Winter Wake

by Rick Hautala

  My God! … What if Abby gets her?

  — she might just as well die here, hemorrhaging to death in the snow.

  “Mom! ...”

  The voice came to her from out of the storm … so faint she was sure she had imagined it.

  It couldn’t possibly be …

  Looking up, she saw the diffused glow of the streetlight and, standing beneath the light was a snow-masked figure.

  “Bri! Oh, my God! Bri!”

  She struggled to her feet, but the snow tugged at her, holding her back. Still, she forged ahead as the figure by the streetlight moved toward her.

  She made it… Bri made it! she thought as tears of joy ran from her eyes and froze on her face.

  My baby made it!

  They rushed toward each other, each of them slowed by the deep snow and exhaustion. It seemed to take forever to close the distance between them, but finally--amazingly, when they were no more than ten feet apart, Julia shrank back in blinding terror.

  She screamed.

  Staring at her, her face framed by wind-whipped black hair, was the leering face of Abby!

  “No! … No! ... You can’t be!”

  Julia staggered back in total disbelief.

  How is it possible?

  Could John have been wrong? Did Abby’s influence extend off the island as well?

  I’m hallucinating! … I’m imagining this! she told herself, but as she stared at Abby’s grinning skull face, the reality sank into the core of her soul, and she knew that death was near.

  “What do you want from me?” Julia wailed, falling to her knees in the snow and beating her fists uselessly against her legs.

  “What do you want?”

  Abby’s dead mouth twitched into a lopsided grin, and her red-rimmed eyes bored into Julia.

  “What do I want?” Abby said, her voice low and mocking. “What do I want? Nothing more than your life!”

  She pointed a bony forefinger at Julia and then twisted her hand over to make a clenched fist. When she squeezed, her knucklebones stood out in sharp relief.

  “I want you and your bastard child to die!”

  Raw, burning tears flooded down Julia’s face. Her head felt as though a giant had gripped it and was squeezing until the bones began to crack and collapse inward.

  “I never did anything to you,” Julia wailed, her throat stripped raw and sounding like an old woman’s … pitiful … broken.

  “No — you never did,” Abby said, bringing her face close to Julia’s. She could feel the arctic blast of her breath on her skin. “You didn’t, but your husband did. His father had to pay. And John had to pay for what he did to me. And now you, your daughter, and your bastard child have to pay!”

  “Why?” Julia said, holding her hands out helplessly.

  The mention of Bri — that she had to die — told Julia that Bri was still alive somewhere in the storm. With that thought came a flicker of hope.

  “Why us, too? John never told me about you. I never even heard your name until Randy Chadwick mentioned you.”

  “Your husband killed me!” Abby said, her voice edging into a hollow cackle. “As surely as if he had tied the rope around my neck and pushed me off the hayloft, he killed me and the baby — his baby — inside me! And once I was dead, he tried to hide it! He buried me so no one would know! And I was dead!” Abby’s voice took on a low, mournful tone. “My baby and I were dead!”

  “But I never knew,” Julia said. Staring up at Abby with the streetlight behind her made the shadows hiding her face deepen. All Julia could see was the red glow of her eyes, but she forgot all about the raging storm as she looked into the face of death itself and felt its cold, mind-numbing power.

  Abby snickered, her laughter like dry, crackling leaves.

  “You never knew! … As if that matters.”

  “But I didn’t! I never suspected,” Julia cried. “No one knew except John, so …please. Please let us live!”

  A sudden cramp made her double over, but Julia maintained eye contact with the horrible thing confronting her.

  “I had a baby who wanted to live, too!” Abby shouted, her voice shrieking like the wind. “But my baby died … so yours has to, too!”

  Desperate, Julia folded her hands in front of her, pleading. “I can’t help what happened,” she said, feeling emotion drawn up from the pit of her stomach. “No one could. I couldn’t have known then, but if I had ever suspected what John had done, I would have told someone — the authorities. I would have —”

  Abby laughed again — low, deep, and hollow. The storm raged around her, alternately hiding and uncovering her. Julia had the disturbing sensation that she was talking to nothing but a figment of her imagination. But then Abby leaned forward and extended her hands, and when her frozen fingers gently caressed Julia’s face, she knew this was not an illusion.

  “Get up,” Abby said, her voice low and commanding.

  Julia was afraid her legs wouldn’t support her, but she struggled to stand. The wind off the frozen bay hit her in the back like an iron fist.

  “You said my daughter had to die,” Julia said, forcing out the words through cracked and numbed lips. “She’s still alive … out there.”

  Abby nodded slowly.

  “She’s still alive,” she said. “But not for long.”

  She held Julia’s face in her hands, and now she brought her face up close to her, meeting her eye to eye. As Julia looked deeply into the cold, red fire inside Abby’s eyes, she felt as though she were standing naked in the raging storm. Every fiber of her being, every shred of her soul was exposed as Abby stared long and hard into her eyes.

  “Why does anyone else have to die?” Julia pleaded weakly.

  “You have to die because your husband killed me,” Abby said, “and tried to hide it!” She tilted her head back, as though gaining strength from the storm around them. “But I have another idea.”

  Looking past Julia, out over the bay, Abby’s eyes scanned the darkness. “I would be willing to let you live — all three of you — under one condition.”

  “What?” Julia said, her voice almost a wail. “Tell me! … Anything!”

  “Like you, I have a baby inside me … waiting to be born,” Abby said. “When I died, my child died, but its life force is still inside me. Now that my murderer and his father are dead, I’ll let you and your daughter and your baby live if you will allow the life force — the soul of my unborn baby to enter your womb!”

  Julia was too stunned to speak. It was unthinkable. She lurched away from Abby so violently she almost lost her balance against the buffeting wind.

  “It can be our little deal,” Abby said. In the surrounding darkness, Julia could see her wicked gleaming smile. “Allow the soul of my baby, who never got a chance to be born, to enter your baby … so he will have a chance to live. You do this, and you can all live.”

  “No! ... No, I can’t,” Julia stammered.

  She was looking straight ahead at Abby, but all around her, the snow was spinning like a dark whirlpool.

  “It’s a simple choice,” Abby said, tossing her head back and laughing, high and cruel.

  “You have … have no idea what you’re asking,” Julia said, frantic with fear. “I can’t allow my baby to … to —”

  “But you can ... and you must,” Abby said, leering at her. “A small part of John will live — a part from the time before he did this to me —”

  “I can’t! … I won’t!” Julia shouted.

  But the darkness was all around her, tearing and tugging at her like a thousand tiny hands. Abby suddenly swept her arms around as if to embrace her. Screaming, Julia shielded herself with her hands, but instead of the expected impact, nothing more than blinding cold passed through her body. Then thick, cloying darkness surrounded her, pushing her backwards until she tripped and collapsed into the snow. She looked up, focusing on the glow of the streetlight overhead. Then the light exploded into painful shards that sprinkled down around her,
piercing her like a million silver nails.

  IV

  Minutes ... hours ... a lifetime later, Julia came to.

  At first, all she could hear was a loud, rumbling roar. Thinking she was still on the ice as it was breaking up, she screamed and scrambled frantically to hold onto something. What she saw, when she opened her eyes, was a man dressed in a heavy winter coat with a woolen hat pulled down over his eyes. Behind him, two huge glowing lights stabbed through spinning snow. Julia’s first thought was that she looking at a UFO. It took her a long time to realize that she was lying on the ground in the path of a Falmouth town snowplow.

  “Mrs. Carlson ...?” the man said, leaning close.

  With the truck lights flashing behind him, his face was lost in shadow. Julia wanted to scream — and she would have if her throat hadn’t been stripped raw.

  “Are you all right?” the man asked. The tone of earnest concern in his voice cut through her panic, and she tried to indicate that she was all right by nodding.

  Yes … I’m alive … maybe not all right … but alive …

  “My name’s Larry Fire. Folks ‘round here call me Smokey. I, uhh — found your daughter down the road a’piece, n’she —”

  “Bri?” Julia forced the words through the shredded flesh of her throat. “Is she — ?”

  “She was unconscious when I found her, but she come to,” Smokey said as he patted Julia’s shoulder. “She’s wicked cold ‘n’ scared outta her wits, but she’s in the truck cab, drinkin’ a slug of coffee.”

  “She … she’s all right?” Julia said, gasping. “She’s alive?”

  The roaring of the storm almost drowned her out, but she felt warmer … safer … She realized the driver had put a coat or blanket over her.

  “She’ll be fine,” Smokey said. “Don’t you go frettin’ ‘bout anyone ‘cept yourself.”

  “I —”

  That was all Julia could say. The events of the night crashed over her like a tidal wave threatening to pull her back out onto the frozen bay and down into the cold, dark water.

  “You rest easy there, ma’am,” Smokey said. “I called for an ambulance. It’s on its way.”

  Julia sagged back onto the snowy ground. Darkness pressed in on her, rubbing up against her like some gigantic, dangerous animal, but she wasn’t afraid.

  “I’ll tell yah,” Smokey said, shaking his head. “‘S a goddamned good thing I saw your daughter when I did. Christ!” He wiped his forehead with the back of his gloved hand. “I came purty damned close to coverin’ her up with the plow. Christ on a crutch, I could hardly see ten feet in front o’ me. Almost didn’t see you lyin’ there in the road, either.” He whistled and shook his head, looking up the length of the road to the bridge.

  Bri’s safe, Julia thought, taking hold of that single idea and hanging on to it as if it were her only lifeline.

  She didn’t want to struggle anymore.

  She didn’t have the strength.

  Let the darkness come down now, she thought, satisfied ... What does it matter? … Whatever else happens — or will happen — it’s all okay … Bri’s safe!

  EPILOGUE:

  Waiting to be Born

  I

  Spring finally came after one of the hardest winters on record, and after that, summer with temperatures reached record highs throughout most of July and into August. But even after all that time had passed, with autumn returning once again and the trees on Glooscap changing from green to yellow and brown, the sea shifting from brilliant blue to gunmetal gray, neither Julia nor Bri could satisfactorily explain — much less understand and accept — what had happened to them during that January blizzard. Much of what they had been through, Bri — apparently — had blocked out. For that, Julia was silently grateful.

  The birth of Nathan Edward Carlson on August twenty-seventh gave them both something to live for — a promise of the future to help assuage the ache of losing both John and Frank. Healing was slow and difficult, but for Julia, at least, there was emotional scar tissue — deep and thick — that would always remain.

  As painful as it was, Julia decided not to sell Frank’s house right away and move back to Vermont. In many ways, the decision was taken out of her hands because Dr. Flaherty, her obstetrician, strongly advised her against doing anything that could further jeopardize the baby’s and her health. Although her recovery from the night of the blizzard didn’t require hospitalization, it was slow.

  But time, like physical distance, will eventually heal the body and dull at least the sharpest pain. Even before winter was gone, most of the events of the previous January had begun to take on the vagueness of a vivid but fading nightmare. Although Julia never discussed it with Bri, she knew that it had all been more than a bad dream. John’s death had been real … the havoc inside their house had been real … the rolled-over station wagon buried nose-deep in the snow beside the bridge had been real … and the trauma they both had suffered out on the frozen bay that night had been — and still was — real. All that — and more — had been verified by the police and medics when they arrived on scene.

  But there were other aspects of their ordeal that only Julia knew about, and they still made her wonder …

  The state authorities investigated, and after feeble protestations, Julia accepted their official version of the night’s events — at least in public. What the police pieced together was this.

  John, as several people from the Atkins Company could testify, had been increasingly moody and irritable at work. Almost everyone who had been at the New Year’s Eve party commented on how much he had been drinking — heavily enough, so Barry Cummings testified, that his performance at work was affected. Coming home late on the night of the storm, the police concluded, John had started — or continued — drinking and, in a drunken rage, had trashed the house. After threatening Julia and Bri — enough so they fled the house for their own safety — he stumbled and fell through the picture window in the living room, dying almost instantly, bleeding to death from the massive cuts to his lower abdomen. The rest — Julia and Bri’s desperate attempt to get off the island during the blizzard, their subsequent crash and near-fatal attempt to cross the frozen bay, Larry “Smokey” Fire’s finding them — was all pretty self-evident.

  As long as I don’t tell them what else I saw and heard out there in the storm, Julia told herself.

  As long as I never mention — to anyone — Abby ... or Audrey ... and what she offered me …

  Within weeks, the authorities closed the case, ruling the John’s death as “accidental.” There would be no criminal proceedings against Julia, and it was all right if she wanted to leave Maine.

  That bad been her intention, to move back to Vermont where she and Bri had friends and support … where they could try to pick up the pieces of their lives … until Dr. Flaherty recommended that she stay put at least until after the baby was born.

  With the resilience of the young, Bri bounced back from the physical and emotional trauma of her ordeal in fine form. On the night of the blizzard, she had suffered serious frostbite and had to be hospitalized for a few weeks. For a while, it bad been touch and go. The doctors thought they may have to remove several frostbitten toes, but she recovered fully and by the end of February vacation was back to her usual bright and cheerful self. The only outward physical change was a rather large bleached splotch on her left cheek where tissue and blood vessels had been permanently damaged. If she suffered any long-lasting psychological effects, Julia sure as hell couldn’t tell by her outward appearance or behavior.

  It took an immense amount of courage for Julia to stay in Frank’s house — especially alone during the time Bri was in the hospital. And after that, once Bri was back home, Julia never let her sleep over at Kristin’s house. Bri never complained … not much, anyway. She wanted the security of being with her mother, too.

  Although she never mentioned it to Bri, all through the winter and spring and into the summer, Julia was plagued by night
mares and fitful sleep. Several times a night, she would wake up bathed in sweat, stifling a scream as some distortion of what she and Bri had been through replayed in her dreams. Sometimes late at night, she would wake up with the feeling that someone was lying in bed beside her. Convinced it was John, she would reach for him in the dark and then realize that John was dead. The bed was empty. When she touched the other side of the bed, though, she was positive the mattress had a warm, rumpled depression as if someone had been lying there recently. The worst dreams, though, were the ones in which she confronted the combined fury of John and Abby, both of whom in her dreams were in horrible states of decomposition.

  The effect this lack of sleep had on her pregnancy — especially after the physical stress of the night of the storm — concerned Dr. Flaherty, but he kept her on a regimen of vitamins and constantly reassured her that if she kept taking good care of herself, she and the baby would be fine.

  And she earnestly believed him in spite of the dark thoughts that tracked her like hungry dogs.

  The closer she got to her due date, the more Julia wondered how much of her last conversation with Abby had been real and how much she had imagined.

  She wanted — maybe more than she had ever wanted anything before — to believe that none of it had happened … that, exhausted from her trek across the frozen bay, she had been so far gone she hallucinated her final confrontation with Abby.

  Perhaps, she told herself, her fear for her own and for Bri’s survival — not to mention her baby’s — had overloaded her mind which had already been pushed beyond its limits. She hoped that Abby’s power — whatever it had been — had, like that of the Headless Horseman in the story by Washington Irving, stopped at the bridge.

  Perhaps …

  But perhaps not! her mind whispered late at night when she wanted to sleep but spent too much time staring at the ceiling instead.

  Perhaps not …

  One night in late August, thankfully after the heat wave had broken, she started having contractions that increased in both intensity and frequency. She knew the time had come. Bri came with her when Randy and Ellie drove her to the Osteopathic Hospital in Portland where, after more than eighteen hours of labor — hours edged with a bit more than the usual fear involved with childbirth — she delivered an eight pound, five ounce boy. He seemed hale and hearty, if the strength of his lungs and the avidness of his breastfeeding were any gauge. She wanted to name him after either Frank or John, but heeding some deep-seated fear, she opted for a name that had absolutely no family connection — Nathan Edward Carlson.