A Winter Haunting

TWELVE

>Welcome back, Dale.

Dale stood in the study staring at the screen of his IBM ThinkPad. There was nothing unsettling about receiving an e-mail except for the fact that (a) the modem was not currently connected to a cell phone or to any phone line, (b) the message had not come through his AOL account, and (c) the computer was not even running in Windows. Somehow the computer had exited to DOS and the message had been typed directly after the C prompt.

Then where the hell did the “You’ve got mail” voice come from? It had been the AOL voice. There was no mistake about that.

Dale came closer to the desk and studied the computer. Had he turned it on—or off—the previous evening before going down to the basement and falling asleep while listening to the radio? He couldn’t remember.

The message burned white against the black screen. Without touching the keyboard, Dale checked the serial ports, the PCMCIA slots, and the other connections. He knew that more and more computers and PDAs were operating wirelessly these days, but as far as he knew, his older ThinkPad didn’t have that capability. And even if it did, it would require Windows and his AOL account for him to receive or send mail. He subscribed to no other ISPs and had long ago deleted the other Internet alternatives that had been bundled with his laptop.

Which means that someone typed this directly onto the screen.Dale sat, keeping his fingers away from the keyboard, looking over his shoulder. Did Michelle come in here during her visit? They had gone up the stairs together to look at the plastic sheeting, but Dale could not remember her being out of his sight at any time.

Someone could have come in the house during the night. The door was unlocked this morning.That seemed more probable, but why this silly welcome note? Why not just steal the computer and be done with it? And where the hell did the AOL “you’ve got mail” voice come from? Dale was not terribly techno-savvy, but he’d been writing with and grading on and Internet researching with computers long enough to know that the AOL sounds were stored in wavefile form on the computer itself, so if someone wanted to activate it, all they would have to do would be. . .

But why? What kind of joke is this?

Dale sat staring for several more minutes, waiting for another line of letters to appear. None did.

Sighing, he tapped Enter and typed on the next line,>Thanks. Then he went back to the kitchen to reheat the bacon and make some toast. He had just carried the plate of toast and bacon to the table and was sipping his coffee when he heard, “You’ve got mail!”

This time he walked through the other ground-floor rooms with crowbar in hand before entering the study. Even from six feet away he could read the screen—

>You’re welcome, Dale.

Dale realized that he was breathing shallowly and that his heart was pounding. He took some deep breaths before sitting and typing—

>Who are you?

He sat there another ten minutes, watching the screen and waiting, but no new words appeared. A watched pot, he thought and lifted the crowbar and went back into the kitchen, locking the outside door. His coffee and food were cold, but he ate and drank anyway, listening all the while.

After five minutes or so he peeked into the study. No new words were on the screen.

He had just carried his plate over to the sink and was rinsing it when he heard, “You’ve got mail!”

Dale ran into the study, forgetting the crowbar.

>barguest

Dale laughed out loud. What kind of self-respecting ghost would identify itself as a bar guest? This was the kind of stupid screen name that hackers and technogeeks loved to go by. He typed, >Where are you e-mailing from, Barguest?

This time he waited a stubborn fifteen minutes, wanting to see words appear on the screen, but nothing happened. Finally he lifted the baseball bat out from under the bed and went downstairs to check the basement. He’d just finished looking in all of the dark corners and hidden spaces when he heard the familiar AOL voice upstairs announcing e-mail.

Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it does lessen fear of the unusual. Dale was more curious than anxious when he walked into the study to see what the uninvited hacker had to say.

>thaere theode thaer men habbath hunda haefod & of thaere eorthan on thaere aeton men hi selfe

Dale felt the flesh above his spine go cold. “Barguest” sounded like some young hacker’s screen name, all right, but how many teenage hackers knew Old English? Dale stared at the words, forcing himself to slip into his English professor mode.

“From the nation where men have the head of a dog and from the country where men devour each other.”Nice. Dale didn’t know where the quote was from—it sounded like a quote to him—but he knew that it wasn’t from Beowulf or any of the other epics he’d taught. “. . . the country where men devour each other.”

Thinking of Beowulf, he looked back at the word “barguest.” It wasn’t in any form of Old English that he recognized, but it had that Germanic feel to it. “Geist” meant spirit or ghost, and “bar” could stand for “bier”—as in “funeral bier.” He flexed his fingers over the keyboard and took a few more deep breaths before typing,>Well, you’re clever, but rude, Barguest. Speaking from ambush isn’t polite. I’ll chat with you if and when you tell me how you’ve hacked into my computer and who you are. Do you prefer modern English or Old English?

This time he did not wait around. He had not quite made it to the kitchen when the voice announced new mail.

>Welcome back, Dale. But be careful. We must find what we have lost. Cerberus der arge/und alle sine warge/die an hem heingem.

Dale exhaled slowly. If he was not mistaken, the last part of the message was Middle High German. Dale didn’t speak or read all that fluently in modern German, much less Middle High German, but he’d been required to do some doctoral research in the language, and at least one of his colleagues had been urging him for years to study and teach certain Middle High German epics as a prelude to Beowulf. He tried to print the page, but his printer would not go on-line unless he was in Windows 98 and he was sure he’d lose the DOS page if he opened Windows, so Dale grabbed a legal pad and pen and copied down everything on the screen. Beneath those notes, he translated the poem.

Cerberus the arg (“arag”? Old Norse “argr”?)

and all the wargs (wolves? outlaws? corpse-worriers?)

who follow him.

It was strange that he had seen that Old English word “warg,” derived from the German, only last night—in both his handwriting and Clare’s—in the margins of his Norton’s Anthology’s Beowulf. His hands were shaking slightly as he turned back to the keyboard:

>Enough. Who the hell are you? How do you know me? And what, exactly, have we lost?

He walked back to the kitchen and waited, but no AOL voice summoned him back. Several times he returned to the study, saw the lines on the screen but nothing new, and then walked out of the room, pacing through the dining room with its coffinlike learning machines, standing in the living room looking out at the gray rain, even going down into the basement awhile. No voice. No new message.

Finally Dale went back to the study and loaded Windows 98. He clicked on the AOL icon and tapped in his access code. The modem in the ThinkPad clicked, but the message came up,“No dial tone.” Angry now, Dale went out to the Land Cruiser and dragged in his cell phone. He hooked the phone to the modem and tried again. Now the modem found a dial tone, but the legend came up, “Unable to connect to AOL number.” On the phone itself, the display continued to readNO SERVICE. He exited Windows to DOS. The screen was empty after the C prompt. He loaded Windows and AOL again, but could not get on-line.

After twenty minutes of messing with it all, Dale ripped the phone out, exited AOL, and shut off the goddamned computer. He looked at the notes on his legal pad again. “Cerberus the arg and all the wargs who follow him.” He knew Cerberus, of course—the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the underworld, the infernal regions, the land of the dead—but he had no clue as to what the quote meant.

Whoever this asshole hacker was, he was clever and literate, but he was still an asshole.

Too agitated to try to write, Dale grabbed his parka—returning to the study for the baseball bat—and went outside for a walk. The rain had stopped and the air had actually become warmer, but a fog had rolled in. Dale guessed that he could see less than fifty feet. The black, contorted silhouette of the first dead crabapple tree along the driveway was visible, but the barn and outbuildings had disappeared. His white Land Cruiser, beaded with moisture, looked only semisolid in the weak light and creeping fog. The eaves dripped.

From somewhere in the direction of the invisible chicken coop, a dog howled. It howled again.

Dale actually grinned. After hefting the baseball bat and slapping it against his palm a couple of times, he tugged the hood of his parka up and went hunting for the hound.

The fog changed the straightforward little Illinois farm into a foreign country. The dog had ceased howling the instant that Dale had stepped off the side porch, and he could not be certain of directions, since the shifting walls of fog both muffled and distorted sounds. He walked toward the chicken coop. The house and his truck disappeared in rolling gray behind him.

We must find what we have lost.Aloud, speaking in a Jay Silverheels voice, Dale said into the fog, “Who’s this ‘we,’ white man?”

His voice sounded strange and lost in the gray blankness.

We must find what we have lost.

“Here, doggy, doggy, doggy,” called Dale, swinging the bat in one hand. He had no intention of hitting the pooch—he’d never hurt an animal, or a human being, for that matter—but he was tired of being spooked by the thing. Anne had done a lot of research on dogs before they bought Hasso, their little terrier, and she had explained how they were still pack animals—obeying a pack hierarchy, demonstrating either dominance or submission. For instance, they had never cured Hasso of licking—a classic submissive behavior most people confuse with affection. A submissive dog in the wild licks the pack leader or those hounds above it in pack hierarchy in order to receive food in return. This black dog probably hadn’t worked out its dominance/submission issues with Dale yet. He decided that he’d help it along.

We must find what we have lost.Setting aside the royal “we” for a moment, Dale pondered that phrase. He had come here to Duane’s old farm because he felt that he had lost everything—Anne and the girls, Clare, his job, the respect of his peers, his self-respect, and his ability to write—but down deep, Dale knew that this attitude was all self-pity and mummery. He still had some money in the bank; the ranch could be his again in ten months after the renters’ lease was up; he might not truly be on sabbatical, but odds favored him returning to teach at the University of Montana again next year if he so chose. He had a $50,000 sport utility vehicle parked in the farmhouse’s muddy turnaround, and it was fully paid for. He was sixty-some pages into a new novel and he had a publisher who hadn’t given up on him yet. No, he hadn’t lost everything—far from it.

We must find what we have lost.Perhaps it was a case of “what we have lost.” Not just him, but everyone in this new century. His generation, at least. Writing about the eleven-year-old kids in the summer of 1960 made Dale’s chest ache every time he sat down at the computer—not just because of the nostalgia of that half-lost summer of so long ago, but because of some indefinable sense of loss that made him want to weep.

“Yoo-hoo, dog,” called Dale, opening the door to the chicken coop. He wished that he had brought a flashlight. He stepped into the darkness and then froze as a powerful smell struck him.

Not the smell of decay, thought Dale. Stronger. Coppery. Fresh. He blinked in the dim light, raising the baseball bat like a club.

The smell of blood.

He almost left then, but he had to see. In a minute or two his eyes adapted well enough for him to make out the long, low room of empty roosts and matted straw and splattered walls.

The walls and floor had been splattered with ancient, dried blood the first time he had looked in here. They were splattered with blood now, but even in the dim light he could see that it was fresh blood—wet, dripping, some of it actually running down the rough boards as he watched.

Time to go, thought Dale. He backed out of the chicken coop, setting his back to the wall and raising the bat again. The fog had closed in tighter. The light had failed even more. Dale felt his heart pounding and his ears straining to make out any sound—the soft squelch of mud under boots, the movement of four-legged things. Water dripped from the eaves of the coop. From somewhere to the north there came a loud, strangely familiar rasp of wood on metal. The big barn doors being slid open?

Time to go. Not just back to the farmhouse, but out of here—away from Illinois and its penny-dreadful little mysteries. Back to Montana, or farther east to New Hampshire or Maine. Somewhere else.

No. Here is where we can find what we have lost.The thought made him stop, not just because it had come unbidden and out of context, but because it seemed to have been stated in a mental voice other than his own.

Dale was striding quickly now, trying to keep his boots from being swallowed in the mud, listening hard for something moving behind or ahead of him.

He was almost back to the farmhouse when he saw two huge red eyes glowing at him through the fog.

A second later a car engine started up. Not eyes, taillights.

Dale ran, bat in hand, sure that someone was stealing his truck. The taillights glowed crimson a moment and then shut off as the vehicle drove quickly away through the fog.

Dale slid to a stop on the muddy turnaround area. His Land Cruiser was still where he’d parked it. He beeped the security system. It had been locked. But it seemed to have sunk into the mud. . .

“God damnit,” growled Dale as he stepped closer. All four of the tires were flat. Dale assumed that they had been slashed again.

Dale walked out in front of the house, bat raised to his shoulder and ready to swing. He could hear a truck driving away on County 6, moving much too quickly for the foggy conditions.

There were tracks in the gravel and mud driveway—one pickup truck from the looks of the wheel tracks.

“Not funny, Derek,” yelled Dale into the fog. “Not one bit fucking funny. You assholes are going to jail this time.”

Tracking mud, Dale went into the farmhouse and looked around.

I’ve been here—what—three weeks, and how many dozen times have I had to search this fucking house?He searched it again.

No muddy bootprints except his own. No sign of anything missing or disturbed.

Except the fucking laptop. The ThinkPad was on again, the screen black except for three lines of white letters burning after the C prompt. This time Dale was sure that he had shut the computer off before leaving.

Disgusted, he walked over to flick the power off, not wanting to read another irritatingly cryptic message. But the stanza form of the message made him read, and the content made him pause. This was no High Middle German or Old English—Dale Stewart, Ph.D., even recognized the source. It was from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, if he remembered correctly. Clare could tell him. She had been auditing the graduate-level Eighteenth-Century Literature seminar the last time he’d taught this poem. Clare remembered everything. But Clare was not around to remind him, and odds were overwhelming that she never would be again.

>For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,

Like him of whom the story ran,

Who spoke the spectre hound in man.

Still disgusted, knowing that he would have to walk a couple of miles in the fog just to get his cell phone to work in order to call the Oak Hill garage to get his truck fixed, furious that he would have to deal with C.J. Congden again, knowing in his heart that these punks were never going to be caught or punished, feeling that the mystery of the blood in the chicken coop had been solved in the all-too-mundane fact of the tire slashings, tired of this hacker bullshit, Dale pushed the OFF button and watched the computer screen wink to a point of light and then die to black.