by Gabe Converse
“Dark Water” placed second in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2023 Fall Fiction Contest.
The pond behind the old house is full of leaves and scummy water. It hasn’t been touched for months. Louis comes to it sometimes in the early morning, his feet bare and damp and plastered with mud, until Emma finds him and steers him inside.
“I’m going to have it taken out,” she mutters, not to him. “I’ll call someone next week.”
“I don’t think we should,” he tells her. She doesn’t listen.
They’ve had a strained relationship ever since the seasons changed. Louis isn’t sure why. He wakes up early and makes coffee for Emma, tidies the house while she’s still asleep. He folds a knit blanket across the couch, a gift from Emma’s sister, and finds it in the trash the next day. She never mentions it; he can’t tell if he’s the problem, or her sister
Sometimes she asks him how his day went, if he’s ready to go back to work, maybe look for new clients. He’s an artist by trade and he paints voraciously, but lately they’ve all come out looking like the woods behind the house: smears of brilliant orange and red and yellow tainted by dark trunks, a starless sky. A few times, he painted the pond, but the rocks around the edges had teeth and Emma told him bluntly that she hated it. He still hasn’t forgiven her for that.
“No new clients,” he tells her, with the implication to drop it. Then he feels guilty and adds, “maybe I’ll contact a gallery. I’d like to do a themed show.”
This satisfies her and she doesn’t ask again.
Every night, Louis dreams of water. Stale and bitter, filling his mouth and throat, dragging him down. In his dreams he’s frightened but excited, a strange relief, and he doesn’t remember why. Sometimes Emma is there, her cries a distant and useless distortion, his name a plea on her tongue. Her fingers grasp his wrist but never drag him up.
When the water chains him unto death, he wakes up gasping. Emma wakes up too and she wraps her arms around him, soothing his panic away though he never asks and never wants it. Mostly, he wants to be alone.
October rolls into November and the leaves on the ground start to outnumber the leaves on the trees. The forest becomes a graveyard, the branches grasping fruitlessly at the stars. Emma grows clingy and distant all at once, snappish when he asks a question and cold when he ignores her. Louis pulls into his own memories with a quiet, analytical desperation, running through a patchy network of impressions and conversations. He can’t remember when his brain turned to fog, and it troubles him.
“Let’s go to your parents’ house for thanksgiving,” he tells Emma two weeks before the date. “We haven’t seen them in a while, have we?”
Emma stiffens. They’re sitting at their little kitchen table, he with a book he’s not reading, she with her phone. The window behind her looks onto the backyard: the pond, the empty forest, the thick, rotting carpet of leaves. He’s behind on the yardwork.
A moment passes before Emma answers. “They’re in Boston. It’s too far on late notice.”
“Maybe they could fly in.” He shouldn’t push it, but he only ever talks to Emma lately. “It’s just your mom and dad anyway. They’d love to visit and we could plan a big meal, maybe even get some—“
“I don’t want to.” She stands with surprising venom. “And you barely know how to cook. I can’t do it all by myself, Louis.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
But she’s gone with a screech of her chair, leaving Louis with only the large window and its quiet, dying view. A still pond and a cold wind he can feel from the cracks in the back door. The yard is a derelict mess, but he can’t remember abandoning it.
Louis watches a few leaves flutter to the ground, then stands to find Emma and apologize.
He doesn’t find Emma. She’s not in their room, nor the bathroom, and they both avoid the second room out of habit. He checks the garage and finds his recent paintings and supplies. Emma isn’t there either, but she’s clearly gone through his things, and this annoys him more than he expects. It’s not as if she hasn’t seen all of his paintings, and she used to love them. Only recently has she soured on his art.
The pond looms in his mind, another painting playing on his mind, but he doesn’t move for his supplies yet. Instead he flips through his recent works, studying the pond, the forest, the disused yard, the pond again. A loop, it feels like, but each work is a little different, a splash of artistic liberty and seasonal spookiness. A hand, reaching out of the pond. Eyes like two stars between the black trunks of the trees. A stroke of red paint in the grass. He shoves his supplies aside and lays the paintings out, side by side, searching for something he has no name for, but all he finds are pieces. Nothing useful. Nothing whole.
This angers him more than he expects. He kicks at his paintings, tearing one and crumpling another, and doesn’t feel bad. They feel useless, these paintings, tepid outpourings of emotion he can’t name and doesn’t remember feeling, and if they’re destroyed, they don’t matter. None of it matters. He wants an answer, not absolution.
Another painting tears. One flutters against an old cabinet he’d been meaning to fix up, and Louis glances at it, then pauses. There’s something beneath the cabinet, a strip of white he’d never noticed. He gets down on his hands and knees, pulls it out with a hurried sort of desperation, and finds not one painting, but several. They are his works, his style. They all show the same thing: Emma, himself, and a baby girl he has no memory of.
Behind them, the pond sits in perfect condition.
Emma finds him ankle deep in the pond, no shoes, only socks. The pond surface is thick with algae and other bits of scum, but he knows now what it holds. The bottom is a grave, in memory if not body.
When Emma comes up beside him, she’s trembling. Anger and fear, perhaps grief. Sometimes they exist together.
“I told you not to go in here,” she says. “I keep telling you. And you keep doing it.”
“I know,” he says. Then, he adds, “I was watching her, wasn’t I? When it happened.”
She stiffens but doesn’t say a word. There are none to give. He knows now, even if he only has pieces. She knows that he knows, and the hole between them has a name.
The water, black and fathomless, draws him in. He doesn’t realize he’s leaning over it until Emma pulls him back with a hand on his chest.
“Stop,” she tells him. “Please, stop. You can’t do this again, I—“
Her voice breaks. She looks away.
“I told you not to come here after that,” she says. “But you kept doing it, every damn night. I thought you were sleep-walking. And you never stopped.”
She’s crying openly now and for the first time in months he wants to comfort her. He can’t. The hole between them has a name but it remains unfixed, a jagged opening with the stillness of dark, beckoning water.
“What happened?” he asks. He needs to know if he’s dead.
She looks at him with red, swollen eyes. “I don’t know. I pulled you out and I thought you were dead. You weren’t breathing, you were blue and—and then you came back. I think. But you keep coming to this damn thing, and I want it gone, okay? I want it gone and I want you back, and I—I don’t know why you came back and she didn’t. I hate it. I hate you.”
He looks at her, at her tear-stained face and the grief like shattered glass behind her eyes, and wishes he could take it away but only knows one method and it’s not what she wants.
She seems to sense this, because she takes his hand and tugs him back. “I don’t want it, Lou. You go in, but I won’t, alright? I won’t.”
“But—“ He stares at those rocks, that filthy, beckoning water, and wants it more than anything. Then he pulls back.
“It’s haunted,” he says.
“Bullshit,” she says. “It’s a pond.”
He glances at her, then at the unkempt yard, wishing he had the wherewithal to do something about it. It might be time. It might be too early. He can’t tell.
“Let’s go inside,” he says. Her relief breaks over him like cold water. He allows her to take him into the kitchen, into a warmth he doesn’t feel, and thinks about calling a yard service.
Then he thinks, maybe tomorrow.
Category: Competition, Featured, Short Story, SNHU Student