A Winter Haunting

by Dan Simmons

  Amazing, thought Dale. Duane’s aunt—the Old Man’s sister from Chicago—had lived in this place from 1961 right through to the eve of the millennium and had never moved all this junk. Forty years of living with these things in the dining room.

  The smell was stronger in here. Dale panned his flashlight around, found the light switch, and flipped it on. Nothing.

  Something had died in here; that was certain. Probably a mouse or rat. Possibly a larger animal. Dale had no intention of moving his stuff in or sleeping in here until he found the corpse, got rid of it, and aired the place out.

  He sighed, went back out to his Land Cruiser, shut it off, reclined the passenger seat as far as it would go, cracked all of the windows a bit, pulled an old blanket from the back seat, and tried to go to sleep. Dale was exhausted to the point that when he closed his eyes he saw interstate highway center lines moving in headlights, overpasses flashing above him, exit signs flitting by. He was just dozing off when some fragment of dream or thought startled him awake. Dale reached over and pushed the button that locked all of the doors.

  THREE

  * * *

  IT was snowing when Dale awoke to dull morning light.

  Where the hell am I? It was an honest question. He was stiff, sore, still exhausted from the long drive, disoriented, cold, and achy. His head hurt. His eyes hurt. His back hurt. He felt as he usually did after the first hard day of a backpacking or horse-packing camping trip with its inevitable restless first night of fitful half-sleeping on the cold ground.

  Where am I? The snow was falling in discrete pellets, pounding and bouncing on the hood of the Land Cruiser—not quite hail, not quite snow. Groppel was the word they used in the West. The windshield was iced up. The fields of harvested corn were glazed over. Duane’s house. Illinois. That made no sense. Snow? It was the first day of November. Dale Stewart was used to snow in early autumn in Missoula, even more so at the ranch near Flathead Lake because of the elevation there, but in Illinois? He had lived in Elm Haven for seven years of his childhood and could not remember snow before Thanksgiving in any of those years.

  Shit, he thought, rooting through his closest duffel bag for a jacket. Blame it on el niño or la niña. We’ve blamed everything else on them for the past five or six years.

  Dale stepped out of the Land Cruiser, tugged on his jacket, shivered, and looked at the house looming over him.

  As a writer, Dale had been forced to learn a little bit about basic house types and architecture—writers have to learn a little bit about almost everything, was his opinion—and he recognized the McBride farmhouse as a “National Pyramidal Family Folk Home.” It sounded complicated, but all the term really meant was that it was one of about a million plain, equilaterally hipped-roofed houses in the Midwest, built around the time of the First World War. The McBride place was a two-story pyramidal—tall, with no side gables or interesting windows or details. Flat all around, except for a tiny porch roof over the side door that Dale remembered the McBrides using almost exclusively. Most pyramidal family farmhouses had large front porches, but this front door boasted only a stoop and a bit of skimpy lawn. The side door opened onto the muddy turnaround area between the house and the outbuildings—two tool sheds, a couple of small-garage-size general utility sheds, a chicken coop, and a huge barn where Mr. McBride had kept his farm equipment.

  Dale just hoped that the plumbing worked. He had to piss as bad as the proverbial racehorse. Plumbing? he thought. I don’t need no steenking plumbing. He was at an abandoned farmhouse three miles from a dying little Illinois village. Dale glanced once down the long, dreary driveway toward the road and then went around to the east side of the Land Cruiser to pee. The light snow was trying to turn to rain, but his urine melted a small circle on the frosted mud of the McBride’s turnaround.

  A car horn bleated not far behind him.

  Dale zipped up quickly, guiltily, rubbed his hands against his slacks, and came around the Land Cruiser. A large, dark Buick had pulled up while he was peeing. The woman who got out was probably around Dale’s age, but fifty pounds heavier, matronly, with frizzy hair dyed a totally false blond. She was wearing a long beige-quilted-goose-down coat of the kind that had gone out of fashion about fifteen years earlier.

  “Mr. Stewart?” said the woman. “Dale?”

  For a second, he was totally at a loss. Then the slow tumblers clicked into place. “Ms. Whittaker?”

  The heavy woman began walking carefully over the snow-covered ruts. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she cried, coming too close to him, “call me Sandy.”

  Dale had found the McBride house for rent on the Internet. When he had contacted the local real estate company handling the house rental—a place out of Oak Hill—he had spoken to the woman for ten minutes about the details of renting the vacant house before the two realized that they knew each other. She had said her name was Mrs. Sandra Blair, but only after he told her on the phone that he had lived in Elm Haven for a few years as a child did she say that actually she was divorced—she still kept the Blair name for business purposes because her ex-husband had been an important personage in Oak Hill and Peoria—but that her friends called her by her maiden name, Sandy Whittaker.

  Dale dimly remembered Sandy Whittaker as a thin, blond, quiet girl who hung out with Donna Lou Perry, the best pitcher in their informal but daily summer baseball league. Now, as he stood looking at this heavy, hippy, jowled, top-heavy woman, all the time hoping that she had not seen him taking a leak as she drove up, he could make no connection at all with the eleven-year-old girl from his past. Perhaps she had the same problem: he hadn’t put on as much weight as she had, but his salt-and-pepper beard and glasses certainly hadn’t been part of his image as a kid.

  “Good heavens, Dale, we didn’t expect you until tonight or tomorrow. The place has been cleaned up a bit and the electricity was to be turned on today, but when you called from Montana we thought you said November first or second.”

  “I did, actually,” said Dale. “I just kept on driving. Shall we get out of the snow?”

  “Yes, of course.” She was wearing high-heeled shoes. Dale could not remember the last time he had seen a pair of stiletto heels like these, especially on a woman so formidable. He held out his hand to help her across the frozen ruts and through the snowy patches. “Very strange weather for so early in autumn,” said Sandy Whittaker.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Dale as they came up onto the tiny side porch. “But then I thought maybe I’d forgotten what November was like here in Illinois.”

  “Oh, no, no. Usually very nice. It must be that terrible el niño thing. Have you been in the house?”

  “Only briefly last night,” said Dale. “The power was out and . . . I should warn you . . . something died in there. A mouse or rat, perhaps. It smelled pretty bad.”

  She paused at the doorway and arched one painted eyebrow. She was wearing so much makeup that it seemed to Dale that she was wearing a flesh-colored Kabuki mask. “Smell?” she said. “I was here yesterday with a cleaning lady and the propane people. There was no smell then. Do you think it’s a gas leak?”

  “No,” said Dale, brushing the snow from his hair. “You’ll see.” He opened the door for her.

  Sandy Whittaker batted at the kitchen light switch, and the bare bulb came on. The dishes on the table and counter, Dale could now see, had been freshly washed and stacked. There was no smell whatsoever.

  “That’s strange,” he said. He stepped into the dining room where the cold daylight illuminated the gray boxes of the learning machines. There was no smell there, either. “I was sure that something large had died in here.”

  Sandy Whittaker giggled nervously. “Oh, no, Mrs. Brubaker—that was Mr. McBride’s sister—died in the hospital over at Oak Hill, where I live. Oak Hill, I mean, not in the hospital. That was almost a year ago. And Mr. McBride died in Chicago . . . oh, when was it?”

  “1961,” said Dale.

  “Yes, of course, the w
inter after . . . well, after that terrible accident to little Duane out here.”

  Dale had to smile despite himself. His childhood friend had weighed over 200 pounds at age eleven. No one had ever called him “little Duane.”

  “And he died in a farm machinery accident some distance from here, didn’t he?” continued the Realtor.

  Dale realized that she was worried that he would think the house was haunted. “I just meant that last night it smelled as if a mouse or something died here,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s gone.”

  “Yes,” said Sandy Whittaker, all business now. “Would you like to look at the house? I know that the snapshots I sent you via e-mail weren’t all that clear. I don’t have one of those newfangled digital cameras . . . I just scan in the snaps from my little Instamatic.”

  “No, they were very helpful,” said Dale. He glanced at his watch. “Aren’t you working a little early . . . oh, wait, I forgot that I lost an hour driving to the Central Time Zone. My watch says seven forty-five.” He started to reset it.

  “No,” said Sandy Whittaker, with a small frown, consulting her own watch, “your watch is right. It’s just seven forty-five.”

  Dale paused. He was sure that he hadn’t reset it during his drive. Then he realized the obvious: Daylight Standard Time had begun while he was traveling. Fall back, thought Dale. Indeed, he seemed to have fallen all the way back into his childhood hometown, his childhood friend’s house, and this conversation with his elementary-school classmate without gaining or losing a minute of his life.

  Just forty-one years, thought Dale with a slight tinge of vertigo bordering on nausea.

  Sandy led the tour, starting with the ample kitchen. “I’m afraid only one burner works on the old stove. It’s gas, of course. Everything runs off the propane tank out by the tool shed. I’m sure you can get some place in Oak Hill or Peoria to come fix it. The stove, I mean.”

  “I probably won’t need more than one burner,” said Dale. “Actually, it’s a microwave I’ll miss. I’ve been subsisting on Hungry-Man frozen dinners. I guess now I’ll just have to suck on them frozen.”

  Sandy Whittaker actually stopped and stared at him in something like shock. He could see that she was revising her estimate of him down several notches. “I’m sure that there’s an inexpensive microwave available in . . .”

  Dale held up his palms. “I was just kidding. An old Woody Allen line, I think.”

  The Realtor frowned and nodded. “The refrigerator is small, but it still works. Plates and glasses and everything you’ll need are in the cupboards here. Mrs. Brubaker was a very tidy person, but I had Alma—that’s our cleaning person—wash everything again anyway. And the dining room here . . .” The floorboards creaked under Ms. Whittaker’s weight. She paused to fiddle with a wall thermostat, and Dale heard an old furnace kick on seconds before the house filled with that not-unpleasant dusty smell of the first-time heat of autumn.

  “Well,” she said, stepping further into the dining room, “we just didn’t know what to do with these . . . machines. They were too heavy for Alma and me to carry all the way out to the old chicken coop or the barn, and of course the propane men were too busy to be bothered. I have no idea what these contraptions were, but obviously Mr. McBride had been working on them years and years ago—you may have noticed that Mrs. Brubaker kept everything as she found it, although cleaner, of course.”

  “Why did she do that?” said Dale.

  “Do what?”

  “Keep everything as she found it?”

  Sandy Whittaker shrugged. “You remember how . . . eccentric . . . little Duane and his father were. Well, Mr. McBride’s sister was the same way, I guess. She kept to herself. I don’t think anyone ever visited except the Meals on Wheels people during her last year here. And Sarah from Meals on Wheels said that the house never changed. Mrs. Brubaker had kept it up like a museum.”

  “What did she die of?” asked Dale.

  “Cancer,” said the Realtor. The floorboards creaked again as she crossed the dining room, passed through a small arch with missing pocket doors, and stopped in the small, dark living room. “The living room,” she said. “I don’t believe the McBrides ever spent much time in here . . . or Mr. McBride’s sister, for that matter.”

  Two ancient chairs, a side table with a circa-1940s lamp, a sprung sofa, and a rug with huge white flowers grown gray over the decades. No radio. No television. No phone. The two tall windows here were so heavily draped that almost none of the weak morning light found its way in.

  Dale started to tug the drapes apart, found them pinned, undid the pin and struggled to open them. Another layer of draperies was pinned inside the first.

  “You should have seen the dust before Alma and her daughter vacuumed,” said Sandy.

  “I believe it,” said Dale. This inner layer of dark drapes had actually been sewn together. “Mrs. Brubaker must have been a vampire.” He pulled a folding knife from his pocket, flicked open the gravity blade, and cut through the stitching. The drapes did not want to slide along the heavy rod, but eventually he wrestled them back. A once-white curtain turned the sunlight a dim, watery yellow. He tugged the curtains down. “I’m going to need more light in here to work,” he explained, dropping the brittle curtains on the old couch and squinting up at the high draperies.

  “I don’t think so,” said Sandy Whittaker.

  Dale folded his knife away and looked at her.

  “A vampire,” she said. “I don’t think that Mrs. Brubaker was a vampire.”

  The tour of the rest of the first floor took only a few minutes. A “National Pyramidal Family Folk Home” was pretty much like Dale’s former American-square home in Missoula before the additions had been added—square, four rooms, a narrow hallway, and a bathroom. Going counterclockwise: the tiled kitchen (one window and a door), the large dining room (two windows with drapes and curtains), the small front living room (two heavily draped windows), the front entrance hall that ran back to the kitchen (its front door had leaded glass—the only decorative item Dale noticed on the first floor), the front “study” across the hall from the living room—a small room, but surprisingly cozy, with an old rolltop desk, built-in bookcases along the north wall, a single window looking down the front drive, and a long daybed with sleighbed headboard and footboard.

  “This is where Mrs. Brubaker slept and—I believe—Mr. McBride before that.”

  “They didn’t sleep upstairs?” said Dale.

  Sandy Whittaker smiled. He was standing close enough to smell her talcum powder and perfume. “No. I believe I mentioned the reason in my first e-mail to you.”

  They paused by the first-floor bathroom: a pedestal sink, a wonderful clawfoot tub, but no shower. The black and white floor tile was chipped. The toilet actually had the flush box on the wall behind it, making Dale think of the scene in the first Godfather where Michael Corleone goes in the rest room of the Italian restaurant to find a pistol with which to kill Tattaglia and the police captain, played by Sterling Hayden.

  “No shower?” he said.

  “There’s one downstairs and one upstairs, I believe. But they never used the upstairs shower.”

  “Why not?” said Dale.

  “I’ll show you,” said Sandy.

  As it turned out, she did not accompany him upstairs. It was a narrow stairway, winding, enclosed in the wall between the bathroom and the front door. It had no light switch and was very dark. Dale was gallant—thinking of the steep, narrow stairway and Ms. Whittaker’s size—and suggested that he go up alone, clumping up the steep winding staircase in the dark. There was a dim light at the top.

  A thick spiderweb covered the door to the second-floor hallway. Something distorted and huge—a spidery shape as tall as Dale—moved in the layers of web, its limbs shifting and twitching, reaching for him.

  Dale simply froze. Later, he was glad that he did not scream. Certainly that story would have soon gotten around Oak Hill and Elm Haven: Dale Stewart, learned
professor, rugged Westerner and author of the Jim Bridger: Mountain Man series, scared by his own shadow.

  There were multiple layers of thick, clear construction plastic nailed across the doorway. The plastic had warped and yellowed with age—Dale remembered now that Duane McBride had said that his Old Man had “shut off the second floor for heating reasons” after Dale’s mother had died. That must have been around 1952.

  Dale reached out and gingerly touched the first layer of plastic. Thick. Brittle. There must have been four or five layers nailed into place, each with its own latticework of folds and cracks. Dim light from a second-story window barely made it through the discolored layers. No wonder he had thought it was a web. The giant spider, of course, had been his own distorted reflection. He leaned closer but still could see no detail of the hallway or rooms beyond.

  Dale clicked open his knife, set the blade to the plastic, and then thought better of it. He went carefully down the steep stairway.

  “Is it still all sealed off?” asked Sandy Whittaker.

  “That’s an understatement,” said Dale. “I was going to cut through the plastic, but I figured I’d better ask you if there was some reason for the second floor being off-limits. Ebola virus or something.”

  “Pardon me?” said Sandy Whittaker.

  “Just kidding. I’m just curious as to why all the plastic sheeting.”

  “Don’t you remember in the e-mail I sent you?” said Sandy. “I mentioned that Mrs. Brubaker had never heated the second floor—that it was shut off.”

  “I thought you meant the heating vents,” said Dale with a soft smile. They had walked back into the kitchen where there was more light. “I didn’t know you meant that Mr. McBride had hermetically sealed the whole second floor.”

  “Alma wouldn’t go up there,” said Sandy.