A Winter Haunting

by Dan Simmons

  The two pickups had also been required to slow behind him. The leader of the skinheads was a lot braver than Derek driving the white Chevy truck—the green Ford plowed through small fir trees and knocked over thick bushes and more saplings in its eagerness to get at Dale. The green Ford was gaining.

  Dale stood on the brake, managed to miss by inches a black-trunked maple tree that would have totaled the Land Cruiser, and slid the heavy truck the last hundred feet to the leaf-filled bottom of the gully.

  Where the hell am I? He clearly remembered that their Gypsy Lane hikes had always ended with a triumphant exit from the forest, across that pasture, past the empty farmhouse . . .

  No, there had been a final hill to climb to get up out of the lane. They’d always had to wait at the top for Duane to catch up.

  This had to be it. This shrub-filled, leaf-filled, forested gully had to be the old Gypsy Lane. Which way? Gypsy Lane in his memory ran east and west, but this gully ran mostly north and south. Straight ahead—east—was not an option now, since the hillside ahead was far too steep even for the Land Cruiser in four-wheel-low, and the trees on the hillside grew only a foot or two apart. Dale glanced up the hill he’d just descended.

  The green Ford was thirty feet away, sliding, the skinheads inside screaming. They were going to ram him.

  Dale slapped the Toyota into four-wheel drive and accelerated madly, tires whining as they dug through half a foot of dead leaves. The big vehicle sloughed, almost went into the small creek to his right, and then pulled ponderously ahead just as the green pickup slid through the space where Dale had been two seconds earlier.

  I should just get out and fight them. Dale ignored the mental suggestion. If this was Gypsy Lane, it had become nothing more than a muddy, snow-and-ice-filled gully filled with trees almost as old as Dale. He quit worrying about that and concentrated on keeping the big SUV moving, sliding and sloughing up inclines, bouncing over stones and fallen trees, sometimes driving into the shallow creek to avoid trees and deadfall. The green Ford roared and spit its way along behind. Farther back, Derek’s white Chevy gamely came on.

  The gully was bending toward the east. It seemed very dark down here now. Dale expected an unclimbable hill or deadfall to stop him at any turn. The straight-six Toyota engine growled as it pulled the SUV over another rise between narrowing gully walls.

  This was Gypsy Lane. Thirty feet wide here—it had widened out near its terminus at the county road—but still recognizable as the hidden lane the kids had enjoyed. Even the overhanging trees appeared the same. There were fewer trees growing in the lane itself now, although Dale had to dodge and swerve to avoid those that were there.

  Before the skinhead in the Ford could catch up, Gypsy Lane narrowed further. Old stone walls were visible on either side, a black fence of mature trees growing from the stone. Dale drove on eastward, hearing and feeling rocks and low stumps scraping the metal guarding the Land Cruiser’s underside. The Ford bounced and slewed its way along, fifty feet behind. Much further back, the Chevy kept pace.

  This is nuts, thought Dale ten minutes into this madman’s slow-motion chase. I should have driven to a police station.

  And have C.J. Congden help you? came a voice.

  The air seemed to brighten, the trees back away, the ditch that was Gypsy Lane widen and release its claustrophobic grip. Dale accelerated up a steep rise and came out into an open pasture.

  Billy Goat Mountains. Less than a mile from the cemetery and County 6.

  The quarry ponds had long since been filled in, but the gravel heaps and dirt hills that they had called Billy Goat Mountains were still there—lower and more rounded and weathered than Dale remembered, none of the rises more than twenty feet high, and all with tenth-generation grass and weeds growing out of the mud, but still there. The former ponds were wide sloughs of mud from the snow and sleet and freeze and thaw. For Illinois kids who had never seen a real mountain, or even a serious natural hill, the slag heaps and gravel piles of the old quarry had been mountains enough. And now they had to be mountains enough again for Dale.

  But the old quarry went on farther than Dale remembered. The mud flats and muddy hills stretched ahead for a quarter of a mile or more. Beyond that he could see a hint of the lane leading east to the rutted service road that ran south of Calvary Cemetery to County 6. But could even the Land Cruiser cross this expanse of mud?

  Dale actually stopped. There were tree lines half a mile on either side, but he remembered the woods there being thick and deep. Certainly impassable by vehicle. Probably a whole different forest now anyway, he chided himself.

  He looked behind him. The Ford 250 pickup came up over the rise. The skinhead hanging out the right window still brandished his knife.

  Dale drove into the slough.

  The Land Cruiser bogged down almost immediately. Even in four-wheel drive, all the heavy vehicle could do was slip and slide and throw mud and ice crystals high into the air. The green Ford pickup slammed into the mud and came sliding on, its skinhead occupants looking as reckless and demented as the average SUV driver in SUV commercials on TV.

  Before he lost all momentum, Dale pushed the button that locked the center differential. A lighted diagram appeared on the instrument panel, showing the locked rear axle. Dale pushed a second switch, locking the front differential. His nimble SUV suddenly turned into a tank. Locked wheels dug into the mud and moved the mass of metal ahead slowly. The green Ford plowed after him, obviously in four-wheel-low. Derek had hesitated before accelerating out onto the mud flats and the loss of momentum decided the issue: the white Chevy pickup bogged down after sixty or seventy feet, the spinning wheels only dug it deeper into the icy quagmire, and the pickup stopped, sank another six inches to its running board, and stayed where it was.

  Dale glanced in his mirror long enough to see Derek leap out of the driver’s side of the Chevy and sink halfway to his knees in the mud. Not being a fast learner, the other young skinhead had seen Derek jump and still jumped out the passenger side of the pickup, where he flailed around and dropped his knife in his attempt to keep from falling face-first into the mire. But the green pickup with the three older gang members in it continued slewing steadily after Dale’s Land Cruiser.

  It was, thought Dale a minute or so later, one sad excuse for a car chase. The two heavy vehicles—Dale’s huge Toyota fifty feet or so ahead of the scabrous green pickup—were slipping and sliding and slopping across the mud flats at a top speed of about one half of one mile per hour. Dale’s Land Cruiser had the advantage of expensive differential locks and Japanese engineering. The skinheads’ truck had the advantage of larger tires, greater horsepower, and a felon—perhaps a killer—at the wheel: someone who probably didn’t recognize how crazy his actions were. All Dale knew for certain at this point was that if the skinheads in the Ford did catch up to him, they’d be more furious and violent than they would have been at the KWIK’N’EZ.

  Two-thirds of the way across the bog, Dale realized that he had a serious choice to make. Ahead of him were the sad remnants of Billy Goat Mountains—a line of gradual hills, perhaps twenty feet high, that ended east of the final hundred feet or so of slough before solid ground again, all within sight of Calvary Cemetery. To try to climb those hills might be fatal for Dale—if the Cruiser bogged down or slid backward he’d be at the mercy of the skinheads. To head north or south to bypass the hills would just prolong the slow-motion chase another fifteen or twenty minutes and almost certainly result in the Land Cruiser and the Ford pickup slogging out onto solid ground just fifty feet apart. This whole absurd Gypsy Lane detour would have been for nothing.

  Dale floored the gas pedal and accelerated onto the first hill of slag and mud. Halfway up the incline, Dale knew that he wouldn’t make it. At first the Land Cruiser had dug in and climbed, but he hit a patch that was especially steep and especially muddy. The big SUV slid sideways. Dale fought the wheel, tapped the brake to arrest the slide, and floored the gas pedal to keep the moment
um going sideways on the muddy slope, but then had to swing the steering wheel lock to lock the opposite direction just to keep the heavy truck from swapping ends. The Land Cruiser dug in again with all four locked wheels and hauled itself crablike up the slope to the summit.

  At the top of the hill, barely as wide as his SUV was long, Dale stopped, panted, and stared. The north slope of the slag heap was twice as steep as the side he had just climbed. At the base of it, the mud and snow had melted into a virtual bog. Dale glanced over his shoulder.

  The Ford pickup had built up enough speed to take a healthy run at the slope and now was climbing it at twice the speed Dale had managed. He could see the skinheads and the leader screaming, their mouths wide and black, the leader’s knuckles white on the steering wheel as the pickup’s oversized tires threw mud fifty feet into the air behind it.

  Dale kept the gear-select in four-wheel-low and actually accelerated down the nearly vertical slope. Gears ground in protest, but the gearing, the locked differentials, and the Land Cruiser’s massive compression slowed him and kept him aimed straight all the way down. The heavy SUV hit the mud and water like a giant boulder, digging the wheels in above the hubs, but Dale fought the wheel and kept it pointed north, mud, water, and ice spewing wide on either side and kicking up a rooster tail behind him. Fifty feet and he slapped off the locking differentials, kept it in full-time four-wheel drive, and shifted to second gear, gaining the solid ground in a final lunge. The windshield wipers pounded away, scraping the smallest gap in the mud there so that Dale could see to drive.

  He stopped the truck where the lane to the cemetery began and looked back again.

  The skinhead had paused a long minute at the summit and then followed Dale’s lead by gunning the Ford straight down the hill. But the pickup’s torque and gearing failed it. Halfway down, the green truck swapped ends, then slewed and yawed again. It hit the mud at the bottom of the hill, sliding completely sideways. The useless oversized tires immediately sank three feet into the bog and the pickup flipped on its left side, half burying its cab and hood in mud and water.

  For a long minute there was no movement, and then all three of the skinheads crawled out the open passenger-side window and balanced precariously on the tilted side of the truck. One of the henchmen tried walking out onto the tipped and tilted side of the pickup’s carrying bed, the young man’s arms pinwheeling as he lost balance. He hit the mud and went up to his waist.

  Dale realized that he had the urge to lock the Land Cruiser’s differentials again and drive back to the pickup—not to help the three skinheads, he realized a second later, but to run over the miserable bastards, driving them so deep in the mud that they’d only be found five hundred years later, like those peat mummies in England. Dale tried to laugh, but his hands were shaking now as he gripped the wheel and his heart pounded as he came off the adrenaline rush that had been driving him. He realized that he had never been so angry—or at least not since he had been a kid in Elm Haven. Some of the wild energy and anger of that mostly forgotten year came back to him now with fragments of memory itself—We killed that goddamned rendering truck that was chasing us. He didn’t understand the thought, but he recognized the echo of it in his current fury.

  Driving slowly now, Dale headed west on the rutted lane that ran along the south boundary of Calvary Cemetery. At County 6, he got out, opened the gate, drove through, and closed it behind him. He knew that the skinheads would be walking this way soon—although not that soon, given the mud they had to wade through—but he doubted if they’d be pulling their vehicles out of the mud all that soon.

  They don’t have to, came the unbidden thought. All they have to do is turn north here and walk to The Jolly Corner.

  Dale mentally shrugged. The anger was stronger than the post-adrenaline shaking now, and he felt the fury crystallizing in his chest like a clenched fist. He had his shotgun at the farm. And new shells. Let them come.

  The Jolly Corner was dark when he arrived. Icicles from the day’s thaw and freeze hung like cold teeth in front of the side door. Dale went from room to room, turning on lights as he went. No one was waiting for him. The Savage over-and-under was in the basement where he had left it, unloaded, propped against the wall. Dale took the box of .410 shells, loaded one, and carried the weapon back up to the kitchen. He made sure the door was bolted with the chain lock on. Let them come.

  He walked into the small study. A message glowed on the dark screen. It was not the bit of poem he had last seen there, or his challenge for the unknown e-mailer to identify himself or else, but a verbatim repeat of the earlier message:

  >I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellowed, grafted onto daylight. Maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripple of mysterious meaning. Everything dies, unwanted and neglected—everything.

  When Dale had first seen it, it had made no sense, but now it stirred a dim recollection of something written by Vladimir Nabokov. Now he remembered the story in question—“The Vane Sisters”—and immediately recognized this text as a riff on a playful acrostic in the last paragraph of that story. Treating the computer message now as an acrostic, Dale could read it easily, jumping from first letter to first letter of each word—

  >Icicles by God. Meter from me, Duane.

  TWENTY

  * * *

  DURING the last months that Clare Hart was a student at the University of Montana—before she left for Princeton and her real doctoral program—she and Dale spent most weekends at his ranch and found themselves snowed in for five days and nights that final April.

  He had left Anne and the girls. Everyone on campus seemed to know what was going on. The head of Dale’s English department seemed amused by it all, his colleagues were obviously either interested or repelled or both, and the dean let it be known that she was mildly annoyed. Affairs with students happened and affairs between faculty and graduate students were common enough, but Missoula was still a small enough and rural enough town that no one liked to advertise the fact of such liaisons on campus.

  Dale and Clare had gone up to the ranch on a Friday—he from the small apartment he had rented in town after leaving home, Clare from the apartment she still leased—and by late morning Saturday the county highway was impassable, the half mile of driveway was under four feet of blowing snow, the phone wires were down, and the electricity was out in the ranch house. It was perfect.

  They chopped wood and sat close to the wide fireplace in order to stay warm. They crawled under the down coverlet on the bed and made love to stay warm. The kitchen stove worked off the large propane tank, so there was no problem cooking. Dale had stocked months’ worth of canned goods and the large freezer was out in the utility shed between the ranch house and the barn, so they just opened the freezer doors—the temperatures plummeted below zero every night—to keep the frozen food from spoiling. Dale actually used a snow shovel to clear the propane grill on the ranch house deck to barbecue steaks their second evening there.

  During the day they cross-country skiied or snowshoed along the ridges and valleys. The sunlight was brilliant between sudden snow squalls, the sky cerulean when glimpsed between shifting clouds. The wind blew almost constantly, whipping snow off the branches of Douglas firs and Ponderosa pines, drifting snow higher along the west wall of the ranch house, and burying the access road under undulating white dunes. On the third day Dale and Clare snowshoed down to the county highway, but it was immediately obvious that although plows had come along the day before, the wind and fresh snow the night before had closed the road again. They went back to the ranch house and built a fire—it took Dale ten matches to get it going—and took off their clothes and made love on a Hudson’s Bay blanket in front of the hearth. Dale said later that he had calculated that they had only enough firewood to last until the following December.

  It was on the last night before the roads were cleared that Clare told Dale that he seemed haunted. That day the county highway had be
en opened, the phones were working again, and a neighbor with a snowplow had promised to clear Dale’s access road as soon as he finished a dozen other jobs nearby, probably early the next morning. Dale had told him that there was no hurry.

  It was long after dark and Dale and Clare were lying in front of the dying fire, a thick quilt beneath them, the red Hudson’s Bay blanket above them. The rest of the ranch house was dark and cold. Clare was closest to the fire and had turned away, toward the failing fire, propping herself up on her right elbow, so that her buttocks and hips were all that touched him. Her left arm, shoulder, and rib cage were outlined in red from the embers beyond and seemed to pulse from some internal heat of their own. Dale had been half dozing, too lazy to stoke the fire and get the room warm enough for them to retreat to the bedroom, when he heard her speaking softly to him.

  “Do you know why I chose to be with you?”

  He blinked at the coolness of her tone, but quickly realized that it must be the prelude to either a joke or a compliment. “No,” he said, rubbing his palm down the red-limned curve of her shoulder and arm. “Why did you choose to be with me?”

  “Because you’re haunted,” whispered Clare Two Hearts.

  Dale waited for the punch line. After a long moment of silence broken only by the settling of embered logs, he said, “What do you mean? Haunted?”

  It was dark enough now that he did not see her shrug, but felt the slight motion under the curve of his palm. “Haunted,” she said. “Touched by something dark. Something from your childhood, I think. Something not completely of this world.”

  The wind rattled the high window ten feet from them. In daylight, the view looked through the trees into the long meadow going down past the barn toward the lake. Now it was just darkness pressing against glass with the wind as its fingers. “You’re joking,” said Dale. He had to fight the urge to remove his hand from her cool skin.