Dark Waters Read online

  ALSO BY KATHERINE ARDEN

  Small Spaces

  Dead Voices

  The Bear and the Nightingale

  The Girl in the Tower

  The Winter of the Witch

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Copyright © 2021 by Katherine Arden

  Excerpt from Small Spaces copyright © 2018 by Katherine Arden

  Excerpt from Dead Voices copyright © 2019 by Katherine Arden

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  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Arden, Katherine, author.

  Title: Dark waters / Katherine Arden.

  Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2021] | Summary: “Stuck on a mysterious island, Ollie, Coco, and Brian must band to together if they hope to escape the creature that haunts them on both land and sea”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021004839 (print) | LCCN 2021004840 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593109151 (hardcover) ISBN 9780593109168 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Supernatural—Fiction. | Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. Champlain, Lake—Fiction. | Horror stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.A737 Dar 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.A737 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004839LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004840

  Ebook ISBN 9780593109168

  Cover art © 2021 by Matt Saunders

  Cover design by Eileen Savage

  Design by Eileen Savage, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  To Cassandra,

  the very first fan of this series

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Katherine Arden

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Excerpt from Small Spaces

  Excerpt from Dead Voices

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  SPRING IN EAST EVANSBURG, and the rain poured down like someone had turned on a hose in the sky. High in the Green Mountains, the rain turned snow into slush and turned earth into mud. It washed ruts into roads and set creeks to roaring. It sluiced down the roof of a small inn perched on a hillside above town.

  The rain had begun at dawn, but now it was that long blue springtime twilight, getting close to dark, and the inn looked cozy in the soft light. The walls of the inn were white wooden clapboards, neatly painted. The roof was red metal. The sign said moose lodge, and it swung, creaking, in the spring wind.

  The inn’s parking lot was empty. Everything was quiet.

  Brian Battersby lived in the inn with his parents. The inn had started off as a day spa, inherited from his great-uncle. But slowly, Brian’s parents had turned it into a proper inn, with ten rooms. It was a Tuesday in late April, and the lodge was empty. The skiers had all left for the year. The bikers and hikers hadn’t come yet. There was no one in the lodge at all except for Brian and his two friends. His parents had gone down into East Evansburg.

  “We’ll be back in a few hours, with dinner,” they had told him. “Don’t burn the place down.”

  “Sure,” Brian had said. “No problem.” But he’d gulped a little as he watched his parents drive away. He and his friends hadn’t been alone in months. They’d been careful not to be alone.

  They felt safer when they weren’t alone.

  Brian and his friends were in the main room of Moose Lodge. It was extremely cozy. There were paperbacks on shelves, magazines on tables, and a huge stone fireplace with a fire crackling.

  The door was locked. They felt safe. Well. Sort of safe. They hadn’t felt completely safe in months.

  “Spring rain is way worse than fall rain,” said Brian, shoving aside his disquiet. He’d been sitting cross-legged on the sofa opposite the fireplace, but now he dumped his book to go stand by the front window. He peered past the curtain at the big sweep of parking lot and the muddy, washed-out track of the dirt road beyond. Everything was veiled in rain, water falling like ropes and raising a mist where it smashed into the ground. He added, “Because in fall you’re not even hoping for it to get warm and sunny. But in spring . . .” He squinted out into the twilight. Was that something moving? No, just a trick of the light.

  “You’re tired of winter,” finished his friend Olivia Adler from another sofa, where she lounged on pillows, wrapped in a wool blanket, a book in her lap. Ollie was taller than Brian. She had big dark eyes and corkscrewing curls that stood out all over her head. She took a sip from a mug of hot chocolate, trying to nab a marshmallow with her teeth. He heard her swallow before she asked uneasily, “See anything out there?”

  Brian kept watching the streaming window. “No,” he said.

  “I don’t mind the rain,” chimed in Coco Zintner. Coco always looked on the bright side. She was sitting on the floor nearest the fireplace. She was practically in the fireplace. She was the smallest person in the sixth grade, and she got cold easily. A stack of books teetered at her side, and she sipped at her own mug, a knitted blanket around her shoulders. Her hair, which was pinkish, was braided down her back. “It’s cozy in here.”

  “Yeah,” said Brian, a little doubtfully. They’d spent a lot of that winter holed up in cozy places. Long afternoons in the Egg, Ollie’s old farmhouse. Weekend mornings in the small, neat house Coco shared with her mom in downtown East Evansburg. And plenty of time in Moose Lodge, where Brian and his parents lived.

  But Brian was tired of being cozy. When you couldn’t go out, places stopped being cozy and started being small. He was tired of peering out of windows and into mirrors, looking for anything out of place. Looking for danger.

  The main room at Moose Lodge had white walls and old pine floors and piles of pillows on each sofa. The radiator clanked; the walls were covered with pressed flowers and dried leaves and bugs behind glass. Snug, woolly blankets draped the furniture and them. It smelled like orange oil and pine.

  The only not-quite-right thing was the blanket that Ollie had used to drape the mirror opposite the fireplace. The second Brian’s parents had left, she’d covered up the mirror and wrapped it in bungee cords, all without saying a word.

  Mirrors, all three of them knew, could be dangerous. None of them trusted mirrors, especially
not Ollie.

  While she covered the mirrors, Brian had bolted the doors.

  They were fine, Brian told himself. They were safe. Turning away from the wet window, he tripped on a pile of books.

  “Ouch!” Brian hopped, clutching his stubbed toe.

  “Book monster strikes again!” cackled Ollie just as Coco said, “Are you okay, Brian?” Their voices echoed in the empty lodge.

  “Yes,” he said, dropping with a grimace back onto the sofa. “No thanks to this stuff.” He glared around at the books. Twenty or so books, divided into three heaps, one for each of them. Brian pulled the top book off his stack and scowled at it. The title was Hauntings and Horrors in the Green Mountain State.

  “I think I read this one already,” he said. “They’re all blurring together.”

  Ollie’s book was called Giggles in the Dark: True Stories of Truly Awful Hauntings. “I know what you mean,” she said. She pulled a blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Anyway, I dunno if any of it is helpful. Like—listen to this.” She read aloud:

  Long ago, the Green Axe Man lived alone on South Hero Island. He used to steal other people’s milk, but his neighbors were so afraid of him that no one ever said a word about it. Once, by accident, he cut his hand off with his own axe, but he was so tough that he didn’t care. He just stuck the axe where his hand should be. Ever after, he had an axe instead of a hand, and whenever he went out, you could hear the chopping from far away as he swung his arm back and forth . . .

  “Weird,” commented Brian.

  “Not what we’re looking for, though,” said Coco.

  Actually, Brian thought, none of them knew exactly what they were looking for. All they knew was that they were desperate to find it, and they really hoped they’d know when they found it.

  Coco’s book was called True Tales to Make You Scream. Slowly, she said, “Maybe no book has what we’re looking for. I mean—we’ve been doing all this research since December, and we haven’t found anything. Not even a clue.”

  “There’s something,” said Brian fiercely. “Somewhere. We just have to keep looking.”

  He picked up Hauntings and Horrors in the Green Mountain State and flipped a page. Both girls fell silent. The rain wrapped them in its roar, like another blanket. If something tried to creep up on them, there was no chance they’d hear it through the sound of the rain.

  Don’t think about that, Brian ordered himself.

  Brian’s eye snagged on a new paragraph.

  Captain Sheehan and the Wreck of the Goblin, said the heading.

  The wreck of the Goblin wasn’t what they were looking for either, but Brian paused anyway. He loved stories about boats.

  In 1807, went the text, the Goblin was a merchant vessel on Lake Champlain. Her master was called William Sheehan, and folk said that he was the smartest, the handsomest, and the most ruthless ship’s captain between Burlington and Ticonderoga.

  But the Embargo Act of 1807 stopped his trade, and so Captain Sheehan turned to smuggling. He smuggled timber to the British fleet in Halifax and smuggled linen back. And he was good at that too.

  Until the night he, his ship, and his crew disappeared.

  On a foggy night in the fall of 1808, the Goblin waited at the mouth of Otter Creek to pick up a cargo. But the revenue cutter Fly had been warned about the notorious Goblin. She was waiting. Sheehan and his men were forced to flee.

  The ships raced across the lake, into the night. The Goblin led, with the Fly sailing after. All night the two ships sailed. Sheehan tried every trick he knew to lose the Fly, but the revenue cutter hung on.

  Finally, the fog dispersed and the moon rose, revealing a terrible sight.

  The Goblin was no longer under sail. She was sinking. Bow to the sky and stern in the lake. She must have run aground, but on what? The two ships were in open water.

  The Fly went closer. And closer. But before she could reach the Goblin, the smuggler went down with a gurgle. The sailors on the Fly waited to hear the shouts of survivors.

  But there was only silence.

  When dawn came, the Fly swept the area where they’d seen the Goblin go down.

  But there was nothing. Not so much as a floating plank to show where the Goblin had been at all. Men and ship had been swallowed by the lake.

  But on foggy nights, it’s said, you can still see the Goblin racing across the lake. And you can still hear Sheehan cursing the Fly for sending his ship to her doom—

  The lights flickered.

  Brian’s head jerked up from the book. Ollie and Coco looked around too, warily. The lights flickered again.

  “Must be the storm—” Coco began.

  And then the lights went out.

  Right at that same moment, someone knocked—boom, boom, boom—on the door.

  The three of them froze. They knew better than to scream. They stared at the door. The only light came from the fire. It threw their shadows big and strange on the walls.

  Boom. This time the knock shot them to their feet and close together. Coco tripped over her pile of books; Ollie caught her, and they stood in the middle of the room, hands gripping tight.

  “I didn’t see anyone outside!” Brian breathed. “I didn’t see a car . . .”

  “There wasn’t a car,” whispered Ollie. “We’d have seen the lights.”

  “Maybe it drove up with the lights off?” whispered Coco.

  Ollie glanced down at her wrist. She was wearing a watch. But it wasn’t an ordinary watch. It had belonged to her mother, who was dead. Its screen was cracked; it didn’t tell time. But sometimes it gave Ollie advice.

  Like now.

  It was glowing faintly blue, and a single word jumped on the screen in faint, flickering letters.

  hush, it said.

  All three of them went still. Brian felt sweat start on his forehead. His heart was thumping away, like a pheasant in spring. Why were heartbeats so loud? He tried not to breathe. He could feel the girls’ hands sweating in his. Run away? Stay still?

  hush.

  The knocking had stopped. Now he heard the soft sound of footsteps. Circling the house. Going toward the big front window. Scratch. Scritch. Someone was scraping at the pane of glass. Brian’s heartbeat seemed to rattle his rib cage. None of them moved.

  The footsteps went back toward the door. Now they saw the door handle quiver. Very slowly, the handle turned downward. Down and down it went. Brian couldn’t see the dead bolt in the dimness. He’d locked it, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he?

  He could hear Coco breathing quick and shallow beside him.

  The door handle was down at its very lowest point.

  “Run,” whispered Ollie, her hand clutching his.

  But before any of them could move, a brilliant light cut through the curtains, like a car—a car coming across the parking lot. The handle stopped moving. They all stood, holding their breath.

  The lights flickered. Came back on.

  The door was still shut. There was no one there but them.

  “I locked the door,” Brian whispered. “I did. I swear.”

  “I believe you,” said Ollie. She glanced down at her watch again. Brian looked over her shoulder. So did Coco. The watch was blank now. Just an old digital wristwatch, too big for Ollie’s wrist, with a spiderwebbing crack on the screen. They were all trembling.

  The headlights in the parking lot cut out. Next moment, Brian heard his parents’ voices, arguing cheerfully, as his mom and dad got out of the car. He breathed again. They might have imagined the whole thing.

  But he was pretty sure they hadn’t.

  “What was that?” whispered Coco.

  “I—don’t know,” said Ollie.

  “Saved by your parents, Brian,” said Coco. “I guess that is your parents?”

  “Yes,” said Brian. They were st
ill clutching hands.

  “You don’t think anything’s still out there?” said Ollie. “Anything dangerous?”

  “The lights came back on,” Brian pointed out shakily.

  Neither girl replied. He heard his mother’s footsteps on the front walk. Heard them pause on the front porch. Then she came clattering in, pausing at the threshold to say something, laughing, to Brian’s dad. Just like normal.

  Brian’s mom seemed surprised to see them all standing in the middle of the great room. “You look like baby raccoons on walkabout,” she said, smiling. “I guess you got hungry?”

  Brian licked his lips and found his voice. “Yeah, Mom,” he said. “Super hungry.”

  Brian’s mom had light brown skin and her eyes were just like Brian’s. Like a pond in summer, Brian’s dad would say. When the light shines through.

  When the inn was in season, they ate whatever the restaurant was serving. When it wasn’t, they ate a lot of takeout. His mom, who ran the restaurant during the season, got tired of cooking. “A break, please. I beg,” she’d say, and call the Thai place or the burger spot. Everyone in town knew his mom.

  Now Brian smelled something yummy. The next second, his dad came in, holding four flat boxes.

  His dad said, “We met Roger and Zelda in town.” Roger and Zelda were Ollie’s dad and Coco’s mom. “They’re coming up for dinner. Brian, wash your hands, wash your ears. It’s time to make dinner!”

  Coco said, “Mr. Battersby—are we not eating pizza?”

  Brian’s dad looked at the boxes in his hands and jumped, like he was surprised. “Oh,” he said. “Where did these come from?”

  His dad liked to joke. So did Ollie’s dad. They got along amazingly. “Ha,” said Brian. “Come on,” he added to the girls. “Let’s wash up.”

  As they were heading out, he heard his mom calling. “Brian—Brian,” she said. “Did you leave anything on the front porch?”

  Brian stopped. Beside him, he felt the girls go still.

  Brian turned around. “Um, no,” he said. His tongue felt sticky. “Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing, really,” said his mom. “Just found this on the ground in front of the door. Thought I’d check before I chuck it in the bin.” She held it up. It was a round black piece of paper about the size of Brian’s palm.