Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

Congden squinted at him and rested his thumbs in his gun belt. Leather creaked. The sheriff’s gray shirt was dirty and straining at the belly.

If he asks me for my license and registration, I’ll say that I forgot them , thought Dale in a panic and realized at once that this would not work. He’d just end up in the county jail while they traced the registration. He shook his head. What the hell am I panicked about? I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m the victim here . That was the reasonable point of view, but Dale remembered those mean pig eyes of C.J. Congden’s behind a shotgun aimed at Dale’s head when he was a boy. There was no statute of limitations on bullies and their victims.

The fat sheriff opened his mouth to speak, but right then the radio in his cruiser squawked and hissed. Congden leaned into the open door, listened a minute, said something into his radio, and hung it up.

Congden straightened up, rested his hands on his gun belt again, and turned back to Dale. “You want to ride back to Oak Hill with me? We gotta get some paperwork done if you’re going to swear out a complaint.”

I’d rather have a colonoscopy with a Roto-Rooter , thought Dale. He shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him. “I’ll ride back in the tow truck. I need to get some junk out of the Land Cruiser.”

Congden squinted at him again as if trying to remember where they’d met. Finally he shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just make sure that you stop by the sheriff’s office.”

Dale nodded and watched the former bully wheeze his way back to his sheriff’s car, get in, and drive off.

The tow truck arrived less than a minute after Congden’s sheriff’s car disappeared. The two mechanics, Billy and Tuck, were efficient in getting the Cruiser slung into its towing cradle. “We could change the one tire here for you,” said Billy, the older of the two brothers. “Wouldn’t do no good, though. I don’t think anybody in Oak Hill’s got any of these tires in stock. Probably have to bring one in from Peoria or Galesburg. Tomorrow afternoon maybe.”

Dale nodded. “Is there a place to rent a car in Oak Hill?”

The brothers shook their heads. Then Turk said, “Wait a minute. Mr. Jurgen over at the Happy Lanes rents out his dead wife’s car sometimes.”

“That’ll do,” said Dale.

Dale did not get out of Oak Hill until after 7:00P.M. The tires would be delivered the next day and he could pick up the Cruiser the next afternoon. He ate dinner at the counter of a five-and-dime on the city square—not a Woolworth’s, they had all disappeared from America years before—and Mr. Jurgen brought his late wife’s blue Buick by from the bowling alley. The Buick was older than most people Dale knew, it reaked of cigarette smoke, and it cost Dale more to rent than it would have to rent a luxury car from Hertz and he had to leave $300 for a damage deposit, but he was glad to pay and get out of Oak Hill before C.J. Congden thought to come looking for him.

It started to snow again during his drive back to Duane’s farmhouse. Dale was sleepy as he turned down the long lane and drove past the dead trees, snow dancing in his headlights, but he woke up quickly and slammed on the brakes a hundred yards from the farmhouse.

Dale had not left any lights on when he had driven off to buy groceries earlier in the day. The downstairs was dark.

But there was a light burning on the second floor.

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.