Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Mist had seeped out of the ground here and there, and here and there Willis thought he could see Roger and Johnny running, hiding.

  The woods had grown colder, the bark on the trees ice to the touch. Willis’s breath turned to fog. Fog wreathed the trees like phantom boughs.

  Willis imagined himself pulling the darkness over him like a cloak. To keep the fog away.

  The fog hissed, and dampened his socks. The skin between socks and pant cuffs felt hard, brittle.

  The fog hissed again, and there was Roger, a small dark silhouette in the fog. His arm a black branch in the air, beckoning.

  Willis wanted to stay out of the fog, but he wanted to play so bad. The fog frightened him, and he was afraid he might get some of it inside. When he stepped into the fog he was careful to keep his mouth shut.

  He figured the two grey shapes ahead of him—now and then disappearing, now and then broken into pieces by the fog—were Roger and Johnny. They’d slowed down some, maybe to let him catch up.

  Willis was grateful, and didn’t want to let them down. He tried to walk faster. The fog would stick to his shirt, his pants, his skin. Like it had glue in it. He had to keep rubbing himself as he walked, just to keep the fog off.

  After a long time walking—Willis knew he’d never been this deep inside the woods before—the fog began to separate some. Roger and Johnny stopped. The darkness here was blacker than anything Willis had ever imagined. The trees were so black Willis couldn’t tell how tall they were anymore. The sky was so black he couldn’t see the stars anymore. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and there was no difference.

  The ground was so soft he couldn’t feel it. He felt as if he were standing in night air.

  “Tell us what you see,” Roger whispered, and Willis felt a center of blackness inside him give way, and a place even blacker opened up at the center of the woods, near where Johnny and Roger were standing.

  The black center began to breathe, rough and heavy, just the way Johnny breathed. And smoke came out, wispy and thin, like hair—long, pale strands of it—and for some unaccountable reason Willis thought of his mother and wanted to run away, thinking that his mother must have died and she was there in the hole and her body was going to follow her hair and come out of the hole.

  Willis could see pieces of the woods behind the smoke, like the smoke had light in it, and finally pieces of ground, lowlying brush, and backlit fallen branches.

  And the smoke became fog, long columns then irregular clouds of it. And then there were pale animals coming out of the hole, the well, and drifting off into the darkness through the trees.

  A white rabbit turned and stared at Willis before fading back into the night. A pale cat-thing hissed, and leaped into the dark.

  Roger Plummer and Johnny Williams opened their mouths full of fog, and showed Willis their pale drifting teeth.

  The ancient Victorians of North Hill stared down at Willis as he walked home from the library. The streets and the buildings here had a uniform and vaguely comforting greyness. Willis did not know why he felt comforted, he just knew that he was.

  Some people would want to change that greyness, make it into something new, something “dynamic”, like other cities. But those people weren’t the true inhabitants of the Bay. Willis, and the other true inhabitants of the Bay, had a certain reluctance about changing the old.

  From time to time, they would come up to him and whisper. The other children. They would drift up the sidewalk and whisper something in his ear, the blanched fullness of their faces creased by their perfectly linear smiles. Their faces were white and soft, like wet dough, smoke, or cloud.

  “It’s like a dream come true,” he’d overheard his father tell his mother that one evening. He was glad to be able to please his parents.

  He could not imagine another life besides this one. In this life he had friends, pale faces who drifted up the sidewalk and whispered. They didn’t need to show their teeth. He’d been born in Chicago, and reborn in the Bay. He could not imagine.

  He opened his eyes and closed his eyes. Either way, it was the same.

  Ice House Pond

  I

  “That pond is much bigger than it is,” Rudy had said to the realtor the last time, the first time, he’d seen Ice House Pond. He would never be sure exactly where the perception came from: something about the way the great stretch of level ice—pewter-colored that late in the afternoon, highlighted with occasional painful stabs of silver—disappeared into blinding snow that rose in clouds he would have thought more typical of high altitudes, snow that expanded and exploded as if with an angry energy. It had been a silly thing to say, really, and he had felt a little embarrassed around this proper New Englander. But it had also been the perfect thing to say, and now, on his return trip to take over ownership of the pond and everything attached to it, Rudy was pleased to see that his original perception still held true. The pond was much bigger than it was.

  And Rudy was in desperate need of just such a place. In the real world, in his old world, things surprised you: they seemed so pitifully small after you’d lived with them for a while.

  “I can’t honestly say that this is the perfect deal, you understand,” the realtor had said that first time. His name was Lorcaster, which, the fellow at the gas station where Rudy’d asked for directions was quick to point out, was one of the oldest names in the Bay. “Unless, of course, it’s exactly what you’re looking for.” He didn’t look like the scion of a great family. He had the belly, certainly, but none of the air. His clothes were a mismatch of pale greens and dark blues. And here he was, actively discouraging the sale and they hadn’t even got to the place yet.

  A small, wooded hill, more like a bump really, still obscured the property. The dirt road to the pond was so iced over they’d had to park on the narrow secondary that had brought them out of town, then walk a “short” jog cross-country. Lorcaster had supplied an extra coat and snowshoes. Although there was very little wind, it seemed much colder out here than in town. “It’ll require some fixing up, no doubt about that. But if you’re handy with tools—”

  “I’m not,” Rudy interrupted. “But I have a little money set aside.” More than a little. The deaths of two families in ten years and the resulting insurance payoffs had seen to that. His father had believed in insurance, had insisted on it for himself and for Rudy’s families, but Rudy would always wonder if he hadn’t, literally, bought himself trouble. And now he was about to buy himself a new life with the death money, the pain money.

  Lorcaster said nothing more about money for the rest of their walk. In fact, he seemed a bit uncomfortable that Rudy had brought up the subject in the first place.

  “Just a few feet more,” Lorcaster had puffed, trudging up the wooded rise, grabbing on to occasional nude trunks for support. “Watch your step, real slippery through here. You know, I’d hoped to be selling this place in the summertime. Beautiful out here in the summer.” He paused at the top of the small hill, holding fast to a thick branch, and looked back down at Rudy, who still struggled. “You’ll need to be getting a snowmobile, or a Cat.”

  Rudy stopped and looked around. The snow here was wet and heavy, not the fluff he was used to. And for the most part the snow surfaces were rough and icy. It was like a hardened white sludge that stuck to everything. The trees, instead of looking decorated with lace, seemed assaulted by the snow, encased in it as it froze. Not exactly pretty, but he would hardly call it ugly, either. Perhaps uncompromising was the word he wanted. “I don’t know.” Rudy grimaced from the cold. The temperature appeared to drop noticeably each foot closer to the place. Rudy had never experienced such cold, but he was reluctant to tell Lorcaster that. “Maybe I’ll want to stay put all winter.”

  Lorcaster stared at him appraisingly, as if at some questionable piece of property. “Maybe you will at that,” he said after a while. “Anyplace you go, there’s always some that stay to themselves, and don’t mingle in town. Old Finney, the one
that built the house and the ice house as well, they say he was like that. Well … speaking of … looks like we’re there.”

  Rudy forced himself up the few remaining feet, chagrined that this fat old man was actually in better shape than he was.

  He couldn’t believe the increase in cold.

  “Heating system’s in good shape, or so they tell me. You’ll need it.”

  The property was in an enormous saucer of land, edged by the small rise, with its trees around two-thirds the circumference, and a short arc of hand-fitted stones along the remaining third. Beyond that wall were the far edges of the forest, and beyond that, farmland, although Lorcaster had made it clear that the closest farm was still some miles away. He could see the bright white, two-story house with the odd angles that so often characterized owner-built homes—unassuming but interesting—and connected to that was another large white building with a walkway around it, but with no windows, which Rudy assumed to be the ice house itself The truly dramatic feature of the landscape was the pond, which extended in all directions beyond the buildings: Ice House Pond. From this angle, it seemed more like a lake than a pond, and it seemed to have its own movements—its own weather.

  The air moving above the pond was whiter than the air surrounding it, and more active, with eddies and sudden swirls, transient movements of white and silver which disappeared as soon as Rudy thought he had found some pattern. Now he knew where the intense cold lay: the pond obviously trapped cold, but he had no idea how. It appeared to be snowing just over the pond, but nowhere else.

  “The old-timers, the ones who knew about it before Old Finney bought the property, called it Bear Paw Pond,” Lorcaster said. “I suppose because of those four little projections along the north shore. They kept calling it that even after Finney had renamed it and posted that sign—Ice House Pond.” Lorcaster paused. “Well, there was a sign. Looks like somebody’s torn the blamed thing down. Anyway, even before that some of the old maps have it named as “the Hand”, but it doesn’t look like any hand to me.” Rudy could detect five long shadows growing out of that north end, four of them being extensions of the four small projections; during high water periods, or maybe times of flooding, they might indeed make the pond look like a hand. But he didn’t argue. “Don’t know where the water comes from. No sign of a spring, or any kind of exit. There may be some sort of tunnel under the surface, I suppose, that would lead up into an underground body of water. Folks around here will give you more explanations of exactly how the pond came to be than you’ll ever need. Or maybe you’ll just want to make up your own.”

  Every now and then the snowy air above the pond would clear a space, and Rudy could then see all the way to the surface of the ice. It was grey and silver, like frozen fog. Rudy thought he could detect streaks, dark branching cracks-shadowed areas like smudges, mounds, or many small things, or one large thing, floating or swimming just beneath the surface of the ice.

  That was when he said the thing that would later embarrass him: “That pond is much bigger than it is.” He hadn’t meant to say something so provocative, or poetic as that. His mouth had just acted on its own, giving voice to a silly thought he’d been unable to shake from his consciousness.

  He had been uncomfortably aware of Lorcaster staring at him. But he couldn’t bring himself to turn and look at the man. “Do tell,” Lorcaster finally said. “Then I suppose you’d be getting more for your money that way.”

  The deal had gone swiftly after that. After a cursory examination of the property (although that first glimpse had told him everything he needed to know), Rudy told Lorcaster he wanted the place and flew home to settle his affairs, which mostly consisted of calling up the relatives of his two dead wives and letting them know that they could have whatever they wanted from the house. The remainder of the dealings with Lorcaster were handled by mail and over the phone with his secretary, a Miss Pater. Rudy eventually came to believe that Lorcaster found discussions of contracts and money ill-suited to his old-money background. The man probably believed that such dealings left the founders of the first families of Greystone Bay rolling in their graves. Except he did pass on one note directly, and in his own hand rather than Miss Pater’s errorless typing, suggesting perhaps that Rudy might prefer moving in during the spring. Lorcaster even offered to supply a short-term caretaker “with my compliments”. But Rudy wouldn’t hear of it. Although he couldn’t have put his reasons into words, more than anything he wanted to reside at Ice House Pond before winter was out, when there was still plenty of rough snow and hard ice on those grounds.

  But even when he got back to the Bay he had to live a few days at the hotel—the locals seemed oddly reluctant to rent him a truck capable of negotiating the road, and the small moving van bearing the few household furnishings he hadn’t given away to in-laws refused to take them out there in those conditions. Fortunately, a cooperative manager at the hotel agreed to store the items for a small fee until Rudy was able to get to a neighboring town, buy his own pick-up truck, and return. By the time he got out to the pond with his belongings, it was near dark on the fifth day.

  And the pond was much bigger than it was, even bigger than in the dreams he’d had of it every night since that first visit.

  Rudy had a little trouble with slippage getting the new truck up over the shallow rim of hills, but the snow-packed road leading down into the saucer itself was in much better shape than what had preceded it, as if getting around on the property itself had long been a higher priority than getting back into town. The surrounding trees had already blended into one large, irregular shadow, but the difference in the air suspended over the pond was even more pronounced than before. Floating ice crystals caught the light and magnified it, like dancing, low-hanging stars. Rudy pulled his topcoat more tightly around him, hoping he had brought enough warm clothes. An extensive shopping trip before he left the city had readied him at least for an arctic expedition, but already he was having his doubts. The reality of such hard, inexplicable cold as that generated by the pond was a bit difficult to accept.

  An intense storm was again blowing the width of the pond, lifting the snow off the ice into towering clouds of mist, white as powdered sugar. Then the mist began to tear apart into arms and fingers, and, like any schoolchild watching clouds some late summer, Rudy imagined dancers and boxers, fleeing men and drowning women in the separating mist. Just as the truck was leaving the rise for the flat drive to the houses the mist was blown away completely and Rudy got a clear view of the entire pond. And there was the broad palm scarred with life and death and fortune lines, the slight knobs to the north elongated, by drifting ice and snow and moon-silvered shadow, into long white fingers, as ready to stroke a sad cheek as tear out a heart with their razor-sharp nails.

  The truck bumped its way into the front drive and slid sideways to a halt. Rudy leaned over the wheel, trying to cough out the slivers of ice that he’d suddenly sucked into his lungs.

  Rudy brought in only what he knew he’d need that first night, along with anything that might be damaged by freezing. The rest of the truck could wait until tomorrow. He’d need more furniture from town, but he had plenty of time—years—to get it.

  The house was even emptier than he remembered it, but then that wasn’t what had concerned him most during his first visit. Of the few furnishings which remained, a good number were in such bad repair they were unusable. Rudy collected such debris from three of the front rooms into one large room, to give him a little bit of living space for now.

  The empty rooms reminded him of life back before he was married, when he either couldn’t afford the furniture or didn’t think he needed it, or because his life hadn’t yet been full enough to leave him with bits and pieces to haul around from one place to the next.

  After Eva, his first wife, and their daughter Julie had died in the car accident, he’d held on to every furnishing from that life he possibly could, including most of Julie’s toys. He thought it protected him from the emp
ty rooms. Not until a few days prior to his marriage to Marsha had he thrown those items away. With Marsha had come still more things to fill his life. A fire at a downtown theatre took her from him, and the unnamed baby she’d been carrying, and again he discovered he could not let go of her things. He had surrounded himself with them, even put them out on display.

  His father used to tell him that in the concentration camps the “veterans” encouraged the newcomers to let go of their personal possessions as soon as possible. Sooner or later, they had to learn that their past, their lives, their status meant nothing now—they had only their naked bodies to depend on. The major reason his father had changed the name from Greensburg to Green when he came to America wasn’t because of anticipated anti-Semitism, but because he didn’t want to rely on his old name for comfort. If he had had a choice, he claimed, he would have preferred to go by no name at all. Names meant nothing in such a world.

  So his first night at Ice House Pond, Rudy Green would sleep naked, in an empty room. At least he had heat. Within a few hours of turning on the furnace the place was like an oven. If anything, the heating plant worked too well. He would have to bring someone out to check the thermostat.

  He took a flashlight and made a quick tour of the remaining rooms. The house certainly wasn’t in as bad a shape as Lorcaster had suggested; the walls in what he supposed had been the living-room would require a complete replastering, and the wooden baseboards had been removed in a parlor-sized room. Two of the upstairs bedrooms were in fine shape, complete with essentially usable beds, bookcases, and dressers (although he’d certainly want to replace the rotted mattresses). The other two bedrooms—one upstairs, one down—needed some new furniture and a few patches on the walls, but that was about it. The kitchen was old-fashioned, needed new linoleum, but was workable. The only true disaster area in the house was an ancient nursery at the back of the second floor, which for some reason Rudy hadn’t seen during his first visit here. He couldn’t have forgotten it.