The House on the Lake

-Or-

A Wolf at the Door

I was chained to my oven.

Now, you might think that odd, and you’d definitely find it odd that it was what I had been intending to do for a while. But if I hadn’t, I would have charged with manic fervor into the ice-cold darkness. I suppose, in the interest of your understanding and my sanity, I should explain, though I’m not sure this is the best recording device I can use.

I lived in the outskirts of town, south of the city, and a bit north east of the suburb I was technically a part of. My home was on the top of the hill—a run down cabin that overlooked an Ozark lake. It was amazing that the yuppies hadn’t found it and ruined it with their speedboats and cheap, derivative homes.

As far as I knew, there was only one other house for miles. I had never met its owners, and didn’t really want to. I lived out here to get away from people, not meet them. I didn’t worry about anything, really.

Until the third night I stayed there. I was up past midnight, trying to fix a light switch in what passed for a living room in this place.

Then, it happened.

The Event.

Capital “T”, capital “E”. That’s how I’ve always thought of it.

All of the clocks in my house went crazy. The clock on my VCR, which had been blinking “12:00” as long as I can remember, started to blink “00:00”. I glanced down at my watch, and saw the second hand pointing at six, while it looked like the hour and minute hands were moving in synch through the entire clock face.

I would’ve sat there, wondering, if I didn’t hear a sound. It was somewhat like compressed air escaping a can, but louder and further away.

I circled the couch and pressed my hands against the window, looking out.

The window was frigid, and my breath left a frosting of fog on it. There was mist on the other side, but it was moving, swirling in complex spirals and eddies.

I turned around, and went to turn on the TV and look at the weather. The television clicked on, but the image—a late night infomercial on one of the basic cable channels—on the screen was frozen. I flipped through the channels, and set it on the weather channel, which showed the dark blue readout for the weather, the white letters frozen in place on the screen showed that it should be a clear, cool night.

Most certainly, it should not the frigid, mist-shrouded dark that crouched outside my window like a predator.

That was when I heard the first scratching noises.

They came from my front door, and were faint. It was more like whatever was out there was testing the door, instead of trying to get through. I had left the porch light on, so I figured that I would be able to see whatever it was through the peephole.

Blinking, I placed my eye to that little circle of light.

I saw whatever it was for a brief fraction of a second, before the light outside died on me. I cannot accurately describe it, but the figure outside had radiated a palpable air of deformity. It possessed a feeling that it was hideously misshapen, despite any possible outward appearance.

Despite this, I felt a manic urge to fling open the door and give myself to whatever was crouched in the icy black.

Obviously, I didn’t, but the madness that had brushed against me scared as much or more than whatever was outside.

I went inside, and went into the bathroom—the only other room in the house with a lock. That night, I slept in my bathtub.

I glance every now and then at the items I have sitting next to me on the counter. One is a butcher knife, and the other is the key to my chains. I have enough give to get to the sink, but generally I just crouch by the oven that I chained myself to.

I didn’t take The Event seriously, at first. It was just some messed up stress-dream. A new house, a new job, who wouldn’t be stressed out? No matter how nice both are, it’s still a stressful experience.

Just a dream, until I found four parallel gouge-marks on my door, shallow, but definitely there, marring the paint. Of course it took those marks. I could’ve changed the TV channel to the weather channel and not remembered it.

But the clocks were back to normal in the morning. My watch showed the proper time and my VCR timer was back to blinking “12:00” at me.

I had gotten dressed and gone to work as normal, that day. I tried not to stay awake past midnight, and I had compromised and added a deadbolt—just about the only handy thing I knew how to do.

But I still had all those windows to worry about.

Whatever was out there never wanted to be seen…but I had too many windows to watch constantly. Hence, the butcher knife. If something was going to get me, then I was going to make absolutely sure that I got it first.

That mad urge to throw myself to whatever lay beyond my front door remained. Hence, the chains.

Once, I had to work late; one of our servers crashed, and the guy who was supposed to fix it had called in sick. As the most technically inclined person who was actually at the office that day, it was my job to see if I could fix it.

You would’ve thought that a large greeting card company like this one could afford an IT department that could find choice segments of its own anatomy with both hands and a flashlight. I wrote cards. I would jot down pre-packaged sentiment in iambic meter, and feel my dreams of actually doing something worthwhile die a little bit with every paycheck.

Well it took me longer than I had really hoped for, and had required me to unplug just about every appliance in the office to fix, but I had finally gotten it working again. This put me at six P.M.

Like a moron, I had decided to stop and grab something to eat on my way south. I stopped at Chinese restaurant and got myself some dinner, then headed towards home.

Little did I know that the Triangle—a large cluster of overpasses and underpasses that is in a constant state of repair and coincidentally doesn’t look anything like a triangle—was bogged down with traffic. I had to wade through that and finally reached my doorstep just as one AM should have hit.

A deathly silence extinguished all the night-sounds, and I could see something, like a wave of stillness, spread across the lake.

Then a sound breached the silence.

All the windows and doors of the house by the lake slammed open at once, and that icy mist poured out. It swept over the lake, and then poured onto its shores, oozing up the sides of the valley, and covering everything.

My house became a looming shadow, its windows glinting evilly in what little light remained. Steeling myself against what fear I felt, I got out of the car, and began walking towards the door.

I was halfway to the door when I heard a tremendous crash behind me.

Turning, I saw the black bulk of my car tumble into the woods, as if a charging rhinoceros had hit it.

Like an idiot, I remained standing there, rooted by my own fear. Something moved, behind the mist. I ran, unsure where I was going, but knowing that I had to get away.

Weaving through the trees, I fled from whatever it had been. I don’t have any idea, as of yet, what it was. It had to have been huge.

I tripped over a fallen log, and caught myself before I could roll. I placed my hand on a tree trunk, and gasped for breath. I felt as if I was drowning in the fog, and I was shivering. It was cold out here.

This wasn’t normal. No one would believe me if I told them about this, and yet I couldn’t possibly deal with this situation on my own.

It wasn’t long until I heard something coming through the woods towards me. There were several somethings—I could hear branches snapping underneath their feet, leaves brushing against them, a whole host of noises in the silence.

I blindly headed away from them, further down towards the lake.

I hopped off of a three-foot-tall boulder, and landed wrong on a rotting trunk, breaking through it where I had hit it. I hobbled further down, and heard a squishing noise.

The fog seemed to part, and I was on the shore of the lake, ankle-deep in mud. The full moon, tiny despite its brightness, shone down upon the scene.

I was directly opposite of the house, and I could see lights in it. They had an ethereal, unreal quality to them, like ghost-lights. The doors and windows were still open, and a dilapidated dock extended into the lake.

Fog still seemed to swirl outward, like phantom streamers in the dark. My watch read 8:40, indicating that I still had a good twenty minutes before this nightmare ended.

The lake was smooth, like a plain of silvered glass. I hadn’t ever gone down to it during the day—I had just looked out of my window and studied its brown expanse in the morning, as the first lights came over the tree tops.

I crouched, and dipped my hand into the water.

That was when my hand struck the surface of the lake, and found it solid. It had the same feeling as ice, but was warmer, as if it were room temperature.

I pressed down on it, and found it quite solid.

“What the hell is this?” I wondered aloud.

There was the sound of something stepping out of the woods behind me, just as the for began to fill in the gap through which the moonlight had poured.

I turned, and caught a brief glimpse of the thing. It was tall and skeletally thin, its skin translucent in the pale moonlight. I couldn’t get a clear glimpse of its features other than that, because it moved in an erratic manner, its entire body shaking like a time-lapse video of an epileptic seizure.

Despite how its body moved, below the knees it was steady, and it was moving in my direction.

I stepped back, planting my foot on the surface of the lake. When I realized this, I instinctively tensed, but the fall never came.

Emboldened by this, I turned and ran from whatever it was that was following me. I was careful not to slip, but I almost did, several times. I could hear it coming after me. In addition to its footsteps, there was also a sound like a cassette of ambient noise being rewound at high speeds. There wasn’t the high-pitched twittering of human voices, but the deep rumble and hum of sounds too slow for the human ear filled the air.

Then, halfway across the lake, it stopped.

There was a great rushing noise, and the house on the lake seemed to swallow the mist back into itself.

All its windows and doors slammed shut at once.

Its ghost lights disappeared, and I returned to the stream of normal time.

With a loud splash, I dropped into the lake.

I remember that night vividly, even now. I told everyone my car had been stolen in the middle of the night. They figured some tweaked-out meth-head had done it. I filled out a police report, and went through the hoops for the insurance company. No one could explain the fallen trees between my house and the lake, but my car wasn’t down there.

From then on, I worked at home, and I chained myself to the oven every night. I’d heard that some junkies did this when they tried to kick the horse.

I didn’t want to risk leaving in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to know about what happened outside my home. I didn’t want that extra hour of night.

Something strange happened, just now.

It was eleven at night, just before I was going to lock my chains. The phone rang.

I picked it up, and for a moment, all I heard was static.

“Hello?” I greeted the whispering static.

“?hello, this is the man who lives atop the hill by edgertoN lakE, correcT”

The voice was, quite simply, amongst the strangest things I had ever heard. But strange seemed to be part of my life, now, so I took it in stride.

“Yes. I moved in three weeks ago,” I responded.”

“!oh, how wonderfuL .we’re neighbors, you knoW”

I couldn’t place it. He wasn’t Scandinavian, though at first he sounded as if he might be. I suspect that I simply hadn’t heard enough Scandinavians, but of course, that wasn’t it.

“No, no…I didn’t know that we were neighbors. Where do you live?”

A slight chuckle came over the line, sounding strange. It might simply have been a peculiarity of the line.

“.i live in the house on the lakE .we were wondering, my friend, if you would stop on by for a visiT .you see, we would all like to get to know yoU .we get so few visitorS”

I can imagine, I thought dryly, though my interest had indeed been piqued.

“I might do that,” I said, “when would be good for you and your…family?”

“.any time will worK .you see, we don’t leave our home mucH”

“Well, I’ll have to check my schedule…can I get back to you sometime, Mr.…?”

The line had gone dead. I don’t know what happened, but it was certainly the strangest phone call I’d ever received.

I didn’t know how to respond to any of this situation. How is one supposed to respond when one’s home becomes strange and hostile? Was this place rejecting me?

The next day, I had decided what to do. I set out in the afternoon for my ultimate destination.

I found that it would be impossible for me to get to the House on the Lake by land—a river lay between it and me, but I found an old boat. Metal, but unstained by rust or truly, any sort of entropy. It lacks an engine, but I have all day.

I’m in the front of it, and paddling with my hands towards the far end of the lake.

I’m recording this over my phone—I’ve got plenty of time left on this tape, and I want to record this in as close to real-time as I can. I don’t really feel any urgency, but I want to be listened to, now.

What to say, though?

I’m a normal person. I’ve lived as close to an average life as normal, and I’ve never been diagnosed as having any sort of disorder. Yet, I believe that I think too much, and as I sit here, paddling along towards that dark, abandoned house, I can’t help but give more thought to this whole situation.

What does it mean?

The mist comes from that house. I don’t know what the mist means, but I can guess what the house means. I learned a long time ago that there are metaphors in every part of life. They’re not always readily apparent, and they’re not always easy to accept, but they’re always important.

What could I learn from this? Who lives in the house? What those things are? I don’t know what it is that I’m supposed to learn.

I…I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because I was invited. Maybe it’s because I’m sick of being terrorized in my own home by things I don’t even understand.

I am not a brave person. I’m sick with my own fear. Maybe I came up with the whole thing. Maybe it’s some sick fantasy.

Almost to the shore, now.

What does any of this mean?

…I ask the question, and nothing but the mindless lapping of the lake responds to me.

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.

I’m on the shore now, and I’m walking towards the house. It’s bigger than I thought, and old. Its walls are stained with soot and wood-rot, and its roof is sagging. It’s an old house.

I suppose, if I’m going to do this, I should do it.

There is a knocking sound, followed by a door opening.

“!aH .we have been expecting yoU ?won’t you come iN”

The speaker can be heard, gasping, then stepping through the door.

After this, only silence follows. The tape has another minute of silence, then the phone clicks off, reverting to a tone, which grates on for six minutes before the tape finally cuts out.

After this, only the question remains.