the lake house boy
Author: James William Penson
Copyright 2013 James William Penson
Foreword
This book is dedicated to my mother, who spent an entire summer reading me Huckleberry Finn after lunch every day, and who gave me the love of a good ghost story.
The House
The moon was orange and low, newly risen through the pines like a sick, over-ripe fruit hanging forgotten from a limb. Owls, the first night callers, muttered to each other in the deep woods. The loons made the last of their twilight calls, sounding of madness, as if announcing that all the rules of the day – all that seemed right and true and just and real and safe – were gone with the sun. The night was insane.
The house was not as old as it looked. Ambitious builders had envisioned a two story shuttered salt box, but had done the house in unfinished cedar which, after only the short span of 40 years or so, had weathered a bleached grey lending it the appearance of every child’s image of what a haunted house should look like. It sat on a small outcrop of land on the far side of the lake – the side almost unreachable by anything but logging road, and those were chained closed most of the year. There were almost no houses on this side of the lake, and most of the activity had to do with a scout camp that was only used about 2 months a year. It was Wisconsin forested lake wilderness on this side. Ancient glaciers had dragged their rocky, icy skirts over Wisconsin in prehistory, leaving it pockmarked with deep, clear, cold lakes; so many lakes that were there still some that had no name. In parts of the country where lakes were not numerous, summer vacationers swarmed to lakes, but not so here. There were vacationers, mostly Illinoisans who left their flat cornfields to come fish for a week at a time each summer, but even they often didn’t find the smaller lakes like these. In the high summer, it was unusual to see more than a half dozen boats on the entire lake, despite an abundance of walleye and pike.
So the house sat and aged, forgotten for some reason before even being completed. It was not an abandoned house once lived in. It was a house abandoned in the building process, like the fake façade of a dark house ride at some cheap carnival, shipped from one shopping center parking lot to another on the back of a flatbed trailer. It was a deception.
It was quite alone on its side of the lake. The coves surrounding it were too wild, shores too steep, too densely wooded. Beautiful, but not inviting. Primitive to the point of being almost prehistoric. And yet someone had half built a house here. There were walls of wood studs with no sheetrock or plaster, stairs with no railings, windows that never knew a shutter or a blind, and a porch that looked as if it would collapse on itself at any moment. Moss grew on its North side. Rats had tunneled through the cedar, the remnants of broken plumbing lines spoke of a jerry rigged attempt to give the house indoor facilities, but there was no bathroom, at least not one with a commode or tub. It was a fake house with nothing but a skeleton inside to hold it up. And yet, these ambitious builders had taken some pleasure from it. Over a hearth, not completed, and a fireplace of raw stone that had never seen a fire, but that housed only the skeletons of unlucky birds who’d fallen down the flue, hung a framed photo of a boy of about 14, or 12? Maybe 10- an indeterminate age - holding a string of fish aloft and grinning for the camera. Ancient water skis rested in one corner, so unused and dust covered that they, too, seemed to be devoured by the decay of the house. Two old metal fishing poles with rusted baitcasting reels leaned in one corner with line on them so old it had rotted and fallen in scraps on the floor – from the time before monofilament line, when fishing line was actually more like fine braided string. The rats had used it for nesting material, no doubt.
One table sat in the middle of the one room on the first floor. With only studs for walls, it was as if the whole house was one room, or many spectral rooms. At this table sat three chairs, cane backs and seats rotted from years of damp and dry, cold and heat. On this table sat a deck of cards, open; a partial hand dealt for four players. Perhaps hearts, or gin rummy, or even poker. A few face cards showed. Even these were buried in dust. An ancient aluminum ash tray, garish anodized pink, held two cigarette butts turned to dusty powder save for the filters. It was as if one night over a game of cards, the four parties involved in the building of the house had just decided it wasn’t going to work, slowly stood up, stubbed out their cigarettes, and left, never to return. Two “No Trespassing” signs had been nailed to the outside of the building, signs so old that even they seemed pointless and meaningless, faded almost to bare metal. Whoever had posted them had long since stopped caring about trespassers, and from the appearance of the place, they were probably never necessary in the first place. No one came here. No one knew about the place.
The last shafts of red sun blurred the distant shore while the house settled into the dark. With no walls and no curtains, it was an oddly transparent house. Passing it slowly by boat (somewhat tricky as several downed trees lay in the water as obstacles to landing), even if one were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it through the thick pines, they would see straight through the house as two windows lined up on one side and the other. In the day time this was startling enough, but just at sunset, as those last reddish rays lay down across the lake and lit those windows, the house looked for a few brief minutes, quite alive. Orange glowed through the windows. The new darkness hid the rot and decay and softened the appearance. It looked as if a brightly lit, but quite silent, party was going on. And then the effect was gone, and the darkness of the windows became profound, and the house retreated into the blackness of the pines around it, almost invisible. It was a deception.
And on nights when high Wisconsin summer moons made for a brightness that you could almost read a book by, and the lake took on the inky blackness of unguessed, unsounded depths, beams of silver light shot through second story windows, filtering through holes in the top floor where decking had never been laid, and illuminated the boy on the hearth with the fish, grinning forever in the summer sun. A gap toothed grin forced for the camera that, by the nature of the blue moonlight, looked more like a grimace than a smile, or perhaps even a sneer. The moonlight made the eyes, squinting at the sun in the photo, look half closed, almost leering, and jet black, of unsoundable depth, darkness and depravity. The night was insane, and so was this house.
Jen
Jen was chilled. The oncoming night brought air that felt good and clean. It never seemed to cool down at night in the city in the summer time, but the air cooled by the pines and clear water of Lake Potawamish always called for a light jacket or sweater, very often covering sunburn from the heat of the same day. Her dad loved this, and usually made a small bonfire in the evenings around which they would sit and make up ghost stories, or talk derisively about crazy relatives and neighbors they were glad to get away from for a while.
Wisconsin in the summer was the dream of the Germans who came here seeking a place that felt like home. Deep glens and valleys, dense pines, deep, clear, spring fed lakes. It looked like Germany and so they came here, bringing their names and customs, creating a mix of German city names cheek by jowl with names taken from local Indian culture. Reigelheim sat next to Sangamon, which sat next to Oshtowatami, Berglmen next to Onquashto, and so on. Children grew up blonde and tall, with thick, strong shoulders, and the rich soil that provided generations of German farmers with abundant crops and dairy pastures caused prosperity and growth.
Not much of this was known to Jen, and what was didn’t matter much. She was seventeen, sick to death of spending summers with her family at the lake, and bored. Her name was Isabel, which she hated. She had gone by an abbreviation of her last name, Jensen, since childhood. Even her parents called her Jen, much to her Grandmother (and namesake’
s) dismay.
Jen sat at the end of the pier. The end of the pier represented hope. All journeys, going back to her German forebears, started at the end of a dock. Jen hoped for change. For something. For excitement. Their lake house, which provided her parents with seemingly endless relief from the daily pressures of suburban life, was not as nice or comfortable as their home in the suburbs. She missed her room painted with astrological symbols by her best friend one night when they’d been given a bottle of Thunderbird after a football game by a boy who’d hoped to gain advantage with the state of inebriation it provided, but which instead inspired the artist in Trisha. The two of them stayed