PROLOGUE
UNDER THE RIVER
SHE KNEW ALMOST nothing about the history of the town.
She did not know that once upon a time, the town was not a town at all but a wound in the gypsum hills overrun by Johnsongrass, musk thistle, and milkweed. In those days, the Verdigris River slithered like a brown, muddy snake through the lowlands, the curve of its back brushing up against the towering stalks of thick weeds. The Kiowa called this place p’oiye tsape t’on, meaning “hidden water,” because not a glint of sunlight on the surface of the river could be seen from the steep ridges overlooking the area. There was no reason to go down into the impenetrable brush. There were no animals worth hunting there, no vegetation worth picking.
The town itself seemed to appear out of nowhere, a collection of small, one-room structures along a dirt road etched into the wild countryside. At one end of the basin, the gypsum hills parted like stone curtains, just enough to allow the road to enter. At the other end, the dirt path hugged closer to the river, following its curve around the bluffs. And then, suddenly, the path shot straight north as if startled out of the odd valleys, back into the vast Kansas prairie.
She did not know that the town’s name, Pacington, was nothing more than a bastardization of the original words. But many had forgotten its origin. By the time the first shop owners opened their doors along Center Street, the Native Americans living in Southeast Kansas had long ago been “relocated” to Oklahoma. As more and more white settlers found their way between the river basin, fewer bothered to consider the people who had lived there before them. The untamed tangles of brush and vine along this section of the Verdigris belonged to the town of Pacington.
She vaguely remembered the stories her father told her about the day the Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a reservoir just outside of town. Their intention was to control flooding to the farmland along the river, but on the second day, workers broke through into a chasm hidden beneath the river floor, unleashing a body of water buried eons ago by the shifting earth. It swirled up through the lazy current of the Verdigris and pushed its edges deep into the surrounding forest. In a matter of minutes, the river became a lake, the fleeing water moving too quickly for man or machine to escape. Two workers lost their lives that day. They were swept down into an ancient abyss, the depth of which easily swallowed fifty feet of a toppled crane. The equipment was recovered, but the bodies were not. Some said they just kept drifting down, down, deeper into the dark, endless waters of that underground lake, forever falling into the earth.
Those unlucky enough to own property along Lower Basin Road were paid a reasonable sum by the government. The peak of one roof breaking the water’s surface was all that was left to remind them of what they had lost. A new site farther south, near the town of Oologah, Oklahoma, was chosen for the intended reservoir, and so the Army Corps of Engineers left behind an accidental body of water and more than a little of their pride.
In a single day, Pacington was transformed from a river town to a lake town. For a while, the government’s blunder appeared to be a blessing in disguise. The water in what became known as “Lost Lake” was remarkably clear, a sliver of glass nestled between the red gypsum hills. The cool blue oasis was a summer destination for locals desperate to escape the sweltering heat of Southeast Kansas and Northeast Oklahoma. Pacington was a refuge.
The contrast between the pristine appearance of the lake and the brownish-green waters of the Verdigris River that fed into and from it were striking. The explanation was fairly mundane: the floor of the lake was essentially a crater in the earth, composed of the lighter solid granite than existed beneath the muddy bed of the rest of the Verdigris. That did not stop some from viewing Lost Lake as a natural—or in some cases, supernatural—wonder.
She had first glimpsed the sparkling ripples playing across the lake’s surface when she was four years old. That was in 1982, and the town had been a quaint lakeside resort for over two decades. That was the Pacington she remembered. That was the place where mornings were for sleeping in late, where afternoons were filled with hiking and fishing and rowing, where evenings were painted pink by brilliant sunsets above the hills as her father grilled largemouth bass over a smoldering mound of charcoal. She could smell the life of the forest on the air and stare into an infinite field of diamond-like stars at night. She could imagine anything in the Pacington of her memories, for it was a land where lakes could spring from the ground without warning. It was a place of creation.
Yet there was much she did not know. She did not know that, in this place of beauty, something dark and malicious was mutating beneath her mother’s sun-kissed skin. She did not know that her parents had been aware of it since she was three, or that it was the reason her father had bought the summerhouse on the shore of Lost Lake. She did not know that every summer, her mother was getting sicker, that every day they spent was not the beginning of their life together but the end. She did not know that, after she went to bed, her parents cried and held each other, that they tiptoed out of the lake house one night to make love on the shore.
She did not know of the unspeakable things that came after she left—the shadow that fell over Pacington, the pain and fear that twisted through the town like a barbed, poisonous vine.
Perhaps it was for the best. Sometimes it is easier to not know. Life is happier lived in ignorance.
But that does not mean the unspeakable things are not there. They are simply hidden, like water beneath the ground, searching for a way to flow into the light.
CHAPTER ONE
THE ROAD SLICED a gray line through the black night. Beyond the beams of her headlights, the land was at the mercy of the moonlight. She imagined the road ending without warning, driving over the edge, plummeting into an infinite nothingness, until her screams became a song for the darkness.
It was silly to think such things, but the threads of her life, the loose pieces she had tried for so long to keep in place, had finally unraveled. And so she drove, her eyes on the farthest edge of the headlights’ reach, staring at that line where vision failed and the world became shadow.
Kris Barlow glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and saw a stranger staring back at her. The soft glow of the dashboard deepened the hint of crow’s feet that stretched from the corners of her eyes. Her porcelain skin attempted to peek through large clusters of freckles. She wished her mother had forced her to wear sunscreen when she was little, as Kris did religiously with her own daughter. But that was a different time, before words like “SPF” and “reapply” were drilled into the vocabulary of children. She recalled the odd satisfaction of slowly peeling away thin layers of dead, translucent skin, trying to keep a large section intact. Once, she managed to remove a patch as large as the palm of her hand. She placed it carefully over her right cheek and admired herself in the bathroom mirror, feeling like a lizard as the edges of the old pulled back to reveal the new.
Kris stared at her face in the rearview mirror. When had she become this person? If the measure of her lifespan were her father, who passed away at eighty-two, then she had officially reached the midpoint. If it were her mother, Kris was knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door.
In the back seat, something shifted.
Kris adjusted the rearview mirror until she could see the pale form of Sadie leaning against the side window. The seat belt held her upright, her head hanging limply, chin against her chest. Spirals of red hair twisted down around her sleeping eyes. An iPad and a notebook lay on the seat next to her, both untouched since they’d hit the road.