A Winter Haunting

TWENTY-SEVEN

DALE coughed, blinked, and tried to breathe. He was lying on the floor, there was something heavy lying on him, and the flashlight had been knocked over, its beam stabbing out through the bedroom door. He was getting some air, but the rope was still choking him, cutting into his throat.

Dale reached up and pried the noose looser, his own nails cutting into the already torn skin of his neck. Finally he had the constriction loose and he pulled the rope free, tugging the line through the slip knot and throwing it away from him into the cold darkness. He got to his knees, bits of lathing and plaster falling from his shoulders and hair, dust settling around him. Dale struggled to his feet, retrieved the flashlight, and shined it around the room and then upward.

The entire heavy chandelier had come down on top of him. No, most of the damned ceiling had come down around him. The chandelier’s metal cable still snaked upward into the attic and its bolts were still firmly embedded in parts of the ruined ceiling that had fallen, but the cable had played out enough slack during the ceiling’s collapse to keep Dale from strangling. Shifting the flashlight beam, Dale could see all the way to the torn and dripping interior of the rooftop twenty feet above him. The water had dripped through the ruined shingles and roof for years, decades, one drip at a time, soaking the plaster, rotting the lathing, weakening the ceiling. What had seemed like an hour of kicking and slow dying to Dale had been only a few seconds before the whole mess gave way.

He started to laugh, but the attempt hurt his throat. He ran his fingers along his neck—bruised, torn skin, but seemingly nothing worse.

“Jesus,” he said hoarsely into the darkness. “What a fuckup.” The phrase seemed so funny to him now that he had to laugh, sore throat or no sore throat. Then he began to weep. Dale dropped to his knees and sobbed like a child. He knew only one thing at that moment— he wanted to live. Death was an obscenity, and it had been obscene to court it the way he had. Death was the theft of every choice and every breath and every option the future had offered him, pain and promise alike, and Dale Stewart had always hated thieves. Death was the cold silence of King Lear; it was the never, never, never, never, never that had chilled him from childhood on. From the day Duane had died.

Dale had no idea what he was going to do next, but he was finished not only with hurrying death, but with embracing the cold and solitude in this sad simulation of death. He wanted to go home—wherever home was—but not this way, not here, not so far from any real home he might have left behind.

Dale got to his feet, wiped the tears and snot from his face, lifted the flashlight, and went out of the room and down the stairs without a look back. It was time to sleep. He would decide what to do in the morning. He went into the study just long enough to turn off his computer and flick off the lights.

Suddenly headlights illuminated him through the frosted study window, the white light sliced into thin shafts by the blinds. Dale went to the window but could see only the headlights, high and bright, far down the driveway, as if a vehicle had just pulled in from County 6. Snow was falling heavily between the headlights and the farmhouse.

Dale muttered, “The snow’s too deep. They’ll never get down the drive.” What he thought, though, was, This was what Duane saw that night, alone, the night he was killed.

He walked down the hall and through the kitchen, turning on lights as he went, and then stepped out on the side stoop. Perhaps it was the sheriff, coming with news. After midnight on New Year’s Eve. Not likely.

The lights came closer, showed how deep the drifts really were, how insistent the snowfall, and then swerved to illuminate the mounded Land Cruiser before swinging back into the turnaround. Somehow the big vehicle had made it down the lane.

Not C.J. Congden. Dale could see that it was a Chevy sport utility, huge, dark, all four wheels churning.

Clare’s boyfriend’s Suburban.

He shook that thought out of his head. This Suburban was older, more battered. Hadn’t McKown said something about. . .

The left rear truck window rolled down even as there came a brilliant flash of light and an explosion. Sharp stones seemed to pelt Dale’s right side, tearing his shirt to shreds, swinging him around, dropping him to one knee even as the porch light exploded and went dark. Something had cut his forehead and ripped at his right ear, but before he could register the wounds, the Suburban’s doors swung open and dark figures emerged, silhouetted against the vehicle’s interior lights. The skinheads. They were carrying rifles or shotguns.

Bleeding, hurting, Dale flung open the kitchen door and threw himself inside, into the light, clawing across the linoleum even as a second shotgun blast blew the window out of the door, scattering broken glass everywhere.

Dale kicked the door shut and slammed the locks, throwing himself back against the wall and out of the line of fire. With the window broken, it would take the skinheads five seconds to rush the door, reach through, and throw the locks back. Or they could just kick in the damaged door.

He risked a look. They were not rushing the door. The Suburban’s headlights still burned and all four of its doors were open, interior lights still on. The vehicle was empty. The five men had scattered out of sight, leaving a riot of trails in the deep snow.

Two more shots roared. The kitchen window on the south side blew in and more glass rattled over the counter, into the sink, onto the kitchen table. Dale crouched and covered his face.

Another shot from the east side—a rifle shot this time—and simultaneous with the sound of the shot came the crash of glass breaking in the front parlor.

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.