Karen Wehrstein has written two novels, Lion’s Heart and Lion’s Soul, and, in collaboration with S.M. Stirling and Shirley Meier, Shadow’s Son, all published by Baen Books in 1991. She also contributed a ghost story entitled “O.R. 3” to the Seal Books anthology Shivers. She lives in Muskoka, Ontario, deep in the heart of resort country. When we first contemplated this anthology I suggested that Karen might try writing something set in her neck of the woods in the wintertime—after all the vacationers have gone home.
“What kind of story are you looking for?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said, “make it a chiller.”
In fall, at the height of leaf-turn, with all the hills of Muskoka on fire, the couple comes house-hunting.
The real estate agent ferries them around in her professional car, white as snow with not a scratch on it, trying with each showing to ferret out what exactly these people are after in a property, so she can make a sale in this dead market.
They are in their mid-thirties, she guesses. The husband does all the talking. The wife, who shares his name, only smiles politely, and mumbles to him when the agent is a little way away from them, words she can never make out. Privacy, they certainly seem to want, or at least he does: too many neighbours, he keeps saying while they look at aluminum-sided houses in the subdivisions of Bracebridge or Baysville, but the wife doesn’t seem to mind that, from the way her brown eyes look out windows, almost as if she were searching for other houses, other people.
The agent gathers that the husband’s some kind of middle management, transferred up here out of Toronto, and the wife stays at home. Very traditional, except no kids. The guy always wants to move fast when he’s looking at a house, in and out, quick look at the electric panel, quick look at the plumbing, stride through all the rooms. He has a big chin, which he thrusts forward when he walks, and pale unsmiling eyes, and the agent can tell from the way he talks to her that he thinks women are stupid. She feels sorry for the wife; but maybe they have their way of working things out. Still, she wishes they’d hurry up and buy something, so she wouldn’t have to be with them anymore. Neither of them laughs when she does.
The R-2000 house on twenty acres seems to turn his crank—she makes a mental note: insulation and energy efficiency are important—but he doesn’t start talking offer. Then he spots one listing out of the pile she’s handed him that makes his brows rise over his colourless eyes.
She takes them there. It’s a little house, faced with Muskoka stone nestled among tall hardwoods, on twenty-five acres with a stream and pond. Not a neighbour in sight. He actually smiles. It’s entirely carpeted and heated by a glass-doored airtight woodstove in the basement, with electric baseboard heaters for backup, and there are enough hardwoods on the land to keep the stove fed; he just has to cut and split them.
She overhears them through the vent in the floor over the woodstove. His voice, anger-edged: “What do you mean you don’t like it?”
Her voice, which the agent has never heard before, clearly. “I didn’t say I don’t like it. I do. I just said I don’t think you’ll like it. There’s something—”
“You can’t tell me what I do and don’t like.” Strange to hear a voice that has always cloaked its words in business politeness, so familiar, and so laced with contempt.
For good or ill, the agent realizes, she has a sale.
The sign wore its neon “sold” sticker for a while, but now has been stripped away itself. The dazzling fall leaves of Muskoka likewise, falling and fading brown on the ground, starting their change into dirt, leaving the trees reaching upwards with naked stick fingers. The couple has moved in, settled; she’s made the house nice, full of the smell of potpourris and cooking, spotless carpeting, neatly folded towels in the bathrooms, bright reds and yellows and purples and greens, beautifully coordinated. The shed is piled to the rafters with wood. He is happy, swinging an axe, bare-armed and sweaty in the balm of Indian summer, while she moves around inside. He is where a man should be, and she is where a woman should be. The same as when they have sex in the sweet-smelling Muskoka night: he is always on top, where he can stay in control, using his weight.
He has put locks and bolts on all the doors and windows, despite the assurances of the previous owners that they never locked the doors on house or cars in five years. This is a place where if you park your car so that it’s obstructing the road, you leave the keys in the ignition so that if someone wants to pass by they can move it.
“What’s the point of living in the country if we have to bolt all the doors?” she asks, but he ignores her.
“I don’t want anyone stealing anything of mine,” is all he says.
They’re planning kids. She’s waiting for whenever he’s ready. But he’s not ready yet. He wants to get better settled in first, get things more under control. She fingers the circle of cool blue pills, encased in white plastic, the circle that schedules the spinning away of her days. He’s been saying the same thing for ten years.
Then Indian summer falters, and the first real chill comes, frosting the grass with tiny needles of white, furring the porch rails. He finds it cold in this Muskoka house. He checks the indoor temperature on the baseboard heater thermostats. It’s no colder than before; the woodstove’s going.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asks her, as she passes by bare-armed, while he huddles in a cream and grey wool sweater she knit for him. “It’s fucking freezing in here.”
She just says, “It’s not bothering me.”
The place is insulated to government standards, he had that put in the purchase agreement. But heat’s still being sucked out the windows, thermal pane or not. He buys window-insulating plastic, the kind that you shrink glass-smooth with a hair-dryer, covers every window in the place, putting a third layer between his nerve-endings and the air of Muskoka.
It makes a difference, but hardly any. He wonders if it was worth bothering with, tells himself it was. It’s just that there’s no one solution in the country, no one simple answer to these organic problems.
Drafts—they make a big difference, fingering thermostats on from across the room, so he’s heard. He weatherstrips the doors again. He runs around with packing tape left from the move, balancing on beds and tables to stop up drafts from the edges of window frames and walls. Even where all he can feel is the bare whisper of a chilly zephyr on his outstretched fingers, he slaps on two thicknesses of grey-brown tape. He doesn’t care how it looks.
That night it snows for the first time, big floppy flakes lazing down, coating all upwards-facing surfaces in even cotton batting, icing the feathery branches of spruces and cedars. “Winter wonderland,” she says, awestruck, at the living room picture window.
He doesn’t hear, he is outside, watching the hydro-electric meter in horror. He didn’t know the baseboard heaters were coming on, he’d thought the woodstove was covering it. Baseboard heaters suck juice like crazy, he heard that somewhere; that explains why the little silver disc with the black spot, which he remembers moving at a crawl in the city, is turning so fast.
Sickly, he watches its speed change as thermostats turn on and off in the house, sometimes spinning as fast as a record on a turntable. He hears the sharp silvery little sound it makes on each rotation like a knife, feels it in the pit of his stomach, eating away at his money. Ripped off! he thinks. He thought he’d asked about how much the hydro bill usually was, checked on the listing, remembered it being reasonable. Did they just lie? He crams the woodstove lull of logs. It makes a little difference, little, too little.
Cold seems to radiate off the windows, even plasticked. Snow melts off the arching vaults of the skylights, showing how much heat is being lost through them. Like in the old commercial, his money is blowing away through cracks and chinks in the walls, under doors. He feels as if the house is actually wide open, despite how it looks, as if the walls aren’t really there, or are ethereal, leaving the wind free to blow through, no matter what he does.
Other little things are driving him crazy. Like the carpeting, the wall-to-wall broadloom that covers every floor: things on top of it creep. Sheepskins, bathmats, the welcome mat at the door, they always go the same direction, north, invisibly marching along until they wrinkle up against walls or furniture. He and she are constantly dragging them back to where they’re supposed to be. He wonders vaguely how it happens, though he knows it’s the motion of their feet as they walk, and the bias of the carpet weave. Still, it drives him up the wall.
At night he lies awake, shivering. The silence is total, except when the fridge hums, and the thermostats click. Living in the city all his life, he has never heard such silence or seen such darkness. The utter absence of noise and the utter absence of light press together in his ears and eyes like a viscous substance. Beside him her breathing is even as she sleeps, covers thrown off. She’s a heavy sleeper. Like most stupid people: heavy sleeping is a sign of stupidity, he believes, of lack of awareness.
He hears noises, noises he can’t identify, noises he never heard in the city. Outside, inside, above, below, things ping. Or thump. Or scratch. Or rustle. He tries to guess what they are. That skittering across the ceiling, its rhythm amazingly quick and even, is a mouse, at least he knows that much. She doesn’t like them, she wanted a cat. But he hates cats worse, their fluid way of moving, the way they turn their noses up or their faces away when he snaps his fingers. Soon after they married he got rid of her Burmese, took it to the Humane Society.
A rasp and thunder as a big patch of snow slides off the metal roof and thumps on the ground, sudden in the darkness. In the morning the thermometer has dived so low he wonders for a moment where the mercury went. He rips down the aluminum foil snowflakes she has hung on the windows, tears them to bits. Was that her idea of some kind of sick joke? She cries, silently. They were old, precious, some made by her mother, others made by herself as a child, and she’s been hanging them up every year with no objection from him until now. Christmas slides by silently, into the depth of January.
She looks through the window, past where its snowflake was, sees the sun sparkle in the snow in rainbow colours. Toronto snow never sparkles, even plain white, not for long. Here it never stops sparkling. Once, a few years ago when she still had a camera, she took pictures of snow like this, somewhere else up north, and they came out spangled with rainbow circles, like the spotlights at a rock concert.
He goes outside to haul in wood, looks back to see heat-rise ripples from the open door behind him in the cold angular sunlight of winter. No smells outside: the cold sterilizes them away. He can no longer walk past the hydro meter without looking at it, without seeing how far the needles on the dials have turned. Hydro doesn’t read it every month like in the city, just when they get around to it, when they feel like trudging through the snow, and then they bill. So he doesn’t know how much he owes. He thought he knew how to read it, but can’t believe what he’s reading. Ten thousand kilowatt-hours, it’s got to be, a thousand would be too few, only a hundred dollars over a month and a half. The bill for the first month, when they did read the meter, was $250.
“It’s all right,” she keeps saying, “it’s not moving that fast, you’re not counting it right.” She doesn’t understand these things, doesn’t know machines, dials, she’s too stupid.
The only time he’s warm enough is when he has a bath, running the water so hot it scalds his skin red. But he can’t get all of his body under the water at the same time—to fill the tub that full would use up too much electricity—and whichever limb gets pushed out is icy. He isn’t even warm in bed, even leaning on her. Cold runnels of air reach up from his feet. The woodpile is being eaten away faster than he has expected. How? How can it be? He wonders what the hell is going on, who’s screwing with his head.
He dreams of monsters in the walls, pulling back the batts of pink fluff insulation in the middle of the night to let in tentacles of cold, invisible air-icicles. That’s the only explanation. At four in the morning when he wakes, his pillow drenched in icy sweat, it makes sense.
He hears the movement of something big outside, some animal. A bear? No, they’d be hibernating, warm in their thick layers of fat and fur and meat-warmed air and rock or dirt. A moose? A deer? He wants to shoot it, but when he gets up and looks, groping for his robe on the door hook, his bare feet icy, he sees nothing, not even tracks. Only moonlight, twenty-below moonlight, its steel-sharp light making long shadows of the bare trees and twinklings in the snow in a pale blue imitation of daylight. The snow lies in limp smooth lumps like the curves of a dead woman’s flesh, obscene in its smoothness. Whenever he shovels the steps, he’s doing it to bring back square edges and clean access, to get rid of those liquid, soluble pillow shapes, those drooping Dali-esque globs, that would smother and bury everything fixed and ordered if he let them. The sky is black as the cold of deep space, flung across with a shattering of stars.
He should have gone for that R-2000, he knows now. A house so tight it needs a fresh air system, for shitsake . . . instead he’s got this freezing rathole, and he’ll be paying for it for twenty-five years. Because of her. He remembers how she jerked him into it. “I said you wouldn’t like it.” She sleeps, arms outspread, breath a warm whisper. The more tense he gets, he suddenly sees, the more relaxed she gets. The realization brings a blood-surge of anger: he wants to grab her little neck in his big hands, strangle her. But he feels too helpless.
He sees the carpeting make something creep. Finally, one day while she’s in another room, he sees a small throw rug in the living room do it. A ripple starts up at one edge, moves through like water and breaks out the other end, and when it’s done the little rug has crept an inch.
His mouth is suddenly dry. Something bursts in the woodstove.
He’s got to do something about this, or it’s going to drive him crazy. He looks at himself in the mirror, sees a face haggard beyond its age, the grey at the temples like hoarfrost.
He admits to himself what he hasn’t all along, what he’s been afraid to. There is something weird in this place. There is something. He can’t deny it any more.
At night, on the road outside, a light flares and then fades. But it doesn’t, he realizes, flare and fade the way headlights do, zooming by. It makes no engine sound, for one thing, shows no streaking flash of amber parking lights or red taillights. It also seems to be still, flaring and fading in one place.
He’s scared. He admits it to himself now. He feels his own heart pounding, hammer blows in his chest, his stomach like a wet fish flopping. Will its floppings get weaker and weaker, like the fish on the dock if you don’t give it the mercy-blow? Why is he so scared? Because it’s formless, it’s shapeless, he can’t see it, he can’t define it, he can’t strike at it. He has to do something.
Beside him, she sleeps, sweating. The bedroom air smells of her sweat, and of bedcover smells. She’s been complaining about how goddamn hot it is in here, the bitch! Whatever it is in the place, it makes him cold, leaves her alone.
When they’re in bed, one part of him at least is warm. He stabs inside her with his dick, and his dick is warm. But that’s all, and it’s not enough. He suddenly wants to crawl inside her skin completely, her skin that seems impervious to cold. He wants to cut her open and creep inside the layers of fat and skin and hair, like a parka. Aztec priests did that to sacrificial victims, in hot, hot Mexico.
Is he going crazy? But the thought feels right, so he doesn’t care. She’s lying asleep, naked, dead asleep, the most dead asleep she gets, since it’s two in the morning. The bitch, to lie there softly sleeping, careless, naked, the fireglow on her skin, while he can’t get a wink for shivering, under every quilt and blanket in the place, while the things in the walls that are eating away the insulation with little teeth made of wind are making his teeth chatter.
He realizes. This thing that wants him and is leaving her alone, she’s probably helping it. He remembers how she keeps saying it isn’t that cold in here, the hydro meter isn’t spinning so fast, there’s still lots of wood. Reassuring, so he’ll forget the danger, slide into complacency like hers. It’s not her lack of awareness, this, he realizes, but calculation. Secretly laughing, the little ballbreaker, as she says, “It’s not bothering me.” She wants to help this thing freeze him. All day while he’s at work, away from the house, his house, she’s here. Getting to know the place better than he does. Getting closer to it. Talking to this thing, plotting . . . She wants to help this thing kill him. Of course, she’d inherit the place, she’d inherit everything.
No. He’ll do something. This isn’t a hot rage, like the rage he gets when she does something she shouldn’t, so that he has to figure out a way to prevent her next time. He doesn’t have hot anger in him anymore. Just cold.
He’ll make her cold.
He gets up. He thinks of going into the kitchen to get the chef’s knife, the one she’s always getting him to sharpen. Or the carving set, that only men have ever touched. But those are for dead things, for cutting up dead things, vegetables and roasts and pork crackling that gets cold as soon as it hits his plate, in this hellhole. This ancient Greek hellhole, Hades, cold and dark. He almost wishes he could go to Christian Hell. Like burning a hundred Christmas trees and jumping right in the middle. The thought is heartwarming.
But the knives are things of death. He wants the axe. That is a living thing, you use it on living wood, to fuel the stove. Warms you twice. He thinks of how alive it is in his hands, the wooden handle warm in the air of summer, how vibrations ring through it into his hands, into his arms, as it thumps down into the log. He thinks warmth is life, life is warmth. Cold is death.
She sleeps on, covers thrown off. She’s a heavy sleeper. She’ll never wake up; she’ll go straight from sleep to death, from warmth to cold, once he’s brought the axe down.
He pulls on his shirt and pants. His hands have stopped shivering, for once. Must be the first time in three months. He looks at the thermometer, just for the hell of it.
Forty below. Forty fucking below! Fahrenheit, Celsius, doesn’t matter—that’s so cold they’re both the same, forty below is forty below. Usually he bundles up. But this time he’s only going to be out for a moment, so he just throws on snow boots and a jacket, not bothering with hat or mitts.
Outside, the snot in his nostrils instantly freezes, pinching. Even though the air is utterly still, trees crack all around, as if they’re exploding. The stars are so bright they burn his eyes. The snow looks like if he fell in it, it would cut him up slowly like powdered glass, each grain razor-sharpened, a microscopic arrowhead. Like the tiny glass threads of insulation dust, itching in his skin but piercing invisibly in through his eyes and lungs without causing any feeling at all.
He imagines that when he comes back in he shouldn’t breathe with his mouth open, not right away. He’s read about Siberia, how they have warming rooms at the fronts of houses, half-heated. Like deep-sea divers’ decompression chambers, a gradual adjustment. Or else your teeth crack.
The snow lies in thick pillows. Tire trees watch, their branches reaching up dead still to claw the sky, as always mute to the dramas below. “When we are gone they will still be here,” she has said, she often says. “That puts everything in perspective.” No, he decides. Once she’s gone they’ll go too. He’ll cut them all down. All of them. Every tree within sight of the house. Even the ones on the distant hills. He’ll buy the land. He’ll find a way.
He gets the axe, his feet crack-crunching through the snow, grips the metal doorknob with his bare hand.
Did he lock the door behind him? Shit, he did. Not the new deadbolts that you have to lock with a key, but the old original one, that locks if you just pull the door shut. He can see the keys hanging on their hook, the keys for the front door, the back door, the garage door, the car, the snowmobile.
He thumps on the windows, calls her name. Maybe when she opens the door, releasing a cloud of warm air that turns instantly to steam, he’ll let her have it with the axe. But she sleeps on. She’s a heavy sleeper, like all stupid people. Lack of awareness. She won’t wake up, no matter how loud he yells and pounds. He feels, he notices, how cold he is, his gooseflesh.
He decides to break through the window with the axe. But when the edge strikes the pane, there is no shattering, only a rubbery stretching, as the glass deforms, bounces the axe back in his hand. It has turned to plastic, triple- or quadruple-glazed plastic, like the shrink wrap on the inside. He tries a different window, and it does the same thing, bouncing as if off a cushion of warm air, leaving a momentary tendril of transparent substance like the tiny upward spout on the surface of water after a drip has fallen into it, syrupy slow. Every window. They’re all the same. This thing—it controls the properties of substances, of the materials the house is made of.
He runs around to the door, blowing on his hands, feeling snow sift into his boots. He’s shivering again. He kicks it TV-cop-style. He hurts his foot. He puts his shoulder to it. It just bounces him off as a screen does a mosquito. It’s too solid, with the steel reinforcing and the grille that he himself installed. He knows how solidly he installed it. He knows how solidly he fortified the whole house, carefully going over each possible place a burglar might break in, each weak spot, and doing what must be done to prevent it. Now it seems to be laughing at him.
He staggers through the snow to the bedroom window, screams her name. The cold is working on him, working fast, he not only knows it but can feel it. His panicked breathing draws cold down into his lungs, burning in his chest, lowering his core temperature faster, he knows, but he can’t control it. He’s thirsty, but knows not to eat snow. He remembers reading that eighty percent of heat loss from the body is through the head, and his head is hatless, naked. He pulls his coat up over it, and feels cold stab up his back and around his chest, the only part of his body that was slightly warm now chilled. His sweat pours, but freezes in his hair like sleet.
She sleeps on, hair flung across the pillow, the firelight roseate on her cheeks and nipples. He screams, pounds, kicks. She pulls the pillow over her head. He thinks of burning his way in. But his lighter is hung up with his keys, and he doesn’t have a match. He thinks of climbing up the chimney, to get its warmth, but he is too weak, his fingers too numb to grip. Off the path, his leg plunges thigh-deep, the snow grabs him, grips his leg like quicksand, pulls him off balance as he tries to jerk it free. He thrashes on his stomach, sinking, feels snow crawl down his neck and up his sleeves, moving in icy caterpillar ripples like the creeping carpet. He hears it muffle his screams as his face presses into it, feels it fall in over him.
She half-wakes, lifts the pillow off her head, and vaguely listens. Something big outside. She relaxes. It isn’t a danger. It will go away.