The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (the two towers ebook .TXT) 📗

so hot for that hard-bodied bitch that you would have eaten a shit-sandwich every morning and called it a gourmet breakfast!

For once, the malignant voice was right. Gary was so much in love with his voluptuous and carefree wife that he didn't think twice when Donna suggested they move to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a dark, cold land of trees, bears, and month after month of bitter cold weather. "It's so beautiful in the U.P.,” Donna said, harking back to her childhood days when her mother used to take her camping in the northern woods. “Me and my Mom used to call it God’s country. I bet you could go there, start your own software company and be the next Bill Gates."

In hindsight, Gary realized he was doomed from the start. Setting up his own business proved a thousand times more difficult than he had realized; his level of anxiety and frustration went up as his once-strong bank account went down.  Donna was at first ecstatic in their rural abode but soon seemed to tire of the country life, talking about taking cruises to the Caribbean, flights to Paris and Rome, anything to, as she put it, “get a taste of some real culture.”

Which Gary could understand; he really could. What he couldn’t do was financially sustain such a lifestyle when the money coming in was a trickle at best. It was then that their house-shaking arguments began and their once-active sex life slowed to a couple times a month, if that. Gary was at his wit’s end on how to revive his life and marriage and to appease his increasingly agitated wife’s complaints of boredom and dwindling social life. As much as he detested social get-togethers, he decided that getting together with their nearest neighbors, the McNealins and Doug Freeman, might make Donna happy. It did, only in ways that Gary never imagined.

Doug was a twenty-seven-year-old laid off miner from Ispheming with a Hollywood actor’s face and a Greek god’s body who taught a wood-working class at the local high school, one which Donna enrolled in. Last night, Donna invited him and the McNealins over for dinner. Gary spent the entire evening brooding as he watched the sly glances Donna gave to Doug. After the McNealins and Doug left, Gary and Donna had another blow-up, cumulating in Donna packing her bags that morning and walking out. Gary had refused to give her keys to their Land Rover, so she walked.

Out into the first winter storm of the year.

She’ll come back, he told himself. But she didn’t, and after a few hours, with the storm increasing in its ferocity and the electricity in the house a memory—along with the light and heat, Gary decided to go after her.

He rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets until he found a working flashlight, then put on his heaviest winter coat, scarf, and brand-new leather driving gloves. At the back door, he lit the kerosene lantern that Donna insisted they buy and placed it on the top shelf to provide another source of light for when he returned, then went outside.

Gary’s first breath of the freezing air burned his lungs and brought tears to his eyes. Snow blew about him in angry, white eddies as he moved out into the yard, When he heard the loud crash from the other side of the house, Gary plodded through the snow and around the corner; there, under the heavy weight of the wet snow, sat their Land Rover, covered under the twisted steel and wood structure that used to be a carport, the bulk which had fallen on the hood and driver's side of the SUV. Gary took a deep breath, then began to pull on the twisted wreckage. He managed to remove the largest piece of the carport and almost had the second piece off when the oak support beam slid from the roof and into him.

The impact was like the kick of an angry horse. Gary was thrown back and instantly swallowed by the snow. The pain in his leg burst to life like an exploding sun. When he pushed himself up and tried to stand, the agony in his leg was an unseen force pinning him to the ground, yet he knew if he didn’t make it to the back door, he would die.

“But I made it,” Gary muttered in the dark of the kitchen as he continued to drain the bottle of Armagnac. “I had the guts to push through the pain, to do what I had to do to make it back to the house, even though I was all alone.”

A new memory blossomed in his mind, not of Donna but of a poem from his long-dormant childhood that his Aunt Mildred would sing to him when he felt frightened and alone:

Alone in the woods

in the deep dark night,

under the stars,

under their light,

which show me the road,

which lift my fright,

and guide me to heaven—

Gary frowned; he couldn’t remember the last line. He tried to concentrate, to pull it up from his addled mind, until a strange sound intruded on him. It wasn’t the roar of the storm or the sound of the snow hitting the cabin. This noise was rhythmic, drifting in and out like static from a dying radio.

He held his breath and strained to hear. A tapping. Like someone percussing out a steady, even beat. And it was coming from inside.

Gary ran his left hand through his short greying hair and loudly sighed, his breath coming out of his mouth in a plume of gray, like an ancient dragon huffing in impotent rage. What now? The tapping continued on and off in no discernible pattern. You need to get up anyway and get the fire going. You also need to rewrap your hand…and do about a thousand other things before things progress from bad to very bad.

He limped into the hallway, holding the hissing kerosene lantern out in front of him like an ancient mariner on