The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(97)

Once or twice he saw tire tracks in the muddy snow. The white plates of ice broken in the ruts. Bootprints on the planks of the bridge. He never saw anyone. Water from the snow that had melted off the metal roof stood in pools on the cupped boards of the upstairs bedroom floors and water dripped into the rooms below. Then a norther blew in with two feet of snow and the needle on the cheap plastic thermometer outside the kitchen door dropped to twenty-four below zero.

He kept the chainsaw with him in the kitchen so that it would start and he trudged through the drifts of snow looking for standing dead trees. The trunks a pale gray in the whiteness. He’d made a balm out of the blacking from the inside of the stove door mixed with cooking oil that he smeared under his eyes. One day he started an owl from an evergreen and watched it fly long and straight and silent out through the woods until it was lost to sight. In the morning he went with a broom and cleared enough snow from the door of the truck that he could open it and he got in and fitted the key into the ignition and turned it. Nothing.

A few days later there was a knocking at the front door. He froze, listening. He blew out the lamp and pulled himself into the corner where he could just see the glass of the kitchen door. He waited. A shadow. A figure in a hooded parka trying to see in. Gloved hands against the glass. After a while it went away.

A recluse in an old house. Growing stranger by the day. He’d half a mind to go to the door and call after the visitor but he didnt and the visitor never returned. He went to bed and woke sweating in the cold. He sat up. Clear winter starlight at the window and the dark trees hooded in snow. He pulled the quilt about his shoulders. Certain dreams gave him no peace. A nurse waiting to take the thing away. The doctor watching him.

What do you want to do?

I dont know. I dont know what to do.

The doctor wore a surgical mask. A white cap. His glasses were steamed.

What do you want to do?

Has she seen it?

No.

Tell me what to do.

You’ll have to tell us. We cant advise you.

There were bloodstains on his frock. The mask he wore sucked in and out with his breathing.

Wont she have to see it?

I think that will have to be your decision. Bearing in mind of course that a thing once seen cannot be unseen.

Does it have a brain?

Rudimentary.

Does it have a soul?



* * *



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He ran out of coffee first and then finally out of food altogether. He went hungry for two days and then he suited up and set out upon the road for the village eleven miles distant. It was very cold. The snow in the ruts frozen. He walked with his gloved hands over his ears, his elbows swinging from side to side. When he reached the first house two dogs came down the driveway barking but he bent over as if to pick up a rock and they turned and ran. No one about. A thin plume from the brick chimney. The smell of woodsmoke.

He’d not been on the streets long before he noticed people looking at him. Of late he’d seen himself only vaguely in the windowglass of the kitchen and now he stopped at a store in front of a mirror and studied himself. A disheveled bum with long hair and a reddish beard. Jesus, he said.

Dark caught him on the way back. He was towing his bags of groceries behind him in a child’s wagon with one wonky wheel that he’d found in a junkstore. Great sheets of chloral green and purple light flaring over the sky to the north. A deer crossed the road ahead of him. Then another.

It was close to midnight by the time he reached the house and towed the wagon up the drive through the drifts to the kitchen door. He pushed the door open and kicked his boots against the sill. Hello the house, he called.

He’d bought a comb and scissors and a small handmirror at the drugstore and in the morning he took a screwdriver and unscrewed the mirror in its frame from the dresser in the upstairs bedroom and carried it down and propped it up on the cupboard shelf in the kitchen by the door where the light was good and he scissored off his beard and shaved with a basin of hot water. Then he set about cutting his hair. He’d done it before and it came out all right. He swept up the cuttings from the linoleum and put them in a grocery bag and stuffed the bag into the firebox of the stove and shut the stove door. He put on more water to heat and washed his hair and bathed with a sponge, standing in a galvanized washtub he’d found under the back of the house. The tub was rusty and leaked and the water ran across the linoleum to the wall and slowly disappeared. He had clean clothes in a denim drawstring bag and he dried himself and got dressed and combed his hair and looked at himself in the mirror.

He’d brought a couple of mousetraps back with him and he set them baited with cheese. The mice had pretty much taken over the kitchen. He turned down the lampwick until the flame was all but out and then lay back in the silence. The first trap clicked. Then the second. He turned up the wick and got up and emptied the little warm bodies into the trash and set the traps again and lay down. Click. Click.

When he went to the second trap the little whitefooted mouse had both its front paws on the bail of the trap and was trying to push it up off its head. He lifted the bail and watched the little thing wobble off across the floor and then dropped both traps into the trash and went back to bed.

Then one day the mice vanished. He lay listening for them in the dark. He turned on the flashlight and played it over the room. Nothing. The next night he heard a rustling in the hay and sat up and turned on the flashlight and in the beam sat a slender ermine with a black tipped tail. It looked into the light and then vanished and reappeared in the far corner of the room with such incredible speed that he thought there must be two of them. Then it vanished and did not reappear. A week later the mice were back.