by Timothy Boyd
He spotted the back door through which Christine would soon be entering, and he decided that the first floor was clear. Backtracking toward the front of the house, he made his way to the rickety wooden stairs that led up to the second floor. With each slow step, the wood groaned with agony, announcing his presence to anyone that might be hiding in the shadows. But there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He had to check the second floor.
The moment he escaped the traitorous steps and entered the long hallway that spanned both directions, he felt the temperature of the air around him drop significantly, like a nearby window had been left open. A long carpet runner ran the length of the wooden hallway, giving Jonathan a brief respite from the creaky planks. There was only one door to his right, so he decided to start his search there.
A room filled with various cardboard boxes greeted him when he quickly swept in, staying low and ready for anything. He halted, listening intently for the sounds of movement within the darkened storage room, his hand tensed on his raised weapon. The house shook softly as the billowing wind outside grew stronger, making the old New England house protest the abuse. As his fears howled harshly down the bitter winter wind, raising goose bumps up his spine, only one thought floated to the forefront of his mind:
The calm before the storm was ending sooner than expected.
He exited the storage room and continued down the hallway, quickly searching a bathroom and what appeared to be a spare bedroom that hadn’t been used in ages. Clearly, the owner of the home didn’t have many guests.
Except those intent on murder.
Finally, only one door remained. At the end of the hallway stood the only room still to be searched, and he guessed it was the master bedroom. Upon getting closer, he saw that the door was slightly ajar. Step by cautious step, he moved forward, and as he did so, it seemed as though the air was getting cooler. Unless there was a secret room hidden under the rotting floorboards or behind the thin wall panels somewhere within the house, this final room contained the intruder or the dead man’s body. Or both.
Jonathan stood before the threshold now, his heart beating faster, his breathing becoming labored. He felt his palms grow moist and clammy on the grip of his gun, and the small of his back began sweating. Faint plumes of breath could be seen escaping his lips as he realized that the temperature had definitely decreased. He placed the muzzle of his weapon against the wooden door, pushing softly.
As it inched open, excruciating screeches of rusted metal hinges rang out through the decrepit house. At this point, whoever was waiting for him inside the room would be fully ready and alerted to his presence. The groaning door tingled the nerves under the fillings in his teeth, and he trembled from the chilling dread that overtook him.
He wasn’t a fearful man in the usual sense, but rather the idea of making Leslie a widow was what would often make him hesitant to jump into dangerous situations for his job. He knew she hated his line of work, even though she never said it out loud. She was supportive in every way possible, and that’s what made these situations all the more unbearable. He wasn’t sure what he would do when they finally decided to start a family.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then he swiftly crouched low and pivoted into the room, gun aimed forward, his eyes focused and mind alert. And then he screamed.
* * *
After dismissing her partner’s urges to let him take the more dangerous path, Christine swiftly made her way past the front porch and to the side of the house. If there was one thing she could not stand, it was men that tried to be the hero. Jonathan knew that she was capable of taking care of herself, so why had he tried to be chivalrous?! She wondered this for far too long before finally letting it go and refocusing her attentions on her work.
Her boots crunched on the frozen earth under her feet, and the chill of the air made her shiver. She held her gun comfortably in her hands, pointed low, and she swiftly continued past the balding shrubs that covered part of the house’s cheap aluminum siding. Thoughts of the day slowly crept back into her mind, and she damned herself for allowing the awful past to make her so vulnerable when she should be focused on her work.
Tall hedges separated the yard from the neighbor’s, and judging by what she could see from her current position, the same was the case all around the property. She felt like she was in an alleyway between buildings, slightly cramped and claustrophobic.
Spotting something on the ground, she slowed herself and crouched to examine the area further. In a small patch of icy slush left behind from a previous snowfall, she spotted a small shoeprint. She estimated it to be around a size nine in men’s. She would be sure to notify the forensics team when they arrived.
The dormant grass was too solid to yield any other footprints, so she continued, slowing as she neared the corner of the house that turned into the backyard. As she leaned against the frigid aluminum siding, her gun pulled close to her body and aimed toward the sky, she took a few deep breaths, preparing to engage whoever may be in the backyard.
She felt as though the tall hedges in front of her reached out, their twiggy fingers of death yearning to tear her limb from limb. Shaking away the nonsense from her mind, she took one final breath and swept quickly into the backyard, her gun aimed in front of her.
Eyes darting side to side, she scanned the environment: an old picnic table with two wooden benches, an empty fire pit in the center of the yard, a flimsy enclosed patio that looked like it had been added to the original house years ago.
But no intruder.
The wind picked up forcefully, sending tremors throughout her body as the gray sky grew one shade darker. The gusts created eerie whistling noises around her, and she noticed a few snow flurries flutter past. The storm was beginning earlier than expected.
She pulled open the white screen door that led into the enclosed patio, and she slipped into the house through the back entrance. In the small kitchen, she crouched low, listening closely for sounds of movement.
She flinched, bringing her gun to the ready when she heard the creak of an old door slowly swinging open coming from somewhere on the floor above. She waited as seconds felt like hours, wondering whether the noise was her partner, the intruder, or the man that had screamed. Moments like these didn’t happen often for the police force in Rockport, Maine. But every time they did, the same nauseating dread crept into her stomach as she wondered whether Jonathan would survive.
“Colt,” she found herself whispering softly.
She loved that he took to calling her by her last name, Brody. It was a fresh nickname that aurally stripped away her feminine qualities, making her feel like an equal in what people considered to be a man’s world, not to mention a man’s profession.
As if on cue, she heard his voice bellow from upstairs, “Brody!”
Without hesitation, she ran, precariously turning corners and narrowly avoiding end tables, charging up the creaky steps two at a time. She halted briefly at the top, looking right then left. “Colt?” she called out.
The door to her left at the end of the hall screeched farther open, and she spun on her heels to meet the offender with her weapon, not immediately noticing the severe drop in temperature.
“Colt?” she asked hesitantly, seeing her partner in the open doorway, focused on something within the room, his gun hanging loosely at his side. His skin was whiter than usual.
She approached slowly, her weapon still trained ahead, not at Jonathan but at whatever may pop out into the threshold.
“Colt…”
Finally, he turned to look at her and nodded toward something in the room. “You gotta frikkin’ see this.”
From the expression on his face, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see. She slowly lowered her gun and stepped into the master bedroom. The second her boot made contact with the floor, she slipped on something slick and lost her balance, Jonathan grasping her arm to steady her.
Along the wall to her right was a large dresser with a mirror
on top; at the far end of the room was the draped window that pointed toward the front of the house; along the left wall was the unmade queen-sized bed with an end table next to it that contained a wrist watch and an old alarm clock.
In the center of the room, standing on the large overly-ornate rug that covered most of the wooden floorboards, was a sculpture of a man encased in a thin layer of ice, twisted into a horrific position, head looking back over his shoulder as if trying to flee from something terrible. Christine marveled at the incredible level of detail on the macabre effigy, like she were viewing an attraction at a wax museum. The vivid fear in his eyes. The fluid way the button-down shirt flowed behind him, like a snapshot of motion. The goose pimples that covered the bluish hypothermic skin. The strands of hair slicked back on his head.
It looked as though once the temperature warmed up, the statue would come alive and shake off the thin ice, going about its day.
“I think we found our vic,” Jonathan announced, waiting for Christine’s reaction.
She looked at him with confusion, her brow furrowed, and then the realization dawned on her. She turned and examined the iceman once more, and upon closer inspection, she realized why the level of detail was so great: this was no statue; it was a man!
“Shit!” she muttered quietly, holstering her weapon and circling the frozen masterpiece. She slowly reached out her hand, wiping a few fingers across the man’s shoulder. “He’s… it’s…” she wasn’t totally sure what to say. “He’s solid ice.”
“Ayuh.”
“So… what did this?” Christine asked the first obvious question.
“Or who…” Jonathan followed, a bit less obviously.
“You think someone did this?”
Jonathan shrugged, holding his arms out. “What do ya see around here that could a’ frozen a full-grown man in his late fifties so quickly that he had no time to escape?”
Christine grew irate with his irrational leap of logic. “You show me a person that could have frozen a full-grown man!” The two stood in silence, allowing thoughts of the impossible to swirl through their brains. And then another thought struck her, and she gasped. “Oh, shit! What if he’s not dead, Colt?”
“If whateva’ happened didn’t kill him, he probably suffocated.”
She reached out to touch the icy corpse, futilely hoping that she might see a flicker of life within his arctic gaze. As she closed her hand around his, all of the frosted fingers shattered and crumbled to the floor. She screamed and leapt back, jumping up and down and shaking her hands out, as if a slew of insects had just crawled across her arm.
Jonathan snickered at her display, enjoying the rare moments when she let a silly reaction slip past her personality filter.
She glared at him. “You’re laughing?!”
“Your reaction was—.”
“You’re seriously laughing?!” She advanced on him, slipping on a patch of ice on the floor, struggling to balance herself.
Jonathan reached out to steady her.
Fuming, she punched both fists into his chest. “There’s been a damn homicide, and the dead guy’s hand broke off, and you’re laughing!”
“Sorry. This is all just… I don’t even know,” he admitted.
“Call it in, asshole!”
Jonathan turned and reached for his walkie as the house shuddered once more, releasing an unsettling squeal as it protested the coming storm.
“We need to get a team out here to search the yard before it’s buried under five feet of snow! Hurry up!”
Holding up one hand, he attempted to calm her down. “Just chill, Brody. I’m callin’ it in right now.” But something stopped him from following through with this promise. A noise from outside in the front yard.
A woman’s blood-curdling scream.
Without thinking, driven by instinct, the two cops sprinted down the steps and through the first floor of the house, guns raised and ready for trouble. Almost as though their shoes had the wings of Hermes to carry them, they flew out the door and across the lawn toward the source of the scream: the young blonde who had called in the homicide, who was now sprawled on the ground, struggling to rise.
Snow fell steadily now as Jonathan quickly swept the area around them, swinging his gun back and forth looking for movement. Christine grasped the screaming woman and helped her to her feet. “What happened?!”
The witness continued howling hysterically, her horrified eyes fixated behind the female cop. Sirens approached in the distance, finally answering the original radio call. The old man’s Chihuahua yapped feverishly at Christine’s pant leg.
Jonathan continued scanning the area, calling out over his shoulder, “Brody, what’s goin’ on?”
Christine shook the blonde woman, lightly kicking away the annoying dog at her feet. “Hey! What happened?!”
The hysterical female pointed behind Christine, tears streaming down her face, creating harsh streaks of red in the bitter cold. The cop turned her gaze to follow the woman’s finger. Standing only a few feet away was the old man, mouth opened wide, staring down the street, his eyes brimming with fear.
Frozen.
The Dead of Winter
III
As Christine had charged from within the house and through the yard to the screaming blonde woman, she had noticed the old man in her periphery, but she had thought nothing of his lack of movement. Some elderly people just aren’t that animated. But now as she stared at the icy horror immobilized on his wrinkled face, she had felt stupid for having not immediately recognized that something was wrong when she’d stepped out onto the yard.
The steady snowfall whipped through the air as a gust of wind swept down the street, pelting the cops in the face. The blonde woman’s shrill howling had lessened and had turned into heaving sobs of fear as the police sirens grew ever closer. Christine was not sure what to think about the mysteriously frozen people. It felt unearthly and bizarre, like something out of the Twilight Zone, and yet she knew in order to get to the bottom of things, she would have to remain calm and rational.
“Colt, we got another one!” she called out to Jonathan, who had his back to the women while scanning the street for signs of life.
He spun around and took note of the old man, the Chihuahua jumping at the corpse’s feet, scratching at the icy leg, yapping and whining for his master. Inching closer to the second human ice block he’d seen in the past five minutes, he lowered his weapon slightly, his heart pounding in confusion.
Another blast of frigid wind twirled around them, forcing them to shield their eyes from the building snowfall, quickly turning itself into an unruly blizzard. The old man wobbled precariously as the gust assaulted, and before Jonathan could reach forward to steady him, he fell over onto the sidewalk, shattering into hundreds of tiny ice chunks.
The woman clasped her shaking hands against her mouth, eyes gone wide at the horrific scene before her. Another screech escaped her mouth, muffled by her hands, paling in the dangerously chilly weather. She bent at the knees and doubled over, like she had been kicked in the stomach by some unseen frozen force, heaving screams bellowing from her mouth.
Christine grabbed the woman’s shoulders tightly, hoping to give her a sense of support to get through the trauma. “Hey, I need you to calm down,” she said, foolishly hoping it would be enough to stifle the woman’s hysterics. “Ma’am, please. I really need you to calm down.”
Jonathan had already returned to a crouched position, his gun aimed forward and on high alert, searching the immediate area for an intruder. He took quick glances at the ground but saw no easily discernible footprints, as the sidewalk wasn’t yet completely covered with snow.
As two other police cruisers skidded to a halt on the street in front of the old house, Christine lowered herself to look the woman in the eyes. “Hey, it’s going to be all right. But you have to calm down and give us some information.” She saw the flicker of fear skip past the young woman’s eyes. It was a fear of which she was
intimately familiar: the fear of being prey.
She closed her eyes, flashes of her past swimming through her mind, and she quietly muttered a mantra to herself: “You will not haunt me.”
Bringing herself back to the problem at hand, Christine attempted to steer the woman’s focus away from the scene of horror with easily answered questions. “Ma’am, what’s your name?”
Her eyes darted back and forth, observing the overwhelming flurry of activity around her, cops running and ordering each other around, some dashing toward the house as Jonathan gave orders and pointed toward it. The heavy snowfall flickered dizzyingly with the red and blue flashes of the police beacons. She faintly heard the female officer asking her questions, and her gaze slowly came to focus on the green eyes of the cop, intent on receiving the answers she needed.
“What’s your name?” she asked again.
“It’s…” she stammered as she regained control of her breathing. “Rita. Rita Mayes.”
Christine nodded and gave a small, comforting grin, brushing a few strands of her own auburn hair from her face. “Ok, Rita. I’m Officer Christine Brody. That’s my partner, Jonathan Colter. We’re not going to let anything happen to you, so I need you to calm down for me.”
Jonathan approached them. “What do we got?”
“I got this, Colt,” she responded without turning to look at him.
“Well, what did she see?”
“I was distracted and on my cell phone when I heard the old man cry out,” Rita explained, beginning to cry again as she was forced to relive the event. “I turned and saw a man next to him, but before I knew what was happening, I was on the ground, and he was gone.” Her gaze pointed down the street, and her brow furrowed as she tried to remember more details.