A Winter Haunting

EIGHT

DALE sat in the reeking Buick, looked at the light glowing in the second-floor upper left window, listened to pellets of sleet bouncing off the windshield, and thought, Fuck this.

He backed the rattling old car down the long lane, pulled out onto County 6, and headed back south. Dale had seen enough scary movies in his life. He knew that his role now was to go into the dark farmhouse by himself, call, “Is somebody there?,” go fearfully up the stairs, and then get cut down by the waiting ax murderer. Either that or Realtor Sandy Whittaker had let herself in with her key, cut through the layers of plastic at the top of the stairs, and even at that moment was waiting for him, naked, on one of the beds up there.

Fuck that, too.

Dale drove up the second hill and paused at the stop sign at Jubilee College Road. He wasn’t sure where to head next.

Montana, came his answer.

He shook his head. Besides a natural reluctance to abandon his $50,000 Land Cruiser in swap for this cigarette-stinking old Buick, he had nowhere to go in Montana. The ranch was rented out. Missoula was hostile territory for him these days. He had no job this year at the university there.

Oak Hill?

That made sense, since his truck was there and would be ready the next afternoon. But Dale could not remember if Oak Hill even had a motel—and if it did, it was a primitive one.

He crossed Jubilee College Road, took the narrow cutoff road through frozen fields to 150A, kept going straight, and turned east onto an empty I-74. Twenty-five minutes later he was in Peoria. Exiting onto War Memorial Drive, he found a Comfort Suites, paid with his American Express, asked the counter guy for a toothbrush, and went up to his room. It smelled of carpet cleaner and other chemicals. The king-size bed was almost obscene in its immensity. A card on top of the TV offered him recent-release movies, including softcore dirty movies.

Dale sighed, went back out to the rented Buick, and grabbed the sack of groceries that held fruit drinks and some snacks. He rooted around in another bag, found the new tube of toothpaste, and tossed it into the bag. That left only another $230 worth of groceries in sacks covering the back seat, the rear floor, and the front seat of the car. He carried the bag back up to his room, kicked off his boots and sweater, and munched Fig Newtons and sipped orange juice while watching CNN. After a while, he turned off the TV, went in the bathroom and brushed his teeth.

Eventually he went to sleep.

Dale awoke with the kind of absolute, heart-pounding, bottom-dropping-out-of-everything sense of desperation that comes most solidly between 3:00 and 4:00A.M. He looked at the motel alarm clock. 3:26A.M.

He sat up in bed, turned on the light, and ran his hands over his face. His hands were shaking.

He didn’t think that it had been a nightmare that had brought him swimming up out of a troubled sleep. It was simply a sense that the world was ending. No, he realized, that wasn’t quite right. It was simply the conviction that the world had already ended.

The clickover of the century and millennium had been problematic for Dale. Of course, his life had turned to shit about that time and he’d tried to kill himself, but even more troubling than that had been his deep and silent conviction that everything of value to him had been left behind in the old century. Tonight that conviction was totally pervasive and endlessly empty.

Christ, thought Dale, I left my Prozac, flurazepam, and doxepin at Duane’s farmhouse. He had to smile at the thought. An old short circuit brings a light on in the second floor of a farmhouse and Professor Dale Stewart blows his brains out for lack of meds. Difficult, he thought. I left the Savage over-and-under at the farmhouse, too.

Dale glanced at the phone. He could call Dr. Hall. It was earlier in Montana—only about 2:30A.M. Psychiatrists must be used to that crap.

What would I tell him?Well, the black dog was back. That had been Dale’s term of choice for deep depression, borrowed from Winston Churchill, who had been plagued by his own Black Dog for decades. Churchill had saved his life by taking up oil painting.

Why is the black dog back?Dale went into the bathroom, ran some tap water into one of the little plastic glasses—sanitarily wrapped for his protection—and came back and sat on the small couch and thought about it.

I don’t like running away from here. From Duane’s place.Why not? Duane’s farm and Elm Haven and Oak Hill and C.J. Congden and even Michelle Staffney were depressing enough in their own right. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to leave now?

No.Missoula and the ranch were out of bounds for him now. He knew that. If he returned, it was probable that he would finish what he started on November 4 a year earlier.

But why Duane’s drafty old place? Why Elm Haven?Because he had old connections there. Because the place had changed—for the worse—but so had he, and perhaps it was necessary for him to find that connection to his childhood, to something good about himself, to Duane, to the reason he became a writer and a teacher.

And there’s the book. This is the only place I can write it.For the first time, he consciously acknowledged that he was going to spend his sabbatical year writing a novel about Duane, about Elm Haven, about 1960, about the summer he had so much trouble remembering, and, ultimately, about himself.

Vanity, vanity, vanity.He knew better. It would take great humility to write this novel: humility, not the professorial, historical, commercial, and auctorial cleverness that went into his Jim Bridger mountain man books. This novel would be just for him. And he would need both Duane’s notebooks and a connection with Duane’s life to write it.

The heater hummed on. A big truck roared up through its endless gears out on War Memorial Drive. Dale turned the light out and went back to sleep, even without his Prozac and flurazepam and doxepin.

Stewart! Dale. . . Stewart!”

Dale paused just outside the garage where the mechanics were finishing mounting the Land Cruiser’s wheels with his two new tires. He looked over his shoulder, but he had recognized the voice.

Sheriff C.J. Congden was strolling across the oily concrete driveway toward him. Congden had one hand on the revolver in his holster. He was wheezing slightly as he came. Dale waited.

“Miller, huh?” said Congden. “TomMiller. Yeah, cute. Well, I knew I’d seen your ugly-ass face before.”

“Do you want something, Sheriff?” Unlike the day before, Dale’s pulse did not race. He felt completely calm.

“Why’d you lie to me, Stewart?” snapped Congden. “I ought to fucking arrest you.”

“For not telling you my real name?” said Dale and smiled.

“For misrepresenting yourself to a peace officer,” wheezed Congden. His fat fingers continued tapping at the grip of his revolver. Leather creaked.

Dale shrugged and waited.

Congden squinted at him. “I remember you, Stewart. You and that fucking bunch of weasel friends of yours.”

“Watch your language, Sheriff,” said Dale. “You’re a public servant now, not the town bully. Get nasty with me and I’ll swear out a complaint.”

“Fuckyour complaint,” growled Congden, but he looked around the garage to see who was listening. The brrrpp-brrrppp of the air wrench putting on the Land Cruiser’s lug nuts sufficiently covered the conversation. “And fuck you, Stewart.”

“You have a nice day, too, Sheriff,” said Dale and turned back to watch them lower his truck on the lift.

Congden walked toward the open garage door and then paused. “I know where you’re staying.”

Dale was sure that he did. It was a small county.

Congden walked away and Dale called after him, “Hey, Sheriff—any luck finding those punks who just cost me more than three hundred dollars?”

C.J. Congden did not look back.

The beautiful morning had shamed Dale. The snow had turned into sleet during the night, the sleet into rain, but the morning dawned sunny and warmer and sweet-smelling. Dale went out to breakfast at a pancake house across the parking lot from the Comfort Suites. The food was good, the coffee was good, and the waitress was friendly. Dale read the morning Peoria Journal Star and felt better than he had in weeks.

War Memorial Drive became Highway 150 outside of Peoria, and Dale drove the Buick the back way to Elm Haven, leaving the window open to air the cigarette smell out of the car. He was surprised to note that half of the trees still had their leaves and that those leaves still held deep fall colors. It was a beautiful day.

Just at the edge of Peoria’s western limits—about ten miles beyond the city he’d known as a boy in Elm Haven—there was a plaza with a hardware and a sports store. Dale visited both and came out with a thirty-six-inch crowbar and a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. He tossed both in the trunk of the Buick and drove on to Duane’s farmhouse.

The fields on either side of the approach lane were wet and sweet-smelling. Dale stopped the Buick in front of the house, but there was no way he could tell if the upstairs light was on in all that blazing daylight. He pulled to the side, parked the Buick, retrieved the baseball bat from the trunk, and walked up to the side door.

It was locked, just as he’d left it. Dale let himself in and stood in the kitchen a moment.

“Hello?” He heard the slightest echo of his own voice and had to smile. He’d be damned if he’d yell “Is anyone there?” just before the supernatural killer in the hockey mask jumped out to cut him down.

He searched the first floor. Everything seemed to be as he’d left it. He went down into the basement. No hockey-mask killers there. He remembered that he’d stored his Savage over-and-under down here in two pieces, but after checking that the pieces were where he’d put them, he decided not to add it to his Louisville Slugger arsenal. Besides, he’d thrown away the only shotgun shell.

Dale went up the stairs.

The layers of yellowing plastic were intact. Dale checked the nails and staples around the wood frame, but they had not been pulled out or replaced. The frame itself had been nailed into the door frame at the head of the stairs—decades ago. Dale pushed against the plastic, but it yielded only slightly, crackling a bit. If someone had visited the upstairs, they’d not come this way.

Not if they’re human.

Dale had deliberately phrased that thought to amuse himself, but in the darkness of the stairway, it didn’t seem that funny. He leaned closer to peer through the heavy plastic. The vague outlines of a hallway and a table. Sunlight through thick curtains. Nothing moved.

Dale pulled out his multi-use knife and set the longest blade against the plastic. He hesitated a second and then folded the blade back and set the knife back in his pocket. He laid the baseball bat against the yellowed plastic and tapped it lightly. Let sleeping dogs lie.

As if on cue, there came the scrabble of claws against the linoleum downstairs.

Dale whirled, bat raised, just in time to see a very small black dog run from the parlor hall into the kitchen.

“Jesus Christ!” said Dale, his heart pounding.

He clattered down the stairs and ran into the kitchen just in time to see the outer screen bang shut. He’d left the inner door open and the little dog had been able to push the screen door out.

Dale ran outside and stood on the stoop, bat ready. He half expected the small black dog to be out of sight—a delusion—but there it went, running hellbent-for-leather toward the outbuildings behind the farm, its little black ass wiggling as it ran.

Dale almost laughed. He’d been ready for the undead killer in the hockey mask and instead he’d found a lap dog. Whatever the little thing was, it was definitely a dog and definitely a shrimp—terrier-sized, but short-haired. All black except for a glimpse of pale or pink on its muzzle. Short ears.

“Hey, dog!” yelled Dale and whistled.

The little black dog did not slow down. It disappeared through a hole in the first outbuilding—the one Dale remembered Duane calling the chicken coop.

If the dog was in the house, why didn’t I find it when I searched?Dale shook his head but walked out to the chicken coop.

The shed was a mess. The door had been wired shut—Dale had to unwrap a yard of rusted wire—but one side of the structure had rotted away between the wood and the foundation until the hole was large enough for that dog to slip through. But it was a runt of a dog.

Dale propped the door open and looked in the coop. “Jesus Christ,” he said again, softly this time. He took the gold Dunhill lighter out of his pocket and flicked it on, holding the lighter high. There was just enough light to see by, but not enough to show detail. He walked back to the farmhouse and returned with a flashlight.

The interior of the coop had a fossilized layer of chicken manure mixed with embedded white feathers. The roosts were empty and the straw was ancient. The boards, walls, and floor were covered with dried blood, aged to a deep brown patina. There was no sign of the dog.

“What the hell happened in here?” Dale said aloud, but he knew the answer. Fox. Fox in the henhouse. Or a dog. He had to smile again. Not this dog. It was too small. Hell, a chicken could have beaten up this little black dog.

Dale looked in all of the roosts and niches, but no black dog. On the west wall, however, there were more slats missing. The pooch had probably run right through the chicken coop.

Dale went out into the bright sunlight and wonderful autumn air and checked in the mud at the west end of the coop. Sure enough, tiny dog tracks crossed the lot toward another of the handful of small sheds and outbuildings.

Well, I guess it isn’t a ghost dog. It left tracks.

He tried whistling and calling again, but no dog appeared. Knowing that he should be hauling his groceries in, Dale checked out the other sheds.

The dog’s prints had disappeared here where grass grew, but the second shed had an open door. Dale’s flashlight flicked across hanging harnesses, hanging blades, hanging saws, hanging butchering equipment. All of it was rusted.

The next shed boasted a padlock, but the hinges had given way and Dale merely lifted the door to one side. Inside was a circa-1940s electrical generator, a mass of black cables, and half a dozen gas canisters. Only one of the jerry cans held gasoline. Dale checked over the generator, but even a cursory inspection with the flashlight showed insulated wires that had been chewed through by mice, rusted and corroded points, missing leads, and an empty fuel tank. Behind the generator shed was a huge oval fuel tank set low in girders—obviously a fueling station for the farm equipment. Unlike the other sheds and equipment, this gas tank looked as if it was still in use; the rubber hoses and nozzles had been maintained or replaced, which made sense if Mr. Johnson next door stored his tractor and combine in the barn and still tilled this land. Dale rapped on the two hundred-gallon tank. It sounded full. He had to remember that if his Land Cruiser ever ran out of gas.

There were three more tiny outbuildings, but they had all but collapsed. The black dog might be hiding in any one of them, but Dale had no intention of crawling in after him.

That left the barn.

Dale had planned to visit the barn at some point. It might as well be now. Holding the flashlight in one hand and the Louisville Slugger in the other, he approached the huge structure.

Dale had vague memories of being in Duane’s barn as a kid. Of all of Illinois’s glories, the giant barns might have been the most interesting to a kid. Some of the farms boasted barns big enough to play baseball in, the lofts thirty feet high and filled with sweet-smelling hay. Perfect places to play as a boy.

This barn had a main door on the east side, but it was chained and padlocked. The huge barn doors on the south side did not budge—locked from the inside or frozen on their metal tracks. Dale hesitated. He didn’t know if his rental agreement allowed him to wander around the barn and other outbuildings. He imagined that these were used for storage by Mr. Johnson.

Dale walked back to the Buick, ignored the waiting groceries, and traded the Louisville Slugger for the crowbar. He walked the sixty yards or so to the huge, looming barn, stuck the flashlight in his jeans pocket, forced the curve of the crowbar into the gap in the large doors, and struggled and cursed until something snapped—in the door, luckily, not in his back—and the doors squealed back on their rusted tracks.

Dale stepped into the darkness and then took a fast step back out into the light.

The huge harvesting combine all but filled the central space. Long, rust-mottled gatherer points thrust toward Dale from the thirty-foot-wide attached corn head. The glass-enclosed cab, seeming infinitely high above, was dark. Dale breathed through his open mouth, felt his heart pound, and was amazed that he remembered terms and details about the combine: corn head, snapper rolls, lugged chains, shields.

It can’t be the same machine.

His friend Duane had been chewed up and swallowed by a combine here, under circumstances no one had understood then or now. At night. When Duane was alone at the farm. Duane’s Old Man—Duane’s invariable term for his father—had a solid alibi (drunk, in Peoria, with half a dozen cronies), and no one had suspected the Old Man.

It can’t be the same machine. This combine was old enough to have been there then, but it was green. The machine, old even in 1960, that had killed Duane had been red. How did I remember that? thought Dale in something like wonder. But he did remember it.

And the metal shields over the gatherer points and snapping rolls had been off when they found the machine in the field and Duane’s remains in the works. Mr. McBride had removed them weeks or months earlier, meaning to repair the rolls. Now this huge green combine had its shields in place.

Dale shook his head and walked around the combine, running the flashlight beam over the empty glass cab and the maze of metal ladders and catwalks on the giant machine. As large as it was, the combine took up only a third of the floor space in the huge barn. Doors and gates led to side rooms off the central space, and wooden ladders ran up to not one but half a dozen lofts. Dale flicked the flashlight beam up toward the eaves fifty feet above, but he saw only darkness. But he heard the frenzied flutter of wings.

Bats, he thought, but another part of his mind said, No, sparrows. He remembered now. That was the first time he had been in Duane’s barn. A summer night when he and his brother, Lawrence, and their friend Mike O’Rourke had walked the gravel road from Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s farm and shot sparrows in Duane’s barn. First they froze the sparrows in the beams of their flashlights, and then they shot them with their BB guns. Not all of the sparrows had died. The BB guns were not that powerful. Duane had opened the barn doors for them, but he had not taken part. Dale remembered Duane’s ancient collie—Wittgenstein—hanging back with Duane in the dark doorway, the dog excited by the boys’ bloodlust and the wild fluttering of the sparrows but not leaving his friend’s side.

“To hell with this,” said Dale. He went out of the barn, pulled the screeching doors as shut as he could get them, and went back to unload his groceries.

On the way, he walked around the farmhouse, checking to see if there was another way anyone could have gotten to the second floor. The tall old farmhouse had no easy way to the six windows more than fifteen feet up there. The windows were all shut, most covered on the inside by drapes or curtains, or both. Someone with a tall ladder might have done it, but the dirt around the farmhouse was all mud after the night’s rain, and there were no footprints or marks from a ladder.

I guess whoever turned on the light lives up there, thought Dale. It was hard to scare himself in the bright daylight under the blue sky.

He set the crowbar and the baseball bat just inside the kitchen door and went out to ferry in his small-fortune’s worth of groceries, trying not to track in too much mud as he did so.