy and have him locked up in the nuthouse? And how do you explain the voice on the recording? The voice we just heard? Can you explain that?” He folded his arms and actually started tapping his foot. “I’m waiting.”

“I didn’t say Scotty’s going crazy, asshole,” Rachel snapped. “But there are other possibilities besides the supernatural, you know.”

“Nobody’s locking Scotty away in a nuthouse,” Teresa snapped. “Just let him finish, Rachel, before we decide what to do, okay?” Rachel made a face but nodded. “Go on.”

“As I was saying”—Carson glared at his sister for a moment—“one of the houses we investigated on the show this past summer was in Northern California, and before this particular family moved into it, no one had the slightest idea that the house was haunted. But their teenaged daughter—within a week of moving into the house, she started acting really strangely. Walking in her sleep, talking in her sleep to the point where her family could actually have conversations with her that she wouldn’t remember when she woke, and they swore the person they were talking to wasn’t their daughter.”

“Was she possessed?” Teresa managed to keep her voice neutral, but disbelief was clearly written all over her face.

“In a way, but not the way you think—not like
The Exorcist,
you know, a demon or the devil or whatever it was.” Carson replied with a scowl, totally serious. “There was a restless spirit trapped in the house—she died in the house when she was the same age as the family’s daughter, Ruth. Well, she was
murdered
in the house when she was the same age.” He pushed his glasses up. “Look, I don’t pretend like I know everything—no one does. All we can do is theorize based on the evidence”—Rachel snorted at this, but didn’t say anything—“that we do have, but the general consensus among parapsychologists is that ghosts are simply souls that can’t move on because, I don’t know, they have unfinished business? This girl in the California house, she was raped and murdered by a previous owner, and she eventually led them to where her body had been buried on the property. Once she’d been buried properly, the hauntings stopped.”

“You’re right, you didn’t explain that well,” Logan said with a shake of his head. “So, basically you’re saying this ghost in California was haunting that house because she hadn’t had a proper burial? What about countries where burial customs are different? Wouldn’t all those souls be trapped, if they needed to be buried?” When we all stared at him, he shrugged. “I took a Comparative Religion class last year. It was interesting.”

“I said I don’t know all the answers—no one does.” Carson glared at Logan. “But there’s also a theory that the afterlife—what happens to the soul after we die—is directly tied to what we believe in while we are alive.” He shrugged. “Maybe what we experience after we die is completely based on what we believe, who knows? When you’re a spirit—”

“So what you’re saying is Albert has some unfinished business here?”
Tell them about the young man you saw.
I leaned back against the tree. “And for some reason, he’s using me to finish it? I don’t see how that explains what just happened here. And he is buried—we all saw his grave.”

Carson flushed. “Ruth—the girl in California—the same thing that’s happening to you also happened to
her.
She was getting flashes of memory from the murdered girl, seeing the house the way it had been when the dead girl had lived there, that sort of thing. And when it would happen, her eyes would go glassy, and she wouldn’t hear people talking to her. Sometimes she’d go into a dead faint when it was over, just like you did.” He turned and looked at the ruined cabin. “My guess is that this place is important somehow to Albert, and he was trying to show you something. Are you sure you told us everything you saw?”

I bit my lip. For some reason, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t tell them the young man I saw looked like Marc. “I think so. I mean, I’m pretty sure. If I think of anything else I’ll tell you.”
Why won’t you tell them about Marc? Don’t you think it’s important? Are you afraid if you tell him the guy you saw looked like Marc they’ll think it’s some gay fantasy of yours? They’ll laugh at you? They’re your friends, Scotty. Don’t be afraid of them.

But I didn’t say anything.

“We need to know who this cabin belonged to,” Carson went on. “Since it’s on the lodge property, I’m sure the Bartletts probably know something about it. Someone lived here—you can tell.” He swept his arm around. “Rosebushes, a well…yeah, someone lived here.” He beamed at them. “And I’d be willing to bet a million dollars someone lived here when Albert was alive.”

“I think we should talk to Aunt Arlene and Uncle Hank,” Rachel insisted. “If you’re wrong, and there’s something medical wrong with him—and before you bite my head off, brother dear, I’m not saying that a medical problem precludes paranormal activity, okay? But wouldn’t that be part of the process?” She smiled triumphantly at her brother, who was sputtering. “Just because I didn’t intern on the show doesn’t mean I don’t ever watch it, you know. And your Ruth—she had a complete medical exam, complete with a brain scan to make sure there wasn’t something physically wrong with her, didn’t she?”

“She has a point,” Teresa said. “We have to rule out medical causes.”

“And the voice could have been a collective hallucination,” Rachel continued. “We have to tell Aunt Arlene and Uncle Hank. If something’s really wrong with Scotty, and we didn’t tell them—I don’t want to be responsible for that. I mean, for all we know, he could have a brain tumor or something. We don’t know. We’re not doctors.” She flung a hand out. “And this is crazy. Carson, I’m sorry. I know you want to believe in the paranormal and all, but do you have any idea how crazy all of this sounds? Could you imagine the reaction we’d get from our parents if we tried to explain all of this to them? They’d have us all locked up in a psych ward.”