by Ronald Malfi
Crouching behind a veil of holly bushes, Shawna peered at the back of Rita Tubalow’s house. Shaking from a mixture of cold and fear, Shawna counted to fifty, until she could feel her heartbeat regain its normal rhythm again. The rifle clinging to her side, she surveyed Rita Tubalow’s backyard, now blanketed in an undulating carpet of snow. The moonlight made the snow radiate with nacreous light.
A doghouse sat at an angle beneath the deck, and a concrete sundial, the top of which held about eight inches of compacted white powder, rose up out of the center of the yard like a lighthouse on rocky shores. The house itself looked deserted, all its windows black, like a mountainside pocked with caverns.
What she had told Nan Wilkinson had been true—that while many of these houses appeared empty, that was far from the truth. She’d seen the worst of what had come to Woodson over the past week, and it was all too horrible to attempt to relay to any outsider who hadn’t witnessed it all firsthand. As Shawna had.
It had started quietly in the night, without anyone’s knowledge. Like a sneak attack from an advancing army, they had entered the town under everyone’s radar. And maybe that analogy wasn’t too far off—after all, what were those things and where had they come from? It was anyone’s guess. It was a sneak attack from an advancing army; the only difference was that their attackers hadn’t been human.
The snow had been falling steadily since the middle of November, so it was impossible to pinpoint exactly when things had changed. If they had come in on some special storm, or if they were actually the storm itself, Shawna had no clue. For all she knew, they could have been here since November, unobserved and biding their time until the right moment. But what Shawna did know was that the horror hadn’t begun until earlier that week. And it had started with Jared.
She’d known Jared from high school, although they hadn’t dated until after they’d graduated and took full-time jobs together—merely by chance—at the local Ben Franklin. He was a bird-chested, narrow-faced lover of classic rock who couldn’t grow a full beard if someone said they’d pay him a million dollars, and in truth, Shawna hadn’t even liked him at first. She knew of him from school—it was a small town, needless to say—but they hadn’t been what you’d call friends. While she’d hung out primarily with girls from the soccer team, Jared Calabrese had smoked dope behind St. John’s with the motorheads from Mr. Barnholdt’s shop class. So when Jared had asked her out after two weeks working in adjacent checkout lanes at the Ben Franklin, she was taken aback. She’d merely smiled and told him she had a boyfriend—an utterly ridiculous and easily refutable lie, since everyone knew everyone else’s business in Woodson. Yet Jared hadn’t called her out on it; he’d only grinned his goofy grin and given her what approximated a two-fingered salute, which had coaxed a surprised laugh from her before he returned to work.
Eventually, though, he’d cornered her in the stockroom, where they’d shared a cigarette and where she’d finally succumbed to his persistence. (Shawna had taken up smoking after her father, a health-conscious marathon runner, had died from lung cancer, which was when Shawna figured fuck it, there were no guarantees in life, bottoms up and smoke ’em if ya got ’em and all that.) She hadn’t even been attracted to him but, in the face of total honesty, there really weren’t a whole lot of prospects around Woodson. So they’d gone on a number of dates, Jared keeping his hands astoundingly to himself in a display of self-control worthy of some award, and before she knew it she’d found herself falling for the son of a bitch.
They’d spent the next few months rutting like feral cats. Twice she feared pregnancy and sweated her period, wondering what her mother would say, until it eventually arrived and she was able to breathe normally again. Jared had been clumsy in bed but Shawna found the trait surprisingly endearing, and it soon erased all doubt about whether the stories she’d heard about him back in high school—about his sexual deviance—were true. He’d gotten her flowers and candy for her birthday—rather uninspired, but appreciated nonetheless—and this Christmas would have marked their one-year anniversary. She had been looking forward to it. (Back in her bedroom on Fairmont Street, in the top drawer of her dresser and wrapped in a tube sock, was a Timex watch with a silver band and their initials engraved on the back—a Christmas gift that had cost her four months’ salary, meticulously saved.)
But then earlier this week, all that had changed.
It started at the high school. During a fresh snowfall, a group of kids sledding down the steep hill behind the school had never returned home. Frantic parents had donned hats and gloves and poured out into the streets. At this time, Jared had come to pick Shawna up after her shift at the Ben Franklin—it was his day off, something they were unable to coordinate because of a lack of employees at the store—and he’d filled her in on the mystery of the disappearing children with the excitement of someone who’d just come from seeing a kick-ass rock concert.
“Where’d they all go?” she’d asked.
“Don’t know,” he’d said simply, jerking his shoulders up to his ears. “But that’s not the weird part. Just as I was leaving, I heard from Mr. Dormer across the street, who was outside talking with some of the neighbors. They were talking about the sheriff being called out to the school, too, and that some of the parents had come running back into town, saying stuff about the snow rising up off the ground and covering people.” His grin had looked fiendish in the glow of the Subaru’s dashboard lights. “Like, the snow fucking came up in a wave and swallowed them whole.”
“Are they okay?”
“You don’t get it, ’Na. They’re fucking gone.”
She scowled, searching through her purse for her lipstick. “What do you mean, they’re gone?”
“Gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Snow swallowed ’em up. They can’t find them.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s Dormer fucking with your head.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you were there. Mr. Dormer looked scared enough to shit bricks. I could hear the cop cars racing through the snow from the house.”
“They’re probably just out looking for the kids.”
“They won’t find them, either.”
“Why’s that?”
“Snow got ’em,” he’d said, as if this were the most logical thing in the world. “Swallowed ’em up like popcorn.”
Upon arriving back at her house, her mother was quick to usher her inside. As she watched Jared drive off through the snowy streets, Shawna felt an awful premonitory pang resonate in the center of her chest. Her mother, a frail woman encumbered with a perpetual scowl, rushed her to the kitchen before Shawna could even take her coat off, her sneakers squeaking wetly on the linoleum.
In the kitchen, all the lights were off. Shawna went to flip them on but her mother slapped her hand away. “Ouch! Mother, what’s going on?”
“Be quiet!” her mother chastised. She grabbed Shawna’s wrist in a pincerlike grip and dragged her over to the bank of windows that overlooked the backyard. The rear porch lights were off, too, but orange-pink sodium light from the nearby streetlamps filtered through the bare branches of the surrounding trees.
Shawna leaned closer to the window. There was someone out in the yard. Just standing there in the snow, staring at the house.
“Is that Mr. Kopeck?” Shawna asked her mother.
“He’s been there for over an hour now. I shut the lights and locked the doors but he hasn’t moved.”
“But what’s he doing?”
“Waiting,” said her mother.
“Waiting for what?”
“I don’t know. But it can’t be good.” Her mother pointed past their yard to their neighbors’, the Samjakes. “Look.”
Someone was standing in the Samjakes’ backyard, too. The distance was too great to know for certain, but Shawna thought it looked like plump old Delia Overmeyer from over on Port Avenue. Just like Tim Kopeck, Delia Overmeyer was standing up to her shins in the snow, staring at the back of the Samjakes’ house.
“I got a phone call from Lizzie MacDonald about twenty minutes ago,” said her mother. “She said George Lee Wilson is in her yard, too. Just standing there, staring up at her house, just the same way, Shawna. She said her dog Brutus was out there barking his head off. She called to the dog but he wouldn’t come. He ran out into the yard and disappeared into the shadows. Then she said she didn’t hear him no more.”
A twinge of icy terror rippled through Shawna’s body. “Jared said some kids disappeared down at the school tonight. Said their parents went looking for them but some of them disappeared, too.”
No, that’s a lie, she thought immediately afterward. That’s not exactly what Jared said. He said they were eaten up by the snow. Eaten up like popcorn.
But she couldn’t tell this to her mother. The poor woman already looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Shawna leaned over the counter and pulled the telephone to her ear.
“There’s no answer at Joe’s,” said her mother. Joe Farnsworth was the sheriff.
Shawna dialed the number anyway. It was printed on the phone’s handset in her mother’s spidery handwriting.
Her mother finally let go of Shawna’s wrist. The woman gripped the sill of the window with both hands, her face very close to the windowpane. Her breath was fogging it up, but she was still able to keep an eye on Tim Kopeck out in the yard. Tim Kopeck, who had undoubtedly lost his frigging mind…along with Delia Overmeyer…along with George Lee Wilson…
No. That’s impossible.
The telephone at the other end of the line kept ringing, ringing, ringing. Shawna caught her mother’s worried stare. “No one’s going to answer, Shawnie. Poor Joe’s probably got his hands full tonight.” There was moisture glittering in the corners of her mother’s eyes. “Don’t tie up the line. Lizzie’s been calling every few minutes.”
Shawna hung up the telephone while chewing on her lower lip. “I don’t understand,” she said after a time. “What does this mean?”
“It means—” began her mother, but then the words dried up in her mouth. The older woman’s eyes were locked back on the window. “He’s gone,” she said in a low utterance.
Shawna practically pressed her face up against the windowpane. Her mother was right: Tim Kopeck was no longer standing in their backyard.
Shawna cast her eyes over to the Samjakes’ yard and saw that Delia Overmeyer—or whoever that had been—was also gone.
“Where’d he go?” said her mother. Her voice was paper thin.
“There’s no footprints,” Shawna said. “Look in the yard.”
“What are you talking about? That’s impossible.” But her mother looked and could say no more. It was obvious—there were no footprints in the snow, save for the two divots where, only a moment ago, Tim Kopeck had been standing. It was as if the man had simply vanished into thin air.
Above their heads, rafters creaked. Both women jerked their heads toward the ceiling. It was an old A-frame house built in the early ’70s, and both women had lived in the place long enough to become familiar with all its typical creaks, groans, and rumblings. This sound was not one of them.
“Is something upstairs?” said her mother, still staring heavenward.
“Sounds like someone’s on the roof.”
In the summers, squirrels would tromp about the shingles and drop acorns down on the roof, where they’d roll like tiny boulders down into the gutters. Even those pedestrian sounds had resonated with amplification, and Shawna would imagine squirrels up there the size of small dogs and acorns as big as apples. Right now, whatever was up there sounded like a pickup truck slowly ascending the pitched roof.
“Stay here,” Shawna said.
“Where are you going?” her mother called after her, but by that time, Shawna was already halfway down the hall on her way to the stairs. “Shawnie!”
Upstairs, the house was dark, the moonlight sliding in shafts through the windows. Pausing on the landing, Shawna held her breath and listened for the sound again. But all was silent.
Shawna had loved her father very much and, since his death, thought of him often, but this was the first time since perhaps the funeral she’d actually tried to will him back into existence. If he were here, this wouldn’t be happening. If he were here, she wouldn’t have to be checking the upstairs hallway, the bedrooms, making sure the windows were locked. That had been her father’s job.
She went quickly from bedroom to bedroom, making sure all the windows were locked. They were. Tight. Outside, the snow continued to fall. From her bedroom window she peered down into the yard. Mr. Kopeck was still MIA, but those two footprint-shaped divots stared up at her like eyes.
Downstairs, her mother screamed.
Shawna raced back down the hall and took the stairs two at a time. She grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella rack at the foot of the stairs—the only weapon she thought of at the moment—and rushed toward the kitchen amid the sounds of pots and pans clattering loudly to the kitchen floor.
“Mom!”
She arrived in the kitchen just in time to see a fleeting shape yanked backward through the doorway at the opposite end of the kitchen. One of her mother’s slippers skidded across the floor.
Shawna charged forward, wielding the umbrella like a sword, and crossed the threshold into the living room. What she saw there would be etched into her memory until her dying day.
It was her mother, her housedress torn down one side, her ample bosom clad in a padded bra fully exposed, a look of incomprehensive terror on her face. She was on her back…but not necessarily on the floor, because something was sliding wetly beneath her, something big, keeping her up off the floor. The sight caused Shawna to freeze, her eyes blazing like the headlamps of a tractor.
“Shawwwwnieeee!”
The thing beneath her mother bucked and the woman slid to the floor. Then, impossibly, what looked like a narrow funnel of snow corkscrewed up from the floor. Wind blew Shawna’s hair off her forehead and sent loose papers and napkins fluttering about the room. There was a smell, too—something thickly rotten and unearthly.
Something separated from the funnel of snow—something long and tapered, pointed at the tip. In her stupefaction, Shawna thought of a shark’s dorsal fin. Then reality rushed back to her and she lunged forward, swinging the umbrella at the twirling mass of snow like a baseball bat.
The umbrella passed right through it, unencumbered.
“Shawww-NIEEEE!”
It was the last thing she would ever hear her mother say. The dorsal fin blade pitched downward, lightning quick, and buried itself into her mother’s chest. A gout of black blood erupted in a geyser from her mother’s mouth. Around Shawna, the house shook. That hideous, dead-animal stink intensified until Shawna’s eyes burned.
She blinked, her vision sliding away from her.
And when she opened them again, she caught the final vestige of the snow funnel withdrawing up through the chimney. Her mother was gone now, too, but her other slipper lay in the hearth of the fireplace, powdered in soot…
The days following that event had been pure madness. By the time she reunited with Jared, half the town had vanished and those who remained had either turned into drooling savages or had simply become different. Some of the neighborhood children had simply vanished…but the ones who lingered became ghosts of their former selves, faceless little nymphs hiding out in the surrounding woods. It was as if the creatures could not properly meld with children, that they corrupted them visually and ruined them.
Jared’s plan was to get out of town ASAP, but unfortunately he was having trouble starting his Subaru. Gunning the accelerator while the vehicle straddled a snowbank achieved nothing except for igniting a small fire beneath the undercarriage. Jared cursed and panicked but, as it turned out, the fire kept the snow-things away. Fire, Jared told her, could hurt them, maybe even kill them. It had been Jare
d’s idea to hurry over to the Pack-N-Go for containers of lighter fluid so they could make torches…but when they got there, the proprietor, George Farmer, had changed. And something had gotten inside Jared, too.
She’d had to shoot him, bring him down. She could still see his head coming apart in her mind’s eye…
These thoughts, along with a thousand others from the past week, cluttered Shawna’s mind as she crouched down in the holly bushes, staring at the back of Rita Tubalow’s house. Her whole body felt numb and her breath was becoming shallower and shallower. As much as she hated to consider this alternative, she knew she had to get out of the cold as soon as possible, not to mention away from those things that were pursuing her…which meant ditching into the nearest shelter.
What if those things are in that house? Those things like Tim Kopeck and Delia Overmeyer?
It was a risk she’d have to take.
When she finally felt more in control of herself, she stood. She was aware of a ripping sensation followed by a surge of pain that raced up her left leg—Fred Wilkinson’s stitches coming undone.
In pain, she hustled across the snow-covered yard toward Rita’s house. Glancing over her shoulder, she was horrified to find spatters of blood left behind in the snow.
She hid briefly in the shadow of the raised deck, catching her breath. Suddenly, the rifle hanging from her shoulder weighed about a thousand pounds. Her breath wheezing through her tightening throat, she leaned forward and looked in either direction, examining the neighboring yards for signs of life. Or signs of…something other…
There were no broken windows at the back of the house that Shawna could find. That was how they got in. Through the chimneys, too, of course. Or open doors. Any way in at all.
Slinking along the concrete wall, Shawna made her way to the basement door. Curling her numb fingers around the doorknob, she said a silent prayer to a god she did not believe in before trying to turn it.
It turned. Blessedly.
She eased it open and waited to see if anything would rush out at her. The rifle at the ready, she counted to ten. Nothing came for her. She leaned into the doorway and examined a basement as black as the solar system. Sniffing the air, she braced herself for that decaying, dead-animal stink they carried with them, but the place just smelled musty and unused. Not dangerous.