by Dan Simmons
No, not darkened. There was a light on the second floor, up there behind the taut, white wall of sheet. Seeking out no weapon, not even thinking about finding the baseball bat or crowbar, Dale climbed the cold stairs.
The light was only a dim glow from the front bedroom. The candle again. A shadow moved between the bedroom door and the wall of translucent white sheet. Dale watched as the center of the sheet seemed to ripple in a stronger breeze, then bulged ever so slightly outward. He moved to the top step and leaned closer. Six inches from his face, the sheet took on the definite impression of a nose, a brow, eye sockets, full lips.
Michelle or Clare?
Before he could find a resemblance, the bulge receded, but another disturbance moved the thin cotton toward him lower down. Three ripples, then five. Fingers. Dale looked down and could see the perfect shape of a woman’s hand, palm toward him, fingers straining against the sheet. He waited for the sheet to rip free of the nails. When it did not, he moved his own left hand to within an inch of that slowly moving white hand in the cloth. Less than an inch. His fingertips were millimeters away from touching the pressing fingertips through the sheet.
“No,” whispered Dale. He turned and went slowly downstairs. When he looked up the staircase again, the glow was gone and the sheet was as flat and vertical as the edge of some ageless glacier. He went into the kitchen and made some tomato soup, using the last of his milk to mix half-and-half with water in the can just as his mother had shown him when he was ten years old.
* * *
He had just dozed off in the basement, listening to the big band music as usual, when a sudden silence made him snap awake.
Dale sat up on the edge of Duane’s old bed. The radio console had gone dark. Had he shut it off? He didn’t remember doing so. But the reading lamp was still on, so the fuse hadn’t blown. Suddenly he felt a slight chill. “Aw, no,” he whispered to the empty basement.
Sliding out from under the quilt, setting the book of Proust he’d been reading safely on a wine-crate bookcase, Dale stepped over to the large console radio and wrestled it away from the wall.
The inside was empty. No wires, no tubes, no lights for the dial, no works at all. Dale looked at the interiors of the other radios he’d listened to over the past two months. All empty.
He went back and sat on the edge of the bed. “This,” he said to no one in particular, “is just plain stupid.”
Suspecting on some deep level that this would be the last night he would ever sleep in Duane McBride’s home, Dale slid back under the quilt and listened to the wind rise outside in the dark.
TWENTY-SIX
* * *
THE sunrise of the last day of the old year, the old century, and the old millennium did not dawn; it seeped in like an absentminded spill of sick light, its stain of lighter gray blotting slowly beneath a shroud of darker gray. Dale watched it from the kitchen where he had been since 5:00 A.M., drinking coffee and looking out the small windows, watching the snow fall just beyond the frosted panes and sensing the movement of black hounds circling farther out.
The snow was already ten inches deep, and it continued to fall. The stunted trees along the long lane had become as fanciful as twisted bonsai inked into some Japanese watercolor, snow-laden, abstracted. The outbuildings no sooner appeared in the weak morning light than they tried to disappear behind accumulating drifts and blowing snow. Even the white Land Cruiser was up to its black running boards in snow and wore rounded cornices and caps on its hood and windshield.
Dale checked his provisions—smiling again at the word—and decided that he had enough canned goods and bread to last for a few days. A part of him knew that he would not need a few days’ worth of food, but he worked at ignoring that voice.
It was a good day to write and Dale wrote, conjuring up summer days while winter pressed cold and flat against the study’s single-paned glass. When he took a break for a late lunch sometime before 3:00 P.M., the daylight was already ebbing, draining out of the day like gray water out of a sink. Dale returned to the computer but could not concentrate on the passage in the scene in the chapter that had seemed so alive only moments earlier. He shut down Windows and stared at the DOS screen.
>ponon yo-geblond up astigeo
won to wolcnum, ponne wind styrep
lao gewidru, oopaet lyft orysmap,
roderas reotao. Nu is se raed gelang
eft aet pe anum. Eard git ne const,
frecne stowe, oaer pu findan miht
fela-sinnigne secg; sec gif pu dyrre.
Dale had to smile at this. His ghostly interlocutor was becoming less imaginative—this message was Old English, of course, but it was hampered by the ghost’s (or Dale’s computer’s) apparent lack of diacritics and proper Old English letter forms. For instance, Dale knew immediately that what his ThinkPad script—set up to work with his HP Laserjet 4M printer—had shown as “3st4ge0” should have been rendered “astigeo,” and what looked like “oopaet” on his screen should be “o0p1t.” More importantly, even without translating it all, Dale knew at once that this was a passage from Beowulf.
Dale had brought Seamus Heaney’s brilliant 2000 translation to Illinois with him and now he went to the basement to retrieve it. He found the cited passage in lines 1373 to 1379 in the description of the haunted mere:
When wind blows up and stormy weather
makes clouds scud and the skies weep,
out of its depths a dirty surge
is pitched toward the heavens. Now help depends
again on you and on you alone.
The gap of danger where the demon waits
is still unknown to you. Seek it if you dare.
Dale contemplated a response to this, decided that none was needed, and reached to shut off his computer. He paused then and opened Windows instead, clicking on the Word icon. Rather than calling up the file for the novel he’d worked on every day for the past two months, he opened a clean document page and began typing.
To Whom It May Concern:
Everything that I’ve lost, I’ve lost because I fucked it up. It’s no one’s fault but my own. I think that I’ve spent my life either trying to be someone else or waiting to become me and not knowing how. I’ve come too far out to this place and I don’t know the way back.
At least a few things make more sense. After all these years, I finally managed to read part of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu—the title is translated on this edition as Remembrance of Things Past, but I remember Clare telling me that a better translation would be In Search of Lost Time. It’s shameful for an old English major, much less a writer and professor of English, to confess to never having read this classic, but I’d picked it up a hundred times over the decades and never gotten past the boring first section. This time I found it lying here in Duane’s basement, opened it randomly to the section called “Swann in Love,” and read that straight through. It’s brilliant, and so funny. The last paragraph made me laugh so hard that I started crying—
“To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”
When one reduces one’s life to a series of meaningless obsessions, the last stage is to turn other people into obsessions.
I wish I’d been a better husband and father. I wish I’d been a better teacher and writer. I wish I’d been a better man.
Who knows? Perhaps the universe, or life, or something important that we can’t see, is a Möbius loop after all—that by sliding down one side of things we can come out on the other. Or maybe not. I’m very tired.
Finished, Dale reread the letter and saved it to hard disk. He glanced at his watch and then had to look again. It was twelve minutes before midnight. The evening and night and year and century had almost slipped away while he was writing. Dale considered printing the thing, but there was no paper in the printer and he was too exhausted to replenish it.
/> “It doesn’t matter,” he said aloud. If anyone was interested in finding the note, they would look in the computer. He left the machine on and went down to the basement, searching around the worktable for the bundle of clothesline he had seen there on the day he’d moved in. It was only clothesline, perhaps thirty or forty feet, but it was thick and expertly coiled. Dale wondered if it had been Duane or his Old Man who had coiled the rope with the easy expertise of someone who had worked with his hands all of his life. It didn’t matter.
Dale took the rope up to the kitchen, untied one end, and used a butcher knife to cut a three-foot length of line from the bundle. He furled this in a loop, left the main bundle of rope on the counter, and carried the knife, a flashlight, and the short loop of rope up the stairs to the second floor.
He paused as he reached the white barrier of sheets at the top of the steps, then plunged the knife into the taut fabric, ripping down and sideways as if disemboweling an enemy. The closest sheet separated with a long slash down the center, but the sheet behind that one showed only a ragged cut. Dropping the knife, and slipping the rope and flashlight into his pocket, Dale used his hands and fingernails to open the cut wider, tugging, clawing, and finally biting his way through the thin cotton like some predator chewing its way out of its own amniotic sac.
The second floor was dark and cold. Nothing stirred. Ignoring the front bedroom, Dale flicked on the flashlight and walked to the rear bedroom.
It was just as he had last seen it—the children’s rocker in the center of the room, the ungainly chandelier above it, the complicated water stain spread across the ceiling ten feet above the floor.
Trying not to think and mostly succeeding, Dale entered the room, set the flat-bottomed flashlight on the floor so that it threw a circle of light on the ceiling, and concentrated on knotting the end of the rope into a noose that would not give way. When he was done, he stared up at the chandelier. It looked sturdy enough to hold five men his weight. The spreading water stain all around it kept shifting in the yellow light, one minute looking like a fresco of warring men and horses, then curling into storm clouds, then resembling nothing so much as a spreading pool of blood. Dale blinked and looked away, sliding the rope and knot through his hands.
I’ve been wandering between worlds since the night the shotgun shell misfired. Time to choose one world or the other.
The child’s rocker held his weight as he stood on tiptoe, tossed the loose end of the rope around the central axis of the metal chandelier, made a triple knot that would not give way, tugged on it, lifted his feet and hung there a minute from his hands, then found the child’s rocker under his soles again. Even with some stretching, his feet should stay two feet and more off the floor.
Dale slipped the noose around his neck, tugged it tight, and kicked the chair out from under him. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t . . .
The clothesline cut deep into his neck at once, cutting off all air. Flashbulbs exploded behind his eyes. Instinctively, Dale kicked and flailed, reaching above him to grab the clothesline, but the slip knot pulled even tighter and his fingers skittered and slipped on the rope, unable to give him enough leverage to lift his own weight for more than a second or two before the choking began again.
The room seemed to come alive around him—shadows leaping from the water-stained ceiling into the corners, dark forms dancing around and below him like Indians whirling around a campfire. The room filled with voices, a multitude of sibilant, urgent whispers hissing at him.
Dale felt unconsciousness flapping around him like a raven’s wings, batting against his face, trying to enfold him. Then the flapping of ravens’ wings became the triumphant howling of hellhounds. He tried to grab the rope and lift himself again, but his hands had lost all strength and his swelling fingers slipped off the rope even as the clothesline cut deeper into his neck. Dale’s vision grew red and then slid into black even as he kicked and coughed.
His last sensory impressions were of great movement, of noise exploding around him, of sharp sticks or skeletal hands striking him and clawing at him, and then of flying into the night, falling into blackness.
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 ch
urning.
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.
