Black Lake Read Online Free Page A

“Dublin” in his mother’s writing. He checked the labels on his things carefully; he was relieved to see that they all said “Cottage” on them.
    Kate found him, sitting there on the rose-patterned couch, as she wove about the chaotic outdoor room. She was carrying an armful of plastic sheeting, which Philip recognized as the covering for the turf in the barn.
    “We have to save all this before it’s ruined. Mum said.”
    “Where is she?”
    Kate was too busy pulling plastic over the dining room table to answer. He dragged a piece over to his bed. The sheets were still on it, just as he’d left them when the men took it away. He pulled them up.
    “Come and help me with this, will you?” Kate shouted from the other side of the gravel, as she tried to cover the top of the very tall bookcases from the drawing room.
    Philip made his way over to her.
    “Why is all this stuff outside in the rain anyway?”
    “Mum thinks the movers are useless,” Kate answered, matter-of-factly. “They’re over there, having lunch.”
    Philip looked down the avenue and saw a white van parked there. A thermos rested on the dashboard. They were not the men who’d come into his room.
    “It’s too early.” He looked at his watch.
    “They got here at seven, so it’s their lunchtime now. They moved all the furniture when we were asleep.”
    Philip didn’t like the idea that they had been dismantling the house as he slept upstairs. He thought that he shouldn’t have been able to sleep through that, that he should have somehow known what was going on.
    “What are we going to do today?” he asked Kate. “What are we supposed to be doing —I mean, if we haven’t got schoolwork and stuff?”
    “I think we’re supposed to be helping.”
    “How?”
    “I don’t know, ask someone.” She gestured to the bookcase.
    He thought for a moment and said, “I’ll help you, but then I’m going to look for the others.”
    When they had finished, the driveway looked like one of those slums in India that they’d seen in books, a plastic city with a life throbbing away underneath.
      
    He rubbed the mist off his face with his sleeve and rounded the corner of the big house, passing between the pillars with the deer antlers on top. The avenue was rutted with puddles—he avoided them carefully because he wasn’t wearing his boots. His father had told them that minibuses would carry the visitors from the main road up to the house. He tried to imagine what it would be like when Dulough was full of people, when there’d be lots of little buses on the avenue. He followed the curve of the lake for half a mile or so before the cottages came into view. The Connollys’ was small and whitewashed, with a geranium-red half door and well-looked-after roses in the garden. Their own had appeared after Christmas—it magically grew out of the ground in the middle of the night, like a toadstool.
    The only good part of this was that he’d be nearer to the Connollys—and the lake. Francis had taught him how to fish. Some days Philip would be summoned to their kitchen, with its frilly lace curtains and Virgin Marys lined up on the windowsill, for a decent meal. They were Francis’s words. You had to have a decent meal before going fishing; with a decent bit of food in you, you could stay still out there for hours. He had heard his mother say that Francis reminded her of Yeats’s fisherman. Philip found a book in the drawing room, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. He’d leafed through it until he came across the right poem. He agreed that a man with a “sun-freckled face” who went fishing at dawn was a good description of Francis, but he wasn’t sure what the rest of the poem meant.
    Because the new cottage floated on a sea of deep, sticky mud, a long, thin plank connected the avenue with the front door. It wobbled as Philip stepped onto it. He knew that if he fell in without his boots on, he’d certainly be in trouble. So as to make sure he