CHAPTER FOURTEEN
This time they walked anti-clockwise around the lake. There was a chill in the air that had their breath puffing out in miniature white clouds and the sun blinked in a watery haze over the tips of the trees.
‘God, I hope it’s not hunting season or something,’ Michaela said after they’d walked a good way.
Trisha, wearing a bright pink jacket, laughed. ‘It’s always hunting season up here. For one thing or another.’ She looked pointedly at Michaela’s clothes. ‘Didn’t I tell you to wear something other than black?’
‘I was trying to keep a low profile,’ Michaela said, looking down at her black jacket and jeans. She cast a glance at Trisha’s brightly colored outfit. ‘But yeah, I think I see your point now.’
Trisha laughed. ‘Stick by me, you’ll be fine.’ She looked around. ‘Where are we anyway?’
It was Michaela’s turn to laugh. ‘Stick by me,’ she mimicked. But she stopped and looked around. ‘We’re still away from where we found that residue yesterday. How long have we been walking, do you think?’
‘Forty minutes,’ Trisha replied. She pointed away from the lake, through the trees. ‘What’s that?’
Michaela stepped over to her side and looked where she was pointing. ‘What’s what? I don’t see anything.’
‘Between those trees. A building or something.’ She tugged at Michaela’s sleeve. ‘Let’s go have a look.’
Michaela followed as they slipped deeper between the trees and the sun disappeared almost entirely. ‘It’s a bit bloody gloomy in here,’ she said, mostly just to say something.
‘You got that right,’ Trisha agreed. ‘Who would want to build something this far away from the lake?’ She was winding in and out of the trees. There was no track. ‘It’s no picnic spot back here.’
The building seemed to materialize out of the shadows, rising almost organically between the trees. Michaela stood and gaped. ‘Oh wow,’ she said. ‘This is a bit spooky.’
Trisha was stepping gingerly over the tree roots up to its walls. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘I mean, what’s it for?’
Michaela shrugged. She reached out and touched one of the walls. The building rose from the ground in a circular stone wall, built in a colonnaded Greek style. The wall seemed unbroken by windows, but she couldn’t tell properly – it was covered in a violent green creeper. She walked around to where Trisha was standing.
‘I’ve found the door,’ Trisha said. But neither of them moved forward.
The round building, not tall enough to be a tower, glowed dimly in the green light that filtered through the trees.
‘It looks like some sort of diseased mushroom,’ Trisha said, twisting her mouth in distaste.
Michaela couldn’t help but agree. Even with the columns rising on either side of the heavy wooden door, it didn’t look inviting. Stone steps rose towards the door.
‘We don’t have to go up there and try the door or anything, do we?’ Trisha asked. ‘I mean look at this place. No one’s been here for years. What would it ever be for anyway?’
Michaela eyed those steps. ‘It’s a folly,’ she said after a while.
‘A what?’
‘A folly. People used to build them pretty much just for something to do, I think. Like a summer house, but more elaborate. They were often built to look like pagan temples. This one’s copying the Greek style or something, I’d say.’ Michaela fell silent.
Trisha gave her a strange look. ‘Where do you learn this shit, Sherlock?’ she asked. Then they looked back at the door. ‘So there’s not going to be anything inside?’
Michaela shrugged. ‘I guess we may as well look.’ Trisha grunted. ‘After you,’ she said.
The steps were narrow and made more so with soil and rotting leaves. It smelt damp and Michaela found herself taking shallow breaths. She reached the door, thinking it would be locked and then they could get out of here. She grabbed the handle and turned it.
It wasn’t locked. The door pushed open almost smoothly. Michaela looked back at Trisha still standing at the bottom of the stairs and raised an eyebrow. Trisha climbed the stone steps. They stood together on the threshold and Michaela pushed the door wide open.
The smell hit them first before their eyes had time to adjust. Michaela gagged and clapped a hand over her nose.
‘Oh shit, that stinks. What the fuck is it?’ She forced herself to look inside. Trisha reached for her other hand, standing by her side as they peered into the old building.
The roof was glass, or rather, had once been glass, a vaulted dome that doubled as a skylight. There was only one other window, on the far side of the building, and it was overgrown on the outside with creeping greenery. The floor around the circular wall was littered with year’s worth of debris, leaves and in some places, whole branches, blown in through the broken roof. Michaela shivered as she looked around, and gripped Trisha’s hand tighter.
The worst lay in the middle of the room. Steps led down from the door to a tiled floor, she couldn’t make out the pattern, not with the dirt and the bad light, but she made out the source of the damp, stagnant smell all right.
‘This place is not a nice place,’ Trisha said, breaking the silence. ‘You can’t tell me people used to use this place. No way.’
Michaela had to agree. An errant breeze rustled around the wall and set the water in the center of the room sluggishly alive. The bottom of the building was around a pool, filled now with dark, stagnant water. The light from the roof reflected in it in small eerie movements, as though something lived under the surface of the water.
Michaela stepped back to the door. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘What a horrible, evil place. God, I’m going to have nightmares now.’
She pulled the door shut behind them and they stumbled down the steps, hands still clasped. Trisha’s face was a pale smudge under her dark hair.
‘There’s no fucking way,’ she said, ‘that anyone ever swam in there. You can tell me that but I’m never fucking going to believe it. It would be like being stuck inside a bloody well. Shit Michaela. Let’s go back to the cabin all right? I need a bloody great drink. What an awful place.’