by Dan Simmons
The three looked in the other room—dark and empty except for the child-sized rocking chair still in the middle of the room—and then clumped downstairs to the kitchen again.
“Are you going to search for her outside?” asked Dale. His throat felt raw and his head pounded worse than ever.
“Yeah,” said Deputy Presser. “In the morning. Deputy Taylor here’ll stay with you until we get back.”
“To hell with waiting until morning,” said Dale. Someone had brought his flashlight inside from where it had fallen during the dog attack and set it on the counter. Dale tried it. It worked. “I’m going to search the fields and outbuildings now.”
Deputy Presser shrugged. “Larry,” he said, talking to Taylor, “you stay with him here at the farm until we get back. If Mr. Stewart goes looking, you stay near your car radio in case we need to get in touch. If he don’t come back in an hour, you radio dispatch. You got that?”
“But Brian, it’s cold and dark out there as a . . .”
“You do what I say.” Presser looked at Dale. “We’ll be back sometime in the morning. Mr. Stewart, I suggest you get some sleep rather than wander around the farm in the dark, but Larry’ll be here in case you need help.”
“I don’t need for Deputy Taylor to stay,” said Dale. “But I’ll need my shotgun.”
Presser took the weapon from Taylor. He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said with absolutely no tone of regret. “We’re going to have to keep this at the sheriff’s office for a while. Just in case.”
“Just in case of what?” said Dale, truly mystified.
The deputy looked Dale hard in the eye. “You say there’s a woman missing here. You say dogs got her. Well, if a woman’s really missing, maybe something other than dogs got at her. We may need this shotgun for tests.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Dale.
Presser gestured for Deputy Reiss to follow him, motioned for Deputy Taylor to stay where he was, and he and Reiss went out to their car and drove off. Dale glanced at the clock. It was a few minutes after 4:00 A.M.—still three hours until the first pale hint of sunrise.
Dale pulled on his winter peacoat, which was hanging on a hook by the door, switched on the flashlight, and went outside.
You shouldn’t ought to go off alone,” shouted Deputy Taylor from the circle of light on the stoop.
“Come with me, then,” called Dale, not turning, walking toward the first outbuilding.
“I gotta stay near the car radio!”
Dale paid no further attention to the deputy. At the edge of the muddy turnaround, he whisked his flashlight beam through the frozen weeds, stabbed it behind the fences, swept it around the outside of the chicken coop. Nothing. Dale slammed the frozen door to the coop open and peered inside, moving the light from walls to nests to floor. For a second it looked as if someone had piled a dozen small, dark-metal coffins in the coop, but then Dale remembered moving Mr. McBride’s punch-card learning machines out here. Dark stains were everywhere, but they were the old, dried, faded stains. A fox had gotten into the coop when there had been chickens here, he had told Michelle. Or a dog.
The next several outbuildings were also empty. Dale’s flashlight beam moved across hanging sickles, scythes, grass cutters, plow disks, extra cornrollers, harrow disks, unnamed blades—all rusted red-brown. His flashlight beam was fading, the batteries dying.
Dale walked farther from the farmhouse, its few visible lights seeming very far away. Out by the rusting gas tank, which hung like some great spider’s egg from the iron girders, one pair of wheel ruts led to the barn, another south along the fence at the edge of the empty field. Dale walked out into the field, slapped the flashlight hard against his palm to brighten the beam, and repeatedly called Michelle’s name into the night, pausing each time to listen for any response from the dark fields. Nothing. Not even an echo or distant dog bark. Dale walked up and down the rutted lanes, shining the flashlight beam on bare patches of mud, hoping for dog prints, a human bootprint, a shred of cloth . . . anything as a sign. The ground was frozen and unrevealing.
Panting slightly now, his breath fogging into the freezing predawn air, flashlight glow as dim as a dying candle, Dale walked to the giant barn and leaned his weight into sliding back the huge door. The warped wood and rusted steel screeched in protest, but finally opened enough for him to slip in.
The harvesting combine still filled the space, the cornrollers reaching for him like faded red teeth.
“Michelle!!”
Something rustled in one of the high lofts, but it was too small a sound to be a woman. The hounds couldn’t have hauled her up there. He shined the light up toward the impossibly high rafters and hidden lofts, but the cone of light was too dim now to reach that far. But if she escaped the dogs, she could be up there, hiding, injured.
Dale tucked the flashlight in his jacket and climbed the nearest ladder, feeling the rot in the wood and smelling the rot in the boards and straw of the barn itself. The structure was old and the ladder soft. He made sure that he never had both hands holding a single rung at one time—if one rung let go, he wanted to be connected to something solid.
Thirty feet up and he was high enough to peer over the edge of the wall and into the dark void of the first loft. The roof of the combine—the same combine that had killed his friend Duane forty years ago, chewing him up like so much offal?—was below him now, looking scabrous in the dying light. Dale shook the flashlight again, but this time the beam only dimmed further.
This loft was empty except for matted straw, some rotted tack, and a skull.
Dale crawled into the loft area, feeling the thin, rotted wood creak beneath his weight, groping ahead for the skull. It barely filled his palm, the long yellow teeth pressing toward the blue vein in his wrist. What the hell had it been? A rat? It seemed too large for a rat. A raccoon or fox? How did it get up here?
He set the skull back, swept the flashlight uselessly back and forth toward the other black rectangles of the loft, and called Michelle’s name again. The only response was a fluttering of a barn owl or sparrows in their nest.
The flashlight died completely before he started down the ladder. Dale tucked it into his jacket and checked the luminous dial of his watch, noting that his arm was shaking from either the terrible cold or the strain of climbing, or both. It was just 4:45.
Dale left the barn door open when he walked back to the house, half hoping that the hounds would jump him in the dark along the way, wanting to know that they were real. He gripped the long barrel of the useless flashlight so hard that his fingers cramped.
The deputy’s car was idling and the deputy was snoring in the front seat, his police radio cackling static audible even through the raised window glass. Dale left him sleeping and went into the house. It was still cold inside. He turned up the thermostat, heard the old furnace click in, and walked into the study. He had forgotten the computer.
>Hrot-garmr. Si-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at. Wargus sit.
Dale rubbed his cheek, feeling the beard there. He was very tired, and his headache had grown worse rather than better. He found it difficult to focus his eyes on the screen. “Howling dog”—as if for fire. “He shall be a warg.” But what the hell was the middle part? After another moment of thought, during which he half dozed, Dale typed—
>What the hell is the middle part?
A moment later he snapped awake, realizing that he had dozed off in his chair while waiting for an answer. The screen never answers when I’m here. Aching everywhere, his head and lacerated scalp throbbing, Dale pulled himself out of the chair and walked out to the kitchen. He peered through the glass—the deputy was still there—and then locked the door and went back into the study.
>It is Hittite.
Dale sighed and rubbed his cheek again. He had to try twice before he could type out his next question without misspellings.
>What does it mean?
This time he walked to the bathroom, holding himself upright wi
th one palm against the wall as he urinated into the bowl. Flushing the toilet, washing his hands, staring at his pale and red-eyed image in the mirror, he felt as if he were observing and feeling everything through a waterfall of red pain. He walked back into the study.
>zi-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at means “thou art become a wolf.”
Dale felt a surge of rage through the pain and fatigue. He was so fucking tired of games, he could throw up.
>Why the hell do you send me these messages in code if you’re just going to translate them for me?
Even before he had walked back from the kitchen, he knew he had wasted a question. This was absurd. The computer screen seemed to agree with him, since there was no reply. He hurriedly typed—
>Who has turned into a wolf? Me?
This time Dale walked to the head of the basement stairs and paused. Big band music was coming from the console radio down there. Hadn’t it been off when he and the deputies had been down there? Wishing that he still had his loaded shotgun but almost too tired to care about what was waiting for him, Dale went down the stairs.
The soft lamps near Duane’s old brass bed spilled soft yellow light onto the pillows. The wine crates and wooden shelves of paperbacks were reassuring in their familiar clutter. The furnace rattled and breathed with its usual sound. The radio dial glowed, and the old music played softly. Perhaps he had turned the radio on without thinking about it when he was down here. Or perhaps the station had been off the air for a while when the deputies were here with him. Who cared?
His legs felt leaden as he climbed the stairs and went back into the study.
>LU.MES hurkilas—the demon entities who are set to capture wolves and to strangle serpents.
“Well,” said Dale to the empty room, “thanks for nothing.” He switched off the ThinkPad and fell onto the daybed, still fully clothed, his muddy boots hanging over the edge. He was asleep before he thought to pull a blanket up over himself.
TWENTY-TWO
* * *
DURING their last months together, before and after the late-spring blizzard that had snowed them in at the ranch, Clare and Dale had spoken—at first via banter but then more seriously—about being together. Clare had been accepted into an elite medieval studies graduate program at Princeton and would be leaving in July to meet some of the other anointed scholars there and prepare for the coming years. In June, Dale heard himself offer to join her there so that they could be together.
“I’ll finish the fall semester, take that sabbatical I’ve been putting off, and head your way.”
“What would you do there?” asked Clare. “Around Princeton?”
“Maybe they need a lit teacher. Some nontenure-track guy to teach freshman comp.”
Clare said nothing, but her silence showed her skepticism.
“Seriously,” said Dale, “what am I going to do here in Missoula without you? I’d be like Marley’s ghost hanging around someplace that’s dead to me.”
“Isn’t it the ghost who’s supposed to be dead?” said Clare. “Not the place?”
“Whatever,” said Dale. “Actually, I’ve always thought that it was the ghost who was vital and the place that died. That’s why ghosts can be seen—they’re more real than the thin, faded version of the place. You know, like Lincoln’s ghost in the White House.”
“Interesting,” said Clare. They were cleaning out the stables at the ranch, and now she paused to rest on a pitchfork. “You’re serious? About coming east?”
“Absolutely,” said Dale. He realized even as he said it that he had not been serious, not up to that moment, but that now the plan meant more to him than anything else in the world. At the same instant, he felt the relationship between them swing as if on the hinge of his intentions; up to that moment he had been the locus, his hometown, his university, his classes that she was auditing, his family here in Missoula to be dealt with—but now he would be the guest, she the focus of action and attention. As if acknowledging this further, Dale said, “What I’ll really do is write my serious novel and learn how to be a good house husband while you’re at the library studying The Song of Roland or whatever the hell it is. When you come home in the wee hours, I’ll have a hot meal waiting and give you a back rub when we go to bed.”
Clare had looked up at him then, almost startled, with something like alarm visible in her eyes in the instant before she looked back toward the horses. Perhaps, Dale thought, it had been the use of the word husband. Whatever the reason, her glance had given him the first solid foreboding of their final breakup just three months in the future.
As if denying the possibility of that, he had stepped forward then, pushed her pitchfork away, and hugged her tightly, feeling her soft breasts through the denim workshirt. If there was a second or two of awkwardness on her part, it fled as soon as she returned the hug and raised her face for a kiss. One of the horses—Mab’s roan, probably—showed jealousy by kicking the stall gate.
Someone was knocking on the door.
Dale struggled awake, registered that he was lying on the daybed in Mr. McBride’s study still fully clothed and that his head still hurt like a sonofabitch, and then the pounding resumed. He looked at his watch. 9:15 A.M.—they had promised to have people here for the search at first light. “Goddamnit to hell,” muttered Dale.
Groaning, rubbing his whiskered cheeks, he went out to let Deputy Taylor in.
“Where are they?” asked Dale as the heavyset deputy stepped into the kitchen, swinging his arms to get warm and eyeing the empty coffeemaker. Taylor had obviously also just been awakened.
“You’re supposed to come with me,” said the deputy, nodding toward his idling car outside.
“What are you talking about? Deputy Presser said he’d bring some people at first light for the search and . . .”
“I got a radio call. You’re supposed to come with me right now.”
“To the sheriff’s office?” asked Dale. “Have they found Michelle?” Dale’s skin went cold then with the absolute certainty that they had found her body.
Deputy Taylor shook his head, although Dale couldn’t guess which part of the question he was answering. Hopefully both parts. “You gotta come now,” the deputy said, pulling Dale’s peacoat from the hook.
“Do I have time to grab a quick shower and change my clothes?”
“I don’t think so,” said the chubby deputy, holding out the peacoat.
“Am I under arrest? Do I have to ride in the back of your car?”
The question seemed to surprise the deputy. For a few seconds he could only blink. Then he said, “Uh-uh,” but without conviction.
“In that case,” said Dale, “I’m going to go brush my teeth. That’s non-negotiable.”
Dale rode up front, in silence. The clouds were low and leaden this Christmas morning, and it was beginning to snow with that slow steadiness that often meant a real accumulation. Dale was surprised when Taylor turned into Elm Haven rather than taking the road to Oak Hill, but he knew where they were headed as soon as the car turned north on Broad Avenue.
The old Staffney house and barn looked in bad shape in the dim light, paint missing, the barn leaning, all the windows dark. The only vehicle in the driveway was another Sheriff’s Department car. Deputy Presser came out from around the back of the house as Taylor led Dale down the driveway.
“Michelle?” said Dale. The cold hand closed around his heart again. If she had driven here, injured, it was possible she could have died here in the house that she and that Diane woman had been renovating. But the deputies said yesterday that the house was empty. And her truck’s not here.
Deputy Presser shook his head and led them up onto the back porch. He used a key to let them in the back door.
“Don’t you need a warrant for this?” asked Dale, following Presser into the cold kitchen. The place smelled of mildew and rat droppings.
“The Staffneys don’t own it any more,” said Presser, sliding his hands back in his jacket pockets. It was c
older in the kitchen than outside. “The bank over in Princeville has had the paper on this place since Dr. Staffney’s wife died in the home a few years ago.”
“But Michelle said . . .” began Dale and stopped. He realized that the kitchen was not just empty, it was abandoned. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling, exposing the bare ribs of lathing, and cabinet doors had long since been ripped off. Dust and droppings and chunks of plaster lay everywhere on the counters. Sections of the tile floor had been torn up and other sections destroyed by a leak from the ceiling. The ancient stove had been pulled out of place, with parts of it missing. There was no refrigerator. Pipes and gas valves and plumbing had been disconnected. The sink itself was filled with broken glass and mold, as if someone had broken bottles in there and left it many years before.
“I don’t understand,” said Dale. “Michelle said that she and her friend had been working on the place, bringing it up to snuff so that she could sell it.”
“Yes,” said Deputy Presser. “That’s what you told us last night.” He gestured for Deputy Taylor to hand him the long flashlight, flicked it on, and nodded for Dale to follow him down the hall into the other rooms.
Dale stopped in shock at the end of the stale-smelling, plaster-cluttered hallway. What had been a downstairs bathroom to the right showed a toilet ripped out of the floor, broken ceramic in the shattered sink, and an empty spot where an old claw-footed bathtub might once have crouched. The dining room and living room were worse.
The broad wooden boards in both rooms had been torn out, leaving only the upright edges of obviously rotted two-by-fours with a black drop to the unlighted basement visible between them. Even if the three men could have tiptoed successfully across the old support beams, there was nowhere to go; the once-grand staircase to the second floor was completely gone. Someone had long since torn out and scavenged all of the stairs, banisters, newel posts, and fixtures. Above the huge hole to the basement where the stairway once rose, the ceiling had collapsed. Dale could see all the way through the hole to the broken second-floor ceilings and even through the water-damaged roof to the low clouds. It looked to Dale like photos from London during the Blitz, some buzz-bombed tenement in Soho. Snow blew down the ruined shaft and disappeared into the basement, white flecks being absorbed by absolute black.
