by Dean Koontz
They stopped at a market on the north shore, a large but rustic building shadowed by tamarack and spruce. They still had most of the groceries they’d bought in Santa Barbara yesterday, the stuff they’d never had a chance to put in the refrigerator and cupboards at the Wile-Away Lodge. They’d disposed of the perishables, of course, and that was what they stocked up on now: milk, eggs, cheese, ice cream, and frozen foods of all kinds.
At Charlie’s request, the cashier packed the frozen food in a sturdy cardboard box with a lid, separate from the goods that were not frozen. In the parking lot, Charlie carefully poked a few holes in the box. He had purchased nylon clothesline in the market, and with Christine’s assistance, he threaded the rope through the holes and looped it around the box and secured it to the luggage rack on top of the Jeep. The temperature was below freezing; nothing carried on the roof would thaw on the way to the cabin.
As they worked (with Chewbacca watching interestedly from inside the Jeep), Christine noticed that a lot of the cars in the market lot were fitted with ski racks. She had always wanted to learn to ski. She often promised herself that she would take lessons with Joey one day, the two of them beginning and learning together, just as soon as he seemed old enough. It would have been fun. Now it was probably just one more thing they would never get to do together . . .
That was a damned grim thought. Uncharacteristically grim.
She knew she had to keep her spirits up, if only for Joey’s sake. He would sense her pessimism and would crawl away even deeper into the psychological hole he seemed to be digging for himself.
But she couldn’t shake off the gloom that weighed her down. Her spirits had sunk, and there seemed to be no way to get them afloat again.
She told herself to enjoy the crisp, clean mountain air. But it just seemed painfully, bitingly cold. If a wind sprang up, the weather would be insufferable.
She told herself that the snow was beautiful and that she should enjoy it. It looked wet, cold, and forbidding.
She looked at Joey. He was standing beside her, watching as Charlie tied the final knot in the clothesline. He was more like a little old man than a child. He didn’t make a snowball. He didn’t stick out his tongue and catch snowflakes. He didn’t run and slide on the icy portions of the parking lot. He didn’t do any of the things a small boy could be expected to do when setting foot on a snowy landscape for the first time in his life.
He’s just tired, and so am I, Christine told herself. It’s been a long day. Neither of us has had a restful night since last Saturday. Once we’ve had a good supper, once we’ve each gotten eight solid hours in the sack without nightmares and without waking up a dozen times to the imagined sound of footsteps . . . then we’ll feel better. Sure we will. Sure.
But she couldn’t convince herself either that she would feel better tomorrow or that their circumstances would improve. In spite of all the distance they’d driven and the remoteness of the haven toward which they were making their way, she did not feel safe. It wasn’t just that there were a couple of thousand religious fanatics who, more than anything else, wanted them dead. That was bad enough. But there was also something curiously suffocating about the huge trees rising on all sides and pressing close from every direction, something claustrophobic about the way the mountains walled them in, an indefinable menace in the stark shadows and the gray winter light of this high fastness. She would never feel safe here.
But it wasn’t just the mountains. She wouldn’t have felt safer anywhere else.
They left the main road that circled the lake, turned onto a two-lane blacktop that rose up a series of steep slopes, past expensive homes and getaway chalets that were tucked back in among the densely packed and massive trees. If there hadn’t been light in those houses, glowing warmly in the purple-black shadows beneath the trees, you wouldn’t have known most of them were there. Even on the dayside of eventide, lights were needed here.
Snow was piled high on both sides of the road, and in some places new drifts reduced traffic to a single lane. Not that there were many other vehicles around: They passed only two—another Jeep wagon with a plow on the front, and a Toyota Land Rover.
Near the end of the paved road, Charlie decided it would be a good idea to put the chains on the tires. Although a plow had been through recently, the drifts were inching farther across the pavement here than on the lower slopes, and there were bigger patches of ice. He pulled into a driveway, which ran across the face of the mountain and was level, stopped, and got the chains from the back. He required twenty minutes to complete the job, and he was unhappily aware of how fast the sunlight was fading from behind the snow-spitting clouds.
With chains clanking, they drove on, and soon the paved road ended in a one-lane dirt track. This, too, was plowed for the first half mile, but because it was narrower than the lower road, it tended to drift shut faster. Nevertheless, slowly but steadily, the Jeep clawed its way upward.
Charlie didn’t attempt to keep a conversation going. There was no point in making the effort. Ever since they’d left Sacramento earlier in the day, Christine had become steadily less communicative. Now, she was almost as silent and withdrawn as Joey.
He was dismayed by the change in her, but he understood why she was having difficulty staving off depression. The mountains, which usually conveyed an uplifting feeling of openness and freedom, now seemed paradoxically restraining, oppressive. Even when they passed through a broad meadow and the trees fell back from the roadway, the mood of the landscape didn’t change.
Christine was probably wondering if coming here had been a serious mistake.
Charlie was wondering, too.
But there had been nowhere else to go. With Grace’s people looking for them, with the police searching for them throughout California, unable to trust the authorities or even Charlie’s own employees, they hadn’t much choice but to go to ground in a place where no one would spot them, which meant a place with few people.
Charlie told himself that they had done the wisest thing, that they had been cautious in the purchase of the Jeep, that they had planned well and had moved with admirable speed and flexibility, that they were in control of their destiny. They would probably be here only a week or so, until Grace Spivey was brought to heel either by his own men or the police.
But in spite of what he told himself, he felt as if they were out of control, fleeing in near-panic. The mountain seemed not a haven but a trap. He felt as if they had walked out on a gangplank.
He tried to stop thinking about it. He knew he wasn’t being entirely rational. For the moment, his emotions had the upper hand. Until he could think calmly again, it was best to put Grace Spivey out of his mind as much as possible.
There were considerably fewer houses and cabins along the dirt lane than there had been along the paved road, and after a third of a mile there were none visible at all.
At the end of the first half mile, the dirt road was no longer plowed. It vanished under several feet of snow. Charlie stopped the Jeep, pulled on the emergency brake, and switched off the engine.
“Where’s the cabin?” Christine asked.
“Half a mile from here.”
“What now?”
“We walk.”
“In snowshoes?”
“Yep. That’s why we bought ’em.”
“I’ve never used them before.”
“You can learn.”
“Joey—”
“We’ll take turns carrying him. Then he can stay at the cabin while you and I come back for—”
“Stay there by himself?”
“He’ll have the dog, and he’ll be perfectly safe. Spivey can’t have known we were coming here; she’s not around anywhere.”
Joey didn’t object. He didn’t even appear to hear what they’d said. He was staring out the window, but he couldn’t be looking at anything because the glass was fogged by his breath.
Charlie got out of the station wagon and winced as the winter air bit at his
face. It had grown considerably colder since they had left the market down by the lake. The snowflakes were enormous and falling faster than before. They spun down from the lowering sky on a gently shifting breeze that became a little less gentle, more insistent, even as he paused for a moment to look around at the forest. The trees shouldered against one another and seemed to be crouching, ready to pounce, at the edges of the meadow.
For some reason he thought of an old fairytale: Little Red Riding Hood. He could still remember the spooky illustration in the storybook he’d had when he’d been a child, a picture of Red making her way through a gloomy, wolf-haunted forest.
That made him think of Hansel and Gretel, lost in the woods.
And that made him think of witches.
Witches who baked children in ovens and ate them.
Jesus, he had never realized how gruesome some fairytales were!
The snowflakes had grown slightly smaller and were falling faster by the second.
Softly, softly, the wind began to howl.
Christine was surprised by how quickly she learned to walk in the cumbersome snowshoes, and she realized how difficult—and perhaps impossible—the journey would have been without them, especially with the heavy backpacks they carried. In some places, the wind had almost scoured the meadow bare, but in other places, wherever the land presented even the slightest windbreak, drifts had piled up eight, ten, or twelve feet deep, even deeper. And of course snow had filled in every gully and hole and basin in the land. If you were to attempt to cross an unseen depression without snowshoes, you might find yourself sinking down into a deep well of snow out of which it would be difficult or impossible to climb.
The gray afternoon light, which had a disconcerting artificial quality, played tricks with snow glare and shadow, giving a false sense of distance, distorting shapes. Sometimes it even caused a mounting ridge of snow to look like a depression until she reached it and realized she must climb instead of descend as she’d expected.
Joey found it more difficult to adapt to snowshoes than she did, even though he had a small pair suitable for a child. Because the day was fast fading and because they didn’t want to finish unloading the Jeep entirely in the dark, they didn’t have time for him to learn snowshoeing right now. Charlie picked him up and carried him.
Chewbacca was a big dog but still light enough so he didn’t break through the crust on top of the snow. He also had an instinct for avoiding places where the crust was thin or nonexistent, and he could often find his way around the deepest snow, moving from one wind-scoured spot to another. Three times he sank in; once he was able to dig his way up and out by himself, but twice he had to be helped.
From the abandoned Jeep, they went up a slope for three hundred yards, until they reached the end of the meadow. They followed the snow-hidden road into the trees, bearing right along the top of a broad ridge, with a table of forested land on their right and a tree-choked valley on their left. Even though nightfall was still perhaps an hour away, the valley dropped down through shades of gray and blue and purple, finally into blackness, and there were no spots of light down there, so she supposed there were no dwellings.
By now she knew that Charlie was a considerably more formidable man than either his size or general appearance would indicate, but she was nevertheless surprised by his stamina. Her own backpack was beginning to feel like a truckload of cement blocks, but though Charlie’s pack was bigger and heavier than hers, he did not seem to be bothered by it. In addition, he carried Joey without complaint and stopped only once in the first quarter-mile to put the boy down and relieve cramping muscles.
After a hundred yards, the road angled away from the rim of the valley, moving across the mountain instead of uphill, but then turned and sloped upward again in another fifty yards. The trees became thicker and bigger and bushier, and in places the sheltered lane was so deep in shadow that night might as well have come already. In time they arrived at the foot of another meadow, broader than the one where they’d parked the Jeep, and about four hundred yards long.
“There’s the cabin!” Charlie said, the words bursting out of him with plumes of crystallized breath.
Christine didn’t see it.
He stopped, put Joey down again, and pointed. “There. At the far end, just in front of the tree line. There’s a windmill beside it.”
She saw the windmill first because her eye caught the movement of the spinning blades. It was a tall, skeletal mill, nothing picturesque about it, more like an oil derrick than anything a Dutchman would recognize, very businesslike and somewhat ugly.
Both the cabin and the mill blended well with the trees behind them, although she supposed they would be more visible earlier in the day.
“You didn’t tell me there was a windmill,” she said. “Does that mean electric light?”
“Sure does.” His cheeks, nose, and chin were pink from the cold, and he sniffed to clear a runny nose. “And plenty of hot water.”
“Electric heat?”
“Nope. There’s a limit to what a power mill can provide, even in a place as windy as this.”
The jacket snap at Joey’s throat had come undone, and his scarf was loose. Christine stooped to make adjustments. His face was more red than pink, and his eyes were tearing from the cold.
“We’re almost there, Skipper.”
He nodded.
After catching their breath, they started uphill once more, with Chewbacca bounding ahead as if he understood that the cabin was their final destination.
The place was constructed of redwood that had silvered slightly in the harsh weather. Though the cedar-shingled roof was steeply sloped, some snow clung to it anyway. The windows were frosted. Snow had drifted over the front steps and onto the porch.
They took off their snowshoes and gloves.
Charlie retrieved a spare key from a cleverly hidden recess in one of the porch posts. Ice cracked away from the door as he pulled it open, and the frozen hinges squealed briefly.
They went inside, and Christine was surprised by how lovely the cabin was. The downstairs consisted of one enormous room, with a kitchen occupying the far end, a long pine dining table just this side of the kitchen, and then a living area with a polished oak floor, braided rag rugs, comfortable dark green sofas and armchairs, brass lamps, paneled walls, draperies in a Scottish-plaid pattern that was dominated by greens to complement the sofas and chairs, and a massive rock fireplace almost as big as a walk-in closet. Half the downstairs was open all the way to the second-floor ceiling, and was overlooked by a gallery. Up there, three closed doors led to three other rooms: “Two bedrooms and a bath,” Charlie said. The effect was rustic yet quite civilized.
A tiled area separated the front door from the oak floor of the living room, and that was where they removed their snow-crusted boots. Then they took an inspection tour of the cabin. There was some dust on the furniture, and the air smelled musty. There was no electricity because the breakers were all thrown in the fuse box, which was out in the battery room below the windmill, but Charlie said he would go out there and remedy the situation in a few minutes. Beside each of the three fireplaces—the big one in the living room and a smaller one in each of the bedrooms—were stacks of split logs and kindling, which Charlie used to start three fires. All the fireplaces were equipped with Heatolators, so the cabin would be reasonably warm even in the bitter heart of winter.
“At least no one’s broken in and wrecked things,” he said.
“Is that a problem?” Christine asked.
“Not really. During the warmer months, when the road’s open all the way, there’s nearly always somebody staying here. When the road is snowed shut and there’s no one here to look after the place, most would-be looters wouldn’t even know there was a cabin this far into the woods. And the ones who do know . . . well . . . they probably figure the trek isn’t worth what little they’d find to carry away. Still, first time you arrive each spring, you wonder if you’re going to discover t
he place has been wrecked.”
The fires were building nicely, and the vents of the Heatolator in the downstairs mantel were spewing welcome draughts of warm air into the big main room. Chewbacca had already settled down on the hearth there, head on his paws.
“Now what?” Christine asked.
Opening one of the backpacks and removing a flashlight from it, Charlie said, “Now you and Joey take everything out of these bags while I go out and see about getting us some electricity.”
She and Joey carried the backpacks into the kitchen while Charlie pulled his boots on again. By the time he had gone out to the windmill, they were stashing canned goods in the cabinets, and it almost seemed as if they were an ordinary family on an ordinary skiing holiday, getting settled in for a week of fun. Almost. She tried to instill a holiday mood in Joey by whistling happy songs and making little jokes and pretending that she was actually going to enjoy this adventure, but either the boy saw through her charade or he wasn’t even paying attention to her, for he seldom responded and never smiled.
With the monotonous humming-churning of the windmill’s propellers above him, Charlie used a shovel to clear the snow from the wooden doors that protected the steps that led down to the room under the windmill. He descended two flights of steps that went rather deeply into the ground; the battery room was below the frost line. When he reached the bottom, he was in a hazy-blue darkness that robbed the whiteness from the snowflakes sifting down around him, so they looked as if they were bits of gray ash. He took the flashlight from his coat pocket and snapped it on. A heavy metal door stood in front of him. The cabin key worked this lock, too, and in a moment he was in the battery room, where everything appeared to be in order: cables; twenty heavyduty, ten-year storage batteries lined up side by side on two sturdy benches; a concrete pallet holding all the machinery; a rack of tools.