The House Across the Lake(84)

“When did you take over?” I say.

“It happened gradually,” Len says. “It took me a while to get my bearings in a new form, to understand the logistics of how it worked, to learn how to control it. And, boy, did she resist. Katherine refused to go down without a fight.”

Good for her, I think, before being consumed by another thought.

“Is there a way to bring her back?”

Len doesn’t answer.

“There is,” I say. “Otherwise you would have told me no.”

“There might be a way, yes,” Len says. “Not that I plan on sharing it with you.”

“You can’t stay like this. You’re trapped. Not just here, in this room, but in another person’s body.”

“And what a lovely body it is. I suspect it’ll make things easy for me.”

Len looks down at Katherine’s breasts with an exaggerated leer. Seeing him do it unleashes an anger I’ve probably been keeping in my entire life. Not just at him, although he’s left me plenty to be angry at, but at all men who think life is somehow easier for women, especially the pretty ones.

“Easy?” I say. “You have no idea how hard it is to be a woman. Or how maddening it is to always feel at risk because that’s just how our fucked-up society is. Trust me, you’re not equipped to handle it. Wait until you have to walk down the street alone at night or stand on a subway platform and wonder if one—or more—of the men around you will try to harass you. Or assault you. Or kill you just like you killed those three girls who are now somewhere in that lake.”

The knife is in my hand, although I have no memory of picking it up. Now that it’s in my grip, I fly across the room and, seething with pent-up rage, bring the blade to Len’s neck. He gulps, and the rippling of his skin scritches against the steel of the knife.

“Maybe I should do it right now,” I say. “Just so you know how it feels.”

“Remember what I told you,” he says. “You kill me, then you also kill Katherine. Stab me, and you’re stabbing her, too. My blood is her blood now.”

I don’t immediately remove the knife. Anger bubbling inside me like hot tar makes me keep it there another minute, the blade on the cusp of breaking skin. During those sixty seconds, I feel bright and wildly alive and finally in charge of the situation.

This, I think, is what being a man must feel like.

But then I catch Len looking at me, and in those gray-green eyes that once belonged to Katherine Royce but are now his, I see approval.

“I always knew we were a good match,” he says as the knife blade continues to scratch his flesh.

Horrified, I recoil, drop onto the other bed, let the knife slip from my hands.

I’d become him.

Just for a minute.

Long enough for me to feel something inside that I’m certain wasn’t part of me.

It was Len.

Curling around my organs and skittering between my ribs and tugging on my muscles and growing in my brain like a tumor.

I huff out a single, shocked breath.

“What did you just do?”

Len keeps grinning. “Tom warned you I could be tricky.”

He did, but it never occurred to me that Tom meant this.

“How did you do that?” I say, even though I have a good idea. It happened earlier, when he’d sighed into my face as I was binding his right wrist. That foul breath had felt like an invasion because it was.

Len had planted a part of himself inside of me.

“Neat trick, right?” he says.

I scoot farther onto the bed, backing away from him until I’m pressed against the wall, more worried than ever about being too close to him. He’s contagious.

“How was that possible? How is any of this possible?”

Len stares up at the spot where the wall meets the ceiling and the bit of his long shadow that crosses that divide. “When I was alive, I never gave much thought to the afterlife. I assumed that when we die, that’s the end. But now I know better. Now I know that something stays behind. Our souls, I guess. When people die on land, I suspect it rides out with their final breath and eventually dissipates into the atmosphere. But when I drowned, it—”

“Went into the lake,” I say.

“Exactly. I don’t know if it can happen in all bodies of water or if there’s something special about Lake Greene that causes it. All I know is that I was trapped there.”

“What about Megan, Toni, and Sue Ellen?” I say. “Are their souls also trapped in the lake?”

“You need to die in the water for that to happen.” Len pauses, knowing he just gave me a hint about what happened to them. Completely intentional, I’m sure. “So, no, I’m afraid it was just me.”

While I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about Lake Greene as someone like Eli, I do know there hasn’t been a drowning there since my great-great-grandfather built the earliest version of the lake house. Len had been the first since at least 1878.

Until Katherine came along.

“How were you able to enter Katherine? Or me, for that matter?”

“Because our souls—if that is indeed what it is—don’t need to vanish into the ether. They’re like air and liquid and shadow combined. Slippery. Weightless. Shapeless. In order to remain, all they need is a vessel. The lake was one. Katherine’s body is another. I’m like water now, able to be poured from glass to glass. And what you experienced, my sweet, was a mere drop. How did it feel?”