Winter Wake Read online

  Winter Wake

  by

  Rick Hautala

  A revised edition with a new introduction published by

  Necon Ebooks at Smashwords

  Revised Edition Copyright 2010 Rick Hautala

  Introduction Copyright 2010 Gary Braunbeck

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  DEDICATION:

  To Bob Booth … for years of friendship.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Gary Braunbeck

  A Brief Note from the Author

  PART ONE: Clotho-the Spinning Fate

  ONE: Coming Home

  TWO: Church Wood

  THREE: Unloading

  FOUR: First Day Jitters

  FIVE: Meeting Audrey

  SIX: A Certain Slant of Light

  SEVEN: Frank and Julia

  EIGHT: Trick or Treat

  PART TWO: Lachesis-the Assigning Fate

  NINE: Wharf Rats

  TEN: High School Memories

  ELEVEN: After the Storm

  TWELVE: “Dem Bones”

  THIRTEEN: Fish Bait

  FOURTEEN: Ice Maiden

  FIFTEEN: Nor’easter

  SIXTEEN: Father and Son

  PART THREE: Atropos — the Cutting Fate

  SEVENTEEN: Wish List

  EIGHTEEN: Christmas Eve

  NINETEEN: DOA

  TWENTY: Suspicions

  TWENTY-ONE: “See what he did ...”

  TWENTY-TWO: Storm Watch

  TWENTY-THREE: The Blizzard

  TWENTY-FOUR: Across the Bay

  EPILOGUE: Waiting to be Born

  Rick Hautala, Samuel Beckett, Frank Marino, and Winter Wake: An (Answerless) Equation That Would Make Stephen Hawking Give Up and Go Into a Gloomy Room to Weep.

  by Gary A. Braunbeck

  Read the following line and remember it; it’s going to be important later. Or maybe not. You never know:

  “‘I’m serious,’ he said, his expression grim and serious.’”

  That beauty – which haunts me to this day – was from the original 1989 Warner Books release of the novel you are about to read. Note the date of original publication – it right at the cusp of horror’s so-called “halcyon days” in the late-80s – early 90s, a time when publishers couldn’t get the stuff out fast enough and readers couldn’t buy it in enough quantities. What should have been a formulae for glorious success quickly turned into a (pardon the cliché, but seeing as we’re talking about horror in the 80s and 90s …) a recipe for disaster. Because the public couldn’t get enough, publishers and many you-should-pardon-the-expression writers were churning out … let’s be courteous and call it work of sub-standard quality. A lot of horror writers whose work was all over the place and were rapidly be hailed as new “household names” by their publishers are now little more than trivia questions under the Whatever Happened To …? subject line on dark fiction discussion boards. Their work is now consigned to used-book stores, and those of us who were around back then spot these names and book titles and feel a momentary wave of nostalgia … then the embarrassment and nausea kicks in and we flee to the Dickens, the Poe, the Lovecraft, Straub, King, Barker, and eventually to drinking alone in a darkened living room, trying to kill those memories and staunch the scent of horror’s first bout of explosive diarrhea.

  Not exactly a literary pinnacle for the field (I refuse to use the word “genre”), is what I’m saying.

  However, some really good stuff got lost in the shuffle. Case in point, Winter Wake, which, despite a few clunks here and there -- “‘I’m serious,’ he said, his expression grim and serious.’” -- could still stand tall above the majority. The clunky areas can be attributed to both youthful impatience on Hautala’s part and the often-unreasonable deadlines writers were working under at the time. (The late J.N. Williamson once had to deliver a novel to Zebra Books in – get this – twenty-five days from their acceptance of his proposal package. (For those of you unfamiliar with that term, a proposal package is the first 3 chapters or 50 pages of a novel, along with a 2-page, single-spaced synopsis of the remainder of the story. Even with 50 pages already finished, can you imagine what it must have been like to have to write, revise, and deliver an entire novel in less than a month? Is it any wonder than even several quality writers such as Williamson occasionally coughed up something as resplendently awful as Queen of Hell? Plus it damn near killed him and paid a pittance -- $3,000.00 – to boot.)

  All of that might be important later. Or maybe not. You never know.

  The ‘89 edition of Winter Wake was also blessed with one of the most gaudily gruesome covers of the decade. I’m not even going to try to describe it – go online and find it for yourself; you’ll be glad you did. It still has a strange, compelling kind of beauty to it, though I often hid the book in a newspaper as I read it in public.

  The novel also put Hautala on the brink of becoming a Big Name. And that’s where Samuel Beckett and Frank Marino come into the equation. Take off your Stephen Hawking Hats, because you’ll never figure this out, either.

  What does Samuel Beckett have to do with any of this? Well, in the early 1970s, Beckett, for the first and only time, directed a stage version of his Waiting for Godot in London. It enjoyed a respectful limited run but received decidedly mixed reviews, mostly because Beckett, having come back to his most popular but least-favorite play, directed the actors to move and speak in an almost robotic fashion, all but annihilating the Absurdist humor that made – and still makes – the play a classic. One critic from The Sunday Times remarked that audience members should keep in mind that “…the Samuel Beckett who directed this production is not the same Beckett who wrote Godot thirty years ago …” Some critics even accused Beckett of displaying his near-contempt for the piece by directing in such a manner so as to destroy its original tone and the memories of past productions’ warmth and humanity.

  Sensibilities can change in an instant, and thirty years’ worth of changing sensibilities can cause a writer to re-examine and/or re-interpret his or her work in ways that do more damage than they do any enriching of the original.

  The Rick Hautala who so painstakingly revised this version of Winter Wake is not the same Rick Hautala who wrote it over twenty years ago. His sensibilities have changed, his literary concerns have deepened, and his prose is now a richer reflection of much more patient, thoughtful, and self-critical craftsman.

  Which is to say you needn’t worry that he’s somehow ruined the novel he wrote over two decades ago; if anything, he’s streamlined much of the narrative, more fully developed the humanity of his characters (which was pretty damned impressive to begin with), and turned the volume on the creepiness factor up to 11 – but without grandstanding or drawing attention to the writing or his intent as the writer, no small achievement.

  Here’s the thing; Winter Wake, in its original form, and for its sometimes clunky prose and plot-holes, was about something, and I will forgive a novel many faults if its thematic concerns strive toward more than giving the reader a good scare, chill, or gross-out. I’m a little snobbish that way. What Hautala has done here is comparable to the breathtaking sleight-of-hand William Peter Blatty pulled on us when he re-wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane to give us the magnificent The Ninth Configuration. And Hautala has done it for the same reason as Blatty; he was never happy with the original, could see only the flaws, the misse
d opportunities, the moments of self-indulgence or self-consciousness.

  You don’t always get it right the first time. Sometimes it takes twenty years to get it right.

  That may be important later on. Or maybe not. You never know. I say this seriously, with a grim and serious expression on my face.

  Now Frank Marino enters the equation, and Hawking’s Tears begin.

  I know – know for a fact, do you hear me? – that a full 98% of you have no effing idea who Frank Marino is, and if you love, like I do, really exquisite and overpowering blues-rock-jazz guitar, your musical life is all the poorer for it.

  Frank Marino is the guitarist for a group called Mahogany Rush, who came this close to superstardom in the mid-70s. They still record and tour, as does Marino as a solo act, but few will recall albums like Maxoom, Tales of the Unexpected, World Anthem, and a minor masterpiece called Strange Universe (which, as far as I’m concerned, was the inspiration for other great metal bands like Tool and Dream Theatre, but I digress). In 2007, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush released a live album called, simply enough, Real Live. It is, hands-down, one of the 10 finest live albums ever recorded by any band, and contains guitar work by Marino that is nothing short of astonishing – hell, he plays “Red House” better than Hendrix did. His virtuosity is right up there beside that of Hendrix, Roy Buchanan, Rory Gallagher, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Pat Metheny, Emily Remler, John McLoughlin, and Steve Morse – and in a few cases, Marino’s fretwork surpasses some of them. He’s that good. So why haven’t you heard of him and Mahogany Rush? Confuses the shit out of me. But now, hopefully, I’ve piqued your curiosity enough to seek out the work of Marino and company.

  What’s the Hautala/Marino connection that further confuses this equation? In 1989, Rick Hautala’s name was high up on many peoples’ reading lists. It’s the last third of 2010 as I write this, and for some reason, Rick’s name has slipped through the cracks; and like the obscurity of Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush, there’s no good goddamn reason for it. Here we have a writer who for the past decade has been producing some of best work in the field, a majority of it coming from the small press. Rick’s last appearances in the mass-market ended a couple of years ago with the publication of the last in a series of heart-wrenching and mind-bending ghost story novels published under the pseudonym of “A.J. Matthews” by Berkley Horror (this was back when publishers still put that word on the spines of their books). The confidence, depth of feeling, multi-leveled characterization, and ominous tone that was the trademark of these fine novels is on full display here in this (most definitely) “preferred” version of Winter Wake. It begins with that old chestnut, the dreaded Family Reunion Under Difficult Circumstances, but it quickly becomes so much more than a mere familial fable of deep dark secrets and the ghosts that accompany them.

  There is an ongoing sequence throughout this novel wherein one of the major characters keeps having repeated dream-memories of a real-life past event that at first seems, well, sad and tragic, but every time this dream-memory occurs, something has been altered. This is one difficult mother of a chore to pull off in a novel, because each time you go through the sequence, a lot of it’s the same as last time. Something like this can wear on a reader’s patience in a hurry, but in Hautala’s hands, it becomes something akin to a metaphysical Greek Chrous warning the audience that all is not as it seems. By the time the revelation hidden deep within this dream-memory (and the character’s crumbling denial of the truth) is revealed, your heart may very well be trying to squirt out through your rib-cage; and the final fifth of Winter Wake achieves a level of operatic grandeur with one of the longest and most jaw-dropping set-pieces I’ve ever encountered, taking place in a wicked blizzard that gains momentum and destructive power as the dark forces coalescing around the Carlson family turn Glooscap Island into a place of broken spirits and frozen life-death. Think of the finales of Ghost Story and Bag of Bones combined and streamlined, with a dash of both Poe and Lovecraft added to the mix, and you’ll have some idea what you’re in for.

  Rick Hautala’s work deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers who have had their fill of Hannibal lector-wannabes, Romero knockoffs, and minor-league Lestats posing as angsting teenagers with perpetual scowls that are supposed to pass as characterization.

  The re-issue of Winter Wake trumpets with loud fanfare the ferocious second wind of one of our most underrated story-tellers. You should hop on the New Hautala Express, or else you’ll wind up weeping alongside Hawking while listening to Frank Marino and reciting passages from Godot as you try to discover why you missed out.

  -- Gary A. Braunbeck, Lost in Ohio, Sept. 2010

  A BRIEF NOTE

  The republication of an early novel must always give a writer pause. I had a very long and frustrating pause with this particular project.

  When Bob Booth first said he wanted to republish Winter Wake as part of the NECon Classics, I was — of course — flattered and thrilled to have what, in memory, anyway, has always been one of my personal favorites of my own books. Unlike some authors, I never go back and re-read or even browse through my earlier books. They are what they were when I wrote them, and I have decided to leave them alone.

  But republishing Winter Wake required that I look over the electronically scanned text, and let me tell you — while the story was (I think) fairly solid, all I saw where awkward constructions, faulty syntax, clunky dialog, lousy punctuation, and way too much “rumination” on the part of the characters. Naturally, I was sorely tempted to revise, rewrite, and restructure the whole damned thing. Point of fact, I started doing exactly that. The red-lined version looked like the computer screen had been hit by an arterial spurt or two. Before long, though, I found myself getting frustrated. I wanted to firebomb the whole damned novel and start from the ground up.

  And then my good buddy Matt Costello (who was gently reinforced by Holly) made it clear to me that Bob was publishing what he considers a “classic” horror novel. Here I was, on the verge of coming up with “New Coke” to replace the old “Classic Coke.” Why not, Matt and Holly asked, let it stand as it is?

  Please don’t even begin to think that I consider this book — or anything else I’ve written — to be a true “classic.” Far from it. I am painfully aware that I was a very young man when I wrote Winter Wake. It was, after all, only my fifth completed novel. I had a lot to learn (and still do) about the art and craft of writing and story telling. This particular book reflects a young man’s concerns and perspectives — some honest and true; some callow and (to be kind) “immature.”

  But I had to make a decision, and ultimately that was to leave the book almost exactly as it was originally published — scabs, warts, divots, and all. There was a much longer opening scene that explained in more detail the death of Bri’s cat, Bungle, that was cut due to length considerations. I see now where I could have engaged in other, more judicious pruning. Yes, I have removed my (youthful) overuse of exclamation points(!), and I have tweaked a few sentences here and there, but this book as you’re reading it is 99.9% the way it was when it was originally published by Warner Books.

  For better or worse, here is Winter Wake, alive and breathing again thanks to Bob Booth and the NECon Classics line of e-books.

  Enjoy!

  (… There I go with the exclamation point again …)

  Rick Hautala

  July 8, 2010

  Westbrook, Maine

  Do you not see from what

  acts of yours you suffer as you do?

  To destruction self-inflicted

  you fall so shamefully.

  — Sophocles

  PART ONE

  Clotho — the Spinning Fate

  In the shadow of the hill,

  Shall my soul be upon thine,

  With power and with a sign.

  Though thy slumber may be deep,

  Yet thy Spirit shall not sleep;

  There are shades which will not vanish,

  There are
thoughts thou canst not banish.

  — Lord Byron

  So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,

  And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

  — Shakespeare

  ONE

  Coming Home

  I

  As John Carlson drove, his mind sifted through thoughts and speculations about what lay ahead — for both him and his family. After leaving home almost twenty years ago, there wasn’t much comfort in the prospect of coming back to Glooscap Island. Hell, why not admit it? There wasn’t any for him. Of course his wife, Julia — as usual — was making the best of the situation, but that only made it worse.

  The bottom line was — his father, Frank, needed help. Last spring, he had suffered a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed on the left side and subject to blackouts and memory lapses. The stroke was “very minor,” as the doctor had said, but still worrisome. So he and Julia had been given two rather obvious options — either put him into an elderly care unit, hospital, or nursing home, or else move back to Maine and live with him so they could be there to help. If he had wanted to spend the rest of his life sleeping on the couch — or out in a snow bank — he would have said no when Julia insisted they move back to the island.