James Hynes - Next

His heart racing, Kevin sat in his ticking car in the middle of the road. The tracks looked fresh, unblurred by later snow or wind. The old farmhouse, though, was heaped with snow. Its front porch had long ago collapsed like a shopkeeper’s shutter over the first-floor windows and the peak of the farmhouse roof had caved in, so that he could see bitter blue sky through the empty window frames of the second story. Across the weathered gray siding someone had spray painted, in huge letters, NO ENTRING. Even under the blanket of snow Kevin could see the tangle of untrimmed bushes across the farmyard, the angular heaps of rusting farm machinery, and the splintered uprights of a barn that had long since burned or collapsed completely into itself. The tracks of the overturned pickup seemed to aim straight through the only unobstructed path across the yard and into the field beyond.

Still trembling, Kevin restarted his car, checked his mirrors, and pulled the car as close as he could to the side of the road without getting stuck. He put on the emergency blinker, left the motor running, and got out. Clutching his denim jacket shut at his throat, he slipped and slid in his soaking sneakers up the track of the pickup, calling out weakly in the bitter cold, “Hello?” The empty farmhouse seemed bigger and gloomier now; through its broken windows he saw that the first-floor ceiling had also caved in, too, so that the interior of the house was stuffed full of splintered gray timbers like a box full of pickup sticks. Even if you wanted to, there’d be no entring that house, making the blunt warning across the front seem both superfluous and more menacing. Scuffing up the track on his icy feet, Kevin thought the handpainted warning might as well have read ABANDON ALL HOPE.

Kevin called out again, “Anybody there?” but his words froze and died, leaving only a ringing, icy silence. He was shivering, and his feet were beginning to sting. The snow around the truck was disturbed by the truck’s final topple onto its side, and Kevin steadied himself with one hand on the freezing side panel as he edged along its rust-eaten and salt-rimed undercarriage. He kicked through the snow around the front of the truck, trailing gusts of white breath. The truck’s hood was still warm under his hand, so he called out again, “Anybody in there?” The windshield was cracked but not shattered; it might even have been an old crack, an elongated S that snaked from one side to the other. The cold light fell across cracked black vinyl seats that were patched with duct tape and leaked sickly yellow foam stuffing. Kevin put his shaking hand on the cold, cracked glass and peered into the cab. The driver’s door window was rolled up and intact, while the passenger door window, pressed into the snow at Kevin’s feet, was crazed with fractures. His pulse throbbed in his throat, and he angled this way and that, peering into the foot wells and the narrow space behind the seats, briefly misting the glass with his breath. There was no one in the truck.

The hair rose on the back of his neck as if someone were watching him from behind, and he spun suddenly around. The field of snow glittered away into the distance, poked through with the dried stalks of last year’s corn. No one there, either. He glanced at the gloomy house, gray wood heaped with white, then at the ruins of the barn, blackened uprights frosted with snow. He stepped back into drifts up to the calves of his jeans to get a wider view of the truck. There was no snow on it, so it must have crashed since the storm, but the only footprints around it were his own, coming up from the road. He trudged along the top of the truck, noting the empty bed and the intact window at the rear of the cab. Standing behind the sideways tailgate, he saw the truck’s tracks and his own coming up from the road, saw his Pinto with its lights flashing dimly in the bright sun, saw its thin plume of exhaust rising straight up in the brittle, windless air. He turned completely around, stamping a hole in the snow. There was no one in the truck, and no tracks led away from it.

Suddenly the cold penetrated deeper, not just the freezing air through his thin jacket, but an all-encompassing cold that seemed to flow from the truck, the ruined barn, the decaying equipment, the slowly collapsing house.

“Hey!” he shouted, as loudly as he could, but the syllable disappeared into the cold as quickly as the mist of his breath, leaving no trace that he had ever cried out at all. The snow glittered painfully in every direction, except in the interior of the derelict house. Even though the roof had collapsed and the windows were all broken out, none of the relentless winter light seemed to make it into the house’s interior, where all he saw were the shadows of shattered and upended timbers, curling peels of ancient wallpaper, sheets of water-stained lath and plaster, and where, he knew, with absolute certainty, that if he stared into the shadows long enough — trembling in the cold, up to his knees in snow — something would move and beckon him.

He started to run, clumsily, back toward the road. He threw his arms out for balance and let his jacket flap open, lifting his knees high to punch his sodden, freezing sneakers through the drifts. Halfway across the farmyard it occurred to him that he might tread on something sharp under the snow, that he ought to retrace his original path back around the truck, but there was no way he was going back there. He plunged through drifts up to his knees, caking his jeans with snow, and he struggled past the front of the ruined house without looking back, finally bursting through onto the pavement, gasping white clouds, his whole body shaking, his throat raw. He yanked open the Pinto’s door, fell into the bucket seat, and put the car in gear even before he slammed the door or buckled his seat belt. The wheels whined in the snow, ratcheting Kevin’s panic even higher, but then treads caught pavement and he skidded out onto Dexter Trail and rocketed away from the house and the empty truck, warmed as much by sheer relief as by the car’s wheezing heater. He didn’t look back, he never drove that road again, and he never mentioned what he’d seen to another living soul.

Now, as he hesitates in the smoky, flickering hallway, Kevin thinks, that’s two tests I failed in twelve hours: not staying awake for Grampa Quinn and not reporting the overturned truck. The memory of that Christmas has haunted him for twenty-five years. He’s imagined alternate versions, where his grandfather clutches his hand and calls his name, the last words Grampa Quinn ever said, or where Kevin pulls an unconscious driver out of the truck and drags him through the snow to his car and races him to the emergency room in Stockbridge or Pinckney. Sometimes he thinks he’s exhausted the memories of that day, that they’ve stopped making sense, but now the hand sticking out of the rubble — motionless, fingers curled — is another test, and it’s as if he were standing beside the truck again, in the cold, cruel winter sunlight. His eyes are beginning to sting from the smoke, from the flickering light, and he knows he ought to touch the hand, to see if the guy’s still alive under there. But he’s more scared of touching that hand than he’s been of anything else, ever, in his whole life. What if it has a pulse, or, worse, what if it twitches? What can Kevin do? He can’t lift the beam, he can’t pull the guy out, he’s not sure if even clawing at the rubble would do anything but bring the rest of the ceiling down on top of them both. What if it’s still warm? What if it clenches in pain, like a dying spider in its last throes? What if, in a moment out of a horror movie, it clutches him tightly and won’t let him go?

“He’s dead.” The Yellow Rose is just behind him. She’s edged into the hallway after Kevin.