The Caretaker

The front door opened by itself at ten past three, and I was awake for it.

I'd been lying there listening to the lake. You don't realize a lake makes noise until you sleep next to one. It sucks at the dock, this wet slapping sound, like somebody licking their fingers. Then the latch lifted. Click. Then the hinge, a long dry creak that went on way longer than a door should.

I didn't get up. People always say they'd have gone and looked. I stayed under the quilt, which smelled like cedar and mothballs, and counted to a hundred, twice, because I lost my place the first time. When I finally went out there the door was standing wide open, porch light off, a stripe of moon across the floor.

I shut it. Locked it. Put the chain on, which I hadn't done once in eleven days, because who was coming? Raccoons?

When I turned around there was a kid standing by the cellar door.

Okay, back up.

My name's Eli, I was thirty-four, and that October I had $212 in checking. A guy from my building, Pete, whose cat I used to feed, said his aunt knew a woman who needed a winter caretaker for a place up by a lake. Free rent, four hundred a week, keep the pipes from freezing, keep the animals out. I called from the lot of a Sunoco and a woman picked up on the second ring and said "Oh, good" before I'd even gotten my whole name out.

That was Dolores Pruitt. Seventy-something, white hair pinned up, lavender cardigan missing a button, and she touched your wrist whenever she talked. I don't love that but I let it go. She drove up the next day in an enormous old Buick to show me around. The woodstove, which she called temperamental. The pantry, which she'd stocked herself: forty-one cans of soup, I counted later, and not one vegetable. Then the cellar.

The cellar door was in the corner of the main room, painted the same green as the wall so you could walk right past it. Somebody had screwed a bolt onto it. On the outside. Big black thing, the kind you'd put on a shed.

"Damp," Dolores said, when she caught me looking. "Floods in spring. Easier to keep it shut. The boiler's new, runs itself, you'll never need to go down."

I said sure. I was thinking about four hundred dollars.

At her car she patted my wrist again. "Nice to have a strong young man up here. The last few didn't stick it out. City boys, you know. They get lonesome."

Weird thing to say with a smile that sweet. I noticed it, and then I thought about my rent, and I stopped noticing.

So. The kid.

Nine, maybe. A nightgown the color of dishwater, hem soaked through, hair plastered flat to her face, bare feet. She was just there, the way a coat on a hook turns into a person at three in the morning, and for a second I honestly thought it was a coat. I said "Hello?" Like an idiot.

She raised one arm and pointed at the cellar.

I didn't scream and I'd like that on the record. I backed into the bedroom, jammed the dresser against the door, and sat on the floor holding a kitchen knife until the window went gray. Over a nine-year-old girl. I know.

In the morning the bolt on the cellar was slid shut, same as always. I made instant coffee and told myself it was nerves, eleven days alone, too much soup. I walked down to the mailbox, two miles, because that's the only place my phone got a bar, and I told my sister Dee everything was great. She said I sounded weird. I said it was the wind.

But the girl kept coming back. Not every night and never when I was ready for her. A wet little footprint by the cellar door, about the size of my palm. The smell of lake water in the pantry. One afternoon I came in with an armload of wood and every cupboard in the kitchen was hanging open, every single one, like somebody had been through looking for something and gave up.

And the cellar, always the cellar. If I stayed in the main room too long I could feel it at the back of my neck, that being-watched feeling, and when I looked she'd be there, arm out. Pointing. Pointing. I started leaving every light on. I slept with the knife. Honestly, I started to hate her a little, which is a strange thing to feel about a ghost, but nobody had ever scared me that much with so little effort.

On day nineteen I lost it. I stood in the middle of the room at dusk and yelled, "What do you want?"

She was at the cellar door. Her mouth moved, and the voice that came out wasn't a kid's. It was thin and tired and doubled up, like four or five people talking from the bottom of a well.

She's coming back.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "Who is?"

Headlights went across the window.

The Buick came up the gravel. I watched Dolores get out, lavender cardigan, a plaid thermos in one hand and a foil-covered plate in the other, and when I looked back the girl was gone. The cellar door was shut. There was a fresh handprint on the green paint, low down, where a child would put one.

She knocked once, polite, and let herself in.

"Eli! Was in the area. Brought you a coffee cake. And some of my tea, I know you boys never make a proper pot." Her eyes went around the room fast, the way you pat your pockets for your keys. "Everything all right? No trouble with the cellar?"

"Why would there be?"

"No reason." She patted my wrist. Her hand was dry and light as paper. "People get ideas out here alone. Hear things. You'd tell me if you were hearing things, wouldn't you, dear?"

I've thought a lot about why I lied right then. I think my body decided before I did. Something in my chest went flat and cold, the way a deer goes still on the shoulder of the road.

"Quiet," I said.

"Good boy," said Dolores, and smiled, and that was when I knew. Not all of it. Just that I was in a closed-up cabin at the end of a dirt road with a woman who had now told me twice that the last few caretakers didn't stick it out, and had never once said where they'd gone.

She unscrewed the thermos and poured me a cup and set it by my elbow. I picked it up. I said thanks. I held it, and held it, and she watched me hold it. She talked about the lake, her husband Gerald who'd passed, the summers when they rented the place to families, and about every four minutes her eyes slid over to that green door and came back to the cup.

"Don't let it go cold, dear."

"I'm waiting for it to cool."

Lying has never been something I'm good at. When she went to use the bathroom I poured the whole cup down the kitchen sink and ran the tap.

On her way out she said, "I'll swing by Sunday. Maybe stay over, make us a proper supper. Be nice to have company."

She said it so kindly.

She'd parked the Buick right behind my Corolla, boxing it in, and I watched her back it out and go off down the road, taillights bobbing on the ruts. Then, around the bend, they went out. Nobody turns their lights off on a dirt road at dusk.

So I did the thing I'd put off for nineteen days. I walked to the cellar door, slid the bolt back with both hands, and opened it.

I'm not going to tell you all of it. Some of it I can't.

The stairs were steep. The air coming up was cold in a way that wasn't about the weather. My flashlight found a concrete floor and a boiler that was maybe thirty years old, not new, and shelves of mason jars along one wall. I thought, preserves. Then I got closer and the jars were full of small stuff. Wedding rings. House keys. Car keys with the little plastic fobs. A kid's barrette, the plastic kind with a bow. On the end of the shelf sat a tin of loose tea, labeled in a neat old-lady hand. I didn't touch it.

And the floor. Along the far wall the concrete changed color, a long strip of newer gray, smooth, about the size of a person. Five of them in a row. The last one was still pale at the edges, still curing.

Nobody had told me about the last caretaker. I never asked. I was so grateful for the job.

The stairs creaked behind me.

I spun around and the cellar was full. Not just the girl. A man in a work jacket, two women, a boy who couldn't have been more than twenty, all of them crowded together in the dark, pale like smoke off a candle. The girl was in front, dripping lake water on the floor. Every one of them looking at me.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, which is a dumb thing to say to the dead. "I didn't know. I'm so sorry."

The well-voice again, all of them at once. We tried to tell the others.

"The others left," I said. "That's what she told people. They left."

One of the women stepped forward. She had a name tag pinned to her cardigan, Kroger, the letters mostly worn off. She looked at me with a kind of tired kindness that made my eyes sting.

"I never left," she said, and for the first time she sounded like a person.

That's when I heard the front door.

She hadn't gone. Of course she hadn't. I'd lied to her, and some part of Dolores Pruitt had known, the way those people always know. She'd driven off, parked the Buick down the road, and walked back through the trees in her good shoes. Now the cabin door opened above me with a long, slow creak, and I'd forgotten to lock it.

"Eli?" Her voice came down the stairs, soft as ever. "Oh, dear. I wish you hadn't."

I clicked off my flashlight and slid in behind the boiler.

She came down one stair at a time, no hurry, one hand on the rail, the thermos knocking against her hip, because why would she hurry? Nobody had ever gotten out of that cellar. This was how it ended. It always had been.

At the bottom she stopped and clicked on a little penlight. It found the shelves, the jars, the long gray strips on the floor. And then it found them, all six of them, standing there in the dark.

"Oh," she said. "All of you."

She wasn't scared. That's the part that got me. She sounded like a woman who'd found kids in her garden. "I told you lot to stay put."

The dead didn't move, and I understood they couldn't, not really. They could stand and point and leave wet footprints for nineteen days, and that was it. They'd given me every minute they had. The rest was mine.

So while she stood there in her lavender cardigan scolding six ghosts, I came out from behind the boiler on my toes, went around her, and took the stairs two at a time. I heard her say "Eli?" behind me, surprised, almost hurt.

Then I was through the door and I threw it shut and I slid the bolt. The big black one, the shed bolt, on the outside, right where it had been the whole time. I stood there with both hands on it and my heart going like a drum.

"Eli, dear." Her voice came through the wood, patient and sweet. "Open the door. It's cold down here."

I got my keys. I got in the Corolla. I drove until I found a lit gas station and told the kid at the counter, who had a vape pen behind his ear, exactly what was in the cellar.

They found six. The deputy said one of them, the girl, had been under that concrete since 1987, when Dolores's husband was still alive and the two of them were renting the cabin out to families in July. He said it was unusual for somebody to start that young, and more unusual to still be at it in her seventies, and to be so tidy about it. The coroner used words I didn't write down. I stopped listening around the part about the Kroger name tag.

I remember a blanket. I remember the back of a patrol car, and watching them bring her out at dawn, seventy-eight years old, cardigan buttoned wrong, and how she looked at me through the glare with an expression I can only call disappointed. The deputy told me later she'd sat on the bottom step the whole night, perfectly calm, and wouldn't stop staring at one corner of the cellar.

What I remember best is going back for my stuff. They let me, with a deputy standing by. The cabin was empty and the cellar door stood open all the way, bolt hanging off its screws, and I stood in the doorway with my duffel bag and the sun coming in and felt nothing pulling at the back of my neck. No wet footprints. No lake smell. Nobody.

I turned to go, and the front door, the one I was reaching for, swung open before my hand got there. Slowly. It stayed wide, the way you hold a door for somebody you're grateful to.

I stood there a second. My throat was doing something.

"Thanks," I said, to the empty room.

The lake was bright out there. I walked out into it and didn't look back.

I hope they went wherever they were trying to get to. Sometimes at night, if a latch clicks somewhere in the dark and a door eases open on its own, I lie still and listen. And I say thanks again. Just in case.