A Winter Haunting

TWENTY-SIX

THE sunrise of the last day of the old year, the old century, and the old millennium did not dawn; it seeped in like an absentminded spill of sick light, its stain of lighter gray blotting slowly beneath a shroud of darker gray. Dale watched it from the kitchen where he had been since 5:00A.M., drinking coffee and looking out the small windows, watching the snow fall just beyond the frosted panes and sensing the movement of black hounds circling farther out.

The snow was already ten inches deep, and it continued to fall. The stunted trees along the long lane had become as fanciful as twisted bonsai inked into some Japanese watercolor, snow-laden, abstracted. The outbuildings no sooner appeared in the weak morning light than they tried to disappear behind accumulating drifts and blowing snow. Even the white Land Cruiser was up to its black running boards in snow and wore rounded cornices and caps on its hood and windshield.

Dale checked his provisions—smiling again at the word—and decided that he had enough canned goods and bread to last for a few days. A part of him knew that he would not need a few days’ worth of food, but he worked at ignoring that voice.

It was a good day to write and Dale wrote, conjuring up summer days while winter pressed cold and flat against the study’s single-paned glass. When he took a break for a late lunch sometime before 3:00P.M., the daylight was already ebbing, draining out of the day like gray water out of a sink. Dale returned to the computer but could not concentrate on the passage in the scene in the chapter that had seemed so alive only moments earlier. He shut down Windows and stared at the DOS screen.

>ponon yo-geblond up astigeo

won to wolcnum, ponne wind styrep

lao gewidru, oopaet lyft orysmap,

roderas reotao. Nu is se raed gelang

eft aet pe anum. Eard git ne const,

frecne stowe, oaer pu findan miht

fela-sinnigne secg; sec gif pu dyrre.

Dale had to smile at this. His ghostly interlocutor was becoming less imaginative—this message was Old English, of course, but it was hampered by the ghost’s (or Dale’s computer’s) apparent lack of diacritics and proper Old English letter forms. For instance, Dale knew immediately that what his ThinkPad script—set up to work with his HP Laserjet 4M printer—had shown as “3st4ge0” should have been rendered “astigeo,” and what looked like “oopaet” on his screen should be “o0p1t.” More importantly, even without translating it all, Dale knew at once that this was a passage from Beowulf.

Dale had brought Seamus Heaney’s brilliant 2000 translation to Illinois with him and now he went to the basement to retrieve it. He found the cited passage in lines 1373 to 1379 in the description of the haunted mere:

Dale contemplated a response to this, decided that none was needed, and reached to shut off his computer. He paused then and opened Windows instead, clicking on the Word icon. Rather than calling up the file for the novel he’d worked on every day for the past two months, he opened a clean document page and began typing.

To Whom It May Concern:

Everything that I’ve lost, I’ve lost because I fucked it up. It’s no one’s fault but my own. I think that I’ve spent my life either trying to be someone else or waiting to become me and not knowing how. I’ve come too far out to this place and I don’t know the way back.

At least a few things make more sense. After all these years, I finally managed to read part of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu —the title is translated on this edition as Remembrance of Things Past, but I remember Clare telling me that a better translation would be In Search of Lost Time. It’s shameful for an old English major, much less a writer and professor of English, to confess to never having read this classic, but I’d picked it up a hundred times over the decades and never gotten past the boring first section. This time I found it lying here in Duane’s basement, opened it randomly to the section called “Swann in Love,” and read that straight through. It’s brilliant, and so funny. The last paragraph made me laugh so hard that I started crying—

“To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”

When one reduces one’s life to a series of meaningless obsessions, the last stage is to turn other people into obsessions.

I wish I’d been a better husband and father. I wish I’d been a better teacher and writer. I wish I’d been a better man.

Who knows? Perhaps the universe, or life, or something important that we can’t see, is a Möbius loop after all—that by sliding down one side of things we can come out on the other. Or maybe not. I’m very tired.

Finished, Dale reread the letter and saved it to hard disk. He glanced at his watch and then had to look again. It was twelve minutes before midnight. The evening and night and year and century had almost slipped away while he was writing. Dale considered printing the thing, but there was no paper in the printer and he was too exhausted to replenish it.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said aloud. If anyone was interested in finding the note, they would look in the computer. He left the machine on and went down to the basement, searching around the worktable for the bundle of clothesline he had seen there on the day he’d moved in. It was only clothesline, perhaps thirty or forty feet, but it was thick and expertly coiled. Dale wondered if it had been Duane or his Old Man who had coiled the rope with the easy expertise of someone who had worked with his hands all of his life. It didn’t matter.

Dale took the rope up to the kitchen, untied one end, and used a butcher knife to cut a three-foot length of line from the bundle. He furled this in a loop, left the main bundle of rope on the counter, and carried the knife, a flashlight, and the short loop of rope up the stairs to the second floor.

He paused as he reached the white barrier of sheets at the top of the steps, then plunged the knife into the taut fabric, ripping down and sideways as if disemboweling an enemy. The closest sheet separated with a long slash down the center, but the sheet behind that one showed only a ragged cut. Dropping the knife, and slipping the rope and flashlight into his pocket, Dale used his hands and fingernails to open the cut wider, tugging, clawing, and finally biting his way through the thin cotton like some predator chewing its way out of its own amniotic sac.

The second floor was dark and cold. Nothing stirred. Ignoring the front bedroom, Dale flicked on the flashlight and walked to the rear bedroom.

It was just as he had last seen it—the children’s rocker in the center of the room, the ungainly chandelier above it, the complicated water stain spread across the ceiling ten feet above the floor.

Trying not to think and mostly succeeding, Dale entered the room, set the flat-bottomed flashlight on the floor so that it threw a circle of light on the ceiling, and concentrated on knotting the end of the rope into a noose that would not give way. When he was done, he stared up at the chandelier. It looked sturdy enough to hold five men his weight. The spreading water stain all around it kept shifting in the yellow light, one minute looking like a fresco of warring men and horses, then curling into storm clouds, then resembling nothing so much as a spreading pool of blood. Dale blinked and looked away, sliding the rope and knot through his hands.

I’ve been wandering between worlds since the night the shotgun shell misfired. Time to choose one world or the other.

The child’s rocker held his weight as he stood on tiptoe, tossed the loose end of the rope around the central axis of the metal chandelier, made a triple knot that would not give way, tugged on it, lifted his feet and hung there a minute from his hands, then found the child’s rocker under his soles again. Even with some stretching, his feet should stay two feet and more off the floor.

Dale slipped the noose around his neck, tugged it tight, and kicked the chair out from under him. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t. . .

The clothesline cut deep into his neck at once, cutting off all air. Flashbulbs exploded behind his eyes. Instinctively, Dale kicked and flailed, reaching above him to grab the clothesline, but the slip knot pulled even tighter and his fingers skittered and slipped on the rope, unable to give him enough leverage to lift his own weight for more than a second or two before the choking began again.

The room seemed to come alive around him—shadows leaping from the water-stained ceiling into the corners, dark forms dancing around and below him like Indians whirling around a campfire. The room filled with voices, a multitude of sibilant, urgent whispers hissing at him.

Dale felt unconsciousness flapping around him like a raven’s wings, batting against his face, trying to enfold him. Then the flapping of ravens’ wings became the triumphant howling of hellhounds. He tried to grab the rope and lift himself again, but his hands had lost all strength and his swelling fingers slipped off the rope even as the clothesline cut deeper into his neck. Dale’s vision grew red and then slid into black even as he kicked and coughed.

His last sensory impressions were of great movement, of noise exploding around him, of sharp sticks or skeletal hands striking him and clawing at him, and then of flying into the night, falling into blackness.