A Faint Cold Fear

A

FAINT COLD

FEAR

A Novel By:

DAVID L. RUGGERI

A Faint Cold Fear by David L. Ruggeri

Copyright 2012 by David L. Ruggeri

Smashwords Edition

DEDICATION

For my fantastic children

Kelly and Sean

Without them I would

never have seen the world

through new eyes

which allowed

me to write.

"I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,

That almost freezes up the heat of night.

Romeo and Juliet

Wm. Shakespeare

"My life has crept so long on a broken wing

Thro’ cells of madness, haunts or horror and fear,

That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing.

Maud

Tennyson

PROLOGUE

Winter 1849

The quiet in the small cabin is greater than it has ever been, now that the children are dead and his wife lies in their bed, waiting for him to join her to meet their God.

Weak, Caleb Summner stands by the frosted window, watching the snow fall incessantly through the surrounding trees. He shivers with the cold, but no longer regrets not caulking the chinks between the rough-hewn boards. It is too late for that. Too late for everything. The cold will help them sleep.

They never should have come to this god-forsaken place.

Miriam had pleaded with him not to bring them back into the mountains after the disaster of '47. She said she wanted to bathe in a bowl of sunshine for the rest of her life. Foolishly, he had convinced her--and the other two families--that the mountain winters of Southern California would never be as unforgiving as those of the High Sierras. And where better to escape the notoriety and the taint of the Donners?

Here they could disassociate themselves from the other survivors and flee the publicity of that fatal trek across the mountains. But, he thinks bitterly, they hadn't been able to avoid the wickedness--the evil--harbored and brought to this place within themselves.

How could they have known that the seeds of corruption were still growing in the children, nurtured by the depravity to which they had all resorted just to survive that other winter of supreme horrors?

Last month they had found the children feeding on one of their own, one of the Miller brood, who had died of the ague and who had been laid safely in the ice house for the spring thaw so they could bury him when the ground softened.

They had to bring the children back to God. It was God's retribution for their transgressions and He demanded the ultimate sacrifice for the salvation of all their souls.

Neither Miriam nor the other women hesitated. Bravely, they had sewn all the children's mouths shut lest they ever again partake of the Devil's Banquet. With the courage of righteousness the adults had closed their ears to the false screams of the evil one and gone ahead with God's bidding.

Only after the children's deaths did they understand what else God required of them: That they emulate their children and find ultimate redemption in their own quiet agony.

Their isolation from the community stood them in good stead as they gathered in prayer and fasting until, too weak to move from one cabin to another, they took to their own beds, allowed the fires in their hearths to die, and waited for salvation in the freezing air.

Caleb is ready now. Ready to join Miriam in their final rest.

Before he turns from the window, Caleb Summner looks for one last time at the trees and reflects on the darkness that has settled in the snow-laden branches.

The trees are filled with birds.

Caleb wonders what the birds eat in the middle of winter. Perhaps, he thinks, they feed on the souls of the dead.

#

CHAPTER ONE

Closure is important.

That's the real reason I'm going back. I'm old enough now, with almost-grown children of my own, so you'd think I should be able to look back on it all with a different perspective. But I still can't shake the memories of that summer, the summer of 1964, when I was surrounded by death.

Kennedy's assassination was as fresh in my mind as the cold black and white television pictures of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. They broadcast it over and over until it became a surreal morbid curiosity.

Winter memories of dead neighbors were as tangible as the spring bodies of small birds on our front walk. Even my father, who should have been my rock of understanding in this world of seemingly casual extinction, also lay dead and buried for five months already.

Mother had grown fragile and childlike from her inability to reconcile the remainder of her life with the eternal absence of her husband, and all-too frequently I felt as if I were the only sane person in a world gone strangely mad.

* * *

There are more dead birds on the porch, Byron.

Cigarette smoke blossomed upward and wreathed Mother's reflection in the streaked glass of the kitchen window where she stood, her back to me.

I buried my face in a bowl of Wheaties.

Did you hear me? You need to clean up the mess on the porch again.

Uh-huh. I ate fast, before the cereal got soggy, before Mother thought of more chores for me to do.

I'm putting up a screen next year.

Uh-huh.

Dad had said that every spring. Now Mother took up the refrain none of us took seriously.

Those birds are filthy. They mess on the porch and the steps--and every year we get dead chicks all over the walk.

Each spring a flock of mountain blue jays built new nests in the trees around the front porch. Occasionally, we'd find small, naked hatchlings on the steps, probably plucked out by the mother bird protecting her brood from the weak or dead sibling. Or some little chick had become too anxious to try its fledgling wings and had plummeted to the hard ground and inevitable death.

Although nature's scavengers, the cats, possums and raccoons, usually devoured this unexpected bounty, whenever they didn't it became my responsibility to dispose of the tiny corpses.

Mother squinted through a stream of smoke and spoke softly. We're getting new neighbors.

Oh yeah?

Someone's moving into the Cornwall house.

I felt a chill.

It isn't right. Mother shook her head, her voice still early-morning dry, scratchy from smoke and restless, drugged sleep. The bank must've sold it. There aren't any surviving relatives that I know of--except Ellie, of course. And she's... Her voice trailed off.

Mother was talking about the big house down the street, the one on the corner, the Cornwall place--a house of recent, tragic death.

* * *

It had been the week before Christmas last. Tom Cornwall had roused his family--wife Mary, seventeen year-old Becky, twelve year-old Ellie, and Billy, who had just turned eighteen--for Sunday services at the Episcopal church. With the first big freeze of winter hard upon our mountain valley, and snow piled in five-foot drifts, Cornwall had gone to put chains on their old Ford station wagon in the dry, relative comfort of the cold garage.

Afterward, no one could believe that he had been so foolish as to leave the engine running while he laid out the chains behind the rear wheels. But he had. Somehow--though the auto dealer said it was impossible--the transmission had slipped into reverse and the car rolled backward over Cornwall, crushing his head.

For weeks after, visions of the horror in that garage kept me awake at night. My fertile imagination conjured up images of Tom Cornwall, behind the old Ford, struggling with the latches of the cumbersome metal chains. Had he moved the vehicle back and forth to get the tires positioned over the them? Was that why he'd left the engine on? Concentrating on his task, had he even noticed when the worn transmission slipped into reverse? And, if he had, was it the last sound he ever heard before the sharp crack of his own shattering skull had echoed through the garage?

Unfortunately, Cornwall's final act had set an even greater catastrophe into motion. The snow packed against the garage door trapped the car's exhaust in the garage, where the central heating unit's intake vent--illegally placed, according to the newspaper--sucked deadly carbon monoxide into the whole house. The rest of the family had been overcome in a matter of minutes. Mary Cornwall and Rebecca were found at the bottom of the stairs in their Sunday clothes, purses and prayer books in hand. Billy was sprawled in the doorway between the garage and kitchen. Ellie--I remember she was always late for everything--was still dressing in her upstairs bedroom. She hadn't been killed outright, probably because she was so far from the source of the deadly gas. But by the time the fire department arrived she was unconscious and barely alive. Now, six months later, Ellie was still in a coma. Mother told us that her friend Martha Flaherty, a local medical clinic nurse who worked in a hospital down in San Bernardino on weekends, said that Ellie was a vegetable. They could find no relatives to authorize the doctors to pull the plug and release the girl into the communion of death with her family.

* * *

That house shouldn't have been sold, Mother persisted.

Finally I got up to look out the kitchen window where I could see the distant, large red letters of a moving van through the trees.

The four houses that made up our isolated neighborhood were far apart, scattered in a forest of pines and Douglas firs above a steep gully. Our house and the Cornwalls' stood at the two ends of the street. Across the way, buried in the trees, were two more homes. All four lots at the top of our wooded hill were grandly named Ridgecrest Hollow.

I suppose you can't let a perfectly good house go to waste, I said.

I couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for what would at any other time be the exciting prospect of new neighbors.

There's nothing good about that place, Mother muttered.

What place?

I turned at the sound of my sister's voice. At fifteen, a year younger than I was, Shelly had even more resentment and anger about the Cornwall place than either Mother or I.

I pointed toward the window. We're getting new neighbors.

Fuck 'em.

Shelly and I both turned to look at Mother, expecting her normally sharp retort to any use of profanity in her hearing, especially the dreaded F word. But Mother stood quietly looking out the window as if my sister hadn't said a word.

I shook my head, reminding Shelly that we had an unspoken agreement not to aggravate our mother unnecessarily. Since Dad's death, things had changed drastically and both of us had been forced to grow up a hell of a lot faster than we'd wanted.

Shelly rushed on to needle me and fill the void her obscenity had left in the smoky air. Hey, Percy, maybe there'll be some girls you can actually meet and date.

Calling me Percy, a literary companion name to Shelly, Byron and Keats (our cat), was my sister's annoying response to my silent admonition. She knew I hated the nickname. What she didn't know was that Billy Cornwall had overheard it one day and used it whenever he wanted to harass me.

I've got more than I can handle already, I lied self-consciously. Both of us knew very well that I was so shy when it came to girls that I had never had a real date. Besides, if they look anything like you, I don't think my eyes could take the strain.

My sister was not a morning person. Her ratty terry-cloth bathrobe complemented a tangle of sleep-spiked blonde hay still matted with yesterday's hair spray. A fold in her pillowcase had left a long red crease across her soft cheek. It was hard to believe that this early-morning gargoyle could turn into a beautiful girl whose social calendar was as full as mine was empty.

Shelly glanced at Mother to make sure she wasn't watching us, and then flipped me the bird.

Oh, that's just lovely, I said. How ladylike!

Shelly ignored this feeble comeback when she saw that Mother's distracted gaze still hadn't wavered from the window.

I shrugged helplessly at her puzzled look. Moments like this, when Mother seemed to slip away into a world of her own, were becoming more and more frequent.

Although we could bicker with the best, Shelly and I shared a real concern for our mother. Ever since my father's death four months earlier, this warm, loving, assertive woman who had always seemed so strong and self-sufficient had become a lost soul.

* * *

Dad's last assignment had been at Norton, a Military Air Transport Services base near San Bernardino. San Berdoo was about ninety miles east of Los Angeles, and the minute he saw it, Dad said, Not on your life! He wasn't going to have his family live in that cesspool of pollution!

One of his new buddies on the base told him about the small community of Glenoaks in the mountains above San Berdoo, and it was the first place he looked for a home before he brought the rest of us out to California to join him. It was a ninety-minute drive down the steep mountains to the air base, but Dad said he'd rather drive the hill every day than have us all live in the brown air of the flatlands.

Although he always tried to get home every night, occasionally, in the winter, snow storms closed the mountain passes and he had to stay in the bachelor officers' quarters on the base until the current storm passed and the county crews could clear the roads.

But the prospects that February of spending the long 1964 Washington's Birthday weekend by himself on the base was probably too much for him. He decided to drive home after dark, even though snow and ice had plagued the mountain passes for two weeks. The biggest storm of the season had almost isolated Glenoaks from the rest of the world, and even school had been suspended, much to our--mine and Shelly's--delight. We might not be able to go to school, but we didn't have to remain indoors. Snow was a novelty. It was also a killer.

And snow isn't the only thing that can kill on a mountain road. Black ice is worse. Black ice spreads a clear glaze of treachery across the road. It looks like clean, dark asphalt, but it's not.

Dad called about six o'clock to say he was leaving the base. He assured Mother that the roads were fine, all cleared and very passable, and he should be home in about two hours. But the two hours passed and the wind began to whip new snow through the trees.

Your father should have been here by now, Mother finally said around nine-thirty.

Maybe he decided not to try the drive, what with the storm and all, I suggested feebly.

She shook her head. He would have called again.

I picked up the phone, expecting nothing. Service was never reliable in the mountains. It was especially erratic in the winter when ice coated the lines. But the dial tone was loud as ever.

It's working, I said, wishing that the silence from my father had been justified by downed telephone lines.

Mother called the air base. B.O.Q., please, extension thirty-six.

The base operator put her through and Shelly and I sat quietly while the phone rang in an empty room on the other end.

Mother hung up and dialed the base again. May I have the Officer of the Day, please. Mother was soft spoken and polite, even when she looked like she was about to cry. This is June Carmona. My husband is Tech Sergeant Walter Carmona. I wonder if you could tell me if he's on base. We expected him over an hour ago. Glenoaks. Yes, I know, but he... Mother began to shake. ...He said the roads were clear. Yes I know there's a new storm. But it's just begun. He should have been here by now. Maybe he turned around and signed back in.

The Officer of the Day said that Dad had signed out hours earlier and had not checked back in.

As Mother put down the receiver, Shelly began to cry.

Mother pulled her close and hugged her. Don't worry, baby. Just because our phone's working, it doesn't mean that he's not stranded at some gas station or restaurant where their phone isn't.

I could see the expression on Mother's face. She was more worried than she sounded.

Byron, she said, Maybe we'd better call the Highway Patrol, just in case...

This brought fresh sobs from Shelly.

Yeah. But I'm sure it's okay, I said wanting to cry too. I forced a laugh for Shelly's sake. Dad's probably sitting in some restaurant on his tenth cup of coffee, just waiting for the plows to clear the road.

I called the highway patrol. They had no reports of accidents, but the weather had turned so bad, they had been unable to patrol most of the mountain road between Barton Flats and Glenoaks. Yes, of course, they would keep an eye out for my father's Chevy and notify the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department if they found him.

Desperate to be doing something, I got the phone book out and, trying to remember every rest stop, restaurant and gas station along the winding mountain road that led to Glenoaks, proceeded to call them all. Without success.

My father had disappeared.

And then began the most miserable week of our lives-- until the Highway Patrol finally found his car, overturned in a steep canyon filled with snow and ice and deep brush.

Black ice had probably been the cause.

That's what they said at the time.

At first, no one could tell us how long Father must have lain, still alive, pinned beneath the crumpled steering wheel of the old Chevy. The County Coroner eventually said it could have been hours before the freezing fingers of the mountain cold finally reached in and turned his heart to ice.

The Coroner's Report, a little sheaf of papers filled with all kinds of horrors, said that by the time the Highway Patrol had located the wreck, winter-hungry scavengers had gotten there first. Birds had pecked out Father's frozen eyes and ripped his face to shreds. Wild dogs or coyotes and mountain lions had feasted on his flesh. His bones had been gnawed and cracked so that even the frozen marrow could be sucked from them.

Life would never be the same for us again.

* * *

Mother continued smoking at the sink, a long lost habit she'd picked up again since the funeral. Her paint-smeared fingers ferried the unfiltered cigarette from ash-flicks over the drain to her mouth. The stains were a regular part of her anatomy now, ever since she had been forced to transform her part-time hobby into a thriving business that provided a steady flow of drawings, watercolors and acrylics to Hallmark Greeting Cards. She worked on a freelance basis, and they always paid well for whatever she sent.

I miss Mary, Mother said, still staring out at the Cornwall house, her distracted tone all too-familiar.

The milk almost soured in my mouth. I couldn't say the same for Mary Cornwall's son, Billy, who had once been my best friend. And I was sure that Shelly felt even stronger about him after what he'd tried to do to her.

It was such a shame, Mother continued. So very sad, so stupid!

Mary Cornwall had been one of my mother's closest confidants, even after that