A Winter Haunting

by Dan Simmons

  “No.”

  “Is this the Blackfoot mystic talking?” said Dale. He kept his tone light. But he remembered their camping trip that first weekend on the ridge near the reservation. “Or the descendant of some Italian witch?”

  “Both,” said Clare. She did not turn toward him.

  “I thought that houses were haunted, not people,” said Dale. He tried to banter, but his tone was straining around the edges.

  Clare said nothing. She no longer propped herself on her elbow but lay on her side, her arm crooked over her head as if in sleep. The embers had dimmed so thoroughly that all he could see of her was the pale glow of her skin in the starlight reflected from the snow piled outside the window.

  He removed his hand. The cold air in the ranch house settled heavier on them where they lay on the floor. “Why would you choose to be with someone because he’s . . . haunted?” Dale asked into the darkness.

  “Because it’s growing stronger,” whispered Clare. She seemed half asleep, or perhaps completely asleep, talking in her sleep, a medium in her trance. “It’s reached a quickening. Something dead is struggling to be born.”

  Dale felt the cold air under the blanket then, as tangible as a third body between them. Clare was, indeed, sleeping. She began snoring softly.

  Someone was banging on the door.

  Dale struggled up out of sleep. For a minute he was confused, but then he noticed the brass headboard of the old bed, the oak bulk of the floor console radio at the foot of the bed, and the weak winter light coming through the high basement windows. Duane’s bed in the basement.

  The banging came again.

  Dale pulled off the quilt and sat on the edge of the bed. The .410-gauge shotgun was where he had left it, propped against a bookcase. Dale remembered that he had loaded it after coming home from the truck chase the evening before. He did not remember falling asleep in the bed with his clothes on, but he had.

  Someone was pounding on the kitchen door.

  Dale slipped into his shoes, tied them, tucked in his shirttails, picked up the shotgun, checked to make sure it was loaded, closed the breech and clicked on the safety, and walked upstairs.

  The clock in the kitchen said ten-thirty in the morning. Dale peered through the curtains on the little window in the door before opening it.

  Michelle Staffney was on the stoop holding three large grocery bags. Dale could see a plastic-wrapped ham protruding from the largest of the plastic bags, the pink meat looking vaguely fleshlike and obscene.

  “Open up!” shouted Michelle. “It’s cold out here!” She smiled at him. She was wearing bright red lipstick and her cheeks were pink.

  Dale propped the shotgun out of sight but within easy reach between the kitchen counter and the stove, and unlocked the door.

  Michelle bustled in, bringing in a blast of cold air with her. Dale had time to notice her truck parked in the frozen mud turnaround, notice that the snow was mostly gone and that the day was sunny in its weak, winterish way, and then he closed and locked the door behind Michelle. He turned his attention her way as she tossed her long down coat over the back of a chair and got busy removing cans and bottles and jars and the ham itself from the three bags.

  “Well, I would have called you, but of course I couldn’t since you don’t have a phone here and refuse to keep your cell phone turned on or whatever, so I just made the decisions myself.” She removed two bottles of red wine from a skinny brown bag that had been concealed in the grocery plastic. “I hope you like Merlot. I do. So I just bought two yesterday before the stores closed. And I decided to keep it simple . . . you know, just ham and baked potatoes and green beans. But I got a wonderful Sara Lee pie for dessert.” As if submitting it as evidence, she removed an apple pie from the plastic and held it up.

  “Great,” said Dale, totally confused. “But what’s the . . . I mean, why are we celebrating?”

  Mica Stouffer née Michelle Staffney paused in the act of reaching for a water glass from one of the high cabinet shelves, and Dale noticed how tightly her white blouse was pulled over her large breasts. He glanced away as if inspecting the bottles and cans and ham on the counter.

  Michelle took time to run some water from the tap and drink before answering. “I hope you’re joking, Professor Dale Stewart. Today is Christmas Eve.”

  They had dinner in mid-afternoon, before the thin daylight faded completely. Dale had showered and shaved and dressed in chinos, a clean shirt, and a dark brown leather sport coat while Michelle made coffee and began to fill the old house with rich smells of cooking. They had glasses of wine while the ham was cooking and opened the second bottle of Merlot during dinner. They ate at the kitchen table. Michelle had brought two stubby candles in her purse. Dale had tried not to think of Clare when he lit the candles with his gold lighter, and now the dimming daylight was augmented by candlelight on the table rather than from the brash overhead bulb. Dale had felt disoriented and light-headed when he awoke, and now he felt absolutely drunk. He amazed himself by telling Michelle all about the slow-motion truck chase the day before, emphasizing the farcical rather than frightening elements, and they both laughed. Dale poured more wine for both of them.

  “I read that story you were talking about,” said Michelle after they had cleared the table. Coffee was brewing in the coffeemaker and the apple pie had been warmed in the oven, but for now each of them was enjoying a final glass of wine. “You know,” she said, “ ‘The Jolly Corner.’ “

  Dale only vaguely remembered talking about the Henry James story, but he nodded. “Did you like it?”

  Michelle sipped her wine. Her red hair gleamed in the candlelight. The light was all but gone from the square of window over the sink behind her. “I don’t know if I like it,” she said at last. “Actually, I thought it was pretty weird.”

  Dale smiled. When he spoke, he worked to keep his voice from sounding condescending. “Yeah, I have to confess that I find a lot of James’s stuff heavy going. You know what Dorothy Parker said about Henry James?”

  Michelle Staffney shook her head.

  “She said that he chewed more than he bit off,” Dale said and laughed. The air smelled of coffee and pie. The last of the wine tasted rich. He had left five skinhead punks wallowing in the mud of Billy Goat Mountains. All in all, he felt pretty good.

  Michelle shook her head as if dismissing Dorothy Parker’s clever comment and getting back to the subject. “I read the thing three times, but I still don’t think I understood it. I mean, Spencer Brydon sees this ghost in his old house—this alter ego—this horrible version of himself. Who he might have been.”

  Dale nodded and waited. The wine was almost gone.

  “But was it real? The ghost, I mean?” Michelle’s voice was low, throaty.

  Dale shrugged. “That’s the interesting thing about Henry James’s fiction,” he said, hearing the echo of Professor Stewart’s lecturing tone in his voice despite his best efforts. “The ghost—his old New York home, haunted as it was—they’re all external manifestations of the mind itself, aren’t they? The merging of the external and internal? Reality for James—at least in his fiction—was always metaphorical and psychological.”

  “Alice Staverton saw it too,” Michelle said softly.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The girlfriend,” said Michelle. “Miss Staverton. The one who’s cradling Brydon’s head in her lap at the end. She saw the ghost—the bad Brydon—at the same time that he did. She tells him that. And she liked the bad one . . . was attracted to him.”

  “She was?” Dale said stupidly. He had taught the story a score of times—almost always to first-year students—but he had never really focused on the footnote fact that Miss Staverton had seen the same ghostly image, much less that she said that she liked the monster.

  “Yes,” said Michelle. “And she liked the other Brydon—missing fingers, rough appearance and all—because it was him, the ghost Brydon, not the real, wimpy Brydon, who said that he wanted her.”
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  “Wanted her to come find him,” said Dale. “To help him.”

  It was Michelle’s turn to shrug. “That’s not the way I read it. I heard her say that the other Brydon, the Mr. Hyde one, wanted her. Like in wanted to take her to bed. As if it took this other Brydon, the monster Mr. Hyde one, the crass American merchant version of Brydon, to tell her that he wants to fuck her. And that’s why she shocks the wimpy Brydon—who’s still lying on the floor with his head in her lap at this point, I think—when she says, ‘He seemed to tell me of that . . . So why shouldn’t I like him?’ “

  Dale set his empty wine glass on the table and stared at her, dumbfounded. All the years of teaching this story . . . how could he have missed this possible interpretation? How could the various James scholars have missed it? Did James himself—that master of self-sublimation—miss it as well? For a moment Dale could not speak.

  “All I know for sure,” continued Michelle, “is that it would make a shitty movie. No action. No sex. And the ghost isn’t all that scary. So, Professor Stewart. Shall we?”

  Dale shook himself out of his reverie. “Have coffee and pie?”

  “Go upstairs and fuck,” said Michelle.

  Dale follows her upstairs in candlelight, feeling thick and removed, watching things unspool in slow motion, as if in a dream.

  This is no dream, Dale.

  He suggested the basement bed instead, saying it was warmer there, with more light and . . .

  “No,” said Michelle, carrying the candles to the base of the stairs. “That’s a boy’s bed.”

  A boy’s bed? thought Dale, realizing at once that it was indeed a boy’s bed, and a dead boy’s bed, but what difference did that make? All the beds in the house belonged to dead people.

  “Why don’t you get the quilt and the blanket from the daybed in the study?” said Michelle.

  “The study is warmer, too . . .” began Dale.

  Michelle had shaken her head. “The computer is in there. Just get the quilt and a blanket.”

  Dale fetches the quilt and the blanket and returns to the stairs, not understanding the comment about the computer, not focusing on it, not focusing on anything. Their shadows climb the stairs with them. Standing on the landing at the top of the stairs for a moment before entering what had been the master bedroom, Dale wonders idly why there is no electricity to the second floor.

  The Old Man rewired it. Cut the wiring to the fuse box.

  Michelle encircles his wrist with her fingers at the entrance to the bedroom. The candle flame is reflected in her strangely glassy eyes. Contact lenses, thinks Dale. And too much wine.

  Dale starts to speak, can think of nothing to say. The candle she had handed to him below drips hot wax on his wrist. He ignores it. It is strangely warm up here.

  “Come,” says Michelle Staffney. She leads him into the room.

  The excitement hits him the instant he crosses the threshold, but this time it may be as much because of Michelle’s slim fingers on his wrist, or the sight of candlelight on her pink cheeks and red hair and open blouse, or the mingled scent of perfume and woman rising from her flesh as if activated by the small flame in her left hand.

  “I know how this room affected you before,” she whispers and sets her candle on the bedside table. She takes his candle from him and sets it beside hers, removes the quilt and blanket from under his arm, and smooths them onto the old bed—first the blanket, smoothing it down, then the red quilt. Their shadows move across the faded wallpaper and ripple on the closed drapes.

  Dale continues to stand there stupidly, watching, as she turns back the edge of the quilt and steps closer. He smells the shampoo scent of her hair. Michelle kisses the side of his neck, presses her right hand against the small of his back through his sport coat, and slides the pale fingers of her left hand down his chest and across his belly until they find and hold his erect penis through his cotton trousers. She looks up at him.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

  He kisses her. Her lips are full and very cool, almost cold.

  Michelle smiles and uses both hands to remove his sport coat. There is no place to put it. She drops it on the floor and begins unbuttoning his shirt. When her fingers drop away and move to her own blouse, Dale finishes unbuttoning his own shirt, pulling the tails out of his trousers.

  Michell drops her blouse on the floor next to his jacket and unbuttons her skirt. Her bra is white, lacy, strangely virginal-looking. Her full breasts rise palely above white lace. Freckles on her throat give way to the whiteness.

  She unhooks Dale’s belt and slides down the zipper of his fly. Then she goes to one knee, pushing his chinos and boxer shorts lower, and takes his stiff penis in her mouth.

  Dale gasps not just because of the sudden assault of intimacy but because her mouth is as cold as if she had been chewing an ice cube a second before.

  What are Anne and the children doing right now? On Christmas Eve?

  Dale angrily shakes away the alien thought.

  Michelle stands again, smiling, her red lips moist. Both hands replace her mouth now, sliding up and down the moist shaft of his penis. She whispers, “Aren’t you going to help me undress?”

  Awkwardly, literally throbbing with excitement as her cool hands stay on him, Dale slides her skirt down and off. She temporarily releases her hold on him and steps out of her shoes as he pulls her white underpants lower. Dale notices that her red pubic hair is cut in a narrow vertical strip; he has seen this form of trimming in magazines and in movies but never in real life. Suddenly he is aware that Michelle Staffney will know all sorts of Hollywood secret pleasures, sex tricks that women in Missoula, Montana, have never heard of. The thought would normally make him smile, but the sight of her standing there, naked except for her white bra, legs slightly apart, thighs curving inward and the pale pink lips of her vulva glowing moistly in the candlelight, does not allow him to smile.

  Her arms curve behind her and she drops the brassiere. Her breasts are huge, pale, round, with pink areolae. They are as high and firm as the breasts of any seventeen-year-old girl.

  False. No longer real.

  Dale blinks away the thought and watches as she squeezes his penis a final time, turns back the down comforter again, and slides onto the blanket. The bed squeaks. There is no pillow. She raises her left leg slightly and props herself on her right arm. Dale can never remember being so sexually excited, not even with Clare.

  “Are you coming in?” Michelle asks, lifting the comforter higher in invitation.

  Dale suddenly feels a slap of cold air, almost as if another presence has entered the room through an invisible door in the wall. He turns, startled, but sees only his absurd shadow—stiff penis rising—imprinted on the faded wallpaper.

  “Dale?” Her whisper is soft but urgent.

  He turns back to her, seeing the candlelight dancing in her eyes. Her nipples are hard.

  This is not right, Dale.

  “This is wrong,” says Dale.

  “What are you talking about?” She reaches for his hand, but he pulls it back. Her cool fingers close around the head of his penis. “It doesn’t feel wrong,” she says softly, smiling at him in the candlelight. The flames stir as if to a slight draft.

  Dale steps back, not understanding his reaction, feeling a stab of infinite regret as her fingers slip off the hot head of his cock.

  This cannot happen, Dale.

  “This isn’t going to happen,” Dale says dully. He feels as if the floor of the room is rising and dropping, pitching like the deck of a ship during a stormy night crossing.

  Michelle pulls her hand back, sits up, lifts her other pale hand, cups her full breasts, and raises them. Her lacquered nails shine as she plays with her nipples. “Come here,” she whispers.

  Dale makes himself look away. His shadow is that of a hunchback, a circus freak, unstable and dancing in the wildly flickering candlelight. Suddenly the air is freezing. He sees his breath fog in the cold air and smells
the tang of frozen mold. He does not look back at the bed.

  Fato profugus.

  “Fate’s fugitive,” gasps Dale, having no idea why he is saying it.

  “Dale . . .” It is a throaty entreaty, little more than an exhalation behind him as Dale scoops up his clothes, dropping his left shoe and retrieving it again, leaving his socks behind as he stumbles down the stairs.

  Michelle stood clothed and stiff by the kitchen door. She would not look at him.

  “I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand why . . .” Dale stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  The woman shook her head and pulled on her coat.

  “The extra food . . .” said Dale, turning back to the counter.

  “Leave it,” said Michelle. “Enjoy the pie.” She unlocked and opened the door, her back still turned toward him. She had not met his gaze since coming downstairs fully clothed, face pale.

  He reached for her, touching her shoulder through the coat, but she shrugged off his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, hearing how stupid it sounded even in his own ears. “Perhaps another time . . . another day . . .”

  Michelle laughed. It was an oddly strange sound—hollow, deep in her throat, not feminine at all. She stepped out into the darkness.

  “Wait, I’ll get the flashlight,” said Dale. He grabbed the flashlight from the counter and hurried out the door to help her cross the frozen ground to her truck.

  The black dogs came invisible out of darkness, three leaping on Michelle and two jumping at Dale where he stood on the concrete stoop. The hounds were huge, larger than dogs could be. Their eyes were bright yellow, their teeth white in the glow from the kitchen. Dale had time to swing the flashlight like a club, lighting the jackal eyes of the closest black dog, and then their paws and the mass of both hounds knocked him backward, his head hitting the kitchen door hard, the flashlight flying away beyond the stoop and illuminating nothing.