Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

Restlessly pacing the living room, smoking her fifteenth cigarette of the day, Rebecca was intensely aware of the metronomic ticking of the antique pendulum clock on one wall. Ordinarily she did not even hear the familiar tempo, but today, this afternoon, now, it seemed to have grown in volume with its marking of each passing second, so that it filled the room and hammered at her consciousness and at her nerves in the manner of a steadily dripping faucet.

Twenty till four, the clock hands said.

The cigarette tasted raw and noxious, and she turned to the coffee table and jabbed it out in the cloissone tray. I can’t go on with this passive waiting any longer, she thought. I’ve got to find out where Matt is and why he hasn’t come home.

When Martin Donnelly had telephoned her the previous evening-she’d been in bed at the time, thinking about the curiously intimate encounter with Zachary Cain; that he was a man tortured by a personal crisis greater than her own and that she had selfishly misjudged him-Rebecca had unhesitatingly accepted Donnelly’s account of a fallen tree likely stranding Matt overnight at the lake. There was no reason to doubt Martin’s word-he was a scrupulously honest man-and no reason to suspect anything wrong.

But when Matt did not return this morning or call as he always did when legitimately or illegitimately detained somewhere, she had experienced a vague presentiment of things being not quite right. There was little to support such a foreboding, other than the fact that a team of men should certainly have been able to clear the road of a down tree by midmorning, but it had nagged at her until, finally, she had gone to the telephone with the intention of calling the Donnelly home. The phone had not been working-lines down someplace probably, it happened occasionally during the winter months-and that, she told herself, was obviously the reason Matt hadn’t called. Everything was quite normal, otherwise. After all, what could happen in a snowbound little place like Hidden Valley?

And yet At eleven forty, with Matt still not home, Rebecca had briefly considered going to church. But then she thought that Matt would never think of setting foot inside All Faiths Church on Sunday unless he had dressed for the occasion in his best suit and tie and shirt and shoes. Since he hadn’t come home to change, it was axiomatic he wouldn’t be in church-and was then, supposedly, still out at the lake. Too, formal religious observance had been destroyed for her some time ago by Matt’s hypocrisy: seeing him in fervent, righteous prayer on those Sundays when she knew he had lain with another woman the previous night; she continued occasionally to accompany him when he insisted and for the hollow sake of appearance, but while she still believed in God, actively worshiping Him had been and was impossible. And so she remained in the house, busying herself with prosaic chores, waiting.

One thirty had come. No Matt. She’d tried the phone again, and it was still out of order. Two o’clock. Three. Three thirty. The premonition of wrongness had steadily amplified until, now, it made further waiting unconscionable. Perhaps it was only a case of too much imagination-the making-mountains-out-of-molehills syndrome-and there was some simple and innocuous reason why Matt hadn’t returned; but she had to find out, she had to know.

Rebecca went into the hall and opened the door of the coat closet. Boots, hat, parka, mittens. She would, she thought, go to the Tribuccis first. They would know about the fallen tree business, and if there was more to it than that, if they weren’t aware of his whereabouts, John or Vince would drive her out to Mule Deer Lake so she could talk to Martin Donnelly. Quickly she buttoned her parka and then opened the front door and hurried outside.

She was halfway across the front yard when Sid Markham’s old pickup pulled into the drive and the dark, smiling stranger stepped out to confront her…

Beneath the lean-to which ran the full rear width of his cabin, Cain stood at a round, flat, tablelike stump and used a hatchet to split halved pine logs into kindling. The logs were stacked evenly along the rear wall, several cords of them flecked with icy snow; the area covered by the long, shake roof was otherwise bare. He worked mechanically, breath puffing white and hazy, and the thudding, splintering sounds he made reverberated hollowly in the brittle late-afternoon stillness.

Inside him, with an intensity that had mounted throughout the day, guilt fought with memories and despair grappled with rebirthing personal need.

He had had a recurring dream last night, so sharply vivid that it had half awakened him three or four times and had left him, when dawn finally came and ended all sleep, feeling weak and shaken. In the dream he was walking alone on a huge, sere plain, under a copper-colored sky. Far ahead of him he saw that the withered grass gave way to a stretch of bright green, and he went toward it and recognized as he approached that someone was standing just beyond the separation line between green and brown. The someone was one-half of himself-and he realized that there had only been half of him the entire time he’d been on the burned section of prairie, that he had been hopping on one leg instead of walking on two. Frightened, he stared with his single eye as though transfixed by his second eye.

And the other half of him said, with half a mouth, Why do you keep fighting me? Sooner or later we’re going to merge, you know that. We’re going to become whole again.

We can never be whole again, he said.

We can and we will. And when we are, we have to go back-back to architecture, back to San Francisco, back so we can pick up some of the pieces. It has to be that way; you can’t run away from me any longer.

You’re dead, do you hear me. You’re dead!

I’m alive, we’re alive. Listen, now, listen.

No.

Question: Would Angie have wanted you to do what you’ve done to us? Would Lindy and Steve, as young as they were, have wanted it?

That doesn’t matter. They’re gone, it doesn’t matter.

Yes it does, oh yes it does. Question: Why weren’t you able to suicide us? Wasn’t it because I stopped you? Wasn’t it because I, you, we want to go on living, after all?

Enough, I don’t want to hear any more.

Question: If you truly wanted to turn us into an alcoholic, moribund vegetable, why did you come to Hidden Valley-why did you choose to live among people-in the first place? Aren’t there hundreds of totally sequestered areas in this country where you could have become a literal hermit? Didn’t I stop you there, too, even though you were stronger then?

Shut up, shut up.

“You’re not stronger anymore, I’m stronger. The incident with Rebecca Hughes was more than a spilling over of words, it was me taking over at last, it was the beginning of the end of these past six months. You know that, why won’t you accept it?

I can’t. I won’t.

You can and you will. It’s inevitable. Come to me now, come to me and we’ll be whole again.

No!

He turned and tried to run, but with his single leg he could only hop; and the plain shimmered and suddenly became a quagmire that made accelerated motion impossible. Darkness took away the copper light of the sky, folding around him, and he could feel warm breath against the back of his neck-the other half of him pursuing, unimpeded by the boggy ground, coming closer, touching him then, touching him…

At this exact point he would come out of it-only to sink back into slumber and have it start all over again.

When Cain had gotten up at dawn, and the shaken feeling had passed, he tried not to think about the dream; but it was fixed in his mind, each detail as ineradicable as the stain of loneliness. He dressed and went into the kitchen and fried two eggs, and couldn’t eat them; poured bourbon into his coffee, and the smell of it gagged him. It was cold in the cabin, and he made a fire with the last of his kindling. The cold seemed to remain. He sat at the table by the window, chain-smoking, but the sitting began to gnaw at his nerves. Pacing did not help, and he thought of going for a walk and didn’t want to do that either.