1960. Dale tried hard to remember the details of that summer. Nightmares—he remembered nightmares. White hands pulling his younger brother under his bed in their shared bedroom in the tall white house across from Old Central in Elm Haven. The ancient school itself, boarded up and awaiting demolition, but burning mysteriously at the end of that summer before the wrecking balls could bring it down. A green glow from the shuttered cupola atop the monstrous old building. The kids had created legends and spooky tales around that school. And some of those legends seemed real after Duane died in these very fields that summer.
Dale turned slowly around. Below the slight rise, a few shattered cornstalks were the only hint of even faded color against the featureless white, rows upon rows of slight mounds that had been high stalks even this summer past.
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 and 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.
Who am I to talk?Dale tasted bile as he thought of his Jim Bridger books. It was work-for-hire these days: a set fee for a series of formulaic frontiersmen-and-Indian-maiden tales. They might as well have been bodice rippers for all the serious intent that Dale had brought to the writing the past few years.
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 left the low hill and began walking south along the creek, using the wooden cross-braces to climb over fences. A dog was barking far away to the west, but Dale could tell from the sound that it was just a run-of-the-mill farm dog, a real dog, a mortal dog. As opposed to what? My hellhounds?
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, feng shui, horoscopes, positive energy, demons, angels. . . God. Dale did not. It was a form of easy stupidity to which he preferred not to subscribe.
Have I gone crazy?Probably. It made the most sense. He knew that he had not been sane when he had loaded the Savage over-and-under a little more than a year earlier and set the muzzle to the side of his head and reached to pull the trigger. He could recall with perfect tactile memory what that circle of cold steel had felt like pressing into the flesh of his forehead. If he was crazy enough to do that, why not all this?
All what? Dining with ghosts? Imagining being seduced by the sexiest girl in sixth grade? Writing questions and answers and acrostics to himself on the computer?
If Michelle had been a ghost—if ghosts existed, which Dale did not believe for a second—why would she be here? She barely knew his dear friend Duane McBride. Twelve-year-old Michelle Staffney, the doctor’s daughter, simply did not play with raggedy-ass boys like Duane or Harlen or Mike or Kevin. . . or Dale. Besides, Michelle Staffney aka Mica Stouffer had hated Elm Haven. She had lived in California for more than thirty years and—it seemed absolutely certain—had died there. If she were going to haunt someplace, why not haunt the Bel Air home of her lover, Diane Villanova, where both of them had been murdered? Or better yet, haunt her husband’s place—the esteemed producer of the Val Kilmer Die Free series.
Jesus.Dale shook his head at the banality of the world. The movement shook free snow that had been clinging to his hair. He realized that he’d not brought so much as a baseball cap and his hair was soaked, his face sheened with melted snow. It was cold.
Dale looked around and realized that he had walked to the little woods not far from the Johnson farm. The black dogs had followed him this far a few weeks ago. Had they? There was almost certainly a real black dog somewhere in all this hallucination—a visual trigger for these fantastic illusions—just as there was probably a real, living red-haired woman that he’d glimpsed at the Oak Hall City Market some weeks ago that had made him obsess on the memories of the sixth-grade sex grenade, little Michelle Staffney.
Anne’s hair is an auburn red—in the right light.
Dale rubbed his face, realizing that he had forgotten his gloves as well as his hat. His hands were chapped and red with cold.
The hellhounds could be behind you right now, moving silently through the snow, stalking you.He turned slowly, not feeling real alarm.
Empty fields and falling snow. The already dim light was fading farther. Dale checked his watch—four-thirty. Could it be so late? It would be hard dark in half an hour. The snow had accumulated to seven or eight inches now, wet, soaking through his chinos. . . the same bloody chinos he had been wearing the night before. It was his blood, of course, from where he struck his head on the door during his fall. What made me fall? Who made me fall?
He walked back toward the unseen farmhouse, cutting diagonally across the frozen fields and climbing two more fences where they came together at a post. He was approaching the barn from the south along the fenceline there when the house came into view, a dark gray shape against the dark gray evening.
A Sheriff’s Department car was in the drive, but it was the bigger vehicle, years older than the ones the deputies drove. The sheriff’s car.
C.J. Congden stood near the chicken coop, gray Stetson covered by one of those clear plastic hat covers that state troopers and county mounties wore when it rained or snowed. Congden had his hand on his holstered pistol and was tapping the white grip of the gun. He was grinning.
“Thought you had orders to stay in the house, Professor,” the big man said.
“They told me to stay at the farm,” said Dale. “I’m at the farm.” His head began hurting in earnest again. His voice sounded dull even to himself. “Did you have a good Christmas vacation trip, Sheriff?”
Congden grinned more broadly. His teeth were yellowed from nicotine. Dale could smell the cigarette and cigar smoke on the fat man’s jacket. “So, you all through telling ghost stories, Professor ?”
Suddenly Dale felt as if someone had put snow down the back of his neck. “Wait a minute,” he said, reaching out as if to grab Congden’s jacket. The sheriff stepped backward so as not to be touched. “You were there.”
“Where?” C.J. Congden’s grin had gone away. His eyes were cold.
“At the schoolyard that night. You saw her. Presser had so convinced me that I was nuts that I almost forgot. . . you saw her. You spoke to her.”
“To who?” asked Congden. He was smiling slightly again. It was dark enough now that Dale had to lean closer just to see the expression on the former bully’s face under the brim of the cowboy hat. With no lights on in the house, the big structure seemed to be disappearing with the last of the winter daylight.