by Aaron Polson
“There’s no blood...” Ryan muttered as he bent over the prone figure. He pulled off one thick glove and gently touched her porcelain face. Her skin was ice, so he quickly felt for a pulse. Finding none, he knelt on the ground next to her body and placed his head on her chest. “Trevor—she’s dead.” He stood up, and the image-memory sliced like a razor in front of his eyes. This poor victim was the woman in white from the gas station.
Trevor stood at the driver’s door, no longer holding his nose, but looking beaten with the thick gouts of drying blood meandering down his face. He staggered and fell to the ground. “My head...”
“We’ve got to get out of here, find some shelter.” Ryan scanned the horizon in all directions. The road was now all but invisible. One small farmhouse seemed to echo out of the whitewashed world. “There, maybe they can help.”
Quickly, almost without thinking, Ryan scooped the woman’s body in his arms, carried her over to the car, and placed her next to the driver’s side, shielded from the snow. He grabbed a backpack of necessities from the back seat, and then helped his friend to his feet as they made for the lone farmhouse. The cold started to pinch his face, and he knew they both needed shelter if they were to survive the night.
They stood on the porch of the small house, Trevor leaning on Ryan’s shoulder. Traveling across about two hundred yards of open snowfield, the two young men left an odd trail, like that of a bipedal creature with a heavy tail because Ryan dragged Trevor most of the way. Ryan tried to peer through the small window atop the door, but his friend’s weight held him down and kept him from seeing into the house.
“It looks dark.” Ryan automatically reached for the doorbell. “No bell either...”
“Knock... Shit... My head.” Trevor bent away from Ryan, slumping onto the porch next to the door, leaning against the front wall of the house.
Ryan’s fist rapped against the door. The windows rattled, indicating that the house must be old, poorly constructed, or some blend of both. Free of his burden, he stepped to a window, looked through to find red and white gingham curtains and a dark kitchen. On the other side of the porch, he carefully stepped around Trevor and found another dark room.
“I don’t think anybody’s home.” He wrapped his gloved fingers around the door handle and pushed with no luck. “There’s gotta be a key.” He brushed away a miniature drift of snow with his foot, and reached under a woven mat to find an old-style cylindrical key, brown with rust. “Bingo.”
He removed the fat gloves to use the key, but his numbing fingers rebelled against the intricate work as the wind lanced at his exposed hands. With redoubled effort, the key jiggled into place, and he turned it, pushing the door open to reveal the maw of the house. A stiff belch of stale, musty air brushed his face as the seal broke. Hooking his hands under Trevor’s arms, he pulled his limp friend inside like a lumpy bag of lumber. He hauled Trevor past the kitchen, and Ryan found an overstuffed couch in the parlor, depositing Trevor on the maroon upholstery.
“It’s cold in here too. I’ll check the furnace.” Ryan realized he moved in the dark and hunted for a light switch along the wall near the entrance. Finding none, he turned to a lamp on an end table. “Hey Trevor. This is an oil lamp.” Ryan looked at Trevor and realized that his friend had slipped into sleep.
Ryan rifled through his backpack and found a small flashlight. The small yellow cone of light swung through the house as he searched for any electric lights or switches of any kind, but he found only bare walls and waiting darkness. The house was also devoid of any phone or other obvious electrical device. “What are these people, Amish or something?” Ryan muttered aloud. The house creaked and groaned in the wind as a response.
His one fortunate discovery was a stack of dry firewood on the back porch. Ryan hurriedly gathered a few smaller logs and brought them inside. The room in which Trevor slept held a fireplace, and Ryan grabbed a Playboy that he stuffed in his pack, whispered “sorry ladies,” tore out a number of pages, and crammed them under a small stack of wood to act as kindling.
Once the orange flames popped and snapped in the fireplace, Ryan remembered the woman—the body—out next to the car. He waited a few minutes, warming himself in front of the bright fire, before slipping his gloves, coat, and hat back on and leaving the house.
Outside, the world was a thick expanse of white with only occasional grey blemishes of trees peeking through the bleached landscape. Ryan navigated in the general direction of the car, and as he approached, he easily made out its dark lump just off the highway embankment. His breath came fast and labored as the cold air seared his lungs, and the stout wind battered against his body.
He leaned on the car for a moment before glancing around to find the body. Nothing. He couldn’t even make out a misshapen mound covered with snow. “I haven’t been gone that long,” he mumbled. Ryan scrambled up the embankment, right to a spot on the edge of the road—a road now blanketed with a smooth layer of powder, and shuffled in a widening circle. He collapsed to the ground, confused, staring into the grey sky, the whole world transformed and glowing slightly from the thick mat of snow.
He was forced to quit the search and work his way back to the small house once frostbite began licking at his cheeks and nose. Ryan warmed himself and watched his friend sleep for a moment before stoking the fire and settling in a chair across the room. Two trips through the cold worked on his weary body, and he dissolved into heavy sleep.
He woke, almost as if startled, to find the fire dark and the cold room washed in a blue-white pallor. I need to restart the fire, he thought, but when he tried to rise, his mutinous body seemed to press against him. Then he saw her.
She had the same bleached face, the same dark hair, but now the hair trailed behind, smooth and flowing as if tossed by a slight breeze. He wanted to cry out, say something, but he felt bound and gagged in the chair. Slowly, as if floating or gliding, she moved across the room toward Trevor’s prone figure. She titled her head toward Ryan slightly, and he could see nothing in her eyes—just black, empty space. Bending over Trevor, she turned to his face, and only inches away seemed to blow on him. A white fog slipped from her mouth and crawled over Trevor’s body.
Ryan’s heart stirred and began grating against his ribs, but he couldn’t force any other part of his body to move. The woman turned to him now, empty eyes fixed on his, her mouth slightly open, revealing nothing but the crushing blackness of a deep cavern that combined with her eyes to create a blank mask with no warmth or life behind. She approached without sound.
Her face—that awful, white, empty face—bent over Ryan’s, just inches away, and his throat closed to hold back the stinking stomach-acid fear. The black eyes searched his, and he heard her voice in his head. “You came back for me. ” Her eyes bled from black to deep winter sky blue.
Then nothing.
Ryan woke to a tapping sound. He opened his eyes and squinted against the brilliant sunshine reflected from the white expanse all around, and he realized he sat in the driver’s seat of Trevor’s car. A highway patrol officer stood outside his window, tapping it with the end of his flashlight.
“You alone in there?” the officer asked.
Ryan panicked for a moment, remembering the woman, and twisted in his seat, finding only the backpack next to him in the car. He pushed against the car door, and the officer steadied him as he tumbled out.
“My friend. He’s in a house over there.” Ryan, still groggy, held his index finger in the direction of the farmhouse.
“Son, there isn’t anything over there.”
“No—I took him—there was a woman.”
The officer helped him into the back of an ambulance, and Ryan saw the two squad cars, both with silently flashing lights. “Alright buddy, you take it easy. You have some frostbite, but I’d say we were lucky to find you. We’ll take a look for your friend.”
A paramedic pulled the highway patrol officer aside and asked, “What’s wrong with the kid, he seems pretty
shaken?”
“Probably delirious. He insists he has a buddy over toward those trees across the field. Said something about a house.”
The paramedic followed the tree line with his eyes, tracing the slightest line across the white field. “There hasn’t been a house there in years—at least since the highway’s been built.”
“What?”
“An old house used to be out there. When I was new to the department, a couple of old-timers talked about a lady whose husband just up and left her in the middle of the winter. She froze to death in that house. He never came back for her.”
“We better check it out. If his friend is over there—”
“If his friend is over there, he’ll be frozen solid.”
Both men stood next to each other for a moment, looking toward the faintest hint of an old stone foundation poking through the snow.
Uncle Bobby
Uncle Bobby ran away to California when he was sixteen and lived most of his years as a B-movie star on the bubble, dabbling in poetry and various other forms of expression. He stayed there until his health forced him home. I met him six years ago when I was an eighth grader at Springdale Junior High. His sister Karen, our next door neighbor, told Mom that her brother needed some help with word processing—formatting a collection of poetry for publication. The poetry was stupid, rambling and nonsensical for the most part, but he paid $200 for about four hours of effort, much better than my lawn mowing money and the work was far easier with less sweat.
So there I was, home from college five years later and strapped for cash. Springdale never offered much in the way of employment, and summer jobs in that town lived like myths. I tried the sanitation department, the county road crews, the grocery stores, gas stations, and fast food restaurants. No vacancies existed in the Springdale employment picture. My mom said “no problem,” but I knew the finances were tight. Karen suggested calling Uncle Bobby when she saw me mowing Mom’s lawn one day.
“Hello?” Uncle Bobby answered with a much older voice than I remembered.
“Hi, um, Robert, this is Aaron—you know, Karen’s neighbor?”
“Yeah, Aaron my boy! We sure made a team, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, well, Karen suggested you might need some more word processing work done?”
“Right-o! Can you pick it up? The doctor, well, the doc has given me strict no-driving orders.”
When I walked into Uncle Bobby’s house, a small bungalow across town, both the interior of the place and Bobby’s physical state knocked me back a bit. The house was devoid of furniture, at least in the front rooms. Stacks of old canvases—Uncle Bobby also fancied himself a visual artist—rested against every open wall space, sometimes ten paintings deep. Bobby stood with the door open and extended a shriveled and shaking hand.
“Aaron my boy! It’s been years!” His voice wavered around the room, like he couldn’t control his tongue or lips. He looked at my face and said, “The Parkinson’s, man. Real downer.” He walked over to the nearest stack of canvases. “Years of work, years of work. My life is in these canvases.” His hand made a difficult sweep of the room.
“Yeah,” I shuffled my feet a in the doorway. “The manuscript?” Maybe I was rude, but the place had a weird vibe, and I felt highly uncomfortable watching him shake and twist involuntarily.
“Yeah, the book. My masterpiece.” He shuffled into the other room, returning momentarily. He thrust a stack of maybe two hundred faded pages into my hands. “This is it, man. This is the one.” When he said the words I realized that he had been saying those words his whole life. I looked at the canvases, a stack of old movie posters from second rate films in which he played bit roles, and I thought of the self-published drivel I’d typed six years ago. Uncle Bobby always worked for the big break that never came.
I looked at the first page, the title page. The Adventures of the Arch-Baron von Geschlechtmaschine, Esquire. This was the one alright.
“Look, I’ll get to work on this. I’ll let you know, um, if I need anything.”
“Yeah buddy—swell. I’m dying to get this thing published, man.” Uncle Bobby tried to wink, but the muscles wouldn’t cooperate. I didn’t feel really sure about the intent of that almost wink.
So there I sat in my room later that night, the pages stacked on the corner of the desk. I read the first few pages—the prose version of the weird, meandering poetry I’d typed in eighth grade. Ten pages in and I had no real sense of this Geschlechtmaschine character except that he had a strong case of hubris, especially where his sexual prowess was concerned. The book kind of read like a bad knock off of something Dr. Seuss might write but all sexed up.
I snapped off the light, vowing to tackle the first bit of typing in the morning.
The next morning I woke up and forced myself to start typing this horrid piece of faux erotica. Think of the money, I told myself, just words on a page. Maybe I didn’t sleep enough the previous night, but I sucked down two cups of coffee while knocking out the first fifty pages. Fifty pages of this crap meant good ol’ Geschlechtmaschine had already embarked on two successful sexual conquests. Maybe the book is a farce—satire or something, I tried to convince myself.
After hammering through those fifty pages I was spent, despite the ample caffeine flowing through my veins. I sacked out for a couple hours before waking up at one and calling an ex-girlfriend. This girl, Julie, well I really had her bad, even after the royal shit-pile she dragged me through when we broke up last summer. She was a year younger than me, a senior at Springdale High while I attended K-State. Supposedly—and prep the bullshit meter here—her folks made her dump me ‘cause I was too old for her. Later that fall, she dated some G.I. from Fort Riley, making me the official goat. Still, I had her bad.
“Hello,” Julie said as she answered the phone.
“Hey, Jules, it’s me, Elliot.” I braced for the disappointed sigh but it didn’t come.
“Hey Elliot.”
“Look, I was wondering if you might like to, you know, see a movie or something sometime.” My strategy followed that the less specific the request, the less likely Julie could deliver a knockout “busy doing something else that night” diversion.
We made a date for the next Saturday, and I should have been “busy doing something else that night”. I don’t remember the movie, something surely inane and most likely the impotent sequel to one of last summer’s big budget affairs. The embarrassing moment didn’t revolve around movie choice; during the film I tried this awkward hand holding gesture, and she just glanced at me and laughed—out loud, right there in the theater.
I came home that night feeling a rock-star-in-rehab level of shame. Uncle Bobby’s manuscript rested on the desk in two piles, the first fifty pages face down and the larger pile talking to me as I flopped on my bed. Come type me, I heard in my head, Geschlechtmaschine. Being more pissed off and disappointed than sleepy, I obliged. After about ten pages, I felt sleep creep in again, but I was suddenly obsessive-compulsive about the protagonist’s name—Geschlechtmaschine. I tried Babel Fish on AltaVista and worked German to English—just a guess. The words “sex machine” burned on my monitor in the little “In English” box. Great, this fictional wunderkind scores more than I do, I thought.
I woke up the next morning feeling more exhausted than I had all week. After the Geschlechtmaschine translation last night, I crashed in bed, but in the morning everything was well out of whack. Maybe the not-so-subtle humiliation I received at the hands of my ex caused more consternation than I wanted to admit.
I groaned audibly under the effort to roll out of bed. Staggering over to the full length mirror next to my bedroom door, I stared at my image. I still wore my jeans from the last night, but my t-shirt sat behind me on the floor. My face, arms, and chest looked pale—all except my eyes which were rimmed with a raw pink. The room spun around me, and I shuffled back to bed, pulling the heavy covers over my head. Did I drink something last night? My head sure as hell felt like a varsi
ty hangover with only a foggy recollection of anything that happened. Something must have kicked me in the head. Hard.
A couple of hours later I stumbled downstairs to the fridge. Sunday morning and Mom wasn’t home—probably at church or whatever. I poured a tall glass of orange juice, chugged it, and then crawled back to my room. I spent the rest of the day in bed, blinds sensibly shut, trying to regain some energy. My buddy Charlie called twice that afternoon, and Mom mumbled something to him about my big date last night and how I probably came home late. At dinner that night, I didn’t have the heart to explain that I flamed out on the date, strictly crash and burn. I wanted to blame my state on Julie but my brain kept telling me Geschlechtmaschine. I started to really hate that book.
“You’re nuts dude,” Charlie explained while he chalked his cue.
“No – I think there is something seriously fucked up about that book,” I explained.
“The only fucked up thing remotely connected to that old geezer’s book is you.”
“The other day, after working on it, I spent the day in bed. Tell me that’s not fucked up.”
“Whatever man. Your shot.” Charlie flashed this big grin my way and asked, “How was the date with Jules?”
“Fuck you.”
“Whoa, easy buddy.” Charlie gave me this hands-up-I-surrender look.
I clammed up and beat Charlie best three out of five games.
I lost the courage to crack Uncle Bobby’s manuscript since my convalescence. The thing made me feel a little dirty, like I should have been reading it at three in the morning with a flashlight under my sheets or something. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Mom what the damn thing was about. She asked and I just explained it’s sort of a coming-of-age novel.