Chapter Thirty-Four
With his back to the dresser, which meant his back was to the door, Brad listened for any hint of his attacker's movements in the darkened hallway on the other side. His ears found only silence, save for the faint crackling of the fire in the main room. It had been that way for nearly 10 minutes.
The list-maker in Brad's head began tentatively rattling off options. For a change, it was a short list. The first choice was to pull the furniture away from the door just enough to allow a peek down the hall. If the creature was indeed waiting on the other side of the door, Brad knew he would likely be staring death in its white face. The second item on the list was the notion of trying to pry open the only window in the room and escaping into a blizzard. He had contemplated and discarded that idea yesterday. With the snow returning and sanctuary not even an infinitesimal fraction of an inch closer today, that alternative hadn't improved much. Option three was to stay right where he was and wait it out, even if that meant staying until the spring thaw.
Marrying option one and three like a desperate minister trying to unite two unwilling betrotheds, a new thought sprang into Brad's head. He carefully got off the bed and onto his knees. Never a particularly religious man, the fact that he was in a posture he hadn't taken since the bedtime prayers of his childhood didn't even register. He bent over further, placing his ear against the hardwood floor, and tried to look beneath the bed, past the dresser, and under the door. In the dark hallway beyond, he couldn't detect movement or the outline of toeless, unshod white extremities. In fact, he couldn't see anything.
Thinking that if he couldn't see any obstacles outside the door but could maybe feel one, Brad reached up and grabbed the curtain rod from the bed. Both ends swelled then tapered to decorative points that resembled spears, but were actually supposed to be individual decorative leaves. Brad navigated the rod under the bed and dresser, then pushed it under the gap at the bottom of the door and began sliding it side to side, feeling for anything it might hit beyond the door. Nothing there.
Brad pulled the rod back and laid it on the bed again. If he was going to learn whether the killer was still on the other side of the door, he was going to have to open it to find out.
Returning to his feet, Brad grabbed the bed frame to start moving the furniture out of the way. Before he could apply pressure, he was catapulted across the room as the angry white creature exploded through the door, scattering the bed and dresser to opposite corners like so many dollhouse fixtures and knocking Brad against a wall. The curtain rod clattered away with the bizarre sound of a dinner triangle being rung outside a ranch house.
Brad crumpled to the floor, his will insisting that he rise and fight or rise and flee, but his battered body refused to answer the call. Dazed, he tried to think, tried to summon a single idea for survival, but the list-maker had run out of paper and ink, resigning itself to a destiny that was as inevitable as it was tragic.
The creature took its time crossing the room, certain in its quarry's fate. It bent over and grabbed Brad by the throat, effortlessly lifting him with one arm and pinning him to the varnished wall. Brad's feet lifelessly dangled nearly six inches above the floor, his eyes rolling unfocused around their orbits as a rip opened in the lower half of the creature's face. It drew its horrendous mouth toward its victim, preparing to freeze Brad's last breath while it was still in his body.
“No!” a voice yelled from the main room beyond the hallway.
The moment was frozen as predator and prey processed this new entry into the battlerama. Brad, his windpipe shut off by the powerful grip of the beast, tried to place a label on the vaguely familiar voice but drew a blank as unconsciousness tore at his mind like a hungry piranha.
The creature dropped its vanquished quarry like an indifferent lion distracted by the prospect of a better meal. It turned and slowly made its way back through the hallway toward the commanding voice, leaving Brad in a heap on the floor.
As its shape receded, Brad could see the blurry image of someone wavering in the gloom of the new day which had arrived through the picture window and destroyed front doorway.
Vi Enderrin stood defiantly in the center of the room.
"Come on, you blubbery piece of freezer burn," Vi screamed at the creature, balancing on one wrist cane while waving the other like a rapier in a fencing match. "I'm the one you really want."
Flames from the nearby fireplace reflected off the side of her face, making her skin appear alive as the shadows moved back and forth across her wrinkled cheek.
The creature lumbered down the hall, but without the confidence and speed it had shown before. Its lifeless blue eyes displayed no emotion, but its slowing movements suggested a wariness of the small but formidable one-legged woman in its path. It took one step into the main room and stopped, turning its head slightly toward the warm flickering hearth to its right.
"I'm not afraid of you," Vi taunted, her own eyes turning as hard and steely as the creature's. "You prey on the weak and the cold and the exhausted. I'm none of those things, you son of a bitch! You took my Jimbo. You took my Denny. You're going to pay for that."
The creature remained silent, but edged slightly to its left, trying to put more distance between himself and the fireplace, but still moving closer to the enraged white-haired woman. Vi pivoted with it, her cane following the beast's movements like an aluminum compass point tracking a mobile North.
Taking two tentative steps forward, the creature's path was interrupted by a load-bearing post, forcing the beast to ease back to the right. Vi didn't retreat as it came closer.
"That's right, face me you chickenshit snowman wannabe," Vi spit between gritted teeth.
The creature took another step forward then stopped within a foot of the upraised cane. Before Vi could brace herself, it snapped a large white arm out and grabbed the crutch, knocking over the sputtering woman.
As it took another step toward her, a slurping sound erupted from its torso. Looking down, it saw a black wrought iron bar protruding from its chest.
Behind the beast, Brad held the other pointed end of the curtain rod which he had shoved into the monster's back.
“Vi, you have to leave,” Brad yelled as he battled to stay on his feet while clinging to the black makeshift weapon.
“Bullshit, buddy boy,” the woman replied, sitting up and grabbing the cane that the creature had dropped after being perforated by the rod. Using both canes, she was able to stand and prepare for round two. “This is my fight. All I have to do is get him close and I'm going to shove this crutch up his ass!”
The beast reached down with one hand and grasped the rod to remove it. But instead of pushing it back out the way it came, or pulling it the rest of the way through its body, the creature pulled it left. The iron bar made a sucking sound as it passed horizontally through the membranous torso. The curtain rod elicited a small pop as it left the monster's body.
Brad tried to continue holding on, but the strong white killer easily snatched the bar from his hands, water dripping from the center of the dislodged metal stick, and flung it across the room toward the wrecked front door. The beast then turned on Brad, the weakened prey it had previously failed to finish off.
Before it could take a step toward the empty handed man, an aluminum cane sliced into the yielding skin of the monster's shoulder near the neck, a blow that appeared to cause no pain, no discomfort, but did manage to again distract.
The creature spun around again to face the meddlesome woman, wrenching the crutch out of her hands as he turned.
Taking a step back, her eyes never leaving the approaching creature, Vi reached into the pocket of her overcoat and produced a set of keys, which she skipped across the floor between the approaching monster’s legs to Brad behind.
“I didn’t mean for you to get caught up in this,” Vi yelled, taking another step backward and toward the fireplace as the creature continued its approach. “This evil bastard took my family. Now it has to deal wit
h me!”
Brad eased beyond the opening of the hallway, also circling around to the hearth, where a fire continued to radiate warmth in a room that had just dropped another 20 degrees. Spotting the fireplace set, where nothing remained but tongs and a worn out set of bellows, Brad grabbed the rack and upended it, emptying the items on the floor.
The attempt at one more distraction didn't work. The creature continued to approach Mrs. Enderrin. Brad maneuvered to sneak up behind it and prepared to swing the rack with all his might.
The rack splashed through the creature’s body like a spoon through a bowl of Jello, leaving two long gashes but causing no real injury.
Once more, the creature temporarily forgot about Mrs. Enderrin, turning its attention on the man who was now slowly backpedaling toward the hall.
With renewed vigor, the monster chased Brad, who found himself once again trapped in the hallway leading to the empty back bedroom. He knew there would be no escape, and that he would soon die in the same room as Jimbo and Denny Enderrin, and in the same, horrible manner. If there was any solace at all, at least it would allow Mrs. Enderrin a chance to get away.
Once back inside the room, Brad grabbed the bed frame and tried to slide it into the beast's path in an effort to buy an extra moment.
It was a short one, as the creature yanked the bed from the man's hands and hurled it against the wall.
Brad then grabbed the top of the dresser and pulled, toppling it into the path of his pursuer. The monster kicked through it just as easily, scattering shattered drawer splinters onto the remnants of the bed.
With nothing to his back but the window now, Brad prepared to hurl himself through the pane, hoping his momentum would carry him through without getting caught in the frame. But before he could leap, the creature stopped and turned toward the shattered doorway, then began heading back down the darkened hallway.
It was then that Brad smelled the smoke.
He waited less than a heartbeat before reversing the earlier pursuit, now following the creature along the hallway and into the too-bright main room. But the light wasn’t pouring in through the picture window, or the missing front door. It came from the flames now dancing atop the back of the sofa and racing up the walls next to the fireplace, the red and yellow flickers creating a border around Mrs. Enderrin, standing in the middle of the conflagration with a burning piece of wood in the hand that had previously held the aluminum crutch.
“You took my son. You took my husband. You took my life, everything that was dear to me. And now I’ve come back for you. You want me, big boy, come and get me.”
The creature abruptly stopped halfway between Mrs. Enderrin and Brad, who had now reached the main room. The jellied mound atop its shoulders turned toward Brad, then slowly rotated back toward Mrs. Enderrin, as if trying to decide which quarry it would ultimately select. After acknowledging Vi, it again turned its head toward Brad, slowly raising its right arm toward him.
The blue eyes cleared momentarily, focusing on the man as the extended arm seemed to point at Brad. The gaping slash of mouth turned up slightly at the corners.
Without uttering so much as a whisper, the creature had communicated clearly.
He would be back for Brad.
Then, with a stealth camouflaged by its bulk, the creature turned and flew at Mrs. Enderrin, driving both of them into the fireplace.
Vi clawed ferociously at the creature with the burning piece of wood, scorching deep gouges into the viscous matter all over its body that turned to steam with each jab. Flames from the fireplace and the surrounding inferno began to tear at the monster while other parts of the fire began to burn Vi’s silver hair.
Above them, the fire had reached the ceiling and bloomed across the joists toward the opposite end of the house, with burning pieces of debris dropping onto the wooden floor and nearby furniture, starting mirroring conflagrations above and below. Upstairs, the sound of a tumbling wall meant the fire had already engulfed parts of the second story.
Scrambling around the burning furniture, Brad tried to reach the fighting couple in an instinctive act of courage, hoping to save his friend. He pounded on the monster's rubbery back, but this time it wouldn't be deterred from its decision. Continuing to hold Vi's throat with one arm, the beast didn't bother to look, swinging the other arm around and connecting with the heavy man behind. The powerful punch knocked Brad across the fire-littered floor and over the flaming sofa. Still conscious but without a breath of his own, Brad could temporarily do no more than lay on his back staring at the teams of flames skittering across the joists and boards above. As air sneaked its way back into his chest, he was able to roll over and try to lift himself on weakened arms, but there just wasn't enough strength. The increasing flow of oxygen was also beginning to be tainted by heavy smoke, even while laying at floor level.
Unable to help, Brad could do little more than watch his client, his friend, die at the hands of a monster he could still barely fathom.
Free to finish its heinous task, the creature opened the slash at the bottom of its face and lowered its head to cover Vi's spittle-laced mouth with its own.
"No," Brad tried to yell, but could only coax little more than a croak from his still flattened lungs. Tears sprang to his eyes and began coursing down his ash-streaked cheeks.
Vi had reached out to him at the darkest moment of his life, showed an understanding reinforced by strength when most of the people closest to him could offer little more sympathetic looks and pithy greeting card homilies about time healing wounds and other fish in the sea. Sylvia Enderrin hadn't just talked. She took him in and shared her love, a love otherwise restricted to this building, and the phantoms within it. It was a love powerful enough to give life to her dead child and husband once a year. If he was honest, it was also powerful enough to give him solace, and in a way give him life again as well. And now having so recently found it, or rather it had found him, it was about to be taken away again as Vi gave up her life for his.
Just as the victor began forcing frozen air into its victim's lungs, a huge chunk of the burning ceiling fell onto the embraced couple. A deafening sound that could have been a scream or an explosive release of steam accompanied the sudden collapse as the creature’s body was boiled by the wood-fueled heat. The hulk began evaporating into a mixture of thick ivory-colored mist and tiny white particles that rode the rising heat waves toward the burning ceiling, like snow returning to the sky instead of falling to the ground. The whiteness began mixing with the black smoke before finding a hole in the roof, where it escaped into the outside world. In seconds, the beast was gone.
Vi's clothes caught on fire, then quickly spread to her face and hands, turning them first red then black under the dancing flames. Brad tried once more to get to his knees, to crawl to the woman who had saved him, who had come back for him, but the last of his strength drained out of him and his head tumbled onto his own blistering skin, his eyes still open as he watched ash and smoke rise from his friend into the furnace-hot air. One black flake caught an updraft of heated air, shooting toward the burning roof then floating back and forth on buffeting hot currents as if touring the main room one last time.
The cabin, completely engulfed, began to sing its own final song. Nails screamed as they were pulled from burning wood, while beams and joists offered deep-throated rumbles on their way from their supportive perches to the burning floor below. The pops of ignited wood knots provided a rhythm section to a melody of destruction and collapse.
Taking one last look at the burning room, the books and furniture and memories of a family’s lifetime fueling the blaze, Brad closed his eyes and prepared to let go. Smoke forced its way into his nose and open mouth, choking off what little bit of air had made its way back into his barely functioning lungs.
Off to his right, the blazing stairway fell. To his left, an exterior wall wavered, wobbled, then toppled outward, bringing down another large section of the roof. The timbers falling inside made the groun
d and remaining walls tremble, forcing strips of tongue and groove flooring loose and levered upward like skinny brown diving boards poised over a swimming pool of fire.
With his eyes closed, Brad could no longer see, but he could feel his body moving with the undulating floor. He could smell his own hair burning. Then he sensed his feet going into the air, and his torso sliding in the direction of his legs.
He felt like he was floating, gliding away. After a few moments, the heat and noise began to lessen.
Coming to grips with the knowledge that his time on this planet had come to an end, Brad could feel himself letting go, surrendering to whatever came after this life.
His body's journey continued without his assent or dissent. The glide became bumpy, then smoothed out again, continuing until it ended abruptly with an unpleasant thump. Without movement, he was furiously cold, his stomach and chest feeling wet. The cold then enveloped him, wrapping around his body and covering his head.
Unable to fight it, Brad felt his body rolling over onto his back. Opening his eyes, he stared into an overcast sky filling with smoke. He forced himself to take a tentative breath, with smoke still burning his nostrils, but now blending with a new freshness - air. Clean air. Cold air.
Looking to his right, the pained face of a man wearing a houndstooth fedora looked down at him.
"God?" Brad asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.
The face broke into a grimaced smile.
"Name's Micah," the face said back.
Brad nodded once, then let the oblivion of unconsciousness finally overtake him.
Chapter Thirty-Five
There is a silence in a snow-covered forest that is unlike any other in nature. Sound is swallowed up by the mounds of accumulated snowflakes blanketing trees and grass, absorbing it with more efficiency than the most sophisticated soundproof booth.
The solitude seemed an appropriate moment of silence for the loss of the woman who had brought Brad to this place.
Howl of a Thousand Winds Page 20