Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

“A pale hand, you said last time.”

“Yes. No. Not just pale, white. . . grub white. . . dead white.”

“What else about the hand. . . or is it hands, plural?”

“Just one hand at first. It grabs Lawrence by the wrist and pulls him off the bed before either one of us can react. The hand—the white hand—is weird, long fingers. . . I mean, way too long. . . eight or nine inches long. Spiderlike. Then I grab Lawrence by the legs. . .”

“He has already been pulled under the bed at this point?”

“Just his head and shoulders. He’s still screaming. That’s when I see both of the spidery white hands, pulling and cramming him under the bed.”

“And sleeves? Cuffs? Bare arms?”

“No. Just the white hands and blackness, but blackness darker than the dark under Lawrence’s bed. Like the sleeves of a black velvet robe, perhaps.”

“And you don’t succeed in saving your brother?”

“No, the hands pull him under and then he’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone. As if a hole has opened up in the wooden floor and the hands had pulled him in.”

“But your brother—in real life—is still alive and well.”

“Yes. Sure. He runs an insurance investigation agency in California.”

“Have you discussed this dream with him?”

“No. We don’t see each other that much. We talk occasionally on the phone.”

“But you’ve never mentioned the dream?”

“No. Lawrence. . . well, he’s a big, gruff guy sometimes, but he’s also sensitive. . . he doesn’t like talking about that summer. Or about his childhood, actually. He had a rough time as a teenager in Chicago and had sort of a nervous breakdown after he dropped out of college.”

“Do you think that he also has memory gaps about that summer of. . . when was it?”

“1960.”

“Do you think that he has the same gaps?”

“No. I don’t know. I doubt it. He just doesn’t like talking about it.”

“All right. Back to the dream itself. How do you feel when you lose this. . . tug of war. . . and your younger brother disappears?”

“Scared. Angry. And. . .”

“Go on.”

“Relieved, I guess. That the hands had grabbed Lawrence instead of me, I think. Dr. Hall, what the hell does this mean?”

“We discussed the fact that dreams don’t have to mean anything, Dale. But there almost certainly is a reason for having them. It sounds like a straightforward anxiety dream to me. Do you feel anxiety about the months ahead?”

“Sure I do. But why this dream?”

“Why do you think anxiety shows itself through this dream?”

“I have no idea. It couldn’t be a repressed memory?”

“You think that you have an actual memory of white hands dragging your little brother under the bed?”

“Well. . . or something like that.”

“We discussed repressed memories. Despite all the movies and TV talk about them, they are actually very, very rare. And a repressed memory would deal with a real event, such as physical or sexual abuse, not a fantasy nightmare. What is it? I can tell by your face that you’re disturbed.”

“Well, it wasn’t the recurring nightmare that woke me up last night.”

“What was it?”

“A sound. A scrabbling noise. Under my bed. Is our time up?”

“Just about. I do have one final question.”

“Shoot,” said Dale.

“Why go all the way to your childhood friend’s house in Illinois to write this book? Why leave everything you know, everything you have in life, and go back to this empty house in a state you haven’t lived in for forty years?”

Dale was silent for a full minute. Finally he said, “I have to go back. Something’s waiting for me there.”

“What, Dale?”

“I have no idea.”

To get to Duane McBride’s farmhouse when he was a kid, Dale had pedaled his bike about a mile and a half west on the gravel of Jubilee College Road, turned north on County 6, an even narrower gravel road, passed the Black Tree Tavern on his left, swooped down and up two steep hills, past the Calvary Cemetery where Elm Haven’s Catholics were buried, and then straight on another half-mile of flat road to the farm.

Jubilee College Road had been paved and widened. The Black Tree Tavern was gone, as far as Dale could tell in the dark—the building torn down, a cheap mobile home tucked in under the trees where yellow bulbs on wires had once hung—and County 6 here had also been asphalted and widened. These two hills had been death traps when Dale had lived here: wide enough for only one car, slick with gravel, dark even on sunny days with the overarching trees and the weeds coming right to the edge of the road, no shoulders for escape. It was exciting to pedal down and then coast up them on a bike, trying to keep on the hardened ruts of the road, and even the adults tended to play an elaborate game of chicken on the hills, accelerating their cars and pickup trucks down them in a cloud of dust and gravel and roaring to the top of the next hill with only the hope that no car was doing the same coming the other way. Frequently the drivers were drunken farmers headed home from the Black Tree. Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena—who had lived in the neat little farmhouse just beyond the hills—had always joked that Calvary Cemetery had been put where it was—on the top of the middle hill—just to save everyone the bother of dragging the victims of the car wrecks back to town.

Now the asphalted road was easily wide enough for two cars to pass, and the woods and weeds had been cut back on either side.

Dale pulled the Land Cruiser onto the grassy berm outside the Calvary Cemetery, stopped the engine, left the headlights on, and stepped out into the night.

The wind had come up more strongly now, and the low clouds seemed to be rushing by just yards overhead. There were no stars. The cemetery’s tall black iron gate and the long spiked iron fence were visible in the headlights and looked just as he remembered them, except for the fact that they appeared to have grown black bat wings or witches’ robes—long, flapping streamers of what seemed to be black crêpe paper. It was no illusion. Dale could hear the frenzied flapping of the streamers and see different lengths of tattered black material waving and blowing eastward along the full length of the fence and all around the arched gate.

Corn husks , thought Dale. “Shucks,” we used to call them . He had seen this post-harvest phenomenon when he was a kid here, and he often thought of it on windy days in Montana when tumbleweeds lined the fences of the highways. To the east of the cemetery, across County 6, had been Old Man Johnson’s farm when Dale was a boy, and whoever now owned the land still raised corn. Hundreds of these dried shucks and husks had blown from the field and tangled themselves on the black iron gate after the harvest.

Harvested by a combine with rolling-chain corn pickers, just like the machine that killed Duane. Had Duane’s torn clothes and flesh flown through the night wind like this, catching and flapping on some barbed-wire fence along this road?

Dale shook his head. He was very tired.

Dale had no family in the cemetery—his folks had not been Catholic—but he knew that the O’Rourkes and many of his other Elm Haven friends and acquaintances had people buried there. Some of those old friends of mine are probably buried there now as well , he thought. He would come back in the daylight and check. He would have plenty of time in the coming weeks. He climbed back into the Land Cruiser, started the engine, and headed down the next hill, leaving the flapping, waving, crackling apparitions behind.

It was another mile to Duane McBride’s farm. Dale passed his great-aunt Lena and uncle Henry’s farm to the right—the house was dark—and wondered who lived there now. Uncle Henry had died in 1970, but someone had told Dale that Aunt Lena was still alive in a home in Peoria—suffering from Alzheimer’s, beyond communication for the last two decades or so, but still living. If the report was true, then the old woman had lived through parts of three centuries. Dale shook his head at the thought. What would it be like to outlive one’s spouse by more than thirty years? He felt a lurch in his belly at the thought. He no longer had a spouse, and the idea still seemed strange to him.