Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

“No,” I say truthfully. “Just one bad novel and some personal stuff.” Including a suicide note, but I do not say that.

McKown does not pursue it. He ascertains that I am healthy enough to answer a few more questions, takes out an audiotape recorder and his notebook, and spends the next hour asking me very precise and logical questions. I answer as truthfully as I can, providing often imprecise and rarely logical answers. Sometimes, though, I have to lie.

“And those rope burns on your neck,” he asks. “Do you remember how you received those?”

I automatically touch the torn tissue on my throat. “I don’t remember,” I say.

“Possibly something when you were crawling through that tunnel,” says McKown, although I know that he knows that this is not the case.

“Yes.”

When he is finished and the notebook is put away and the recorder is off, he says, “Dr. Foster tells me that you can leave here tomorrow. I brought a present for you.” He sets a single key on the moveable tray hanging over the bed.

I lift it. It is darkened with carbon and the plastic base of it has melted slightly, but it looks intact.

“It still works on your Cruiser,” says Sheriff McKown. “I had Brian drive it over. It’s in the lot outside.”

“Amazing the key survived the fire and that you found it,” I say.

McKown shrugs slightly. “Metal’s like bones and some memories. . . it abides.”

I look at the sheriff through my puffy, swollen eyelids. Not for the first time am I reminded that keen intelligence can be found in unlikely places. I say, “I imagine that I will have to stay around here for quite a while.”

“Why?” says Sheriff McKown.

I start to shrug and then choose not to. The bandages are very tight around my right side and ribs, and it already hurts a bit to breathe deeply. “Arraignment?” I say. “More depositions? Investigation? Trial?”

McKown reaches over to where he has set his Stetson on my bed, lifts it, and unnecessarily re-creases its crown. “One more interview this evening with Deputy Presser,” he says, “and I think we’ve got all the information we need. You won’t be needed for the kids’ arraignment and I doubt if there’ll be a trial. . . about the burning of the farmhouse and their attack on you, I mean.”

I sit in my hospital bed and wait for more explanation.

McKown shrugs and taps the brim of his hat against his knee. The crease in his gray-green trouser material is very sharp. “Derek’s and Toby’s and Buzz’s confessions pretty well agree that they came to burn you out and hurt you on New Year’s Eve. And you didn’t use any sort of deadly force. . . all you did is try to run. It’s not your fault that Bonheur was such a moron that he drove Mr. Johnson’s combine into the fuel tank.”

I nod and say nothing.

“Besides,” continues the sheriff, “the real crime here is the death of Bebe Larsen. But I don’t think that will come to trial either. Three of the boys are juveniles, they’ll get plea bargains and spend some time at a juvenile center and then waste my time on probation around here. And the other two will cop to lesser charges rather than face murder. If Bonheur lives, and I guess he’s going to, he’ll be going away again for a while. Can I ask you a question, Professor Stewart?”

I nod again, sure that he is going to ask about the extra figure the skinheads say they saw struggling with me in the light of the fires, even though I’ve stated in all the interviews that it was Bonheur who tried to choke me before collapsing again.

“The dogs,” he says, surprising me. No one has mentioned the dogs in all the formal interviews during the past twenty-four hours.

“A lot of people and vehicles stomped that snow down before daylight, but there were still a few paw prints,” he says and settles his Stetson on his knee and looks at me.

I suffer a shrug. I think, Homage to thee, Oh Governor of the Divine House. Sepulchral meals are bestowed upon thee, and he overthroweth for thee thine enemies, setting them under thy feet in the presence of thy scribe and of the Utchat and of Ptah-Seker, who hast bound thee up.

Why had a lonely nine-year-old boy on an isolated Illinois farm in the late 1950s chosen Anubis to worship, going so far as to learn the ancient deity’s language and ceremonies? Perhaps it was because the boy’s only friend had been Wittgenstein, his old collie, and the boy liked the jackal god’s head and ears. Who knows? Perhaps gods choose their worshipers rather than the other way around.

The question had been whether to tell Dale that he was never at risk from the Hounds. The Guardians of the Corpse Ways, like jackals cleansing the tombs of undeserving carrion, are protectors of the liminal zone at the boundaries of the two worlds. Like phagocytes in the bloodstream of the living, they are not just psychopomps, protectors of souls during the transition voyage, but scavengers, seeking out and returning souls who have crossed that boundary in the wrong direction and who do not belong on the east bank of the living, no matter how terrible the imperative of the torment that has brought them back there. But who is to say that Dale had not been at risk? He had, after all, volunteered to travel to the west bank necropolis in attempting to kill himself, and in that sense at least, summoned Osiris to weigh his heart in the Hall of the Two Truths.

“Professor, you all right? You seem to have gone away for a minute there.”

“I’m all right,” I say huskily. “Tired. Side hurts.”

McKown nods, lifts his Stetson, and stands. He turns to go and then turns back. Columbo , I think, remembering Dale’s earlier thought. Instead of asking some final, insightful, damning question, McKown gives me information. “Oh, I looked through Constable Stiles’s files for 1960–1965 and found something interesting from 1961.”

I wait again.

“It seems that Dr. Staffney, Michelle’s father, the surgeon, called Barney Stiles in late March of that year and demanded that C.J. Congden, his old henchman Archie Kreck, and a couple of other local thugs be arrested. . . for rape. According to Barney’s sloppy report, Dr. Staffney said that these boys—well, Congden was seventeen then, so not quite boys—these punks had taken his daughter for a ride, driven her out to the empty McBride house—Mr. McBride had moved to Chicago and the place was empty then before his sister moved in—driven her out to the empty McBride place, and raped her several times. Did you know anything about this, Professor?”

“No,” I say truthfully.

McKown shakes his head. “Dr. Staffney dropped the charges the next day, and as far as I know neither he nor Barney ever mentioned it again. Michelle was only in seventh grade then. My guess is that J. P. Congden, C.J.’s father, threatened the good Dr. Staffney.”

Neither of us speaks for a moment. Then Sheriff McKown says, “Well, I just thought I’d let you know.” He walks to the door, his hat still in his hand, but pauses a moment. “If you’re not needed around here, I imagine you’ll want to get going when you’re released from the hospital tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Heading back to Montana, Professor?”

“Yes.”

McKown puts his hat on and tugs the brim down slightly. His light eyes look intelligent but colder with the official hat on. “And if there’s no trial or anything, you’re not planning to come back this way, are you?”

“No.”

“Good,” says McKown, adjusting his hat again before leaving. “Good.”

On the third day, they wheel me to the door of the hospital—hospital policy, it seems—and let me walk to the Land Cruiser. The day is cold but absolutely cloudless. The sunlight and blue sky suggest the possibility of spring even though it is the first week of January. Deputy Taylor has brought by a red wool mackinaw for me to wear, since my coats had burned in the farmhouse with my other possessions, and I appreciate it as I walk the chilly hundred yards to where the SUV is parked. I wonder for a minute if the taxpayers had paid for this largesse, but the coat hangs on me, two sizes too large, and I guess that it’s a castaway from one of the bigger deputies.