Dead of Winter (8 page)

And after some inestimable time spent
quivering and weeping uncontrollably, Jake did something he hadn’t
done in twelve years.

He ran.

* * *

Someone was whispering to him but he
would not listen.

Instead he ran on, lurching forward in
unsteady strides like a wounded deer, clutching his coat to his
chest even though it was not open, as if doing so would keep his
heart in his chest long enough for him to make it home.

Home. A million miles away now in this
hostile frozen wasteland in which normality seemed to have been
frozen too. Everywhere lay indistinct figures, smooth and
glittering beneath their cold blankets, sometimes moving in the
periphery of his vision, sometimes shuddering like yawning dogs,
sometimes whispering to him in a language he did not understand,
nor want to.

The cold rattled him as he lurched
along, the snow accepting his booted feet, hampering his progress
as he sank with each frantic step. The tears froze on his face, his
lower lip quivering as he sobbed.

Home. All the demons he feared beyond
the walls of his home, all the night things that whispered to him
of his cowardice, all the sounds that made him feel crowded and yet
hopelessly alone, that detestable ticking like tiny bones being
tapped together, all of it he would suffer gladly now. Nothing
could possibly be worse than this. Nothing, for it was not the snow
and the things beneath it he feared any more, but what they
represented. Madness, pure and simple. Somewhere along the line –
maybe when Julia died – his mind had split, crumbled, and betrayed
him, sketching nightmares for him to have in his waking hours.
Waiting until he was most vulnerable. Waiting until he was alone
and cold and terrified. It was the simplest explanation and also
the most horrible one.

And yet, the possibility offered
hope.

For madness there was a
cure.

For a reality turned nightmare,
none.

He emerged from his own panicked
thoughts to find he had reached Mabel Brannigan’s house. Carl
Stewart’s truck was still there but Carl was not. A fresh skin of
snow hugged the metal. The door of the pickup swung in the wind,
the green glow from the dashboard oozing onto the empty seats.
Beneath the door was a ragged hole, ringed with some kind of dark
matter, and from the hole a two foot high mound of snow crossed the
street in a zigzagging pattern.

Something had tunneled
here.

The deposited snow ran like a barrier
across the road but Jake crossed it in a hurry, and without
incident, though the hair on his neck had stood on end as he drew
one leg and then the other across it and hurried on, his breath
warm around his face. Every inhalation felt as though he was
drawing in sand and when he coughed, he thought his lungs would
explode.

Then Lenny’s house loomed, just as
before.

With one difference.

The front door was open, granting him
a view of nothing but absolute darkness within.

He considered venturing inside – at
least he’d be out of the cold – but with all that had happened, he
decided it was best to get home, to get safe. Then maybe, he’d come
back, or call someone to…

Forget it. Keep
moving
. And he did, feeling as if someone
had strapped still-burning coals around his knees.

There would be nothing to find in
Lenny’s house, he knew. Nothing he wished to find at least.
Something was happening, whether instigated by his own bruised mind
or not, he couldn’t tell. People were vanishing, the town had
changed and malevolent things lurked beneath the snow. Some tangle
in his synapses had made Miriam’s Cove a ghost town.

Alone.

He hurried on, ignoring the faintest
suggestion of frenzied pale tendrils emerging from that oblong of
dark that was Lenny’s front door. If they were really there, then
so be it, but nothing short of a broken neck would make him look in
that direction. Not now, not when he was so close to
home.

Fighting the white road, the
all-consuming mold, the blanket beneath which the dead lay
dreaming, a line from a poem he had read in his younger, healthier,
saner days came whispering through the dark inside his head:
“‘
Fall, winter, fall; for he/Prompt hand
and headpiece clever/Has woven a winter robe/And made of earth and
sea/His overcoat for ever
.’” A.E. Housman,
he recalled, mildly amused to find he had recited the stanza aloud.
A poem he had read for students in his high school teaching days,
days long gone, along with everything else, along with the history
teacher he had met and fallen in love with there. Housman had known
the deal, Jake knew, securing his suspicions of winter’s wrath in
the lines of a poem to escape ridicule and accusations of madness,
accusations Jake couldn’t hope to escape now that the projections
of it had turned the whole world around him into a hollow white
nightmare.

Keep going!

He did, hobbling, grimacing, hissing
air through teeth cold as stone, squinting through eyes that saw as
if through a film of ice.

And then, his street, silent as a
tomb, buried in snow, twinkling in overwrought mimicry of something
benign. His house, smoke ghost tearing itself from the chimney,
light in the window. He stopped, fresh tears dripping down his
cheeks, scarcely daring to believe it could be true. Light in the
window. Warm amber light.

And in the driveway, Sheriff Baxter’s
police cruiser, gleaming. No sirens, no wailing. Quiet. Doors
closed. No damage.

Jake nodded and cracked a smile from
which inner heat seemed to flow. This was right. This was the way
it was supposed to be. He knew what he would find in there. Warmth,
safety, sanity, and Sheriff Baxter warming his hands by the fire,
angry that Lenny and Jake hadn’t waited for him. Joanne would be
fine.

She tripped and hurt her
ankle on the ice
, Baxter would tell
him.
Nothing critical. I sent Deputy Harlow
to take her to the hospital. She’s fine. Be out by morning. Now
where the hell is her damn fool husband gone? Probably figured out
that’s where she’d be and walked over there.
Here Baxter would shake his head.
Bad
idea for a man his age in this weather let me tell you.

And Jake would smile, agree and offer
the Sheriff a glass of something strong and the lawman would take
it, because even lawmen were not impervious to this kind of cold.
Then they would sit and wait in the warmth for word from
Lenny.

Grinning now, Jake took a step toward
his house.

And the lights went out.

No. Oh
please…no!

In the snow around him
something moved. No, not something. The snow
itself
was moving, slowly undulating
like a sheet in the wind. Whispers, struggling to imitate the
breeze but failing to sound even remotely natural, swept up from
the rolling white, overlapping into a nonsensical chorus it hurt
the mind to hear. Jake, despite his panic, remembered when he had
heard it before, close to his ear and hidden in what he had
mistakenly thought was Lenny’s breathing.

Full insanity. Had to be. Such things
simply did not, could not happen. There were laws that dictated it.
And yet, all around him the snow erupted, tunnels tearing toward
him, slick white tendrils bursting from the drifts and waving at
him, opaque eyes unblinking in the darkness. The ground shuddered
and his feet sank further, though this time it was not the snow
that hugged his ankles. It was fingers, malleable slivers of ice
that slid around the exposed skin there and held tight.

His bladder let go but he was only
dimly aware of it, less aware when the urine froze halfway
down.

The clouds of his breath caressed the
facial features of things which had preferred to remain invisible
as they circled him, but he could see them now. Grinning, their
white eyes alight with fierce intelligence, with
awareness…

They know,
Carl Stewart had said, and it was clear now that
they did. They knew everything. They knew he had tried to take his
life in a drunken fit of suicidal hysteria. They knew the barrel
had been in his mouth even after he’d called Lenny. They knew he
had pulled the trigger and the gun had jammed.

But most of all, they knew about the
cancer that had eaten his wife and the pillow that had stopped her
breathing.

The churned up snow stopped mere
inches from his feet as the tunnel digger ceased its
labors.

They know…

Trembling turned to convulsing as if
these things – whatever they were – had stripped him naked. The
cold fed on him and he shrieked at it, at them, at everything that
had brought him on this path, to this moment, to his certain
death.

“
Go away!” he screamed at
them, his mind unable to cope with the sheer amount of movement
that registered in his vision. Here, a hand only slightly smaller
than Carl Stewart’s truck, scarred and patterned with intricate
loops and swirls, clutching at the sky with fish belly fingers, its
wrist blue where it emerged from the snow. There, a dark figure,
flinching as if beaten by unseen fists, its eyes elliptical slits
stuffed with shards of glowing ice. To his left, a woman danced
like a marionette with too few strings, her hair fashioned from the
snow itself, clumps of it obscuring her face. She was naked, her
body blue, breasts full, nipples black, legs studded with icicles
that gleamed as she swung in the arms of an invisible partner. To
his right, a glass scarecrow hissed and bowed in supplication. But
not to Jake.

Whimpering, he watched as a hole
formed at his feet, the snow pulled down by several pale hands
scrabbling frantically.

“
Please…”

But even as the words staggered over
his trembling lips, he knew they would go unheard. They already
knew all they needed to.

The hole widened. The hands vanished
into the dark and then slowly, slowly, something started to
emerge.

Jake pulled, desperately trying to
tear himself free of the snow, but it was no use, the spikes of
pain in his arthritic knees only served to remind him how old, how
weak, how cold and how foolish he was. And how pointless it was to
try and escape.

A face rose smiling from the hole, a
gaunt weathered face with eyes like cold suns. The shock of
recognition almost knocked Jake backward, a move that might have
left him with two shattered ankles so tight was the grip of the
snow hands.

“
We know,” said Lenny, or
the shell of what had once been his best friend. Jake fell to his
knees and felt the resistance from the clutching snow, allowing him
the fall but not his freedom.

Lenny still wore his coat, hands in
pockets, hat askew on his head. If not for the eyes, the impression
would have been flawless.

Jake lifted his head to look into the
creature’s face. “Why you?” he asked. “Why did they hurt you,
Lenny?”

The Lenny-thing tilted its head. “We
know. And you must know too.”

Jake looked longingly towards his
house. It was dark now, and unwelcoming, and he could hear the
faintest of ticking sounds echoing from inside. The memory of
Lenny’s voice, spoken from fireside safety, spoken on the fringes
of a nightmare, joined the deathwatch echo.

“
You mentioned dying. I was
wondering if you remembered the last time we talked about it. What
you told me, I mean.”

And now he did remember, more than
he’d remembered before, as the cold shattered the walls of willing
resistance.

He had called Lenny that night, had
wept his sorrows into the phone. But that was not all. Amid the
pleas and the desperation, there had also been a
confession.

“
Jake, calm down. I can’t
understand you.”

“—
her!”

“
Talk into the phone. I
can’t—”

“
I killed her, Lenny. I
fucking killed her because I couldn’t watch her dying in front of
me and now I want to be with her. Help me!”

“
Oh my God…”

Lenny knew. But being the loyal friend
he had been forever, he had chosen to keep it a secret and that
secret had killed him because these things, these creatures of
guilt and punishment, had known too.

The thing in Lenny’s clothes grinned,
exposing a mouthful of icicle teeth.

Tick, tick,
tick
, the watch wound down, the same watch
Julia had worn in her deathbed as she struggled feebly against the
pillow, her hands trapped beside her face. The same watch he had
used to count the seconds until her death, to count the beats of
her heart.

Both had stopped running at the same
time.

He swallowed and hugged
himself.
This is how they mean to kill
me
, he thought.
They’ll keep me here, in the cold until it stops my
heart.

Silence.

Someone standing behind him reached a
slim pale blue hand over his shoulder, grazing his cheek with its
rough skin and clamping down hard enough to register pain over the
numbing cold.