by Beverley Lee
Gabriel murmured and she dropped to one knee to balance him. A noise, like the skittering of a thousand insects, skipped across the floor and a frigid breeze passed so close to her face that it swept her hair from her brow. She recoiled in horror, burying her face against Gabriel’s head.
The lights went out. And stayed out.
In total darkness a slow scraping began. The dragging of furniture across the floor. The skittering was everywhere at once, on the walls, under the floor, behind her in the chimney. All she could do was hold Gabriel tight and pray.
Suddenly, the skittering stopped. Beth held her breath. Gabriel stopped mid-cry. The light in the kitchen flickered first, then the one in the hallway.
She gasped, a sharp intake of breath that made Gabriel whimper. All of the furniture stood, heaped in the centre of the room. A pile of chairs and tables and lamps, defying the laws of gravity and reason. A dining chair supported a side table with the sofa balanced on one edge. Out to the side, like wings, were the two high-backed chairs from the fireside. A standard lamp stood upside down, its cord trailing down into space. But it was lit. She stared in disbelief, half expecting for it all to come crashing down and crush them.
She glanced down at Gabriel. He was staring transfixed at the hearth. She followed his gaze. Thin tendrils of smoke drifted in from the chimney—two swirling lines that came together, then separated, curling inside itself, lazily tasting the air.
With trembling legs, Beth forced herself to stand. The smoke rose, spreading in a slow, measured ebb and flow. It looked like it was breathing. She was beyond fear now, trapped in that primeval place of fight or flight.
She ran for the kitchen, where her phone lay on the countertop. Grabbing it, she stuffed it into her pocket as she made for the door. Better to take their chances outside than stay another moment with whatever had infested their home. But desperation and agitation crushed that tiny, nurtured hope. She had double bolted the door earlier—when she thought throwing the box in the snow would fix everything.
Gabriel squirmed in her arms, his wide blue eyes fearful. It was her job to keep him safe. Something kicked into place deep within her. She whirled, sliding the top bolt open with one forceful push. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the insidious smoke curling through the kitchen, long tendrils like bony fingers, searching.
She kicked the bottom bolt with her foot. A sharp pain coursed through her ankle but she kicked it again. It gave, begrudgingly, and she yanked open the door. There, blocking them in, was a snowdrift—at least four feet tall. Her stomach lurched; they weren’t going anywhere.
She pulled out her phone but it slipped from her fingers, clattering onto the stone tiles. The screen shattered. This was it then. She had backed them into a corner and the snow had sealed them into a winter tomb.
‘Please....please.’ She begged now, all other options exhausted. ‘Don’t hurt my baby.’ Tears ran down her face and Gabriel grabbed for them, his own eyes filling up.
The smoke darkened and rose until it became a pillar. She stood with the open door behind her, one hand shielding Gabriel’s face. Stars glittered overhead. It had stopped snowing. Somewhere in the woods, a fox barked.
Beth Davenport stared into the depths of the pillar, certain that she was looking straight into her own demise.
Chapter Six
Reverend Noah Isaacs cursed under his breath, which wasn’t very fitting considering his vocation. Snow piled over the top of his wellingtons, melting and filling them with a freezing cold slush. He pulled the hood of his winter parka more snugly around his chin and continued his laborious, high-stepping journey up the lane. His car lay in a ditch about half a mile away. Not his best decision to try and make it home. Whoever said that God looked after his own clearly hadn’t a clue.
The call to visit Mrs. Langley had come early. The vicarage phone rang as he sat eating toast, watching the local news. It had to be one of his older parishioners—everyone else used his mobile. Joan Seymour, who always went to help Irene Langley out of bed, was obviously upset.
‘Can you come now, Father? I don’t think she has long left.’
Noah oozed sympathy whilst chewing his toast at the other side of his mouth and ruminating on why she addressed him as ‘father’ despite the fact that he wasn’t Roman Catholic. He should have known. A cold snap like this usually finished off the most fragile of his flock.
Irene Langley had departed this world at 4.10 p.m. and it had taken until around 7 to make the necessary arrangements. By then, the snow lay far too deep for most people to even consider trying a car journey, but Noah didn’t relish the idea of spending the night with his dead parishioner. Just because he dealt in death didn’t mean he actually liked it.
He stared into the darkness, his torch beam bouncing back from the whiteout surface. Damn the no street lights ruling. One day, he would get a job somewhere nearer civilisation. The hedges loomed like sleeping albino mammoths. He had no idea how far he had come. The landmark post box in the wall had been obliterated along with everything else. The road curved—or was that his snow-blind imagination? He rubbed his eyes with the back of a cold, stiff glove.
In the darkness, a lonely light shone out. Noah swiped the wet hair out of his eyes. Frigid air stiffened his brows and lashes. He didn’t know where the light was coming from, but he hoped someone inside would take pity on a half frozen and soaked-to-the-skin man of the cloth. Spurred on by the thought of a good cup of tea—or something stronger—he battled on.
He seemed to have been struggling knee deep in the thick snow for hours. Every single muscle in his body screamed in protest. He couldn’t feel his feet or his face. But at least it had finally stopped snowing.
Constellations winked down on him with tireless disinterest. Throwing back his hood, he raised his head, his laboured breath coming in small white clouds. Orion, The Plough, The Big Dipper—he knew them all. It had been a toss-up between astronomy and faith when he had to make a career choice. God had won out, but he sometimes wondered if his calling had been a drunken decision based on the amount of holiday time he assumed the clergy received.
The light seemed definitely closer now and he could make out the shape of the building. Must be the old farmhouse the couple from London had bought in the summer. Eleanor Grimsby, the woman who cleaned for him, had said they had a baby too. But they weren’t churchgoers.
Noah stopped and rubbed the back of his neck. The fine hairs at his nape had begun to prickle. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. At nearing forty, he knew that when instinct punched you in the gut, you listened.
He nearly walked straight into the gate by the hedge; his eyes were glued on the open doorway, and the churning in his stomach had nothing to do with the chicken sandwich Joan Seymour had put in front of him at lunch.
‘Hello?’ His voice sounded odd in the winter stillness. Why was the door wide open on a night like this?
He blinked hard. Twice. Could that be smoke? He watched, transfixed for a moment. His skin chilled. But not from cold. He slipped his hand into his pocket and closed around a small book of psalms. Irene Langley had been particularly fond of psalms.
‘Hello? Is everything okay?’
The gate stood solid against his pushes, so he gave up and clambered over, cursing again as his feet floundered for grip in the drifts. Snow shoes, he thought. When this is over, I’ll buy snow shoes. I’m too unfit to be carrying on like this.
He tucked the book inside the front of his coat, somehow glad of its closeness. From inside the farmhouse, a baby cried. It was the sound of acute distress.
Noah found strength from a sudden flush of adrenaline, pushing through the snow with legs that were both numb and on fire. He didn’t want to believe that the smoke was behaving erratically. It seemed as if it were forming the shape of...
He drew out the psalm book and held it aloft.
‘This is the word of God!’
The pillar of smoke stopped moving. Noah tho
ught the glint of an eye opened from somewhere deep within, but surely that had to be a trick of the light? A terrible skittering echoed over the snow and the baby’s cry grew louder.
‘Leave the child!’ Noah took a guess and a gamble. The psalm book felt warm and comforting in his hand. ‘He is a member of the Christian church. You will not taint him.’
It could all go horribly wrong. If the baby was a girl. If the child had not been christened. After all, it wasn’t traditional anymore. And what if the parents weren’t Christian? Thoughts flickered through Noah’s mind but he quenched them, sending them spiralling down into his unconscious.
Halfway down the path, Noah’s boot caught something hidden in the snow. He fell, coughing and spluttering, aware of the silence as the snow swallowed him whole. He dropped the book and scrabbled madly for it, frozen fingers closing over the spine as if it was a hotline to heaven. Above him, the stars still watched. With some difficulty, he found his legs again and raised his head and shoulders above the snow line. The smoke rushed at him in a plume of noxious air, filling his nose and lungs, suffocating the breath from his body. Inside his skull, a voice hissed—a frustrated and thwarted serpent’s tongue, the words alien but filled with venom.
Just as Noah thought he might pass out, his breathing eased. White lights flashed behind his eyes, and then they were plunged into darkness.
The smoke hovered above him, blocking his view of the stars. Then, with a noise like sucking air from a bottle, it condensed into a small, black ball and disappeared.
Noah eased himself from the confines of his snow hole, not wanting to believe what he had witnessed. Did being close to hypothermia make you hallucinate? But his gut told him this had been no hallucination.
The baby’s cries sounded weaker now. Alarmed, Noah clambered to his feet, pushing himself through the last wall of snow before the doorway. The drift finally gave way to the level ground of the entrance. A woman sat hunched on the floor with her back towards the door, her arms around an infant dressed in pyjamas. Noah knelt down, his knees cracking. His arms trembled.
‘You’re safe now,’ he murmured, reaching for the woman’s hand. It was ice cold.
She lifted her head, her dark hair dusted with snowflakes. Her eyes looked right through him. Noah’s breath left his body in a long exhale. The baby started to wail again, its lower lip quivering at the sight of a stranger.
The woman didn’t move. She was in an extreme state of shock. Noah had seen it once in his college days when a student jumped from a four-storey accommodation block. The young woman who witnessed it had that same expression on her face.
But they couldn’t stay in the doorway; they would freeze to death. Although the snow had stopped, a chill north wind whistled over the fields. Noah gently eased the baby from the woman’s arms. It squirmed in his grip, despite all the shushing noises he made. He didn’t have any experience with infants, apart from the odd christening that might come his way. They were tiny versions of adults with no sense of reasoning.
He held the baby tightly, in what he hoped was the right way, and walked into the living room. It felt wrong to be in someone’s house without an invite. He stopped dead and his mouth fell open.
All of the furniture lay in a makeshift heap in the middle of the room, like someone—something—had been planning a giant bonfire. An old-fashioned pram lay tipped to one side near the hearth. He righted it with one hand, straightening the crumpled bedding inside. A blue, felt rabbit with a happy smile stared up at him. A boy then. At least that part of his guess had turned out right. Carefully, he laid the baby down. The noise level of his upset increased. But Noah knew he had to get the woman into some warmth.
A throw lay on the ground in the doorway that led to the hall. He picked it up, his eyes still drawn to the pile of furniture. What in God’s name had caused that? But God had had nothing to do with it.
In the outside doorway, the woman hadn’t moved. He slid his arm around her and hoisted her to her feet. She made no attempt to help or deter him. Her eyes, staring and desolate, bored through his skull. She let him walk her into the kitchen, but she froze solid at the sight of the living room. Noah eased her down onto a kitchen chair and wrapped the throw around her shoulders.
He paddled through the slush in the hallway, and putting his whole weight against the front door, managed to close it. The remains of a mobile phone lay scattered in the mess, bits of broken screen floating like little boats. He slid the bolts shut with a resounding click and the boiler fired up with a reassuring belch. At least the house should start to warm now.
He knelt down beside the woman and grasped her cold hand. ‘You have nothing to be afraid of. My name is Noah Isaacs. I’m the Reverend at St Jude’s at the top of the hill. Your baby is safe. Can you tell me your name?’
The woman didn’t acknowledge that he was even there.
Noah looked around the kitchen. By the coffee maker, a few unopened letters sat on the counter. He flicked through them and found a postcard with a photo of a Swiss chalet at the top of a picturesque mountain. Feeling like a voyeur, Noah turned it over.
Dear Stu, Beth and Gabriel,
Perfect ski-ing weather. Chalet great and the girls feed us a banquet every night. Sorry you couldn’t come this year, maybe next? Gabriel can learn to ski before he can run!
Love,
Amy and Steve
Knowing their names made Noah feel more comfortable. The baby (Gabriel) had quietened a little bit. Noah tiptoed in and found him chewing the end of his thumb. His colour seemed better.
Noah searched around but couldn’t find a house phone. His mobile was missing in action. It must have slid off the dashboard when his car met with the ditch. He sighed as he peeled off his soaking coat and his boots. Lumps of snow fell out onto the floor. His thighs itched as feeling slowly began to seep through his numb flesh. He went upstairs and grabbed a towel from the bathroom.
The main bedroom door stood open. It was a pretty room with vintage, floral curtains and a cream iron bedstead. A canvas hung above the bed. A wedding shot of the woman downstairs. She was smiling, dark hair swept into an elegant bun. The man beside her, a few inches taller, gazed down on his new bride with adoration. The woman in the kitchen resembled a cardboard cut-out of this image.
A floorboard creaked under Noah’s feet and he stopped, holding his breath. Whatever had been in this house had gone, but the sense of it remained.
He poked his head around the other doors. There was the nursery, with families of little orange lions dancing about, and a jungle mobile with brightly-coloured parrots and giraffes that hung above the cot. There was nothing to suggest anything bad had happened. The other room, stuffed with suitcases and general clutter, had that certain air of a room not often used. Noah went downstairs, his mind trying to pull rational thought out of the mire he had wandered into.
Beth still hadn’t moved, but he managed to half walk, half manoeuvre her into the living room. She stopped suddenly, her eyes fixed on the upheaval of furniture. He didn’t want to force her to move, but the chaos in here was obviously unsettling her. He left her standing, her face devoid of any colour, whilst he pulled and righted tables and chairs from the heap. The sofa weighed a ton. He pushed it across the floor in a crab-like fashion, then gently moved a sleeping Gabriel beside it. Beth watched him with her arms hanging listlessly at her sides.
Noah led her to the sofa. He had to physically move her shoulders and pick up her legs to make her lay down but finally, she accepted. He covered her with the throw. As an afterthought, he grabbed his psalm book from where he had dumped it in the kitchen, and tucked it under her arm. He hoped it would bring her a little peace.
They were totally cut off from the outside world. All he could do was wait it out and hope that by tomorrow, someone would pass by. He made some tea and toast, still trying to make sense of what had happened and try to forget it at the same time. There was only one person he could go to about this—the only man who wouldn’
t think he had been at the whiskey too much, or had managed to lose half of his marbles in the cold.
Chapter Seven
Stu Davenport was brought back down to earth by the bartender’s bored monotone.
‘A refill, sir?’ he asked, in the kind of voice that couldn’t have given a damn whether Stu said yes, no, or are there Martians in the restaurant? Stu tapped his fingers along the side of his glass. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, under the optics; a man in an open shirt, with tired eyes and hair that needed a decent cut, stared back at him.
‘No, thanks,’ he replied, sliding from the barstool. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
All the way into work, he had chewed over how edgy Beth had been that morning. She wasn’t the kind of woman who did needy. It was her independence (and wicked sense of humour) that had drawn him to her in the first place.
He didn’t realise how bad the weather had got until after he had come out of his conference call. The police were already advising people not to travel, which was all well and good if you were tucked up at home and not staring out of the office window, weighing the odds of getting home in one piece. Stu was on his way out of the office, quite prepared to take his chance on the roads, when Alan King, one of the contractors on this latest project, had called him from another room.
‘Stu, wait up!’ A shiny bald head flashed by the interior window and appeared in the doorway with its owner. ‘Just had the traffic update on. The motorway is at gridlock. Some idiot ran into the back of a milk tanker and there’s only one lane open. I don’t think you’ve got much chance of getting through.’
Alan was a nice enough guy, but he was one of those people who liked a bit of drama. Stu swore under his breath.
‘I could cut through, go cross country.’ Mentally, he was already out of the door.
Alan paused, for effect. ‘The loop road is shut anyway—bridge repairs—and my wife rang to say the B roads going your way are hellish. The snowploughs haven’t even been out yet. Typical Brit weather panic.’ He grinned.