A Winter Haunting

TWENTY-EIGHT

C.J. Congden was sitting against the back wall of the chicken coop not ten feet from Dale. He did not look good. Even in the flickering red light filtering through the chinks in the east wall, the skin of Congden’s face glowed mold-white and green. His eyes were sunken and opaque with white, as if covered with fly eggs. The ex-sheriff was not wearing a hat tonight, and as Congden turned his head slightly, Dale could see the exit hole the suicide.45 slug had left in the back of his skull and the fragment of bloody hair and scalp hanging over that hole as if in an obscene attempt at concealment.

Congden grinned, showing a black gap where the recoil of the pistol he had fired into his soft palate had knocked out his front teeth. That pistol was still in his hand, and now the thing aimed the weapon at Dale, its white fingers looking like bloated worms on the trigger guard and pearl handle. Congden’s mouth did not move when the voice spoke, and the sound seemed to come from the thing’s bloated belly. “Time to go out and join the party, Stewart.”

Dale reached for the hammer in his belt and then remembered that he had dropped it down the hole. “Fuck you, Congden,” he whispered. He had no intention of going anywhere, not knowing whether this apparition from hell could harm him but having no doubts as to what the skinheads would do. “Fuck you,” he said again.

Congden seemed amused by this. His mouth opened wide for a grin and continued widening, stretching impossibly and terribly wide, fat cheeks and jowls rippling as if in a high wind. The thing’s mouth became nothing more than a widening hole, as ragged as the hole Dale had just burst through, broken teeth substituting for splinters. In a literally heart-stopping moment, Dale realized that he could see through Congden’s skull within that rippling maw, through the hole in the palate and out the back of the thing’s head.

A noise issued from Congden then: at first a hissing, a tea kettle beginning to announce itself, but then the hissing rose until it became the rush and roar of a fire hose, then a boiler pipe exploding steam, and then a siren.

Dale crouched on his knees and clapped both hands over his ears. It did not block the noise. Nothing could block that noise. Congden had raised his ruined face toward the ceiling of the bloodied chicken coop and seemed to be hauling in air through the wound in the back of his skull as the screaming whistle roared from the funneled mouth. The skinheads had to hear this.

Dale surrendered, swung around, flung the door of the chicken coop open, and staggered out into the snow and naked light of the burning farmhouse.

One of the skinheads saw him and set up a hue and cry before Dale had run thirty steps toward the darkness of the fields. Injured as he was, Dale would have preferred taking his chances reaching the Land Cruiser and driving away for help, trusting his four-wheel drive once again to keep him ahead of the other vehicle. But the keys to the Land Cruiser were in his peacoat pocket, and the peacoat was hanging on the hook in the kitchen.

That entire kitchen side of The Jolly Corner’s first floor was a wall of flame throwing red light like a spotlight toward Dale as he followed the lane toward the barn, jogging from side to side in the deep snow, trying to put the chicken coop and other outbuildings between himself and the screaming skinheads. Twice he fell, each time leaving bloody streaks in the snow. Both times he clawed his way to his feet and staggered on through drifts up to his knees. Even the falling snow seemed blood red in the light of the burning house.

How bad was I hurt? How much blood have I lost?The pain was no worse than it had been, but his entire right side from shirt collar to pant cuffs was soaked with his own blood now. Dale felt light-headed and fought vertigo with each running, staggering step.

Out away from the fire now, running left past the fueling station and into the fields. It was darker out here, if he could just keep low, head for the creek and the woods a mile southwest.

They can follow my trail in the snow.Dale looked behind him and saw not only the path he was leaving through the drifts but the bloody smears like painted arrows.

The skinheads were whooping like cowboys, throwing open doors to the outbuildings and throwing the last of their Molotov cocktails inside. The old shed holding Mr. McBride’s antiquated punch card learning machines went up in a ball of flame.

The skinheads were firing their shotguns and rifles into the shadows behind the outbuildings now, the muzzle flashes bright against the dark structures. One of the silhouetted figures found Dale’s track in the snow and began screaming above the din.

I’ll never get across that field.Dale knew that he did not have the strength left to run that far even if there were no snow slowing him down. The punks would be on him in minutes.

He slid to a halt in the snowy field. The barn was to his right. Perhaps he could climb to the lofts, hide in the maze of rafters up there in the dark.

One of the skinheads flicked on a handheld spotlight, throwing thousands of candlepowers in a single, blinding beam stabbing across the field. Dale ran toward the barn anyway. It was the only thing he could think of.

Using a flashlight to freeze sparrows in the barn, then shooting them with BB guns. The black eyes staring.He slipped and fell, crushing frozen cornstalks under the snow, then staggered ahead on his knees, fighting his way to his feet again.

Something in the farmhouse, perhaps a gas main, suddenly exploded upward in a curling mushroom of flame and noise. The silhouettes of the skinheads paused a moment by the sheds, looking back at their handiwork. Dale glanced that way, praying to see flashing red lights, emergency vehicles, Sheriff McKown’s car rushing to the rescue. Everything to the east was dark and lost to sight in the falling snow.

He was still a hundred feet from the barn when he lost his footing in the dark and fell again. Dale hit hard on his right side, and this time the pain was very bad. He got to his knees and looked back at the burning farmhouse, noting but not really thinking about all of his books and other possessions burning in there.

What was the word in the Eddic poem for the hero’s funeral pyre?

Hrot-garmr.“Howling dog.” Flames like a howling dog.

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

Kneeling there, hearing the punks shout and howl off to his right, knowing that he was no hero but just an injured and terrified middle-aged man unused to violence and afraid to die, Dale still wished that he could become a wolf. If he became a wolf, he would rip the throat out of the nearest skinhead before the others killed him. If he became a wolf, he would taste their warm blood even as they killed him.

He did not become a wolf.

Dale had just struggled to his feet again when the huge door to the barn exploded outward, ripped away its steel slide suspension, and seemed to plow through the snow toward him in slow motion. Then the door fell away and Dale saw that it was the huge combine lumbering toward him, the thirty-foot-wide harvesting extension shifting snow aside like a plow from hell, its corn head covers missing so that its open maw revealed picker units with their exposed snapping rolls and lugged gathering chains grinding.

This is the last thing Duane McBride ever saw.

The glassed-in driver’s cab, twelve feet above the whirling blades and flying snow, was illuminated by weak interior lights, and Dale stared at the face of the driver, shifting like a poorly done digital effect in a movie—first Bonheur’s, the oldest skinhead’s, leering face, then the Congden corpse face, then Bonheur’s, then Congden’s. The interior light went out. Dale turned and ran.

Forty-one years earlier, Duane had run deeper into this field and died. Dale swung left, back toward the burning farmhouse and its outbuildings, desperate to put something—anything—between himself and the machine lurching and chewing behind him.

Halfway to the nearest shed, Dale knew that he was not going to make it to the chicken coop and other outbuildings. And the shouting in the darkness there told him where the other skinheads waited. Running only thirty feet in front of the rusted gatherer points and whirling chains and snapper rolls, Dale cut right and lurched through the drifts toward the fueling station. There was a chance, just a chance, that he could climb the support girders around the two hundred–gallon fuel tank, jump from there to the roof of the old generator shed, and leap down to the safety of the other outbuildings from there.

Dale leaped for the metal support trusses, slashed his palms on the rusted metal of the girders, pulled himself up with his feet scrabbling against the big cylindrical fuel tank for leverage, and managed to get ten feet above ground level when the giant combine smashed into the tank, ripped the support girders out of the ground, and drove the whole complex into and through the rear of the generator shed. Dale was thrown fifteen feet into the air, and it was only luck and the mysteries of ballistics that brought him down twenty feet north of the combine rather than headfirst into the churning snapper rolls. As it was, the giant machine lurched several yards further, corn pickers boring into and chewing up the rusted fuel tank while spewing gasoline over the combine and everything around it. Just the inertia of the ancient combine smashed the rear wall of the generator shed to kindling while the corn head’s gathering points spewed back splinters and rusted steel within the geyser of gasoline.

Stunned, the wind knocked completely out of him despite the cushioning effect of the foot of snow he had landed in, Dale lay on his back and watched Bonheur’s face melt into C.J. Congden’s face, both visages leering at him from the high driver’s cab. Dale heard the old transmission grind and the combine backed away from the wreckage, the fuel tank still stuck on the corn picker points like a rust-colored rat in a terrier’s teeth. The combine ground another thirty feet back, shaking and scraping the skewered tank off its snapper rolls, and then turned back in Dale’s direction.

Dale had crawled a few feet north, away from the huge circle of fuel-reddened snow, but he knew that he did not have the strength to rise and run again. He barely made it to his knees to face the giant machine.

The combine’s harvesting lights snapped on, pinning Dale in their merciless beams.

“Not this time,” gasped Dale. He pulled Clare’s gift of the Dunhill lighter from his pocket and flicked it. It lighted at once. Almost wearily, Dale tossed the lighter six feet into the circle of soaked snow.

The flames leaped ten feet high at once, roaring in a circle around the combine, leaping up the soaked snapper rolls and climbing like blazing ivy to the high grain bin and soaked driver’s cab. The glass there blackened and buckled. Then the fire ignited the remaining fuel in the lacerated storage tank, and the explosion lifted the front of the combine five feet in the air while blowing Dale twenty feet in the opposite direction.

Dale rolled in the drifts, using his hands to rub snow on his flash-burned eyebrows and hairline.

For a minute the combine just burned steadily, the flames having not yet reached its own interior fuel tank, melting snow, curling paint, and superheating old steel and iron with a hiss that filled the night.

Hrot-garmr,Dale thought dully. Funeral flames like a howling dog. The heat from the flames was intense, but almost pleasant after all the wet cold.

Then, slowly, amazingly, the door to the flaming cab opened and a human figure engulfed in fire stepped out on the burning grain bin deck and jumped out to lie facedown and burning in the snow.

Dale was vaguely aware of the other skinheads fifty feet or so behind him, silhouettes against the other fire—The Jolly Corner—but none of these forms moved. “Shit,” said Dale and staggered to his feet. He rushed as well as he could to the burning man’s side, dragged him out of the circle of burning fuel, and threw snow on the back of the man’s burning jacket and flesh until the flames were smothered. He rolled the man over. Skinhead Lester Bonheur’s features were burned red down to the muscle layer, and his eyes were flickering as if from an epileptic fit.

On his knees next to him, Dale sagged backward and shouted to the unmoving skinheads back by the sheds, “For God’s sake, go for an ambulance.” None of them answered or moved.

The burned shape in front of him seemed to gain mass, rolled over, and got to its knees. “It looks like I have to do this myself,” hissed the corpse of C.J. Congden and lunged at Dale, knocking him onto his back and grabbing him by the throat.

Dale’s gasping breath was visible in the air as he clawed at Congden’s tightening fingers. No breath came from Congden’s broken, open maw. The thing was terribly strong, its rotted mass heavy on him, and Dale felt what was left of his own strength slipping away with the last of his breath.

“Fuck you,” Dale gasped up into Congden’s contorted death mask, and then Dale surrendered—not to Congden, not to those fuckers behind him, but to forty years of resistance, letting the wall in his mind crumble like chalk. With the last of his breath, Dale shouted into the night, “Gifr! Geri! Hurkilas! Osiris sews healf hundisces mancynnes, he haefde hundes haefod!”

Congden’s rotted fingers tightened on Dale’s windpipe, cutting into the flesh of his neck, and the mouth lowered as if ready to suck the last breath from Dale if necessary. Instead, Dale used his last breath, to howl defiance.

“Anubis! Kesta! Hapi! Tuamutef! Qebhesenuf!”

Then there was no more breath with which to shout or breathe, and the Congden thing laid its full weight upon Dale, who sensed but could not see the five hounds knocking aside four skinheads, not leaping on them but past them, and then the first and largest of the impossibly huge jackal dogs hit Congden with a noise like a sledgehammer striking a rotten watermelon and ripped Congden’s head off with one swipe of its massive jaws.

Congden’s arms and fingers continued to choke Dale.

The hounds were all on Congden now, ripping the animated, headless corpse literally limb from limb and then limb from torso, black dogs running through flames from the burning combine and then circling back as if the flames did not exist, growling, snarling, and fighting each other in their hound-frenzy over the lacerated torso and scattered parts.

“Jesus fuck,” cried one of the distant skinheads, and Dale dimly heard them running back toward the burning farmhouse and their Chevy Suburban.

Dale staggered to all fours, shaking the last of Congden off his chest and legs. Blazing-eyed hounds knocked Dale to one side and snatched up the rotted bits—a cowboy-booted foot, a fleshy ribcage trailing intestines, a half-fleshed jawbone—and then ran with them into and through the flames, disappearing into the darkness beyond. Dale rolled onto his side and looked over to where Bonheur still lay in the trampled snow. Smoke rose from the man’s dark form. Dale could not tell if he was breathing.

Dale tried to get to his feet, aware that the burning combine’s fuel tank could ignite any second, but found that he could no longer stand or even kneel. He rolled on his belly and started crawling back through the mottled snow toward the sheds and blazing farmhouse.

Flashing red lights and flashing blue lights. A half dozen vehicles, all with lights flashing, in the turnaround near the farmhouse, and more emergency vehicles just visible on the driveway. Dale caught a glimpse of the skinheads raising their arms, dropping weapons, of a fire truck, of men rushing with hoses and other men running and stumbling through the drifts toward the burning combine and him, and then Dale decided it might be a good idea to rest a minute. Belly down in the snow, he put his burned forehead on his bloody forearm and closed his eyes.