A Winter Haunting

NINE

DRIVING to pick up his truck that afternoon, Dale took the Catton Road shortcut to Oak Hill Road. A few miles away from Duane’s farm—the dead zone, as he thought of it—his cell phone came alive again. The asphalt road was empty. The day was still warm. Dale drove with one hand on the wheel and punched in Sandy Whittaker’s real estate number.

“Heartland Realty.” It was Sandy answering. Dale identified himself, and there was the expected salvo of niceties. They both agreed that it was a beautiful fall day and very welcome after the cold and snow.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Stewart. . . Dale?” said Sandy.

Dale hesitated. He was tempted to ask about the upstairs light, but what could he say? “Say, Sandy, any reports of phantom lights on in the McBride farmhouse?” Instead, he said, “Yeah, I was just wondering if you knew anything about a dog hanging around the farm I’m renting.”

“A dog? What kind of dog?”

“A little one,” said Dale. “A black one.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Dale drove by clean white farms and large barns. The road stayed empty.

“Never mind,” said Dale. “Silly question.”

“No, no,” said Sandy Whittaker. “Have you seen a dog on the property?”

“In the house, actually.”

“In the house ?” said Sandy.

“I left the inside door open this afternoon. I guess the screen was open just enough to let a dog in. . . a little thing. It ran off and I just wondered who it might belong to. Duane’s aunt didn’t own a dog, did she?”

“Mrs. Brubaker?” said Sandy. “No. . . no, I’m sure she didn’t. No one saw her much, but everyone knew that Mrs. Brubaker was crazy about keeping things clean and tidy. I’m sure she didn’t own a dog.”

“Maybe it was a neighbor’s dog,” said Dale, already sorry that he’d called the woman. “Coming over to check me out.”

“Not if it was a small black dog,” said Sandy. “Mr. Johnson to your south owns two hounds for hunting, but they’re big and brown. The Bachmanns—the young family who moved into your aunt Lena and uncle Henry’s place over toward the cemetery—they had an Irish setter, but it was killed by the milk truck last summer.”

Christ,thought Dale, talk about small towns.

“What kind of dog was it?” Sandy asked again.

Dale sighed. Some cows in a muddy field looked up as he drove past, and he wondered if his expression was as vague as theirs. “I don’t really know dogs,” he said.

“I do,” said Sandy Whittaker. “I own five and subscribe to the AKC journal and watch the Westminster Dog Show on satellite every year. Describe the dog and I’ll tell you what kind it is.”

Dale rubbed his head. It was beginning to ache. “A little thing,” he said. “About ten, twelve inches tall, I guess. Not much longer. Black. I thought that maybe it was a terrier.”

“Did it have longer hair?” said Sandy.

“No, it didn’t really have hair.”

“No hair?” said Sandy. She sounded shocked, as if he’d said something obscene.

“I mean really short hair,” said Dale. “Very short. Black.”

“Well, American staffordshire terriers and toy terriers and pit bull terriers and Boston terriers and their type all have very short hair,” Sandy said dubiously, “but none of them are all black. And no one in the county owns any of those breeds. Did you see the dog’s head?”

“Sort of,” said Dale.

“Was the snout long, thin? Or sort of pushed in?”

“Sort of pushed in, I think,” said Dale. He had to grin. He felt like a crime witness being grilled by a relentless cop. “Sort of like a bulldog’s.”

“Hmmm,” said Sandy Whittaker, sounding judicious. “American bulldogs and Old English bulldogs are larger than you described, unless you saw a puppy. . .”

“I don’t think it was a puppy,” said Dale, no longer sure what he’d seen.

“Then it could have been a pug or a French bulldog. Was it slim and sleek, or did it have a sort of barrel chest?”

Dale was tempted to close his eyes to remember. A pickup passed the other way. Dale kept his eyes open. “It did sort of have a barrel chest—powerful—and little tiny legs, but solid—not like one of those ratty little Chihuahuas.”

There were several seconds of silence. “Two of my five dogs are Chihuahuas, Dale.”

Dale rolled his eyes. “Well, gosh, thanks for your help, Sandy. . .”

“What kind of tail did this black dog have?” she asked, all business now.

“Tail?” He called back the memory of the little dog’s black ass retreating toward the chicken coop. “I didn’t see a tail. I don’t think it had a tail.”

“Pugs have curled tails that sort of sit up on their backs,” said Sandy Whittaker. “What about this dog’s ears? Were they flat or raised?”

“Raised,” said Dale, not really caring any longer. “Triangular. They stuck up.”

“Then it’s not a pug,” Sandy Whittaker said. “Their ears curl down. Do you remember anything else about the black dog?”

“It had sort of a pink splotch on its face, muzzle, whatever,” said Dale. He was almost to the outskirts of Oak Hill. He could just stop by Sandy Whittaker’s office if he wanted. He had no intention of doing so.

“Yesss,” said the woman, “it sounds like a French bulldog. They grow about twelve inches tall, weigh about twenty-five pounds. They have a puglike face, barrel chest, and pointy ears. And they have a broad, short, snubby nose with slanting nostrils and a pink flush to their muzzle.”

“Well, thanks, Sandy. You’ve been a big help and. . .”

“The only problem,” interrupted Sandy Whittaker, “is that French bulldogs come in fawn coloring, pied—that’s black and white—red brindle and black brindle—that’s sort of reddish and black. Never pure black. Are you sure that the dog you saw wasn’t pied?”

Absolutely, positively coal blackthought Dale with absolute, positive certainty. “It could have been pied, I guess,” he said. “Well, thanks again, Sandy, you’ve really. . .”

“The other problem with a French bulldog,” said Sandy Whittaker, “is that there aren’t any around here. Not in Elm Haven. Not in Oak Hill. Not anywhere around here. Not even on any of the farms in your part of the county. I would have noticed.”

After confronting C.J. Congden in the garage and paying for the new tires, Dale drove back to the farm. He had always hated confrontations, especially confrontations with any sort of authority, but rather than being rattled by the encounter, he found himself slightly amused by it. And the previous night’s sense of being displaced far from the center of things—even from himself—had receded. He had his truck back, the farmhouse was full of food and drink, and if he wanted, he could drive west—or east—anytime he wanted. Things looked better.

But the weather did not. Dark clouds were moving in from the west. The warm autumn day slid slowly but exorably into a winterish chill.

He was almost back to Elm Haven when he noticed how low he was on gas. There was nothing for it, he thought. He had to deal with the KWIK’N’EZ.

It was raining when he got to the gas station/convenience store. Trucks hissed past on I-74 just down the slope. Dale pumped the gas and cleaned his windows. There was no pay-at-the-pump option, so he took out his American Express card and walked into the store to pay.

Derek, the skinhead nephew, looked up from behind the counter. He was wearing a brown and orange KWIK’N’EZ shirt and a cap with the company logo on it. His face froze when he saw Dale.

Dale laughed out loud.

“What’s so fucking funny?” said the boy.

Dale shook his head and set cash down instead of his credit card. “Derek,” he said, “the day just keeps getting better and better.”

The day got worse and worse. The clouds lowered, the breeze turned into a windstorm, and the temperature dropped forty degrees by nightfall. That evening Dale retreated early to the relative warmth of the basement to read in Duane’s old bed and listen to the old-time radio station being picked up by the big console radio. Outside, the wind howled.

Inside, the wind howled. Dale lowered his book and listened to the sound—first a whistling, then dropping suddenly to a bass growl. He walked from one of the high windows to the next, checking for cracks or broken panes, but the sound was not coming from any of the windows. It was coming from the darkened coal bin behind the furnace.

Dale took out the Dunhill lighter that Clare had given him, flicked it on, and peered into the lightless hole. There had been a hanging light there once, but the bulb had long since been removed. The noise was very loud in the small space. Dale stepped up into the coal bin and moved the lighter flame in a circle, looking at the floor and walls. Traces of coal dust remained on the concrete floor all these decades later. The gap where the coal hopper had been before Mr. McBride had switched to gas had been bricked up, as had the opening to the coal chute itself. There were no windows in the cramped space. There was a huge, square board, probably four feet by four feet, screwed into the bricks on the west wall. The howling was coming from there.

Dale bent low to cross to the west wall. He set his hand against the thick square of plywood. The wood pulsed as if something on the other side was pushing back. Cold air gusted through chinks along the top of the rotted wood and the howl returned, then rose to a whistle.

It took Dale only a minute to use his fingers to pry the old screws out of the decaying mortar between the bricks. Parts of the wood splintered when he pulled the barricade back and away.

Cold air blew freely now, carrying with it the dank stench of cold earth—the smell of the grave. Dale held his flickering lighter forward, throwing pale light down what had to be a tunnel—perhaps three feet wide, almost four feet tall. Corrugated red earth and stone were visible for twenty-five feet or more, to a dirt wall where the tunnel either ended or doglegged to the right.

It can’t end there. The wind’s coming from somewhere.

Dale considered exploring the tunnel for a full two milliseconds. No way was he going crawling into that wet, half-caved-in hole in the ground. Bringing a screwdriver, hammer, and nails from the workbench in the basement, Dale set the barricade back in place, reset the long screws in the crumbling mortar as best he could, and then drove in ten of the longest nails he could find. The wind continued to push and pulse against the wood, whistling through the splintered gap at the top.

Replacing the tools and washing his hands in the basement utility sink, Dale thought, What the hell is that? Where does it go?

He was almost asleep an hour later, the wind having dropped and been replaced by a heavy, sleety rain, when he remembered the Bootleggers’ Cave.

Every summer during his four years in Elm Haven, Dale and his brother Lawrence had joined Mike and Kevin and Harlen and Bob McKown and some of the other town kids in searching Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s property north of the cemetery for the legendary Bootleggers’ Cave—a combination of underground speakeasy and liquor depot rumored to have been operated up County 6 during Prohibition. None of the kids knew what Prohibition had been, exactly, but that did not keep them from digging holes all over Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s hillsides in search of the legendary cave. Many of the old-timers swore that the bootleggers had operated out of their cave somewhere up County 6, always on the lookout for revenuers—none of the boys had a clue what “revenuers” were, but it sounded scary to them as well. By the time the Bike Patrol kids started digging up Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s property for the first time in the summer of 1959, the legend of the Bootleggers’ Cave had become gospel and had grown to include a complete speakeasy buried somewhere under those hills, complete with several Prohibition-era cars entombed there, hundreds of barrels of whiskey, and possibly a dead gangster or two. Dale and his friends had moved several tons of soil in the fruitless search.

But Duane almost never joined them on those outings. Dale had always thought that it was because the fat boy did not want to work at the digging, but Duane worked harder on his farm than any of the city kids, so one summer day Dale had asked him why he didn’t want to find the Bootleggers’ Cave with them.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” Duane had said.

Dale had ridden his bike out to Duane’s farm alone—Lawrence was in bed with the flu—and Duane’s Old Man had sent Dale up to one of the high, hot lofts in the barn, where his genius friend was busy writing what looked like hieroglyphics on the barn wall. It turned out that they were hieroglyphics—Duane had decided to become religious and worship some Egyptian god or goddess—but Dale hadn’t been interested in that right then, even though Duane had accumulated quite a treasure trove of animal and bird skulls at his makeshift altar in the loft. Dale wanted to know about the Bootleggers’ Cave.

“What do you mean, we’re looking in the wrong place?”

“And for the wrong thing,” continued Duane, dabbing white paint on his row of bird-and-eyeball-and-wavy-line hieroglyphics.

“What do you mean?”

“The bootleggers didn’t have a cave, just one of these farmhouses with an escape tunnel they dug. The tunnel’s not even that long.”

“How do you know?”

“They used our house,” said Duane.

“You’ve seen this tunnel?”

“I haven’t been in it.”

“Where would we dig for it?”

“You don’t have to dig. It runs right out of the basement of The Jolly Corner.”

“And are there cars and stuff in it? Like dead guys?”

Dale had laughed and rubbed his nose with the paintbrush. “I don’t think so. More like rats and sewage. I doubt if the gangsters dug a very good tunnel. It must go right by where the old outhouse used to be.”

Dale had wrinkled his nose. “That isn’t the Bootleggers’ Cave. The real cave is huge—with cars in it and stuff—and lots of whiskey. We’re pretty sure it’s down by the creek on Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s farm.”

Duane had shrugged, and that had been the end of it. Dale had never asked him about it again.

Now, more than forty years later, Dale went to sleep smiling at the memory. He did not hear the scratching that had replaced the howl of the wind—a scratching coming from the darkness behind the furnace where the opening to the coal bin was.