What Lies Beneath

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife.”

What Lies Beneath

The shiver wasn’t mine. It belonged to the place.
Settled into the bones of the cabin. Low and deep, past the sagging beams and the crawlspace webbed with mildew and time. Down where the soil sweats and the roots twist like nerves. From there it climbed. An annexation slow and sure, seeping into the walls like blood through gauze. The boards swelled with it. Itching, infecting, spawning within aged timber flexing, whining, like lungs learning how to breathe again after something long. Something cruel.
The spruce groaned in the silence. Not wind. Not weather. Something older. Something…
At night, the sentinel watched. Not eyes, but presence. The kind that waits. Patient and without breath. As if waiting isn’t something it learned but something it was born for.
The cabin walls smelled of old paper and damp earth. Mold in the corners, whispers in the grain. Each fiber bore the weight of voices never raised; arguments left to rot. My name among them. Etched in the dark.
Come morning, the lake mirrored the sky, and the world tried to forget itself. Sunlight touched the porch, and the place wore peace like a borrowed coat.
But the cabin remembered. It always did.
It knew the shape of my silence. And the sound of every failure I tried not to bring with me.
The candle leaned, half-spent, stuck in the neck of a wine bottle gone dry. Flame stammered in the draft like it wanted out. Shadows twitched across the cabin walls, long and nervous.
She sat across from me, hands folded on the table like she was waiting on a verdict. Her face caught the light in pieces. Pale, sharp. Eyes too still.
The flame jumped again. Lit her cheek, then vanished.
Like it couldn’t decide if she was still there.
Porcelain, maybe. But cracked. Hairline fractures the light kept trying to crawl into. Each flicker lit something different. Sorrow, maybe. Or something sharper.
No one spoke.
Forks cold against the plate. Her wine untouched. And me, watching the candle fight to live.
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife.”
She was a vision. Even then, though it wasn’t her.
The way she looked at me didn’t carry weight. Didn’t carry anything. Just the drag of old glass across rusted hinges. A flicker, maybe then. Grown mostly hollow. No flirt, no fire. No trace of the girl who used to kill with a smile behind the bleachers.
We were ghosts in that high school hallway once. Lockers bleeding green paint. Fluorescents buzzing flies in a jar. I remember her fingers, chipped polish and ink smudges, brushing mine in the dark of the AV closet. I remember the warmth like it was a sound.
Now she just stared.
The awkward teenagers, the secret glances, the shared laughter spoiled like stank of burnt espresso and wet wool. The ceiling fan spun, like they’d forgotten why. Rain tap danced against the café windows. The rhythm of it made her silence louder.
         “You still writing?” she asked, not looking up.
         “Sometimes.”
She nodded. Tapped her swirling bubbles in her cup. No ring. Just a bruise along the knuckle, faint yellow trying to pass as skin.
Outside, a kid ran past, laughing. Someone shouted after him. Her eyes flinched toward it, then settled on a crack in the table.
         “When’d you quit smoking?”
         She smiled. It didn’t last. “Who said I did?”
I watched her mouth. The corner of it tugged once like it wanted to remember how.
The waitress dropped our check like a guillotine.
         “Same dreams?” I asked.
She folded a napkin in half. Then again. Then into quarters.
         “You ever get the feeling something followed us back?” she said.
Her voice was calm. Like asking about the weather.
         “No,” I lied.
She left the napkin on the table. The shape of it sharp and neat and quiet.
And then she was gone.
Something touched you at the edge of it. Not hands. Not quite.
Like breath drawn slow through teeth.
It crept across the slope of your shoulders, soft as ash, slick as something left behind in a drained sink. The place where spine meets skull. That empty that knows before you admit.
Not pain.
Not yet.
Just the hum beneath skin when the lie’s no longer working. When the shape of the truth curls dark like a thing waiting to molt.
You felt it, right? Still do.
But you look away.
And call it cold.
The words stalled behind my teeth. Sat there like a swallowed stone.
I cleared my throat, didn’t need to, but did.
         “We could... go up,” I said. Voice low, casual, like it didn’t matter.
She looked at me over the rim of her glass. No smile. Just the faint click of ice shifting.
         “To the cabin,” I added. “Just for the weekend. Get out of town. Like we used to.”
The silence that followed wasn’t silence at all. Just the slow churn of something neither of us wanted to name.
She nodded. Eventually. But her eyes didn’t.
“This is not my beautiful wife…”
…fingernails split against the grain before I realized I was digging in.
The table shuddered under me. Not from movement, but memory. The kind baked deep into wood. My palms flat against it, pressed like I was afraid the floor might vanish if I let go.
Voices coiled low in the rafters. Not loud. Not yet.
Just enough to needle the air.
You know.
The candle had guttered out hours ago. Maybe longer. The wax ran down the bottle like blood under ice. The shadows did what shadows do—shifted, stared, waited.
It wasn’t cold, but I shook anyway. That itch in the spine like someone else had borrowed my skin and worn it badly.
I stared at my hands. Red welts blooming under the nails. The table's grain felt wrong. Not wood, not anymore. Something older. Etched with things that didn't speak in words but still found their way in.
You know what you must do.
The voices never said it the same way. Didn’t need to. The meaning was always there, heavy as rot.
The kind of truth you don’t hear. You just remember.
Her smile flashed. Too large and toothy. A chasm all pearls and gums. Her lips moved in imitation of affection, but it marionetted a face drained of emotive. Void of emotion, feeling, and humanity. The impression of what one would imagine a smile to be, but incomprehensive of the act.
         “Remember when you tried to tell that joke?” she mused, the golden memories lighting up her cheeks, “I never laughed at the punchline. I laughed because you were funny in your attempt.”
Her voice. It sounds like her. Yet the inflection was wrong. In the same breath she smells sour and musty like wet foliage. Her head knocked to the side and blinked, mimicking motion to remain human. Gauging the perception of her ruse, I must remain steadfast and diligent.
“This is not my beautiful wife…”
She laughed or at least attempted to. Her voice conjured histories, but her cadence was laced with an undernote riddled in foulness and decay. Her head's unnatural knock, craning side to side with false blinking crow eyes were ill-concealed attempts at mimicry.
Still, I play along.
Does she know?
Pause, hindrance a heartbeat, the muscle wedged in my throat and force it back down. When the voice returns an answer, I wish I could unhear.
She knows.
“This is not my beautiful house…”
The plates sat between us, scraped clean but heavy all the same. Not with food. With something else. The kind of weight that hangs after conversation dies. When silence stretches long enough to turn hostile.
She didn’t look up. Just circled the rim of her glass with a fingertip, slow and even. Her eyes weren’t hers anymore. Not the hazel I remembered. The eyes I’d lost myself in, once warm and autumnal, now betrayed and darker. The light-streaked, always dancing like leaves caught in wind. No. Her eyes were still. And they knew.
Knew what was coming. Knew what I wouldn’t say.
She used to laugh with her whole body. A sound you could live inside. That was before. Back when her lips tasted like cider and she believed October meant something good. Before the edges started to fray. Before truth became something sharp enough to draw blood.
The cabin had been her idea. Her retreat. She said the stillness gave her room to breathe, to create. She'd sit by the window for hours, sketching the lake like it might vanish if she stopped watching.
         “You’re like this place,” she told me once. “Beautiful. But you hold things down too deep.”
She meant it as a compliment. Then.
Now I saw the truth of it in the way she avoided my gaze. As if the surface of me was calm, but the things beneath weren’t.
The fire crackled in the hearth but gave no warmth. It danced strangely in the corners of the room, like it knew what we were avoiding. The lake beyond the glass looked thick, black, unbroken. An eye, unblinking.
Something had shifted.
She knew. I knew.
The third presence in the room—unspoken, shapeless—knew too.
And it was waiting.
“This is not my beautiful wife...”
She wasn't the same after the dog disappeared.
It went quiet first. Her voice, her touch. Then came the stillness. Not peace. Not grief. Just the kind of silence that feels deliberate, sculpted, as if she were pulling herself inward one layer at a time.
I tried to speak to her about it. Once. Maybe twice. She nodded like I’d said something about the weather.
By the third evening the sky outside turned the color of rotted fruit. The trees no longer swayed; they watched. Light peeled away from the edges of the forest like old paint. The shadows grew longer than they had any right to. Fingers through the glass.
She took to standing by the window. Same time, every night. Never drew the curtains. Just stood there with her hand flat against the pane like she was checking for breath. Her hair hung down her back, unmoving. Moonlight draped over her like a shroud.
The first night I called to her. The second, too. By the fifth I didn’t bother.
I just watched.
One eye open beneath the pretense of sleep, breath slow and measured.
She never turned. Never looked at me. Her lips moved, but there was no sound. Not prayer. Not song.
Just motion.
Like she was repeating something. Practicing.
Or summoning.
The woods beyond the cabin pulsed black. The moon showed only what it wanted to. Somewhere out there, the branches shifted in rhythm with her breath.
She stood like she was waiting for a reply.
And I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever had taken the dog hadn’t stopped with the dog.
Like I said, there was Dog.
But the thing that came back wasn’t him. Not entirely.
He crept into the clearing at dusk, belly low, nose twitching like the air itself offended him. His eyes didn’t hold me in recognition. Just calculation. Hunger, maybe. Or something meaner.
He circled once. Ears flat, tail stiff. Then froze.
The air was heavily charged, metallic like sucking on pennies. Not the kind of wrong you can name. Just the kind that makes your teeth itch.
Dog twitched. A single, sharp motion. His eyes darted to the trees. And then he ran.
Didn’t look back.
Just bolted in full sprint, tail curled between his legs like shame, into the mouth of the woods. The shadows took him like they’d been waiting.
That was the moment. Right there.
The moment dread went from suggestion to fact.
“This is not my beautiful house…”
Her sigh dragged through the room like smoke.
Not loud, but long. Measured.
It pulled me back to the table. The scraps on the plates between sat like carcasses to vultures, the fresh bottle of wine untouched. Her fingers traced the rim of her glass, slow and absent, like she was stalling for a silence she hadn’t earned.
Words hovered, thick as wet rope. Whatever she meant to say, it already sat in the space between us, waiting for a name. My throat tightened around the weight of it.
The cabin breathed shallow now. Walls drawn closer. Shadows climbed higher. The golden warmth we used to know—her laugh, the way she'd reach across the table without thinking—was memory now. Faded. Fragile. A smear on glass.
The hand axe leaned beside the door.
Its blade caught a sliver of firelight. Just enough to gleam, not enough to reassure.
Next to it, my boots. Mud dried along the soles like crusted blood.
She didn’t look at them. Didn’t need to.
The room held its breath.
As did I.
“This is not my beautiful wife.”
Dog. That was his name. Stupid, I know. We thought it was funny once. Our little inside joke, the kind couples cling to like totems. Do you have one? A word, a gesture, a look?
Don’t say it too loud.
They're listening. They are learning. They want to be us.
He was an Australian Shepherd. Blue merle, eyes like marbled glass. The kind of dog that chased shadows for sport and looked good in a red bandanna. We’d play fetch until the sun slipped behind the trees, and he’d still come back for more.
It had been hours. Maybe more. I’d lost track painting the dock with a second coat, deep green, same shade she said reminded her of the lake in early spring.
She came back alone.
Didn’t say a word.
Walked past me, straight through the clearing, across the porch and into the cabin. It was as if I didn’t exist. No glance. No smile. Just air between us. Cold, empty air.
I followed. Asked where he was.
         “Ran off,” she said, voice flat, already halfway up the stairs. Like she’d misplaced a sock.
I stood there with the paint still drying on my hands. Something sour settled in my gut. That was the first time I felt it. The shift. Small, like a fracture in glass, but I knew.
Dog didn’t just run.
I searched until dark pressed in and the trees turned to silhouettes with teeth. Called his name until my throat went raw. No bark. No rustle. Not even the echo of paws.
He’d gotten out before. But not like this. Not this long.
And never without coming back.
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife...”
A soft, melancholic sigh escaped her, pulling me back from the edge of my thoughts. “It’s beautiful out here, isn't it? So much like us. Beautiful, but with hidden depths waits heaven. After dinner. In the moonlight, we should take a walk.”
I watched the dripping wax descend the plume, pieces coagulating around on the table. I pecked at it with the butter knife; the act was something that would gall her last nerve. Yet nothing. The weight of her voice, a drying cement, settled around us. The room seemed to close in, the walls echoing suffocating accusations and unspoken truths. Our past, vibrant and full of love, contrasted sharply with the present grave markers at the dinner table.
My eyes shift the distance between us, to the axe at the bedroom door, and land back upon her.
Did she see?
“This is not my beautiful wife...”
Dog returned a day later, twigs and sticks mangled in tuffs of fur. He moved unsure of me, and I called to him again. Fearful and reluctant he moved closer, paw measured step over paw. Snout testing the air, tail hung sunk between his legs. He gave a lick of relief after he closed the gap between us. But when I went to take him inside, he refused, digging firm with all four paws into the ground.
The cabin door creaked, a slow, deliberate sound. Like the world had suddenly fallen under thick molasses. She stood, swathed in white linen, her skin eerily mirroring its pallor. Her chest, barely rising and falling, gave the impression she was only simulating life. Every nuance of her posture twisted in nature’s mockery. A disturbing pantomime of the woman I'd once known. Every motion feeling rehearsed. Deliberate. Uncanny.
Her arm lifted slow, like it took effort just to defy gravity.
The sleeve slid back. What was beneath wasn’t muscle. Just bone wrapped tight in paper skin, tendons like wire drawn too thin. Her hand hovered, then extended. Fingers stiff, shaking slightly—until one pointed.
Toward Dog.
He froze. Ears perked. Pants held.
Then he turned to me once, just once, eyes wide and wild, and twisted free.
A blur of fur and panic, claws scraping the porch.
Gone.
Back into the woods that swallowed him like a mouth closing quiet.
She lowered her arm. No word. No sound.
Just that look.
And the way the trees seemed to lean closer after.
Perhaps I should have done the same.
         “My love,” she drawled, her voice dripping with a saccharine sweetness that did nothing to mask the venom lurking beneath. I watched her, trying to find the woman I knew, but her form was a mere effigy. Each word seemed forced. Spoken through clenched teeth. “Where might Dog have run off to?”
Dog's desperate barks from the woods drew my gaze. The chilling undertones in them were unmistakable. Fear. Panic. His sounds grew distant, like the last whispers of a ghostly wind.
It struck me, the change in her. Like a record playing at 45. Too fast, yet too slow. My throat tightened. “Into the woods,” I managed, each word an effort. The atmosphere around us grew dense, suffocating.
         There was a sly twist to her lips. “Ah, he always loved the woods, didn’t he? As do I.”
Her eyes, once the haven where I lost myself, now felt like twin voids, expanding and devouring all like black holes. Gluttonous and insatiable. Drawing me in, demanding answers to questions gone unspoken. The once-familiar hazel was replaced by an inscrutable shade of luminescent blue. Was it an illusion of moonlight or my mind at tricks? My heartbeat, a frenzied in my ears, the drum a metronome that seemed oddly distant. Was this truly my wife?
         “Come back inside,” she beckoned. Her words wrapped in ice. “Let’s finish our dinner.”
But I hesitated. Was it really her? The memories of us, young and so full of life, clashed with this current version of reality. The cabin drew her. A dark puppeteer controlling the strings. Or was it the other way round? The land is spoiled.
“This is not my beautiful wife...”
We stood at the edge of the dock, the boards beneath us groaning like something waking up.
Moonlight spilled across the lake, black and slick, a surface too still to trust. Like ink poured over glass. No ripple. No breath. Just the weight of it staring back.
The trees loomed around the clearing, their silhouettes warped, stretched long as if yawning wide to swallow us whole.
She didn’t speak. Neither did I. There was no need. The quiet said enough.
Even the insects held their tongues. No trill, no hum. Just the empty hush of a world holding its breath. The kind of stillness that isn’t peace but pause. Waiting for something to break.
The air pressed down on us. Thick, unmoving. Not wind, not cold. Just pressure.
Like being underwater without the mercy of drowning.
         “You feeling okay? You seem...”
But the rest caught in my throat like a splinter. I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence, couldn’t give shape to the thing squatting in the space between us.
She turned slow. Smile crooked. Mocking. A flash of teeth too white, too long.
         “But you haven’t,” she said. As if I’d accused her of something out loud. The light from the moon threw her face into slices. Cheekbone sharp, shadows stitched under her eyes like bruises. Porcelain gone wrong.
         “He knows.”
She didn’t say it. She growled it.
Mouth widening. The corners pulled too far; skin stretched like wax under a slow flame.
         “Know what?”
Her head tilted, considering. The motion disjointed and mechanical, a deliberate tick, like a doll winding down. Eyes unblinking.
         “What lies beneath,” she said. Barely audible. Barely human.
The cabin groaned, wind dragging its fingers down the outer walls. The lake stirred without sound. The trees leaned in. All of it—the woods, the shore, the structure itself—wrapped around us like a noose waiting for the right moment to cinch.
         “You’ve been spending too much time in that cabin,” I said. Tried to say. It came out thin, watery.
I remembered cider on her breath. Leaves underfoot. Laughter that once made the cold easier to bear. All of it tasted wrong now. Like spoiled fruit.
She cocked her head the other way. That smile didn’t move. Her voice, when it came, was sing-song and hollow.
         “I think it’s time you understood too.”
I reached for something—anything to pull her back. Any part of her that may remain.
         “Remember when we named him Dog?” I said. “Just... Dog.” Weak. But it was all I had. A rope thrown into deep water.
She paused.
Something flickered behind her eyes. That woman, the one from before, blinked into existence. Fragile. Faint.
         “I do,” she whispered.
Then gone.
Her gaze cooled, flattened. The glimmer snuffed.
         “Wouldn’t you like to search for him with me?” she asked. “The woods at night are... enchanting.”
And then that sound.
A gurgle. Low. Wet. Crawling up from something deeper than her throat. Something waiting to speak through her.
Or already had.
Temptation scraped fingers inside of my skull, but my feet refused to move.
The cabin pulsed with a sound I couldn’t name. Not voices. No, it was too old for that. More like breath caught between the runes. It wormed into thoughts, twining around the panic already rooting there. Each step of reason became suspect. Each memory curdled on contact.
This place—we built it. Hammered nails, sanded wood, stained the porch ourselves. But now even the grain in the floorboards looked foreign. A language scratched out beneath the varnish.
Roots moaned beneath us. Not from age. Not from wind. A low, wooden groan that sounded like disapproval. Or regret.
I felt them underfoot. Shifting. Holding.
         “Remember the time you tried to tell that joke?” she said, sudden, soft.
Her voice cut through the silence too cleanly. Her eyes locked on mine, unblinking.
         “I never laughed at the punchline,” she went on. “I laughed because you were funny in your attempt.”
The words didn’t land right. I’d heard them before.
Not here. Not like this.
She’d said them years ago, yes. Same tone. Same tilt of her head. But that had been real. This—this was a performance. A practiced echo. A creature rehearsing its lines, just human enough to fool the light.
The air tightened. My ribs felt bound.
         “What happened in the woods?” I asked.
Her eyes shimmered, then dulled. She took a step closer. The dock didn’t creak.
Her scent hit me. Pine needles crushed underfoot, wet moss, something dead wrapped in cloth. Old meat beneath a blanket of fern.
         “There’s something I want to show you,” she said. Her voice was thick, dripping warmth that didn’t belong.
I shrank, contracting from its touch.
         “You should climb the stairs,” she whispered, a hand drifting up toward my chest. Her eyes never left mine. “They are...”
She trailed off. Brows furrowed, lost in a thought that didn’t seem to belong to her.
Something creaked.
Not footsteps.
Breathing.
My mind twisted, fast and useless, ricocheting between instinct and paralysis.
The air pressed in, dense and slick, growing heavier with each step closer she took. The lake behind me offered no escape, only reflection. Black water, black sky. No line between.
         “I just—” I said, too quickly.
I steadied. Tried again.
         “I need to grab something inside,” I said, slower this time, masking the tremor. “Should blow the candles out. Hate to burn down what we built.”
I forced a smile. It fractured at the corners.
She didn’t move. Just stood there. Between me and the path back to the cabin. Between me and any kind of exit.
Her head tilted. Slight. Her lips parted but made no sound. The whites of her eyes rolled, sudden and strange. Like something inside her tasting the air through eyelids, parsing the fear from the molecules.
They fluttered, unfocused, then snapped back to mine.
The silence stretched. Tightened.
And then, a nod. Barely a breath’s worth of motion.
Permission.
But not forgiveness.
She turned, slow as dusk, letting me pass.
Moonlight spilled across the cabin floor in fractured shards, tracing long, twitching shapes that didn’t seem to settle. My boots stood in the center, damp with lake mist. Beside them, two tools. One gleamed. One waited.
The axe. The shovel.
Not symbols. Not metaphors. Just choices. Real ones.
The edge of the axe caught the light like a warning. The shovel leaned against the wall, flecked with dried earth that smelled wrong. Sour, mineral-rich, the kind of rot you only find in places meant to stay buried.
The soil is rotten.
You know what comes next.
The thought didn’t feel like mine.
I stood still. Grounded in name only. Every board beneath me pulsed like a second heartbeat. The walls whispered. Nothing you could repeat, just the cadence of old things remembering their purpose.
Something drew at me. A pull from nowhere, like fishing line hooked to the base of the spine. The mystery, or whatever had replaced it, tugged gently, promising understanding. Promising love. Promising truth.
Would I follow her? Into the black swell of trees, the mouth of the forest swallowing the last of the moon?
Or run. Like Dog. A blur of instinct and desperation.
I blinked.
Once. My eyes dropped to the axe.
Twice.
She was there.
At my back. No sound. No weight. Just sudden cold and the sick-sweet scent of decay wrapped in pine needles. Her arms draped over my shoulders like vines, slow and deliberate. Her breath slid against my ear, wet and warm.
         “There’s something I’d like to show you,” she whispered. Words soft as silk, voice hollow and distant. “In the forest. A staircase like no other.”
Her fingers brushed my chest.
         “Come,” she said, breath sweet with rot. “See what lies beneath.”
I didn’t move.
Not yet.
The axe remained. Close. Heavy. Familiar.
But her smile—I could feel it in the dark—was already certain I’d follow.
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house.”
And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife.”