Winter Wake

by Rick Hautala

  John nodded and forced himself to smile.

  “I thought, you know, if you needed proof —” he said, his voice tight and high.

  He was looking at Julia, trying not to think about what had just happened — what he had seen outside; but he couldn’t shake the feeling that, even now, someone was out there, and if he went to the window and looked outside, he would see a cold, pale face close to the window, staring in at him … at all of them.

  And in the depths of his soul, he was convinced he would recognize the face that was pressed up against the freezing glass.

  III

  Other than Frank, who opted for his own bed, the rest of them decided it would be fun — and warmer — to sleep in the living room by the fireplace. John figured it would be an easy way to keep the fire tended, and Bri — although she didn’t dare admit it to anyone — didn’t relish the idea of sleeping alone in her room with only a flashlight to find her way around. So after Frank had gone off to bed — with three out of four satisfying wins at checkers under his belt — John and Julia folded out the couch, and Bri spread her sleeping bag out on the floor by the hearth.

  Trying to get to sleep, though, with the storm still raging outside was difficult, and long past midnight scattershot conversations were still going back and forth. Finally everyone drifted off to sleep and stayed that way until sometime in the night Julia woke up with a start and nudged John.

  “Huh? … What?” he muttered, instantly awake.

  Julia rolled over and looked at him. In the fading glow of the firelight, his face was lined with deep shadows.

  “You hear something?” she whispered close to his ear so as not to disturb Bri.

  John smacked his lips and said, “No — Christ, I’ve been sound asleep.”

  The truth was, he had been in the middle of a disturbing dream.

  He was lost in a rickety, old building and was desperately trying to find a way out while a tornado — suggested, no doubt, by the nor’easter howling outside the house — tore the building apart, board-by-board. The most vivid part of the dream had been the sensation that he couldn’t breathe, that the air was being sucked out of him. The sensation was so acute that he awoke with a sharp pain in his chest.

  He was silently grateful that Julia had brought him out of the dream. He could see how his dream was simply a distortion of what had happened earlier that evening. The only difference was that he hadn’t been in his father’s house. It had been someplace else. But the dream was rapidly fading, and he couldn’t hold on to the fragmented images.

  “I heard something,” Julia whispered, her voice wire-tight. “Something like — I don’t know … like music.”

  “Umm … church wood,” John said, his voice thick with tension as the dream lingered.

  “What?” Julia said, sitting up suddenly and leaning over him.

  “Huh? … I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John said.

  “I said I thought I heard music, and you said something,” Julia said.

  “The wind in the eaves?” John replied, keeping his eyes tightly shut even though he knew his sleep had been shattered. “It’s the wind. The storm’s not over yet.”

  “I thought you said something else,” Julia said.

  “Give me a break,” John said. “Go back to sleep. I’m beat.”

  Julia eased herself back down on the couch and closed her eyes, letting the low whistling of the wind and the pebbly hiss of snow beating against the house lull her to sleep. Before long — once no other sounds came to her from the darkness — she drifted off to sleep.

  John, meanwhile, realized that he was getting farther and farther away from sleep. He had felt uncomfortable about sleeping on the couch again. The memories of seeing that hanging figure reflected in the window their first night here was still fresh in his mind. Whenever the image began to resolve more clearly, he could see the cold, bloated face of the dead person …

  She was hanging by the neck …

  The frayed rope — as gray and rotting as her dead skin — had bit deeply into her neck … so deeply it was almost buried in the folds of rotting flesh …

  Her tongue — a thick, purple wad of flesh — protruded from between her teeth, almost bitten clean off …

  Whimpering softly, John rolled over and stared into the fire. Whenever he closed his eyes, he watched for a while as the insides of his eyelids glowed with a flickering orange glow. He prayed that the light would dispel the images swirling in his brain, but it didn’t.

  Finally, though, he gave up. It was too late. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so he opened his eyes and lay there, staring at the wanly glowing embers on the hearth. The wind shrieked in the darkness outside, but — unlike Julia — the sound didn’t soothe him back to sleep. She may have heard music, but as he lay there waiting to fall asleep, he was afraid that the next sound he heard would be a heavy hand, pounding on the front door …

  IV

  Overnight, the world was transformed.

  Bri was the first to get up. She ran to the living room window and looked out at the heavy blanket of snow, glowing with blinding white in the slanting rays of the morning sun. Out by the headlands, the sea was roiling blue-green as heaving waves smashed into the rocks and tossed white spray high into the air. The purity and freshness of the world thrilled her as she got dressed to go outside. She decided that — Audrey be damned! — she was going to take a walk out on Indian Point to see how beautiful it was after the storm.

  “You going to help your father shovel the driveway and front walk?” Julia asked as she trudged into the kitchen where Bri was already half finished eating breakfast.

  “I want to go for a walk first,” she said, busily chewing the last bite of toast. “I can’t believe how beautiful the snow is. I want to go down to the Point. I’ll bet it doesn’t even look like the same place anymore.”

  Julia sniffed and nodded as she fumbled to get the coffee brewing. Without waiting to hear her mother’s response, Bri cleared her place and tugged on her heavy overcoat, hat, scarf, and mittens.

  “Make sure you’re careful down there,” Julia said once Bri was bundled up and ready to go.

  “Don’t worry,” Bri replied. “I learned my lesson. Tell Dad to save some of the shoveling for me to do later, all right?”

  With that, she swung open the door and stepped out into the razor sharp air and started down the hill to the shore.

  The closer she got to the ocean, the louder the sound of the waves got. Sometimes, depending on the wind, there were deep, muffled roars, like distant cannons … and sometimes there were loud, explosive crashes followed by a deep, grinding rumble like thunder as rocks tumbled against each other.

  Nothing compared to being this close to the sea and being surrounded by the sound,, smells and the feeling of such surging power …

  The power that almost pulled me under, Bri thought, and that finalized her decision to stay well up on the headlands, away from the water. She could enjoy the brisk air and hear the waves just fine from up there.

  She had been right about the snow changing things on Indian Point. It covered everything with an unbroken white sheet. Only close to the water had the waves stripped the snow away and exposed glistening black rocks to the sunlight. Thick clumps of snow were caught like distorted baseballs in the twining branches of the scrub brush. The rocks and branches on the seaward side were crusted with thick ice-frozen salt spray. Corny as it was, Bri started singing “Winter Wonderland” as she plowed through the snow out to the tip of peninsular. She hadn’t gone more than twenty or thirty feet along the trail before she saw that she wasn’t the first person out here this morning.

  “Audrey...? she whispered as she stared at the footprints entering the trail from the right Of course, there was no way to be sure who it was, but Bri was positive it was Audrey, and she wouldn’t enjoy her walk if Audrey was around.

  Thanks a lot!

  The tracks in the snow were small and obviously fres
h. The edges where the snow was broken were still sharply defined, so whoever had walked here had done so no more than a few minutes or even seconds ago.

  Bri strained to see through the winter-stripped trees out to the point. There was no reason to shout or to try to hear because of the pounding roar of the ocean, but suddenly Bri wanted to — she had to know if these tracks were Audrey’s. If they were, then she was set to turn around and go home.

  The walk could wait.

  “No, damn it!” Bri slapped her mittens together and adjusted her scarf and woolen hat over her eyes. “I have just as much a right to be out here as she does.”

  She started forward, struggling through knee-deep drifts. She wondered why the tracks she was following looked as if they had been made so … easily — as if whoever was walking out here had lightly skipped through or over the snow. She found it quite a job to plow her way along the trail.

  As she went along, Bri had to admit that she was following the tracks, curious to see whose they were. She didn’t want to meet with Audrey. She wanted to avoid her more than anyone else. She also had to admit that she was curious to find out who — if not Audrey — was out here so early after a storm.

  The tracks wound along the edge of the cliff overlooking the pounding surf. Soupy white foam shot up into the air as wave after wave smashed against the rocks. Bri stopped to watch, feeling both thrilled and terrified by the power of the ocean. Far out on the deep blue water, sea gulls were bobbing in the waves like miniature icebergs, heedless of the danger closer to shore. Bri wondered if sea gulls or seals ever got swept up in a rushing tide and were smashed against the rocks to die. She shivered when she thought how that’s exactly what could have happened to her that day she had fallen into the water. Trying to put such morbid thoughts from her mind, she turned and continued following the tracks, which were beginning to fill in with windblown snow.

  The tracks swung back along to the west side of Indian Point, but before they got to the ledge with a clear view of the harbor, they swung back around under the trees.

  “It’s Audrey, all right,” Bri said under her breath, recognizing the place where, not so long ago, Audrey had stopped their walk and turned around, saying she didn’t want anyone down by the dock to see her.

  Under the snow- and rime-laden trees, Bri followed the single set of footprints. She knew that not more than a couple of hundred feet ahead she would come back to where she had first picked up Audrey’s tracks, so she was looking for the trail to veer off to the left. She grunted with surprise when the trail continued straight back to where she had initially picked it up.

  “What the …? That’s impossible,” she said, squinting as she looked back the way she had come, then forward to where she could clearly see where she had started following the trail.

  “How can that be?” she wondered aloud, scratching her forehead with the rough wool of her mitten.

  There had only been one set of footprints, and she was positive she had followed them around in a circle until they came back to where they started, making one big circle in the snow.

  But where had they started?

  She either must have missed where the tracks branched off or …

  “It’s another one of her tricks,” Bri said.

  Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she was taking tiny sips of air, like water, through her mouth. Knowing Audrey, the only surprise was that the trick wasn’t meaner.

  Bri suddenly straightened up and turned to face away from the wind. Cuping her hands to her mouth, she shouted as loud as she could, “Audrey! I know you’re out here!”

  Her voice was whisked away like a dandelion fluff caught by a breeze.

  “I know you are! And I know what you’re trying to do!”

  Behind her, the ocean surged and roared, and closer to her, the wind whistled shrilly through the ice-covered branches, but that was all — no reply came … none that she heard, anyway.

  The sun glinting off the snow and the knife-sharp wind brought tears to Bri’s eyes, blurring her vision as she looked back and forth along the circular trail in the snow.

  How did she do that?

  She supposed Audrey — or whoever — could have looped around the point and then smoothed over the snow to hide where she had come from and gone. Bri remembered how, back in Vermont after a snowstorm, she and her friends used to hop on one foot around the base of a tree to make it look as if a person had straddled the tree — or walked right through it — like in cartoons.

  Or maybe Audrey had simply done one complete circuit and then, while Bri was following her first set of tracks, gone down to the rocks closer to the ocean where the surf washed away her footprints. That was a possibility, but it didn’t explain why, looking back and forth, she still could only see two sets of tracks — her own and … whoever else was out here.

  “Audrey!” Bri yelled, letting the word tear from her lungs. Her voice sounded frail against the sound of the wind and the ocean.

  “The hell with you, Audrey!” Bri shouted as her anger boiled over.

  Whatever was going on here — even if Audrey was running around in a million circles — Bri wasn’t about to waste her time playing follow the leader. She had better things to do than try to figure out where Audrey had come from or where she was going. With an angry harumph, she turned and started back along the path toward the road. She had promised her father she would help him shovel, so to heck with this … to heck with Audrey ... to heck with everything!

  As she made her way off the point and back to the road, Bri paused halfway and looked back over her shoulder. She still could see some of the tracks she — and presumably Audrey — had made. She shouted one last time, “To hell with you, Audrey!”

  SIXTEEN

  Father and Son

  I

  The following two days — Saturday and Sunday — were beautiful … sunny and cold with temperatures reaching into the lower teens.

  “Damned-right seasonable for December,” Frank commented when he returned from church and visiting friends on Sunday afternoon.

  By Sunday night, the sky was overcast again, and Bri found herself hoping against hope that the storm roaring up the East Coast wouldn’t veer out to sea. She wouldn’t have minded another day off from school. By midnight, though, two hours after she had gone to bed but wasn’t able to sleep, the snow hadn’t started, so she resolved to get up in time for the school bus at seven o’clock.

  On Monday morning, Bri and John both agreed that it was a perfect Monday — overcast, cold, and gray. By now the freshness of the snow had been broken by snow plows and footprints and melting. The island took on a desolate atmosphere that made Bri wonder if this was how life was in Russia all the time.

  On his way to work that morning, John slowed after crossing the bridge and, looking to his left, was surprised to see evidence of his skid off the road. A lot more snow had fallen, and the snowplows had cascaded snow off the road, but he could see faint traces of his tire tracks and the tracks left by Harry’s tow truck. He shivered and sped past the site, trying to put the incident out of his mind.

  In the office, he lingered only for a few minutes around the coffee urn and then went straight to his office to begin work on the plans for a new septic system for an apartment building on Maple Street, in Westbrook. He was finding — as long as he didn’t have to deal with Surfside condos — that the office was the only place where he could relax.

  With blueprints and logbooks and computations spread out over his drawing board, he immersed himself in work, but even though the system he was designing wasn’t all that complicated, his mind kept drifting back over events of the last few days. His feelings of uneasiness grew stronger, and he found himself swearing at the slightest thing — a dropped pencil, a blueprint that wouldn’t stay flat, cold coffee.

  First and foremost, there was Julia.

  Something … something bad was coming between them.

  He had no doubt. He could see it as clearly as if
someone, literally, had driven a wedge between them. For … how long now? A month or more, she had been acting like she didn’t trust him … as if she didn’t believe half of what he said even when it was about innocuous things.

  Of course, in many ways, she was correct because he was keeping secrets from her.

  Several things had happened lately that he couldn’t or wouldn’t discuss with her.

  What happened last Thursday night, for instance, when he had skidded off the road … How could he tell her — and expect her to believe him — that he had seen a person walking along the side of the road in the snow storm, and the next that person had bounced off his car? And when he had gotten out to check on her — yes, her … He was sure it was a woman — she was gone.

  How could he expect Julia to believe something like that?

  Either it never happened, and he imagined it, or else he had hit someone and left them to die on the side of the road.

  Worse were those notes he’d been finding around the house.

  Who was writing them?

  And what in the name of Christ did they mean?

  So far, he had found four, and so far they spelled out the message:

  I won’t forget what …

  Was this someone’s idea of a practical joke?

  The thought had crossed his mind more than once that someone in his family or maybe Randy or someone else on the island was playing an elaborate practical joke on him. But if they were, he wasn’t getting it,

  The memories being stirred up in him were not at all funny.

  So he didn’t talk to Julia about the notes because — first of all, he had no idea who was writing them or why, and second, he didn’t know what they supposed to accomplish … if anything except piss him off.

  Why give Julia something else to worry about?

  There were other things gnawing at his heart as well … things a husband didn’t like to think about or acknowledge … such as Julia’s wanting to have a baby.