A Winter Haunting

NINETEEN

I KNEW what Dale had been thinking the instant he turned east on Jubilee College Road. I knew why he had done this seemingly senseless thing even before he did.

Gypsy Lane had been one of the magical places for us boys in the late 1950s and the first year of the decade of the 1960s—my last year of life. Of all our places to play, Gypsy Lane had been the most mysterious. Kid legend had it that the old wagon road had been used more than a century earlier by caravans of Gypsies who plied their trade across the Midwest, keeping to little-used back roads rather than the main thoroughfares. Kid legend also had it that the Gypsies had been driven out of Elm Haven, Oak Hill, and other nearby towns after children had gone missing—kidnapped for their blood, was the opinion of the townspeople—and the Gypsies, still needed by farm folk for their elixir cures and fortunetelling and knife-sharpening tools, had discovered this old lane through the thickest forest, a path broadened to wagon width by the Quakers and other builders of the Underground Railroad running slaves north a day’s walk at a time in the years before the Civil War, and then the Gypsies had taken the lane as their own, moving from Oak Hill to Princeville, Princeville to Peoria, Peoria north toward Chicago on this secret highway in the moonlight, their horse carts and caravans creaking through the darkness and leaf shadow.

To get to Gypsy Lane, Dale and the other town kids hiked up Jubilee College Road to County 6 past the Black Tree Tavern, where I would meet them outside the Calvary Cemetery. We’d all cross through the cemetery—brave in the daylight, more than a little nervous if we returned at dusk or after dark—climbing the back fence, crossing the pastures and meadows there, crossing a wooded valley, then reaching Billy Goat Mountains—an abandoned strip mine and gravel quarry—and finally entering the old woods, the original and uncut forest, where Gypsy Lane remained only as a sunken roadway, carpeted by moss and deep grass, overhung by brambled branches. The expedition usually included Dale and his kid brother, Lawrence, Mike O’Rourke, Kevin Grumbacher, weird Jim Harlen, and sometimes some of the other town boys—only very rarely a girl, although Donna Lou Perry, the pitcher in their all-day baseball games, occasionally came along.

I always brought up the rear. I was fat. Even on the hottest summer days, I wore heavy flannel shirts and thick corduroy pants. I set my own pace. The guys didn’t mind. They’d take a break every once in a while and let me catch up. We rarely followed the sunken path more than two or three miles, usually ending our hike on this very county gravel road on which Dale had just turned, then retracing our steps to the cemetery, then heading back to town, me waddling north alone to The Jolly Corner. On those spring, summer, fall, and occasional winter days, I walked along Gypsy Lane with the guys, not believing in any of the legends or myths about it, assuming that it was an old unpaved farm road that had been bypassed by the county and state roads fifty or sixty years earlier, but enjoying the walk and the dappled shadow and thinking my own thoughts.

The reason that Dale’s subconscious had come up with Gypsy Lane as a possible way to throw off his pursuers is that he remembered that the sunken lane ran most of the two and a half miles between this dead-end road and County 6 at the cemetery. It had been a rough and sunken path then, but passable. Billy Goat Mountains, where we boys had often played, was an obstacle course of ponds and slag heaps and huge hills of dirt and gravel. Dale’s subconscious, if not his frightened conscious mind this day, had realized that the odds were good that his Toyota Land Cruiser, with its high clearance, exceptional four-wheel low gear, and locking front and center differentials, had a better chance of making it up Gypsy Lane and across Billy Goat Mountains than did the rusted and clapped-out pickups chasing him.

But he had forgotten something. We had hiked Gypsy Lane more than forty years ago. Things change.

Before he saw the gray wreck of the abandoned farmhouse ahead on his left, Dale had remembered Gypsy Lane and smiled to himself. He’d wanted some difficult terrain in which to lose these skinhead punks. This should be perfect.

The green Ford was roaring closer now, throwing gravel and ice thirty feet in the air. Dale could see the pale faces behind the reflective windshield, even make out the black tattooed swastika on the back of the leader’s hand as he drove. For a second, Dale’s burst of confidence abandoned him. What if these kids wanted to hurt him seriously. . . to kill him? He’d led them to a perfect place: abandoned, isolated, empty. It could be spring before someone found his body.

Too late to worry about that now, thought Dale, and swung the Toyota off the dead-end road into the snowy and brambled yard of the abandoned farmhouse. It was just as he remembered it from the end of their long hikes down Gypsy Lane. Behind the farmhouse and to the left began the. . .

“Shit,” whispered Dale.

Where Gypsy Lane had come out into open pasture when he and his brother Lawrence and Duane and their friends had hiked it four decades ago, a mature forest now grew.

“Shit,” Dale said again and concentrated on weaving between the trees. He was doing only thirty miles an hour now, but even that was too fast. Mud and snow flew from the rear wheels. He dodged a bare oak, but slammed over a sapling. Suddenly the Land Cruiser was sliding on a steep hill made ski-slope slick by a thick carpet of leaves. Dale had no idea where he was. There was no sign of Gypsy Lane.

The two pickups had also been required to slow behind him. The leader of the skinheads was a lot braver than Derek driving the white Chevy truck—the green Ford plowed through small fir trees and knocked over thick bushes and more saplings in its eagerness to get at Dale. The green Ford was gaining.

Dale stood on the brake, managed to miss by inches a black-trunked maple tree that would have totaled the Land Cruiser, and slid the heavy truck the last hundred feet to the leaf-filled bottom of the gully.

Where the hell am I?He clearly remembered that their Gypsy Lane hikes had always ended with a triumphant exit from the forest, across that pasture, past the empty farmhouse. . .

No, there had been a final hill to climb to get up out of the lane. They’d always had to wait at the top for Duane to catch up.

This had to be it. This shrub-filled, leaf-filled, forested gully had to be the old Gypsy Lane. Which way? Gypsy Lane in his memory ran east and west, but this gully ran mostly north and south. Straight ahead—east—was not an option now, since the hillside ahead was far too steep even for the Land Cruiser in four-wheel-low, and the trees on the hillside grew only a foot or two apart. Dale glanced up the hill he’d just descended.

The green Ford was thirty feet away, sliding, the skinheads inside screaming. They were going to ram him.

Dale slapped the Toyota into four-wheel drive and accelerated madly, tires whining as they dug through half a foot of dead leaves. The big vehicle sloughed, almost went into the small creek to his right, and then pulled ponderously ahead just as the green pickup slid through the space where Dale had been two seconds earlier.

I should just get out and fight them. Dale ignored the mental suggestion. If this was Gypsy Lane, it had become nothing more than a muddy, snow-and-ice-filled gully filled with trees almost as old as Dale. He quit worrying about that and concentrated on keeping the big SUV moving, sliding and sloughing up inclines, bouncing over stones and fallen trees, sometimes driving into the shallow creek to avoid trees and deadfall. The green Ford roared and spit its way along behind. Farther back, Derek’s white Chevy gamely came on.

The gully was bending toward the east. It seemed very dark down here now. Dale expected an unclimbable hill or deadfall to stop him at any turn. The straight-six Toyota engine growled as it pulled the SUV over another rise between narrowing gully walls.

This was Gypsy Lane. Thirty feet wide here—it had widened out near its terminus at the county road—but still recognizable as the hidden lane the kids had enjoyed. Even the overhanging trees appeared the same. There were fewer trees growing in the lane itself now, although Dale had to dodge and swerve to avoid those that were there.

Before the skinhead in the Ford could catch up, Gypsy Lane narrowed further. Old stone walls were visible on either side, a black fence of mature trees growing from the stone. Dale drove on eastward, hearing and feeling rocks and low stumps scraping the metal guarding the Land Cruiser’s underside. The Ford bounced and slewed its way along, fifty feet behind. Much further back, the Chevy kept pace.

This is nuts, thought Dale ten minutes into this madman’s slow-motion chase. I should have driven to a police station.

And have C.J. Congden help you?came a voice.

The air seemed to brighten, the trees back away, the ditch that was Gypsy Lane widen and release its claustrophobic grip. Dale accelerated up a steep rise and came out into an open pasture.

Billy Goat Mountains.Less than a mile from the cemetery and County 6.

The quarry ponds had long since been filled in, but the gravel heaps and dirt hills that they had called Billy Goat Mountains were still there—lower and more rounded and weathered than Dale remembered, none of the rises more than twenty feet high, and all with tenth-generation grass and weeds growing out of the mud, but still there. The former ponds were wide sloughs of mud from the snow and sleet and freeze and thaw. For Illinois kids who had never seen a real mountain, or even a serious natural hill, the slag heaps and gravel piles of the old quarry had been mountains enough. And now they had to be mountains enough again for Dale.

But the old quarry went on farther than Dale remembered. The mud flats and muddy hills stretched ahead for a quarter of a mile or more. Beyond that he could see a hint of the lane leading east to the rutted service road that ran south of Calvary Cemetery to County 6. But could even the Land Cruiser cross this expanse of mud?

Dale actually stopped. There were tree lines half a mile on either side, but he remembered the woods there being thick and deep. Certainly impassable by vehicle. Probably a whole different forest now anyway, he chided himself.

He looked behind him. The Ford 250 pickup came up over the rise. The skinhead hanging out the right window still brandished his knife.

Dale drove into the slough.

The Land Cruiser bogged down almost immediately. Even in four-wheel drive, all the heavy vehicle could do was slip and slide and throw mud and ice crystals high into the air. The green Ford pickup slammed into the mud and came sliding on, its skinhead occupants looking as reckless and demented as the average SUV driver in SUV commercials on TV.

Before he lost all momentum, Dale pushed the button that locked the center differential. A lighted diagram appeared on the instrument panel, showing the locked rear axle. Dale pushed a second switch, locking the front differential. His nimble SUV suddenly turned into a tank. Locked wheels dug into the mud and moved the mass of metal ahead slowly. The green Ford plowed after him, obviously in four-wheel-low. Derek had hesitated before accelerating out onto the mud flats and the loss of momentum decided the issue: the white Chevy pickup bogged down after sixty or seventy feet, the spinning wheels only dug it deeper into the icy quagmire, and the pickup stopped, sank another six inches to its running board, and stayed where it was.

Dale glanced in his mirror long enough to see Derek leap out of the driver’s side of the Chevy and sink halfway to his knees in the mud. Not being a fast learner, the other young skinhead had seen Derek jump and still jumped out the passenger side of the pickup, where he flailed around and dropped his knife in his attempt to keep from falling face-first into the mire. But the green pickup with the three older gang members in it continued slewing steadily after Dale’s Land Cruiser.

It was, thought Dale a minute or so later, one sad excuse for a car chase. The two heavy vehicles—Dale’s huge Toyota fifty feet or so ahead of the scabrous green pickup—were slipping and sliding and slopping across the mud flats at a top speed of about one half of one mile per hour. Dale’s Land Cruiser had the advantage of expensive differential locks and Japanese engineering. The skinheads’ truck had the advantage of larger tires, greater horsepower, and a felon—perhaps a killer—at the wheel: someone who probably didn’t recognize how crazy his actions were. All Dale knew for certain at this point was that if the skinheads in the Ford did catch up to him, they’d be more furious and violent than they would have been at the KWIK’N’EZ.

Two-thirds of the way across the bog, Dale realized that he had a serious choice to make. Ahead of him were the sad remnants of Billy Goat Mountains—a line of gradual hills, perhaps twenty feet high, that ended east of the final hundred feet or so of slough before solid ground again, all within sight of Calvary Cemetery. To try to climb those hills might be fatal for Dale—if the Cruiser bogged down or slid backward he’d be at the mercy of the skinheads. To head north or south to bypass the hills would just prolong the slow-motion chase another fifteen or twenty minutes and almost certainly result in the Land Cruiser and the Ford pickup slogging out onto solid ground just fifty feet apart. This whole absurd Gypsy Lane detour would have been for nothing.

Dale floored the gas pedal and accelerated onto the first hill of slag and mud. Halfway up the incline, Dale knew that he wouldn’t make it. At first the Land Cruiser had dug in and climbed, but he hit a patch that was especially steep and especially muddy. The big SUV slid sideways. Dale fought the wheel, tapped the brake to arrest the slide, and floored the gas pedal to keep the momentum going sideways on the muddy slope, but then had to swing the steering wheel lock to lock the opposite direction just to keep the heavy truck from swapping ends. The Land Cruiser dug in again with all four locked wheels and hauled itself crablike up the slope to the summit.

At the top of the hill, barely as wide as his SUV was long, Dale stopped, panted, and stared. The north slope of the slag heap was twice as steep as the side he had just climbed. At the base of it, the mud and snow had melted into a virtual bog. Dale glanced over his shoulder.

The Ford pickup had built up enough speed to take a healthy run at the slope and now was climbing it at twice the speed Dale had managed. He could see the skinheads and the leader screaming, their mouths wide and black, the leader’s knuckles white on the steering wheel as the pickup’s oversized tires threw mud fifty feet into the air behind it.

Dale kept the gear-select in four-wheel-low and actually accelerated down the nearly vertical slope. Gears ground in protest, but the gearing, the locked differentials, and the Land Cruiser’s massive compression slowed him and kept him aimed straight all the way down. The heavy SUV hit the mud and water like a giant boulder, digging the wheels in above the hubs, but Dale fought the wheel and kept it pointed north, mud, water, and ice spewing wide on either side and kicking up a rooster tail behind him. Fifty feet and he slapped off the locking differentials, kept it in full-time four-wheel drive, and shifted to second gear, gaining the solid ground in a final lunge. The windshield wipers pounded away, scraping the smallest gap in the mud there so that Dale could see to drive.

He stopped the truck where the lane to the cemetery began and looked back again.

The skinhead had paused a long minute at the summit and then followed Dale’s lead by gunning the Ford straight down the hill. But the pickup’s torque and gearing failed it. Halfway down, the green truck swapped ends, then slewed and yawed again. It hit the mud at the bottom of the hill, sliding completely sideways. The useless oversized tires immediately sank three feet into the bog and the pickup flipped on its left side, half burying its cab and hood in mud and water.

For a long minute there was no movement, and then all three of the skinheads crawled out the open passenger-side window and balanced precariously on the tilted side of the truck. One of the henchmen tried walking out onto the tipped and tilted side of the pickup’s carrying bed, the young man’s arms pinwheeling as he lost balance. He hit the mud and went up to his waist.

Dale realized that he had the urge to lock the Land Cruiser’s differentials again and drive back to the pickup—not to help the three skinheads, he realized a second later, but to run over the miserable bastards, driving them so deep in the mud that they’d only be found five hundred years later, like those peat mummies in England. Dale tried to laugh, but his hands were shaking now as he gripped the wheel and his heart pounded as he came off the adrenaline rush that had been driving him. He realized that he had never been so angry—or at least not since he had been a kid in Elm Haven. Some of the wild energy and anger of that mostly forgotten year came back to him now with fragments of memory itself— We killed that goddamned rendering truck that was chasing us. He didn’t understand the thought, but he recognized the echo of it in his current fury.

Driving slowly now, Dale headed west on the rutted lane that ran along the south boundary of Calvary Cemetery. At County 6, he got out, opened the gate, drove through, and closed it behind him. He knew that the skinheads would be walking this way soon—although not that soon, given the mud they had to wade through—but he doubted if they’d be pulling their vehicles out of the mud all that soon.

They don’t have to,came the unbidden thought. All they have to do is turn north here and walk to The Jolly Corner.

Dale mentally shrugged. The anger was stronger than the post-adrenaline shaking now, and he felt the fury crystallizing in his chest like a clenched fist. He had his shotgun at the farm. And new shells. Let them come.

The Jolly Corner was dark when he arrived. Icicles from the day’s thaw and freeze hung like cold teeth in front of the side door. Dale went from room to room, turning on lights as he went. No one was waiting for him. The Savage over-and-under was in the basement where he had left it, unloaded, propped against the wall. Dale took the box of.410 shells, loaded one, and carried the weapon back up to the kitchen. He made sure the door was bolted with the chain lock on. Let them come.

He walked into the small study. A message glowed on the dark screen. It was not the bit of poem he had last seen there, or his challenge for the unknown e-mailer to identify himself or else, but a verbatim repeat of the earlier message:

>I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellowed, grafted onto daylight. Maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripple of mysterious meaning. Everything dies, unwanted and neglected—everything.

When Dale had first seen it, it had made no sense, but now it stirred a dim recollection of something written by Vladimir Nabokov. Now he remembered the story in question—“The Vane Sisters”—and immediately recognized this text as a riff on a playful acrostic in the last paragraph of that story. Treating the computer message now as an acrostic, Dale could read it easily, jumping from first letter to first letter of each word—

>Icicles by God. Meter from me, Duane.