Cradle Lake by Ronald Malfi Page A

it. I heard it. It was you.”
    â€œCome on.” He slipped an arm around her waist and led her across the yard toward the house.

CHAPTER SIX
    Sunday afternoon, a full week after they’d moved into the house, Alan found himself alone for the first time since arriving in town. Lydia had come by earlier and, after much prodding, convinced Heather to go shopping with her. Heather had pulled on a pair of wrinkled slacks and a blouse and, after searching around the house for her purse for nearly fifteen minutes, left with Lydia without saying good-bye to Alan. He was certain Lydia noticed the awkwardness between them—she wasn’t blind—but she didn’t say anything. Heather’s bandages were gone now, and she took to wearing heavy silver bracelets to cover the scars, but Alan wondered if Lydia had noticed the bandages that first day when she brought over the casserole and the bottle of wine.
    Nonetheless, he savored the solitude. He hadn’t realized how much he had begun to feel like Heather’s babysitter—no, Heather’s goddamn
keeper
—since her suicide attempt. It hadn’t even been a conscious thing; he just knew that henever felt right leaving her alone. And the night he’d found her standing in the yard, staring at the trees? Even now in the relative safety of daylight, it chilled him to recall that event. What the hell had she been doing? When he questioned her about it the following morning, she couldn’t even remember doing it let alone provide a reasonable explanation. With much unease, he wondered what he was going to do when school started in the fall.
    Maybe that night in the yard was just a fluke and things will be different here,
he thought.
Maybe things will get better. This is a nice town and the people, however tedious, are nice, too. Heather might even find a friend in Lydia or one of the other neighbors and start living her life again. We can beat this; we can get past all the badness.
    He hoped.
    In the kitchen, he heated up some of the coffee from that morning in the microwave and listened to the silence of the otherwise empty house.
    Jerry Lee poked his head into the kitchen, sniffed around, then admonished Alan with solemn eyes. Then the dog licked his chops and retreated down the hall, yawning.
    â€œLazy bastard,” Alan called after him.
    He was contemplating cutting away some of the vines that crept along the house when he happened to notice one of those very vines crawling up the wall from behind the refrigerator. It startled him at first, as it looked nearly snakelike in its appearance. Only a few inches were visible, thin and curling at the tip, but he imagined it must have come up from the floor behind the refrigerator and was probably several feet long and thick as an electrical cord at its base.
    â€œSon of a bitch, you buggers are stubborn.”
    He leaned against the wall and peered behind the refrigerator. Sure enough, the vine ran down the wall and vanished into a crack in the molding at the bottom. A second vine, much thinner, had branched off the first and had wrapped itself around the grate at the back of the refrigerator. The vines reminded Alan of a video he’d seen about Humboldt squid in the Sea of Cortez and how their tentacles would splay out and make grabs at the cameramen.
    The microwave beeped, making him flinch. He laughed nervously and retrieved the steaming mug, smelling the rich aroma. The doctor had cautioned him about drinking too much coffee, as it promised to aggravate the ulcer, but for Christ’s sake, he couldn’t give up all his worldly pleasures, could he?
    Through one of the kitchen windows, Alan caught sight of something dark moving in the forked trunk of a tree in the side yard. He approached the window for a better look and felt his bowels clench. His blood suddenly turned to ice.
    It was enormous—perhaps the size of a car’s spare tire—and the enormity of it made the thing