Free Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) by Caitlin R. Kiernan

nothing remaining but bobbing canoes and the waves, and the trees bending down almost to the ground.
     
    He passed the night downstairs, hours sobering into headache and listening to the storm from the huge main living room. He sat on pebble-grained calfskin and paced the Arabian carpeted floors, thumbing nervously through the new Mark Twain novel someone had left, finished or merely forgotten, on an end table. Occasionally, he glanced at the windows, towards the docks and the lake. And already the sensible 19 th -Century part of his mind had begun to convince itself that he’d only been dreaming, or near enough; drunk and dreaming. 
    Finally, others were awake and moving, pot and pan noise and cooking smells from the kitchen, and the warm scents of coffee and bacon were enough to settle the argument; rational breakfast, a perfect syllogism against the fading night. He smoothed his hair, straightened his rumpled shirt and vest with hands that had almost stopped shaking and rose to take his morning meal with the others. 
    Then young Mr. Parke, resident engineer, shaved and dressed as smartly as ever, came quickly down the stairs, walked quickly to the porch door and let in the dawn, light like bad milk and the sky out there hardly a shade lighter than the night had been. Something roared in the foggy distance. 
    John Parke stepped outside, and Tom Givens followed, knowing that he was certainly better off heading straight for the dining room, but finding himself shivering on the long porch, instead. Before them, the lawn was littered with branches and broken limbs, with unrecognizable debris, and the lake was rough and brown.
    “It’s up a ways, isn’t it?” Tom asked and his voice seemed magnified in the soppy air.
    John Parke nodded slowly, contemplatively, then spoke without looking away from the water. “I’d say it’s up at least two feet since yesterday evening.”
    “And that awful noise, what is that?”
    Parke pointed southeast, towards the head of the lake, squinting as if by doing so he might actually see through the fog and drizzle. 
    “That awful noise, Mr. Givens, is most likely Muddy Run coming down to the lake from the mountains.” He paused, then added, “It must be a torrent after so much rain.” 
    “Doesn’t sound very good, does it? Do you think that the dam is, ah, I mean, do you…”
    “Let’s see to our breakfasts, Mr. Givens,” John Parke said, offering up a weak smile, a pale attempt at reassurance, “and then I’ll see to the lake.”
    The door clanged shut, and he was alone on the porch, rubbing his hands together against the gnawing damp and chill. After breakfast, he would go upstairs and pack his bags, find a carriage into South Fork; from there, he could take the 9:15 back to Pittsburgh. More likely than not, there would be others leaving, and it would be enough to say he was sick of the weather, sick of this dismal excuse for a holiday.
    Whatever else, that much certainly was true.
    Tom Givens turned his back on the lake, on the mess the night had made of the club grounds, and as he reached for the door, he heard what might have been laughter or glass breaking or just the wind whistling across the water. Behind him, one loud and sudden splash, something heavy off the docks, but he kept his eyes on the dark walnut wood grain, gripped the brass handle, and pulled himself inside once more.
     
    A week drowned, and what was left of her, of her body, bloated flesh sponge like strawberry bruise and the whitest cheese, pocked by nibbling, hungry black-bass mouths, this much lay knitted into the pine-log tangle and underbrush jamming the big iron fish screens. The screens that strained the water, that kept the lake’s expensive stock inside (one dollar apiece, the fathers and grandfathers of these fish, shipped all the way from Lake Erie by special railroad car). Screens that now sieved the cream-and-coffee brown soup of the lake before it surged, six feet deep, through the