By Don Liddick

David Dawson was one of those types who liked to be alone. He never intended harm, but the folks who crossed his path were not wrong when they assessed him as “anti-social.” As a child friends had not come easy, and for a brief time David envied those kids who seemed to naturally gravitate to others. He was an only child of older parents, and by the time he entered junior high David had acquired more experience with adults in their forties and fifties than with other kids. Yet eventually, even at an early age, he came to accept who he was: friends of his parents would praise him as he sat quietly for hours at small gatherings, content and comforted to be around adults as he wandered in his own daydreams.

An early event in his life is illustrative of his essence, his desires: his paternal grandmother was dying, and standing at the side of her last bed in the hospital, he’d told her that he felt sorry they would not get to spend time together in his cabin in the woods. He’d been eight years old, and Nanny Dawson’s hair was mostly gone because of the chemo. The hunted look in his grandmother’s eyes had frightened him badly, but the issue most relevant to an understanding of David is that, even at that tender age, he’d already formulated the plan to live out much of his life in isolation.

Although over time he grew to be perfectly content with his aversion to human company, it is also true that David’s innate shyness set in motion a circular and self-defeating process. Other children, and later students in college and colleagues at the university, misinterpreted his nervousness of people as aloofness, even snobbery. By the time he was thirty and in the tenure track at Calumet College, his interactions and observations had already convinced David that he was quite different from most people. Conclusions of this sort inevitably led to questions about self-worth, and in his reaction to this observation he was not so very different—his perception of others became tainted and skewed. Over time, all that he did, how he thought and processed information—every interaction—became distorted in maneuvers to defend his self-esteem. And so, he did become aloof, and a bit of a snob.

Outside of his parents—and there was great distance there as well—only one person had ever come close to cracking David’s shell, and that was his wife Debbie. Intellectual and with few emotional needs of her own, she’d been able to give him the space he required—but even that had not been enough for David. After his divorce, he never became close with anyone again.

So, as the years passed, David only did what he had to do as a member of society, but no more. As a publishing university professor who taught on-line classes, his interactions were minimal. So a good bit of the time he did what he wanted to do (that is to say, he spent time alone), and counted the days until his retirement when he could retreat to his asylum: a small cabin in the woods, as far removed from humanity as possible.

With no wife, girlfriends, or dependents to spend his money, expenses were limited, and by the time he turned sixty, his life-long ambition was realized. Professor Dawson retired, and left behind forever annoying students, pretentious faculty colleagues, meaningless committee meetings, and pin-headed administrators. Cutting all ties and leaving no forwarding address, David purchased a small log cabin set in the midst of eighty acres of northern Pennsylvania wilderness. It was not the barrens of Alaska, but the tiny home abutted the Allegheny National Forest, a vast tract of wooded plateau that afforded something quite a bit more intense than mere privacy. The rutted driveway stretched for a quarter mile off the little traveled rural route that led to the nearest village of Bear Rocks, twelve miles distant. There was no phone or television in the cabin, and he stocked up at the Bear Rocks general store with a month’s worth of supplies.

But soon David found that even one trip to town a month brought entirely too much human contact. “Gigi” at the store—short for “G-string” she informed David with a mawkish wink—dropped some very broad hints, but of course he had absolutely no desire for that hassle. So he really stocked up, including filling a 55-gallon drum full of gasoline for the generator that powered his refrigerator, water heater, and water pump (no electric lines led to Professor Dawson’s Walden). And so, settled into his self-made asylum, David reflected that he could urinate off his front stoop and sing the Star Spangled Banner at the top of his lungs, and not disturb another soul. He was finally content (that he knew his former colleagues in the world would say “content to be an asshole” bothered him not at all).

One day about six months after he’d settled into the cabin, some kids in an old El Camino came up the rutted lane, probably looking for a place to party. After that David piled brush across the end of his driveway. With no mailbox, the infrequent passing motorists would not even know there was a dirt lane leading into the woods, let alone a house sitting back in beyond the pines.

At first the isolation was everything David had dreamed it would be. He went for long walks in the woods, and appreciated the somnolent and brooding ambience which was the presence of the natural world. There was a time exploring the ridge above his cabin that a singular perception overcame him, immense and pervasive. It took some while before he could identify the other-worldliness of the experience: it was the complete and utter lack of sound. Sitting on his porch, he would hear nothing but an occasional rustle of wind through the pines on the ridge, or perhaps the song of a robin or snort of a buck in rut that carried for a mile in the solitude.

And how he would read, sometimes twelve hours a day! Everything from Thoreau to Shakespeare, Dickens to Gibbon to the theories of Stephen Hawking—everything but social and political theory, the driest and most boring body of literature ever generated by mankind (and the stuff he had consumed and contributed to for the last thirty years). And so, for some months it seemed like David had reached the apex of his contentment—a state of bliss that he fully expected to last through a long retirement.

But as the fall season accelerated toward a brutal and forgetful winter, there came upon him that first feeling of unease, a vague and ill-defined perception of something awry. One time as he hiked through the trackless forest he was overcome by the immensity of the silence, something he had heretofore relished. It was as if there was something beyond the silence, larger still, looming, and mocking the emptiness of his soul. He suddenly perceived that something inhuman shared the forest with him. The story of Blackwood’s “Wendigo” recurred, and he walked hurriedly home, not chuckling at his “silliness” until he had safely shut out the forest beyond the door of his cabin.

Before long his contentment was further sullied, for the quiet that had made perfect his solitude was ruined—not by a logging company that bribed some Senator to get access to the Allegheny Forest, or kids dragging out on the rural route, but a defect in his own fragile body. It was his ears. One morning, sitting on his small porch floored and bordered with mountain stone, the absolute still and quiet of a late Fall morning was marred by a continuous atonal ringing—tinnitus, no doubt caused by the too loud rock music of his solitary adolescence.

As the first snows of November graced the boughs of mighty beeches and firs that enclosed his cabin like a womb, constant reading lost some of its luster, and besides the annoying tinnitus, David became aware of a feature of his psyche that, given his intellectual and introspective disposition, generated in him a profound disquiet. He’d begun talking to himself, and he spent much of his time thinking and reflecting about his former life in the world of people. At first the occasional verbal expostulations—intended to cheer him—had been rare events, but now the practice evolved into arguments where two Davids argued opposing viewpoints. “You know, it’s not like you were exactly attentive to Debbie,” David number one reasoned, and then David number two would explode: “Yeah, but I didn’t tell her to sleep with a graduate student!” Or David number one said “even when you hung up on them during the divorce, Mom and Dad called all the time before they were killed in the accident,” followed by number two, who rejoined—“sure, because they were getting too old and miserable to live their own lives, so they wanted to run yours!”

And so on, until the November snows became December snows, and all the forest was blanketed in deep, forgetful silence. It was a solemn quiet, but not for David, whose annoyance evolved into torment because of the constant atonal ringing in his ears.

Not long before Christmas David’s annoyance and disquiet evolved into something quite a bit more like fright. Stepping out one brisk morning for an armload of firewood, he could not help but notice fresh footprints in the skim of snow surrounding the cabin. More than one person, judging from the differential size of the prints, had walked around and around the house sometime during the previous night. But the thing that generated a primal, child-like fear in him was the fact that the feet had been unshod. Moreover, the outlines of bare feet did not lead to or from the house, nor were there any tire tracks leading down the long lane to the little-used rural route. With each fresh covering of snow (almost a nightly occurrence), David would emerge in the morning to discover the same disquieting tracks that circled his cabin, apparently made by two or more people who simply dropped in out of the sky, and then vanished!

Just after Christmas—David had no calendar, and did not note the holiday—a major winter storm rode warm Gulf moisture into the established deep cold of New England. For much of western and northern Pennsylvania, it was the largest snow storm in a quarter century. The snow fell in horizontal curtains for two days, and as the drifts piled up to the eaves of the cabin, David thought, with a tinge of surprise, that he couldn’t seek out human company now even if he’d wanted to—his Nissan X-Terra was but a vague hump just off the porch, and no plow would likely touch the rural route off his driveway for days.

As the second night of the storm approached and inky dark covered the forest—so thick was the precipitation—the professor was no longer bothered by tinnitus, as the haunted moan of the wind rose to frightening, animal-like howls. The wind effaced the ringing in his ears; but it brought little comfort, for the sound it made was the very antithesis of music, hollow and devoid of soul. David was scared and exhilarated by the ferocity of the storm, unlike anything he’d experienced; and so he sat in the recliner instead of retreating to the single small bedroom. “Yes sir, Davey, this is a good one.”

He must have dozed, because when he became cognizant of his surroundings the fire had burned low, and the oil in his lamp was used up. The wind shrieked around the eaves, and even in the dark David could see that the kitchen window was entirely obscured by a drift. It was then, half waking to a room lit with the dim and flickering light from the fireplace, that he noticed he was not alone after all. In the small half-moon of a kitchen nook with a cushioned wrap-around bench, sitting behind the little table, was the dark outline of a person. David was only half awake at first, so it took him a moment to react, but then he inhaled and screamed loudly, twice, in outrage as much as fear. But the figure did not move, just sat there, unresponsive to the rightful tenant’s protestations.

David huddled in his recliner, an afghan pulled up to his chin like a seven year old who’d just been informed by a mischievous older brother about the thing in the basement. Time spun out in indefinite swirls like the blowing snow outside the cabin. The wind rose and fell in womanish moans, and just when David convinced himself after an eternity of visual straining that the figure at the kitchen nook was merely a trick of the dying firelight, the seated figure moved its head to observe him as he shuddered in the recliner.

Hard as it was for David to believe, he must have fallen asleep again, because dull light was filtering through the snow-draped windows of the cabin. The storm was over. Nothing sat at the kitchen nook, but neither did he find a forgotten grocery bag or carelessly discarded coat that might have assumed humanoid dimensions in the fickle light of the previous night.

That day David did not leave the cabin, as the door was blocked by a snow drift as high as his head. There was enough firewood inside for another two days, so that was good. He tried to read, but found that he was more interested in continuing his introspective endeavors.

Awareness had been growing in David for some time—but in the day after the storm, and with the hallucinatory fright of the night before, the truth of his life filled him with sadness for the first time. He’d pushed people away all of his life, and not all of them were silly, ignorant, self-serving, pretentious, or any number of characteristics he’d attributed to folks over the years as an excuse to not take a chance, to open up. It was a long overdue epiphany, and yet David number two promptly stepped up and pointed out all of the slights and insults he’d been subjected to: a catalog of injuries stretching back over fifty years.

That night the professor filled the lamp with oil and kept it burning on the stand next to his single bed. All was quiet, or would have been except for the ringing, louder than ever now that the wind had died. Sleep would not come. He tossed, roiled and straightened the bed covers countless times. When he woke in the middle of the night, he was not surprised to see two figures standing just outside his bedroom door. He couldn’t make out their faces, but from their outline clearly discerned that one was male, the other a shorter female. David was scared, of course, but as they stood there, motionless, and the minutes become hours of night, he also became angry at the intrusion. After spending his adult life working toward his retirement dream of time alone, was he to be pestered by ghosts? He made a game of it to pass the time, pretending that he could see their eyes, and so engaged in a battle of wills—a staring contest to see who would blink first.

The following day the night specters were gone. David filled the time inside his solitary confinement. He read and thought about two of his favorite fictional characters: Walter Mitty—a man who certainly enjoyed his own company—and Phileas Fogg, a character possessed of admirable stoicism. But mostly David sat and reflected, and now the arguments were less forceful. The waning light of the short winter’s day heralded the coming night, and for the first time, David felt regret, and indulged the pity for self that sprouted from the seeds of what-might-have-been. He built up the fire and waited in his recliner.

After midnight, he began to wish for the wind to return. All he could hear was that constant, monotonous tone, like the sound a heart monitor makes when the patient has flat-lined.

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