A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons.
Title: A Winter Haunting.
Author: Dan Simmons.
Genre: Fiction, horror, mystery, ghost story, haunted house.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2002.
Summary: A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage-and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation. But moving into a long-deserted farmhouse on the far outskirts of town-the one-time residence of a strange and brilliant friend who lost his young life in a grisly "accident" back in the terrible summer of 1960-is only the latest in his long succession of recent mistakes. Because Dale is not alone here. He has been followed to this house of shadows by private demons who are now twisting his reality into horrifying new forms. And a thick, blanketing early snow is starting to fall...
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
♥ Forty-one years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered. It was a very bad winter.
♥ Unfortunately, I am not a ghost. Nor do I know anything about any afterlife. 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. Dale's 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.
♥ And, no, I have no memory of my death. I know no more of that event than does Dale. Evidently one's death, like one's birth, is so important as to be beyond recall.
♥ 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.
♥ Dale could tell that Hall had no idea what he was talking about. Perhaps male psychiatrists had never been boys. That would explain a lot.
♥ Jesus, the place is full of children's coffins. Dale froze in place, flicking the light in all directions. Instead of one dining room table, there were six or eight rough benches set on sawhorses, and on each bench was a long, dull-metal box the size and shape of a small coffin. Then he saw the slots for punch cards, rudimentary keyboards, and small windows on the metal boxes.
Learning machines, Dale remembered.
♥ Dale Stewart had always despised the idea of suicide and felt anger toward those who tried it and a real fury toward those who succeeded at it. ..Even before Dale's own descent into functional insanity, he had understood that suicides were not usually responsible for their decisions-his older friend, a French woman writer named Brigitte, had spent years battling depression before she locked herself in her bedroom and took two vials of horded sleeping pills-but Dale had always hated the narcissism of self-destruction, the ineluctable selfishness of the act. Brigitte had left four school-aged children behind. His former student, David, had left a pregnant young wife to deal with the trauma of finding his body hanging in the garage. It was, to Dale, inexcusable to leave such messes behind. Dale hated messes as much as he despised self-pity.
♥ Dale had once taught a semester-long seminar on Ernest Hemingway, and he had fallen into flat-out argument with a few of his smarter students on the writer's culpability in ending his life the way he had.
"The selfish bastard pulled the trigger on his Boss shotgun right at the foot of the stairs," he had half yelled, "so that Miss Mary would have no choice but to walk through the puddles of blood and brains and shards of skull on her way to the phone."
"His dear Miss Mary had been the one to leave the keys to his gun case in plain view on the kitchen windowsill," said his sharpest student, not retreating a bit. "Perhaps he was just acknowledging her choice and making her pay for it a bit."
Dale had actually glared at Clare across the seminar table. "Don't you think that he was making her pay too high a price for agreeing with him that access to a man's property was his right?"
"After he'd received shock treatment for depression?" said Clare. "After he'd tried to walk into a spinning propeller during the flight to the clinic? After Miss Mary had needed to call a friend over to the Idaho house to wrestle a shotgun away from Hemingway the week before? No, I don't think he made her pay too high a price. Besides, she received-and exploited to the teeth-all of his copy-rights, including those miserable posthumous books that he never would have chosen to see in print. I think Hemingway knew exactly what he was doing when he sat on the steps to blow his brains out, knowing full well what Miss Mary would have to step through to get downstairs to the phone. They each got what they wanted."
♥ He shook is head What the hell am I panicked about? I haven't done anything wrong. I'm the victim here. That was the reasonable point of view, but Dale remembered those mean pig eyes of C.J. Congden's behind a shotgun aimed at Dale's head when he was a boy. There was no statute of limitations on bullies and their victims.
♥ Dale awoke with the kind of absolute, heart-pounding, bottom-dropping-out-of-everything sense of desperation that comes most solidly between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. He looked at the motel alarm clock. 3:26 a.m.
♥ The clickover of the century and millennium had been problematic for Dale. Of course, his life had turned to shit about that time and he'd tried to kill himself, but even more troubling than that had been his deep and silent conviction that everything of value to him had been left behind in the old century. Tonight that conviction was totally pervasive and endlessly empty.
♥ On the way, he walked around the farmhouse, checking to see if there was another way anyone could have gotten to the second floor. The tall old farmhouse had no easy way to the six windows more than fifteen feet up there. The windows were all shut, most covered on the inside by drapes or curtains, or both. Someone with a tall ladder might have done it, but the dirt around the farmhouse was all mud after the night's rain, and there were no footprints or marks from a ladder.
I guess whoever turned on the light lives up there, thought Dale. It was hard to scare himself in the bright daylight under the blue sky.
♥ During the next few weeks at the farm-the first three weeks of November-Dale began to enjoy himself. It was a brief respite before the nightmare.
♥ Dale was writing easily, but not well. Both his academic background and commercial writing experience had trained him to start from the outside in: that is, to structure the tale, research the characters and settings, and then write inward, the way a whittler carves a shape from a stick. I was just a kid when I died, but I had already discovered one important truth about writing-to do it well, one has to work from the inside out. That is, there has to be a quiet but unshakable center to the tale, whether in the core of the characters or the story or, preferably, in both, and everything must spiral outward from that point. Dale was still whittling away, trying not to cut across the grain and hoping to find honest shapes in the wood.
♥ What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods? Occasionally he would get in the Land Cruiser and drive slowly through the streets of Elm Haven to refresh himself on some item of geography, but in truth he wasn't writing about the sad and battered Elm Haven of this shoddy new century. Dale was living in the summer of 1960 now, and when he drove the streets of the little town he was looking at structures and people who were no longer there, who would never be there again.
♥ "But you know-I always hate that part in the movies where the people know that something scary's going on but they stay anyway. And then the monster comes out and gets them. You know, like in the old Poltergeist or that mess of a remake of The Haunting or those slasher movies with the guy in the hockey mask or whatever. ..Speaking of surprises... weren't we going to go upstairs, take down the plastic, and see what's up there?"
Dale swallowed the last of his wine and looked toward the ceiling. "You mean you don't mind the parts in those dumb slasher movies where the characters go somewhere they've been warned to stay away from?"
"Actually," said Michelle Staffney, "I love those parts. That's the point in the movie where I quit rooting for the humans and start cheering for the monster or psychopath or whatever."
♥ Dale nodded, pretending to understand. "But you have to admit that this is some of the most beautiful country in the world."
Clare shrugged. "It's spectacular."
Dale smiled. "Isn't that the same as beautiful?"
"Not really," said Clare. "Spectacle us just more accessible to the dulled sensibility. At least that's the way I think of it. This kind of country is hard to ignore. Rather like a Wagnerian aria."
Dale frowned at that. "So you don't find Glacier Park beautiful?"
"I don't find it subtle."
"Is subtlety that important?"
"Sometimes," said Clare, "it's necessary for something to be subtle to be truly beautiful."
"Name a subtly beautiful place," challenged Dale.
"Tuscany," said Clare without hesitation.
♥ "Your people considered these mountains to be sacred."
Clare smiled at the "your people" but said nothing. As they came back toward the campground, she said, "Can you think of any mountains anywhere in the world that some primitive people did not consider sacred?"
Dale was silent, thinking.
"Mountains have all the attributes of the gods, of the Jehovah God, don't they?" continued Clare. "Distant, unapproachable, dangerous... the place whence cometh the cold winds and violent storms of rebuke... always present and visible, looking over everything, but never really friendly. Tribal peoples worship them but have the sense to stay away from them. Western types climb them and die of hypothermia and asphyxia."
♥ Dale found himself irritated at his passenger-at her arrogance, at her refusal to be amazed by the amazing scenery, at her dismissal of her own heritage. He was sorry that they had another night of camping and day of driving ahead of them before he could get back to Anne and the girls and his work. He was sorry that he'd invited this spoiled little diva's daughter on a trip that usually made him calm and happy to be living in Montana. He was sorry that he'd ever spoken to Clare Two Hearts about her real name.
He was only hours away from becoming Clare Hart's lover and, much worse, from falling in love with her.
♥ This Jolly Corner-ish idea of who he had become and what he had lost along the way had been buzzing through Dale Stewart's brain for months. In writing his novel about the kids of Elm Haven in the summer of 1960, Dale had been staring unblinkingly at an innocence and breadth of potential that might have remained better off forgotten.
Potential, Dale had decided, was precisely the sort of curse that the Peanuts character Linus had once said it was. It was a burden before it was realized, and a constant specter after it had been failed to be realized. And every day, every hour, every small decision made, eliminated the remaining set of potential until-in what post-fifty Dale considered his last home stretch of life-that potential was fast dwindling toward zero.
Clare had once described the topography of life in those terms-an inverted cone dwindling to zero potential. Now Dale agreed with that figure.
♥ Whatever the scary details had been, the second bedroom did not live up to them. The room was empty except for a small child's rocking chair set precisely in the center of the square space, but directly above the rocking chair hung a massive and ornate chandelier. A huge, sepia-colored water stain covered much of the ceiling, looking like a faded fresco or a Rorschach test for giants.
.."Just think," Michelle said softly, "the last time the air up here was breathed, Dwight Eisenhower was president."
"That's just because whatever walks up here doesn't breathe," said Dale, using his best Rod Serling voice.
♥ Dale shook his head again, feeling the last tidal surges of lust disappearing. He had not felt such an erotic moment since his late adolescence, and possibly not even then. This, he thought, must be the kind of wild loss of sexual control that the brain-dead fundamentalists are afraid of when they try to ban pornography-to ban anything erotic. Sex with no humanity at all. Pure sexual energy, absolute desire. A fucking frenzy.
♥ She watched the shabby town fall behind with its touristy traps and shops-many closed now after the end of the tourist season-selling their "authentic Indian artifacts."
"Does all this make you angry?" asked Dale.
She turned to look at him with those piercingly clear eyes of hers. "No. Why should it, Professor Stewart?"
Dale lifted a palm. The homes on either side were rusted-out trailers with junked pickup trucks lying about in the gravel and scrub brush. "The injustice of the history to... to your people. Your mother's people. The poverty."
Clare smiled slightly. "Professor Stewart. Do you get all worked up about historical injustices to your Scottish ancestors?"
"That's different," said Dale.
"Oh? Why?"
Again he gestured with his open hand. "I've never even been to Scotland."
"This is the first time I've been to Blackfeet country."
"You know what I mean," said Dale. "This economic injustice against the Blackfeet-the alcoholism, the illiteracy, the unemployment on the reservation-it's all still going on."
"And Scotland still isn't independent," Clare said softly. She sighed. "I know what you're talking about, Professor Stewart, but it just isn't in me to have mush interest in all of the historical grudges in the world. My mother and I lived in Florence, but my stepfather's ancestral house is in Mantua. In that part of the world, every city has tales of oppression by every other city. Every old family remembers a thousand years of injustice and oppression at the hands of almost every other family. Sometimes I think that remembering too much history is like alcohol or heroin-an addiction that seems to give meaning to your life but just wears you down and destroys you in the end."
♥ The book was titled English and Cornish Regional Myths and Folktales. The "Yeth or Wisht Hounds" were, as he thought, Heath Hounds-demonic dogs given to wandering the moors. Hounds of the Baskervilles. Always black dogs. It turned out that demonic black dogs, phantom dogs, spectral dogs, had quite a history in Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Cornwall, and the Quantock Hills of Somerset.
At Brook House, Snitterfield, in an ancient home formerly called the Bell Brook Inn, during World War II, guests and locals observed a big black dog haunting the grounds. The dog had red eyes, and it left no footprints in the freshly tilled garden.
In 1190 A.D., near the Welsh Marches, a chronicler named Walter Map wrote of spectral black hounds, huge and loathsome, haunting the fields. These spectral hounds invariably presaged violent death in the area.
On Sunday, August 4, 1577, the parishioners of the church in Bungay, Suffolk, huddled against a memorably violent thunderstorm. In several written accounts it was told of a terrifying black dog that suddenly appeared inside the church, slavering and howling, roaming the aisles while the faithful cried out for divine help. Three people touched the hound: two of them died instantly and the third shriveled up "like a drawne purse." In separate accounts but on the same August day in 1577, the same or similar hounds appeared in the church in Blythburgh, seven miles away, killing another three people there and "blasting" others.
Dale skipped ahead to 1613 A.D. when "a blacke dogge as bigg as a bull" suddenly appeared during services at Great Chart in Kent, killing more than a dozen people before demolishing a wall and disappearing.
Dale pulled down more old books, tracking the Black Dog legends all the way to Beowulf-learning that Grendel was primarily lupine, "him of eagum stod ligge gelicost leoht unfaeger"-"from his eyes shone a fire-like, baleful light," before watching the legend disappear into the mists of prehistory via the Frankish Lex Salica, the Lex Ripuaria, the legends of Odin's wolves in Grímnismál, and the Eddic poem Helreith Brynhildar, which spoke of the hrot-garmr, the "howling dog" that ate corpses and breathed fire. All of the black dogs in all of these legends seemed to be associated primarily with corpses, the dead, funeral grounds, funeral pyres, and the underworld. Dale was reminded that the warg was "a worrier of corpses."
Dale realized that he could make a doctoral dissertation out of this crap, given the proper primary sources and a few years. It looked as if the connection between spectral black dogs and the "realm of the dead" ran through Indo-European mythologies into prehistory, through Vedic, Greek, and Celtic myth, offered hell-hounds in such epic Scandinavian poems as Baldrs draumar (Balder's Dreams), left paw prints through American Indian legend, and offered death-bound devil dogs romping through Altaic shamanic ritual and pre-Classical Greek thought and the Hindu Mahabharata, while all of it pointed straight back to old Anubis and his Egyptian underworlds pals.
♥ ..but memory of lust, much like memory of pain, is surprisingly unspecific, clouded thing..
♥ When I lived outside of Elm Haven, reading away my less-than-dozen winters and summers and equinox months, my ideal of the perfect woman was the Wife of Bath. I suspect that if I had grown up, moved on, sought, and found such a woman-identifiable, I always assumed, by that delightful, sensual gap between her front teeth-I would have, in the end, fled from the vitalism of such a sexual life force. More to the point, what would she have wanted with me-the sedentary lump, the solipsistic, overweight, clumsy and poorly dressed geek?
But then again, Arthur Miller ended up with Marilyn Monroe, however briefly.
♥ Perhaps it is only with one's mother and girl children that a male human being can really hold any hope of knowing and understanding women.
♥ Dale was not a good writer. Trust me on this, I was a better writer at age nine than my friend is in his fifty-second year. The reason is, at least partially, I suspect, that he was not born to the craft, not driven to the task by the non-negotiable flames of internal fires, but, rather, made a conscious decisions to become a writer at the end of that summer of 1960, the summer in which I died. Added to that is the simple fact that in training to be an academic, Dale was crippled by the need to write in academese. It is not a language formed by any human tongue, and few, if any, academics survive the degradation of it to move on to actual prose. Finally, there is the choice of Dale's fiction-"mountain man" stories. This was a conscious choice on his part-an attempt to retain his professorial status by not slumming in such genres as mystery or science fiction or, god forbid, horror-but, again, a cool one, a cerebral one, and not one forged by desire. Patterning his style on the work of the limited genre's masters-Vardis Fisher, for one-Dale wrote about the few white men in the West of the 1830s and the Native American tribes (his professor self made it almost impossible to be politically incorrect enough to think "Indians"-even though his mountain man characters did so frequently enough-much less frame some obscenity like "savages").
Hemingway once wrote that a true writer had to "work from the inside out, not from the outside in." The difference, he explained, between art and photography, between Cézanne and mere documentation. All of Dale Stewart's so-called Jim Bridger books, as I have said before, were written from the outside in.
Clare had confronted him with this fact more than once and Dale had demurred rather than defend himself, but he was hurt. He thought of his books as a contribution to literature, sort of. She wold not allow him that illusion, just as, in the end, she allowed him none of the illusions one needs for survival.
This Elm Haven book that Dale is so enthused about-the book that makes him willing to stay at The Jolly Corner despite its discomforts and psychic uneasiness-is, at least, different from the mountain man books. But it is also, in its own exuberant way, a lie. It is all sunlight and summer days, swimming holes and dirt-clod fights, bicycle freedoms and idealized friendships. Dale had sworn, in his own mental preparation to write this book, to be "true to the secrets and silences of childhood," but in his actual writing of it, the secrets have become smug and the silences far too loud.
..A work completely devoid of irony has no more hope of becoming literature than does the most sincere piece of Christian apologetics or Marxist polemic. As Oscar Wilde once said, "All bad poetry is sincere." Dale's writing, in both the mountain man entertainments and his Elm-Haven-summer-of-1960 manuscript, was overwhelmingly sincere.
♥ Certainly my pedantic and opinionated side would have gravitated to that vocation, but all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.
♥ The conference writers were all being put up at the swanky Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail, but of the ten American writers there, only Dale seemed to know that this hotel had been the headquarters for the Gestapo all during the Occupation. A faded bronze plaque near the entrance announced the historical importance of the hotel only in terms of it having been the headquarters of the Red Cross after the war and the locus for attempts to reunite refugee families.
♥ This sense of being lost in a jet-lagged nightmare in which human speech dominated everything yet in which almost nothing could be understood continued through the next two days, although by that time his editor had spared him some time and he had been assigned an interpreter..
♥ The restaurant was the Bofinger near the Bastille. The food was fantastic and the atmosphere was pure upscale Alsatian brasserie-black and white tile floors, wood, brass, tall glass looking out on the rain-swept streets, and people who knew how to dine and drink in style. There were several dogs in attendance late that evening, but no children. The French knew that dining was serious business and not improved by the presence of children.
♥ Later, at Gestapo headquarters, in their bed, with the moonlight flowing over the rooftops of Paris and falling on their naked bodies, Dale had whispered, "Is this real? Are we real? Is this going to last, Clare?"
She had smiled at him from inches away. Dale was not sure, but he did not think that it was the same smile that she had showed Jean-Pee-wee in the Alsatian brasserie. "I can only think of Napoleon's mother's favorite quote," she whispered back.
"Which was?"
"Ça va bien pourvu ça dure-"
"Which means?"
"It goes well as long as it lasts."
♥ "Hey, Professor Jewboy motherfucker," said the skinhead leader, reminding Dale that this crew had heard of him trough the series of anti-militia articles he'd stupidly written. The anti-Semitism of these so-called patriotic groups had been one of his major themes.
Now losing your teeth and getting cut up will be your major themes, he thought as he stopped in front of the five young men. He wanted to tell them to get the fuck out of his way, but he didn't trust his voice to be steady. Wonderful. I'm fifty-two years old and I just discovered that I'm a coward.
♥ Suddenly the air is freezing. He sees his breath fog in the cold air and smells the tang of frozen mold. He does not look back at the bed.
Fato profungus.
"Fate's fugitive," gasps Dale, having no idea why he is saying it.
♥ "Seriously," said Dale, "what am I going to do here in Missoula without you? I'd be like Marley's ghost hanging around someplace that's dead to me."
"Isn't it the ghost who's supposed to be dead?" said Clare. "Not the place?"
"Whatever," said Dale. "Actually, I've always thought that it was the ghost who was vital and the place that died. That's why ghosts can be seen-they're more real than the thin, faded version of the place. You know, like Lincoln's ghost in the White House."
♥ What the hell happened to our generation? Dale tried to remember his college energy and idealism. We promised so much to so many-especially to ourselves. He and other professors his age had often commented on it-the easy cynicism ans self-absorption of today's college-age students, so different from the commitment and high ideals of the mid and late 1960s. Bullshit, thought Dale. It had all been bullshit. They had bullshitted themselves about a revolution while really going after exactly what every previous generation had sought-sex, comfort, money, power.
..Sex, comfort, money, power. He had obtained everything on the list but the last-and had schemed and connived in faculty politics to obtain even his pathetic version of that over the years-and what had it brought him? Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with a ghost.
♥ Dale wished that he believed in ghosts. He could not. He realized that everything-life, love, loss, even fear-would be so much easier if he did. For decades of adulthood now he had tried to understand the psychology of people who prided themselves in believing in ghosts, spirits, fen shui, horoscopes, positive energy, demons, angels... God. Dale did not. It was a form of easy stupidity to which he preferred not to subscribe.
♥ Now, as then, he knew that if the dogs wanted to come in, they would. They were larger than ever. Larger than barrel-chested huskies, taller than wolfhounds. If they wanted to come in, the kitchen door would not hold them out.
Feeling an urge not dissimilar from an acrophobic's desire to leap from high places, Dale found it pleasing to consider opening the door and going out into the night, allowing them to drag him down and off. At least the waiting would be over.
♥ A soft voice said something indecipherable upstairs.
Dale got the flashlight and went up, leaning into the cold draft flowing down the staircase. There was a light. He hefted the bat, feeling his heart pound faster in his chest but also feeling no real fear. Whatever was there was there.
♥ This night is where my friend Dale passed the point of no return. What was going to happen here was going to happen. He knew that even as he slept. There was no going back.
Dale did not feel like an unintelligent character in a sloppily told tale. This was his life. Everything in the past year or two had seemed to lead him here-to this house, to these events, to this pending conclusion to all doubts. In an age when his generation sought to hide all reality behind simulation and feigned experience, Dale had to know what was real. What was memory and what was fantasy? And there remained the simple fact that despite everything, Dale did not believe in haunted houses or ghosts. This disbelief ran deep as marrow, and his belief in this disbelief was as stubborn as bone. Dale believed in mental illness and in schizophrenia and in the uncharted confusions of the mind, but not in ghosts.
More important to his decision to stay these last few days of his life at The Jolly Corner was his perception-was his understanding-that whatever was happening to him had to be resolved here. This cascade of insane events had come to him in the form of a coming to life of something vital, a stirring of energies, a preparation for birth. Or perhaps a preparation for death. Either way, Dale believed, labor had been induced in this cold farmhouse out in the ass end of Illinois, and some rough beast was slouching toward The Jolly Corner either to be born or to die.
♥ Once, when talking with Clare during a long hike in Glacier Park, he had asked her what she thought the topography of a human life might look life. She suggested that it was an inverted cone measured out in units of potential-infinite at the top, zero at the bottom-and that the decreasing radials around the diminishing outer shell of the cone could be measured in accelerating time as one grew closer to old age, death, dissolution. Dale had thought this a tad pessimistic. He had suggested that perhaps a human life was a simple parabola in which one never knew what the apogee-the highest, most sublime point-had been achieved.
"Maybe this is your apogee," Clare had said, gesturing to the pine forest and the lake and the distant peaks and to herself. Somewhere nearby in the trees a Clark's nutcracker had scolded them.
..But Dale had wondered about that topography of a lifetime later, both before and after Clare and the sure grasp of his sanity had left him. Recently, it had amused him to think that the ribbon of his life might be twisted in a mad Möbius loop, curling on and through itself, inside becoming outside, losing entire dimensions even while acquiring some impossible continuity.
♥ ..Dale was lost in the hot summer days of his childhood and did not notice. He was almost three hundred pages into the novel by then, and although no distinct plot had emerged, a tapestry had been woven of leafy summer days, of the Bike Patrol kids wandering free around Elm Haven and the surrounding fields and woods during the long summer days and evenings, of endless hardball games on the dusty high school ball field and wild games of hide-and-seek in the deep woods near the Calvary Cemetery. Dale wrote about the Bootleggers' Cave-not deciding whether his band of friends would find it or not-and he wrote about friendship itself, about the friendship of eleven-year-old boys in those distant, intense days of dying innocence.
♥ The sunrise of the last day of the old year, the old century, and the old millennium did not dawn; it seeped in like an absentminded spill of sick light, its stain of lighter gray blotting slowly beneath a shroud of darker gray.
♥ When one reduces one's life to a series of meaningless obsessions, the last stage is to turn other people into obsessions.
♥ I've been wandering between worlds since the night the shotgun shell misfired. Time to choose one world or the other.
♥ Then he began to weep. Dale dropped to his knees and sobbed like a child. He knew only one thing at that moment-he wanted to live. Death was an obscenity, and it had been obscene to court it the way he had. Death was the theft of every choice and every breath and every option the future had offered him, pain and promise alike, and Dale Stewart had always hated thieves. Death was the cold silence of King Lear; it was the never, never, never, never, never that had chilled him from childhood on. From the day Duane had died.
Dale had no idea what he was going to do next, but he was finished not only with hurrying death, but with embracing the cold and solitude in this sad simulation of death. He wanted to go home-wherever home was-but not this way, not here, not so far from any real home he might have left behind.
♥ zi-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at. "Thou art become a wolf."
Kneeling there, hearing the punks shout and howl off to his right, knowing that he was no hero but just an injured and terrified middle-aged man unused to violence and afraid to die, Dale still wished that he could become a wolf. If he became a wolf, he would rip the throat out of the nearest skinhead before the others killed him. If he became a wolf, he would taste their warm blood even as they killed him.
He did not become a wolf.
&heats; I lift it. It is darkened with carbon and the plastic base of it has melted slightly, but it looks intact.
"It still works on your Cruiser," says Sheriff McKown. "I had Brian drive it over. It's in the lot outside."
"Amazing the key survived the fire and that you found it," I say.
McKown shrugs slightly. "Metal's like bones and some memories... it abides."
♥ Why had a lonely nine-year-old boy on an isolated Illinois farm in the late 1950s chosen Anubis to worship, going so far as to learn the ancient deity's language and ceremonies? Perhaps it was because the boy's only friend had been Wittgenstein, his old collie, and the boy liked the jackal god's head and ears. Who knows? Perhaps gods choose their worshipers rather than the other way around.
♥ I drive south along County 6, past Uncle Henry's and Aunt Lena's old place, up the first hill, and past Calvary Cemetery. A single figure stands far back there in the snow amidst the headstones, and there is no car parked outside the black iron gate. The figure seems to be wearing olive or khaki and a campaign hat. I give him only one glance. If there are other ghost here, they are not mine.
♥ Once on I-74 the way goes on ahead open and free to the west, and so do I.