A Winter Haunting

by Dan Simmons

  Dale waited, lying on his stomach in the comfortable confines of the sleeping bag and cupping his chin in his palm.

  “I mentioned that my stepfather has a place in Mantua,” continued Clare at last. “My father was an artist in Florence, but after he was killed in an auto wreck, Mother married this older man from Mantua—his family has earned uncounted millions selling salami. The Salami King. A perfect title for the husband of one of Europe’s foremost divas.

  “Anyway, I was about ten when Mother married this guy—his family made me nervous because the Salami King had a son six years older than me who’s always on the make—and we went to stay at his house in Mantua. We still spend several weeks every spring and autumn there—the summers and winters are miserable. Do you really want to hear this story, Professor Stewart?”

  “Yes,” said Dale.

  “The Mantua house is truly incredible,” said Clare. “The Salami King commissioned an architect back in the seventies to combine three old homes dating back to the sixteenth century and a courtyard into one huge home with interior design straight out of the twenty-third century. The stairway up to the library, for instance, doesn’t even have railings—just a single spiraling ribbon of steel for support and raw wood steps with skinny steel cables hanging on either side. It looks like some sort of dinosaur vertebrae rising up between these ancient terra cotta walls covered with the remnants of frescoes from the seventeen hundreds.

  “Anyway, my room is just off the library, near the service elevator, and I have windows that look both outward onto the piazza and inward down onto the ancient courtyard that the architect had enclosed with clear Plexiglas doors and roofed in with steel. One night that first autumn we visited, I awoke some time after three A.M. to the sound of a woman weeping. At first I was afraid it was Mother—this was less than a year after Father’s death and I knew she sometimes cried in private—but this crying was louder, coarser than anything I’d ever heard from Mother. I ran to the open interior window, since the crying was coming from inside the house.

  “It was a woman dressed in black, just like so many of the old Italian women in Mantua and Florence today. But this was not an old woman. She wore a scarf, but I could see long, lustrous black hair escaping from it, and I could tell by her carriage and figure that she was a younger woman—in her twenties, perhaps. And she was carrying a baby. A dead baby.”

  “How could you tell it was dead?” whispered Dale.

  “I could tell,” said Clare. “The baby’s eyes were sunken and glazed over and staring. Its flesh was bloated and white beyond white. Its little hands were frozen into claws by rigor mortis. I could almost smell it.”

  “Your window onto the courtyard was that close?” said Dale, trying not to sound skeptical.

  “It was that close,” said Clare. “And then the woman looked up at me. Not at me, not through me, but into me. And then she just . . . disappeared. One instant she and the baby were there, the next instant they weren’t.”

  “You said you were ten,” suggested Dale.

  Clare had been lying on her back, looking at the stars as she recited all this, but now she rolled over to look at him. The little backpack stove sat between them, separating their bedrolls like a modern-day sword of honor.

  “I was ten, but I saw what I saw,” she said softly.

  “And, of course, there’s a legend in the town about a woman whose baby died in that house,” said Dale.

  “Of course,” said Clare. “Actually, the baby had drowned in the well that used to be in that particular courtyard. The mother—who was only twenty, it turned out—refused to allow the child to be buried. She carried it around for weeks until the Mantuans restrained her and buried the child. Then the mother threw herself down the same well. That all happened late in the sixteen hundreds.”

  “Good legend,” said Dale.

  “I thought so.”

  “Any chance that you heard the legend before you saw the ghost?” he asked.

  “No,” said Clare Two Hearts. “No chance at all. My stepfather and his family wouldn’t talk about what I saw. I finally coaxed the story out of an eighty-six-year-old cook whose family had served the household for five generations.”

  Dale had rubbed his chin, feeling the stubbled whiskers there. “So you do believe in ghosts,” he said.

  “No,” said Clare Two Hearts. There was a silence, and then the two of them laughed at the same time.

  “What do you believe, Clare?” asked Dale.

  She looked at him for a long moment. Then she unzipped her old sleeping bag and folded back the top, in spite of the cold air. She had slipped out of her jeans and sweatshirt before crawling into the bag and now her bra and underpants glowed very white in the starlight.

  “I believe,” she said, “that if you come over here, Professor Stewart, our lives are going to be changed in some way that neither one of us can imagine.”

  Dale had hesitated, but only for the space of ten or fifteen wild heartbeats.

  The five black dogs circled the farmhouse for days. When Dale came outside, they retreated to the fields or disappeared behind the outbuildings and barn. When he went back inside, they moved in close, circling, sitting, watching. Their tracks were everywhere in the melting snow and mud. At night he could hear them howl.

  Finally he got tired of them, went out to his Land Cruiser, and drove to Oak Hill. There was a hardware store there that sold firearms and ammunition. Dale bought two boxes of .410-long shells. Driving out of Oak Hill, he saw the tall cornices of the Carnegie Library and pulled into the tiny parking lot. He had come here a few times as a kid—the Elm Haven library had been tiny, its books musty with age—but Dale knew that Duane had used this library regularly, sometimes walking all the way from his farm on the railroad tracks to do research here.

  A weight seemed to lift off Dale’s shoulders as he settled into a study carrel and began to read from the heap of books he had collected in the stacks. This was more his métier—the books, the quiet hum of purposeful reading, the lamps on the tables—a clean, well-lighted place.

  Dale took a crumpled page of yellow legal-pad paper out of his pocket. He had been carrying around the handwritten list of DOS messages for days. Now he looked at the last quote.

  >The lords of right and truth are Thoth and Astes, the Lord Amentet. The Tchatcha round about Osiris are Kesta, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Qebhsenuf, and they are also round about the Constellation of the Thigh in the northern sky. Those who do away utterly sins and offenses, and who are in the following of the goddess Hetepsekhus, are the god Sebek and his associates who dwell in the water.

  Dale had never researched or taught Egyptian mythology, but as an undergraduate decades earlier he had gone through an avid Howard Carter phase, so he remembered some of this context and knew the source. These words were from the papyrus of Ani, also known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Amazingly, the Oak Hill Library had a copy of this book, and now Dale used the index to look up the various names.

  Anubis, although not mentioned directly had to be involved and was the easiest god to track down: also known as Anpu, Anubis was the jackal-headed son of Nephthys and Osiris and the deity given the greatest duties in guiding souls to the afterlife and protecting them once they were there. Anubis was the god of embalming and the god of the dead, although it became obvious in The Egyptian Book of the Dead that this role was usurped by Osiris as the centuries rolled past. It was thought that Anubis wore the head of a jackal, or a dog, because of the jackals and wild dogs that lurked around the Egyptian tombs, graves, and cities of the dead, always waiting for a rotting morsel.

  Dale followed the research trail to Plutarch. The ancient historian had written:

  By Anubis they understand the horizontal circle, which divides the invisible, to which they give the name of Isis; and this circle equally touches upon the confines of both light and darkness, it may be looked upon as common to them both—and from this circumstance arose that resemblance, which they imagine betwe
en Anubis and the Dog, it being observed of this animal, that he is equally watchful as well by day as night. . . . This much, however, is certain, that in ancient times the Egyptians paid the greatest reverence and honor to the Dog, though by reasons of its devouring the Apis after Cambyses had slain him and thrown him out, when no animal would taste or so much as come near him, he then lost the first rank among the sacred animals which he had hitherto possessed.

  Dale read on, following the maze of connections through the available books and then onto the Internet, using one of the library’s surprisingly new computers. In all the sources, Anubis emerged as a psychopomp—the creature charged with ushering the souls of the dying from this world to the next. It was Anubis who mummified and prepared the corpse of Osiris. It was also the jackal god who assisted Maat in judging these souls for truth and was considered the primary messenger from the underworld. Anubis was the Opener of the Way, presiding over the oval gateway to the realm of the dead—that gateway known to the ancient Egyptians as the Dat, or Duat, or Tuat. Dale blinked at this, realizing that the Egyptian gateway to the dead was in the form of a vagina—that portal both to and from this life.

  “Twat,” he said aloud, appreciating the etymological geneology, and then realized that an elderly woman at the next computer was scowling fiercely at him. Dale smiled wanly and went back to his study carrel.

  He realized that it would take days to track down the provenance of all the other spirits and gods mentioned in his short e-mail message, but he stayed at the books long enough to confirm that the “Constellation of the Thigh” was now known as the Great Bear and that the “Tchatcha,” or spirits, of “Kesta, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Qebhsenuf” were the chosen from the Seven Spirits whom Anubis had appointed as guardians and protectors of the dead body of Osiris. The goddess Hetepsekhus, he discovered after two more hours of reading, was “the eye of Ra.” He had no idea what that really meant, although it sounded like a sunbeam to him. He was getting tired.

  Dale returned the Egyptian books to their shelves and looked at his crumpled paper. He looked at the first line of the first message he had copied:

  gabble retchets yeth wisht hounds

  Dale checked a library clock. It was after 6:00 P.M. The library closed at nine. He was starving. Sighing, unwilling to give up the hunt just yet, he went back to the stacks.

  A moldering old book with a surrendering spine, a book that had, according to the still-used checkout stamps glued in the front, last been checked out on June 27, 1960—exactly the kind of book, Dale knew, that would have long since been thrown away by any “modern” library—provided him with the jackpot. The book was titled English and Cornish Regional Myths and Folktales. The “Yeth or Wisht Hounds” were, as he thought, Heath Hounds—demonic dogs given to wandering the moors. Hounds of the Baskervilles. Always black dogs. It turned out that demonic black dogs, phantom dogs, spectral dogs, had quite a history in Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Cornwall, and the Quantock Hills of Somerset.

  At Brook House, Snitterfield, in an ancient home formerly called the Bell Brook Inn, during World War II, guests and locals observed a big black dog haunting the grounds. The dog had red eyes, and it left no footprints in the freshly tilled garden.

  In 1190 A.D., near the Welsh Marches, a chronicler named Walter Map wrote of spectral black hounds, huge and loathsome, haunting the fields. These spectral hounds invariably presaged violent death in the area.

  On Sunday, August 4, 1577, the parishioners of the church in Bungay, Suffolk, huddled against a memorably violent thunderstorm. In several written accounts it was told of a terrifying black dog that suddenly appeared inside the church, slavering and howling, roaming the aisles while the faithful cried out for divine help. Three people touched the hound: two of them died instantly and the third shriveled up “like a drawne purse.” In separate accounts but on the same August day in 1577, the same or similar hounds appeared in the church in Blythburgh, seven miles away, killing another three people there and “blasting” others.

  Dale skipped ahead to 1613 a.d. when “a blacke dogge as bigg as a bull” suddenly appeared during services at Great Chart in Kent, killing more than a dozen people before demolishing a wall and disappearing.

  Dale pulled down more old books, tracking the Black Dog legends all the way to Beowulf—learning that Grendel was primarily lupine, “him of eagum stod ligge gelicost leoht unfaeger”—“from his eyes shone a fire-like, baleful light,” before watching the legend disappear into the mists of prehistory via the Frankish Lex Salica, the Lex Ripuaria, the legends of Odin’s wolves in Grímnismál, and the Eddic poem Helreith Brynhildar, which spoke of the hrot-garmr, the “howling dog” that ate corpses and breathed fire. All of the black dogs in all of these legends seemed to be associated primarily with corpses, the dead, funeral grounds, funeral pyres, and the underworld. Dale was reminded that the warg was “a worrier of corpses.”

  Dale realized that he could make a doctoral dissertation out of this crap, given the proper primary sources and a few years. It looked as if the connection between spectral black dogs and the “realm of the dead” ran through Indo-European mythologies into prehistory, through Vedic, Greek, and Celtic myth, offered hellhounds in such epic Scandinavian poems as Baldrs draumar (Balder’s Dreams), left paw prints through American Indian legend, and offered death-bound devil dogs romping through Altaic shamanic ritual and pre-Classical Greek thought and the Hindu Mahabharata, while all of it pointed straight back to old Anubis and his Egyptian underworld pals.

  It gave Dale a headache.

  He shelved the last of the books, realized that he was the only person in the building other than the librarian, saw with a shock that it was three minutes before 9:00 P.M., and went out into the cold night to his truck.

  Dale was halfway between Oak Hill and Elm Haven when his cell phone rang. The sudden noise startled him enough that he almost drove off the dark county road. He grabbed the instrument from the passenger seat, where it had been lying for days.

  “Hello?”

  Silence on the line, but a sense of presence. In a wash of emotion that made him pull the truck to the side of the empty highway, Dale knew that it was his lover Clare on the line—Clare calling him after more than a year—Clare telling him that his life and reality could resume once again.

  “Daddy?”

  For an instant Dale felt only vertigo. The voice, the two syllables—all lacked context.

  “Daddy? Are you there?” It was his older daughter, Margaret Beth, Mab, away at Clermont College in California.

  “Mab? What is it, baby? What’s wrong?”

  An exhalation through the receiver. “We’ve been going crazy trying to get in touch with you, Daddy. Where have you been?”

  Dale shook his head in confusion. A pickup truck drove past him in the night, an old man’s face checking the Land Cruiser to see if Dale needed help.

  “I’ve been right here in Illinois, kiddo. Right where I told everybody I’d be. Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s all right here, Daddy. But you don’t have a phone number there and you never answer your cell phone number. Katie and I have been trying to call you or write you. Did you get the letters we sent?”

  Dale blinked. He had told his daughters as well as his colleagues and business associates that he would pick up his mail care of General Delivery in Elm Haven. He had never thought to do so.

  “Sorry, kiddo,” said Dale. “I’ve been . . . busy.” He heard how silly that phrase sounded. “What’s up, Mab? Are you calling from Clermont?”

  “No, Daddy. I’m home for Christmas vacation. We needed to know if you were coming . . . back this way.” Dale heard the unheard word—home.

  “Christmas vacation?” he said, confused again. “It’s weeks until your Christmas vacation, Mab. Why are you home early?”

  There was a silence broken only by the idling of the Land Cruiser and the hiss of static and distance over the frozen fields. Then Mab said, “Dad . . . it’s not
early. Today’s December twenty-second.”

  Dale laughed. “No it’s not, kiddo. Thanksgiving was just a few days ago . . .” He paused, not wanting to tell his daughter that he had spent the holiday with a woman they had never heard about. “Seriously, why are you home early?”

  “Daddy,” real frustration audible now. “It is December twenty-second. Tomorrow is the day before Christmas Eve. Now stop it. You’re scaring me.”

  “Sorry, kiddo.” It was all that Dale could think of to say. He looked at his watch, switching on the overhead light in the truck to check the date. The watch had stopped at 4:15. The date said the 8th, although he had no idea what month.

  Another voice spoke. His younger daughter, Katie, her voice still cooler but deeper than Mab’s. “Dad?” Katie had never called him Daddy.

  “Hey, Butch,” said Dale, using his old joke name for her. He tried to keep his voice light. “How’s everything?”

  “Where are you?” asked Katie.

  Dale looked around at the dark fields, but he could see only his own reflection in the windows and windshield. “I’m here where I said I’d be. I’m sorry I haven’t called or checked the mail. I just . . . got busy. I’m writing a novel. An important novel. I sort of . . . lost track of everything, I guess.”

  The cell phone’s low battery indicator blinked once. Dale cursed softly to himself. He did not want to lose the call now.

  “Daddy,” said Mab, “are you coming home for Christmas?”

  Dale felt as if someone had cut through his ribs and squeezed his heart once, very tightly. He took a breath. “I hadn’t thought about it, kiddo. The ranch . . .” He stopped. The girls didn’t want to hear about the ranch or its renters. He tried again. “Your mother . . .” he began and stopped.

  “Mom didn’t know if you’d be back in Missoula for Christmas,” said Katie. It seemed to be a question.

  “I don’t think that she’d think that it was a good idea,” Dale said at last.