So while his sneakers soaked up snow, he flailed at the accumulation on his car with the little brush on the end of his windshield scraper, until the faces watching from the farmhouse realized he was serious, and Kyle and a couple other burly farm cousins tromped out in their boots with the laces undone and helped manhandle Kevin’s Pinto through the snow down the drive and into the road, then stood by the mailbox in their shirtsleeves and watched him fishtail down the hill. Kevin barely made it down the road, his wheels churning snow and gravel, but the Grand Ledge Highway had been plowed and the tires gripped the scraped gray pavement gratefully. A haze hung over snowy fields on either side, and a weak winter sun, just risen, hovered above the skeletal branches of some farm’s woodlot. He fiddled with the radio but found only Christmas music, and every tune, from “Run, Run Rudolph” to the “Hallelujah Chorus,” sounded like a taunt, so he drove with the radio off, listening to the rush of the heater and the clatter of his shitty little car.
East of Lansing on I-96, bored by the freeway, he got off at the Okemos exit and headed south through Mason, hoping that the storm the night before had passed mostly north of the freeway and that the back roads were clear. By now the sun had climbed higher into a crystalline blue sky, and the snow on either side of the road glittered so painfully that Kevin regretted not having brought his sunglasses. The road itself was clear and dry and the streets of Mason were empty early on a Christmas morning, so he decided to risk an even smaller road, Dexter Trail, that wound around small lakes and through woods and past ranch houses and farms. On a long, straight stretch of the Trail east of M-52, just north of Stockbridge, he impulsively pressed the accelerator to the floor and pushed his rattling little deathtrap as fast as it would go on the cracked pavement — which, luckily for him, wasn’t very fast, so that when the road passed through a gloomy patch of woods where the low winter sun hardly ever shone, and the car hit some ice and began to spin, he wasn’t instantly propelled into a tree. Tree trunks slid sideways past his windshield, then the road behind him, then trees sliding the other way. When he was facing forward again, his adrenaline kicked in and he stomped on the brake, screeching to a halt on a dry patch of pavement just beyond the woods and stalling out the car. As he sat panting in the sudden silence, he saw that someone else had hit the same ice and spun out not long before, only without as much luck as he’d had. In the steely winter light falling across a farmyard just beyond the woods, Kevin saw a pair of tracks plowing through the snow across the yard and past the front of a derelict farmhouse. The twin tracks ended at a green pickup truck tipped on its side at the edge of the field beyond the house.
His heart racing, Kevin sat in his ticking car in the middle of the road. The tracks looked fresh, unblurred by later snow or wind. The old farmhouse, though, was heaped with snow. Its front porch had long ago collapsed like a shopkeeper’s shutter over the first-floor windows and the peak of the farmhouse roof had caved in, so that he could see bitter blue sky through the empty window frames of the second story. Across the weathered gray siding someone had spray painted, in huge letters, NO ENTRING. Even under the blanket of snow Kevin could see the tangle of untrimmed bushes across the farmyard, the angular heaps of rusting farm machinery, and the splintered uprights of a barn that had long since burned or collapsed completely into itself. The tracks of the overturned pickup seemed to aim straight through the only unobstructed path across the yard and into the field beyond.
Still trembling, Kevin restarted his car, checked his mirrors, and pulled the car as close as he could to the side of the road without getting stuck. He put on the emergency blinker, left the motor running, and got out. Clutching his denim jacket shut at his throat, he slipped and slid in his soaking sneakers up the track of the pickup, calling out weakly in the bitter cold, “Hello?” The empty farmhouse seemed bigger and gloomier now; through its broken windows he saw that the first-floor ceiling had also caved in, too, so that the interior of the house was stuffed full of splintered gray timbers like a box full of pickup sticks. Even if you wanted to, there’d be no entring that house, making the blunt warning across the front seem both superfluous and more menacing. Scuffing up the track on his icy feet, Kevin thought the handpainted warning might as well have read ABANDON ALL HOPE.
Kevin called out again, “Anybody there?” but his words froze and died, leaving only a ringing, icy silence. He was shivering, and his feet were beginning to sting. The snow around the truck was disturbed by the truck’s final topple onto its side, and Kevin steadied himself with one hand on the freezing side panel as he edged along its rust-eaten and salt-rimed undercarriage. He kicked through the snow around the front of the truck, trailing gusts of white breath. The truck’s hood was still warm under his hand, so he called out again, “Anybody in there?” The windshield was cracked but not shattered; it might even have been an old crack, an elongated S that snaked from one side to the other. The cold light fell across cracked black vinyl seats that were patched with duct tape and leaked sickly yellow foam stuffing. Kevin put his shaking hand on the cold, cracked glass and peered into the cab. The driver’s door window was rolled up and intact, while the passenger door window, pressed into the snow at Kevin’s feet, was crazed with fractures. His pulse throbbed in his throat, and he angled this way and that, peering into the foot wells and the narrow space behind the seats, briefly misting the glass with his breath. There was no one in the truck.
The hair rose on the back of his neck as if someone were watching him from behind, and he spun suddenly around. The field of snow glittered away into the distance, poked through with the dried stalks of last year’s corn. No one there, either. He glanced at the gloomy house, gray wood heaped with white, then at the ruins of the barn, blackened uprights frosted with snow. He stepped back into drifts up to the calves of his jeans to get a wider view of the truck. There was no snow on it, so it must have crashed since the storm, but the only footprints around it were his own, coming up from the road. He trudged along the top of the truck, noting the empty bed and the intact window at the rear of the cab. Standing behind the sideways tailgate, he saw the truck’s tracks and his own coming up from the road, saw his Pinto with its lights flashing dimly in the bright sun, saw its thin plume of exhaust rising straight up in the brittle, windless air. He turned completely around, stamping a hole in the snow. There was no one in the truck, and no tracks led away from it.
Suddenly the cold penetrated deeper, not just the freezing air through his thin jacket, but an all-encompassing cold that seemed to flow from the truck, the ruined barn, the decaying equipment, the slowly collapsing house.
“Hey!” he shouted, as loudly as he could, but the syllable disappeared into the cold as quickly as the mist of his breath, leaving no trace that he had ever cried out at all. The snow glittered painfully in every direction, except in the interior of the derelict house. Even though the roof had collapsed and the windows were all broken out, none of the relentless winter light seemed to make it into the house’s interior, where all he saw were the shadows of shattered and upended timbers, curling peels of ancient wallpaper, sheets of water-stained lath and plaster, and where, he knew, with absolute certainty, that if he stared into the shadows long enough — trembling in the cold, up to his knees in snow — something would move and beckon him.