A Winter Haunting

TWENTY-ONE

AND then what happened?”

“I already told you what happened next.”

“Tell us again,” said the deputy sheriff.

Dale sighed. He was very tired and his head hurt. The local anesthetic was wearing off where he had received nine stitches for the cut on his head, and a tetanus shot made his arm ache even through the throb of various bruises. But the headache was the worst part. The nurses had let him get dressed again, and now he and the sheriff’s deputies were talking in an empty lounge just off the emergency room at the Oak Hill Hospital. It was a little after three in the morning, but there were no windows in the lounge and the fluorescent lights were very bright. The air smelled of burned coffee.

“After you left the farmhouse,” prompted Deputy Presser. He was the older of the two men in uniform but still in his twenties, with a florid face and short-cropped blond hair. “How long was that after you say you lost consciousness?”

Dale shrugged and then regretted the movement. His arms and shoulders and ribs ached as if someone had been kicking him with hobnailed boots. The headache stabbed behind his eyes like so many steel darts. “After I left the farmhouse,” Dale said slowly, “I walked to the KWIK’N’EZ at the I-74 exit.”

“But you say you had a cell phone. You could’ve used it before you got to the KWIK’N’EZ.”

“I said that I couldn’t find the cell phone,” Dale said softly, so as not to aggravate the headache. He tried to place words between waves of pain. “I looked in my truck, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe it slipped down between the seats. The Land Cruiser’s interior lights weren’t working. I could have looked in the house, but I thought it was important to get out of there and call for help.”

“Your sports utility vehicle would not start,” said the deputy in a monotone. He was glancing at the cheap spiral notepad in his hand. Dale could see the price sticker with its bar code still on the back of the notepad.

“My sports utility would not start,” confirmed Dale. “The battery. . . it wouldn’t even turn over.”

“But Deputy Reiss got it started on the first try using the keys you lent us,” said the sheriff’s deputy. He glanced at the younger deputy sitting on the other side of the table. The younger man nodded seriously in confirmation.

Dale started to shrug again but then nodded. “I don’t know why it didn’t start earlier.”

“And you have no phone at your residence. At the residence you currently lease?”

Dale took a breath. Nodded again. They had been going over this in one form or another since midnight. “You’re sure there’s no sign of Michelle?” he asked the younger deputy.

“Nope,” said Deputy Dick Reiss. His name badge was pinned over his left shirt pocket.

“It’s dark out there,” said Dale. “Did you check the big barn?”

“Taylor and me checked all the barns and sheds,” said Deputy Reiss. Dale saw for the first time that the young man had a small wad of tobacco tucked between his cheek and gum.

The older deputy held up the notepad as a gesture for Deputy Reiss to shut up. “Mr. Stewart—do you prefer ‘Mister’ or ‘Professor’?”

“I don’t care,” Dale said tiredly.

“Mr. Stewart,” continued the deputy, “why did you walk the three miles to the KWIK’N’EZ? Why not to a neighbor’s house? The Fallons live just a mile and a half north of you. The Bachmanns are just three quarters of a mile back toward the Hard Road—right before the cemetery.”

“Bachmanns?” said Dale. “Oh, that’s who live in Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s house now.”

Deputy Brian Presser returned a blank gaze.

Dale shook his head again. “If we’re talking about Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s old house just north of the cemetery, it was dark. There were no vehicles in the driveway. A big dog was barking in the side yard. I kept walking.”

“But why the KWIK’N’EZ rather than into town, Mr. Stewart?”

“I couldn’t remember where there was a pay phone in town,” said Dale. “I thought there might be one at the post office or in front of the bank, but I couldn’t remember. And it seemed darker in that direction. When I got to Jubilee College Road. . . well, I could see the lights of the KWIK’N’EZ just a mile or so ahead along the cutoff past the Hard Road.” He touched his throbbing temple. “It seemed. . . safer. A straight line.”

Deputy Presser wrote something in his tiny notepad. Dale noticed that the deputy’s fingers went white with the tension of holding the pen and that the fingers bent almost concave in the same too-tight way that some of his students at the university had held their pens while taking notes.

Dale cleared his throat. “I didn’t actually make the call,” he said. “I was. . . well, I sort of lost consciousness again when I got to the gas station. I just asked the night man there to call the police and then I sat down on the floor next to the frozen foods until your deputy arrived. Not Deputy Reiss. The other one.”

“Deputy Taylor,” said Deputy Presser.

“The sheriff’s not involved?” asked Dale. He had been relieved to the marrow of his bones when C.J. Congden had not responded to the call.

“No, sir,” said Presser. “The sheriff’s taken his family up to Chicago for the holidays. He’ll be back day after tomorrow. Did you say you knew the sheriff, Mr. Stewart?”

“A long time ago,” said Dale. “We went to school together. A long, long time ago.”

Deputy Presser looked up at this, then made a note in his notepad.

“Jesus Christ,” said Dale, shaking with fatigue and the aftereffects of shock, “aren’t you going to get some people to look for Michelle? Those. . . animals. . . might have dragged her anywhere. She could still be alive!”

“Yes, sir. Come daylight, we’ll have some folks out there. But tonight we’ve still got to get some things straight. You say she drove a white Toyota pickup truck?”

“A Tundra, I think,” said Dale. He looked up at the two deputies. “It must still be parked there at The Jolly. . . at the farm.”

“No,” said Presser. “When Deputy Taylor and Deputy Reiss here drove out to the old McBride place, there was no white pickup. No vehicle whatosever. . . except for your Toyota Land Cruiser, of course. Which started right up when Deputy Reiss tried it with the keys you gave him.”

Dale could only frown at the two men for a moment. “No pickup?” he said at last. “No other car?”

“No, sir,” said Deputy Presser, jotting notes again. “Are you sure you saw the vehicle you say Miz Staffney arrived in?”

“Yes,” said Dale. “Wait. . . no. I don’t remember seeing her truck yesterday. But. . . I mean. . . she had to have driven there, right? It’s too far to walk from town. . .” For a wild moment, Dale felt his heart hammering with hope. Michelle must have not been hurt too badly if she could have driven her truck away. Then he remembered the snarling and snapping of the hounds and his heart rate slowed, the surge of hope fading. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Did you check her house in town?”

“Yes, sir,” said Presser. “We checked the house you told us about. There’s no one there. No vehicle in the drive there, either.”

Dale breathed out and looked down at his hands where they lay as heavy and clumsy as poorly executed clay sculptures on his thighs. His chinos were filthy and spattered with his own blood.

“You say she arrived at the farmhouse in the daylight, though?” asked Deputy Presser.

“Late morning,” said Dale. “Or very early afternoon. I was sleeping late. She woke me. We started cooking the dinner shortly after she arrived.”

“And you never noticed what vehicle Miz Staffney arrived in?”

“No,” said Dale. He looked the young deputy in the eye. Then he turned his gaze on the younger deputy, who stared back while chewing his tobacco. “Look, I asked earlier, but neither of you answered. Did you find blood there? Torn clothing? Signs of a struggle?”

“We found blood where you hit the door,” said Deputy Reiss, moving the chaw aside with his tongue. “We found that sports jacket you talked about. It was all tore up, just like you said.”

“And Michelle? Was there any sign of. . . of the dog attack?”

Before the younger deputy could answer, Deputy Presser raised the notepad to silence him again. “Mr. Stewart, we’re going back out to the McBride place now, to look around again. We’d like your permission to search the house itself. Deputy Reiss there stood in the kitchen and shouted in to see if the lady was inside, peeked in a couple of rooms, but we’d like your permission to really search in the house. Could be, if she was hurt, she might be in there out of sight somewhere.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Dale, struggling to get up.

“No, sir, that’s probably not a good idea,” said Deputy Presser. “The doctor here says that it might be better, because of the knock on your head, if you stayed in the hospital until tomorrow noon or so for observation.”

“I’m going,” said Dale. He held on to the back of his chair, blinking away the dizziness that came with the waves of headache.

“Your call, Mr. Stewart,” said Deputy Presser. He and the other deputy led Dale through the empty ER, past the curious nurses and interns, and outside to where a Sheriff’s Department car idled in the driveway, its exhaust roiling up and surrounding them like fog.

Dale rode in the back of the cruiser and felt like a prisoner—wire mesh grille between him and the two silent deputies up front, no window or door handles in the back, and the stink of urine and desperation rising out of the ripped upholstery. Evidently even small counties like Oak Hill’s and Elm Haven’s had their problems. Dale felt his heart begin to pound heavily as they drove up the lane to The Jolly Corner, the dead trees gaunt at the edge of the headlights.

Deputy Taylor was waiting in his idling vehicle. For a minute the four men stood in the dark side yard, the three deputies talking softly among themselves while Dale’s gaze flicked repeatedly to the night-dark fields beyond the dim glow of the lights. “Could I have the keys?” he asked.

“Pardon?” said the deputy who had shown up at the KWIK’N’EZ hours earlier. Taylor was short and fat.

“Car keys,” said Dale. He took them from the deputy and crawled up into his Toyota SUV. The truck started immediately. Dale turned on the overhead light and found his cell phone where it had slipped down between the center console and the passenger seat. He thumbed its on switch, but the display showed the charge depleted. Dale slid the phone into his shirt pocket and joined the three deputies on the stoop. He was cold and shivering without a jacket.

The kitchen was just as he and Michelle had left it after dinner—dishes rinsed but piled on the counter, the apple pie cold next to the empty coffee cups. Dale remembered that Michelle had turned off the coffeemaker before they had gone upstairs.

Deputy Presser stepped over to the stove and pulled the Savage over-and-under shotgun from where it had been propped against the wall. He broke it open, removed the unfired.410 cartridge, and raised his eyebrows while looking at Dale.

“I kept the gun loaded because of the dogs,” said Dale.

“So you’d seen them dogs before,” said Deputy Reiss from where he stood looking into the empty dining room.

“I told you both that I’d seen the dogs before. Just never so. . . big.”

Deputies Presser and Reiss exchanged glances. Dale noticed that Presser had slipped the shotgun cartridge in his jacket pocket. He handed the weapon to Deputy Taylor, who remained standing by the outside door.

“I’m freezing,” said Dale. “I’m going to go downstairs to get a sweater.”

“We’ll come with you,” said Deputy Presser. To Taylor, he said, “Larry, you look in the rooms up here.”

The basement was, as always, warmer than the upstairs. Dale pulled a heavy wool sweater from his stack of clothes near the bed and slipped it over his head while the two deputies looked around the room, shining their flashlights behind the furnace and peering into the empty coal bin. Michelle was not hiding anywhere.

Upstairs again, Deputy Taylor reported that there was nothing on the first floor. Presser nodded and stepped into Dale’s study. “What’s that mean?” asked the deputy, pointing his heavy flashlight at the IBM ThinkPad’s screen.

The message on the otherwise dark screen read,>Hrot-garmr. Si-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at. Wargus sit.

“Is that German?” asked Deputy Presser.

“I’m a writer,” said Dale. He was stalling for time and trying to translate the message himself. He had never seen it before.

“I asked you if it was German or something.”

Dale shook his head. “Just double-talk. I’m writing a science fiction novel, and I’m trying to get the sound of some alien’s speech.”

“Like Klingon, you mean,” offered Deputy Reiss from the hall.

“Right,” said Dale.

“Shut up, Dick,” said Deputy Presser. The deputy walked out into the hall, leaving Dale to continue staring at the screen. If any of the deputies read Old English—a long shot, Dale knew—he might be in trouble. But as far as he could tell, only the first and last parts of the message were in Old English. “Hrot-garmr” translated as fire, but literally meant “howling dog,” as in the howling funeral pyre they built for Beowulf’s or Brynhild’s funeral in the old epics. “Wargus sit” translated into “he shall be a warg”—that word again. “Warg” meant an outlaw who had literally become a wolf in the eyes of his comrades, a worrier of corpses, someone who, like Indo-European werewolves, deserved to be strangled.

“Mr. Stewart? What’s upstairs?”

Dale came out into the crowded hall and looked up to where Deputy Presser stood five steps up the staircase. “Nothing’s up there,” said Dale. “It’s been sealed off for years. I just took the weather plastic down a few weeks ago. It’s empty.” He shut up, realizing that he was babbling. His heart pounded in syncopation with his throbbing headache.

“Mind if I take a look?” asked Deputy Presser. Without waiting for an answer, the deputy switched on his flashlight and loudly climbed the stairs. Deputy Reiss followed. Taylor went back into the kitchen, still carrying Dale’s empty over-and-under. Dale hesitated a few seconds and then went up the stairs.

Both men were in the front bedroom. One of the candles on the bedside table had burned out in its own pool of wax, but the other one was still burning. The blanket and the quilt on the bed were still mussed from when Michelle tossed them back as she got up to leave just. . . My God, thought Dale. . . just hours earlier. It seemed like days.

Deputy Presser lifted the quilt with his long flashlight and looked at Dale for an explanation. Dale met his gaze and stayed silent.

The three looked in the other room—dark and empty except for the child-sized rocking chair still in the middle of the room—and then clumped downstairs to the kitchen again.

“Are you going to search for her outside?” asked Dale. His throat felt raw and his head pounded worse than ever.

“Yeah,” said Deputy Presser. “In the morning. Deputy Taylor here’ll stay with you until we get back.”

“To hell with waiting until morning,” said Dale. Someone had brought his flashlight inside from where it had fallen during the dog attack and set it on the counter. Dale tried it. It worked. “I’m going to search the fields and outbuildings now.”

Deputy Presser shrugged. “Larry,” he said, talking to Taylor, “you stay with him here at the farm until we get back. If Mr. Stewart goes looking, you stay near your car radio in case we need to get in touch. If he don’t come back in an hour, you radio dispatch. You got that?”

“But Brian, it’s cold and dark out there as a. . .”

“You do what I say.” Presser looked at Dale. “We’ll be back sometime in the morning. Mr. Stewart, I suggest you get some sleep rather than wander around the farm in the dark, but Larry’ll be here in case you need help.”

“I don’t need for Deputy Taylor to stay,” said Dale. “But I’ll need my shotgun.”

Presser took the weapon from Taylor. He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said with absolutely no tone of regret. “We’re going to have to keep this at the sheriff’s office for a while. Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” said Dale, truly mystified.

The deputy looked Dale hard in the eye. “You say there’s a woman missing here. You say dogs got her. Well, if a woman’s really missing, maybe something other than dogs got at her. We may need this shotgun for tests.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Dale.

Presser gestured for Deputy Reiss to follow him, motioned for Deputy Taylor to stay where he was, and he and Reiss went out to their car and drove off. Dale glanced at the clock. It was a few minutes after 4:00A.M. —still three hours until the first pale hint of sunrise.

Dale pulled on his winter peacoat, which was hanging on a hook by the door, switched on the flashlight, and went outside.

You shouldn’t ought to go off alone,” shouted Deputy Taylor from the circle of light on the stoop.

“Come with me, then,” called Dale, not turning, walking toward the first outbuilding.

“I gotta stay near the car radio!”

Dale paid no further attention to the deputy. At the edge of the muddy turnaround, he whisked his flashlight beam through the frozen weeds, stabbed it behind the fences, swept it around the outside of the chicken coop. Nothing. Dale slammed the frozen door to the coop open and peered inside, moving the light from walls to nests to floor. For a second it looked as if someone had piled a dozen small, dark-metal coffins in the coop, but then Dale remembered moving Mr. McBride’s punch-card learning machines out here. Dark stains were everywhere, but they were the old, dried, faded stains. A fox had gotten into the coop when there had been chickens here, he had told Michelle. Or a dog.

The next several outbuildings were also empty. Dale’s flashlight beam moved across hanging sickles, scythes, grass cutters, plow disks, extra cornrollers, harrow disks, unnamed blades—all rusted red-brown. His flashlight beam was fading, the batteries dying.

Dale walked farther from the farmhouse, its few visible lights seeming very far away. Out by the rusting gas tank, which hung like some great spider’s egg from the iron girders, one pair of wheel ruts led to the barn, another south along the fence at the edge of the empty field. Dale walked out into the field, slapped the flashlight hard against his palm to brighten the beam, and repeatedly called Michelle’s name into the night, pausing each time to listen for any response from the dark fields. Nothing. Not even an echo or distant dog bark. Dale walked up and down the rutted lanes, shining the flashlight beam on bare patches of mud, hoping for dog prints, a human bootprint, a shred of cloth. . . anything as a sign. The ground was frozen and unrevealing.

Panting slightly now, his breath fogging into the freezing predawn air, flashlight glow as dim as a dying candle, Dale walked to the giant barn and leaned his weight into sliding back the huge door. The warped wood and rusted steel screeched in protest, but finally opened enough for him to slip in.

The harvesting combine still filled the space, the cornrollers reaching for him like faded red teeth.

“Michelle!!”

Something rustled in one of the high lofts, but it was too small a sound to be a woman. The hounds couldn’t have hauled her up there. He shined the light up toward the impossibly high rafters and hidden lofts, but the cone of light was too dim now to reach that far. But if she escaped the dogs, she could be up there, hiding, injured.

Dale tucked the flashlight in his jacket and climbed the nearest ladder, feeling the rot in the wood and smelling the rot in the boards and straw of the barn itself. The structure was old and the ladder soft. He made sure that he never had both hands holding a single rung at one time—if one rung let go, he wanted to be connected to something solid.

Thirty feet up and he was high enough to peer over the edge of the wall and into the dark void of the first loft. The roof of the combine—the same combine that had killed his friend Duane forty years ago, chewing him up like so much offal?—was below him now, looking scabrous in the dying light. Dale shook the flashlight again, but this time the beam only dimmed further.

This loft was empty except for matted straw, some rotted tack, and a skull.

Dale crawled into the loft area, feeling the thin, rotted wood creak beneath his weight, groping ahead for the skull. It barely filled his palm, the long yellow teeth pressing toward the blue vein in his wrist. What the hell had it been? A rat? It seemed too large for a rat. A raccoon or fox? How did it get up here?

He set the skull back, swept the flashlight uselessly back and forth toward the other black rectangles of the loft, and called Michelle’s name again. The only response was a fluttering of a barn owl or sparrows in their nest.

The flashlight died completely before he started down the ladder. Dale tucked it into his jacket and checked the luminous dial of his watch, noting that his arm was shaking from either the terrible cold or the strain of climbing, or both. It was just 4:45.

Dale left the barn door open when he walked back to the house, half hoping that the hounds would jump him in the dark along the way, wanting to know that they were real. He gripped the long barrel of the useless flashlight so hard that his fingers cramped.

The deputy’s car was idling and the deputy was snoring in the front seat, his police radio cackling static audible even through the raised window glass. Dale left him sleeping and went into the house. It was still cold inside. He turned up the thermostat, heard the old furnace click in, and walked into the study. He had forgotten the computer.

>Hrot-garmr. Si-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at. Wargus sit.

Dale rubbed his cheek, feeling the beard there. He was very tired, and his headache had grown worse rather than better. He found it difficult to focus his eyes on the screen. “Howling dog”—as if for fire. “He shall be a warg.” But what the hell was the middle part? After another moment of thought, during which he half dozed, Dale typed—

>What the hell is the middle part?

A moment later he snapped awake, realizing that he had dozed off in his chair while waiting for an answer. The screen never answers when I’m here. Aching everywhere, his head and lacerated scalp throbbing, Dale pulled himself out of the chair and walked out to the kitchen. He peered through the glass—the deputy was still there—and then locked the door and went back into the study.

>It is Hittite.

Dale sighed and rubbed his cheek again. He had to try twice before he could type out his next question without misspellings.

>What does it mean ?

This time he walked to the bathroom, holding himself upright with one palm against the wall as he urinated into the bowl. Flushing the toilet, washing his hands, staring at his pale and red-eyed image in the mirror, he felt as if he were observing and feeling everything through a waterfall of red pain. He walked back into the study.

>zi-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at means “thou art become a wolf.”

Dale felt a surge of rage through the pain and fatigue. He was so fucking tired of games, he could throw up.

>Why the hell do you send me these messages in code if you’re just going to translate them for me?

Even before he had walked back from the kitchen, he knew he had wasted a question. This was absurd. The computer screen seemed to agree with him, since there was no reply. He hurriedly typed—

>Who has turned into a wolf? Me?

This time Dale walked to the head of the basement stairs and paused. Big band music was coming from the console radio down there. Hadn’t it been off when he and the deputies had been down there? Wishing that he still had his loaded shotgun but almost too tired to care about what was waiting for him, Dale went down the stairs.

The soft lamps near Duane’s old brass bed spilled soft yellow light onto the pillows. The wine crates and wooden shelves of paperbacks were reassuring in their familiar clutter. The furnace rattled and breathed with its usual sound. The radio dial glowed, and the old music played softly. Perhaps he had turned the radio on without thinking about it when he was down here. Or perhaps the station had been off the air for a while when the deputies were here with him. Who cared?

His legs felt leaden as he climbed the stairs and went back into the study.

>LU.MES hurkilas—the demon entities who are set to capture wolves and to strangle serpents.

“Well,” said Dale to the empty room, “thanks for nothing.” He switched off the ThinkPad and fell onto the daybed, still fully clothed, his muddy boots hanging over the edge. He was asleep before he thought to pull a blanket up over himself.