Jake watched him for a moment, then shivered and started toward the truck.
“What are you doing?” Lenny called over the shriek of the wind.
“I want to check on Carl. See if he’s okay.”
“If he is, let me know. I want to give him what-for. Damn fool almost ran us down.”
Jake reached the truck and resisted the urge to warm his hands over the heat flooding from beneath the warped hood. He was so cold now that all consideration for Lenny and his quest had frozen and shattered. He was going home, he decided, which was where he knew he belonged, ghosts of light and shadow bedamned. He would drink the memory of Julia’s death and the ticking of that accursed deathwatch away, if only for a few hours, and if it led him to the box beneath the bed again, then so be it. Misery had been his lot for too long now and the ice on his bones only fed it.
Rubbing his hands together, he moved around to the driver side door and tugged on the handle. Something cracked but the door did not open. The glass was pebbled with ice and through it he could see the dim green glow of the instrument panel.
He looked back to where Lenny was still staring at the snow. “Lenny, I need your help. The door’s stuck!”
Lenny looked up, but if he replied, his words were stolen by the wind.
“Lenny!”
No answer.
Great.
Jake turned back to the door.
And heard a dull thump as a horribly misshapen head flattened itself against the glass.
“Christ!” Jake jolted, his body immediately flushed with the welcome warmth of adrenaline as his hand clamped over his heart. The heat rapidly abated however, replaced by an inner cold that radiated outward.
The electric control for the window whined and slid down a crack, before stalling, ice grinding and snapping against the rim.
Jake composed himself and moved closer, his heart thumping so hard it almost hurt, his breath wheezing from his lungs.
Too much, he thought. This is too much to handle. I need to get home.
It had to be the frosting on the window that made the silhouette in the vehicle seem so out of proportion, for surely no one could survive with that much of their head missing. The green glow from the dashboard illuminated the slope of a bleached white cheek. Shuddering.
“Carl?” Jake called, pressing his hands to the glass and struggling to make out the man’s features. “Carl, are you all right in there?”
The shadow bobbed, twitched, moved away from the glass, as if the man was stretching. Or in pain.
“Carl? Can you talk?”
The whisper that floated out from the cracked window made Jake move back a step as he frowned at the window and the flinching figure behind it.
“Yesssssss,” it said.
Jake composed himself. He imagined Carl lying in there, bloodied and broken and in urgent need of attention. Now was not the time for fear no matter how unsettling the situation might be.
But God, it was so damn cold.
“Carl, can you move? Are you hurt?”
The figure jerked.
The reply: “They knowwwwww.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Theyyyy knowwwwww.”
“’They know’ what?”
A gurgling sound that might have been a chuckle. Or a man choking on his own blood.
“Carl?”
Silence from inside the truck.
“Carl? Answer me. Can you open the door?”
No answer.
“Carl? Shit!” Jake slapped his palm against the window, knocking away more of the ice. He sighed a cloud of frustration and wiped a hand over his face. His touch was warm against the cold of his cheeks.
Inside the truck, tendrils of shadow rose.
Jake backed away. “Lenny?”
“Is he in one piece?”
Jake was relieved to hear his friend’s voice because for just a moment a marrow-freezing panic had taken hold of him, filling him with certainty that when he turned around, Lenny would be gone.
“I don’t know,” he called back. “Maybe. I can’t tell, but I can’t get the door open either.”
He turned to find Lenny shivering but moving toward him.
“Let’s go find help,” Jake said. “The door is stuck fast. The longer we spend trying to get him out ourselves, the more chance he stands of dying in there if he’s hurt bad enough. Let’s just keep going, make our way to the police station and get them to come back for him. It’s too goddamn cold here anyway.”
He couldn’t keep the desperation from his voice and saw it reflected in Lenny’s eyes, but no argument was proffered. The night was freezing fast and hard and they both knew they could die out here if the snow got so thick they lost their way.
They could send help. Assuming things didn’t get so bad that they ended up being the ones in need of it.
A blast of wind-borne snow lashed into them, making Jake rock on his feet, the icy cold licking against his uncovered neck. “Shit!”
Lenny nodded, teeth clicking together as a shiver rippled through him. “Let’s go.”
* * *
They continued on into the storm, neither of them saying a word.
Jake had never seen the town so quiet, so deserted and he didn’t like it. The absence of the streetlights made an alien landscape of Miriam’s Cove, the hollow roar of the sea beyond Patterson’s Point lost beneath the faint hissing as the snow fell in endless waves, white dunes heaping themselves high against the somber black buildings. The darkness weighed down upon them, a smothering thing.
They turned into what memory told them was Lewis Avenue, a narrow street which opened out onto Cove Central.
Jake could no longer feel his toes, and the cold was spreading. His coat felt like a sheet of plastic, the thickness of it rendered impotent by his fall in the snow.
When they entered Cove Central, it was as if they’d tripped a wire hidden in the snow. They stopped dead in their tracks, their eyes following the lamps around the thoroughfare as each one stuttered back on, flooding the area with harsh white light.
“That’s something at least,” Lenny said, nodding once in wearied satisfaction. “Maybe now we’ll be able to see where we going.”
“Yeah,” Jake agreed. At the sight of the drifts piling high against the buildings and smothering the cars, he felt that knot of fear in his throat tighten. He had thought the snow hungry before, but now that he could fully appreciate the depth and the sheer mass of it, he amended that description. It was not hungry. It was ravenous. And no matter how implausible it was to think of snow as anything but innocent, to attribute such a natural thing with sentience, he knew there was something wrong with it. Something terrible hiding in it. And like bleeding swimmers in a shark-filled ocean, here the two of them stood, up to their shins in the stuff.
So let’s engage this little madness for a moment shall we? a quieter, more reasonable voice in his head piped up, and assume you’re right. Why then, has it not already killed you?
He didn’t want to think about that. Couldn’t, because aside from the fear and the inexplicable dread he was valiantly attempting to blame on the barbed wire coils of grief, he sensed something bigger at work here – something far more peculiar and unpleasant than unseen things in the snow. He felt led. Yes, that was it. He felt as if a hook had snagged in his soul and someone, something somewhere was slowly reeling him in.
The night had become a strange place, unfamiliar, unkind and filled with latent malice.
Carl Stewart was more than likely freezing to death, if not already dead from his injuries, lying there alone in the battered shell of his snowplow.
Joanne Quick was missing, or worse, a possibility that had to have settled itself on Lenny’s shoulders, ageing him terribly as he struggled through the drifts to uncover a truth that might destroy his world.
The police station dominated the east end of the square, a narrow two story red brick building, unremarkable except for the cast iron bl
ack bars over the windows, making it look like it had been designed by an aged cowboy pining for the days of the old jails. Clumps of snow sat like sleeping cats in the gutters and atop the windowsills. Over the door, a brass sign marred by verdigris read: MIRIAM’S COVE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.
Lenny paused at the foot of the wide stone steps leading up to the station. He frowned. Jake drew abreast of him and rested his hip against the low wall that bordered the steps, relieving some of the pressure from his aching joints but cementing the cold into his flesh.
Jake didn’t have to ask why Lenny had stopped.
Even though the streetlights had come back on, the police station’s windows were dark.
They stood together in silence for a moment, then Lenny sighed. “I can’t figure it out. This is like a bad Twilight Zone episode or something. Looks like everybody’s gone. Are we dreaming?”
Though he knew Lenny wasn’t serious, but rather speaking from frustration and more than a little fear, a similar thought had occurred to Jake and, like Lenny, he had been unable to completely dismiss it as fancy. Dreams were not bound by natural law and wasn’t that how things seemed in the town tonight? Jake wished it to be so, some inner part of him warmed by the idea of waking in his bed to find none of this had happened outside of his own feverish imaginings.
But the hope was weak.
The cold was real, too real to pin on a dream.
And let’s face it buddy, even if it was a dream, the real world ain’t so friggin’ hot for you these days, is it?
“Maybe we should head back just in case Baxter’s waiting at your house.”
“Maybe,” Jake said. “But I’m a little leery about following your suggestions after that last one about me getting out of the house.” He grinned feebly and folded his arms. “Let’s check out the station first. Maybe they’ll at least have some still-warm coffee. If we can get in at all.”
Lenny nodded and headed up the steps. Jake followed, wincing. He whispered a silent prayer that the door would be unlocked.
Just one break. Please. Just one.
Lenny slipped his fingers around the brass door handle, thumbed down the button and pulled. Ice crunched and tumbled from the crack in the doorjamb but the door did not move.
Jake sagged. “It’s a goddamn night for locked doors, isn’t it?”
Lenny didn’t reply, but turned, a scowl on his face.
“Can you see inside?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Maybe they just locked the place up because of the storm?”
Lenny offered him a tired smile. “For a grieving man, you’re sure quick with the sunshine.”
“Call it desperation. I’m sick to death of this cold.”
“Then maybe we should kick the doors down.”
“Right, breaking and entering into a police station. That’ll be one for the books. Assuming of course we had the strength in our legs to even try without crippling ourselves.”
Lenny snorted and gestured out over the thoroughfare. “Doesn’t look like there’d be many witnesses though, huh?”
“No. Guess not.”
With a satisfied nod, Lenny turned back to the door. “Oh JESUS!”
Jake’s scalp prickled and he took two paces back from the door, almost expecting it to explode outward with the same force that now held his heart in its hands. “What? What is it?”
Lenny was standing stock-still, arms by his sides, staring in through the rectangular glass panel on the left side of the door.
“Lenny?”
“I…I saw someone.”
“Saw who?” Ignoring the fresh bursts of pain that coruscated across his knees at the suddenness of his movements and propelled by renewed hope, Jake rushed to join Lenny at the window. He almost screamed when he saw a white, hollow-eyed face leering back at him from the glass, but then it shrank and vanished only to reappear at the behest of Lenny’s breath. Condensation, nothing more, but it had almost been enough to prompt those invisible hands into giving his heart a final squeeze. With a sigh, he squinted to see through the window.
Beyond the glass, the suffused light from the street allowed him a glimpse of a pale rectangular smudge which might have been the desk sergeant’s computer. Like imitation moonlight, the silvery glow shining through the high windows sent fractured streaks across the tile-floor hallway. The hall ran toward the back of the building until darkness claimed it.
The station seemed as deserted as the rest of town, but in there, as out here, there were plenty of hiding places.
Lenny’s tremulous breath rumbled in his ear.
Still scanning the hall, Jake asked: “What did you see?”
“A woman.”
“Did you recognize her?”
“No.”
“Well…why didn’t you try and get her attention?”
He felt Lenny shrug. “The way she looked, I didn’t want to get her attention.”
“How did she look?”
“Dead,” Lenny said simply. “Or damn close.”
Lenny didn’t answer, but his breathing had slowed. Jake guessed whatever had spooked him had already rationalized itself in his mind now that he’d said it aloud. But that still left the question of who was inside the station. Jake cupped his hands around his face, and tried one last time to see if he could detect movement from inside.
Lenny’s breathing quickened almost immediately, thundering in Jake’s ear and heating the flesh there.
Inside the station, nothing moved.
“In all my years in this town I don’t think I’ve ever seen the police station locked up, for any reason. So why now?”
No answer.
“It’s bad but not bad enough to evacuate a building as solid as this one, don’t you think?”
No answer.
We have to get home or we’ll die out here, Jake thought as a wave of cold rushed up his back, making his teeth chatter.
“We better go back,” he said.
Lenny’s only response was his frightened breathing, now so loud that after a few moments Jake pushed away and rubbed a tickle from his ear. “Would y– ?” he began but stopped just as fast, one hand still clamped to the side of his head.
He noticed two things at once.
First, it was no longer snowing, but any joy he might have felt at that realization drained from him almost immediately.
Because Lenny was gone.
But he was just here! Right next to me. Breathing like a horse in my bloody ear!
His own breath shriveled before his face then, eyes widening as something dreadful occurred to him.
At least you think it was Lenny.
With a furtive glance around the town square from his vantage point atop the steps, Jake yelled Lenny’s name, once, twice, then waited.
The town listened, but did not respond.
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 h
im 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.
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 115