The Invited(20)

The work had gone well at first. They got out all their shiny new tools and had taken turns doing the measuring and cutting. They quickly found their groove, moving together, making great progress. It felt good to be doing carpentry work again; it made her think of all the time she’d spent working with her father, of how satisfied she always felt at the end of the day. And there was something meditative about working with tools: you had to clear your mind of everything else and focus on what you were doing. She felt calm. Peaceful.

Until things started to go wrong.

She started thinking about the scream she’d heard, about the bundle with the tooth and nail. It ruined her focus.

Nails bent. Boards jumped. Things didn’t line up in real life the way they did on paper. Helen was put on edge by the chop saw, which they were using to cut the framing lumber to length. Each time she brought the blade down and watched it bite into the wood, she was reminded of last night’s scream.

They had argued when Helen had cut something too short. “I thought you said ninety-two and five-eighths,” she said.

“I did,” Nate told her, checking the plans again. “That’s the length of all the vertical studs.”

“Well, that’s where I marked and cut.” She’d used the tape measure and made a careful line with the metal square and the chunky carpenter’s pencil. “Just like all the others I just did.”

    “Maybe you read the tape measure wrong,” he suggested.

“You think I don’t know how to read a tape measure?” she’d snapped.

“No, babe, I’m just—”

“Cut the next one yourself,” she’d said. She hadn’t meant to. This was so un-Helen. She was on edge. Prickly. It was the lack of sleep. The memory of the hideous scream. The tooth and nail, which Nate had taken to calling “our strange gift.”

“Hey,” Nate said, coming up and rubbing her shoulders. “What do you say we call it quits for today. We can go for a little walk. Then I’ll go into town and pick us up a pizza and a bottle of wine. Sound good?”

She’d agreed, apologized for being such a shit, and they’d put away the tools and walked down to the bog. It was a five-minute walk, downhill through the woods. The air was sweet and clean, and the path was layered with a thick carpet of pine needles. It really was beautiful. Along the way Helen spotted delicate, balloon-like oval pink flowers.

“What are those?”

“Lady’s slippers,” Nate said. “They’re a member of the orchid family. But I’ve gotta say, it’s not the foot of a lady I think of when I look at it.”

Helen smiled, leaned down to study one. It was a delicate flower, almost embarrassingly sexual.

“So, I’ve been doing some research, and it turns out Breckenridge Bog isn’t a true bog,” Nate told her. “It’s a fen: a boggy wetland fed by underground springs.”

“A fen,” Helen echoed.

“Yeah, most bogs are just fed by runoff. They have very little oxygen. A fen, on the other hand, has streams and groundwater that give it more oxygen, richer nutrients in the soil and water.”

They got to the bog, which was circled with pine, cedar, and larch trees. There were a few small cedars growing up in the bog itself. The ground was a thick carpet of spongy moss floating on water. There were sedges, low bushes, thick grass that cut their legs as they walked. Their feet were sucked down. It was like walking on a giant sponge.

Everything about this place was wonderful and new, full of magic. “It’s like another planet here,” Helen said, leaning into Nate, who hugged her from behind.

He showed her the pitcher plants with red heart-like flowers and leaves at the bottom shaped like little pitchers.

    “They’re carnivorous,” he said. “Bugs are drawn into the pitcher and they drown in the water there, then the plant digests them.”

“Why don’t they just crawl out?”

“They’re trapped. The sides are sticky and have little teeth. Once they’re in, there’s no easy way out.”

Helen shivered.

At the heart of the bog was a deep pool of dark water. Water lilies floated on the surface. Dragonflies soared over the top.

“I wonder how deep it is,” Helen mused.

“Could be pretty deep. It’s spring fed—feel how cold the water is here.”

They got to the other side of the bog and found piles of large round fieldstone on the solid ground at the edge.

“An old wall, maybe,” Nate suggested.

Helen walked around, looking. “No. Look, there are four sides.” She stepped back, getting a better view. “It’s an old foundation. There was a building out here once, Nate! Maybe a small house!” She walked back up to the foundation, got a little thrill as she stood there, right on the place where she imagined a front door had once opened.

“Funny place for a house, so close to the bog,” Nate said, brow furrowing in that way it did when something confused him, didn’t make sense to his rational mind.

Helen leaned down, picked up a rock, wondered who had stacked it, how long ago, and what had happened to them. The rock seemed almost alive to her, thrumming with history, with possibility. She wondered what else she might find if she did a little digging around the site—glass, pottery, bits of metal—signs of the people who’d once lived there.