This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Ten years ago the lake gave everyone back. Now it wants something returned.
Ben Bender was eight years old the summer he watched a man vanish off a Vermont lake, and he drew what he saw in crayon, and the world told him he was wrong. His parents burned the drawings. His family stopped talking about that year. He grew up believing what everyone taught him: that he had imagined it.
Then, on his eighteenth birthday, a letter comes from a woman he has never met. She was there. She saw it too. She was tried for murder because of it. And she has kept his crayon drawing taped inside her cupboard door for ten years, saying good morning to it every day.
You were right, Benjamin. You were right the whole time. Come and I will tell you the rest.
Ben goes north. What he finds is a lake going wrong again. Birds gone from the shoreline. A clock that stopped in 1989 and started losing time on its own. A returned man aging thirty seven years in a week. A boy who came back from 1974 slowly blurring out of his own photographs.
Something is coming through, and the thing in the lake is not strong enough to stop it, because ten years ago it left a piece of itself behind. In a boy. At an art table. In a drawing that was true.
But the horror waiting on the other side does not take people the way the lake did. It does not study. It does not give back. And when it takes a woman off a dark road, the whole town forgets she ever existed. Only five people still remember her name, and one of them is a state trooper who keeps it written on an index card inside his hat.
An eerie, heart driven supernatural thriller about memory, grief, and what a person truly owns. Book two of the 'I' series, and a complete story on its own.