Lake Effect

The twins lived on the estate next door and had been haunting him ever since he’d taken the housesitting job, so it seemed appropriate that he’d make them into characters in his horror story. Almost every day the pretty redheaded girls would make their way around the brick wall that fenced the property, and he’d see them staring. The wall didn’t reach all the way to the beach, the barrier being mostly to keep the riffraff from coming in off the street to access the lake.

He’d guessed their age as fourteen or fifteen when he first saw them. Not that he was an expert. All he knew was that they looked old enough to get themselves — and him — in a lot of trouble, but not old enough to understand that a twenty-seven-year-old man housesitting next door wasn’t appropriate crush material for teenage girls.

Eventually they started coming over — giggly and fresh-faced — to pester him when he did chores outside. He would be polite but taciturn with them; he didn’t need a couple of teens deciding he was their new playmate. This morning he’d been putting up the storm windows after the weather channel predicted lake effect snows, and the twins bounced over in their plaid private-school skirts and their equestrian boots, their cashmere scarves artfully draped over their Burberry trenches, their hair and smiles shining brightly.

“Hi Andrew,” they said together, like one person’s voice run through reverb. An image of the creepy hotel twins in The Shining flashed through his mind.

“Hi girls.”

“What are you doing?”

He thought that it was Annie speaking, but it was impossible to tell them apart. Maybe it was Katherine. He’d been playing it safe and not addressing either of them by name.

“Putting up the storm windows for Mr. Friedman. Weatherman says we’re going to get a big storm. Lots and lots of snow.” He fit the window into the frame and fastened the bolts. Then he climbed down, moved the ladder over, and grabbed the next window.

Mr. Friedman — his father’s golf buddy — was some kind of Wall Street financial whiz, and the house was huge; one of those old, usually slightly crumbling, turn-of-the-century estates on the Lake Erie shore. Built during Buffalo’s moneyed heyday, the few estates left were relics of Golden Age excess. This one had a restored stone behemoth of a house with multiple balconies and a tiered terrace overlooking the lake. There was a long driveway that ended in a circle around a marble fountain, tennis courts, acres of manicured grounds, and a private beach. Plus a caretaker’s cottage where Andrew was presently living. The cottage had missed out on the renovations so far, but was shabbily charming and full of character, according to Mrs. Friedman when she had given him the tour.

The twin’s house next door was even more excessive in its opulence but had a patina of gentile decay. Maybe the twins’ father needed a job in high finance.

Andrew hadn’t been sure he was interested in working for Mr. Friedman when his father first mentioned it. He was between jobs, and he was happy hanging around his parents’ house for the moment. He’d tended bar for a while after school, but that got old after a few years. Then he’d worked at an insurance company downtown, but it had been hard to adjust to getting up early in the morning after being used to bartending hours. He guessed he could be described as still finding himself. He’d joined a few digital publishing/blogging sites and started a writing thing lately; maybe something would come out of that.

His father hadn’t approved of his plan to hang around the house for a while and hit up him and his mom for beer and gas money. Dad encouraged him — nagged might be a better word — to take the housesitting job for the winter when Mr. Friedman and his family flew south to Florida with the snowbirds. It wasn’t too bad, really. Do a few chores and keep an eye on things. He got a bit of money — not bartender tip money, but pretty good — and lived rent-free in the old cottage. It left him lots of time to write. He’d been into horror stories lately. The estate had a great milieu for horror.

It was a little isolated being out on the Lake in a suburb of Buffalo during the fall and winter, with hardly anybody close by except the twins and their so-far-unseen parents, but what the hell. Beggars can’t be choosers. At least that’s what Dad said when he helped him pack up his stuff and move into the cottage.

One of the twins came closer and held the ladder steady while he ascended with the bulky window in hand. He really wished she wouldn’t do that.

“After the blizzard starts, we’re going to build a fire in the library and make s’mores,” she said.

“That sounds like fun.” Go away, little girl.

“Do you like s’mores, Andrew?” The carbon copy had moved over to join her sister at the bottom of the ladder. Her long, wavy red hair floated like a single mass around her head, undulating in the breeze. The other one had her hair pulled back in a long braid. That was probably the secret to telling them apart, if he could figure out who was pulled back versus who was loose. He inwardly winced. It probably wasn’t a good idea to be referring to one of the teenagers next door as loose.

“Nah,” he told the girl while fastening the window. “I don’t really like sweets.”

The wind was picking up and the temperature was dropping. He could see whitecaps of rough water out on the olive-gray lake from his perch on the ladder, and the clouds were rolling in. Snow for sure. He could smell it coming — crisp and cold and tangy. Early snowstorms while the lake was still warm were always bad news.

He started down the ladder, but long-and-loose was blocking his way. She looked up at him with her big blue eyes, put her foot up on the second rung, and leaned in so she was almost touching his legs. He suddenly felt warm even with the cold blowing in off the lake.

She lowered her voice until she was almost whispering to him. “Are you sure you don’t like sweets, Andrew? Because I have something sweet you might like to eat.”

He was speechless. Kids knew too much these days. The damn Internet’s fault, according to his father. Andrew understood how it was going to be now. He had thought the girls had a crush on him, but in reality, they were just going to torture him for fun, the same way he and his brother use to tease the dumb kid that lived down the street. He would have to put up with it, too, unless he wanted to go talk to their parents and tell them their teenage girls were little cockteasers who were probably going to get themselves in a big load of trouble with the wrong guy — not him, but some guy, someday — if they didn’t watch out.

It wasn’t likely he was going to have that conversation.

Long-and-loose took her leg off the rung and backed up a step or two. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a lollipop, and held it up. “A sucker. Get it? Something sweet to eat.” She laughed at him, the same way he and Jason used to laugh at Donny down the street after they’d talked him into eating a worm. “Do you want it?”

“Nope. Unless you got a plate of nachos in your pocket, I’m not interested. But thanks.” He winked at her, just to let her know he was in on the joke. He moved the ladder and went back for another window. “You better get on home now, girls. I got work to do and I think I hear your dad calling you.”

The pulled-back twin quickly turned around to look toward her house.

“He’s just teasing and trying to get rid of us, Annie. Of course Father’s not calling for us.”

So now he could keep them straight. Katherine was long-and-loose.

“We better go anyway,” Annie said. “Bye, Andrew.”

They ran back to their side of the wall, and he got back to work.

….

He’d gotten the windows up just in time for the snow to start, and it was still falling now, twelve hours later. It had slowed up enough at one point that he managed to shovel the walk and run the plow up and down the driveway to clear some of the snow, so it wouldn’t be such a big job later. Thirty inches of snow and counting. When he looked out the window that faced the lake, it was like white static on a TV screen; he couldn’t see the water, or the horizon, or even the beach.

He cranked the heat up and pulled a blanket over his legs while he sat on the lumpy sofa with his laptop, drinking a cup of coffee fortified with a double shot of bourbon from a bottle he’d found in a kitchen cabinet. His latest story was coming along nicely. A few people were reading the stories he was posting, but he hadn’t yet worked out the whole social-media-marketing-strategy-build-a-following thing. His Instagram was five pictures of him bartending and one of the family dog, he only had a hundred Facebook friends, and his Twitter account had seventeen likes on a political opinion he wouldn’t admit to if he’d been using his real name.

But he had some claps for the couple of stories he’d posted on Medium and he’d cross-posted them on Vocal, so maybe someone would read his stories and maybe he’d get lucky and make a few extra bucks. Some writers were even making more than a few bucks. Maybe he’d get really lucky.

He’d titled his new story Lake Effect, after the snow. It sounded sufficiently literary to make him extremely pleased with his cleverness. He’d turned the twins next door into children of the devil, like Rosemary’s Baby and Damien in The Omen, and made them high priestesses of their own little cult, performing soul-stealing occult ceremonies in their mansion on the lake. He gave them eyes that turned red and glowing, and when they did their witchy things like calling up their father from hell, they wore long, black, hooded robes, and inverted silver crosses. Gory little teenage murderers, they seduced and drugged unwitting men into participating in their black masses. During the ceremony, they would steal their victim’s most intimate bodily fluid so they could impregnate their female followers and increase their cult. They’d offer their victims a chance to sell their souls into service to Satan. If the men refused, they were sacrificed.

Yeah, he liked that a lot, but he edited it a bit to make clear the twins just appeared to be fifteen-year-old girls. In actuality, they were one hundred and twenty years old, like Rosemary’s neighbors, the Castevetes. No use casting an underage jailbait porn shadow on what was shaping up to be his best story ever.

Maybe some big producer would see his story and want to make it into a movie. That would be cool.

He was almost finished when he started to feel a nagging headache creeping into a tight band around his head. Maybe it was the sudden turn to cold weather. He decided a second bourbon-spiked coffee would fix things up in a flash, so he made himself another one and then went back to the couch, finished his editing, and posted his story. He was feeling pretty good about racking up another story, but he was starting to feel sick to his stomach. Had he caught a bug or something? Maybe it was the bourbon. Wouldn’t it suck if someone had poisoned a bottle of booze, and then hidden it in the back of the cupboard for someone else to come along and drink? It might make a good premise for a story, though. He’d think about that.

He went into the kitchen to see if he could find something to settle his stomach, and as he glanced out the window over the sink, a movement outside caught his eye. He wiped the condensation from the window — the furnace was blasting — and leaned over the sink to get a better look.

The snow had slowed, and while the view through the lake-facing window was still television-staticky, the kitchen window that faced next door had a much clearer view. He could see lights on in the twins’ house next door, and he could see moving shapes on top of the stone border wall that separated the two estates.

The wall was eighteen or twenty inches in depth. He would often see the neighborhood cats perched up there, stalking birds or enjoying the sunshine. These shapes were bigger and darker. Suddenly they rose up, and he blinked his eyes to make sure his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him.

Katherine and Annie were standing on top of the six-foot tall wall that separated the properties, their backs to the cottage. He knew it was them because of their red hair; he could see Katherine’s loose hair blowing in the snowy wind and Annie’s braid writhing like an angry snake. They drew up their hoods and he noticed they were wearing long black robes, just like in his story. His heart leapt into his throat, and he decided he must be asleep. He must have fallen asleep on the couch after the two shots of bourbon, and he was having a nightmare.

Wake up, he told himself. Wake up!

He felt a rolling in his stomach and leaned over and lost the coffee and bourbon into the sink.

He was pretty sure he must be awake if he was throwing up that realistically. If he were dreaming, wouldn’t he be throwing up puppies or donuts or glitter?

When he finished, he rinsed his mouth. His head was aching. He was sure now it was the alcohol making him sick and fueling his imagination. He’d been a little buzzed; nothing major, but now he was straight. Of course the girls next door weren’t standing on top of the wall in the middle of a snowstorm.

He looked out the window.

Now they were facing towards the cottage, as if they knew he was looking out the window at them. They were still as statues, holding hands, their faces framed by the dark hoods, their eyes glowing red as if they’d been caught in the flash of a photograph. The wind caught Katherine’s robe and it flew up behind her, and he saw that she was nude. Hanging from her neck was a large, inverted silver cross.

The little cock teases. He didn’t know how they did it, but he was sure they had somehow found out about his story and were screwing with him. Maybe they eavesdropped on the Wi-Fi signal. He sat on the bench by the door and pulled on his boots. Or they’d snuck into the cottage and put a spy program on his laptop while he was working outside. Maybe it was an anonymously sent email with a hidden virus attached.

He zipped up his coat, pulled his hat down over his ears, and tugged on his gloves.

The girls were gone when he got outside. The little shits probably saw him leaving the house and ran home. Amazing what they’d go through for a joke. It was freezing outside. They couldn’t possibly have been nude under their robes. They were probably wearing flesh-colored bodysuits or something.

An additional foot of snow had fallen since he’d shoveled. The fresh, cold air was helping his head to stop throbbing, so he spent a half hour clearing the walk again and waiting to see if the girls were going to come back for round two of scare-the-guy-next-door-to-death. Then he ran the plow up and down the drive again.

No sign of the freaky twins.

When he went back into the toasty warm cottage he headed straight to bed, but half an hour later he was still awake, and his headache was back. The storm had stopped for the moment, and everywhere it was an unending blanket of white scattered with snow-covered shapes: shaggy lumps of icy trees, the pale, frozen mound of the fountain in the middle of the circle, and the big white mountain of the garage. He rolled himself a joint and — wrapped in the blanket from the bed — smoked it standing next to the bedroom window he opened halfway, blowing the plumes of smoke out into the cold air. That seemed to ease his head and settle his upset-again stomach. Should have stuck to weed and never drank the bourbon.

He got into bed and drifted off to sleep.

…

He woke up suddenly, disoriented. This wasn’t his bedroom at his parent’s house…wait…no…he was at the lake cottage, working for his father’s buddy from the club, whose name was escaping him at the moment. He rolled over onto his back and threw off the blanket, staring at a crazed patch of paint on the ceiling. It seemed stifling hot in the room, and he felt weak all over, like someone had beaten the crap out of him.

He heard giggling.

They were in the room. Annie was standing in the doorway and Katherine was sitting on the end of the bed. They were wearing the black robes, but while Annie’s was fastened at her neck, Katherine had flung hers open and it was spread out around her like a fan, showcasing her nakedness and the gleaming silver cross that hung between her perfect young breasts.

He jumped out of bed as if it were on fire and pulled on a pair of jeans from the floor.

“What the hell are you girls doing in here?” He reached over to Katherine and pulled her robe closed. “You have to go home, right now!” He tried to fasten the clasp at her neck, but his hands were shaking, and then he realized he shouldn’t be touching her. He wanted to leave, but Annie — with just the faintest hint of a smile on her lips — was blocking the doorway, so he backed up to the wall, as far away as he could get. Katherine laughed and stood up. She rearranged the robe around herself and fastened it before sitting back down.

“I’m serious,” Andrew said. “Don’t make me walk over and talk to your parents. I really don’t want to have that conversation, but I can’t put up with this bullshit. What the hell is wrong with you two? How did you read my story? Did you put spyware on my computer, you little twits?”

“Our mother died in 1927, Andrew. She would be a little hard to contact. Our father is…” Katherine looked at her sister standing in the doorway, who gave her an odd little smile and shrugged her shoulders. She turned back to him “…available, but it’s a little complex to bring him around. The virgin’s blood, and the special ingredients, and calling everyone together to cast the circle and all that bother. It was so much easier when we were virgins ourselves, but it’s been decades since then, and it’s getting increasingly hard to find untouched young people. If the donor is too young, the blood is not very potent. Not enough time for the lust to build up.”

“That’s it.” He left the refuge of the wall to reach for his shirt on the chair. “Enough of this bullshit.” He pulled his sweatshirt over his head, but then got dizzy and confused, and decided to sit in the chair for a moment and collect his thoughts.

Katherine moved closer; she reached over and brushed the hair off his sweat-spotted forehead. He didn’t stop her. Her robe gaped open and he could see her pale, perfect skin, lightly dusted with strawberry blonde down. For a moment he considered if it would really be such a terrible thing for him to touch her. Maybe they truly were much older than they looked.

“We don’t have to use spyware, Andrew. Our technology is earth, air, fire, and water, the very essences of the world. When you have the ability to manipulate energy and matter, to bend nature to your own will, things like computers and software are primitive.

Although, of course, they do serve a purpose — such as helping to seduce you. We knew we wanted you from the moment we saw you. You’re so young and beautiful, Andrew.”

“Yes. Beautiful Andrew. Beautiful, strong Andrew.” Annie was smiling at him now.

Katherine threw a glance at her sister and Annie shut up. “We gave you the story, Andrew. Our story.”

They kept saying his name like a prayer; he wished they would stop.

“We took some hair from your brush and the nail clippings you left in the sink last week when you cut your fingernails, and we cast a spell that allowed us to see what you desired. Then we gave it to you. If you were to look at the story you posted about us just a few hours ago, you’d see that thousands and thousands of people have read it, and liked it, and left you lots and lots of tips. And shared it, so more people will read it, like it, and leave you lots and lots of tips. It’s spreading like wildfire, all over social media.” She smiled at him. “Sometimes, Andrew, fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Katherine looked at her sister. “Isn’t that Albert Camus, Annie?”

“I think so. My favorite is Emerson. ‘Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.’” She was standing next to his chair now, and she reached down and caught with her finger a drop of sweat that had run in a rivulet down the side of his cheek, and then brought it to her lips and tasted him. “It was fun to give you a story, Andrew.”

What the hell were they talking about? He was having such a hard time pulling his thoughts together. He wished they would stop saying his name over and over again. It was mesmerizing. Rhythmic, like a chant. It was hypnotizing, the way they kept saying his name.

Katherine reached over and put her hand on his knee. “And now, Andrew, we want you to give us something in return.”

No. No, this is not right at all. Everything was too weird. So Surreal. He couldn’t focus; he just wanted to be out of there. He pushed the girls away and ran out of the bedroom, headed for the cottage door.

…

The detective stood with the coroner as he and his assistant loaded the body into the back of the van. “What do you think, Doc? Is it what we thought?”

“Yep. Pretty sure. Did you see the ruddiness in his face? Corpses usually don’t look that flushed and healthy. That’s the giveaway. I’ll know for sure after the autopsy. How are your guys feeling? Maybe they should go to the hospital and get checked out.” He nodded toward the two officers sitting in a squad car.

“Nah, they’re fine. The oxygen the EMTs gave them fixed ’em up pretty quick. They weren’t in the house that long.”

The coroner nodded. “Poor guy probably never knew what hit him. I bet that furnace hasn’t been checked in years. A disaster waiting to happen. Did you know that carbon monoxide poisoning can give you hallucinations?”

“Is that so? Interesting.” The detective was only half listening. He was jotting down some notes. He was hoping he could notify the family, get his reports filled out, and still make it home in time for the game. He’d have to notify the property owner, too. Boy, that guy was going to get sued to hell and back if the dead guy had any family.

“Yep,” The coroner continued. “I was just reading an article that talked about carbon monoxide being an explanation for haunted houses. The hypothesis is that people can get slowly gassed by carbon monoxide and have hallucinations, but not breathe enough CO2 to kill them. They might feel ill, but then they go outside their house to go to work, or wherever, and they recover. They feel better. Then they come home and think they’re seeing ghosts because they’re breathing CO2-saturated air again and having visual disturbances. Fascinating article.”

“Uh huh.” The detective kept scribbling on his pad. The coroner could be a little chatty, probably because he didn’t have anyone to talk to but dead people a lot of the time.

“This poor guy probably got disoriented, and then he came out here into the fresh air and passed out, but it was too late. Too much CO2 in his blood.” The coroner looked down the long driveway toward the road. “It’s a good thing he plowed the place, or we never would have gotten in here. How’d you find him?”

“Anonymous call to the station,” he replied. “No caller ID. Figure it was probably one of the neighbors, wanting to report it without getting too involved.” He closed his notebook, put it in his coat pocket, and pointed to the farthest neighbor. “The guy over there — an architect who lives in that big house all by himself — didn’t see anything. Said he knew the owner was in Florida for the winter but didn’t realize anybody was staying on the estate.

“Then I grabbed the guy that was plowing out the architect’s place and paid him a few bucks to plow me up to the front door of this next-door neighbor so I could talk to them.” He pointed past the stone wall to the house beyond. “Two geriatric ladies live there that look as old as Methuselah, and both of them have long, bright red hair. One had hers pulled back in a long braid, and the other’s hair was all loose and wild, and they were wearing matching plaid skirts. I think they might be twins.” He gave the coroner an incredulous glance. “I’ve run into a lot of odd people in my day, but the two of them are way up there on the list.”

“Wait,” the coroner’s assistant said, turning to the detective with a puzzled look as he closed the door of the van after battening down the corpse. “Did you say there are redheaded senior citizen twins in that mansion next door?”

“Yep. And — get this — they told me they couldn’t talk for very long because they had to get back to their guests. There were a bunch of other ancient-looking people in the house, like they were having an old people, snowed-in slumber party. I saw half a dozen people from where I was standing in the entrance hall, and they looked like extras in a ’70s horror flick. Or maybe cosplayers. Who knows.”

He could hear himself running off at the mouth, something he usually didn’t do, but talking to the two old ladies had kind of shaken him up. There was something repellant but also weirdly attractive about them at the same time. And where in the hell did all the guests come from? He hadn’t seen any cars.

“That is so weird,” said the assistant, who was pale as the snow and skinny, with long hair peeking out from under his black watch cap. “I was just reading a really cool story a friend sent me a link to, about a coven of devil-worshipers run by two ancient witches with long red hair. They’re daughters of the devil, and they live in a big mansion on the great lakes somewhere. They appear to men as young girls but they’re really — ”

“Anyway…” the detective said, cutting him off. He didn’t have time for chit-chat if he wanted to be home in time for kickoff, and he was starting to get a little creeped out by the whole conversation. “The old ladies said they didn’t see anything, and the person calling the station didn’t sound elderly.” He shook his head. “Nobody knows nothing, so I’m thinking there’s nothing to know about this one. Just a tragic accident.”

“Yep,” said the coroner. “Sometimes shit happens, and there’s not much to do about it except to clean up the mess afterward. I’ll send the report over in a day or two.” He got into the van with the assistant, waved at the detective, and drove down the driveway.

A few minutes later the detective followed. On the way home, he stopped at the store and bought a couple of CO2 detectors. One for the office and one for home. Just in case.