Under the Lake

He drove north on the interstate and watched the hills rise around him. After two hours he turned onto a state road that climbed even higher and turned more sharply. The big station wagon, overloaded with the remnants of his life and the shiny, new word processor, swayed horribly on the bends. God, he missed the Porsche. Three hours from Atlanta he found the southern shore of the lake and, following Denham White’s directions, wound along it toward the town of Sutherland. The lake glistened in the midday sun. It didn’t look manmade, he thought; it was too beautiful. He would have thought a finger of some ancient glacier had scratched it out. Suddenly, looking out over the water as he drove, he felt a tiny knot of dread forming inside him. Three months here pounding out garbage, and then what? Sixty grand in the bank and nowhere to go with it but down. He had the peculiar and very real feeling that he might never leave this place.

In Sutherland, a man answered a telephone.

“Yes?”

“You know who this is?”

“Yes.”

“I have some information for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“They’ve sent a reporter up there to do some digging.”

A pause. “When?”

“I don’t know. From the conversation I heard, he could already be there.”

“Well, I’ll waltz him around a little and send him on his way.”

“You don’t understand. My impression is that he’s not going to introduce himself.”

“I’m not sure I get your drift.”

“Well, I only heard a part of a conversation between two editors, but it sounded to me like they were sending a man up there undercover.”

A snort. “He’ll have to go under ground. There’s no cover up here. I know who comes and goes.”

“Well, I just thought I’d tell you what I heard.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep an eye open. You calling from a pay phone?”

“Of course. If this comes to anything, just remember where you heard it.”

“Don’t worry about that. Thanks again.”

3

As Howell drove into Sutherland a red-brick, white-columned colonial house appeared on the lake side of the road, its back garden rolling down to the water. Near the road a black gardener was being supervised by a tall, elderly man with a fringe of white hair. This had to be Eric Sutherland, the power company owner and, from what Denham White had said, defacto ruler of the town which bore his name. “Better call on the old man and pay your respects,” Denham had advised. “He’ll be your landlord, in a ma

“Mr. Sutherland?” He approached and offered his hand. The man grunted and took the hand gingerly. “My name is John Howell. My brother-in-law, Denham White, has offered me his cabin up here for a few weeks, and he suggested I drop by and say hello.”

Sutherland glanced at the heavily loaded station wagon. “Looks like you could be homesteading, Mr. Howell.”

“Well, yes, I suppose it does. I should be here for about three months, and I didn’t want to make any u

“Yes, it is,” Sutherland replied, without modesty, “and God couldn’t have done a better job.” He didn’t seem to take much pleasure in his achievement, Howell thought. “I like the folks who come up here to do their part in keeping it as it is.”

Howell smiled. “Well, I’ve no plans to change anything.”

“Yankee, are you?” asked Sutherland.

“No sir, North Carolina, originally. Chapel Hill. Guess my accent has gotten a little scrambled with my travels.” Shit, the old bastard had him on the defensive already.

“I knew your father-in-law; damned good man.”

Howell nodded. “So I hear. He died before I met my wife.” Howell had heard nothing of the kind. Denham White Senior had been a ruthless buccaneer of a businessman; not even his own children had had a kind word to say about him. Howell figured anybody who remembered him as a “damned good man” bore watching himself. “Well, it’s nice to have met you, sir,” he said, starting to turn toward the car. But he had not yet been dismissed.

“I believe you’re a newspaper reporter,” Sutherland said, staring right through him. “What do you think you might have to report on in these parts?”

“No sir, I’ve been out of the newspaper business for a couple of years, now. I’m writing free lance; that’s why I’m up here. I’m working on a book.”

“And what is the subject of your book? Wouldn’t be anything local, would it?”

Howell was a bit taken aback by Sutherland’s increasing hostility. “Oh, no, sir. It’s a novel. I’m… not quite ready to talk about it just yet. Superstitious, I guess.”

Sutherland gazed at him in silence for a moment. “We’ve already got too much superstition around here,” the old man said. “Good day.” Abruptly, he turned and walked toward his house.

As the man walked away, Howell reflected that, in his experience, people who didn’t like reporters usually had something to hide. He tried to shake off the thought. He wasn’t up here to report on anything; he had other work to do.

He drove slowly through the little town, a neat, prosperous-looking place with the usual assortment of stores and businesses for a small, north Georgia town, but with a difference. The business districts of Georgia towns were not, in general, very pretty. The shops and offices grew up out of necessity rather than by plan, and if one merchant had some sense of taste and style, his next-door neighbor usually didn’t, creating a hodge-podge that averaged out as plain, or sometimes, plain ugly. But Sutherland, Georgia looked as though someone had worked out a uniform architectural plan on main street. The buildings were all consistent in style, and there were no neon or other garish signs. Instead, the name of each business was lettered in the same typeface. There were old-fashioned gas lights here and there and park benches scattered along the street where elderly people took the sun. The effect was pleasing, Howell thought, if a little artificial, and it seemed to have grown out of one mind. He had not much doubt that the mind was Eric Sutherland’s. Still, if Sutherland the man didn’t radiate much charm, Sutherland the town did, and he liked it. Following Denham White’s instructions, he continued through the town and along the mountainous north shore of the lake until he came to a crossroads with a mailbox marked “White”. He turned left and drove downhill through dense woods toward the water. Suddenly, after a few hundred yards, he came around a sharp bend and had to brake hard. The road simply disappeared into the lake. He sat, bemused by this circumstance, thinking it was Denham’s idea of a joke. Then he looked to his right, and there, at the end of a few yards of overgrown drive, was the cabin.

It sat right at the lake’s edge, seeming to lean into the steep slope of the hillside. A deck reached out over the water, supported by piles; a motorboat covered with canvas rested under it; an open woodshed next to the front door contained three logs. Howell groaned at the thought of chopping wood. He backed the wagon into the drive and got out. The place was certainly ramshackle, but not as bad as he had imagined. He climbed the steps, testing each with his weight. Sturdy enough. The key worked smoothly in the lock. He stepped into a room which ran the length of the cabin, perhaps twenty feet, and was half as wide. A large fieldstone fireplace dominated the wall facing the lake. Light poured in through windows which ran the length of the room, overlooking the deck and the lake. On either side of the fireplace was a door. The first opened into a decently equipped kitchen, the second into a bedroom.