Lucas smiled politely, and took a few steps forward, not sure if he should extend his hand, or simply nod.
“Who’s he waiting for, Daryl?”
Before Lucas could explain, Rayman said, “Joan. Joan Becker. She was on your plane, remember? Cute little thing, blonde hair, big blue eyes?”
“Oh . . . yes. Yes.”
The lights flickered, bright and dark.
Lucas averted his eyes and squinted, as if the room had been touched by lightning.
“Momma, look, we got to go. It’s a long drive, you know that, and I don’t want to speed. You know how you hate when I have to speed.”
The woman nodded. “He’s just terrible, you know, Mr Nelson,” she said gaily as Rayman steered her gently toward the door. “Eats me out of house and home, speeds like a demon, you don’t know what a chore it is just to make him behave. He’s terrible!”
The fat man laughed.
A dark hand fluttered in the air. “But you know, I don’t think he can live without me, poor soul” A laugh of her own, hoarse and woman-soft. “Not that he’d admit it to the Devil, the big oaf.”
The lights flickered again just as Rayman, laughing harder, pushed the door open.
Bright and dark.
“Hey . . . uh . . . Daryl?”
“Nice to meet you, Mr Nelson,” Mrs Rayman called. “You get home safe now, y’hear? Find yourself a nice girl, a boy like you shouldn’t ought to be left alone, the time of night like this.”
Lucas felt his temper spark, but he didn’t move, couldn’t move when Rayman waved good-bye, and his mother glanced over her shoulder to give him a wave as well.
In the corridor light, just before the door closed, he saw her clearly for the first time.
Her clothes were shreded and black; there was nothing left of her face but charred bone.
The door closed.
Slammed.
Another plane landed, and he checked automatically, just in time to see it veer off the runway onto the grass, swing around violently and hit the runway again. Somehow it managed to straighten out before skidding off the other side, and when it rumbled past the gate, Lucas sprinted for the door and slammed it open with his shoulder.
The corridor was empty.
Sixty yards of it in four sections marked by steps, and no doors except the one he propped open with his foot.
The Raymans were gone.
He put a hand to the side of his neck and rubbed the skin there until it burned.
They were gone.
They couldn’t be.
“Daryl!”
No place to hide.
“Mrs Rayman?”
The other voices, the other people.
Nothing left but the light, and dark hand-smudges along the wall.
He stumbled back inside and took hold of the rail, lowered his head and waited until he could think again, until he could stand alone. It was the lighting, of course, and probably not a small amount of guilt at not feeling worse for Joan’s dying. All this time he had been kidding himself – the tears, the glum expressions, the solemn nodding when his friends passed condolences and sympathy his way . . . some of it was real, most of it was sham. And Mrs Rayman there, clearly loving her son as her son clearly loved her, had only underscored the acting he’d been doing all along.
In a way, the admission, like the admission in the car, was a relief.
He still felt like a monster, like something less than human, but it was still a relief.
Burdens lifted, he thought, and all that psychobabble crap.
So when Joan’s plane landed smoothly at precisely three o’clock and taxied to its gate, he blew it a kiss and wished it well, smiling as he watched the unloading proceed without a hitch.
Rayman was right.
The silence here was peaceful. Restful.
These still, small hours of a day yet unborn were indeed something special; wasting them here would be a sin.
“Okay, you heard the lady,” he said to his reflection in the glass. “Get your sorry ass home.”
He grinned.
He pushed the door open and saw Joan waiting at the corridor’s far end.
Suit black and shredded.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she called, smiling broadly as she waved.
Face more bone than flesh.
“She’s right, Lucas, darlin’. You shouldn’t have to be alone.”
STEVE RASNIC TEM
Ice House Pond
STEVE RASNIC TEM is one of the most prolific and successful short fiction writers currently working in the field. Although he has only published one novel (Excavation), he has written around two hundred stories, and among the recent anthologies he has contributed to are MetaHorror, Borderlands 3, In the Fog, Snow White Blood Red, The Ultimate Witch, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, In Dreams, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, and each volume of The Best New Horror to date.
In 1993, Necronomicon Press published his three-story collection Decoded Mirrors: 3 Tales After Lovecraft, and other chapbooks include Fairytales, Celestial Inventory and Absences: Charlie Goode’s Ghosts.
The author lives in a supposedly haunted Victorian house in Denver, Colorado, with his wife, the writer Melanie Tem.
I
“That pond is much bigger than it is,” Rudy had said to the realtor the last time, the first time, he’d seen Ice House Pond. He would never be sure exactly where the perception came from: something about the way the great stretch of level ice – pewter-colored that late in the afternoon, highlighted with occasional painful stabs of silver – disappeared into blinding snow that rose in clouds he would have thought more typical of high altitudes, snow that expanded and exploded as if with an angry energy. It had been a silly thing to say, really, and he had felt a little embarrassed around this proper New Englander. But it had also been the perfect thing to say, and now, on his return trip to take over ownership of the pond and everything attached to it, Rudy was pleased to see that his original perception still held true. The pond was much bigger than it was.
And Rudy was in desperate need of just such a place. In the real world, in his old world, things surprised you: They seemed so pitifully small after you’d lived with them for a while.
“I can’t honestly say that this is the perfect deal, you understand,” the realtor had said that first time. His name was Lorcaster, which, the fellow at the gas station where Rudy’d asked for directions was quick to point out, was one of the oldest names in the Bay. “Unless, of course, it’s exactly what you’re looking for.” He didn’t look like the scion of a great family. He had the belly, certainly, but none of the air. His clothes were a mismatch of pale greens and dark blues. And here he was, actively discouraging the sale and they hadn’t even gotten to the place yet.
A small, wooded hill, more like a bump really, still obscured the property. The dirt road to the pond was so iced over they’d had to park on the narrow secondary that had brought them out of town, then walk a “short” jog crosscountry. Lorcaster had supplied an extra coat and snowshoes. Although there was very little wind, it seemed much colder out here than in town. “It’ll require some fixing up, no doubt about that. But if you’re handy with tools –”
“I’m not,” Rudy interrupted. “But I have a little money set aside.” More than a little. The deaths of two families in ten years and the resulting insurance payoffs had seen to that. His father had believed in insurance, had insisted on it for himself and for Rudy’s families, but Rudy would always wonder if he hadn’t, literally, bought himself trouble. And now he was about to buy himself a new life with the death money, the pain money.
Lorcaster said nothing more about money for the rest of their walk. In fact, he seemed a bit uncomfortable that Rudy had brought up the subject in the first place.
“Just a few feet more,” Lorcaster had puffed, trudging up the wooded rise, grabbing on to occasional nude trunks for support. “Watch your step, real slippery th
rough here. You know, I’d hoped to be selling this place in the summertime. Beautiful out here in the summer.” He paused at the top of the small hill, holding fast to a thick branch, and looked back down at Rudy, who still struggled. “You’ll need to be getting a snowmobile, or a Cat.”
Rudy stopped and looked around. The snow here was wet and heavy, not the fluff he was used to. And for the most part the snow surfaces were rough and icy. It was like a hardened white sludge that stuck to everything. The trees, instead of looking decorated with lace, seemed assaulted by the snow, encased in it as it froze. Not exactly pretty, but he would hardly call it ugly, either. Perhaps uncompromising was the word he wanted. “I don’t know.” Rudy grimaced from the cold. The temperature appeared to drop noticably each foot closer to the place. Rudy had never experienced such cold, but he was reluctant to tell Lorcaster that. “Maybe I’ll want to stay put all winter.”
Lorcaster stared at him appraisingly, as if at some questionable piece of property. “Maybe you will at that,” he said after a while. “Anyplace you go, there’s always some that stay to themselves, and don’t mingle in town. Old Finney, the one that built the house and the ice house as well, they say he was like that. Well . . . speaking of . . . looks like we’re there.”
Rudy forced himself up the few remaining feet, chagrined that this fat old man was actually in better shape than he was.
He couldn’t believe the increase in cold.
“Heating system’s in good shape, or so they tell me. You’ll need it.”
The property was in an enormous saucer of land, edged by the small rise, with its trees, around two-thirds the circumference, and a short arc of hand-fitted stones along the remaining third. Beyond that wall were the far edges of the forest, and beyond that, farmland, although Lorcaster had made it clear that the closest farm was still some miles away. He could see the bright white, two-story house with the odd angles that so often characterized owner-built homes – unassuming but interesting – and connected to that was another large white building with a walkway around it, but with no windows, which Rudy assumed to be the ice house itself. The truly dramatic feature of the landscape was the pond, which extended in all directions beyond the buildings: Ice House Pond. From this angle, it seemed more like a lake than a pond, and it seemed to have its own movements, its own weather.
The air moving above the pond was whiter than the air surrounding it, and more active, with eddies and sudden swirls, transient movements of white and silver which disappeared as soon as Rudy thought he had found some pattern. Now he knew where the intense cold lay: The pond obviously trapped cold, but he had no idea how. It appeared to be snowing just over the pond, but nowhere else.
“The old-timers, the ones who knew about it before Old Finney bought the property, called it Bear Paw Pond,” Lorcaster said. “I suppose because of those four little projections along the north shore. They kept calling it that even after Finney had renamed it and posted that sign – Ice House Pond.” Lorcaster paused. “Well, there was a sign. Looks like somebody’s torn the blamed thing down. Anyway, even before that some of the old maps have it named as ‘The Hand,’ but it doesn’t look like any hand to me.” Rudy could detect five long shadows growing out of that north end, four of them being extensions of the four small projections; during high water periods, or maybe times of flooding, they might indeed make the pond look like a hand. But he didn’t argue. “Don’t know where the water comes from. No sign of a spring, or any kind of exit. There may be some sort of tunnel under the surface, I suppose, that would lead up into an underground body of water. Folks around here will give you more explanations of exactly how the pond came to be than you’ll ever need. Or maybe you’ll just want to make up your own.”
Every now and then the snowy air above the pond would clear a space, and Rudy could then see all the way to the surface of the ice. It was grey and silver, like frozen fog. Rudy thought he could detect streaks, dark branching cracks – shadowed areas like smudges, mounds, or many small things, or one large thing, floating or swimming just beneath the surface of the ice.
That was when he said the thing that would later embarrass him: “That pond is much bigger than it is.” He hadn’t meant to say something so provocative, or poetic as that. His mouth had just acted on its own, giving voice to a silly thought he’d been unable to shake from his consciousness.
He had been uncomfortably aware of Lorcaster staring at him. But he couldn’t bring himself to turn and look at the man. “Do tell,” Lorcaster finally said. “Then I suppose you’d be getting more for your money that way.”
The deal had gone swiftly after that. After a cursory examination of the property (although that first glimpse had told him everything he needed to know), Rudy told Lorcaster he wanted the place and flew home to settle his affairs, which mostly consisted of calling up the relatives of his two dead wives and letting them know that they could have whatever they wanted from the house. The remainder of the dealings with Lorcaster were handled by mail and over the phone with his secretary, a Miss Pater. Rudy eventually came to believe that Lorcaster found discussions of contracts and money ill suited to his old-money background. The man probably believed that such dealings left the founders of the first families of Greystone Bay rolling in their graves. Except he did pass on one note directly, and in his own hand rather than Miss Pater’s errorless typing, suggesting perhaps that Rudy might prefer moving in during the spring. Lorcaster even offered to supply a short-term caretaker “with my compliments.” But Rudy wouldn’t hear of it. Although he couldn’t have put his reasons into words, more than anything he wanted to reside at Ice House Pond before winter was out, when there was still plenty of rough snow and hard ice on those grounds.
But even when he got back to Greystone Bay he had to live a few days at the SeaHarp Hotel – the locals seemed oddly reluctant to rent him a truck capable of negotiating the road, and the small moving van bearing the few household furnishings he hadn’t given away to in-laws refused to take them out there in those conditions. Fortunately, a cooperative manager at the hotel agreed to store the items for a small fee until Rudy was able to get to a neighbouring town, buy his own pickup truck, and return. By the time he got out to the pond with his belongings, it was near dark on the fifth day.
And the pond was much bigger than it was, even bigger than in the dreams he’d had of it every night since that first visit.
Rudy had a little trouble with slippage getting the new truck up over the shallow rim of hills, but the snow-packed road leading down into the saucer itself was in much better shape than what had preceded it, as if getting around on the property itself had long been a higher priority than getting back into town. The surrounding trees had already blended into one large, irregular shadow, but the difference in the air suspended over the pond was even more pronounced than before. Floating ice crystals caught the light and magnified it, like dancing, low-hanging stars. Rudy pulled his topcoat more tightly around him, hoping he had brought enough warm clothes. An extensive shopping trip before he left the city had readied him at least for an arctic expedition, but already he was having his doubts. The reality of such hard, inexplicable cold as that generated by the pond was a bit difficult to accept.
An intense storm again was blowing the width of the pond, lifting the snow off the ice into towering clouds of mist, white as powdered sugar. Then the mist began to tear apart into arms and fingers, and, like any schoolchild watching clouds some late summer, Rudy imagined dancers and boxers, fleeing men and drowning women in the separating mist. Just as the truck was leaving the rise for the flat drive to the house, the mist was blown away completely and Rudy got a clear view of the entire pond. And there was the broad palm scarred with life and death and fortune lines, the slight knobs to the north elongated, by drifting ice and snow and moon-silvered shadow, into long white fingers, as ready to stroke a sad cheek as tear out a heart with their razor-sharp nails.
The truck bumped its way into the front drive and slid
sideways to a halt. Rudy leaned over the wheel, trying to cough out the slivers of ice that he’d suddenly sucked into his lungs.
Rudy brought in only what he knew he’d need that first night, along with anything that might be damaged by freezing. The rest of the truck could wait until tomorrow. He’d need more furniture from town, but he had plenty of time – years – to get it.
The house was even emptier than he remembered it, but then that wasn’t what had concerned him most during his first visit. Of the few furnishings which remained, a good number were in such bad repair they were unusable. Rudy collected such debris from three of the front rooms into one large room, to give him a little bit of living space for now.
The empty rooms reminded him of life back before he was married, when he either couldn’t afford the furniture or didn’t think he needed it, or because his life hadn’t yet been full enough to leave him with bits and pieces to haul around from one place to the next.
After Eva, his first wife, and their daughter Julie had died in the car accident, he’d held on to every furnishing from that life he possibly could, including most of Julie’s toys. He thought it protected him from the empty rooms. Not until a few days prior to his marriage to Marsha had he thrown those items away. With Marsha had come still more things to fill his life. A fire at a downtown theater took her from him, and the unnamed baby she’d been carrying, and again he discovered he could not let go of her things. He had surrounded himself with them, even put them out on display.
His father used to tell him that in the concentration camps the “veterans” encouraged the newcomers to let go of their personal possessions as soon as possible. Sooner or later, they had to learn that their past, their lives, their status meant nothing now – they had only their naked bodies to depend on. The major reason his father had changed the name from Greensburg to Green when he came to America wasn’t because of anticipated anti-Semitism, but because he didn’t want to rely on his old name for comfort. If he had had a choice, he claimed, he would have preferred to go by no name at all. Names meant nothing in such a world.
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