Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

“Yes,” said Presser. “I have Deputy Reiss out doing that today. We found a receipt in the Corner Pantry bag in your kitchen. Deputy Reiss is going to talk to Ruthie over at the Corner Pantry and then visit the few liquor stores in the county.”

“You searched my kitchen?” Dale said stupidly.

“You gave us permission last night to search the house,” Deputy Presser said stiffly.

“Yeah.” Dale lifted the small cup to drink some more water, found it empty, crumpled the cup, and tossed it into a wastebasket. “Am I under arrest, Deputy?”

Presser shut off the recorder and shook his head. “I mentioned that the sheriff wants to talk to you tomorrow or the next day. We could keep you here until then. . .” Presser made a vague gesture toward the far wall, behind which Dale guessed there were jail cells. “But you might as well wait at your farm.”

Dale nodded and winced at the pain. “I don’t suppose you’re going to give me my shotgun back. The black dogs might be real, you know.”

“Deputy Taylor’ll drive you back to the farm,” said Presser, ignoring Dale’s question about the over-and-under. “Don’t go anywhere without letting us know. Don’t even think about leaving the county. But there’s one thing I think you should do, Mr. Stewart.”

Dale waited.

“Call this Dr. Hall,” said Presser.

IT snowed all the rest of Christmas Day. Exhausted and confused, Dale stood at the study window and watched the deputy’s car disappear into the snow, and then just stood there watching the snow continue to fall. After a long period of this during which his thoughts were as vague and opaque as the low gray clouds, Dale went over to his ThinkPad and powered it up. Switching from Windows to the DOS shell, he typed after the blinking C prompt—

>Am I cracking up?

Dale did not expect an answer—certainly not while he sat there waiting—and he did not receive one. After a while he wandered out to the kitchen, washed the plates, and tidied up. Someone—Michelle last night?—had put Saran wrap around some of the ham and placed it on the second shelf of the refrigerator. Dale knew that he should be hungry, since he hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before— Did I really have dinner last night, or did I imagine it as well? —but he had no appetite now. Dale pulled on an extra sweater and his peacoat and went out into the snow.

Several inches of wet, heavy snow had accumulated in the turnaround. Dale headed west, past the white-shrouded sheds and the barn—its large door still slightly open—out toward the low, flat hill above the creek. There were no dog tracks on the rutted lane, no human footprints in the corn-stubbled field, no sign of an injured woman dragging herself.

Am I nuts? It seemed probable. Dale realized that the deputy’s advice had been sound—he should call his therapist. Dale might have called from Oak Hill if not for the presence of the deputy during the ride back.

It was snowing harder when Dale reached the small rise where Duane had buried his faithful collie, Wittgenstein, that same summer of 1960. The trees along the creek running north and south were indistinct in the snowfall, and Dale could not see even the barn, much less the farmhouse. Sound seemed muted. Dale remembered days like this from his childhood in Elm Haven and elsewhere: a day so still that the slight thrumming of one’s own heartbeat or pulse sounded like the settling of snowflakes.

1960. Dale tried hard to remember the details of that summer. Nightmares—he remembered nightmares. White hands pulling his younger brother under his bed in their shared bedroom in the tall white house across from Old Central in Elm Haven. The ancient school itself, boarded up and awaiting demolition, but burning mysteriously at the end of that summer before the wrecking balls could bring it down. A green glow from the shuttered cupola atop the monstrous old building. The kids had created legends and spooky tales around that school. And some of those legends seemed real after Duane died in these very fields that summer.

Dale turned slowly around. Below the slight rise, a few shattered cornstalks were the only hint of even faded color against the featureless white, rows upon rows of slight mounds that had been high stalks even this summer past.

What the hell happened to our generation? Dale tried to remember his college energy and idealism. We promised so much to so many—especially to ourselves. He and other professors his age had often commented on it—the easy cynicism and self-absorption of today’s college-age students, so different from the commitment and high ideals of the mid and late 1960s. Bullshit , thought Dale. It had all been bullshit. They had bullshitted themselves about a revolution while really going after exactly what every previous generation had sought—sex, comfort, money, power.

Who am I to talk? Dale tasted bile as he thought of his Jim Bridger books. It was work-for-hire these days: a set fee for a series of formulaic frontiersmen-and-Indian-maiden tales. They might as well have been bodice rippers for all the serious intent that Dale had brought to the writing the past few years.

Sex, comfort, money, power. He had obtained everything on the list but the last—and had schemed and connived in faculty politics to obtain even his pathetic version of that over the years—and what had it brought him? Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with a ghost.

Dale left the low hill and began walking south along the creek, using the wooden cross-braces to climb over fences. A dog was barking far away to the west, but Dale could tell from the sound that it was just a run-of-the-mill farm dog, a real dog, a mortal dog. As opposed to what? My hellhounds?

Dale wished that he believed in ghosts. He could not. He realized that everything—life, love, loss, even fear—would be so much easier if he did. For decades of adulthood now he had tried to understand the psychology of people who prided themselves in believing in ghosts, spirits, feng shui, horoscopes, positive energy, demons, angels. . . God. Dale did not. It was a form of easy stupidity to which he preferred not to subscribe.

Have I gone crazy? Probably. It made the most sense. He knew that he had not been sane when he had loaded the Savage over-and-under a little more than a year earlier and set the muzzle to the side of his head and reached to pull the trigger. He could recall with perfect tactile memory what that circle of cold steel had felt like pressing into the flesh of his forehead. If he was crazy enough to do that, why not all this?

All what? Dining with ghosts? Imagining being seduced by the sexiest girl in sixth grade? Writing questions and answers and acrostics to himself on the computer?

If Michelle had been a ghost—if ghosts existed, which Dale did not believe for a second—why would she be here? She barely knew his dear friend Duane McBride. Twelve-year-old Michelle Staffney, the doctor’s daughter, simply did not play with raggedy-ass boys like Duane or Harlen or Mike or Kevin. . . or Dale. Besides, Michelle Staffney aka Mica Stouffer had hated Elm Haven. She had lived in California for more than thirty years and—it seemed absolutely certain—had died there. If she were going to haunt someplace, why not haunt the Bel Air home of her lover, Diane Villanova, where both of them had been murdered? Or better yet, haunt her husband’s place—the esteemed producer of the Val Kilmer Die Free series.

Jesus. Dale shook his head at the banality of the world. The movement shook free snow that had been clinging to his hair. He realized that he’d not brought so much as a baseball cap and his hair was soaked, his face sheened with melted snow. It was cold.