Howl of a Thousand Winds

by Howl of a Thousand Winds (retail) (epub)

  The next item on the list was to drive back to town and contact the police. Mr. Berube’s house would be closer, but Brad wasn’t sure which direction would lead to the neighbor. Therefore, a return trip down the highway was the winning entry.

  Brad took one more look at the dark hallway, remembering the frozen bodies just beyond the darkness, then headed toward the opposite door. It was time to go.

  Once outside, the falling snow finally caught his attention. The next round of the circular storm was powering up. If he left now, he could probably reach Chatham before the secondary roads became impassable.

  In freezing weather, most of the 5 human senses begin to dull, particularly the senses of touch and smell. However, the strong aroma of gasoline was one that even snow couldn’t mask. Brad knew the smell immediately, but couldn’t imagine where it was coming from. He didn’t have any spare gas cans in the bed of the pickup, and he knew that no other vehicles had dropped by while he was in the house.

  Before opening the driver's side door, Brad dropped onto his knees and peered under the truck. It took less than a second for him to notice the indentation in the snow toward the back of the truck where gasoline had poured out of the tank.

  “No no no no!” he muttered, beating the snow with his gloved fist.

  He considered trying to head out to the highway anyway, hoping to get a mile or two down the road before the gas in the fuel line ran out. However, the snow falling on his eyelashes whispered the fallacy of this idea. He could see himself standing by the side of the highway where his luck and his fuel supply ran out, snow falling, temperatures dropping, and the highway silent.

  As morbid and chilling as the only alternative seemed, Brad knew that he had no choice but to return to the cabin until this phase of the storm passed.

  He took one more look at his disabled chariot, then went back inside.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Back in the main room of the cabin, Brad filled the silent fireplace with logs and kindling, then brought life to the fire with the scratch of a long wooden match. Once the room began heating up, he started his list-making trick in an effort to keep his mind away from the horror that existed at the end of the hall. Heat. Shelter. Light. Water.

  The first thing on his list was food. It had been over 18 hours since he last filled his stomach with anything less than 80-proof, and adrenalin had drained the last of his reserves. After checking the fire one last time, he headed into the kitchen in search of sustenance.

  With the electricity out, the refrigerator was a hulking mute across from the stove. He found that the lack of electricity wasn’t going to result in food spoilage, because the only item in the appliance was an old box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. The refrigerator was completely empty. The freezer contained four ice trays and nothing else. A more thorough search of the crisper and humidifier also offered the same result.

  Brad turned his attention to the kitchen cabinets. The first few doors he opened revealed dishes, glasses, and bowls. On the other side of the room, next to the stove, he could make out 4 cans of good old-fashioned Campbell’s Tomato soup, and 4 cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup. He also found 2 cans of tuna fish, but wearing labels that he didn’t recognize. Toward the back he found 3 cans of Franco-American Uh-Oh Spaghettio’s, sporting pictures of a silver-mustached chef that hadn’t graced that particular culinary treat in over 15 years.

  He was hungry, but he wasn’t sure he was that hungry.

  Considering the soup to be the safest bet, Brad began the search for a can opener, randomly choosing drawers until he found his quarry. Then the hunt continued for a saucepan, which he found in the third cabinet he tried. Within minutes, the first can was opened, its blood-red contents plopped into the pan with a thud. He then tried to add water into the empty can from the faucet, only to learn that the loss of electricity meant a loss of water, a connection most urban dwellers never consider.

  Reaching back into the under-counter cabinet, Brad withdrew a larger saucepan and headed to the front door to scoop some snow and ice, which he would melt in the fire. Opening the door, he found the snowfall had increased in volume, but was still just tuning up for the opera to follow. One large scoop of loose snow later, Brad was back inside.

  Grabbing the two pans, he headed to the fire. First, he held the larger pan over the flames until the snow became water. He then slopped a little of the clear liquid into the other pan before holding it over the flames.

  Watching the flickering fire, his mind returned to this exact spot barely 24 hours previous, when he sat in this very room watching flames leap into the vertical tunnel of the chimney while discussing some of his deepest secrets with his new friend.

  A friend whose body was now just down the hall, silent and still. Waiting for the soup to boil, Brad reflected on how quickly his life had careened out of control, its meaning lost in a looping, banking carnival ride that was not of his own making. Then, just when the ride appeared to be heading for a smoother stretch, the bottom again fell out, leaving Denny Enderrin dead without so much as the benefit of a thrill-ride scream.

  By the time the red broth had come to a boil, Brad was no longer hungry, but forced himself to eat anyway, grabbing a spoon and eating straight out of the pan. When he was finished, he dropped the soup pan and spoon into the sink, while setting the water pan on the counter. His upbringing nagged at him as he left the unwashed mess in the sink, heading back to the comforting warmth of the fire.

  Passing the large picture window, the sun now no longer a factor after losing its battle to the thickened clouds, Brad could see that this storm was going to get mean before sunlight would get a chance to make a return appearance. The list machine in his head again offered up a mental queue of survival needs, now that water and food had been checked off. The possibility of an extended winter blow meant that more wood would be needed to outlast the freezing cold. While he didn’t enjoy the thought of again going out in the snow, he knew that he had to find the woodpile and transfer enough of it from the outside to the inside as he could before daylight bid a complete adieu.

  Once again going outside, Brad cast a longing but frustrated glance at his truck, which had finished bleeding gasoline onto the snow. He then headed toward the side of the house in search of the woodpile.

  What he found was a tattered blue tarp covered with a thick layer of snow. Using his jacket sleeve to swipe the snow away, he found that much of the tarp had been perforated by moldering pieces of wood. It looked like the wood had been there for ages, rotting and falling apart every time he tried to loosen an armful from the stack. Eventually, he dug deep enough to find a few split logs that retained sufficient structure to be carried into the house.

  After going inside to deposit the first load, Brad returned for a second supply. While digging with his bare hands through the soggy pile, he began to wonder where Denny kept the “good wood,” like the logs they had used during yesterday’s celebration. Scanning the snow-covered yard while continuing to dig for usable wood, he couldn’t find anything else that looked like a fireplace supply cache. Something about that nagged at him, but the increasingly cold wind slapped his face back into focusing on the task at hand. Following a third load, Brad estimated he had enough to keep the fire going through the night and well into the next day.

  Once back inside, faced with the possibility of an overnight stay, Brad revisited the mental checklist. Knowing light would become an issue once the big hand on his watch made four more revolutions, he returned to the kitchen in search of candles. Coming up empty after a quick venture through the drawers and cabinets, Brad opened the door to the pantry.

  It turned out to be a short search.

  The pantry was completely empty, not even a leftover can or paper bag covering the dusty six-foot tall shelves. Like the decaying woodpile, something about the barren storage closet bothered him. It seemed odd that even a cabin used only for a week or two in the summer could be this devoid of food staples and supplies. He
remembered what Mrs. Enderrin had said in the car about her reluctance to cook after Jimbo’s retirement, but the lack of anything on hand for the Enderrin family to eat during their seasonal retreats seemed extreme. Of course, maybe they had taken it all home following an earlier visit in anticipation of closing the place for the winter. But if that was the case, what did Denny and Jimbo eat the day before Thanksgiving while waiting for Vi to show up with T-day vittles? There certainly wasn’t a Papa John’s this far out in the sticks.

  Brad knew that part of his running interrogatory was really a self-imposed distraction, much like his mental list machine, with the similar purpose of keeping his mind from drifting back to the horror at the end of the hall. But that explanation didn’t keep his curiosity from playing racquetball against the back of his cranium, nagging questions not quite crystallizing but slowly growing more insistent.

  Unable to find anything useful in the pantry, Brad realized his next foray for light would involve a trip upstairs. It was possible that there were candles stored in the back bedroom at the end of the hall, not to mention the one he had dropped and abandoned after discovering Jimbo and Denny, but that was a return trip he refused to consider.

  While he suspected the upstairs area would have enough light to allow maneuverability, Brad decided not to chance it without a source of illumination. He closed the door to the pantry and headed back through the kitchen, heading for the dining room, where a single candle and holder remained.

  In times of extreme stress, it’s often inconceivable what may trigger an emotional reaction in a person. For Brad, it was the site of the candlestick missing its mate. Through the tears welling up in his eyes, he could see the imprint in the tablecloth where the second candlestick once stood. It was the catalyst of release, and opened a torrent of memories he had been battling to keep dammed.

  He remembered that he had dropped the other candle and holder in the back bedroom, which forced his mind down the trail of reliving the death that existed behind a closed door less than 50 feet away. He couldn’t keep his mind from revisiting the frozen bodies; Jimbo’s sleep that would stretch into forever, the barren look in Denny’s eyes, and the natural pose of the men that made the scene so unnatural.

  Brad pulled out a chair and sat down in the same place where he had shared a dinner with the men now entombed down the hallway. He put his head on his arms and allowed the tears to pour out in earnest, his sobs racking his shoulders while the sound of his cries echoed across the room.

  Once the release began, despair started its own internal wildfire. Brad’s thoughts quickly turned selfish. He cried for it all. He cried because he had lost a friend that he had just made, realizing that of all his mental lists, his list of friends was the shortest. In the few brief hours he had talked with Denny, he had found someone who had known and shared his pain. He had connected with a man that made him understand that he wasn’t alone, that others had survived this trial. He cried because, in the space of a day, he had gone back to being alone in his grief.

  He cried because he knew how bad this was going to hurt Mrs. Enderrin, the blunt but kind soul who had shepherded him away from a Thanksgiving alone. He cried because he was alone now, frightened and vulnerable. He cried because he had no counterpart to Denny’s mother, had no one who would mourn his death if he had been the one frozen in Denny’s chair.

  He cried for the candlestick with the missing mate. He cried because all of the love he had given to one woman was now gone, wasted, unrecoverable. He cried because his entire life had spun out of control, and in the spinning had lost its meaning. He cried for the children he may never have, and the unforeseeable life of emptiness that seemed to await him.

  “I know. But it’s all going to be okay.”

  Brad’s heart stopped for the second time that day, leaving his blood to turn cold in his veins. His sob froze in his throat.

  Lifting his tear-stained face, Brad slowly turned toward the voice, his eyes widening with fright.

  Denny was standing over him, his face wearing the countenance of a sympathetic and understanding brother.

  Brad instinctively jerked away from the hand resting on his shoulder and stumbled to his feet, his eyes never leaving the man now standing before him.

  “You can’t be real,” Brad exclaimed. “I saw you. I’m, I, this must be a hallucination.”

  Denny broke into a sad smile. “Pink polka-dotted elephants? I gotta admit, I’ve never had THAT much bourbon.”

  Brad stepped back, putting more space and chairs between himself and the apparition before him.

  “Damn it, you’re DEAD! I saw you!” Brad’s mind was spinning on the iced-over pavement that had once been reality, desperately grasping for purchase. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real.

  Denny turned to look over his shoulder at the crackling fireplace. “I don’t know about dead. But I am fucking frozen. Maybe we can continue this debate next to the fire?”

  A mighty struggle broke out in Brad’s brain. However, instead of the quintessential battle between head and heart, this was all logic as two halves of the same truth waged war over what he had just seen.

  Logic said that there was no way Denny was alive. He had frozen to death in that back bedroom. It was physiologically impossible for him to be up and walking around just an hour after Brad had discovered him frozen to a rocking chair.

  That same logic said that the alternative was even less likely: that he was standing in a room having a conversation with a dead man.

  At first, Brad couldn’t bring himself to follow the man into the main room. But within a few moments of watching Denny head to the sofa in front of the fireplace, he realized that all of the answers could only be found there. Slowly, he walked to the nearby recliner, giving a wide berth to the image currently sitting just a few yards away.

  “My dad is dead,” Denny said, staring at his hands as they massaged each other. “I was going to try and brush the snow off of his face, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to see what was under there.”

  Brad began taking inventory of Denny’s appearance. It hadn’t changed much from the way it had looked an hour ago, with the frost just beginning to melt from the front of his red sweater. The icicles were gone from his fingertips, but the bluish white coloring remained.

  “I went in soon after mom left and sat with Dad. I think he may have gotten into the brandy just a little too heavy. I remember making sure the quilt covered his feet, then sat down to watch over him. I know it sounds dumb, but I felt like I was paying him back for the nights he used to watch over my crib when I was sick. I guess I fell asleep.”

  “You weren’t asleep,” Brad said, a little too forcefully.

  Denny looked into his friend’s eyes. The pale blue maintained the same life and sparkle they had shown the day before, when Brad had first met him. Denny then returned his gaze to the fire.

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” His eyes returned to his hands. “I don’t know why I didn’t wake up when the window broke. Or when the snow started pouring in. If I had, maybe Dad would be sitting here with us right now.”

  Brad could see the confusion and sadness on Denny’s face, which was beginning to show signs of pink on the cheeks. Or maybe it was just a color reflection from the fire.

  “But your eyes were open,” Brad insisted. “And you weren’t breathing. Your chest wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t see your breath in the cold.”

  “I don’t have a better explanation, Brad. It’s like I was asleep. Now I’m awake.”

  Acceptance and logic continued to wage war in Brad’s mind. He wasn’t a doctor, but neither was he an imbecile. He was sure of what he had seen, but he wasn’t sure how to explain the man currently warming himself on the sofa.

  The automatic list-maker in his head began reeling off options: Hypothermic state. Near-death and white light. Misinterpretation induced by panic. Hallucination. Miracle.

  Ghost.

  Brad didn’t believe i
n ghosts, in spite of the face he had seen in the dust when he was nine. For the last few months, he wasn’t sure he believed in God, either. But he did believe in medical science and logic, and suspected that an acceptable answer would not be found in a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. He tried to conjure up all he could remember about hypothermia, and the body’s systematic shutdown of organic functions in the face of decreasing internal temperature. He tried to recall if shallow breathing had been one of the indicators, or if blue-tinged skin was post mortem, or if eyes tended to remain open during hypothermic catatonia.

  But it didn’t matter. He knew that the man in that back bedroom had died.

  “Your mother sent me to look for you,” Brad said.

  “I know,” Denny replied. “I didn’t think you came up for the ice fishing.”

  For the first time that day, a smile tried to form on Brad’s lips.

  “My mother is a strong woman, but this family is everything to her. She seems so independent, but the life she made with my father and I is the only one she knows.”

  Brad thought about what to say next, trying to find a rational question to pose in the midst of an extraordinarily irrational moment.

  “What do you…feel?” Brad asked.

  Denny thought for a minute. “I can’t really describe it. I’m not sure they make a word for what I’m feeling. But I’m sorry for the shock you must be feeling right about now.”

  Brad let the silence unroll itself while he continued to try piecing all of the fragments together. Here he was having a conversation with a man that was dead 60 minutes ago. The man who had just lost his father was sitting in the same room, concerned for his friend. A dead man continued to lie beneath a blanket of snow and ice in the next room. And Brad was left with no phone, no way to validate all of this with another human being. All of the lists in the history of mankind couldn’t contain an explanation for what he was seeing, and he couldn’t wrap his head around an answer that could give him peace.