Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

>Did you really kill Clare, Dale?

THE five black dogs returned shortly after midnight. Dale watched from the darkened house, through the kitchen window and then from the dark dining room and then from through the parlor drapes and then from the study as the hounds circled the house, their pelts and eyes picking up the starlight, their forms visible only as negative space against the softly glowing snow.

Dale softly slapped the bat against his palm and sighed. He was very tired. He had not slept all day or evening, and the sleep the night before had been while sitting on the kitchen floor. Now, as then, he knew that if the dogs wanted to come in, they would. They were larger than ever. Larger than barrel-chested huskies, taller than wolfhounds. If they wanted to come in, the kitchen door would not hold them out.

Feeling an urge not dissimilar from an acrophobic’s desire to leap from high places, Dale found it pleasing to consider opening the door and going out into the night, allowing them to drag him down and off. At least the waiting would be over.

He went into the darkened study. The only light here was from the glow from the words he had not disturbed in almost twelve hours.

>Did you really kill Clare, Dale?

He decided to do this thing. To have a conversation. He leaned over to type.

>Are you really Duane?

No new words appeared while he watched, of course, so he took the bat and walked the short circuit down the hallway to the kitchen and back, checking to make sure that no hounds had forced their way in through any of the unprotected windows. The question went unanswered. He had not really expected an answer.

He tried again, typing, walking, finding a response this time, tapping in more words, walking, reading, thinking, and then typing again. In this way a sort of asylum conversation ensued.

>I didn’t kill Clare. I didn’t kill anyone.

>Then why did you remember doing so?

>It wasn’t a memory. Perhaps a fantasy. And how do you know what I’m remembering or fantasizing?

>Have you reached the point, Dale, where you can’t tell your fantasies from your memories?

>I don’t know, Mr. Phantom Interlocutor. Perhaps I have. Are you a phantom or a memory?

No response on the screen when Dale returned. He tried again.

>Look, if I’d killed Clare Two Hearts, I’d be in jail right now. The memory—the fantasy—had me follow her to New Jersey and kill her and her boyfriend at a public campsite. If it had happened that way, I would have left clues everywhere—plane tickets, talking to the kid at the canoe rental place, car rental bills, credit card signatures, probably footprints and fingerprints. I would have flown back to Montana a gory mess. Ax murders aren’t antiseptic acts, you know. The cops would have arrested me within twenty-four hours. Old boyfriends are the first suspects.

>If the police know there is an old boyfriend. Why would Clare tell anyone in her new life at Princeton about you, Dale? What did she call you that time you thought she was joking—“My first foray into the gray-haired set”? Why would she reveal that to anyone in her new life?

>My hair’s not that gray.

Dale made his loop, found no new words on the screen, read the exchange that was there, and laughed out loud in the dark house. “Jesus Christ, I’m certifiable.” He turned off the computer.

A soft voice said something indecipherable upstairs.

Dale got the flashlight and went up, leaning into the cold draft flowing down the staircase. There was a light. He hefted the bat, feeling his heart pound faster in his chest but also feeling no real fear. Whatever was there was there.

The remaining candle in the front bedroom had been re-lighted. It flickered as he entered, and his shadow danced on the mildewed wallpaper.

“Michelle?” There was no answer. He smashed the candle with the baseball bat, the flame skittering across floorboards before dying, and then went downstairs using only his flashlight.

Outside a dog howled.

Dale turned on the kitchen light, found the yellow legal pad he kept on the counter, and started a shopping list for the morning:

plastic sheeting

nails

After a moment of thought, he added:

new shotgun and shells

A different dog howled somewhere in the dark farther to the west, out toward the barn. Dale checked the flimsy door locks, turned out the light, and went downstairs to the basement.

It was warmer there. He turned on the soft lamp near the bed, got into his pajamas, and crawled under the thick comforter. The sheets felt clean, the pillows soft. He tried to read from an open paperback— Swann’s Way , open to the “Swann in Love” section—but he was too sleepy to make sense of the words. The big console radio was whispering dance music, but Dale was too tired to get up and shut it off. Besides, the glow of the wide dial was reassuring in the dark.

The starlight was visible through the small, high windows near the ceiling. Occasionally a dark shape would occlude the stars, then another would glide by, but Dale did not notice. He snored while he slept.

This night is where my friend Dale passed the point of no return. What was going to happen here was going to happen. He knew that even as he slept. There was no going back.

Dale did not feel like an unintelligent character in a sloppily told tale. This was his life . Everything in the past year or two had seemed to lead him here—to this house, to these events, to this pending conclusion to all doubts. In an age when his generation sought to hide all reality behind simulation and feigned experience, Dale had to know what was real . What was memory and what was fantasy? And there remained the simple fact that despite everything, Dale did not believe in haunted houses or ghosts. This disbelief ran deep as marrow, and his belief in this disbelief was as stubborn as bone. Dale believed in mental illness and in schizophrenia and in the uncharted confusions of the mind, but not in ghosts.

More important to his decision to stay these last few days of his life at The Jolly Corner was his perception—was his understanding —that whatever was happening to him had to be resolved here . This cascade of insane events had come to him in the form of a coming to life of something vital, a stirring of energies, a preparation for birth. Or perhaps a preparation for death. Either way, Dale believed, labor had been induced in this cold farmhouse out in the ass end of Illinois, and some rough beast was slouching toward The Jolly Corner either to be born or to die.

And there was the final fact that Dale knew that he could not go home now—could not show up at Anne’s and Mab’s and Katie’s door in this shape—could not return to the shreds and tatters of his former life in Missoula without this thing being resolved, these questions answered.

Once, when talking with Clare during a long hike in Glacier Park, he had asked her what she thought the topography of a human life might look like. She suggested that it was an inverted cone measured out in units of potential—infinite at the top, zero at the bottom—and that the decreasing radials around the diminishing outer shell of the cone could be measured in accelerating time as one grew closer to old age, death, dissolution. Dale had thought this a tad pessimistic. He had suggested that perhaps a human life was a simple parabola in which one never knew when the apogee—the highest, most sublime point—had been achieved.

“Maybe this is your apogee,” Clare had said, gesturing to the pine forest and the lake and the distant peaks and to herself. Somewhere nearby in the trees a Clark’s nutcracker had scolded them.