"You're hearing old mud."
Emmett nodded.
"Every pond around here makes noises."
Naomi opened her notebook.
"This one started producing a repeating pattern."
Otis stared.
"A repeating pattern?"
"Several seconds of bubbling, then a pause. It happens again."
He laughed harder.
"She's timing bubbles now."
The men chuckled.
Naomi closed the notebook.
She felt embarrassed.
But she didn't argue.
She had learned that ridicule wasn't evidence.
And a person laughing at a question didn't make the question foolish.
So she continued working.
Until the last Sunday of August.
That evening, she stood beside the pond while the sun disappeared behind the distant hills.
The air was still.
The cattle were quiet.
And the water looked almost perfectly black.
Then she heard it.
A deep, irregular bubbling.
Three seconds.
A pause.
Then another burst.
Naomi crouched near the bank and listened.
The sound wasn't exactly like a spring.
It resembled water moving through a hollow space.
She wrote down the time.
The conditions.
And the location.
Then she added a sentence beneath the measurements.
If I'm wrong, nothing happens. If I'm right, how long has it been getting worse?
She closed the notebook.
And for the first time, she began wondering whether her grandmother's warning had been about something much more dangerous than ordinary deep water.
The rope experiment happened four days later.
Naomi hadn't intended to enter the pond that morning.
She planned to photograph the widening cracks, measure the shoreline, and check whether the bubbling continued under the bright afternoon sun.
But when she reached the bank, she saw something she hadn't noticed before.
A length of dark material lay just beneath the water near the center of the pond.
At first, it looked like an old branch.
Then sunlight caught an edge.
The surface reflected light in a straight, unnatural line.
Naomi crouched.
She couldn't identify the object.
It might have been a discarded piece of farm machinery.
An old pipe.
Or debris carried into the pond during a storm decades earlier.
She retrieved a long rope and grappling hook from the barn, thinking she might be able to catch the object and determine whether it was loose.
She didn't intend to drag anything enormous out of the water.
She simply wanted to understand what she was seeing.
Dale arrived while she was preparing the rope.
He stared.