Pool Day
2130 Words
By nine o'clock the house had emptied, and Elias had never been so glad to be alone or so afraid of it.
Marianne had taken both children into town to register them at the new school. She'd kissed him at the door and said, "Try to sleep, you look like death," and he'd laughed, a thin sound that stayed in the hallway long after the car had gone crunching down the gravel lane.
He stood in the kitchen with the green-crayon drawing flattened on the table in front of him. He had not been able to throw it away. The little figures stared up at him, their mouths scribbled shut.
The quiet man showed me.
"She's seven," he said aloud. "Kids make things up."
The house did not agree. It said so with a long, slow creak that traveled from the attic down through the ceiling, across the kitchen, and into the floor beneath his feet, as if something very large had just shifted its weight.
He told himself he was going back for research.
He carried the projector down the ladder in his arms like a sleeping animal and set it up in the basement, in the corner he had planned to use as an office. No windows down here. One bare bulb. The concrete walls sweated in the cold. He tacked a white bedsheet across the wall, and his hands only shook a little.
He'd brought the box down too. Four cans in a row, labeled in that rounded, careful, childish hand.
Picnic. Pool Day. Garden Party. Bedtime.
He did not touch the first can. He knew what was in it. He had seen enough of the Pruitts to last him a lifetime, and he had no desire to look into those wet, pleading eyes again.
He lifted the second can instead.
Pool Day.
It was lighter than the first. Colder, too, as if it had been kept in a freezer. The metal bit his fingertips as he opened it, and a smell drifted out, faint and sweet, like chlorine and something underneath it, something coppery, that he refused to name.
Threading the film took only one try this time. His body knew the motions. That should have frightened him more than it did.
He pressed the lever.
Blue.
That was the first thing. A brilliant, chemical blue, so vivid that it hurt, glittering with sunlight. An in-ground pool, long and kidney-shaped, set into a lawn that someone clearly loved. A date had been scratched into the corner of the frame in white grease pencil: JULY 1974.
Not 1966. Different year. Different house.
A man in aviator sunglasses stood at the grill, flipping burgers. A woman in a polka-dot swimsuit lounged in a plastic chair, laughing, holding a paper cup of something pink. Three children splashed in the shallow end, a girl of about ten, a smaller boy, and a toddler in floaties who shrieked with delight every time the water slapped her chest.
It was perfect. It was a postcard of summer.
Elias gripped the edge of the table until his knuckles ached.
It's never the first part, he thought. It's never the first part that gets you.
The camera drifted. It drifted across the lawn, past the grill, past a bright striped umbrella, toward a white wooden fence. Over the fence, in the field beyond, somebody was standing. A tall, thin shape in the heat shimmer, motionless, too far away to see clearly.
The camera held on it a moment too long.
Then the blue went out.
The film jumped. The summer light drained from the screen as if a hand had closed around it, and the picture came back in the gray, bleached colors of a night lit only by a single bare lamp.
The pool was empty.
Someone had drained it. The tiled walls rose around a dry concrete basin, stained green at the waterline, littered with dead leaves. At the bottom, in the deep end, sat the family.
All five of them. They sat in a ring, as the Pruitts had, bound and gagged with gray tape, the mother's polka-dot swimsuit now smeared with something dark. The toddler was crying without sound, her small face crumpled and red. The father's sunglasses were gone, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who had begged for as long as he was able and had finally run out.
Wait. Five. Elias's gaze caught on that number and snagged.
There were three children at the pool. Now there are only two.
He leaned closer. The ring held the father, the mother, the girl, and the toddler. The boy, the little boy in the swim trunks, was gone.
And on the lip of the pool, looking down into the concrete pit, stood a small silhouette. A child. A boy. His hands hung at his sides, and something long and wet hung from one of them.
"No," Elias whispered. "No, no, no."
Down in the deep end, a word was carved into the tile in jagged letters, scratched deep, over and over: HUSH. HUSH. HUSH. Beside it, nine notches in a spiral.
The boy at the edge of the pool tilted his head. Then, with the awful patience of a child about to do something he had been told was allowed, he began to climb down the ladder.
What happened next, the film did not hide. It held steady, without a flicker, in grainy, unforgiving black and white. Elias made himself watch the first three seconds. Then he made himself look away. Then, because he was a coward and a writer in equal parts, he looked back.
He would never describe it. Not in the book. Not to the police. Not to himself, in the dark, in the years that followed.
When it was over, the camera swung one last time toward the edge of the empty pool. A tall, thin shape stood at the far end of the deep, between the bodies and the tiled wall. For the first time, it stepped forward into the light.
It had no face. Only a smooth, pale blankness, where something should have been, and where a mouth would be, a thin black slit that began, slowly, to open.
The film ended in a flash of white. The reel spun loose, flapping against the projector like a dying moth.
Elias sat in the cold basement for a long time.
His mouth tasted of metal. Upstairs, through the ceiling, he heard footsteps cross the kitchen, small, soft, and unhurried. The back door creaked open and clicked shut.
Marianne's car wasn't back yet. He knew the sound of its engine. This was not that.
He climbed the basement stairs on legs that did not feel like his own, crossed the kitchen, and looked out the window.
Wren stood alone in the backyard, in her pajamas, in the frost, her rabbit dangling from one hand. She was standing at the oak tree, one palm pressed flat against its trunk, directly over the nine notches. Her lips were moving. She was talking to someone.
As he watched, she turned her head and looked up at the kitchen window.
She smiled, and waved.
Behind her, high in the bare branches, something long and pale unfolded itself and began to climb down.
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