The Lake House
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
Jason Burt first saw the man in June, shortly after his fifty-eighth birthday, while hosting a group of clients at the K Street steakhouse that his firm favored for entertaining. After dinner, someone suggested visiting the cigar lounge upstairs, and the six of them were soon seated in the quiet, thick-carpeted room, the sofas and leather chairs grouped around low glass tables and well apart from one another.
Four or five parties of men in dark suits were smoking pricey cigars and sipping from bulbous snifters of cognac and, although Jason didn’t care much for cigars and found the whole ritual a bit self-consciously Gilded Age, he made the best of it for the hour or so longer that the party went on.
At some point he happened to notice a group of four men seated across the room directly in his line of vision, and made brief, accidental eye contact several times with an older man at the table, but other than that paid him little mind, even though they were facing each other the entire time. The man did nothing to attract his attention, and Jason would have been hard put to describe his face even a few minutes after leaving the restaurant.
But in the days and weeks that followed, he was surprised to find himself thinking more and more about the man’s face and, what was stranger, remembering it with increasing clarity and detail, as if his memory, independent of any conscious effort, were slowly focusing a lens on the face that he’d hardly noticed in the beginning.
What made this man’s face memorable was hard to pinpoint. It certainly wasn’t handsome but not especially ugly, either, yet there was something unpleasant about it, though again, more in retrospect than at the time. He guessed the man’s age at somewhere between seventy and seventy-five, his face long, thin, and lantern-jawed, with a small, hard mouth, a high forehead and small ears with attached lobes. His skin was sallow, grayish, and most notably — that is, he noticed it at the time, though vaguely— he had black, rarely blinking eyes that seemed less embedded in their sockets than hovering just above them, and chilled out of all expression, as it were, by the overly air-conditioned room.
In fact, he realized — again, much later — that they were the coldest human eyes he’d ever seen, certainly intelligent, but without a trace of emotion, as flat and dead as a shark’s. Most faces, unlike names, register in the memory, so that when seen even years later look familiar. But this man’s dankly forbidding face, so amorphous at first, had done far more than register in his memory; it had infected it. He’d caught the man’s face like an illness, and could no more rid it from his mind than he could his body of the flu until it had run its course.
He kept trying to recall the other three members of the party, but their faces never became more than cursory sketches or blank ovals in his memory. They had made no unconscious impression, he realized. He seemed to see the older man’s face as larger than the others and thought perhaps that it really had been an unusually large face.
Big faces can be frightening, especially to a child. He stopped, wondering why he’d thought of that, and what may have been simply an accidental association led him back to his private mystery of the house on the lake. A very private mystery, since he’d never talked about it with anyone, not even his wife of thirty years. Not that there was anything shameful or ugly about it. It was just one of those little millstones of memory that grind for the self alone, and because they never seem to resolve, one never ceases to grind them, obsessively, uselessly, for decades. Part of the problem was, it had happened so long ago that he couldn’t be sure if the memories were of an actual experience, a dream, or some combination of both. There wasn’t much to it, in any case.
* * *
In the dream, or distant memory, he couldn’t have been more than ten years old, wearing a dark green bathing suit and sprawled on his back on a tightly-inflated inner tube floating in the middle of a small, almost perfectly round lake, the gently sloping banks of which suggested the long, broken chain of lakes along the Highland Ridge of central Florida; Winter Haven, maybe, or Lake Wales. Except for the occasional turtle surfacing nearby, he was completely alone, with neither friends nor family anywhere in sight.
All but surrounding the lake were symmetrical rows of mature orange trees heavy with green fruit, the single exception being a long, low, brown-painted wooden bungalow flanked by moss-laden live oaks, with a dilapidated dock and a faded army-green rowboat pulled up on the grassy shore. It might have been a rental cottage, maybe a duplex, since two screen doors opened onto the generous back porch crowded with paint-peeled Adirondack chairs, the heavy silence and absence of cars suggesting that both units were presently unoccupied.
He was more drifting than paddling toward the house, because the hot rubber had already chafed the tender skin above his elbows and the backs of his thighs. He was still far from the dock, floating contentedly out in the middle where the big black horseflies never ventured, his hands trailing in the tepid water ribbed with cool currents from springs’s boiling below that here and there surprised his fingers. Shadows of cumulus clouds massing for the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm passed in stately procession across the land, the lake, and back to land.
The incident that changed everything was disarmingly minor: he saw what looked like a glasses case floating away from the inner tube. Were they his? Would he have had them with him on a lake? Did he even wear glasses at that age? He began paddling noisily toward the case, succeeding only in sending out waves that seemed to push it away even faster.
In the same moment, a cloud blocked the sun, and a surprisingly chilly wind brought out the goose bumps on his thin body and, from that moment on, the lake seemed less benign, his presence here more like an intrusion in someone else’s domain than a solitary idyll.
He looked at the house, becoming sharper and clearer — no doubt he was nearsighted even then — the closer he drifted toward it, and with that clarity came the gathering sense of something unfriendly, even malign, about this lonely house on a lake hemmed in by orange groves.
This house, it now seemed to him, wasn’t a summer hideaway, it was literally hiding, shunning everything and everyone around it. By now he could see spider webs everywhere in the eaves and the railings of the porch, filled with the dry husks of insects, massive paper wasp nests hanging by their anchoring strand of chewed cellulose, and the gray, adobe-like dwellings of mud daubers, stuffed with paralyzed spiders.
The venetian blinds on the cobwebbed jalousie windows were open. Although he couldn’t see through the windows, he began to wonder if the house was really empty after all. Was there someone inside who hadn’t noticed him until he began his loud splashing toward the glasses case?
All at once he couldn’t talk himself out of a feeling that he was in danger, terrible danger. Imagination is overpowering at that age, and maybe that’s all it was, but his steady drift toward the house now had a nightmare feeling, as if the house were slowly, stealthily drawing him in like a fish in a net.
Frustrated by his minuscule progress backwards, he dumped himself in the water and, holding on to one end of the inner tube, which kept slipping out of his hands or flopping back on top of him, he pumped his legs with all his strength, trying not to panic, heading for the far shore, and presumably, safety. He kept looking back at the house as he drew away from it, but no one ever came outside. For all he knew, he told himself, the house had been empty for years.
That’s all there was to it. Years might go by before he would think of it, then, with no apparent trigger, it came back. Although it felt more like a dream than anything else, he assumed that he must have added details over the years from actual memories. He wasn’t sure if identifying its origin mattered as much as why he remembered it at all.
He was quite certain, however, as he passed into middle age, a husband and father of three grown children, that this memory was not the protruding bump of some treacherously hidden snag of childhood trauma. Children never forget things like that, and his boyhood was a comparatively happy one, his parents as kind, measured and firm as they knew how to be.
The reason it kept coming back may have been mostly nostalgic, since everything in the dream, up until the nightmare feeling began, was made up of the purest elements of his Florida past: the overwhelming sun, the vast sky and its never-ending pageant of clouds, the bludgeoning heat of a midsummer’s day, the near-pristine lake and its cool spring currents, turtles surfacing and the occasional splash of a fish jumping, the grassy shallows, orange groves, and a solitary peace that he’d never known since. Maybe the nightmare was simply the price of admission to that idealized past.
There was no reason he could think of why his childhood dream memory and the oddly tenacious image of a face seen several weeks before in a cigar bar in Washington, DC should be linked in any way, and yet he felt a kind of shudder of recognition when the two apparently unrelated events were placed side by side. What possible connection could they have, other than the obvious one that both had impressed themselves on his mind with a subterranean persistence that defied the usual march to oblivion — or at least to benign obscurity — of most of the minor events of his life?
In a city the size of Washington, it seemed unlikely that he would ever see the man again, and even if he did, he could hardly walk up to a complete stranger and ask him why his weirdly cumulative ugliness was so hard to shake off. So far he hadn’t said a word about this to his wife or friends, and certainly not to his colleagues, although he wondered if the man had had the same effect on any of the clients who’d been with him that evening. He couldn’t ask them, of course, but somehow doubted it. And yet he was sure that the face’s resonance had nothing to do with a sense of familiarity, however vague or distant.
It was impossible to be certain, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen the man before, even as a child, and certainly not at the lake. But the lake experience, he reminded himself, was probably just a memory of a dream, or maybe the dream of a memory. It couldn’t have been altogether real. His parents would never have allowed him to be on a lake alone at that age, without even a friend or two on hand. So why compare an actual physical sighting of a stranger in a restaurant with the oddly persistent dream of his past?
* * *
He’d swum in many central Florida lakes as a boy: Eagle Lake, Crooked Lake, Lake Hendry, Lake Marion, Lake Buffum, and Spirit Lake, among others. His dream had seemed to partake in some way of all those places, distilled them into a purified essence of that summertime experience.
Wasn’t it at least possible that on one of those lakes at around the age of nine or ten, he had paddled away from his parents and friends on an inner tube or rubber raft, and found himself drifting toward a lake house that seemed neglected or deserted, and then seen someone staring at him through a window or from a chair on the porch, unnoticed until that moment, and might that someone have been the man seen in the cigar lounge almost fifty years later?
Was it so unlikely that his face even as a young man was so disturbingly malignant that Jason had somehow repressed or expunged the memory of it from his conscious mind, turning him instead into an unseen threat experienced in a dream? He was skeptical of the whole concept of repressed memory.
But he could admit the possibility, at least, that the man had been lurking in his unconscious mind all these years, waiting, as the Herpes zoster virus waits in the body for a depleted immune system to allow it to rise up as shingles, to be activated by another sighting and remind his adult self of an unwitting brush with evil as a child, an evil still alive and active, although now operating in a wholly different arena.
The steak house where he’d taken his clients was one frequented by politicians and lobbyists. Maybe the man was one of the latter, a dark-suited denizen of that moral gray zone that flourishes inside the Beltway. But even supposing that the man in the restaurant figured in some glancing way with an event in his childhood, he had to admit that no harm had come to him, either then or now. He was making a great deal out of a childhood nightmare.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
