The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  I didn’t want her to go, and I didn’t know what to say. Every day, the world kept tilting farther out of balance, and now people I’d known all my life were starting to slip off the edge. “Let us come,” I said.

  The door stopped closing, and Barbara’s face hung in profile, wreathed in her breath as if the winter air were molding a Barbara mask. Once that mask was fitted, I thought, she’d never get it off.

  “Stay here, Mattie,” she said. “Take care of Spencer and Theresa. I’m counting on you. When the Doctor gets home, tell him what’s happened. Tell him to call your mother.”

  “Maybe we should all go over there.”

  “Just stay put.” Her voice hardened. “She wouldn’t want you outdoors with all this going on. Neither do I.”

  I wanted to hold her there a few seconds longer, but she was out the door, sliding the lock home with her key.

  Instantly, the smothering silence of the Daughrety house stole over us. Spencer and Theresa were kneeling on the couch by the living room window, and I joined them there. Together, we watched Barbara skid out of the driveway in her Pinto and disappear down the street. In the glow of the porch light, ice buds quivered in the trees as if they were about to bloom.

  At first, we were so baffled and unsettled by what had happened that we actually did the dishes. Theresa cleared and stacked in her usual daze. I washed. Spencer dried. In the window above the sink, our reflections hovered in the dark, suspended on strings of snow like shadow marionettes.

  “Could Mr. Fox really hurt anyone?” Spencer asked both of us.

  I shook my head. “No one but himself. That’s what my mom says.” But I wasn’t so sure.

  Theresa just shrugged and went on drying. It was almost twenty minutes later, as we put away the last of the pots, that it dawned on us we had the house to ourselves. I’d been left alone with Brent a few times, and once or twice with Jon Goblin and Joe Whitney. But not with a girl, and not in this house, and not since the Snowman had been spotted and named.

  “We have to take advantage of this,” I said abruptly, and from that point on everything happened very quickly.

  “Let’s bike to Stroh’s,” said Spencer. It would have been a decent idea, but we didn’t have any money, and none of us really wanted to go outside.

  “Mind War,” said Theresa, visibly stirring. “I know where my dad keeps the notebook.” This was good too—a direct defiance of the Doctor, and more daring still.

  “Murder in the Dark,” I said, and both of them stared at me.

  Spencer said, “Fuck no. Not tonight.”

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes,” Theresa said, and raced out of the room in search of a flashlight. I could hear her giggling as she went down the back hallway.

  To this day, I can’t remember all the rules for Murder in the Dark, but rules weren’t the point. The game was just an excuse to go down in the basement, turn out the lights, and imagine yourself in terrible danger. We used playing cards to determine our roles. One of us was the killer—the Snowman, naturally. One of us was the victim. And one of us played the policeperson and carried the flashlight. The flashlight was supposed to be a gun, and the policeperson got to use two blasts of it. If the killer got caught in one of them, the policeperson won unless the victim was already dead. I have no memory of the rules for murder. And it’s funny, because I remember getting the Snowman card that night, which should have meant that I was the one doing the killing. But that can’t be right.

  The light switch for Theresa’s basement was at the top of the stairs, so we had to descend in the dark. I’d been down there once before—also to play this game—but I can’t picture a thing about what the basement actually looked like. I do remember the smell, a combination of dampness and dirt and just-mixed house paint, and there was a sound, too, a rasp of hot air gasping through cold ducts.

  I went down first, drawing that damp dark around me as I eased my way into the room in search of a hiding place. I edged between wicker chairs, suitcases, and an enormous piece of fiberglass that might have been part of a sailboat hull and felt colder to the touch than the air around it. I hit a wall, stood flat against it, and realized to my horror that there were masks hanging there too. I would never have looked at them with the lights on, but that night, I crouched beneath one and stretched out my fingers. It had a horned forehead and empty spaces where the nose and eyes should have been, and when I drew back my hand, it seemed to vibrate, as though something had strummed it.

  I heard Spencer come clomping down, followed a minute or so later by Theresa, who came one step at a time, as if she were marching to a metronome. By then, my eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could just make out her shape, thanks to the line of light under the door at the top of the stairs. Then she dissolved in the blackness, and I heard and saw nothing for a long time.

  The silence lasted so long, in fact, that I began to get nervous. I was kneeling near a La-Z-Boy with a hole in the seat cushion, toying with the fabric, listening hard. The lone window over my head shed no light except a faint glow, like asphalt in moonlight. No flashlight shot had been fired. Nothing moved. Fear swelled inside me, the kind I thought I’d left behind years ago when I first went to sleep without the hall light on. My breath fluttered and my skin tingled, charged by the current in the air and the heat in the ducts, which seemed to hum in my head, saying, You’re here now; you’re going to die someday.

  You’re going to die someday.

  It wasn’t just fear, I realized, or I wouldn’t have remained kneeling. It was exhilaration too. My eyes kept leaping from dark place to dark place, and my ears were straining. I wanted to scream out, impale myself on the policeperson’s flashlight beam, and let the electricity blaze through me. I opened my mouth to release the pressure in my throat, and Theresa clapped her pale hand over my lips. I couldn’t see the paleness, but I could feel it, a cold more profound than the ice outside. Her fingers splayed across my face, and I could feel her pulse on my skin. Her hair tickled my neck. Her breath whistled in time with the gasps from the pipes. Against my ear, I felt her laugh, soft and wet as snowfall. Even her breath was cold. I could feel my own body swelling, changing, because of her but also because of fear, snow, moonlight, silence. For one suspended moment, we floated together under the masks in the murmuring dark.

  Then she jerked. She made no sound at all but went completely stiff. Her fingers dug into my cheek, and I said, “Ow.” Spencer speared us with his flashlight beam.

  “Ha,” he said, and I blinked and saw him prancing toward us. Then he said “Shit” and dropped the flashlight. Theresa let go of me and backed away.

  “Hey,” I said. My first thought was that something had happened to my face, that it had blurred, become alien somehow. But that couldn’t be it, because neither Theresa nor Spencer were looking at me. They were looking over my head. Images of masks floating off the walls flooded my brain. Then the window rattled in its frame and a voice shot through with wind whistled, “Let me in...”

  “Mattie, get away from the window,” Spencer snapped, and I whirled around.

  The moon lit the wild white hair. The eyes glowed orange like a jack-o’-lantern’s, and the mouth worked in spasms.

  “It’s Mr. Fox,” I breathed. “Hey, Mr. Fox.”

  “Let me in,” I saw him mouth. The twitch in his lips seemed to streak up his cheeks. “Let me.” Then he rocked back on his knees and drove his face through the window.

  “What the fuck?” Spencer howled, and I saw him leap for the stairs, stop, spin around. “Where’s Theresa? Mattie, grab her, run.”

  But I was stuck where I stood. A torrent of frigid air had erupted into the room, and I was standing in the blast of it. Mr. Fox’s face hung in the window frame, a Daughrety mask made flesh. Red rivers raged down both cheeks and into his coat collar. Shards of glass sparkled on his eyelids, and he screamed when he blinked. He pulled his head back through the window frame and dislodged the last fragments of glass from the pane, which raked his scalp. He strugg
led to his feet and was gone. I saw snow, part of a tree, black sky, white moon.

  Light bloomed around me. Shivering, I turned around and saw Spencer scurrying back downstairs after flicking on the light switch. Theresa was crouched against the far wall, her arms flung out to the sides as if she were trying to levitate. Her eyes were shut, and she let out a grunting sob that shook her body so badly she almost tipped over. Spencer and I converged around her, held her up, helped her upstairs.

  We stayed in the front hallway, away from the dining room’s giant windows. Spencer brought us water and a box of Saltines. Theresa’s body hadn’t unlocked, but she ate a cracker when Spencer gave it to her. We leaned together in the foyer and listened.

  “What the hell?” Spencer whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Barbara doesn’t live with Mr. Fox anymore, she lives here. He drinks.”

  “My dad drinks. He doesn’t put his face through windows.”

  “My dad doesn’t drink,” said Theresa, startling us. She stuck out her hand for another cracker. Her weeping was so silent, so subtle, that neither of us noticed it right away. Teardrops hung in her lashes. Like glass, I thought. Finally, keys scratched in the front-door lock, the door swung open, and Dr. Daughrety strode in. His scalp glinted with windblown ice crystals, and his cheeks were red. I knew he’d been driving with the Jeep’s side flaps open again.

  “Well, hey there,” he started, his coat half off his shoulders, and then he looked at Theresa. “Theresa? What? Mattie, what’s wrong here?”

  “Mr. Fox,” I said. “He put his face through your basement window.”

  “He put—” Dr. Daughrety stared at me. “What?”

  “Barbara says you should call my mom. Mr. Fox shot the windows out of his house, and no one could find him, and then he came here. He wanted to come in, and then he—“

  Dr. Daughrety shoved me out of the way and grabbed Theresa. “Are you all right, baby?” he murmured, his hands against her neck, her back, as though checking for wounds. Theresa stood statue-still in his arms. “He didn’t touch her, did he? He didn’t touch any of you?”

  “He didn’t come in.”

  “Just his face,” Spencer muttered.

  Dr. Daughrety stood up, his hand still buried in his daughter’s hair. “Where’s Barbara?”

  “She went to find him. Before he came here, I mean. She said you should—“

  “She left you here?”

  I looked at Spencer, and we both nodded.

  “I want you to stay where you are,” Dr. Daughrety said, his voice level. He let go of Theresa’s hair. “Don’t move. Don’t talk. Don’t make a sound. Watch the windows. Listen. You see or hear anything—a dog bark, anything—you yell for me. I’m going to make sure he isn’t downstairs.”

  He slammed the dead bolt home on the front door and brushed past us down the basement steps. He didn’t pick up a shovel or a baseball bat or even a flashlight. But for Mr. Fox’s sake, I found myself praying that the Doctor didn’t find him. We stood and watched and listened.

  “Next time, how ‘bout we have our sleepover in my neighborhood?” Spencer whispered.

  “Sssh,” I said. Then, surprising myself, I reached out and touched Theresa on her neck, right where the Doctor’s hand had been. I felt a single pulse beat and yanked my hand back. Theresa sat like a television set that had been switched off.

  “Phil!” we heard the Doctor bellow, just once. There was no reply. A few seconds later, the Doctor reappeared in the front hall, rebuttoning his coat. “Anything?”

  Spencer and I shook our heads.

  “He can’t have gone far. There’s a lot of blood down there. I’m checking the yard.”

  He opened the front door, and I could see the night rippling like dark water. I could feel its pull, sense the monsters in its depths. “Stay here. I’m right outside.” Bending low, he held his lips to Theresa’s forehead, and then we all heard it, the squeal-skid of a car rocketing way too fast toward us on the iced-over road.

  Dr. Daughrety flew out the door, hands waving, yelling “Barbara!” He didn’t make it off the front porch before we heard the crunch, like a frozen log dropped on a fire. A second thump followed, then one more skidding screech of tires and dead silence.

  “Tell me that was the mailbox,” Spencer hissed in my ear. None of us moved, although Spencer and Theresa were closer together now, touching at the shoulders.

  Barbara’s scream began low, sliding up and up until it pealed through the night like a siren. Lights burst from the surrounding houses, and smaller lights bobbed across the dark. Gradually, I became aware of the frigid air filling the house. Spencer looked at me, at Theresa, and then darted out the front door. I was right behind him.

  Barbara was still behind the wheel of her Pinto, which sat steaming, half sideways in the center of the road. I could see most of her face in the cone of streetlight. She made no move to get out. Spencer and I stumbled side by side through the drifts, scraping our shins on the crusted snow, until we reached the curb. The Doctor was crouched over a sprawled pair of legs. We watched him stand, stare a little longer at the body, then jerk open the passenger door and drag out Barbara. She didn’t move at first, and then she started beating on him, yelling, not saying any words, just yelling, breathing in heaves. The yells flew up in pitch, then down, almost as if she were singing. If only she’d taught me the response for this, I thought, and I stepped into the street. I didn’t know where I was going. But the sight of Barbara balled against the Doctor, her head tucked tight against his neck, made me angry. And the way he was holding her, I knew he wasn’t going to let her go, which made him just like her father, it seemed to me. The cold cut through my lungs like the blade of a circular saw.

  All around us, voices began to buzz. I was ten feet away, trying to decide what to do, when I saw the Doctor drop his arms and then stagger in place as though he’d been punched. Barbara slipped to her knees in the snow. At first I thought she might be praying, and then she turned her face into the light. It was red and ravaged, the eyes staring at nothing as she started to sob. Only gradually did I become aware that all the humming voices had choked to a stop.

  I saw the Doctor say “No” and stagger again. A woman screamed. Slowly, helplessly, I felt myself turn around.

  I saw Spencer first, standing in the path of Barbara’s headlights, his legs twitching, his arms flapping about him as if most of the tendons that held him in place had been severed. I started to say something—and then I looked where he was looking.

  Mr. Fox lay where he’d fallen, his arms flung over his head, his head cocked sideways, with the cuts from the window glass etched in his skin like hieroglyphs. His legs were still partially attached to his waist, but they hung at an absurd angle, and there was almost no torso at all, just a spatter of frozen blood and crushed bone in the snow.

  And that was where Theresa Daughrety knelt, right where Mr. Fox’s belly used to be, the dead center of him, her skirt spreading in the gore, hands near her heart and her mouth wide open.

  Chapter 19 – 1994

  From two blocks away I can see the glow, whitish orange, as if someone lit a fire in the heart of a snowdrift. I never did learn the story of why the East Birmingham Community Library opens at first light on Sunday mornings. I know there was a Polish man named Mr. Borowski who ran the place when I was a kid and had a raspy East European accent that crushed vowels between hard consonants. He’d lost both his feet in an assembly line accident. I remember the stumps that stuck out of his pant legs, sockless and pink in the antiseptic library light, and the shriek of his electric wheelchair as it grooved dark furrows into the slush-gray carpet. How he got from the assembly line to the library, and from his very Polish working-class Hamtramck neighborhood near downtown Detroit to the WASP world I grew up in, I had no idea. But two Polish bakeries had followed him here, one on either side of the library, and they opened before dawn on Sundays too.

  Three or four times a year, my dad would wake
my brother and me, trundle us into our coats, and drive us down these dark blocks of houses, past looming hedges and wide front porches haunted by cats with slitted eyes. There was something magical about going to the library at five in the morning. My father would station himself at the record bins, and I would wander down the rows of books with my fingers brushing the spines, confronting my reflection in each passing bay window as it dissolved into the oncoming day. Always, on those mornings, I made sure to claim one of the yellow beanbag chairs in the center of the reading room. That way, the Daughretys couldn’t possibly miss me. They came here every Sunday without fail. Mr. Borowski once told my father that all three of them—Doctor, mother, and infant daughter—had been waiting outside at five-fifteen in the morning on the Sunday after Theresa was born.

  The library now has sleek new glass doors and a whole windowed wing I have never seen before that stretches from the left-hand side of the original building into the lot where one of the Polish bakeries used to be. The other bakery is still here, although it appears to be closed.

  I did try to sleep. I got in bed at two-thirty and stayed there until close to four, but I never actually dozed off. I kept seeing Theresa step out of the shadows to wrap me in an icy embrace. Spencer’s story played over and over in my mind, his gaunt, glowing face floating above me and mouthing the words. Every now and then, Jon Goblin limped into the room and waved his cane. I flicked on the light. The whole experience of locating Spencer, hearing him tell his terrible tale in his powerful voice, and seeing him all but safe in a community of people who clearly valued him had left me far too anxious to sleep. I got up, reached into my duffel bag, and drew out the blue spiral notebook that Theresa had given me one of the last times I saw her. The top coil had come out of its holes long ago. The cover is scratched, streaked with black slashes of ink. I once believed the key to everything could be found in this notebook. I think I still believe it. But I’ve never been able to translate the scrawls covering every page. Theresa had written up and down the margins and into the pockets, where she had crammed marked-up maps of Oakland County, Macomb County, and downtown Detroit. Her father couldn’t make any sense of it, and neither could the police. Sometimes I open it and chant some of the clusters of words I can actually decipher as if they are spells.