Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

“Mind if I take a look?” asked Deputy Presser. Without waiting for an answer, the deputy switched on his flashlight and loudly climbed the stairs. Deputy Reiss followed. Taylor went back into the kitchen, still carrying Dale’s empty over-and-under. Dale hesitated a few seconds and then went up the stairs.

Both men were in the front bedroom. One of the candles on the bedside table had burned out in its own pool of wax, but the other one was still burning. The blanket and the quilt on the bed were still mussed from when Michelle tossed them back as she got up to leave just. . . My God , thought Dale. . . just hours earlier. It seemed like days.

Deputy Presser lifted the quilt with his long flashlight and looked at Dale for an explanation. Dale met his gaze and stayed silent.

The three looked in the other room—dark and empty except for the child-sized rocking chair still in the middle of the room—and then clumped downstairs to the kitchen again.

“Are you going to search for her outside?” asked Dale. His throat felt raw and his head pounded worse than ever.

“Yeah,” said Deputy Presser. “In the morning. Deputy Taylor here’ll stay with you until we get back.”

“To hell with waiting until morning,” said Dale. Someone had brought his flashlight inside from where it had fallen during the dog attack and set it on the counter. Dale tried it. It worked. “I’m going to search the fields and outbuildings now.”

Deputy Presser shrugged. “Larry,” he said, talking to Taylor, “you stay with him here at the farm until we get back. If Mr. Stewart goes looking, you stay near your car radio in case we need to get in touch. If he don’t come back in an hour, you radio dispatch. You got that?”

“But Brian, it’s cold and dark out there as a. . .”

“You do what I say.” Presser looked at Dale. “We’ll be back sometime in the morning. Mr. Stewart, I suggest you get some sleep rather than wander around the farm in the dark, but Larry’ll be here in case you need help.”

“I don’t need for Deputy Taylor to stay,” said Dale. “But I’ll need my shotgun.”

Presser took the weapon from Taylor. He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said with absolutely no tone of regret. “We’re going to have to keep this at the sheriff’s office for a while. Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” said Dale, truly mystified.

The deputy looked Dale hard in the eye. “You say there’s a woman missing here. You say dogs got her. Well, if a woman’s really missing, maybe something other than dogs got at her. We may need this shotgun for tests.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Dale.

Presser gestured for Deputy Reiss to follow him, motioned for Deputy Taylor to stay where he was, and he and Reiss went out to their car and drove off. Dale glanced at the clock. It was a few minutes after 4:00A.M. —still three hours until the first pale hint of sunrise.

Dale pulled on his winter peacoat, which was hanging on a hook by the door, switched on the flashlight, and went outside.

You shouldn’t ought to go off alone,” shouted Deputy Taylor from the circle of light on the stoop.

“Come with me, then,” called Dale, not turning, walking toward the first outbuilding.

“I gotta stay near the car radio!”

Dale paid no further attention to the deputy. At the edge of the muddy turnaround, he whisked his flashlight beam through the frozen weeds, stabbed it behind the fences, swept it around the outside of the chicken coop. Nothing. Dale slammed the frozen door to the coop open and peered inside, moving the light from walls to nests to floor. For a second it looked as if someone had piled a dozen small, dark-metal coffins in the coop, but then Dale remembered moving Mr. McBride’s punch-card learning machines out here. Dark stains were everywhere, but they were the old, dried, faded stains. A fox had gotten into the coop when there had been chickens here, he had told Michelle. Or a dog.

The next several outbuildings were also empty. Dale’s flashlight beam moved across hanging sickles, scythes, grass cutters, plow disks, extra cornrollers, harrow disks, unnamed blades—all rusted red-brown. His flashlight beam was fading, the batteries dying.

Dale walked farther from the farmhouse, its few visible lights seeming very far away. Out by the rusting gas tank, which hung like some great spider’s egg from the iron girders, one pair of wheel ruts led to the barn, another south along the fence at the edge of the empty field. Dale walked out into the field, slapped the flashlight hard against his palm to brighten the beam, and repeatedly called Michelle’s name into the night, pausing each time to listen for any response from the dark fields. Nothing. Not even an echo or distant dog bark. Dale walked up and down the rutted lanes, shining the flashlight beam on bare patches of mud, hoping for dog prints, a human bootprint, a shred of cloth. . . anything as a sign. The ground was frozen and unrevealing.

Panting slightly now, his breath fogging into the freezing predawn air, flashlight glow as dim as a dying candle, Dale walked to the giant barn and leaned his weight into sliding back the huge door. The warped wood and rusted steel screeched in protest, but finally opened enough for him to slip in.

The harvesting combine still filled the space, the cornrollers reaching for him like faded red teeth.

“Michelle!!”

Something rustled in one of the high lofts, but it was too small a sound to be a woman. The hounds couldn’t have hauled her up there . He shined the light up toward the impossibly high rafters and hidden lofts, but the cone of light was too dim now to reach that far. But if she escaped the dogs, she could be up there, hiding, injured.

Dale tucked the flashlight in his jacket and climbed the nearest ladder, feeling the rot in the wood and smelling the rot in the boards and straw of the barn itself. The structure was old and the ladder soft. He made sure that he never had both hands holding a single rung at one time—if one rung let go, he wanted to be connected to something solid.

Thirty feet up and he was high enough to peer over the edge of the wall and into the dark void of the first loft. The roof of the combine—the same combine that had killed his friend Duane forty years ago, chewing him up like so much offal?—was below him now, looking scabrous in the dying light. Dale shook the flashlight again, but this time the beam only dimmed further.

This loft was empty except for matted straw, some rotted tack, and a skull.

Dale crawled into the loft area, feeling the thin, rotted wood creak beneath his weight, groping ahead for the skull. It barely filled his palm, the long yellow teeth pressing toward the blue vein in his wrist. What the hell had it been? A rat? It seemed too large for a rat. A raccoon or fox? How did it get up here?

He set the skull back, swept the flashlight uselessly back and forth toward the other black rectangles of the loft, and called Michelle’s name again. The only response was a fluttering of a barn owl or sparrows in their nest.

The flashlight died completely before he started down the ladder. Dale tucked it into his jacket and checked the luminous dial of his watch, noting that his arm was shaking from either the terrible cold or the strain of climbing, or both. It was just 4:45.

Dale left the barn door open when he walked back to the house, half hoping that the hounds would jump him in the dark along the way, wanting to know that they were real. He gripped the long barrel of the useless flashlight so hard that his fingers cramped.

The deputy’s car was idling and the deputy was snoring in the front seat, his police radio cackling static audible even through the raised window glass. Dale left him sleeping and went into the house. It was still cold inside. He turned up the thermostat, heard the old furnace click in, and walked into the study. He had forgotten the computer.