The House at the End of the World

Katie’s house on Jacob’s Island is a beautiful place handmade by Joe Smith, a World War II veteran looking to escape humanity after being one of the soldiers who liberated the Dachau concentration camp. The house has a three-inch oak door and steel bars in the window casings. While the previous owner of the house, Tanner Walsh, had a more mystical explanation for the window casings, Katie believes that they are simply to make the place more impregnable.

Katie takes her evening wine into the armory, which doubles as her art studio. Once a famous artist, now she paints only for herself and destroys most of what she creates. She is a hyperrealist painter, trying to capture a subject’s essence in photo-real detail. Sitting down to work on her latest painting, she is startled by an explosion from Ringrock Island.

Katie goes out to watch the activity around Ringrock Island. Unmarked helicopters are dumping what seem like explosives into the water around the island and then surveying the water for something. Katie cannot come up with a logical explanation for this activity, which seems senselessly violent and disturbing. She feels as though she is being watched and goes back inside her house, reminding herself that the outside world doesn’t matter to her.

Katie, ritually clean and tidy, prepares to go to bed. Her preparedness is part of a mental health strategy. However, she compares this to the preparedness of the activity on Ringrock, which seems dangerous and crazy.

In a flashback, a 12-year-old Katie is drawing in her family’s kitchen when she is annoyed by a broken faucet. She uses what she’s observed from her father and her own deduction to fix the faucet herself. Later, when her mother wonders how she did it, her father claims that it is because Katie is an artist—a person who sees and understands the world around them. This incident teaches Katie to become a self-sufficient person.

In the present day, Katie gets dinner ready, noticing the colors of the sunset and the bright electric lights on Ringrock. She decides not to be curious about the island and instead draws the shades on the windows in her house, a nightly routine that helps her feel safe.

While eating dinner, Katie reads one of the books she often returns to, The Split Second by Daphne du Maurier, noticing the quality of du Maurier’s attention to suffering. Her reading is interrupted by loud buzzing from outside. She grabs a pistol and a flashlight to investigate.

Katie finds a swarm of 30 or 40 unfamiliar drones surveying her island and immediately feels as though her sanctuary has been violated. Wishing to capture a drone for evidence in case she’s been put at risk, she shoots twice at the drones but doesn’t hit one. Rethinking her plan, Katie decides that if she ends up in court for damaging potential government property, it might alter her ability to keep an important promise. She stops shooting and returns to her house but feels as though she’s being watched.

Back inside, Katie thinks about Tanner Walsh, the deceased author who previously lived on Jacob’s Ladder. Walsh left an audio diary behind, and Katie recalls hearing a strange entry about the lake in the bits she listened to. She finds it again and hears Walsh recalling a dream in which something on Ringrock was calling out to him, luring him across the lake. When he woke the next morning, he found his slippers on the pier—evidence that he had walked there in his sleep. Katie looks at the date on the tape and realizes that it was recorded the month Walsh died.

Katie listens to more of Walsh’s tapes, which confirm that he had ecstatic dreams of flying to Ringrock to commune with an entity here. She learns that Walsh believed it was possible he was being contacted by a telepath imprisoned on the island and that he decided to research the ownership and use of Ringrock on the mainland. Katie can’t find any tapes dated after this one.

Katie removes guns and ammunition from her armory hidden in the studio and then looks at her current painting, a depiction of a nail shop, a pizza parlor, and an ice cream store—a scene that fills Katie with an unnamed horror. She goes to bed, unafraid of the dark.

Katie wakes to a noise of something thudding against her house. She gets up to investigate, but instead of drawing the shades on the window, she merely listens to odd clicks against the glass.

More noises in and around her house draw Katie out of her bedroom. Something rattles the doorknob and presses against the door before climbing onto the roof and trying the chimney cap. Katie can’t rule out that it is an animal, but her instincts tell her that it is something unnatural and connected to the events at Ringrock.