The door to the lake house is unlocked. Not entirely unusual - Landis hardly ever locks the doors, mostly because he knows for a fact that there are no other properties within walking distance. What is unusual is the motorcycle parked in the driveway - probably belonging to the Austin guy Grace mentioned - and the sound of the TV blaring in the den. Landis goes inside to investigate, Grace and Mal trailing just slightly behind, and finds Danton hovering above the couch, staring wide-eyed at some reality show on the screen.
“Did you turn that on?” Landis asks, trying to piece together what he’s missed. Why is it so cold in here? He tucks his hands into his armpits and shifts his weight around. Maybe the radiator is on the fritz again.
“Hey, you’re home!” Danton looks over at him and grins wide enough to break Landis’s heart a little. “Nah, the lake turned it on to talk to the police guy who was here.”
“His name is Austin,” Jeremy says from the corner of the room, near the window.
“Who’s your friend?” Wes asks, drifting in through the wall that separates the kitchen from the den. “The lady, I mean. We all know Mal already.”
“She’s not my friend,” Landis mutters, looking over his shoulder into the foyer, where Grace is inspecting the stairs to the second floor. “Her name’s Grace. She’s a secretary or something at the police station, she drove me back here.”
“Landis kidnapped her,” Mal adds from Grace’s shadow. The other ghosts all turn towards Landis at once, like it’s a bit of choreography they’ve been rehearsing. Landis almost laughs, but chokes the noise down into his throat until he’s sure it won’t come back up.
“You kidnapped her?” Danton’s eyes are wide. “From the police station?”
Wes’s smirk turns into a full-blown grin. “Well, if you weren’t going to jail before…”
“I didn’t kidnap her! I needed to get back here, and she was the first person I saw - she let me get into her car, I didn’t - I barely threatened her. She could have kicked me out of the car whenever she wanted!” Landis hisses, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet and rubbing his arms through his flannel jacket. “Christ, it’s cold in here!”
“Oh, yeah,” Danton says apologetically, “Austin left the back door open and none of us could close it all the way. Sorry.”
At this, Landis takes pause. There are only a handful of reasons why Austin would have gone out the backdoor, and the outcome of any of them seems virtually the same - Austin’s body is at the bottom of the lake right now. So much for Grace’s plan of exorcising the lake. Landis feels his stomach twist into a knot and realizes, almost startlingly, that up until this moment he has been allowing himself to imagine what a life after the lake might be like.
“What happened after he went outside?” Landis asks, his throat suddenly very dry.
Danton fidgets. “He, uh, he fell in the lake.”
“Who are you talking to?” Grace calls from the kitchen, before Landis has any time at all to process what Danton just said.
Why lie to her? She drove him all the way out here and didn’t cut and run as soon as she dropped him off - she came into the house with him, even knowing who he is and what he’s done. Landis feels like he at least owes it to Grace to be honest about what’s going on here. And, hell, maybe she’ll believe him. Or maybe it’ll be the last straw that sees her running scared back to the police station.
“My friends who I killed,” he says about as flippantly as he can manage. “They hang around here as ghosts most of the time.”
Grace steps into the den quietly. Landis watches her in his peripheral vision, like she’s a skittish animal that might bolt if he makes any sudden movements. She walks a slow circle around the room, drinking everything in, finally coming to a stop in front of the couch.
“There’s four of them?”
“What,” Landis squeaks. Even the ghosts look unnerved.
“I feel four presences in the house. The one from the car came in with us.” Grace glances up at Landis for confirmation. “Did you really kill them?”
“Holy shit,” Wes mouths at Danton.
“Yeah.” Landis leans heavily on the archway between the den and the kitchen, a little overwhelmed. That wasn’t a lucky guess. She really is psychic. Christ. “There’s four of them. Danton, Jeremy, and Wes are in here - and Mal is the one who was in the car with us.”
Grace smiles and clasps her hands in front of her skirt. “Well, it’s nice to meet you all, even if I can’t see much of you.”
A chill runs down Landis’s spine. It’s unnerving to see someone else interacting with the ghosts, someone else who actually knows that they’re hanging around. Up until now, the ghosts were a private secret, a part of his guilt that he had to shoulder by himself. There were times he started to wonder if the ghosts weren’t real, if they were some trauma-induced vision. But now he knows for sure - and hell, if a possessed lake is real, why shouldn’t ghosts be?
“I like her,” Wes says offhandedly, floating a little closer to Grace. “You didn’t bring her here to kill her, did you?”
Landis shakes his head, unwilling to answer out loud lest he have to relay to Grace what was asked. There’s a thread of thought lingering in his mind from before - something Danton said - and he grabs on it and pulls, starting to unravel something he’s not even sure if he wants to know or not.
“Danton, you said the guy who was here fell in the lake?”
“We-e-ell,” Danton says slowly, as Grace lets out a tiny, horrified gasp. “The lake told him to come outside, through the TV, you know. And he walked out onto the ice. We tried to call him back, but I don’t think he could hear us, and the ice - it, uh, it broke underneath him. And he fell in.”
“But then he came out,” Jeremy pipes up again. Landis feels his heart skip a beat in his chest.
“What?”
“He came out of the lake,” Jeremy repeats. “We all saw it. He dragged himself up out of the water and all the way across the ice to the island. I guess he’s still there.”
The island? Why? Landis tries to wrap his mind around what the ghosts saw. Maybe the lake is giving this Austin guy orders. Grace said he was psychic too, so maybe the lake can communicate with him - maybe that’s why it hasn’t been talking to Landis since he left the police station. It’s planning something, manipulating all its pawns into place for some kind of endgame scenario. Landis doesn’t want to think about what that means. Any endgame the lake has planned probably ends with Landis, Grace, and Austin dead.
“I have to go out to the island,” he tells Grace, unable to stop his voice from wavering in uncertainty. “I think the lake took your friend out there for some reason, and he might still be alive.”
“I’m coming with you,” Grace insists, improbably, and Landis balks at the idea.
“Are you sure?”
Grace frowns at him. “Of course I’m sure. I came all the way here with you, I might as well see it through, right? And I want to make sure Austin’s okay. How are we going to get to the island? Do you have a raft or something?”
“I - no,” Landis stammers. He hadn’t thought about that. He’s never been out to the island before, but it’s close enough that he always figured he could just swim there if he felt like it. Only now, it’s covered in ice. Wait a second. “We could walk across the ice, though.”
“You think it would hold?”
Grace crosses to the kitchen and looks out from the sliding-glass door at the smooth, white surface of the lake. She steps onto the porch and slowly descends the steps, her boots fitting snugly into the footprints Austin left behind in the snow. Landis follows her to the very edge of the shore, and they both stand facing the lake. The distance between here and the island looks improbably vast. There’s a dark hole in the ice a few yards away, probably where Austin was pulled under.
He might be dead already, Landis thinks to himself. All that freezing water.
Out loud, he says “There’s only one way to know,” and puts one foot, then the other, onto the ice, listening to it creak under the weight of his body.
nominating grace for best antlers character