Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  “Niko?” she said, her eyes filling with tears, her heart breaking all over again, pain as fresh as it had been that night twelve years past when she had lost her love and her baby at the same time.

  A ghost, she understood, was a terrible thing. It gave her the pleasure of seeing his face and hearing his voice one more time, but he had only the specter of life in his eyes. Seeing the ghost of the man she’d loved felt like an assault, a mocking reminder of all that she had lost when he and Isaac had died, not just love and joy but her faith in the world and her hope for a future she would never have.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  The ghost hung his head, but not before she saw the pain in his eyes and knew that he understood that his presence was not welcome, that he had hurt her.

  “You have lost so much,” Niko’s ghost said, his voice a gentle touch. “I would never wish you more pain. But there will be much more if nothing is done. Others will die, maybe others you love.”

  “Daddy, what are you talking about?” Miri asked, gripping Allie’s hand.

  “Jake told you the truth,” the ghost said, sliding nearer, emerging from the shadows. “The ice men are real. And they’re here.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Miri found it difficult to focus on her father’s words. If she did not look directly at him, didn’t peer too deeply into the shadows, it was possible for her to listen to the rumble of his voice and pretend—for several moments at a time—that he was still alive. In the presence of his ghost she had found that she could barely breathe. Niko Ristani had died when she was only eleven years old, young enough that when she wanted to remember his voice she had to put on old family videos and just listen. Now he was right here with her. Right here in this very room.

  She felt damp streaks on her face and was surprised to find that she was crying. Tears reached her lips and she brushed them away, tasting salt. Her chest ached as if her heart had swollen within her, near to bursting.

  The ghost hesitated.

  “Miri?”

  She closed her eyes, not wanting to look at him. Miri had seen him strike out into the blizzard that night in search of help, already traumatized by Isaac’s death, and the next time she had seen him he was lying dead in his casket, the funeral home not quite able to cover up the blue sheen left behind from lying dead in the snow for days before discovery. And now he was here.

  Niko had been a great father. The best. When he and Miri’s mother had gotten divorced she had been too young to truly understand that there was enough blame to go around for both of them and she had believed Angela to be completely at fault. Those years when she’d had her father to herself had been the best years of her life. He had always told Miri that he could never hate her mother, because Angela had given him the greatest gift anyone could ever have. Even at the age of nine or ten she would roll her eyes, but in her heart she cherished those words. Busy as he was, he would always find time to hug her, and when he had days off he would take her to the beach or just huddle with her in his living room to read a book together, taking turns reading to each other. When he died they had been halfway through the second Harry Potter book. Miri had never picked up the book again, couldn’t bring herself to read the rest of the series.

  For her eleventh birthday, he had taken her to the Grand Canyon and they’d ridden mules all the way down and camped at the bottom. That night, they had lain on some rocks and looked up at the stars framed between the upper edges of the canyon walls, and Miri had cried because it was all so beautiful, and because she wished things could have been different and her mother could have been there with them and her parents still in love. That had been the night that Niko had told Miri that he was falling in love with Allie Schapiro, and though it had been so strange to think of her father with her former teacher, and she had reached an age where she could not trust the prospect of happiness, she had let herself think that perhaps there would be a new family and to begin wondering how she would manage it, being around Jake so much without letting on how much she liked him.

  The memories overwhelmed her. Niko hadn’t been the perfect father—he could be short-tempered and often became too wrapped up in his work, and sometimes he said things about Angela that a child should never have to hear about a parent—but he had loved Miri and tried his best to show her that love.

  “Hey,” the ghost said, startling her.

  Then Allie’s voice. A human voice. Alive. “Miri, honey, please.”

  “Miri,” the ghost echoed. She felt a chill and wondered if it had come from some draft in the house or off of him. “Honey, I’m really here.”

  Opening her eyes, she spun on him, hands shaking as she gestured at the air as if she might wave him away.

  “No, you’re not. You’re not here, Daddy. You’re dead.”

  She stared at him, forced herself to look at him and through him, to see the bricks of the fireplace that were visible through the gauzy nothing that her father had become.

  Allie put a comforting hand on the back of Miri’s neck, but she felt no comfort.

  The sorrow in the eyes of her father’s ghost broke her heart into even smaller pieces.

  “Yes,” the ghost whispered, and his voice seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. “I’m sorry that I left you that night. I would never have done it if I’d known that I wouldn’t be coming back. But Isaac was dead and I couldn’t stand to see you and Jake standing there by his body, to see Allie so broken. I went for help.”

  “It never came!” Miri shouted at him, shaking off Allie’s hand.

  The ghost rushed at her so abruptly that she let out a scream. Allie scrambled back on the sofa but Miri did not move as Niko came up to her, almost nose-to-nose.

  “Listen to me. Awful things happened in Coventry that night and help never came for anyone. Well, now those things are going to happen again, but tonight can be different. You and Allie and I … we can help, and not just the living.”

  Miri stared at him, growing numb, as if so many conflicting emotions had simply overloaded her.

  It was Allie who spoke up. “What do you mean? Are you saying…” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Is Isaac here, too? Like you?”

  “Not like me, but yes, I think he’s here in Coventry. And if we can’t warn him and the others…”

  The ghost shifted away, retreating to the shadows as if he found solace in them. And perhaps he did.

  “Dad?” Miri said. “I’m listening, now. Tell us what we need to do.”

  The ghost remained in the shadows. They gave him more substance, somehow, and Miri studied him at last, hoping to etch the details of her father’s face more deeply into her memory. The slight curl to his short hair and high cheekbones and dark, serious eyes that could turn bright with laughter … only not now. Perhaps never again. Death had taken that from him.

  “Jake called them the ice men,” the ghost began. “I remember that. He got the phrase from Isaac and it’s as good a term as any. The truth is that I don’t know what they really are, though I have my suspicions. They live in the storm, but it’s not just any storm. They exist in a kind of endless blizzard that is somehow its own place, a kind of frozen limbo. When it snows anywhere, this other, unnatural storm overlaps with our world.

  “They killed me, of course. That night I was running toward the sound of the plow on the next street and two of them just plucked me up off the ground like birds of prey. I’ve never been so cold, not before and not even now … and then they dropped me. The fall did me in.”

  Miri shuddered and took Allie’s hand.

  “They strip the ghost right out of you—that’s the only way I can express it—and then you belong to them, dragged along in their wake from storm to storm. They survive on something they take from us at the moment of death, and then after, too, like leeches. Heat or life or soul, I don’t know what. When you’re in the storm you can sense the living world, feel its warmth just out of reach. That’s the worst part, knowing how close you are to love and
light.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Allie said.

  Niko smiled softly and nodded to her. Miri wiped her eyes.

  “I thought of you—both of you—during my time in the storm. I grieved for myself and at the thought of never seeing either of you again. Somehow I kept a little ember burning inside me, a purpose I held on to, and the last time it snowed here in Coventry, I could feel it. I willed myself toward it. That final ember gave me the strength to pull myself from their gravity and I found myself here, fully aware for the first time. When the snow falls, my thoughts are clearer.

  “The others noticed. Isaac and the Newell boy and Cherie Manning and the rest from Coventry. I had left a trail for them and they slipped out after me, but none of them seemed to be able to focus the way I can. They decided that the only way to survive, to hide from the ice men, was to have a living body as an anchor.”

  “What do you mean, ‘anchor’?” Miri asked.

  Niko’s ghost looked at her. “They’ve taken over the bodies of living people.”

  “That’s awful,” Allie said, crow’s feet turning to wrinkles as she frowned.

  “Is it?” the ghost replied. “They’re afraid, Allie. They’re hiding. I think some of them just want a chance at a proper goodbye, but I wouldn’t be surprised if others intend to run off and start new lives in those bodies. The one thing I know for certain is that they were all hoping that escaping meant they were free, but it isn’t that simple. The ice men noticed. They had to wait for a real storm, something powerful enough for them to come through.”

  “And now it’s here,” Miri said quietly.

  “And now they’re here,” her father said.

  Allie tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “You said you had suspicions about what they are.”

  The sight of her father’s ghost shrugging with uncertainty was the strangest thing that Miri had ever seen. The strangest thing she ever hoped to see.

  “They could be the gods of winter, the tattered remnants of long-forgotten deities, left over from an age when people worshipped the elements.”

  Miri studied him. “But you don’t think so.”

  “No, I don’t. I think they’re like me. I don’t know how it started or who the first of the ice men might have been, but I think these things only look demonic. I think they’re just hungry ghosts, searching for warmth. I think they’re what will eventually become of us if we let them take us back into their storm.”

  “Oh my god,” Allie whispered. “Isaac.”

  Niko’s ghost nodded. “Exactly. Isaac, and the rest of us. But they have limits. They can only exist here for as long as the storm rages. Once it begins to die down, they’ll have to retreat along with it.”

  “So, if you can keep from being taken again until the blizzard ends … then what?” Miri asked, knowing that the answer would not be what she desired. Seeing her father like this would be the closest to a miracle she would ever get.

  “I don’t know,” he said, glancing away from her, the fireplace visible through the side of his face. “I’d like to think that we can go on, then … to whatever waits for us all when we die. Wherever we’re supposed to go. All I know is that I won’t be dragged back to that frozen hell, and I have to do whatever I can to help the others. There may be places they can hide, places the storm can’t reach them, but only if they know it’s possible. I have to find them all, give them hope—”

  “But you can’t go out into the snow,” Allie said quickly. “What if they find you?”

  “I broke away from them once already, Allie, and I have to believe I can do it again. We have to find the others—”

  “You don’t know whose bodies they’ve … possessed?” Miri asked, barely able to get the word out. It felt so strange to say such a thing and have it be real.

  “I saw a few faces but I don’t know the names.”

  “We have to call Jake. He’ll help,” Miri said.

  “Will he believe you?” the ghost asked.

  “He saw them, remember?” Miri said. “The ice men. If anyone will believe us, it’ll be him. In fact, given the call he made to me the other day, it may be that he knows this already. But he hasn’t been answering his phone all day.”

  “Isaac,” Allie said, with a hopeful glint in her eyes. “If his spirit really is here, and he hasn’t come to me, he’ll have gone to his brother if he can. He has no one else.”

  “Then we go to Jake’s,” Miri said, getting up from the sofa. “I just hope the plows have done their job.”

  Allie rose as well. She took a deep, shuddery breath and for the first time she approached Niko’s ghost, reaching out as though to caress his cheek. Her hand passed through him and when she turned away, Miri averted her gaze, hating to see the regret in Allie’s eyes.

  “We go,” Allie said. “But we have a stop to make on the way.”

  “A stop?” the ghost asked, his smoky form wavering a little, as if he might vanish.

  Allie turned to look at him again, then glanced at Miri.

  “I think I know where at least one of them is,” Allie said.

  “Who is it?” Miri asked.

  Allie frowned. “I’m not sure, but it’s one of the children and I think he’s very confused and very frightened.”

  “It’s good that he’s afraid,” the ghost said, stepping from the shadows and becoming even less substantial. “Fear may be the one thing that keeps him safe.”

  At first, TJ had found it difficult to look at his daughter. His uncle Jim had once told him that Grace had “her grandmother’s eyes,” and the memory of that moment made him want to scream. He’d loved his mother—still loved her—but his conception of reality didn’t allow for something like this. The idea that they both existed now, his mother and daughter both in one body, made him want to crawl out of his skin. It was simply wrong, truly abominable. All he wanted was to hold Grace in his arms but he couldn’t bring himself to do that now.

  “Is she still in there?” he asked, forcing himself to look at the little girl with her grandmother’s eyes.

  “Of course,” Grace said.

  But she’s not Grace, TJ thought. She’s Martha.

  “Get out!” Ella screamed, making TJ jump. She strode the few paces that separated her from Grace and grabbed the girl by the shoulders, shaking her. “God damn you, get out of her! How dare you do this?”

  “You don’t understand,” Grace said.

  “Then make us understand,” TJ said, putting a hand on Ella’s shoulder and drawing her back. “Explain this … this insanity.”

  And Martha did. Through her granddaughter’s voice, she told the story of the night she died, of walking out into the blizzard and the things that came for her there, of the years living in a constant snow, a storm so cold that she knew she would never be warm, and a sudden opportunity for freedom.

  “Mom,” TJ said when she was done, his heart like an aching pit in his chest, all the guilt of a dozen years burning inside him. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t here. I told you I’d stay with you and I … I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” Martha said, and for a moment Grace’s young features—just eleven years old—did look uncannily like her grandmother’s. “Don’t do that to yourself, TJ. If you’d been here they’d have had you as well, and that would be another kind of hell for me altogether.”

  “And now what?” Ella asked, anger and confusion darkening her eyes. “What about Grace?”

  “She’s lovely,” Martha said. “And as soon as this storm is over, I’ll leave her. I think as long as I’m here, inside her, they won’t notice me. If they’re searching for the dead, they’ll never realize—”

  The wind gusted so hard that it shook the entire house, rattling the windows in their frames. They all flinched, startled, and stared at the window above the kitchen sink. A few seconds passed and TJ exhaled, turning back toward Grace, when the wind kicked up again, shrieking and battering the house, and this time it did not let up.

  “What the�
��” Ella began.

  Something scraped along the outside of the house and TJ’s mouth went dry. They heard scratching at the window and turned again, this time to see the fleeting image of a face outside in the snow, a hideous, jagged rictus of ice and glaring eyes. And then it was gone.

  Ella screamed, even as Grace—Martha—grabbed both her parents by the hand and tried to drag them from the kitchen.

  “We’ve got to hide!” she cried.

  “You said you were already hidden!” Ella shouted. “That they wouldn’t find you!”

  With terror in her eyes, Grace almost looked like their little girl again. TJ put himself between his family and the window, then glanced back at his daughter.

  “What’s going on, Mom?” he demanded. “Why aren’t they just breaking the windows?”

  “They move like the storm,” the late Martha Farrelly said in her granddaughter’s voice. “Solid as they can be, they can’t come in unless the wind can find an entrance—an open door or window or a draft space.”

  TJ glanced at Ella. “Is the bedroom window still open?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ella said, flinching and twisting around at every scrape and scuffle on the roof and walls, her eyes frantic.

  TJ had a moment to think about losing her—not just her leaving him, but losing her forever, and losing Grace as well—and a grim calm touched him.

  “They’ll find a way in,” he said. “We need to—”

  Ella did not have his calm. She spun on Grace … on Martha … and rushed to the little girl, grabbing her by the arms again.

  “Let her go!” Ella shouted, her face etched with rage, hair falling wild across her face. “These things are here for you, not Grace! You’re willing to risk your granddaughter’s life for your own! I don’t care what kind of hell you were in—”

  “I do,” TJ whispered.

  Ella twisted to glare at him. “What?”

  “These things are here, Ella!” he said, stalking around the kitchen, turning at every sound, ready to fight if it came to that. “We’re all in danger, no matter what my mother does now.”