Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting

This is for Karen

For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,Like him of whom the story ran,Who spoke the spectre hound in man.

Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, v. 26

The hounds of winter, they harry me down.

Sting, The Hounds of Winter

FORTY-ONE years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered. It was a very bad winter.

I know what youre thinking. Theres the old journalism anecdote of William Randolph Hearst needing someone to cover the Johnstown flood and sending a young cub reporter. It was the kids big break. The next day the novice cabled back this lead to Hearsts paper: GOD SAT ON A LONELY HILL ABOVE JOHNSTOWN TODAY, LOOKING DOWN IN SORROW AT NATURES FIERCE DESTRUCTION. Old-timers swear that Hearst did not hesitate ten seconds before cabling back this response: FORGET FLOOD STORY. INTERVIEW GOD.

I say I died forty-one years ago and your response is, Forget the story about Dale. Who cares? Tell us what its like to be deadwhat is the afterlife like? What is it like to be a ghost? Is there a God?

At least, these would be my questions. Unfortunately, I am not a ghost. Nor do I know anything about any afterlife. When I was alive, I did not believe in ghosts or heaven or God or spirits surviving the body or resurrection or reincarnation, and I still do not. If I had to describe my current state of existence, I would say that I am a cyst of memory. Dales sense of me is so strong, so cut off and cauterized from the rest of his consciousness by trauma, that I seem to exist as something more than memory, something less than life, almost literally a black hole of holistic recollection formed by the collapsing gravity of grief.

I know this does not explain it, but then I do not really understand it myself. I know only that I am and that there was aquickening might be the best wordwhen Dale decided to return and spend the winter at the farm where I once lived and where I died.

And, no, I have no memory of my death. I know no more of that event than does Dale. Evidently ones death, like ones birth, is so important as to be beyond recall.

When I was alive I was only a boy, but I was fairly smart and totally dedicated to becoming a writer someday. I spent years preparing for thatapprenticing myself to the wordknowing that it would be many more years before I could write a real short story, much less a novel, but practicing with opening paragraphs for stories and novels nonetheless.

If I were borrowing an opening for this tale, I would steal it from Thackerays boring 1861 novel Lovel the Widower:

Who shall be the hero of this tale? Not I who write it. I am but the Chorus of the Play. I make remarks on the conduct of the characters: I narrate their simple story.

Thackerays ominiscient I was lying, of course. Any Creator stating that he is a simple Chorus and impassive observer of his creatures actions is a hypocrite and a liar. Of course, I believed that to be true of God, on the few occasions when I considered that He might exist at all. Once, when Dale and Mike and I were having a chickenhouse discussion of God, my only contribution was a paraphrased quote from Mark Twain: When we look around at the pain and injustice of the world, we must come to the ineluctable conclusion that God is a thug. Im not sure if I believed that then or now, but it certainly shocked Mike and Dale into silence. Especially Mike. He was an altar boy then and most devout.

But Im digressing even before I begin the story. I always hated writers who did that. I still have no powerful opening line. Ill just begin again.

Forty-one years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered. It was a very bad winter.

Dale Stewart drove from western Montana to central Illinois, more than 1,700 miles in 29 hours, the mountains dwindling and then disappearing in his rearview mirror, endless stretches of autumn prairie blending into a tan and russet blur, following I-90 east to I-29 southeast to I-80 east to I-74 south and then east again, traveling through the better part of two time zones, returning to the checkerboard geometries of the Midwest, and forcing himself down through more than forty years of memories like a diver going deep, fighting the pain and pressure that such depths bring. Dale stopped only for food, fuel, and a few catnaps at interstate rest areas. He had not slept well for months, even before his suicide attempt. Now he carried drugs for sleeping, but he did not choose to stop and use them on this trip. He wanted to get there as soon as possible. He did not really understand why he was going there.

Dale had planned to arrive at Elm Haven in midmorning, tour his old hometown, and then drive on to Duanes farmhouse in the daylight, but it was after eleven oclock at night when he saw theELM HAVEN exit sign on I-74.

He had planned to move into Duanes old house in early or mid-September, allowing plenty of time to enjoy the fall colors and the crisp, sunny autumn days. He arrived on the last day of October, at night, in the last hours of the first Halloween of the new century, hard on the cold cusp of winter.

I screwed up,thought Dale as he took the overpass above I-74 and followed the night-empty road the two miles north toward Elm Haven. Screwed up again. Everything I havent lost, Ive screwed up. And everything I lost, I lost because I screwed it up.

He shook his head at this, angry at the bumper-sticker-stupid self-pity of the sentiment, feeling the fog of too many nights with too little sleep, and punched a button to lower the drivers-side window. The air was cold, the wind blowing hard from the northwest, and the chill helped to wake Dale a bit as he came out onto the Hard Road just a mile southeast of Elm Haven.

The Hard Road. Dale smiled despite himself. He had not thought of the phrase for decades, but it immediately came to mind as he turned back northwest onto State Highway 150A and drove slowly into the sleeping town.

He passed an asphalt road to his right and realized that they had paved County Road 6 between Jubilee College Road and the Hard Road sometime in the last few decadesit had been muddy ruts between walls of corn when he had lived hereso now he could drive straight north to Duanes farmhouse if he wished. He continued on into Elm Haven out of curiosity.

Morbid curiosity, it turned out. The town itself seemed sad and shrunken in the dark. Wrong. Smaller. Dead. Desiccated. A corpse.

The two business blocks of Main Street along the Hard Road had lost several buildings, disorienting Dale the way a familiar smile with missing teeth would. He remembered the tall facade of Jensens Hardware; it was now an empty lot. The A & P, where Mikes mother had worked, was gone. He remembered the glowing windows of the Parkside Cafe: it was now a private residence. Luckys Grill on the other side of the street appeared to be some kind of flea market with stuffed animals staring out at the Hard Road through dusty black eyes. The Corner Pantry market was boarded up. The barbershop next door was gone. Bandstand Park was worse than gonethe tiny yard-sized space was now cluttered with a tiny VFW hall and various tin sheds, the bandstand torn down, the trees uprooted and their stumps cut out, and the war memorial hidden by weeds.

Dale made a U-turn and drove back east, turning north onto Broad Avenue. The clouds were low and the wind was cold. Leaves blew across the wide street ahead of his Toyota Land Cruiser, their dry scraping sounding like the scuttle of rats. For an instant, fatigue convinced Dale that these