Lake Harmon is the body of water that gave the town its name, which is the reverse of what most readers assume. The lake is a deep glacial kettle pond, ninety feet at the deepest sounding, fed by a series of cold springs and by the fattened creek the township calls the Harmon River. Its surface is roughly the size of two farms laid corner-to-corner. It freezes in January; it does not freeze every January.
The settlement on its north shore is older than the town proper. The clapboard houses around the marina were built between 1888 and 1912, originally as summer cottages for the merchant class of the nearest large city, then converted year-round when the railroad spur made commuting plausible, then disinherited again when the railroad spur was abandoned. Lake Harmon is, today, a district of about six hundred people, most of whom were born here, none of whom commute anywhere.
You reach Lake Harmon from downtown by the causeway, a quarter-mile of two-lane road built on fill across the narrowest part of the lake’s neck. The causeway was paved in 1953 and has been the township’s most expensive piece of infrastructure ever since. Sarah Marsh grew up on the lake side; she crossed the causeway every morning of her four years of high school, by bus.
The causeway is also the road the Seer takes, in book two, when the warning happens at the license bureau on the lake side rather than the diner downtown.
The marina at the south end of the settlement, thirty-eight slips, of which twenty-two are usually rented, is the setting for the Seer scene in book seven, the one that happens at dusk in late September. The marina is also, less prominently, the place where David Marsh’s father kept the small aluminum boat the family used twice a summer for most of David’s childhood. The boat was sold the spring after the funeral. David has not been to the marina since.
The lake is the series’ only quiet. It is the room where the books send protagonists when the books need a protagonist to stop and look at something for a chapter. The water does not editorialize. The lake is, for the same reason a lake is in any literary novel, the place where the protagonist meets the version of themselves the warning is about to name.