Her only hope now was to find the house. That’s why she was heading through the woods, grateful that the snow wasn’t as deep here, making it much easier to walk. There was no feeling below her knees, but she kept her legs moving. At least the wind wasn’t blowing.
There was no sign of the light at the house the others had spotted through the woods. She hoped she was heading in the right direction. Morning had to come soon. Regardless, she was putting distance between her and the highway and those horrible things that had emerged from the storm.
Francine didn’t understand everything that had happened. It had all gone wrong and now Werner was gone and she was alone. Alone in the woods on a stormy winter day. This was not how she’d expected to spend Christmas.
Francine emerged from the woods and found herself on…
…a street?
It was daylight.
Oh my, she thought, morning has broken fast.
There were houses along both sides of the plowed street, the snowbanks high along the edges, mailboxes poking out of the piles. The scene looked familiar. She marveled as she looked around. She knew this place. This was Charron Street in Berlin, New Hampshire, where she grew up. Down below was Main Street and downtown nestled along the Androscoggin River.
But how could that be? She was nowhere near there. This couldn’t be right.
Francine walked down the street, looking up at the hillside above and the bare trees dotting it. Down the end of the road was Hill Street. She remembered walking down it on her way to Bartlett School. She recalled sledding down the road during that terrible winter.
Of course, that was before the bad things had begun to happen.
She continued down the snowy street till she got to the house she knew very well, the one she’d grown up in. She brought her hand to her mouth in awe, forgetting how cold and raw her fingers were. She stood at the end of the driveway looking at the house, not daring to walk up to it.
Francine’s trance was interrupted by footsteps and she turned to see Calvin, the mailman, walking down the street toward her, mailbag slung over one shoulder, fur-lined flaps of his cap down over his ears, framing his round red face. She saw the smile beneath his walrus mustache when he saw her.
“Hello there, Francine,” Calvin said with a toothy grin.
She looked at him in silence.
This was all wrong, but it felt so good to see a familiar face after all she’d been through.
“Hi,” she said, still stunned.
“Some storm last night, eh?” He stopped before her.
Francine looked up. The sun shone down from a bright blue sky, glaring off the crusty snow covering.
“Yes, it was,” she agreed. She looked at his mailbag. “Anything for me?”
“I believe there is,” he said, bending his head down and digging through his mail pouch. “I think there’s a Christmas present in my bag for you.”
Francine smiled with glee. “I can’t wait to see what it is.”
Calvin continued to rummage through the bag, digging down past the envelopes.
Something occurred to Francine. Something wasn’t right.
“Calvin,” she said. “How come you’re delivering mail on Christmas?”
His hand stopped moving, as if it had found something in the pouch. His head tipped back to look at her. His face had changed, the mustache gone, the skin craggy, straw-like hair poking out from under his mail cap.
“Because I have a special delivery for you today.” He grinned with crooked teeth as his hand withdrew from the mail sack, pulling out a pair of black ice tongs.
Francine stepped back, her mouth opening. Before she could utter a sound, or comprehend what she was seeing, Everett Wick raised the tongs in both hands.
She was about to scream when he plunged the sharp points of the tongs into the sides of her neck. Her scream was drowned in the rush of blood that flooded her throat from the punctured jugular vein and carotid artery.
Francine collapsed to the ground by her mailbox, raising her head as she gurgled on her own blood. She looked up one last time at the back of the Iceman as he walked away, blood dripping from the ends of the ice tongs, staining the snow on the road.
Chapter Seventeen
“You’re crazy,” Clark exclaimed, incredulous. “You blame that schoolyard incident on what happened to your great-grandson? That’s insanity.”
“I’m not saying that one indiscretion caused everything.” Sledge leaned forward, both hands gripping the edge of the pool table. “It was just the catalyst that set everything in motion.”
He may be dead, Clark thought, but worse than that, he’s mad. Maybe that’s what a place like this did to you. Maybe being wherever they were distorted your mind after so much time. If so, Clark needed to find a way out.
“Whatever happened to Leroy Sledge, he chose his own path.”
Sledge chuckled. “Not quite. Let me show you what I mean.” He stepped over to the wooden cabinet against the side wall and opened one of the bottom drawers. He extracted a large wooden box, but as he did, Clark noticed something else in the drawer, a revolver. He took note of which drawer it was in, in case he got a chance to get back to this room.
The old man set the wooden box on the pool table and Clark peered closer. It was a tabletop labyrinth. He remembered having one as a child. There were knobs on each side of the box to control the surface of the maze. Sledge took a round silver marble out of a slot and placed it on a spot at the starting line of the maze.
“More games?” Clark asked.
“Our lives can follow different paths,” Sledge said, turning the knobs that tilted the surface and maneuvered the ball through the labyrinth and around the holes. “And along the way, obstacles intervene and alter our course, and if we’re not careful –” the ball dropped through a hole, “– we get lost.” He stepped back from the table and looked across at Clark.
“And that’s what happened to Leroy?” Clark asked. He had never been able to get to the finish line in the labyrinth game those many years ago, no matter how many times he tried. Close, but never to the finish.
“You and your friend Graham were the first of many obstacles that hindered my great-grandson’s life.”
“You base a lot on games.”
“My whole life was built around games,” Sledge said. “It’s what got me everything I had.”
“And what got you here? You finally played a game you lost?”
Sledge chuckled. “I played a demon in a game of Snakes and Ladders. I had a chance to go up –” he held his hands in the air – “but I ended up down in this realm. Of course it didn’t quite look like this. I built this place, well, in a manner of speaking. Not with my hands, but with my imagination.”
“So you finally lost at a game.” Now it was Clark’s turn to chuckle. He could tell from the look on the old man’s face that he didn’t appreciate it.
“But who’s losing now?”
This infuriated Clark. “Those people on the highway aren’t just token pieces on a game board,” he said, his voice raised. “They’re real people with real lives.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
“They’re just innocent people,” Clark pleaded.
“You’re quite mistaken,” Sledge said. “Follow me.”
He led Clark out of the billiard room and down the grand foyer to the room with the snow globe. On his way by, Clark peered into the open doorway to the living room and saw Graham still warming himself by the fire.
Sledge waited for him by the snow globe. The scene inside it as Clark approached was the house they were in. Snow still fell inside the globe.
“I told you that you and your friend were just the beginning. There were others who affected the course of poor Leroy’s life.” He passed his hand over the globe. A series of faces floated inside the glo
wing orb. “His expulsions from school, beginning with the incident with your friend led Leroy to meeting and befriending another troubled youth, Evan Hodge, who ended up introducing Leroy to drugs. He was the son of Toby Hodge.”
“Who the hell is Toby Hodge?”
“He was the snowplow driver,” Sledge said as another face appeared in the globe. “You don’t want to know what happened to him.”
Clark glanced up at the man’s expression. He was reveling in this, he thought. He could see it in his eyes.
“Of course Leroy ended up dropping out of high school as you may recall. His father tried to help him, got him a position at the Sledge & Ferrin Game Co. A low-level job of course, something made up to help keep him off the street. But it was a start, and Leroy worked toward his GED in the meantime. There was opportunity to grow in the company. But then the parent company I sold the business to brought in a consultant to scale down the firm and eliminate any dead weight.”
Another face materialized. Clark didn’t recognize it.
“Dean Hagen was his name, and of course Leroy’s meaningless position was jettisoned, with little deference to the fact that he carried the Sledge name. Mr. Hagen was the man who ran naked into the storm. I’m sure his body is nicely preserved somewhere out there.” The old man smiled.
Out in the hallway, Clark could hear the sound of rattling chains approaching. He imagined it must be Bernard Ferrin’s move in the chess game. More games, he thought. What significance could that one have, he wondered?
“Once unemployed,” Sledge continued, “poor Leroy slipped back into his bad habits. His father sent him to live in a drug rehab facility down south. It was only a few months before he slipped out one day. He probably would have been caught fairly quickly, since he wasn’t familiar with the area or anyone down there, but he managed to hitch a ride with a truck driver on a run back up northeast.”
Clark saw the brown face of the truck driver appear in the globe. “Tucker Jenks shared some pot with Leroy, and that’s all it took to unravel all the work the rehab center had accomplished. Jenks dropped Leroy off in Manchester, and my great-grandson began a life living on the streets. It wasn’t long before drugs led to other crimes, and soon he was committing burglaries. That led to a stint in the state prison. Even his father and all our family money and lawyers couldn’t help him.”
“Another hole in the maze,” Clark said, staring into the globe.
“Indeed,” Sledge responded. “Once Leroy was out of prison, the family again tried to intervene and help get him on the straight and narrow. But a simple parole violation sent him back, something that could have been easily overlooked by his parole officer….”
“Mason Drake,” Clark finished, seeing the man’s image pop up in the globe.
“Yes. Leroy bounced between jail and the streets, living the transient life when he wasn’t in a cell, scoring drugs when he got the chance. When last winter set in, he was able to get shelter at the Salvation Army homeless facility. But he was ratted out picking another transient’s pocket by Lewis Felker and kicked out.” The face of the Salvation Army worker floated in the globe. “There was no place for Leroy to go, except the streets. The last day of his life, last November, he was panhandling and a couple of young college kids felt pity for him and gave him some money.
The image of the dead young couple in the hatchback appeared in the snow globe and Clark felt his blood stir.
“They were just trying to help him,” he said through gritted teeth.
“And do you know what he did with the money they gave him? He bought heroin and shot himself up under a bridge beside the railroad tracks.” The old man leaned forward so the glow from inside the globe cast a light up under his face, a glow highlighting his expression. “That was the last day of his life.”
Wait a minute, Clark thought. Something was missing. Shelby. Her face hadn’t appeared. Nor her kids. His heart had been racing anticipating her image before him and he had dreaded it, trying to block out what horrible fate might have befallen her inside the doomed RV.
“Shelby,” he uttered softly. He raised his eyes to look at Sledge. “Shelby and her kids. They had no part in this, did they?” He wanted an answer. At least he thought he did.
“Sometimes,” Sledge said, “you can move pieces around on a game board, but you can’t necessarily control everything.”
“You fucked up, you bastard.” Clark clenched his fists by his side.
“Not exactly,” Sledge said with a sigh. “Shelby Wallace was not supposed to be out in the storm tonight. Her husband was supposed to bring the children home to her, but he got drunk and couldn’t drive, so she went and picked up the kids.”
“So her husband?”
“Nelson Wallace was the engineer driving the train that killed Leroy Sledge.”
“So Shelby didn’t deserve what you’ve done.” Clark felt the urge to throttle the man if he only thought it would do any good.
“Unfortunate circumstance,” was Sledge’s response.
Something else occurred to Clark.
“And her kids? You were willing to sacrifice them too?”
“Hell no,” Sledge said. “I’m not a monster. I wouldn’t hurt the children. I had them brought here with me.”
“What?” This shocked Clark, trying to fathom the thought that they were somewhere in this house all this time. In the distance, the rattling of chains made their way up the staircase. Were Shelby’s kids in chains somewhere in the house?
“It gets lonely here,” Sledge said. “I wanted the children for companionship. Seems a fair trade for the loss of my great-grandson.”
“Did you even know Leroy that well?” Clark asked.
“Not really. I died two years after he was born.”
“He wasn’t a nice kid.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Sledge said. “He was family.” The man turned to go. “And now I believe Mr. Ferrin is done and it’s my move.”
“You didn’t show me the Volkmanns in your snow globe,” Clark said, almost forgetting about the couple who had rescued them, though it all seemed a moot point now.
Sledge stopped in the doorway and turned back.
“Oh yes, the Volkmanns. You’ll get a laugh out of this.”
“I doubt that.” Nothing was remotely funny to Clark this evening. Or this morning rather. It had been a long night.
“They are actually Leroy’s grandparents on his mother’s side of the family.” The old man chortled. “I sort of recruited them for their help.”
Clark couldn’t believe it. They seemed like a typical nice old couple. “So they were dead too?” he asked, wondering if they inhabited this realm like Thayer Sledge.
He laughed again. “Well, I hope so now,” he said, his grin wide. “Useless pawns are usually sacrificed after serving their purpose.” He strode out of the room.
Clark turned back to the snow globe. Its image had returned to the house he was in. He wished it would show him something useful, something to help him get out of here. Or at least maybe where Shelby’s kids were. Since he hadn’t been able to save her, he wished he could at least save her kids.
He waved his hand over the globe, like he’d seen Sledge do. Nothing happened. Snow still fell on the house inside. He had the urge to pick the damn thing up and smash it on the floor. He moved his hands toward it, feeling static electricity as his fingers got close to the glass, like some kind of energy was emanating from it. What power did this thing have? He was afraid to touch it.
Clark suddenly thought of Graham.
He hurried from the room. Across the hall, in the other room, Graham still sat by the fire. Clark looked over at the chessboard, but neither Sledge nor Ferrin were there. Sledge must have already made his move. Clark wondered what it could be.
He approached Graham.
“How you doing, pal?”
<
br /> “Still cold,” Graham said, nodding.
Clark looked at his friend. Something was odd. Even though Graham was sitting by the fire, which threw out tremendous heat, his face was still covered over in an icy frost. Nothing had melted even after all this time.
“What’s wrong with you?” Clark asked.
“Funny thing happened when I fell in that snow well out there,” Graham said. He was grinning.
“What happened?”
“I died.”
Chapter Eighteen
The screams of Mason Drake’s wife reverberated in his skull as he fled up the highway away from the RV. He wanted the wind to pick up and drown out the sound and as if on cue it did, blowing snow in his face.
Shame nagged at him as he clambered through the snow heading for his car. He had a chance to stay and save Joy, but instead he had turned coward and ran. He should have been her protector. The fear in her eyes as that thing grabbed her was imprinted in his mind.
And then the screams.
Mason had stood in horror as the branch arms of the snowman shredded her sweater and started stripping the flesh from her bones. He had fled to save himself the same fate. There was no honor in that. He had failed her, but at least he was alive. How would he explain this to their kids?
The only important thing now was to survive. Without a winter coat he wouldn’t last long. That’s why he was trying to get to his vehicle. He wasn’t sure what he’d do when he reached the SUV; start it and get warm for starters. He still wouldn’t be able to drive it out, but it would give him time to think.
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