Page 26 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

Twenty

If asked, I’d have said there was no chance of me falling asleep after all that. But while I toss and turn, working it through, eventually the world goes dark and, the next thing I know, I’m waking to the sun blasting through my window, my bedside clock telling me it’s past noon.

I stumble into the living room to find Josie on the sofa, typing on her laptop. I wait for her to finish, but she must hear me and turns.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“I figured you could use the sleep, so I let myself in.” She shuts the laptop. “There’s no news on your aunt. I knew that’d be your first question.”

I nod and look around, still groggy.

“Let me get you a tea,” she says, rising. “It’s just the two of us. Dad is off doing cop stuff. Ben is off doing … Ben stuff.”

I nod again, struggling to focus.

“Sit,” she says. “Mom sent sausage rolls for breakfast. We can plan our day afterward. For now, let’s get some food and caffeine into you.”

I slide into a chair and let her fuss, too brain-numb to object.

I thought I’d snap out of it with that hot food and caffeine. I don’t. My mood only sags, and I can’t even rouse myself enough to feel guilty about Josie being left on babysitting duty.

I don’t think. I don’t feel. I just exist, in some numb bubble.

Naturally, Josie tries to help. Do I want to go for a walk?

Build a midday fire and toast marshmallows?

Talk? Whatever I need, she’s there. I appreciate that, but mostly, I just don’t want the obligation of having to be roused from this grief-laden funk.

In the end, I say I have to work, and she lets me do that while working on her own laptop.

The afternoon passes. Sheriff Smits arrives with dinner and a non-update.

No sign of Gail. No word on Caleb. He’s been unable to contact my cousin or uncle or aunt, but also, no one in town has seen them.

While he’s asked people to be on the lookout for any strangers, it’s still late summer in a lakeside town.

At least a quarter of the population are strangers.

Ben arrives at some point. He doesn’t check in.

Just parks his pickup and disappears. I glance out to see him trudging into the forest. Doing “Ben stuff,” I guess.

Neither Josie nor her father seems surprised—or even annoyed—that he doesn’t make contact.

He’s there, which means he’s on Sam duty, and after dropping off dinner and that non-update, Smits leaves with Josie, both promising to see me in the morning.

Once I’m alone, I relax for the first time all day.

And apparently relaxing means crying. I don’t need to worry about Ben walking in to check on me.

He’ll do “Ben stuff” until nightfall and retreat to his tent, and I appreciate that because it means I’m free to grieve without anyone telling me that it’s okay, that we don’t know what happened to Gail, that she might be fine.

Last night, I told myself the same thing.

I had an explanation, and she was fine.

That’s a lie. I know it is. She’s dead, drowned, and whatever I saw last night wasn’t her, but in some ways, it feels as if my fears manifested into that blurry photo. As if I projected that fear so strongly it burned the image onto a picture.

I know that isn’t possible, but it’s what I feel.

Gail is gone.

My aunt. My friend. The only family I had left.

Of course, as soon as I think that, guilt reminds me that my mother is alive, which launches into a fresh round of grief for the twilight nothingness that is our relationship these days, where I only catch glimpses of the mother I knew, and the rest feels like trying to provide the best end-of-life care I can. As if she’s already in hospice.

I’ve told the nurses a bit about my situation this month.

Not the truth, which is too bizarre and would sound like the flimsiest of excuses.

I said that I had the chance to go away for a month and earn enough to cover her care, which is true, even if at least one of them nervously asked whether I was doing anything “extreme.” I think her mind went to sex work.

Which in the end, is not far off. I am selling myself for money—selling my sanity and my peace of mind.

And maybe selling my aunt. What if she’s dead because she came—

Can’t think of that.

I’d asked the nurses to text me if Mom is in good enough shape for a video call. I haven’t heard back. In other words, at no time in the past four days has she been lucid enough to recognize me.

I can’t deal with that tonight either. The grief will pull me under and drown me.

Instead, I pick up that book I grabbed from the basement.

I’d been seeing it on the counter all afternoon, feeling the tug of it but knowing I couldn’t read it in front of Josie.

She’d have leapt on the chance to have a little fun, immersing ourselves in superstitious old stories, and right now, that is not what I want.

So what do I want? I ask that as I settle on the sofa. Answers? Do I expect to open the moldy cover and find an entry on “Headless man riding a drowned horse”?

No. But I’m pulled to it nonetheless.

The book is self-published. I recognize that now.

As a child, I wouldn’t have known or understood the difference.

In small towns like this, there are always self-published—or small-press—books in the general store.

Local interest by local writers. This one seems to have been published in the sixties, and a quick internet check shows it’s long out of print, with one copy available on eBay for a few hundred dollars.

Just because it’s local interest and self-published doesn’t mean it’s the work of an amateur.

The writer is a long-dead professor and local historian with an interest in folklore and a string of journal publications to her name.

But a book like this wouldn’t have a wide appeal.

It’s stories told by those living around the lakes, passing on legends from their families.

Worse, it specifically omits the one topic that would make it marketable: ghosts.

No haunted ships or forlorn white ladies.

Also, the language is far too scholarly to appeal to a wide audience, and I’m shocked that I even managed to read it as a kid.

I flip through stories of lake serpents, deadly fogs, and sunken ships. Then I hit one that stops me.

The book is divided into two sections. The first is legends specific to the lake region.

They’re tethered to things that early settlers experienced living near massive freshwater lakes, surrounded by wilderness and indigenous people.

Some of them are obviously ways to explain their unique environment, while others seem like skewed interpretations of native lore, like the Seneca’s lake serpent, Gaasyendietha.

The second section relates stories that white settlers brought with them.

The folklore of their homelands transposed to this new world.

That’s where I stop. At a chapter about water horses.

Water-horse folklore is popular in the British Isles and parts of Europe, which is where most of the local white settlers came from.

The one I’m familiar with is the Celtic kelpie.

I remember it as a horse that lured children to the water.

They’d climb on its back, get stuck there, and be drowned.

With my adult science-leaning brain, I recognize the myth as an explanation for water-related accidents.

A child drowns, and no one wants to admit the adults weren’t paying attention, so they dream up monsters that lured the children in.

If adults are the victims, then it relieves the drowned of responsibility.

They didn’t do anything as foolish as go swimming alone.

They were lured in by something otherworldly.

As I read, old memories surface, memories of poring over this chapter, fascinated by it. I might have only remembered kelpies, but the other names now ring with familiarity. The Welsh ceffyl dwr. The Norwegian b?ckah?sten. The Icelandic nykur.

My grandfather had mentioned the nykur. Something about its connection to the headless horseman legend. In my memory, it was a fairy horse that blurred with the Wild Hunt, but here it seems to be a form of water horse, like the kelpie.

A bit of online research doesn’t get me far. It confirms the nykur as water-horse folklore, but there’s not much more. Wikipedia includes it on a page with humanoid water creatures called nixie, which includes a Dutch form known as nikker or nekker.

I divert to the Wild Hunt, which again, I only know in the vaguest terms. It’s more British Isles and northern European folklore, which does include horses, but mostly as steeds in a hunting party, where the riders collect the souls of the dead.

I set the book down and rub my temples. What am I looking for here? A legend that will explain what I saw? That’s the opposite of finding a scientific answer. Am I looking to figure out what Caleb—or whoever is responsible—might be imitating? What difference would that make?

I put the book aside. It’s barely past seven, still full light and safe to go out.

The danger only comes at night.

Like my grandfather said.

More temple rubbing as I banish the thoughts. The point is that it’s full light, and I don’t need to stay indoors.

I want to talk to Ben. No, I just want to talk to someone, and not about water horses and wild hunts or even my aunt’s disappearance. I want distraction from that, and Ben is sure to provide it, if only by grumbling that entertaining me isn’t his job.

I head to his tent first. “Ben?”

No answer.

“Benjamin?”

If he’s inside and choosing to be unsociable, using his full name should get a snort and tell me where he is. It’s quiet. I peer around. He arrived a few hours ago, and the joke of Ben doing “Ben stuff” doesn’t really explain his continued invisibility.

What does Ben do here? According to him, he keeps my cottage clean and in good repair, which isn’t necessary with me here.

He also clears the lane of debris, but that’s only necessary after a storm.

He’s supposed to do regular sweeps of the property, but that was done thoroughly after Gail disappeared.

So what the hell else is he doing out there now?

Ben stuff.

I shake my head and peer around. My gaze settles on the road, and I remember the hole in the shed that he said he was going to fix. That would take some time, and I wouldn’t hear him working on it, unlike if he was wielding a chain saw or weed cutter.

I head to the shed, but there’s no sign of him. I circle the building, and I’m about to leave when I see the lock is open.

Latched but unlocked.

A shiver runs through me.

I’ve been trying to solve this mystery since the day I arrived. How could someone have been in the shed when it was latched?

Walking over, I say “Ben?” but there’s no answer. I remove the padlock. Then I open the shed and call again, “Ben?”

No answer.

I step inside and pull the door mostly shut. Then I reach through the gap to try putting the lock back on. I can … if I just hang it on the outer hasp. When I found it, though, the latch was shut, the padlock holding it closed.

Is it possible to do that so the person inside can still get out?

I spend ten minutes trying to accomplish it. Shut the door with just enough of a gap to get my fingers out and put the lock back on.

Every time I try it, the lock ends up on the ground, fumbled by my contortions. Sweat drips down my brow. I open the door wide to let in the evening breeze. Then I take out my phone, turn on the light, and look around the shed.

Have I missed anything? A spot where someone could access the shed, bypassing the lock?

Part of me whispers “What does it matter?” but I know the answer. Gail thought I imagined someone in the shed.

Imagined it? Or lied about it?

I know I didn’t lie. I also know I was not mistaken. Except those aren’t the only two explanations, and it’s the third one that keeps me out here, checking everything, desperation rising as cold fear seeps in.

I thought I saw lights on the water. I thought I saw Austin’s drowned body coming from the lake. I thought I saw some zombified version of the water-horse lore with a headless rider.

Were they sleeping hallucinations? Waking nightmares? The man in the shed doesn’t seem to have been either, so maybe the explanation for all of them is that …

I’m losing my mind.

The stress of my mother’s condition and my financial situation and my grandfather’s will and even the recent death of my cat, and then coming here, reawakening all the feelings I’ve suppressed about this place. Could that be the impetus for a mental breakdown?

If I can prove that there was a man in here—despite the door seeming latched—then that will also prove I’m not having a breakdown. Of course, that’s bullshit logic, but I cling to it. Just prove this one impossible thing that I saw actually is possible and—

My light hits something in the corner. The same corner where Gail found the hatchet and bloodied gloves. Those are gone—and I haven’t seen them since—but now there’s something else in their place. A pile of clothing.

I grab a rake and poke at the pile. It’s soaking wet. There are denim shorts and a tank top and—

This is my clothing.

It’s what I wore the day before yesterday.

I lift the shorts on the end of the rake. They’re whole, no signs of damage, but they’re drenched, as if they’d been dropped into a bucket of water and balled up here with my shirt.

Why are my shorts and tank out here? And why are they wet?

I lift the shorts higher. Something is caught on them. I shine my light to see a lake weed tangled in the belt loops, and my breath catches.

I wore this clothing the day before last. I was wearing it the night Gail died.

The night she left marks on the sand, as if dragged into the water.

I drop the rake, and it thumps to the dirt floor as I back away.

I hear Gail again, in this shed, showing me the hatchet and bloodied gloves, telling me she believed I’d cut up the fox. Everything in me had been horrified by the thought. How could she think I had done that?

But now here, in the same place, is my wet clothing, after Gail has disappeared, after it seems she was dragged into the lake.

No, after I thought she was dragged in. That’s how I interpreted the marks in the sand. No one else saw them and thought that same thing. That was me. All me.

My mind goes back to that night. To hiding in my room, pretending to sleep, not wanting to go out and face my aunt after our fight.

When had I taken off my clothing?

I don’t remember.

Oh God, I don’t remember.