The demon yawned. Bored, he sent a fresh nightmare into the head of the young boy sleeping in the deputy sheriff's back bedroom, then listened idly through the phone as the boy woke, screaming, to run for his father's reassuring arms.
Scattered snowflakes swirled on cold night winds across the mostly darkened expanse of Sinnissippi Park. Like white moths drawn by the incandescent brightness of the pole lights bracketing the roadways, they spun and twisted in small explosions of white. Elsewhere, moonlight peeked through breaking clouds to sparkle off frosted iron stanchions and crusted patches of road ice. Snowdrifts climbed tree trunks and hedges, a soft white draping against the velvet black.
Ray Childress finished locking down the toboggan slide, placing chains across steps and loading ramps, hooking warning signs in place, and closing up the storage shed with its equipment and parts. It was quiet in the park, the last of the cars dispersed, the last of the people gone home. Trail lights still burned down the length of the slide and out along the bayou's edge where the ice had been cleared for skating, but only shadows shifted in the glare.
Ray paused in the act of padlocking the shed and stared out at the darkness below. Damned odd, he was thinking, ice breaking apart like that, all at once. He'd tested it himself earlier in the afternoon. He'd gotten four inches, solid, on several bores and no indication at all of a weakening on the run.
Damned odd.
He had been a park employee for a lot of years, and he'd run this slide during the winter months for most of them. He had seen a lot of strange things in that time, some of them of the head-scratching variety, but never anything like this.
A hole in the ice for no reason.
Standing there, thinking it over, he heard the unmistakable sound, sharp and penetrating in the stillness of the night, of ice tightening—a slow, almost leisurely crackling, like glass crunching underfoot.
He turned and looked. Twenty years, and this had never happened before.
He was a thorough, methodical man, one who followed through on what he started and made sure the job was done right. When something difficult arose in his work, he made it a point to understand the nature of the problem so that it wouldn't happen again, or so that if it did, he would be ready.
Impulsively, almost stubbornly, he snatched up his four-cell flashlight and started down the slope. He took his time, picking his way carefully over the icy spots, finding solid footing with each step. He just couldn't help himself—he had to have a look. He was being silly, doing it now, when it was so dark, instead of waiting for morning. But he wanted to see what had happened before someone else did so he could have a chance to think about it. It wouldn't take long, after all, just to take a look.
Myriad pairs of lantern eyes followed his descent toward the bayou, peering out from the gloom of the surrounding trees, tracking his movements, but he didn't see them.
His breath clouded the air before him as he eased down along the toboggan slide to the river bank and made his way past the chute where it opened onto the ice. Carol was off with the church guild and wouldn't be back anytime soon, so there was no hurry about getting home. He shuffled his way across the ice with slow, steady steps, keeping to the edges of the shoveled area so that his boots could find purchase. The beam of his flashlight stabbed the darkness, reflecting off the hard, black surface of the frozen river.
It's so quiet, he was thinking. Not even the wind was—
He stopped abruptly, several hundred feet out, and stared at the tombstone shape of the Heppler toboggan where it jutted from the ice, cocked slightly to one side, its curled nose pointing skyward, its lower half trapped in the frigid waters. Parts of the sled were splintered and cracked, slats sticking out in jagged relief, bindings torn and shredded.
Ray shook his head. He had never seen anything like it. A hole opening and then closing again, crushing a toboggan into kindling. Damn, this was weird!
He started forward, intending to go only another few steps, but the ice gave way beneath him all at once, breaking and snapping apart as if formed of the thinnest crust. Ray threw himself backward toward safety, but he was already sliding down into the freezing waters, the shock of the cold taking his breath away. He went all the way under, then fought his way back to the surface, gasping for breath. His heavy boots and coat dragged at him, and he kicked his way out of them, shucking off his gloves as well, all the while groping desperately for a solid piece of ice on which to find a grip.
"Help!" he screamed, his voice thin and high-pitched. "Help! For God's sake!"
Thrashing wildly in the freezing waters, he tried to reach the edge of the ice. But his flashlight was lost, its light gone out, and he could not find the edge of the hole.
"Help me!" he cried in a long, desperate wail.
Then he saw the eyes, yellow and bright and all around, slipping through the darkness just at the edge of his vision, watching him struggle.
Waiting.
The ice began to shift. He heard it crack and snap, then felt the water about him lift in a slow wave. The crunching that followed was deep and resonant and filled the whole of the night's silence. He screamed anew, but something was dragging at his legs, pulling him under. He went down, then flailed back to the surface, gasping for air. No! he was screaming inside his head. Oh, please, no!
He went down again, and this time when he came back to the surface, the ice was in his face, closing over him. He groped for the edge of the hole and managed to get one arm out before the ice locked about his wrist, trapping everything but his hand beneath the surface. He kicked and lunged frantically from beneath, but the ice would not give way.
From above, just where he could see them, the strange yellow eyes peered down at him hungrily. For a few moments longer, his bare hand groped and twitched in the night air. When it finally quit moving, frost began to form on the skin until it looked as if the hand wore a white glove.
The eyes watched a little while longer, then disappeared.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23
CHAPTER 15
It was dark the next morning when Nest rose to go running. Light from streetlamps pooled on the snow outside, and the luminous crystals of her bedside clock told her it wasn't yet five. She dressed in the dark, pulling on tights and running shoes, adding sweats, then tiptoed down the hall to the back entry where she picked out a rolled watch cap, gloves, and a scarf. A glance at the coatrack revealed no sign of Bennett's parka. Apparently, she hadn't come home.
The early morning air was so cold it took her breath away. She jogged up the drive, highstepping through drifts to the road, and began to run. The snowplows had been out early, and Woodlawn was already scraped down to the blacktop in a broad swath that cut like a river through the snow. Somewhere in the distance, the plows were still working, the growl of the big engines and the harsh scrape of the metal blades clearly audible in the windless silence. Nothing moved on the road ahead, and she ran alone down its center, picking her way along the cleanest sections, avoiding patches of ice and frozen snow, breathing deep and slow as she moved out toward the country.
Out where, in the solitude and silence, in the deep midwinter calm, she could be at peace.
Streetlights illuminated her path until she was past Hope-well's residences and into the farmland beyond. By then, the eastern sky was showing the first traces of brightness, and the black of night was lightening to deep gray. Stars glimmered in small, distant patches through breaking clouds, and the snow-covered fields reflected their silvery sheen.
She picked up her pace, the adrenaline surging through her body, a humming in her ears, the warmth of her blood pushing past the night chill until she didn't feel it anymore. Her mind worked in response to her body's energy, and her thoughts whirled this way and that, like kids waving their hands in a classroom, eager to ask questions. She wrestled with them in silence as she listened to the pounding of her shoes on the pavement, working through the mix of emotions the thoughts triggered. She should have been smarter about last night, taking them all to the toboggan run and putting them at risk. She should have been smarter about Bennett and not let her go out alone afterward. She probably should have been smarter about a lot of things—like running alone in the early morning hours when she was vulnerable to an attack by the demons stalking John Ross and the gypsy morph, almost as if daring them to try something.