Page 15 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

It’s about a half inch smaller and narrower.

Gail wears a size larger than me. I know that, because she grumbles that I’m able to borrow her footwear but she can’t squeeze into mine without getting blisters.

That print didn’t come from our feet.

And the prints are still wet.

I start to shiver. I’ve been trying so hard to explain what’s been happening.

Someone in the shed? A dead animal on the steps?

Lights under the water? Footprints on the beach?

There are a dozen logical explanations, and none of them have anything to do with what happened here before, when my father killed a boy. A boy who …

I swallow and struggle to shake it off. What happened back then wasn’t strange or inexplicable. It was all too real and too human. And yet, seeing those strange and inexplicable footprints, I start to shake, and memories whisper up from the dark hole where I’ve stuffed them.

In the memory, it’s early morning, and I’ve snuck out to run down to the beach.

On a TV show, I saw kids getting up early to look for beach shells, and I’m too young to realize that was the ocean, not a lake, so I race down at dawn …

and see prints on the sand. Bare footprints going into the water.

I’m frowning at them, confused, when a hand lands on my shoulder.

“What are you doing out here?”

I look up, but that part of the memory is lost, and I don’t know who has me, fingers lightly gripping my shoulder. “Why are there footprints going into the water?”

“Come inside. You know you aren’t supposed to be out here at night.”

“It’s morning. Why are there footprints—”

“Someone must have been here. That’s why you never come out here alone. People think they can use our beach. People who might hurt you.”

People who might hurt you.

But it wasn’t those people who hurt me. It wasn’t those people who left mutilated small animals for me to find, who knocked me down and threatened to—

I step back sharply and take deep breaths.

I’m letting this place carry me away. Drag me into its darkest memories when the good memories outweighed them twenty to one.

But it doesn’t work like that—loading all your memories onto a scale and saying the good outweigh the bad.

What happened here, what I saw my father doing, wasn’t the kind of memory you can ever balance with good. Add in what happened before that …

My breath quickens.

I need to get inside. I’m worried about these footprints … and so I’m just going to stand here and tumble into memories while someone might be lurking on the property?

I’m turning away from the lake when something rises from the water. I freeze, my breath stopping.

What I’d spotted out there earlier hadn’t been an otter or a fish. I knew that. Now I’m seeing it again, maybe twenty feet away. A dark semicircle, like the top of a head.

A human head? Is that really what I’m saying? That there’s a person out there?

It looks like a seal or sea lion, but we don’t have those in the Great Lakes.

Debris? Some kind of container? Maybe a small beer keg? No, it looks like the top of a head.

My gut tells me to run, but I find myself rooted there, squinting, wanting a logical explanation. Needing one. Knowing there is one. There must be.

The object starts to move my way, stopping me short, my heart rate accelerating.

That’s not debris. And it isn’t moving in the current. It’s swimming, ripples flowing out on either side. But I can still only see what looks like the top of its head. Whatever it is can breathe underwater.

A memory rises. My grandmother telling me she’d once seen a seal here, on one of the first visits with my grandfather.

Everyone had told her she was imagining things—my grandfather had teased her mercilessly.

But then someone said harbor seals have been spotted in Lake Ontario, having come in from the St. Lawrence River.

The head rises, and I exhale in relief. It’s a seal. I can see the dark cap over a lighter face, with huge liquid eyes and—

I step back. My brain keeps trying to arrange what I see into a seal’s features. A furred head, dark on top, lighter below, small dark snout. Even as part of me screams that it doesn’t look right, that logic center keeps reassuring me it fits.

Then I see shoulders. Human shoulders and a human neck and a human head.

Dark short hair frames a thin, pale face.

Only something’s wrong with the face. The eyes are huge liquid pools, like a seal’s.

And there’s a dark patch where the nose should be, like a hole gaping into a dark and lipless mouth.

Bone. I see bone through that hole. More bone on the cheeks, patches where the flesh is gone. Gray skin. The skin of the drowned.

I slowly back up as my brain screams that I’m wrong. I’m exhausted. I’m freaked out. I’m seeing things.

The figure continues to rise from the water, its naked pale body covered in gaping but bloodless wounds. My gaze flies back to the face and—

My heart stops.

I know that face.

It turns my way, and those eyes, those huge, liquid eyes burn with hate, a hate I know as well at that face, and before I can stop myself, I whisper, “Austin?”

Austin Vandergriff. I am seeing Austin Vandergriff. The boy my father murdered.

I turn and run. I run as fast as I can, brain screaming for me to stop, that this isn’t Austin, cannot be Austin. But I keep going. I race up the steps and onto the porch and into the house, slamming the door behind me and locking it.

Then I run to the window and look out.

Nothing.

I see an empty stretch of land from here to the lake.

No sign of the figure that rose from the water.

No sign of Austin Vandergriff.

Because it wasn’t him. Could not be him. Even if my fevered brain could imagine him drowned and returning from the lake, coming for me, always coming for—

Stop.

I rub my hands over my face, glasses tumbling to the floor.

Austin didn’t drown. He didn’t vanish into the lake. My father tried to bury him, but his body was found and given a proper burial. I know all this.

Am I sure?

It wasn’t as if I’d been here for the funeral. Wasn’t as if anyone told me what happened after I gave my statement.

I fumble my way to where my phone’s plugged in on the kitchen counter. When my fingers tremble, mistyping on the keypad, I take two deep breaths. Then I try again.

Austin Vandergriff. Paynes Hollow. Funeral.

My page fills with results, my stomach clenched as I see my father’s name peppered among them. I force myself to click on a local article titled “Funeral Held for Austin Vandergriff.”

My gaze skims over the words, landing on the ones that matter. Body recovered. Postmortem examination. Laid to rest. Paynes Hollow Cemetery.

I lean against the counter and shut my eyes.

There. It wasn’t him.

Of course it wasn’t. Because even if Austin had drowned—which he did not—he’s dead. He’s been dead for fourteen years.

“Sam?”

That startles me so much I nearly drop the phone. Then I realize it’s Gail. I walk to her bedroom door and crack it open. She’s sitting up, one hand pulling out an earplug.

“I thought I heard you,” she croaks, still obviously half asleep. “You okay?”

“Just getting a glass of water.”

She nods and slides back down onto the bed. I shut the door and look at the window.

What happened out there?

I don’t know.

I only know that I did not see Austin Vandergriff.

I shut the front windows and return to bed.