“Keep working?” Mr. Crenshaw said too loudly. “How do you keep working in a place like that when the power goes out, no matter how warm and toasty you stay?”
“It’s gas heat there. That’s what went out. Not the electricity.”
Mr. Crenshaw grumbled about a few more things, then finally ran out of them, and out of things to argue about, and stomped his way off the porch, through the drifts starting to collect there despite the overhang, while Dad slammed the door behind him.
Jakob made like a ghost back to his room, peering out his window from the very corner, not even sure why he was hiding. Just knowing that he didn’t want to be seen whenever Mr. Crenshaw snapped his head around for another furious glance back at their house.
Later, when they gathered downstairs for breakfast, his father seemed proud of this one-up victory over their treacherous neighbor, yet still ate his bacon as if he were biting the heads off snakes.
“What do you want to bet Stu could find some coffee now that he didn’t know they had?” Dad said. “Well, looky here! It was hiding behind the cereal all along!’”
“We should’ve invited them to stay with us until this is over.” It wasn’t clear if Mom was saying this to Dad or to herself. “He had to be thinking it. He was just too stubborn to ask. Just like you were.”
“Five more mouths to feed? Forget it. We can’t,” Dad said. “Because you can bet they’d find some reason to come up here empty-handed. And with the size of him, Stu eats enough for two.”
Fiona stopped eating for one, unable to get her breakfast past the worried look starting to pull her face in opposite directions. She often played with the Crenshaws’ younger daughter.
“What?” Dad said to her. “Alissa? Is that why you’re giving me the stink-eye? She’ll be fine, so stop your worrying.”
He gnawed at his breakfast awhile longer, then banged down his fork. “What’s the exchange rate between coffee and kerosene these days, anyway? I think I’ll go find out.”
Mom followed him as he abandoned the table, asking what was wrong with him and telling him what a bad idea this was, a really bad idea. He brushed it off, paying attention only to the next thing he had to put on, ski pants and parka and hat and goggles and boots. Then he was out the door like he was setting off on some great vengeful adventure, and things got very quiet in the house again, but not a good quiet.
“Take your sister upstairs,” Mom ordered him in a voice that he knew wouldn’t tolerate any form of reply, and that left the rest implied: And stay up there yourself.
He escorted Fiona to her room, but she didn’t want to stay there alone, and her room wasn’t where he wanted to wait this out – for one thing, her window faced the wrong way – so they went to his room, instead. When he finally got her settled down, she clunked around with a guitar he’d never learned how to play, and he pulled a chair to his window to keep watch.
The snow fell as heavy as ever, but it wasn’t coming in sideways, just straight down, so with no wind to fight, and the trip being downhill, Dad made okay time. Jakob eased up the window so he could listen, in case Dad called for help.
The monochrome world was without corners now, soft and rounded and under a hush so profound that all he could hear was the whisper of snow and, once his dad reached the Crenshaws’, the muffled banging of his fist on their door. Someone opened it, and then came a sound of words hurled at each other to collide like sprays of ice. His father disappeared inside, and the door stayed open, even if Jakob couldn’t see inside, then he heard a distant pop, and a pause, then one more.
He knew what must’ve happened. He knew everything there was to know right now except how to react. Knew how to do everything except leave the chair, or how to stop shivering by the window with a faceful of cold air, or how to tell his sister to stop her stupid banging on his guitar, because something important had happened.
A few minutes later Stu Crenshaw emerged from the house with a determined swagger, returning to the rut that he and Dad had churned along the hillside.
Kerosene. He would be coming for kerosene.
Jakob was too shocked to hate the man on sight. That would come later. He only watched as Mr. Crenshaw fought the hill and the snow beneath him and the snow yet to land, as he fought gravity and the cold. Halfway to the top he began to move in starts and stops, then tried to turn around and head back down. Then he stopped getting anywhere at all, just his arms and legs moving in slower and slower motion, like he was trying to claw a hollow in the snow, until he ceased moving altogether.
Jakob knew he should report to someone what had just happened out there. It was what neighbors were supposed to do. But where could he call now that would answer? Who could he tell that would care?
Instead, he shut the window and continued to watch as the snow did the job of gravediggers, until there was nothing left to see.
****
They didn’t speak much about it afterward – at first, only as much as it took for them to coordinate an exchange of bodies between households. He supposed that the exertion worked out about even for both sides. He and his mom had a longer ordeal, uphill, but the lighter man. The Crenshaws had the heavier one, but downhill and less distance, although they had to dig him out, too.
He didn’t know what the Crenshaws did with Stu, but Dad they wrapped in a blanket and put on the porch until… well, just until. A big, open-ended until.
The task took well into afternoon and left them exhausted, with tears frozen on their cheeks and another six or so inches of new snow to contend with. Mom, in the end, was still concerned about the family at the bottom of the hill, but when she asked Mrs. Crenshaw if she wanted to bring the kids up to ride out the rest of the storm with warmth and power, the woman only glared a moment, then spit at her.
Mom still thought this thing was going to be over.
Then they went home to settle into a cold silence. They left off the TV, because the weather report was only ever more of the same. They played no games to pass the time, because it had gotten too hard to pretend everything was normal. They didn’t play music because there was no music for this.
But sound still found its way inside. Now and again would come the crack and cushioned crash as another tree toppled under the weight of the snow. And a couple days later, the entire Crenshaw home collapsed. It had been a ranch style house, with a far flatter roof to hold the snow, and now the mound of it looked like an igloo with no way in or out.
The snow’s level climbed the windows of the first floor, until it sealed them over entirely. From the second floor, they watched it rise like slow floodwaters. The weight of its accumulation packed the earliest layers tighter, tighter, and the compressed snow sought the easiest way inside. One by one the first floor’s windows burst in as the snow squeezed through like crumbling dough. Besieged on all sides, the house began to creak and groan, but it was better made than the Crenshaws’, and for now the walls held. Even so, it was hard not to think they were being entombed, the house like a fragile stone in a glacier forming around it. The place would be eventually crushed.
Inevitably, the snow’s shifting weight sheared away a power line somewhere, and they too went dark. They had space heaters, though, and Jakob felt bad for not feeling the least bit guilty that Dad had lied about the kerosene. If they’d shared, it only would’ve been wasted, the rest of the Crenshaws all dead down there anyway.
If you were going to die in an avalanche, it was probably better to be cold to begin with.
****
Then one day it stopped. It just stopped. They woke up, sluggish as reptiles, like every morning, and each of the upstairs rooms was filled with an unfamiliar glow. He first thought it must be the light of heaven, that they’d frozen to death overnight, until he understood that it must have been so long since he’d seen actual sunlight that he now mistrusted the memory of it.
The sun was weak, but it was there, and the sky a pale blue again, streaked with the wisps of clouds in retreat. It had be
en an age since the veil of snow had let him see anything much past the distance to the Crenshaws’ house, in any direction, but now that it had lifted, the air left clean and clear, the visual clarity was shocking. He could see for miles, it seemed.
If only there were more to see.
The world was all but featureless, just smooth white plains undulating to infinity from a foot or so beneath the windows. The single-story houses of their neighbors up the road were gone, buried, while the taller ones had been reduced to slivers of themselves – low shacks, or the tented shapes of roofs, or, in a couple of instances, nothing but ice-crusted chimneys to mark the spot, tombstones made of brick. The tops of a few surviving trees broke the surface like ragged bushes.
They waited a day to see if this was but a lull, after which the snow would return in fury, but it didn’t. They waited, too, to see if anyone would come, not that they expected anything by ground, but they could hope for a helicopter, maybe, with a loudspeaker blaring that help was on its way.
But there was no helicopter, and no help.
“You’re going to have to go out there and see what you can find,” his mom told him through chattering teeth. “You and your sister both.”
“Why her?” Not because he didn’t want her tagging along, but because he didn’t want the responsibility of a little sister he almost certainly couldn’t protect if the worst happened. He could stand against bullies. This was beyond anything of the sort. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“She’s smaller, she’s lighter. She might be able to go places you can’t.”
They were both veterans of winter vacations to the mountains. He got the cross-country skis, while Fiona got the snowshoes. They sat on the edge of an open window over the front porch, putting on the skis and snowshoes with their legs dangling down the outside, then stood tentatively, terrified they would sink like stones, although with the porch roof beneath them, it wouldn’t be far. But the dense snow held their distributed weight, and Fiona started looking braver by the moment.
The heavier of them, he’d gone second, and while still pressing close to the house, he leaned down to hug his mom with one arm. She strained upward to put her chill-blued lips near his ear.
“If something happens and you need to leave Fiona behind, I’ll understand,” Mom whispered. “She’s the weakest. If it comes to that, do what you have to do.”
Then she smiled, forcing it, a thing of grotesque comforts. One of her teeth had gone crooked, loose and she didn’t even seem aware of it.
Maybe she was just sick, and didn’t know what she was saying.
He clung to that while they shuffled away from the house, heading due west, careful to consult the compass that was a relic of his scouting days. Without it, and with every direction looking the same, they might never find their way home again. They were as far above the ground and its features as they would’ve been from the bottom of a lake while walking its frozen surface.
When Fiona asked how they would live now, he had no idea how to answer. So he passed the slow miles telling her everything he ever remembered learning about Ice Age cave people. The powerful but non-innovative Neanderthals who draped themselves in skins, and the far cleverer Cro-Magnons, who learned to sew and make better and better weapons.
“We’ll think of something,” he said, even though he couldn’t imagine what was left to hunt.
It gave him comfort to think that, somewhere, Russell Burns may have been snowpacked ten feet below. Then again, his cold heart may have rendered him an ideal survivor, made for this world, like the snowman they’d built that first day. He would swim for the surface and break through its crust and never know the difference.
This first day’s trip was a failure, finding nothing but endless smooth snow and frozen ruin, and people calling across to them from frosted upstairs windows, asking if they knew any news worth telling. Others sought to coax them over – come here and get warm, come in for something to eat, we have hot chocolate here – but none of it felt right, or honest.
He supposed a ski pole would kill, if you jabbed someone in the right place.
“Why don’t you want to stop?” Fiona complained after the fourth time he steered them wide. “They seemed nice. I’m hungry.”
“They’re not nice. And they don’t care if you’re hungry. They don’t really want to be generous. They’re what spiders would sound like in their webs, if spiders could talk.”
“Oh,” she said. “Wait – huh?”
“They’re hungry too. Get it?”
She almost did, but needed to hear him say it all, and he didn’t have the heart to make it any plainer than he already had. It made him wonder how someday, if pressed, he would explain to her, or to someone like her, what was different about the snows of then and now.
“But that was not the same snow,” he would begin, the same as the man who remembered Christmas. ”Our snow not only came roaring from out of an angry, misused sky, it came swirling out of the hearts of neighbors and dripped from the tongues and fingers of all the rest we wished were strangers. Ice grew from our window frames and eyelashes until it no longer mattered that it barred our view like prison doors.”
Something like that, at least.
Home lay at the opposite end of their tracks, not a hard path to follow, even without the compass. He wanted to get back like he’d never wanted anything in his life, except for some different decisions on Dad’s part. Yet the closer they got, the more home felt like something he only wanted to look forward to, instead of actually getting there.
When they climbed through the window, the sky was soft and violet ahead of them. Mom hugged them both, then Fiona ran for the bathroom, because she’d been holding it in a long time, refusing to go in the snow. So maybe she hadn’t noticed how their mother felt so cold it was like she’d been the one outside all day. The skin of her face and hands seemed so pale and thin and clear that beneath it he could see things he’d only ever seen in science books.
“We didn’t find anything out there,” he said, because he had to say something. “We can try another direction tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” she said. “It depends.”
“Depends on what?” he asked, just as he heard Fiona cry out in worry from the bathroom:
“What are all these teeth in the sink?”
“It depends on you,” Mom said, with a smile that had turned to the sharpest shards of ice.
****
Remembrance by Brian Hodge
You never forget your first time.
In an act for which I’ve been eternally grateful, David B. Silva was the very first editor/publisher to send me an acceptance letter for my work, and a check close on its heels.
I was just out of college, and since my junior year of high school I’d been winning or placing in school-based writing contests and publishing in their literary mags.
But this was something altogether different. This required working up the courage to mail things to a stranger on the other side of the country, then wait for him to pass judgment on them. After a couple of encouraging near misses came the ecstatic day in which it felt like the entire course of the future had realigned for the better.
Dave gave me my start. Gave me a place to learn and grow and reach out to like-minded others. He gave encouragement. He loaned me books long-distance. All told, in The Horror Show, he published eight of my earliest stories, featured me in one of the magazine’s two Rising Stars issues, and later commissioned an early online novella experiment. That first story soon grew into my first novel, Oasis. Dave’s impact on my life is incalculable.
He did such things for many, many writers.
This, though, is what for me best typifies the depth of Dave’s generosity of time, caring, and spirit: After he’d accepted a story or two – which hadn’t even been published yet – I asked if he wouldn’t mind providing some general feedback. Not on any particular piece, but his overall impressions of my work, the strengths to capitalize on,
the weaknesses I needed to address to improve, and so on.
Several days later the mail brought not just a few token thoughts dashed off in a spare moment, but a two-page letter filled with his small, precise, enviably neat handwriting. He began from a position of humility and disclaimers, then was right on the mark in everything that followed.
And he’d written the entire letter by flashlight during a power blackout at his mountain home in northern California. It was giving him a headache by the end.
Who does that?
The process is never-ending, he wrote near the conclusion. When you’re 108, you’ll still be learning new things.
Even more so now than then, I expect this to be true, and wish that Dave had gotten the chance to prove it for himself.
Brian Hodge
MUSE
Robert Swartwood
They kept me locked in the interrogation room for nearly three hours before the detectives came in. They apologized at once. They said there had been a development in the case that they needed to follow up on immediately.
“Like what?” I asked.
“We found more bodies.”
This was from Detective Percy, who took a seat across from me at the table. The other one, Detective Huston, lingered sullenly back near the door like he probably saw in every cop drama on TV.
“How many more bodies?”
“Three,” Detective Percy said. “So those counting the two we found previously puts us officially in serial killer territory.”
“You think there are others?”
“Possibly. We’re still searching the basement and backyard. You did a good thing tonight, you know.”
“I killed a man.” There was a tremor in my voice. “It was in self-defense, yeah, but I still killed him.”
“And the world is now better off.” Detective Percy glanced over his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Jimmy?”
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 22