Tiny Horror

The humid July air in Antioch always sat heavier than anything Julian Garrett had known back on the northwest side of Chicago. It pressed close and warm and insistent, the way a place does when it has decided it wants to be felt, as if the land itself wanted to be closer. For twenty years, he and Valerie had congratulated themselves on the migration. They had surrendered the narrow brick grid of Norwood Park for a sprawling colonial home built in the late 1970s, set against the lip of a deep glacial kettle pond. They had raised children here, watched the silver maples grow tall enough to commune with the roof in the wind, and given themselves over to the bullfrogs' midnight liturgies rising from the black water.

Twenty years of comfortable occupancy breeds its own theology. It teaches a man to look at a piece of earth not as borrowed ground but as something that owes him fealty. Julian had learned that theology well. He had mistaken tenancy for dominion.

"Julian, you're obsessing," Valerie teased, looking up from the landscape designer's rendering spread across her lap.

"I'm staging," he corrected, leaning against the wooden railing of their dated pine deck. He lifted his sweating glass of iced tea and gestured toward the wide expanse of lawn that rolled down to the dark, opaque surface of the pond. "Right where the grass starts to dip. That's where the slate-gray pavers go. The masonry crew lays the seating wall along that contour. No more mowing a thirty-degree incline once the stone's in."

Valerie smiled, tracing a finger over the rendering's minimalist fountain. "And the arch? Tell me we're finally hauling that thing out."

His eyes drifted to the shoreline. Partially submerged in the murky, reed-choked shallows stood a heavy Victorian wrought-iron archway, the kind of thing that belonged to a different century entirely. Its empty frame opened onto nothing but the deep center of the pond, and the matching perimeter fencing crept from the water like the exposed spine of something enormous that had fallen there long ago. For two decades the Garretts had lived beside it with the easy contempt of the comfortable. They'd hung flower baskets from it, let ivy throttle its scrollwork, and made peace with the way the pond water always seemed to flatten into something unnatural and oily within the arch's half-circle, as if the surface tension there answered to different laws.

"First thing on the schedule," Julian said. "The excavator can yank it out in five minutes. It clashes completely with the clean lines of the new stone. We've lived with someone else's taste for twenty years, Val. Time we made this land ours."

He had the spreadsheets locked, the stone backordered, the design finalized. Between his vision and the bite of a shovel stood only a routine trip to the Lake County records office. A rubber stamp on a residential zoning permit. He had not yet understood that some thresholds, once approached, change the one who approaches them.

The tale continues...