A Winter Haunting

TWENTY-FIVE

THE five black dogs returned shortly after midnight. Dale watched from the darkened house, through the kitchen window and then from the dark dining room and then from through the parlor drapes and then from the study as the hounds circled the house, their pelts and eyes picking up the starlight, their forms visible only as negative space against the softly glowing snow.

Dale softly slapped the bat against his palm and sighed. He was very tired. He had not slept all day or evening, and the sleep the night before had been while sitting on the kitchen floor. Now, as then, he knew that if the dogs wanted to come in, they would. They were larger than ever. Larger than barrel-chested huskies, taller than wolfhounds. If they wanted to come in, the kitchen door would not hold them out.

Feeling an urge not dissimilar from an acrophobic’s desire to leap from high places, Dale found it pleasing to consider opening the door and going out into the night, allowing them to drag him down and off. At least the waiting would be over.

He went into the darkened study. The only light here was from the glow from the words he had not disturbed in almost twelve hours.

>Did you really kill Clare, Dale?

He decided to do this thing. To have a conversation. He leaned over to type.

>Are you really Duane?

No new words appeared while he watched, of course, so he took the bat and walked the short circuit down the hallway to the kitchen and back, checking to make sure that no hounds had forced their way in through any of the unprotected windows. The question went unanswered. He had not really expected an answer.

He tried again, typing, walking, finding a response this time, tapping in more words, walking, reading, thinking, and then typing again. In this way a sort of asylum conversation ensued.

>I didn’t kill Clare. I didn’t kill anyone.

>Then why did you remember doing so?

>It wasn’t a memory. Perhaps a fantasy. And how do you know what I’m remembering or fantasizing?

>Have you reached the point, Dale, where you can’t tell your fantasies from your memories?

>I don’t know, Mr. Phantom Interlocutor. Perhaps I have. Are you a phantom or a memory?

No response on the screen when Dale returned. He tried again.

>Look, if I’d killed Clare Two Hearts, I’d be in jail right now. The memory—the fantasy—had me follow her to New Jersey and kill her and her boyfriend at a public campsite. If it had happened that way, I would have left clues everywhere—plane tickets, talking to the kid at the canoe rental place, car rental bills, credit card signatures, probably footprints and fingerprints. I would have flown back to Montana a gory mess. Ax murders aren’t antiseptic acts, you know. The cops would have arrested me within twenty-four hours. Old boyfriends are the first suspects.

>If the police know there is an old boyfriend. Why would Clare tell anyone in her new life at Princeton about you, Dale? What did she call you that time you thought she was joking—“My first foray into the gray-haired set”? Why would she reveal that to anyone in her new life?

>My hair’s not that gray.

Dale made his loop, found no new words on the screen, read the exchange that was there, and laughed out loud in the dark house. “Jesus Christ, I’m certifiable.” He turned off the computer.

A soft voice said something indecipherable upstairs.

Dale got the flashlight and went up, leaning into the cold draft flowing down the staircase. There was a light. He hefted the bat, feeling his heart pound faster in his chest but also feeling no real fear. Whatever was there was there.

The remaining candle in the front bedroom had been re-lighted. It flickered as he entered, and his shadow danced on the mildewed wallpaper.

“Michelle?” There was no answer. He smashed the candle with the baseball bat, the flame skittering across floorboards before dying, and then went downstairs using only his flashlight.

Outside a dog howled.

Dale turned on the kitchen light, found the yellow legal pad he kept on the counter, and started a shopping list for the morning:

plastic sheeting

nails

After a moment of thought, he added:

new shotgun and shells

A different dog howled somewhere in the dark farther to the west, out toward the barn. Dale checked the flimsy door locks, turned out the light, and went downstairs to the basement.

It was warmer there. He turned on the soft lamp near the bed, got into his pajamas, and crawled under the thick comforter. The sheets felt clean, the pillows soft. He tried to read from an open paperback— Swann’s Way, open to the “Swann in Love” section—but he was too sleepy to make sense of the words. The big console radio was whispering dance music, but Dale was too tired to get up and shut it off. Besides, the glow of the wide dial was reassuring in the dark.

The starlight was visible through the small, high windows near the ceiling. Occasionally a dark shape would occlude the stars, then another would glide by, but Dale did not notice. He snored while he slept.

This night is where my friend Dale passed the point of no return. What was going to happen here was going to happen. He knew that even as he slept. There was no going back.

Dale did not feel like an unintelligent character in a sloppily told tale. This was his life. Everything in the past year or two had seemed to lead him here—to this house, to these events, to this pending conclusion to all doubts. In an age when his generation sought to hide all reality behind simulation and feigned experience, Dale had to know what was real. What was memory and what was fantasy? And there remained the simple fact that despite everything, Dale did not believe in haunted houses or ghosts. This disbelief ran deep as marrow, and his belief in this disbelief was as stubborn as bone. Dale believed in mental illness and in schizophrenia and in the uncharted confusions of the mind, but not in ghosts.

More important to his decision to stay these last few days of his life at The Jolly Corner was his perception—was his understanding —that whatever was happening to him had to be resolved here. This cascade of insane events had come to him in the form of a coming to life of something vital, a stirring of energies, a preparation for birth. Or perhaps a preparation for death. Either way, Dale believed, labor had been induced in this cold farmhouse out in the ass end of Illinois, and some rough beast was slouching toward The Jolly Corner either to be born or to die.

And there was the final fact that Dale knew that he could not go home now—could not show up at Anne’s and Mab’s and Katie’s door in this shape—could not return to the shreds and tatters of his former life in Missoula without this thing being resolved, these questions answered.

Once, when talking with Clare during a long hike in Glacier Park, he had asked her what she thought the topography of a human life might look like. She suggested that it was an inverted cone measured out in units of potential—infinite at the top, zero at the bottom—and that the decreasing radials around the diminishing outer shell of the cone could be measured in accelerating time as one grew closer to old age, death, dissolution. Dale had thought this a tad pessimistic. He had suggested that perhaps a human life was a simple parabola in which one never knew when the apogee—the highest, most sublime point—had been achieved.

“Maybe this is your apogee,” Clare had said, gesturing to the pine forest and the lake and the distant peaks and to herself. Somewhere nearby in the trees a Clark’s nutcracker had scolded them.

“Not yours?” he said, pausing to hitch up the chafing backpack straps.

“Definitely not mine,” Clare said in that offhand tone of casual cruelty that somehow seemed strangely attractive to him then—cosmopolitan, perhaps.

But Dale had wondered about that topography of a lifetime later, both before and after Clare and the sure grasp of his sanity had left him. Recently, it had amused him to think that the ribbon of his life might be twisted in a mad Möbius loop, curling back on and through itself, inside becoming outside, losing entire dimensions even while acquiring some impossible continuity.

Christmas had been on a Tuesday this year. Dale half expected to be arrested or dragged off to the loony bin by the weekend, but although Deputy Presser showed up to check on him—to make sure that he hadn’t left—on Saturday and Sheriff McKown came by late on Sunday, no one grabbed him and clasped him in handcuffs or strapped him into a straitjacket.

Both times Dale saw a sheriff’s car coming up the snowy drive, he was sure it was C.J. Congden. What would he do if it was? He had no idea. Each time the car drew close enough to be identified, Dale felt something like a sense of disappointment that it wasn’t Congden.

“How are you doing out here, Professor?” asked Sheriff McKown on Sunday afternoon. Dale had just been leaving for a walk, and the sheriff walked down to where Dale had paused near the large gasoline tank behind the generator shed. “Everything all right?” asked the sheriff.

Dale nodded.

“This amount of snow is something after all these warm, dry winters, huh?”

Dale asked, “Have you found the five skinheads?”

The sheriff had removed his Stetson and rubbed his fingers around the brim in a motion that reminded Dale of one of C.J. Congden’s habits. Perhaps all cops with cowboy hats did that. “Nope,” he said. “Their families haven’t heard from them, either. But there is one piece of interesting news.”

Dale waited.

“We have an old bachelor farmer who lives north of you who’s gone missing,” said McKown. “Bebe Larson. Him and his old Chevy Suburban disappeared on the day before Christmas Eve.”

“Do you think I killed him as well as the skinheads?” asked Dale.

McKown put his Stetson on slowly. “Actually, I was thinking that maybe Mr. Larson ran into your friends on County Six and they might have borrowed his truck and maybe him as well.”

“You think those boys are capable of kidnapping?” said Dale.

“I think Lester Bonheur is capable of anything,” McKown said flatly. “And the others are just along for the ride.”

Dale shrugged. “I’d like to go into Oak Hill sometime this week to get some provisions,” he said, amusing himself at the use of the word “provisions.” Pretty soon he’d be talking like one of his mountain man characters.

“That’d be fine,” said Sheriff McKown. “I trust that you’ll be coming back here until we get all of this other stuff cleared up.”

“Does all this other stuff include the return of my property, Sheriff? The over-and-under, I mean.”

McKown rubbed his chin. “I think we’d better hang on to that weapon until we find those boys, Professor Stewart.” The small man hesitated a moment. “Have you been taking the Prozac?”

“Yes,” lied Dale.

“The other prescription stuff too?”

“I haven’t had to,” Dale said. “I’ve been sleeping like a baby.” Like the dead.

“Have you talked to this Dr. Williams in Missoula again?”

“I haven’t been away from The. . . from the farm,” said Dale. “No phone.”

“Well, maybe you can talk to her when you come into Oak Hill.”

“Maybe,” agreed Dale.

When the sheriff got back in his vehicle, Dale leaned over and tapped on the driver’s-side window. The glass whined down. “Sheriff,” said Dale, “are you and your deputies going to be checking on me every day?”

“Well, we’re concerned about you, sir. And there’s this outstanding issue of the false report.”

Dale said nothing. Snow was falling gently on his bare head and eyelashes.

“But why don’t you give me a call when you’re in Oak Hill this week, just tell us when you’re heading back here. Then we’ll drop by sometime later in the week and make sure everything’s all right here.” When Dale just nodded, McKown said, “Well, if I don’t see you before Tuesday, you have a Happy New Year, Professor Stewart.”

Dale stood back and watched as the sheriff’s car turned around in the quickly falling snow and headed down the snowy lane. He noticed that the car’s wheels rolled over the fresh paw prints in the snow as the sheriff drove away.

That afternoon Dale changed his mind about buying plastic sheeting for the second floor and nailed up two sheets to cover the opening. The thin cotton did almost nothing to keep the cold air from flowing down the staircase, but the barrier offered some psychological relief.

Dale worked on his novel all the rest of that afternoon and evening, forgetting to eat, forgetting to pause even to go to the bathroom. The house grew quite cold as night approached, but Dale was lost in the hot summer days of his childhood and did not notice. He was almost three hundred pages into the novel by then, and although no distinct plot had emerged, a tapestry had been woven of leafy summer days, of the Bike Patrol kids wandering free around Elm Haven and the surrounding fields and woods during the long summer days and evenings, of endless hardball games on the dusty high school ball field and wild games of hide-and-seek in the deep woods near the Calvary Cemetery. Dale wrote about the Bootleggers’ Cave—not deciding whether his band of friends would find it or not—and he wrote about friendship itself, about the friendship of eleven-year-old boys in those distant, intense days of dying innocence.

When he looked up from the ThinkPad, it was after midnight. His computer and desk lamp were the only lights on in the house. A cold draft curled through the Old Man’s study. Dale saved his book to hard disk and floppy disk, checked DOS for any phantom messages—there were none—and walked through the dark house to the kitchen to make some soup before turning in.

“Dale.” The whisper was so soft as to be almost indistinguishable from the hiss of the hot water heater or the rough purr of the furnace waiting to light again. “Dale.” It was coming from the top of the darkened staircase.

No, not darkened. There was a light on the second floor, up there behind the taut, white wall of sheet. Seeking out no weapon, not even thinking about finding the baseball bat or crowbar, Dale climbed the cold stairs.

The light was only a dim glow from the front bedroom. The candle again. A shadow moved between the bedroom door and the wall of translucent white sheet. Dale watched as the center of the sheet seemed to ripple in a stronger breeze, then bulged ever so slightly outward. He moved to the top step and leaned closer. Six inches from his face, the sheet took on the definite impression of a nose, a brow, eye sockets, full lips.

Michelle or Clare?

Before he could find a resemblance, the bulge receded, but another disturbance moved the thin cotton toward him lower down. Three ripples, then five. Fingers. Dale looked down and could see the perfect shape of a woman’s hand, palm toward him, fingers straining against the sheet. He waited for the sheet to rip free of the nails. When it did not, he moved his own left hand to within an inch of that slowly moving white hand in the cloth. Less than an inch. His fingertips were millimeters away from touching the pressing fingertips through the sheet.

“No,” whispered Dale. He turned and went slowly downstairs. When he looked up the staircase again, the glow was gone and the sheet was as flat and vertical as the edge of some ageless glacier. He went into the kitchen and made some tomato soup, using the last of his milk to mix half-and-half with water in the can just as his mother had shown him when he was ten years old.

He had just dozed off in the basement, listening to the big band music as usual, when a sudden silence made him snap awake.

Dale sat up on the edge of Duane’s old bed. The radio console had gone dark. Had he shut it off? He didn’t remember doing so. But the reading lamp was still on, so the fuse hadn’t blown. Suddenly he felt a slight chill. “Aw, no,” he whispered to the empty basement.

Sliding out from under the quilt, setting the book of Proust he’d been reading safely on a wine-crate bookcase, Dale stepped over to the large console radio and wrestled it away from the wall.

The inside was empty. No wires, no tubes, no lights for the dial, no works at all. Dale looked at the interiors of the other radios he’d listened to over the past two months. All empty.

He went back and sat on the edge of the bed. “This,” he said to no one in particular, “is just plain stupid.”

Suspecting on some deep level that this would be the last night he would ever sleep in Duane McBride’s home, Dale slid back under the quilt and listened to the wind rise outside in the dark.