by Tim Lebbon
Birds went about their business as normal, unperturbed by the sudden flurry. A siskin hopped from branch to branch in the apple tree, glancing at the house between each hop as if making sure she was still watching.
Megan dropped the curtain and stood back. The light coming through seemed brighter than it should, reflected and exaggerated by the thickening snow.
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“Nikki,” she shouted upstairs, “it’s snowing.” She wanted it to sound like a warning but realized that there should be nothing inherently worrying about it, not really, it was only weather. “Footprints in the snow,” she whispered. “Dan, where are you?”
Megan ran back to the dining room and checked the lock on the French doors. She could see across to the woods from here. They were darkening already, even though it was not even midday, only trees at the very edge standing out from the expanding shade beneath their bare branches. The snow became thick and insistent, hazing the air between the house and the woods. It was settling. A breeze came up from nowhere and sent ghostly shapes hurrying through the downfall.
The birds were watching the house. It wasn’t just one or two anymore, like the siskin and the robin-it was all of them. They sat along the fence at the edge of the garden, hopped across flower beds, hovered down from the roof and back up, down and up. Megan felt their dark eyes upon her, his dark eyes through theirs, and she closed her own eyes and begged God for help and strength.
Receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.
And suddenly she was afraid no more. A rush of joy flushed through her, an epiphany in this dark time, lighting the way to the kitchen, into the cupboard next to the sink and then to the back door. She carried a broken broom handle, one end viciously sharp from where it had
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snapped six months ago. Dan had been meaning to fix it ever since, but it had taken up residence in the rear of the kitchen cupboard along with the rusty wok, the bag of bicycle lights and the box of broken plugs. Useless … until now.
“Nikki!” she shouted again, pleased that the fear had gone from her voice. “Nikki, they’re watching the house but I’m going to see them off. He might be watching but that’s all he can do. I’ll show him I’m not afraid, show him we’re not to be messed with. He’ll leave us alone then. Your dad may have seen him but he won’t again, I won’t let him come in and scare us, it isn’t right, God is with me and He’ll help me see the bastard off!” She opened the back door to a rush of cool air, speckles of snow flurrying in before she stepped over the threshold and slammed the door behind her. Nikki had not responded but that did not concern her. She was hungover. Best she stay out of this, anyway. This was God’s work.
Outside now, in Brand’s domain perhaps, his place where snow was falling again and his natural minions-or slaves-were watching her, she stepped out from the cover of the roof overhang. Snow landed on her shoulders and in her hair like shed skin, kissed her cheeks with lips of the dead, cooled her skin and drew the life from her …
But the idea of Brand was planting these ideas. The snow was white and pure, cool and indifferent. It melted against her skin and took her warmth, warmth she could afford to give because she revelled in the heat of her devotion.
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Megan stood in the middle of the lawn and glanced back. She had left vague footprints already, even though it had only been snowing for a few minutes. If it kept on like this, they’d have a fair covering by the end of the day. She looked across the garden and past it, to the neighboring house and the woods and the lane leading down to the main road, and the only signs of life were the birds and a small dark shape foraging at the wood’s edge.
She had God, the birds were spying for Brand. She felt righteous.
Megan walked towards a fence panel where there were several small birds fluffed up against the cold, observing her approach with tiny jerks of their heads. The broom handle swung by her side. There was no way the birds would stay there for her to strike out at, she was sure of that, but at least she’d be seen to be acting. Seen in the very real sense of the word. She would not be afraid anymore, she refused, and even though the tall stranger had frightened her and abused her, God was there as he always had been. Now more than ever she felt that. Now, as she was starting to fight back.
Several steps from the fence the birds took flight, fluttered a few panels along and perched again. They still looked at her, still fluffed up, eyes reflecting the increasingly white landscape. She swung the handle anyway and hit the fence with it, but even though the impact resounded through the wood the birds did not move. They watched.
She ran a few paces and swiped out as a
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sparrow on it took flight, missing by several feet but still enjoying its panicked little flutter, actually certain that she’d heard a cry of distress.
“Stay away from me!” she shouted. “You hear? You see … but do you hear? You leave me alone, I’ve got God on my side.”
The birds chirped. It sounded as if they were laughing.
“Bastard!” she hissed, running at the dead apple tree, swinging the handle around her head and letting it fly at a magpie in one of the upper branches. It missed the bird and clattered back down through the tree, sticking in the ground between exposed roots. The magpie settled again and screamed down at her. She ran for the stick and tugged it from the earth. As she looked back up at the magpie it took flight and shit at her. It missed, just, and splashed down onto the grass.
Megan hurled the stick again, even though the bird was already way too high to have a hope of hitting it.
The smaller birds along the fence began singing again, laughter running from one end of the garden to the other, no different to the normal birdsong but imbued with some darker significance now. Some of them hopped from fence to ground and back again, taunting her with their trespass.
“Get away from here!” Megan shouted, thinking God help me get them away from here. She ran to fetch the handle and threw it at the fence, actually believing for a second that it was going to hit a great-tit sitting there staring at her. It struck the timber inches below the little bird. It
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did not budge. It was watching Megan.
“Get the Hell away from here!” she screamed, running to and fro, ignoring the useless broom handle now and trying instead to scare the birds into flight. The snow was thicker, deadening the noise of her footfalls, making her all too conscious of her heavy breathing, her sprinting heart, the fear rising in her throat as she realized that she could shoo the birds from one part of the garden, but never all of it. They simply went from one place to another, calmly lifting off as she approached and flitting over her head, past the house and down to the opposite end of the garden.
What a sight she must present. Arms flailing, trousers flapping and spotted with snow, hair wild and whipped around her face. Wherever he was, Brand would be laughing.
Megan stopped at the edge of the lawn. The snow had dropped a fine dusting across the grass now, and her prints were evident, crossing and crissing the garden, showing where she had been and revealing how pointless her little display was. At least for now the birds had stopped singing.
Quietly, calmly, she walked to the back door. By the step into the house she saw a snail, trailing its sticky path through a thin layer of snow as it sought shelter under a sill or beside a window frame. She knelt, letting the snow melt through the knee of her trousers and enjoying the cool kiss of water against her skin. She would be warm again soon. She would be dry and warm and she would pray, and Brand and his minions
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would be out here in the snow, freezing where they sat.
Megan pressed down on the snail’s shell and its eyestalks retracted, the edges of its sticky foot curled up. She pressed more, and more, until she felt and then heard the shell cracking beneath the pressure. Then she left it to die.
Opening the back door she wondered how she appeared to him through a snail’s eye
s.
“Nikki!” Megan stood by the Rayburn and warmed her hands near its hot metal surface. She felt good. She felt that, along with the cold, she had also locked the threat outside. “Nikki, it’s snowing, looks heavy.”
No answer. Hating herself for it, Megan could not help rushing into the hallway and shouting upstairs at her daughter. I was in the garden, she thought, I didn’t lock the back door, wasn’t always in sight of it, anyone could have come in, anything-
“Nikki-” Megan sighed and her shoulders slumped. Her daughter was sitting on the landing, staring down between banisters. Tension left her and the warmth of God’s presence massaged her cold, aching muscles. He would look after them, she knew that now. She had made a stand, however ineffectual, and proving that she had fight in her would please God. He would help her to defeat whatever it was Brand had brought with him to infect and corrupt her mind, and the minds of her family.
“Nikki, I’m going to ring your dad and get him to come home, but we might need. … Nikki? Nikki?”
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Nikki was not moving. She sat with her head rested against the timber uprights, sharp edges pressing into her temples and cheeks and framing her pale face, emphasizing the eyes, those staring, blank eyes … staring straight at Megan.
“Nikki?”
Her daughter smiled slowly and sweetly, but it was not her own mind pulling her lips like that, Megan was sure, she was certain. Not Nikki smiling at her like that.
“You leave her alone,” Megan hissed. She started up the stairs, then darted back down and into the kitchen.
The poker they used for the Rayburn was still hot.
Dan was driving too fast. Even if the snow had not been turning into a blizzard, even if the light had been good and the roads long and straight, even if he had not been eaten with worry he would have been driving too fast. He took corners trusting that there would be nothing coming from the opposite direction. The wheels spun on the road, and he steered into the skids. He needed to get home. Brady would have phoned the police but he needed to get home, now, instantly. He resented the distance between him and his family, cursed the woods and the fields and the hedgerows. Home, with Megan and Nikki, because Brand was still around. And he had met his wife.
Not content with the danger of driving madly through ever-worsening snow, Dan slipped the mobile from his pocket and tapped the memory
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button for home. There was no tone, no signal, not even a sigh of static. The snow had seen to that.
“Shit!” He bashed the wheel with both hands and the car slewed across the road, heading sideways into a curve, straddling the white lines hidden by snow. Dan panicked and overcompensated, the rear end began to go and he had a sudden, sickening image of himself lying dead in a ditch. Brand would stand over him and smile down at his smashed head, walk by his still-steaming body, glass crunching underfoot as his boots left bloody prints behind him … prints heading into the wood directly to Dan’s home.
That was no way to leave his family.
It took three long seconds to save the Freelander from the skid. He cut his speed and took long, deep breaths, trying to take control of his runaway heart.
The snow was terrible now, a heavy fall that seemed to be worsening every second. A breeze was picking up too, driving it across the road in sheets, heading more and more toward blizzard conditions. The second surprise snowfall of the week.
A sudden sense of deja vu hit Dan and he ran with it. He liked the feeling, he always had. This time, however, it changed into one of outright dread within the blink of an eye.
The same turn of the wheel; the same nudge of his knee against the central column; a clump of snow slipping slowly down the edge of the windscreen; a bump as a wheel passed over
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something on the road; the same corner turned…
… the same shape by the side of the road. And then the sensation lifted and the shape was not standing next to the road, it was on the road, the shadow of something not there, a place in the midday blizzard where darkness already hung. Instinct and shock took control of Dan’s hands and he spun the wheel to the left.
Everything slowed down as he realized he was leaving the road.
The steering wheel came alive in his hands as the front wheels struck the curb and lifted the nose of the Freelander into the air. Dan could do nothing but sit tight, watching snow still patter at the windscreen and the wipers still clear it as the hedge grew closer, closer… and then exploded as the vehicle hit.
He managed to turn his head, partly an involuntary gesture to defend his eyes as much as he could from a potentially shattered windscreen, but also to see whether the shape was still in the road. Snow fell, swirled by the breeze, twisting and rising and spinning in impossible patterns, circling the place where the early darkness had been and hiding it from view.
If the front wheels hadn’t lifted, maybe the hedge would have been thick enough to prevent the car from gouging through into the plowed field. Dan’s stomach dropped as the front of the vehicle rose. He grabbed hold of the wheel again and felt the mechanical distress of the smashed front axle as it spun into destruction.
The top of the hedge parted to let the car
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through, clawing at its underside. He could hear paint being scored from the side of the car.
Then the back wheels hit the curb and flipped the vehicle’s rear into the air, the bonnet tipped down and Dan saw the field about to swallow him up.
He tensed against the steering wheel, remembered something about it being best to go limp in a crash, then tensed again the instant the front of the Freelander hit the plowed earth. The impact whipped his head forward so far that he struck his forehead on the wheel. The seatbelt bit into his neck and shoulder, punched against his ribs. He actually smelled mud as a sheet of dirt was flung into the air in front of the car, cutting darkly through the falling snow and splashing against the windscreen and side windows, pattering down onto the roof as the car crashed down fully into the field, gouged through the mud for several feet and then came to a standstill.
After the noise of the crash every little engine tick, gasped breath, trickle of mud along warped body panels and drip of fuel from the punctured tank was amplified by silence.
Dan twisted in his seat to look for the shape that had distracted him.
Him, he thought, it had to be him. But even though the car had smashed through the hedge and formed a second opening from the field into the road, the snow was falling too heavily for him to see beyond it.
Dan’s back hurt, as did his neck and ribs. His hands, already bruised, stung where he had been
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holding the steering wheel when the car hit the field. He touched his forehead and dabbed there gently, expecting blood but feeling only tightly stretched skin, the bump swelling beneath his fingertips. A sense of unreality gave everything a startling clarity. He supposed it was the usual human defence of this can’t have happened to me, but he really was in a field in a crashed car, steam was hissing from the bonnet in stark contract to the heavy snow, and he had to get out … had to get out now. He could smell petrol.
Undoing his seatbelt hurt more than he had anticipated. His head kept tipping forward to ease the pain in his neck, and he had to consciously keep it upright, muscles straining in his neck and jaw. Every time he breathed he felt something click in his chest. Maybe he’d broken a rib. Maybe it was edging into his lung right now, threatening to puncture and deflate and drown him in his own blood. He’d heard of instances where people walked away from an accident, only to drop dead hours or days later from injuries they hadn’t even been aware of sustaining.
He coughed, gently at first then harder, holding his hand over his mouth and inspecting his spittle. No blood. Not yet.
He had to shove hard against the door to get it open. The whole chassis must have twisted, the side panels deformed, because the bottom edge of the door screeched against the sill and stripped t
he paint down to the base metal. The cold came in, and the snow, and the total silence. No birds sang. No animals scampered around in
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the hedge or the field. There were no cars on the road. It had been snowing for a quarter of an hour and there was a layer across the ground. People must already be settling in for another long, cold spell.
Last time, we woke to footprints, Dan thought. And Megan was scared and I was dismissive, and now Brand is here again to do whatever it is he plans to do.
Dan backed away from the car and hugged his arms around his chest, holding the pain, keeping warm, trying to make himself feel safe. He had to get home. The road was safer, he knew, especially in this weather, but across country was far quicker. Two miles by road. A mile across these fields and through the woods, if that. It wasn’t as if he’d get lost walking a mile across country.
And he had to get home.
He should ring Megan. She’d be worried, he was worried, he had to talk to her again and try to calm her and make sure she was doing all the right things. Panicking would not help her, praying to God would not lock the doors and snap home bolts. He knelt in the mud, wincing as his neck protested, and looked beneath the rear of the Freelander. There was a steady trickle of petrol from the ruptured tank, but the wet mud was swallowing it up. The door was open, he only had to reach in for the mobile, no sparks, the engine had gone off on its own accord-Wet mud, and something else. There was a shape under one of the back wheels where it had skidded and ploughed its way into the mud.
