Above their heads, rafters creaked. Both women jerked their heads toward the ceiling. It was an old A-frame house built in the early ’70s, and both women had lived in the place long enough to become familiar with all its typical creaks, groans, and rumblings. This sound was not one of them.
“Is something upstairs?” said her mother, still staring heavenward.
“Sounds like someone’s on the roof.”
In the summers, squirrels would tromp about the shingles and drop acorns down on the roof, where they’d roll like tiny boulders down into the gutters. Even those pedestrian sounds had resonated with amplification, and Shawna would imagine squirrels up there the size of small dogs and acorns as big as apples. Right now, whatever was up there sounded like a pickup truck slowly ascending the pitched roof.
“Stay here,” Shawna said.
“Where are you going?” her mother called after her, but by that time, Shawna was already halfway down the hall on her way to the stairs. “Shawnie!”
Upstairs, the house was dark, the moonlight sliding in shafts through the windows. Pausing on the landing, Shawna held her breath and listened for the sound again. But all was silent.
Shawna had loved her father very much and, since his death, thought of him often, but this was the first time since perhaps the funeral she’d actually tried to will him back into existence. If he were here, this wouldn’t be happening. If he were here, she wouldn’t have to be checking the upstairs hallway, the bedrooms, making sure the windows were locked. That had been her father’s job.
She went quickly from bedroom to bedroom, making sure all the windows were locked. They were. Tight. Outside, the snow continued to fall. From her bedroom window she peered down into the yard. Mr. Kopeck was still MIA, but those two footprint-shaped divots stared up at her like eyes.
Downstairs, her mother screamed.
Shawna raced back down the hall and took the stairs two at a time. She grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella rack at the foot of the stairs—the only weapon she thought of at the moment—and rushed toward the kitchen amid the sounds of pots and pans clattering loudly to the kitchen floor.
“Mom!”
She arrived in the kitchen just in time to see a fleeting shape yanked backward through the doorway at the opposite end of the kitchen. One of her mother’s slippers skidded across the floor.
Shawna charged forward, wielding the umbrella like a sword, and crossed the threshold into the living room. What she saw there would be etched into her memory until her dying day.
It was her mother, her housedress torn down one side, her ample bosom clad in a padded bra fully exposed, a look of incomprehensive terror on her face. She was on her back…but not necessarily on the floor, because something was sliding wetly beneath her, something big, keeping her up off the floor. The sight caused Shawna to freeze, her eyes blazing like the headlamps of a tractor.
“Shawwwwnieeee!”
The thing beneath her mother bucked and the woman slid to the floor. Then, impossibly, what looked like a narrow funnel of snow corkscrewed up from the floor. Wind blew Shawna’s hair off her forehead and sent loose papers and napkins fluttering about the room. There was a smell, too—something thickly rotten and unearthly.
Something separated from the funnel of snow—something long and tapered, pointed at the tip. In her stupefaction, Shawna thought of a shark’s dorsal fin. Then reality rushed back to her and she lunged forward, swinging the umbrella at the twirling mass of snow like a baseball bat.
The umbrella passed right through it, unencumbered.
“Shawww-NIEEEE!”
It was the last thing she would ever hear her mother say. The dorsal fin blade pitched downward, lightning quick, and buried itself into her mother’s chest. A gout of black blood erupted in a geyser from her mother’s mouth. Around Shawna, the house shook. That hideous, dead-animal stink intensified until Shawna’s eyes burned.
She blinked, her vision sliding away from her.
And when she opened them again, she caught the final vestige of the snow funnel withdrawing up through the chimney. Her mother was gone now, too, but her other slipper lay in the hearth of the fireplace, powdered in soot…
The days following that event had been pure madness. By the time she reunited with Jared, half the town had vanished and those who remained had either turned into drooling savages or had simply become different. Some of the neighborhood children had simply vanished…but the ones who lingered became ghosts of their former selves, faceless little nymphs hiding out in the surrounding woods. It was as if the creatures could not properly meld with children, that they corrupted them visually and ruined them.
Jared’s plan was to get out of town ASAP, but unfortunately he was having trouble starting his Subaru. Gunning the accelerator while the vehicle straddled a snowbank achieved nothing except for igniting a small fire beneath the undercarriage. Jared cursed and panicked but, as it turned out, the fire kept the snow-things away. Fire, Jared told her, could hurt them, maybe even kill them. It had been Jared’s idea to hurry over to the Pack-N-Go for containers of lighter fluid so they could make torches…but when they got there, the proprietor, George Farmer, had changed. And something had gotten inside Jared, too.
She’d had to shoot him, bring him down. She could still see his head coming apart in her mind’s eye…
These thoughts, along with a thousand others from the past week, cluttered Shawna’s mind as she crouched down in the holly bushes, staring at the back of Rita Tubalow’s house. Her whole body felt numb and her breath was becoming shallower and shallower. As much as she hated to consider this alternative, she knew she had to get out of the cold as soon as possible, not to mention away from those things that were pursuing her…which meant ditching into the nearest shelter.
What if those things are in that house? Those things like Tim Kopeck and Delia Overmeyer?
It was a risk she’d have to take.
When she finally felt more in control of herself, she stood. She was aware of a ripping sensation followed by a surge of pain that raced up her left leg—Fred Wilkinson’s stitches coming undone.
In pain, she hustled across the snow-covered yard toward Rita’s house. Glancing over her shoulder, she was horrified to find spatters of blood left behind in the snow.
She hid briefly in the shadow of the raised deck, catching her breath. Suddenly, the rifle hanging from her shoulder weighed about a thousand pounds. Her breath wheezing through her tightening throat, she leaned forward and looked in either direction, examining the neighboring yards for signs of life. Or signs of…something other…
There were no broken windows at the back of the house that Shawna could find. That was how they got in. Through the chimneys, too, of course. Or open doors. Any way in at all.
Slinking along the concrete wall, Shawna made her way to the basement door. Curling her numb fingers around the doorknob, she said a silent prayer to a god she did not believe in before trying to turn it.
It turned. Blessedly.
She eased it open and waited to see if anything would rush out at her. The rifle at the ready, she counted to ten. Nothing came for her. She leaned into the doorway and examined a basement as black as the solar system. Sniffing the air, she braced herself for that decaying, dead-animal stink they carried with them, but the place just smelled musty and unused. Not dangerous.
Maybe.
Shawna slipped quickly inside, toeing the basement door shut behind her.
The darkness was absolute. Hulking behemoth shapes rose up out of the ether like beasties from some fabled world—a billiard table, sofas, tables and chairs, boxes of old clothes and appliances. She smelled sawdust and paint thinner and, beneath all that, rodent feces.
She wended her way to one dark corner where she proceeded to stack boxes around her as a sort of improvised shelter. Then she eased herself down onto the cold stone floor, using the butt of the rifle as a crutch. The pain in her leg was a raging conflagration now; it was all she could do not to shout out as she attempted to unbend her knee.
Something thumped on the floor above her head.
Please no please no please no, she prayed. Just give me some time to rest. Please. Just a few minutes.
She waited but the noise did not repeat. Setting the rifle down, she unbuttoned her pants and, over the course of the next fifteen minutes, managed to slide out of them despite the agony it caused. Her fingers grazed the wound. The pain was one thing but actually feeling it caused her gorge to rise; she leaned over on her side and vomited a stringy acidic paste into one of the cardboard boxes.
The easy thing would be to stick that rifle in my mouth and pull the trigger. After all, it’s not like I’m going to get out of here. It’s futile. And if these things live in the snow, if they are the snow…well, around these parts, snow’s liable to stick around until early March. My luck’s bound to run out before then.
It was very unlike her to think like that. Wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she righted herself against the wall and began patting herself down for the flashlight she’d slipped into one of her coat pockets. But the flashlight was not there; she must have dropped it in all the commotion. And this thought caused her mind to summon the image of Nan Wilkinson being swooped up into the night sky where she’d disappeared.
That’s it…a single pull of the trigger and this nightmare is over, Shawnie. It frightened her to think that was her mother’s voice.
Scrounging around in the pockets of her pants, which were now bunched up at her ankles, she managed to locate her cigarette lighter. She considered the implications of flicking it on—was it possible the flame could be seen from outside?—but in the end decided she had little choice. If she didn’t attend to her wound, she’d die right here, frozen and bleeding to death.
Shawna clicked on the lighter and brought the flame down to her left leg.
Again, she felt her gorge rise…but this time, did an admirable job keeping her ground. The injury was bad, made to look worse by the way half the stitches had come undone and given the wound a half-pursed, mouthlike appearance. Her entire thigh down past the knee was brown and matted in sticky, dried blood.
She let the flame flicker out. Leaning her head back against the wall, she silently counted to one hundred. When she’d finished, she began systematically sifting through the surrounding boxes for loose articles of clothing. She found a number of old shirts, which she collected in a nice pile beside her. She’d use some to dress with and keep warm, others as blankets and pillows. Lastly, she’d use the fabric from some shirts to bandage up her leg.
Taking one of the shirts—a long-sleeved button-down—she set it in her lap and proceeded to tear one of the sleeves off. She wrapped the sleeve just above the wound to prevent any future blood loss. The second sleeve she tied over the wound—gritting her teeth as she did so—and pulled it snug. The pain was unbearable and didn’t let up until she finally loosened the bandage. Lastly, she located a pair of sweatpants and decided to pull these on instead of trying to wriggle back into her cold, wet, blood-soaked slacks. The sweatpants were several sizes too large but they felt heavenly.
Her eyes were already beginning to droop by the time she’d piled extra clothes beneath her head and body and lain down on the floor. She pulled a tattered old shawl that smelled of camphor over her shoulders, then dragged the rifle closer to her in the darkness.
Soundlessly, she slept.