Andy listened carefully under the path of flying arguments between both of them—the keen fantasy addict and the scientific skeptic. “Aren’t there any records?” she asked.
“No,” Nate answered, in a Glad you asked pitch. “But let’s do the math: he came in the eighteen forties, as you said, looking about, what? Forty years old? Remember he’d been scallywaggin’ previous to that. Anyway, let’s say he was thirty. So, he digs the mines…Let me remark that you actually need a lot of gold to build a gold mine. This guy wasn’t your average fortune hunter who came west with an empty sack and a shovel; he must have carried along some booty from his sailing days. In my opinion, this gold mine thing was a money-laundering op. Anyway, business booms, the town prospers, and suddenly people start noticing old Debo?n has hardly aged since he arrived. This is just a funny anecdote in the first decade, an oddity after two decades, fucking astounding after five. And that’s when the guy, at the age of eighty by our account, but looking not one day older than forty, moves back east, saying he has business to attend, and leaves everything in the hands of a trusted employee named Allen. Nothing is heard of Damian Debo?n for years, then sometime in the nineteen twenties a young man arrives in town claiming to be Daniel Debo?n, son of Damian, who recently died in Massachusetts.”
“So he lives to a hundred, being generous,” Kerri said.
“After begetting a child at eighty,” Nate countered. “And if you believe it was his child. Because according to the old people in town, Daniel happened to be the spitting image of Damian, only younger.”
“So they haven’t seen Damian in twenty years, they hardly caught a glimpse of him while he lived here, but they all remember him perfectly.”
“Did he age?” Andy inquired. “The new one?”
“He didn’t have much of a chance,” Kerri said, “because in nineteen forty-nine that happened.”
She pointed to bow, and Andy turned her head again to the looming isle and the backlit, mutilated shape of Debo?n Mansion.
The boat and the shadow of the isle had finally met, and under its shelter the colors of the landmass could be told apart, trees from buildings. Andy soon realized that the house, much like the lake, was immune to rediscovery shrinkage. It was grand. Disturbingly big, as overgrown fungi and beetles are—the size something growing by itself in the woods should never reach.
In the area where Kerri was pointing, the top section of the east wing was bitten off, wooden beams torn like blades of grass, the gaping hole covered by brambles like blood platelets containing a hemorrhage.
Kerri again looked through her binoculars. “Did we bring a rope? There isn’t one on the dock.”
“It’s okay, I’ll pull us into the shore,” Andy said.
“I’ll help.”
“No, you can’t.” Andy chin-pointed at her suede boots. “You always did overdress for camping.”
—
Andy jumped a few yards out and sank only to her knees. Tim followed and swiftly paddled to the surface, again becoming the first of the party to land on a new setting.
Andy was still dragging the boat to land when she noticed tracks in the mud under her feet. She checked her soles.
“These footprints are fresh.”
Kerri and Nate disembarked and checked the area. There were deep, fresh prints of a large-sized shoe.
“Funny how they lead away from the water,” Nate said.
Everyone looked up at the mansion after that remark. In front of them, beyond depressed willows and hunchbacked oaks, the house rose, vast and overdetailed with windows and balustrades and balconies and towers and chimneys, unfolding in odd symmetries, jagged by dormer windows, crawling with salamanders of stone and live ones too. Ivy crept all over it, from the mold-scarred foundations to the shingles, covering up the riot of ruins in the east wing, peering through the glass, exploring the columned porch. Weeds brimmed over the stone chalices. Rotting acorns carpeted the stairs. Firs stood like sentinels far above the tallest roof, guarding it, hailing the darkness.
Tim’s human entourage followed the dog into the growth, striding over some fallen boughs and onto the disregarded clearing in front of the porch. He nose-scanned the mold on the right pillar as the other three squinted at the high-reaching crown of the building.
“Just the way we left it,” Andy said almost through a resigned sigh. “I kinda hoped someone would’ve knocked it down.”
“Yeah. And put a 7-Eleven in its place,” Nate seconded.
“Never too late,” Kerri thirded.
Andy breathed in and stepped forward before anyone could stop her. The dog’s obliviousness to dramatic shots had inspired her. The sudden bravado took her up the stairs, acorns popping under her soles, and up to the front door.
“We aren’t going in, right?” she heard Kerri ask.
“No,” she whispered, staring at the chain and padlock around the double door’s handles. Cruised by snails, the half-digested remnants of an irreverently yellow sticker babbled something about a safety hazard. “The place’s been locked,” she informed the others. “For many years, I think.”
“Maybe they didn’t want any more kids fooling around,” Kerri said.
“But the footprints. Someone’s been here recently. Maybe still is.”
Kerri gave it a thought and found no rational argument against yelling out: “Hello! Is anyone there?”
A crow fluttered away, its complaints fading quickly into a not-so-great distance. Then a hush fell over like a deflating balloon. Tim sneezed somewhere.
“If they were still here, there’d be a boat,” Nate reasoned.
“Or there were two people, and someone rowed back.”
Andy hurried downstairs again, feeling the porch frown behind her back.
Tim sneezed again, then puffed twice, shaking his head vigorously.
“Tim? Please don’t tell me you inhaled a slug again.” Kerri knelt beside him, but Tim didn’t linger about, busy trying to clear his nasal conduct. Instead, Kerri noticed something on the ground. The dirt was humid and black, difficult to find under several autumnfuls of leaves, but a few scattered spots of neon yellow stood out.
Kerri took a pinch of dust, smelled it, wiped her fingers and nose. “Sulfur.”
“So…Satan’s been here?” Andy wondered.
“No. Elemental sulfur is used as a fungicide in gardening.”
Nate glanced around. He could almost feel the mildew inside his nostrils. “Not doing a very good job.”
“This has been here awhile,” Kerri said. “It seems to follow a line.”