Chapter 9: What Came Back Wearing Mother

The first nail lifted itself out of the lid with a noise like a tooth being pulled.

Mara stood at the far end of the parlor with the fireplace to her back and watched the coffin breathe.

There was no other word for it. The polished walnut box, beaded with a skin of cold moisture, swelled and sank in slow wet motions. The brass handles gave small, insectile clicks. Mud streaked the rug beneath it in black fans. All around the room the house had gone still in that listening way it had, as if every board and spindle had bent itself inward to hear what was inside.

The curtains over the lake-facing windows hung heavy and damp. Beyond them, through the warped glass, the basin was no longer a basin. Black water pressed against the foundations of the hill like a crowd shoulder to shoulder, glossy as oil, wrinkling under a wind Mara couldn’t hear. Lanterns burned below among the trees where townspeople had gathered, little orange wounds in the dark. They did not move. They simply stood, facing the house.

Witnesses.

The second nail screamed free.

Mara’s grip tightened on the iron poker she’d snatched from the hearth. Her fingers were so numb she could not feel the ridged twist in the metal, only the ache in her knuckles. Her camera hung against her ribs, useless and comforting both. On instinct, as if framing disaster could keep it outside her skin, she had already lifted it twice. Both times the viewfinder had filled with static black water and a reflection of a room that was not this one.

“Don’t,” she said, though whether she was speaking to the coffin or the house or herself she couldn’t have said.

From upstairs came a slow procession of sounds: a door shutting somewhere far overhead, then another, then another, as if invisible hands were moving room to room. Latches slid. Bolts thudded into place. The staircase gave a long complaint. The whole mansion seemed to be drawing itself closed around her one artery at a time.

Mara looked toward the front hall.

The front door was no longer there.

Not open. Not hidden in shadow. Gone. Where she had come in hours ago, there was now paneled wall crowded with portraits, all of them Vosses and not-Vosses, all of them with damp, soft eyes. In one oval frame her mother stood in a dark dress at the edge of the dry lake, one hand resting on the shoulder of a little girl with a braid and a sullen mouth. Mara stepped toward it before she could stop herself.

The child in the portrait had Mara’s face.

And six fingers on her left hand.

Mara stopped so hard the poker rang against the floorboards.

The picture was old enough to craze under the varnish. The extra finger was not a smear. It lay there pale and delicate against the black cloth of the child’s dress, impossible and precise.

“No.” Her own voice came out thin. “No, I would know that.”

A third nail rose.

She turned back in time to see the coffin lid flex upward a fraction. Something inside pressed against it. Not a hand. Too broad. Too soft. The wood bowed, released, bowed again. Water slipped from the seam and ticked onto the rug.

Mara’s mother had been buried yesterday in a church cemetery two counties over, because the ground in Stillwater had gone too rotten and wet to trust. Mara had stood under a white tent while rain drummed on the canvas and listened to polite lies from people who had never met Elaine Voss and would have hated her if they had. The coffin had gone into the ground under six feet of red clay. Mara had watched until the first shovelful hit the lid.

Whatever was in the parlor now had crawled a long way to get home.

A voice spoke behind her.

“You shouldn’t let it out up here.”

Mara spun.

Mr. Pritchard stood in the archway to the dining room, hat in his hands, raincoat dripping black water onto the floor. He was the undertaker, if undertakers still existed in towns like this—thin as a fence post, with liver spots on his cheeks and a careful, apologetic way of holding his shoulders. The first time Mara had seen him since returning, he had greeted her by name before she recognized him. The second time, she had found him in the cemetery measuring her mother’s grave with a length of yellow string.

Now his eyes looked swollen and silvered, like minnows turned in the light.

Mara raised the poker. “How did you get in?”

He glanced toward the place where the front door had been and offered a sad little smile. “House let me.”

“Get out.”

“Can’t.” He lifted one shoulder. “Can’t you neither. Not till it’s done.”

The coffin thumped hard enough to jump on its bier.

Mara aimed the poker at him like a spear. “You people dug her up.”

“Mm.” He tilted his head, listening to the thing in the box. “No. We dug up your mother. This ain’t your mother.”

The words dropped into her chest like stones.

“Then what is it?”

Mr. Pritchard’s gaze shifted to her face, and some queer softness came into it—pity, almost tender enough to be mistaken for kindness. “What you put away.”

The room leaned.

Memory did not come back to Mara in tidy pieces. It came like blows from the dark: the smell of lake mud in summer heat, a child’s bare feet slipping on old dock planks, her mother’s voice saying hold still in the same tone she used for threading needles, for gutting fish, for lies. There had been fire the night the old house burned. There had been smoke. Her own screaming. Afterward there had been doctors and a white ceiling and years with whole corridors in her head bricked over.

Buried under all that, tiny and vicious, something twitched.

“I didn’t put anything away.”

Mr. Pritchard looked down, turning his hat in his fingers. “Children do what their mamas tell ‘em.”

The coffin lid split down the middle with a crack like ice breaking.

Mara moved without deciding to. She lunged for the nearest curtain, yanked it back, and smashed the poker through the glass.

The window shuddered but did not break.

The pane bulged outward under the iron, flexing like skin. A dark ripple traveled through it. On the other side, inches from Mara’s face, stood the townspeople in the yard below—forty, maybe fifty of them, men and women and children and those too old to be one thing cleanly anymore. All of them were looking up. None of them had made a sound. Their mouths hung open, not in surprise, not in hunger, but in reverence. Black water lapped around their calves. Tiny silver fish flicked between them.

When Mara struck the pane again, the blow rang through the whole wall.

Below, every head bowed at once.

“Stop that,” Mr. Pritchard said sharply.

She turned on him. “You think I care what it wants?”

For the first time, irritation cut through his mildness. “Girl, I think you never once in your life cared what anything wanted but yourself, and look where that got all of us.”

The answer came out of Mara before she could stop it. “I was nine.”

Silence met that.

The old man’s mouth trembled. “So were we, in a manner of speaking.”

The coffin burst open.

The lid flew back and struck the floorboards. Black water surged over the sides in a reeking gush, carrying weeds, grave dirt, and the sweet, high stench of fresh rot. Mara stumbled back, choking. Something pale uncoiled in the box. Hair streamed over the edge, long and dark and moving in water that should not have been there.

Then it sat up wearing Elaine Voss’s face.

Mara’s breath stopped so violently her chest hurt.

The thing’s skin had the waxen puffiness of the drowned. Its mouth hung slightly open, showing gums dark as bruised fruit. One eye was her mother’s gray; the other was all pupil, round and lidless and wet as a seal’s. Mud packed the lines beside its nose. Lake grass clung to its throat like jewelry. It tilted its head in that familiar birdlike angle Elaine had used whenever Mara disappointed her, amused her, or measured where to cut.

“Baby,” it said.

The voice was almost right.

Almost made it worse.

Mara recoiled until the mantel dug into her spine. “You are not her.”

The thing smiled. One side of its face lagged behind the other. “No.”

It climbed out of the coffin with shocking delicacy, bare feet finding the rug without a sound. Water dripped from the hem of the burial dress and ran uphill, back toward the coffin. In the lantern-lit dark outside, the bowed townspeople sank slowly to their knees.

Mr. Pritchard removed his hat.

Mara raised the poker and swung.

The iron passed through the thing’s shoulder with a splash and struck the wall. Not flesh. Not water. Something between. The body rippled around the blow and then corrected itself. The thing looked down at the wet dent in its dress, then up at Mara with patient sadness.

“You did always start with hitting.”

Mara backed away. “What are you?”

“Home.”

It took a step. Boards groaned under its weight as if something much heavier moved inside the shape of a woman. “You left me in the dark too long, Mara.”

“I don’t know you.”

“That wasn’t the bargain.”

The chandelier overhead rattled. All through the house, doors slammed in sequence, a rapid descending chain from the attic down. Then, from somewhere beneath the floor, came the deep metal cough of an old latch opening.

The cellar.

Mara knew it with a certainty that bypassed reason. The house was opening downward.

She bolted.

Across the parlor, through the dining room, past the long table laid with tarnished silver and plates that sweated black water. Her boots skidded on warped boards. Behind her she heard neither footsteps nor pursuit, only the soft drag of water over wood and Mr. Pritchard calling her name once in a voice almost frantic.

In the kitchen the walls shone with moisture. Every pot hanging above the stove trembled on its hook. The back door had become a pantry lined with jars. The pantry had no floor, only a shaft dropping into damp blackness where root-cellar steps spiraled down brick slick with slime.

The smell that rose from it hit her like a hand over the face—cold earth, old blood, standing water, and underneath that a maternal sweetness gone rancid.

She nearly turned. Nearly chose the thing in her mother’s shape over whatever the house kept under itself.

Then the doorway behind her filled with a silhouette in a funeral dress, and the decision vanished.

Mara plunged down the steps.

The door slammed above her.

Darkness swallowed the world whole.

For a moment there was only the thunder of her pulse and the slick scrape of one hand against brick. She went down too fast, caught herself on a bend in the stairs, almost pitched face-first into the wall. The air was colder here, close enough to freezing that each breath burned. Something trickled over her wrist. Water. Or not.

Her phone was gone. She did not remember dropping it. Her flashlight lay in her jacket pocket, blessedly still there. She nearly cried when it clicked on.

The beam cut a pale tunnel through the cellar.

It was far larger than the footprint of the house should have allowed. The brick chamber ran outward in impossible vaults, all of it curved and sweating, as if she stood inside a throat lined with masonry. Shelves of preserves sagged under jars whose contents had turned opaque years ago. Coal bins brimmed with smooth white stones shaped uncannily like kneecaps. A rusted furnace crouched in one corner with its mouth wired shut by thick chains. Beyond it, the packed-dirt floor dropped away to a low room where black water pooled mirror-still.

And in the center, under a single hanging bulb that glowed without being connected to anything, stood the child’s chair.

Mara knew it instantly.