Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

“I believe it,” said Dale. This inner layer of dark drapes had actually been sewn together. “Mrs. Brubaker must have been a vampire.” He pulled a folding knife from his pocket, flicked open the gravity blade, and cut through the stitching. The drapes did not want to slide along the heavy rod, but eventually he wrestled them back. A once-white curtain turned the sunlight a dim, watery yellow. He tugged the curtains down. “I’m going to need more light in here to work,” he explained, dropping the brittle curtains on the old couch and squinting up at the high draperies.

“I don’t think so,” said Sandy Whittaker.

Dale folded his knife away and looked at her.

“A vampire,” she said. “I don’t think that Mrs. Brubaker was a vampire.”

The tour of the rest of the first floor took only a few minutes. A “National Pyramidal Family Folk Home” was pretty much like Dale’s former American-square home in Missoula before the additions had been added—square, four rooms, a narrow hallway, and a bathroom. Going counterclockwise: the tiled kitchen (one window and a door), the large dining room (two windows with drapes and curtains), the small front living room (two heavily draped windows), the front entrance hall that ran back to the kitchen (its front door had leaded glass—the only decorative item Dale noticed on the first floor), the front “study” across the hall from the living room—a small room, but surprisingly cozy, with an old rolltop desk, built-in bookcases along the north wall, a single window looking down the front drive, and a long daybed with sleighbed headboard and footboard.

“This is where Mrs. Brubaker slept and—I believe—Mr. McBride before that.”

“They didn’t sleep upstairs?” said Dale.

Sandy Whittaker smiled. He was standing close enough to smell her talcum powder and perfume. “No. I believe I mentioned the reason in my first e-mail to you.”

They paused by the first-floor bathroom: a pedestal sink, a wonderful clawfoot tub, but no shower. The black and white floor tile was chipped. The toilet actually had the flush box on the wall behind it, making Dale think of the scene in the first Godfather where Michael Corleone goes in the rest room of the Italian restaurant to find a pistol with which to kill Tattaglia and the police captain, played by Sterling Hayden.

“No shower?” he said.

“There’s one downstairs and one upstairs, I believe. But they never used the upstairs shower.”

“Why not?” said Dale.

“I’ll show you,” said Sandy.

As it turned out, she did not accompany him upstairs. It was a narrow stairway, winding, enclosed in the wall between the bathroom and the front door. It had no light switch and was very dark. Dale was gallant—thinking of the steep, narrow stairway and Ms. Whittaker’s size—and suggested that he go up alone, clumping up the steep winding staircase in the dark. There was a dim light at the top.

A thick spiderweb covered the door to the second-floor hallway. Something distorted and huge—a spidery shape as tall as Dale—moved in the layers of web, its limbs shifting and twitching, reaching for him.

Dale simply froze. Later, he was glad that he did not scream. Certainly that story would have soon gotten around Oak Hill and Elm Haven: Dale Stewart, learned professor, rugged Westerner and author of the Jim Bridger: Mountain Man series, scared by his own shadow.

There were multiple layers of thick, clear construction plastic nailed across the doorway. The plastic had warped and yellowed with age—Dale remembered now that Duane McBride had said that his Old Man had “shut off the second floor for heating reasons” after Dale’s mother had died. That must have been around 1952.

Dale reached out and gingerly touched the first layer of plastic. Thick. Brittle. There must have been four or five layers nailed into place, each with its own latticework of folds and cracks. Dim light from a second-story window barely made it through the discolored layers. No wonder he had thought it was a web. The giant spider, of course, had been his own distorted reflection. He leaned closer but still could see no detail of the hallway or rooms beyond.

Dale clicked open his knife, set the blade to the plastic, and then thought better of it. He went carefully down the steep stairway.

“Is it still all sealed off?” asked Sandy Whittaker.

“That’s an understatement,” said Dale. “I was going to cut through the plastic, but I figured I’d better ask you if there was some reason for the second floor being off-limits. Ebola virus or something.”

“Pardon me?” said Sandy Whittaker.

“Just kidding. I’m just curious as to why all the plastic sheeting.”

“Don’t you remember in the e-mail I sent you?” said Sandy. “I mentioned that Mrs. Brubaker had never heated the second floor—that it was shut off.”

“I thought you meant the heating vents,” said Dale with a soft smile. They had walked back into the kitchen where there was more light. “I didn’t know you meant that Mr. McBride had hermetically sealed the whole second floor.”

“Alma wouldn’t go up there,” said Sandy.

“Why?” said Dale. “Is it haunted? Is Mr. McBride’s crazy second wife sealed in up there or something?”

Ms. Whittaker could only stare. Her lipsticked mouth hung slightly open.

“Just kidding again,” Dale said hastily, making a mental note not to joke with Sandy Whittaker again. Had she been this literal as a kid? He could not remember. He had not hung around the girls much. “Now I remember when I lived here as a kid,” said Dale, “Duane saying something about their second story being shut off because of the heating bills.”

Sandy Whittaker finally managed a nod. “I assure you, Dale. . . Mr. Stewart. . .”

“Dale,” said Dale.

“I assure you, Dale, that as far as I know, that’s absolutely the only reason for the second floor to be sealed off. The old coal furnace was converted to propane in the 1950s and was never as efficient afterward. Mrs. Brubaker slept in the study—I think Mr. McBride had slept there as well after his wife died—and, well, no one needed the second floor.”

“I just made the joke because you said Alma—the housekeeper, right?—Alma wouldn’t go up there,” Dale said lamely.

“Alma is seventy-four years old,” said Sandy. “With a bad hip. It’s the staircase she’s afraid of. Now. . . you’ve rented the entire house, Mr.. . . Dale. If you would like the upstairs to be opened up, I’ll get my nephew over here to take the plastic down and then Alma—or Alma’s daughter—will help me clean and air out the rooms. I imagine that the air up there could be a little stale if it’s been shut off for almost fifty years. . .”

Dale held his palms up. He had almost made a joke about unsealing Tutankhamen’s tomb, but stopped himself in time. “I don’t need the second floor,” he said. “If I do, I’ll tell you. And for a hundred and seventy-five dollars a month, the first floor and that nice study should work for me.”

“If you think the rent is too high. . .” began Sandy.

Dale had to sigh and shake his head. “Even in Missoula, you couldn’t rent a decent room for that amount, Sandy. Everything’s fine. Did you say that there’s a shower in the basement?”

THERE was more than a shower in the basement. Dale had forgotten that Duane had more or less lived in the basement of this farmhouse.

When Dale had been a boy in Elm Haven, he had been terrified of his own basement. It had been a labyrinth of small rooms with the coal bin far in the back of the maze, and he’d been frightened every night when he had to go down and shovel coal into the hopper.