Howl of a Thousand Winds

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

  The list machine in his head had gone silent. Whatever decision-making equipment he had once possessed was now shattered and strewn about the factory floor of his cerebellum.

  He trembled under the onslaught of a fear he had never imagined possible, tag-teamed with fear’s first cousin, confusion.

  His existence was torn between four untenable options. First, he could try to make his way around the edge of the lake in hopes of reaching the house on the far side of the lake, and whatever was waiting inside the wrecked dormer windows.

  The second choice was to try and make it to the highway and pray for rescue by a passing motorist. But Brad wasn’t sure that prayer was even a logical practice. Could there be a God that would allow the things he had seen today? Didn’t ghosts and spirits and walking dead men contradict the whole idea of Heaven and Hell?

  Also, there was another element to the idea of prayer. Was he even worthy of an answered prayer? Brad wasn’t a bad person, had never intentionally wronged anyone, had worked hard to have integrity in his business dealings, and tried to keep anything but the truth from escaping his lips. But he had also become a heavy drinker of late, was a divorced man, and hadn’t seen the inside of a church since the day he was married. Worst of all, in his drunken rages, he had repeatedly cursed God for his lot. Was Brad willing to risk his life on an answered prayer?

  That left only two other options. The first was to return to the cabin, where two frozen bodies had come back to life and were even now roaming the front room. The girl on the dock had, in her eerie way, suggested that he return to the cabin, but she also warned him that death awaited. Why would a sane man step in front of an oncoming train?

  The other option was to do nothing. He could just stand here in the cold, allow Mother Nature and God and destiny to play tug of war with his life, may the best deity win.

  Brad sensed a new warmth welling inside. It was the heat of rage, an anger with himself for allowing cowardice to become an option. He was ashamed and furious that he would consider just giving up without a fight. He had never thought himself any kind of hero, but also refused to brand himself as a poltroon.

  That angry blaze grew larger as months of sniveling over a lost love became fuel for the rage. He was done being sorry, he was done being afraid, he was done feeling sorry for himself.

  The anger began to manifest itself in motion. Before he could assign a cogent thought to any of his options, his feet began to make the decision for him, kicking purposefully through the snow toward the side of the cabin, then to the front of the cabin, then to the front door.

  He took one deep breath, then grabbed the doorknob and yanked the door open. Once inside, he slammed the door shut, his eyes scanning the darkened room in preparation for battle.

  It was empty.

  A sound outside the door made him spin around, crouched for a surprise attack. The surprise came ten seconds later, when Brad’s mind finally began flickering back to a rational state and eventually identified the sound. It was the sickening thud of a large sheet of snow sliding off the roof and plummeting to the ground just outside of the door. This deduction was confirmed when Brad tried to force the door open, only to find it jammed shut by the weight of the roofline avalanche.

  Sliding over to one of the front windows, he could barely see the edge of the snow pile that had just fallen from the roof. If Brad was to leave this house, it would not be the way he came in.

  “That happened back in ’87. It was the beginning of the end, but we didn’t know it.”

  Brad spun back toward the fireplace, where Denny was again sitting.

  “I’m not going to let you take me without a fight,” Brad said, a defiant look filling his wind-reddened face. “You may kill me, but I’m not going to make it easy.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Brad spread his feet and raised his fists, ready for the bell to ring.

  Denny began to laugh. “Do you know how silly you look? Like Gerry Cooney in a snowsuit and boots.”

  The ridicule was converted to higher octane fuel for Brad’s rage.

  “Well I’m going to put this boot up your ass you come anywhere near me!” he shouted.

  The comment hung in the air, mocking him as it circled the pitched ceiling and echoed back.

  Denny began laughing harder. “Man, you better come warm up by the fire. I think you have frostbite of the brain.”

  “I know you and your dad are planning to kill me. The woman at the dock told me.”

  Denny’s laugh stopped abruptly. He stood and took a step toward Brad.

  “What woman?”

  “The one on the dock, the one with the brown turtleneck.”

  Denny sat back down, his head bowed.

  “She wasn’t warning you about me. She was warning you about…him.”

  Brad dropped his hands, but not his defenses.

  “What? She said you were going to kill me.”

  “No she didn’t, Brad,” Denny said softly. “Think back to what she said. Precisely.”

  Brad silently replayed the mental tape.

  “She said, and I quote, ‘He’s going to kill you, you know.’”

  “Exactly,” Denny replied. “He. Not Denny. Not Jimbo. You’ve already seen the ‘he.’ And it’s not us.”

  “Then who?” Brad demanded.

  Denny turned and walked over to the picture window before speaking again.

  “The one who comes in the storm. The one you saw breaking the windows at the Lingerman place. Him.”

  “Sorry, I’m not buying it,” Brad said, taking a step toward the fireplace. “He’s alive. You’re dead.”

  Denny turned to face Brad. “That’s right. I’m dead. My father too. At least, in the way that you would understand it. We’re dead. And that bastard did it.” Denny wiped his eyes and returned to his chair by the fireplace. He reached over and grabbed the bottle on the table and emptied the last of the Scotch down his throat.

  While Brad’s anger still flared, his defenses piano-wire taut, he took a few steps closer.

  “It was in 1987,” Denny began. “Thanksgiving, to be exact.”

  A cold chill tumbled down the nape of Brad’s neck.

  “That’s right,” Denny continued. “Yesterday, you got to watch the encore performance. Like last night, we were all here for dinner. Usually, the cabin would have already been closed for the winter, but Mom wanted to try something new that year. Wanted an old fashioned Thanksgiving in the woods, this traditional Americana crock of shit she read about in some magazine.

  “So we waited until Thanksgiving. Dad and I spent the early part of the day sealing up windows and bringing things up from the dock. We put away the lawn furniture and chopped up the last of the firewood. We were going to shut off and bleed the water lines as soon as dinner was over.”

  Brad slowly walked over to the fireplace and fed another chunk of decaying log to the dying flames, bringing them back to life before finding a place to sit on the sofa.

  “But you saw last night how it went. Dad got sick after dinner. Hell, he had been using bourbon all day as his own personal anti-freeze, so I can’t say it was much of a surprise. Mom got pissed, loaded up the car and took off just as the snow started. I stayed behind to look after Dad and finish shutting down the place for the winter. Figured we’d head home later that night, after he sobered up enough to find his way to the truck. But he didn’t sober up. He passed out in the back bedroom while I was finishing the water lines.”

  Denny paused and stared into the fire, the creases in his forehead deepening.

  “I went in and bundled up in the chair next to Dad’s bed,” Denny continued. “No TV, no radio, it wasn’t like there was anything else to do. Figured I would just take a little nap.”

  “And while you were sleeping, the wind blew the window out and the snow covered the bed?” Brad asked.

  Denny turned and looked at Brad. “No. I’d been asleep for about an hour. The window crashed in, but it wasn’t the wind. It was h
im.”

  A gust of wind pressed against the picture window, causing it to creak in its frame, almost as if warning Denny not to finish his story.

  “The Ojibwe call it ‘Windigo.’ The Iroquois call him ‘Big Head.’ To the Blackfoot, he’s known as ‘Aisoyimstan.’ Christians can’t even begin to fathom the concept, much less give it a name. But it comes with the winter storms.

  “He was on me before both eyes were open. He pinned me in the chair, just sort of froze me to the spot, but didn’t take me right away. Then…he was on my dad so fast. Dad never had a chance to wake up and fight. He was frozen solid within seconds.”

  “I don’t understand,” Brad interrupted. “What do you mean frozen? Even with the wind and the snow coming in, it would take a while for it to cause hypothermia.”

  “That’s what you don’t understand, what no human being understands. It wasn’t the wind,” Denny replied solemnly. “And it wasn’t hypothermia. It was the creature that comes with the snow.

  “Dad was a block of ice in seconds. I don’t think he ever knew what happened. He died without ever waking up. Then he was back on me. I pushed and kicked and punched, but it was like there was nothing to connect with. It grabbed me in a bear hug, and its, I guess you would say its face, covered my face. At first, you would think it was like a kiss. But it wasn’t.

  “I could sense the air being forced out of my chest from the grip, then the face came down on my mouth. I could feel this incredible cold being forced into my lungs, freezing me from the inside. It happened fast, but not fast enough. The first real pain came when my lungs tried to contract, tried to force out the cold air. But the tissue was already frozen. The contraction shattered the lungs like a light bulb inside a papier-mache gourd. The cold spread outward, actually freezing the blood inside my veins and arteries. Some people will tell you that can’t happen because of the salt content, but blood will freeze if it’s cold enough. I froze from the inside out. The last thing to freeze was my brain, so I got to feel all of this before I checked out.”

  “I’m having trouble understanding,” Brad whispered. “What is this, a person?”

  Denny paused for a moment, trying to explain the unexplainable. “It isn’t human. He isn’t really a creature at all. It’s more…like a concentration of energy. Far away, he looks like a person, but he’s not. He comes with the storm.”

  “You mean he travels with the storm?” Brad asked.

  “No, it’s more like he is a part of the storm. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain it. Maybe if I was a physicist I could find the words. The best I can do is, you know how they talk about hurricanes and thunderstorms being packed with energy? A big winter storm is the same way. Lots of energy, especially static and electrical energy, is generated in a storm. The wind is one manifestation.

  “In the really strong storms, the energy shows up in other forms. And, like most things in nature, there is a positive and negative, a yin and yang. Most of the time, people see the positive, the beautiful snow and the virginal covering of white that obscures all the ugliness usually found in nature and in the man-made. The snow accumulates and grows on the ground and the buildings and the trees. It’s like a temporary construction project, where snow drifts form walls, and layers of snow make rooflines taller.

  “But there’s a negative energy as well. I think nature demands that there always be a balance. The destructive nature is Aisoyimstan. Most people see the results and just attribute the damage to the wind or the weight of the snow on structures. But it’s not. It’s him, knocking over trees, ripping off limbs, tearing shingles off of buildings and smashing windows.”

  “And killing people,” Brad added.

  The silence was serenaded by the whistling wind.

  Finally, Denny spoke.

  “Yeah. And killing people. During a storm, most of the fatalities happen outside, usually listed as exposure and hypothermia. Sometimes suffocation in a mass of snow. Occasionally, someone will even be killed by falling tree branches or a roof collapse. But most of these deaths occur without a witness. The bodies are found, but no one saw how they died. These are the ones killed by Aisoyimstan. And he never leaves witnesses behind.”

  Brad sat and pondered what he had just heard. It sounded logical, though not plausible. But then, he was hearing it from someone who had been dead for nearly a quarter of a century, so believability was relative.

  "You lied to me before," Brad said slowly. "When you told me you were only sleeping after I found you in the bedroom. Why did you do that? I thought we were friends. Friends don't lie to each other."

  "I'm deeply sorry about that," Denny said. "But be honest; friends sometimes don't tell the whole truth. They withhold things for the noblest of reasons, namely to spare heartache for the person they care about. That's why I didn't tell you. I thought, just maybe, I could hold you off long enough that you would eventually leave and never have to know. I didn't want you to have to carry this around with you."

  A sadness quickly swept across his face, the kind of sadness that transcends eternity.

  "And, if I'm being honest, I guess a part of me wanted to leave the door open for you to come back again," Denny continued. "That would be a pretty unrealistic expectation if you knew...the truth about me. About us."

  Brad let this percolate for a few moments. While the circumstances were downright otherworldly, the explanation was...comfortingly human. He understood loneliness, the lengths one might be tempted to go in order to fend off that empty existence. He had lived with that cloying void for only three months and had allowed his world to disintegrate into anger and alcohol, even desperate attempts to reach the very woman who had given birth to his loneliness, only to be met with a disconnected phone.

  “So he killed you and your father that night," Brad said, deciding to set aside the issue of Denny's earlier deception. "What then?”

  Denny stared into the fire. “Mom found us. The next day. She was ripped with guilt because she left us, heartbroken because she was left behind. But she survived. I always knew she was stronger than either my dad or me. The following Thanksgiving, she came up here to be with us. There was no spooky incantation or plea to the winds. We just…became.”

  “As…ghosts?” Brad asked.

  Denny stopped to ponder the title, to put it on like a cloak to see how it fit.

  “Ghosts…I guess that’s as good a description as any, but not quite accurate. We don’t walk through walls, and we don’t go 'boo' on Halloween. We don’t do any of the cool tricks you see on the late, late movies. In some ways, we’re like Aisoyimstan, without the attitude. Einstein proved on paper that energy can’t be created or destroyed, it can only change forms. We’re…energy. And since this is the form we’re accustomed to taking, we just naturally arrange the energy into these forms.”

  “You’re electrical energy?” Brad asked, unsure of the explanation. “Then why didn’t I get zapped when you touched my shoulder earlier? Or when your mother hugged you yesterday?”

  For one of the few times since he began his story, Denny smiled.

  "I've never tried to explain this before," Denny began. "My mother never asked, and you're the only person she has ever dared to bring with her for the annual ritual. I'm not exactly sure where to start, but I'll try. I think you've earned that.

  “First, let me explain something. Contrary to most of the popular theory and religious dogma, death doesn’t provide all the answers. Especially not the big ones. I can’t confirm or deny the existence of God as you know it, or as any human knows it. But after you pass, you do become aware of all the different kinds of energy that exist here and on other planes. I can’t name them all, but I can tell you there are way more energy forms than we can see when we’re alive. God, for lack of a better term, is more of an energy, a different kind of energy, instead of something physical you can touch or personify.

  “Most humans understand energy as heat or light or electricity. But there are actually hundreds of different
kinds of energy," Denny continued. "To be honest, heat and light aren’t even the most powerful of the lot.

  “Love is one of them. It’s more than just an emotion, although that’s probably the extent of mortal understanding. Love is actually another kind of energy. The best way I can explain it is that we’re the embodiment of that kind of energy.

  “I’ve told you, my mother is quite a remarkable woman. Most mothers have incredible 'love energy' for lack of a better term. It shows up in all kinds of ways, starting with the most amazing: childbirth. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. A baby is born with energy provided by the mother. It doesn’t stop when they leave the womb. Then you have some of the more common energy transfers…times when it seems your mother is reading your mind? Sensing what you need without you saying a word? Knowing you’re in trouble when they’re not even in the same room? Those come from that energy. And of course, the more tabloid-type manifestations, like when a mother lifts a 4,000 pound car off of her child. It’s real, just not measurable.”

  “Babies who survive birth defects when doctors say there’s no chance, but their mothers refuse to give up,” Brad offered, his mind beginning to grasp the concept. “Kids recovering from colds and pneumonia with nothing more than mom’s chicken soup. That’s an energy transference?”

  “Sounds hokey and real Ray Bradbury at the same time,” Denny replied, “but you’re as close to the truth as a living person can get. My mom couldn’t save us. But her love…brought back our energies.”

  “But your mom isn’t here now,” Brad pressed. “How can you still be here?”

  “The cabin,” Denny replied, looking around at the interior which was as much a part of his family as a photo album full of baby pictures, or a talisman like bronzed baby booties. “Mom’s love is in every timber and nail. My dad built it for her, his love for her. She loved this place, and loved everyone who came here. She always said that some of the happiest moments of her life happened with her family in this building.”