A Winter Haunting

by Dan Simmons

Where’s the baseball bat? The crowbar? He could not remember. Along with a powerful surge of adrenaline came the absolute knowledge that he wanted to live. He bobbed up just long enough to slap off the overhead light and then he was crawling down the hall, turning that light off. There were no windows in the hallway. If he could wait out the attack there or . . .

  Glass broke in the dining room, and this time there was a loud whuump followed by a blast of heat and light. Crawling on his belly, right arm bleeding from shotgun pellets and his left elbow sliced by broken glass, Dale peered into the room and saw the drapes aflame, the wallpaper beginning to ignite.

  Molotov cocktail. These bastards meant business.

  A shotgun blast took out the front window. Someone tried the locked and sealed front door, then fired a rifle bullet through the wood. Voices shouted back and forth behind the farmhouse. Laughter. Another gasoline bomb exploded—in the kitchen this time—throwing flame across the hallway and into the dining room ten feet from where Dale crouched.

  He had a choice now—upstairs or the basement.

  Dale was crawling toward the basement steps when he remembered the computer. The letter. The novel. Jumping to his feet, he ran into the study, realized he was visible in the lighted room, and grabbed the ThinkPad, ripping it free of its power cord and throwing himself back toward the hallway just as a shotgun blast exploded the window, scattered the blinds, and ripped the wallpaper above him.

  Shouts. Wild laughter. The dining room and kitchen were both ablaze now, cutting off his retreat out the side door unless he was willing to run through flames.

  All in all, he had time to think, I prefer the dogs and ghosts.

  Clutching the laptop computer to his chest, Dale pounded down the steps to the basement as more shots and explosions ripped into the rooms above him.

  He’d left the basement light on, and the space seemed safe and inviting after the insanity upstairs. Plan A had been to squeeze through one of the slim, high windows—he had done it once when he was eleven—but one glance told him that he would never fit now. A second glance showed him a thick boot kicking in the window on the south wall, above the empty console radio, and a wine bottle filled with gasoline came flying in, bounced once on Duane’s bed, and shattered on the concrete floor. The burning wick had been knocked out somewhere on the trajectory and this Molotov cocktail did nothing but spread gasoline over the quilt, bed, books, and floor, but Dale knew that there would be another bomb in a second or two. The fact of that made him both furious and sad. This basement space and its forty-year-old contents were the last real remnants of his friend Duane’s life.

  Another window exploded inward, from a shotgun blast this time. The light must be attracting their attention. Dale had to shut off the light, but first he had to find the hammer and crowbar—not to use as weapons, but as tools.

  The hammer was on the worktable against the east wall. He could not find the crowbar or flashlight. No matter. Dale stuck the hammer in his belt, wrestled a brick loose from a brick-and-board shelf on the worktable, and flung it across the room, breaking the lamp and throwing the room into darkness just as another Molotov cocktail came through the south window. This one exploded, throwing flaming gasoline all over the worktable even as Dale ran full tilt for the opposite end of the basement room, sliding around the furnace and clambering through the opening to the coal bin. He almost dropped the computer but clutched it to his chest with his left hand as he used the hammer in his right hand to rip the nails and screws out of the plywood barricade on the south wall of the coal bin. Already the basement was filling with smoke and he could hear heavy thuds upstairs, although whether this was footsteps from the skinheads in the burning building hunting for him or collapsing masonry, he had no idea.

  The board ripped away, and Dale jammed the hammer in his belt again and fumbled for his Dunhill lighter. His right jeans pocket, where he always kept it, was empty, and for an instant Dale felt pure panic, but a quick patting located the lighter in his left pocket. It flicked to light on the first try, as it always did.

  Dale was already scuttling down the dank tunnel, taking no notice of the remnants of old bottles already in the tunnel or of his own torn and bleeding right arm and scalp. Odds were that this was no bootleggers’ escape tunnel—more likely an unfinished basement project from the 1940s or ‘50s—but the breeze he had felt and heard weeks ago suggested that it must open somewhere.

  But not in an opening big enough for you to fit through.

  It didn’t matter. Even twenty feet away from the burning basement and house was better than nothing.

  No it isn’t. The fucking tunnel is already filling with smoke. There was no way that Dale could just hunker down here and let the skinheads burn the house down, hoping that they would not wait around to comb the ruins. The fire—he could feel its heat against his back as he shuffled along on his knees—was sucking the air right out of this tunnel. He’d be dead from asphyxiation long before he died of burns. This tunnel had to go somewhere or he was finished.

  The flickering lighter showed that the wall he’d seen the first time he had peered down the tunnel was not the end; the shaft angled six or eight feet to the northwest, then continued on an indefinite distance straight ahead to the west. But the old passage had caved in much more here away from the foundation of the house. The roof of the passage dropped from four feet in height to a ragged three to a hole not much more than fifteen inches high. Dale did not hesitate, but wriggled onto his back, held the ThinkPad tight to his chest, extended the lighter back and over his head, and kicked forward through the narrow slit, his sneakers sliding in the mud. Everything smelled of sewage, and for a second he was sure that just the flame of his lighter was going to ignite methane gas and set off an explosion that would lift the burning house right off its foundations and surprise the hell out of the skinheads.

  It did not explode, but rats scurried over Dale’s groin, chest, and face, evidently fleeing the fire in the basement. He ignored them and kept kicking and writhing, moving west an inch at a time.

  The tunnel opened out again to something like the original passage, and Dale flopped back on his knees and kept pressing ahead. The lighter illuminated rotted boards in the mud and stone overhead, and Dale realized that this was indeed a tunnel, a sort of crude mine, and that Duane’s bootlegger tale was probably correct.

  Another two or three minutes of scrabbling and the tunnel ended in a rock and mud wall. No doglegs or side passages here. Dale was panting, swinging the flickering lighter in an arc behind him. Despite the cold hair striking Dale’s lacerated scalp, smoke was billowing into the tunnel behind him, curling toward him.

  Cold air on my scalp. Dale lifted the lighter and looked up. A narrower shaft, no less than three feet wide, ran straight up. There seemed to be three very faint stripes of light perhaps eight feet above Dale.

  There was no way for him to get up there. No ladder, no rungs, no footholds—just mud and rock and darkness.

  Dale had not lived in the mountain West for almost twenty years for nothing. Flicking the lighter off and pocketing it, he removed the hammer from his belt, flipped it around to present the claw side, slammed it into the hard clay as high as he could reach, wedged his knee against the far wall, and began to climb. It would have been infinitely easier if he’d had both hands to use, but he continued cradling the computer to his chest while using his injured arm and hand to pound in the claw, lift himself with upper-body strength while bracing himself with one extended knee, then repeat the process.

  He banged his head against something solid. Using what seemed the last of his strength to hold himself in the narrow chimney, he shifted the hammer to his left hand and felt above him. Boards. Very solid boards. It was as if he had reached up and found the roof of his coffin.

  No.

  Pressing against both walls of the shaft with his knee and back, he grabbed the hammer again and began pounding and slashing madly at the solid ceiling, not caring how much noise he was
making. Let the skinheads find him. Anything was better than being buried in this stinking shaft as it filled with thicker and thicker smoke.

  The hammer was not working. He dropped it into darkness and took the risk of shifting his weight, putting his right sneaker sole on the slippery wall behind him and extending his right arm across the gap to brace himself while he wedged up as high as he possibly could, almost horizontal to what must be wooden floorboards above him, his back and shoulder against the wood. In a final wild surge of adrenaline, Dale flexed in both directions, feeling lacerated muscles in his right arm tear, not caring, almost dropping the ThinkPad but clutching it in time, pressing upward in the darkness until his neck muscles audibly popped and the veins stood out on his forehead.

  The rotted boards overhead splintered, gave, splintered again. With his balance failing, Dale made a fist and punched his way up through the rotten wood, punched again, then reached up and wedged his elbow over the edge just before he fell. He widened the hole, using his laptop as a battering ram, and pulled his head and shoulders up through the splintered opening.

  He was in the chicken coop. Dale could see gaps in the east wall and around the door illuminated by brilliant red and yellow, flames from the burning house a hundred feet away. He slid the laptop across the rough floor, pulled himself out of the hole, and set his eye to the crack between the door and its hinge.

  The Jolly Corner was fully engulfed in flame. Parts of the roof had already caved in, and even as he watched, flames exploded out both the first-floor kitchen window and the corner second-floor window. Silhouettes moved in front of the flames, cavorting, carrying weapons. The five skinheads ran back and forth, high-fiving one another and leaping into the air. They seemed to have no concern that the Elm Haven fire department would show up, and this late on New Year’s Eve, this early on New Year’s morning, they were almost certainly correct in their confidence. Dale could see the gleaming skull of the chief Nazi skinhead, Lester Bonheur, as he directed two of the others to get back around the front of the burning building, obviously hoping that the Jewboy nigger-loving professor would run, burning, from the building so that they could shoot him.

  But the skinheads had eyes only for their conflagration. Dale stayed on his belly, trying to slow his panting and pounding heart. All he had to do was hide here until the bastards left or until the flames died enough for him to slip out and make his way across the snowy fields to the Johnson farm to call for help. He wasn’t going to freeze to death yet. The heat from the burning building was strong here even a hundred feet away. The skinheads could not wait all night with impunity—the farmhouse would be collapsing in fifteen or twenty minutes anyway, convincing them that Dale was dead—and there should be no reason for them to search the chicken coop or other outbuildings.

  All Dale had to do was stay put and wait.

  “Don’t bet on it, Stewart, you cowardly fuck.” The voice was infinitely cold and totally dead, and it came from directly behind him.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  C.J. Congden was sitting against the back wall of the chicken coop not ten feet from Dale. He did not look good. Even in the flickering red light filtering through the chinks in the east wall, the skin of Congden’s face glowed mold-white and green. His eyes were sunken and opaque with white, as if covered with fly eggs. The ex-sheriff was not wearing a hat tonight, and as Congden turned his head slightly, Dale could see the exit hole the suicide .45 slug had left in the back of his skull and the fragment of bloody hair and scalp hanging over that hole as if in an obscene attempt at concealment.

  Congden grinned, showing a black gap where the recoil of the pistol he had fired into his soft palate had knocked out his front teeth. That pistol was still in his hand, and now the thing aimed the weapon at Dale, its white fingers looking like bloated worms on the trigger guard and pearl handle. Congden’s mouth did not move when the voice spoke, and the sound seemed to come from the thing’s bloated belly. “Time to go out and join the party, Stewart.”

  Dale reached for the hammer in his belt and then remembered that he had dropped it down the hole. “Fuck you, Congden,” he whispered. He had no intention of going anywhere, not knowing whether this apparition from hell could harm him but having no doubts as to what the skinheads would do. “Fuck you,” he said again.

  Congden seemed amused by this. His mouth opened wide for a grin and continued widening, stretching impossibly and terribly wide, fat cheeks and jowls rippling as if in a high wind. The thing’s mouth became nothing more than a widening hole, as ragged as the hole Dale had just burst through, broken teeth substituting for splinters. In a literally heart-stopping moment, Dale realized that he could see through Congden’s skull within that rippling maw, through the hole in the palate and out the back of the thing’s head.

  A noise issued from Congden then: at first a hissing, a tea kettle beginning to announce itself, but then the hissing rose until it became the rush and roar of a fire hose, then a boiler pipe exploding steam, and then a siren.

  Dale crouched on his knees and clapped both hands over his ears. It did not block the noise. Nothing could block that noise. Congden had raised his ruined face toward the ceiling of the bloodied chicken coop and seemed to be hauling in air through the wound in the back of his skull as the screaming whistle roared from the funneled mouth. The skinheads had to hear this.

  Dale surrendered, swung around, flung the door of the chicken coop open, and staggered out into the snow and naked light of the burning farmhouse.

  * * *

  One of the skinheads saw him and set up a hue and cry before Dale had run thirty steps toward the darkness of the fields. Injured as he was, Dale would have preferred taking his chances reaching the Land Cruiser and driving away for help, trusting his four-wheel drive once again to keep him ahead of the other vehicle. But the keys to the Land Cruiser were in his peacoat pocket, and the peacoat was hanging on the hook in the kitchen.

  That entire kitchen side of The Jolly Corner’s first floor was a wall of flame throwing red light like a spotlight toward Dale as he followed the lane toward the barn, jogging from side to side in the deep snow, trying to put the chicken coop and other outbuildings between himself and the screaming skinheads. Twice he fell, each time leaving bloody streaks in the snow. Both times he clawed his way to his feet and staggered on through drifts up to his knees. Even the falling snow seemed blood red in the light of the burning house.

  How bad was I hurt? How much blood have I lost? The pain was no worse than it had been, but his entire right side from shirt collar to pant cuffs was soaked with his own blood now. Dale felt light-headed and fought vertigo with each running, staggering step.

  Out away from the fire now, running left past the fueling station and into the fields. It was darker out here, if he could just keep low, head for the creek and the woods a mile southwest.

  They can follow my trail in the snow. Dale looked behind him and saw not only the path he was leaving through the drifts but the bloody smears like painted arrows.

  The skinheads were whooping like cowboys, throwing open doors to the outbuildings and throwing the last of their Molotov cocktails inside. The old shed holding Mr. McBride’s antiquated punch card learning machines went up in a ball of flame.

  The skinheads were firing their shotguns and rifles into the shadows behind the outbuildings now, the muzzle flashes bright against the dark structures. One of the silhouetted figures found Dale’s track in the snow and began screaming above the din.

  I’ll never get across that field. Dale knew that he did not have the strength left to run that far even if there were no snow slowing him down. The punks would be on him in minutes.

  He slid to a halt in the snowy field. The barn was to his right. Perhaps he could climb to the lofts, hide in the maze of rafters up there in the dark.

  One of the skinheads flicked on a handheld spotlight, throwing thousands of candlepowers in a single, blinding beam stabbing across the field. Dale ran towa
rd the barn anyway. It was the only thing he could think of.

  Using a flashlight to freeze sparrows in the barn, then shooting them with BB guns. The black eyes staring. He slipped and fell, crushing frozen cornstalks under the snow, then staggered ahead on his knees, fighting his way to his feet again.

  Something in the farmhouse, perhaps a gas main, suddenly exploded upward in a curling mushroom of flame and noise. The silhouettes of the skinheads paused a moment by the sheds, looking back at their handiwork. Dale glanced that way, praying to see flashing red lights, emergency vehicles, Sheriff McKown’s car rushing to the rescue. Everything to the east was dark and lost to sight in the falling snow.

  He was still a hundred feet from the barn when he lost his footing in the dark and fell again. Dale hit hard on his right side, and this time the pain was very bad. He got to his knees and looked back at the burning farmhouse, noting but not really thinking about all of his books and other possessions burning in there.

  What was the word in the Eddic poem for the hero’s funeral pyre?

  Hrot-garmr. “Howling dog.” Flames like a howling dog.

  zi-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at. “Thou art become a wolf.”

  Kneeling there, hearing the punks shout and howl off to his right, knowing that he was no hero but just an injured and terrified middle-aged man unused to violence and afraid to die, Dale still wished that he could become a wolf. If he became a wolf, he would rip the throat out of the nearest skinhead before the others killed him. If he became a wolf, he would taste their warm blood even as they killed him.

  He did not become a wolf.

  Dale had just struggled to his feet again when the huge door to the barn exploded outward, ripped away its steel slide suspension, and seemed to plow through the snow toward him in slow motion. Then the door fell away and Dale saw that it was the huge combine lumbering toward him, the thirty-foot-wide harvesting extension shifting snow aside like a plow from hell, its corn head covers missing so that its open maw revealed picker units with their exposed snapping rolls and lugged gathering chains grinding.