Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

Strange that they wouldn’t answer. He was aware that he was beginning to feel afraid before he knew why. Perhaps they were up to something. He forced himself to wait three or four minutes longer, then started up the Jeep, shifted into low-low and four-wheel drive, and half let the clutch out, preparing to drive up out of the ditch. There was a strange noise, something wrong with the engine, he imagined, and he shoved the clutch in again. The noise continued, growing louder. He switched off the key, then extinguished the lights. Even now it took his drunken brain another moment to understand that the noise came from outside somewhere, a whining engine roar, a little like the sound of an earthquake—he’d experienced small ones in California. Then he saw what it was. He blinked, half convinced he was hallucinating.

One close behind the other they came over the hill and down the narrow macadam road past Mickelsson; two of them, huge trucks black as midnight, driving with their lights off. He hadn’t the faintest idea what they might be—one wild thought after another went through his mind. Huge army trucks on midnight maneuvers, he thought, remembering the great caravans of his World War II childhood; but those trucks hadn’t driven with their lights off, and not on high-crowned narrow back roads. If these were army trucks they weren’t on maneuvers anyway, but up to something more serious: one could tell by the whine that they were heavily loaded. Trucks moving nuclear waste? Not likely. They’d stay on 81, wary of hijackers. What then? He thought of switching on his headlights. Only when his hand refused to move did he realize how afraid he was. The second truck wailed past, a huge black rectangle solid as concrete, slowed for the curve at the bottom of the hill, brakelights darkly glowing like rubies, then vanished. Mickelsson continued to hear the wail for what seemed a long time. At last, all his muscles weak, his head full of confusion, he started up the motor and carefully pulled up out of the ditch. The troll-doll hanging from the rear-view mirror swung lazily. It was an ugly thing, but for some reason it made him think, with a pang of grief, of his daughter.

He parked behind the house. His body still trembled, and there was pain in his chest. He massaged it with one hand, rubbing slowly but hard. With a part of his mind he was aware that a herd of deer stood on the cant of the mountain above him, just this side of the trees, watching. At last he opened the door of the Jeep and got out. As he approached the back door, sorting through his keys in the dark, he heard his phone ring. He thought immediately, once again—or perhaps was thinking just before it rang—of his daughter. Who else could be calling him at two, maybe three in the morning? His son, perhaps; or Ellen, if something terrible had happened.

None of the keys seemed to fit the back door. The phone went on ringing. Four rings. Five. He tried the keys again, one after another, slowly and systematically, growing angry. The phone stopped ringing.

Furious, knowing it was his drunkenness that made the keys not fit, he gave up on the door and leaned back, looking around, wondering how he might break in. The house rose high in the night above him, like a docked ship, black as the mysterious trucks against the starlight. There were faint noises inside the house, creakings and settling sounds, not unlike sounds from the movements of a large animal stirring in its sleep. To his left, just this side of the high, darkly frowning triangular woodpile delivered two days ago, stood the door to the debris-filled workroom. Once he’d noticed it it seemed to call attention to itself, almost beckoning, like a door in a horror film. Carefully he moved toward it, then tried the knob. It opened. There was a rush of fleeing mice and—so he thought for an instant—a scent of bread baking. Almost at once the scent decayed to something else, an excessive sweetness a little like the smell of rat poison, or like the anal scent of devils’ breath Martin Luther used to catch a whiff of, now and then, in his rooms. He decided to leave the door open, air the place out, and when his hand, feeling along the wall in the darkness, came to a window, he decided to open that too, to get a cross-draught. The smell of clear air bursting over his nostrils made him try one last time, before the other scent was gone, to identify what it was. He felt it right at the edge of his memory, but the scent, as it weakened—full of devils’ slyness—changed again. Molasses cookies, he thought; mingled with the cloying scent of flowers at a funeral parlor.

He got a vivid, bleak memory of his younger sister’s funeral, the casket set up in the family livingroom, in front of the high, clumsy windows with their old yellowed curtains of dusty, brittle lace. He stood looking down at the shiny white satin cushioning on which her body lay propped, miraculously straightened out—in life she’d been twisted by polio (he wondered, now for the first time, whether those who’d prepared her had had to break bones to get this doll-like serenity)—and his father’s boyhood friend, still his best friend, a man named Hobart, who had a farm just down the road, had stood with his hand laid on Mickelsson’s shoulder. There had been others in the room, he could not remember anymore who they were, and in the kitchen there were women, various neighbors, who had brought food—casseroles and baked goods.

He shook off the memory and, feeling his way, continued through the workroom’s blackness. It