Rise of the Snowmen

by Emmi Lawrence

  The SUV beeped open and Taylor reached in and started up the engine before flicking the heater on full blast. Then he skirted around the elf Greg had shot dead—that now grossly seeped in sugary swirls about the concrete—and began to shove his things back into his duffel. Mandy leaned against Greg, her head becoming a dead weight against his shoulder.

  “I’m tired, Daddy.”

  “I know, sweetheart. Let’s get you bundled in the car.”

  He set her into the backseat and buckled her in—“I’m not a baby, Dad! I’m a warrior! I can do it!”—and then braced himself against the passenger side door.

  As Taylor passed, his hand swept over Greg’s back. The action was particularly intimate, not seductive nor sexual in any way, more suggestive of an intrinsic relationship that went beyond the physical.

  “Go ahead and get in,” said Taylor softly. “I’ll drive.”

  “To where?” said Greg on a pseudo-laugh. With a glance at Mandy inside the vehicle, he lowered his voice. “Where are we supposed to go?”

  “We can drop Mandy off at Katie’s so she can have a normal Christmas and then wherever you want. Or, hell, we could just drive around if you’d rather. Bound to be someplace open that sells shoes.” He glanced down at Greg’s feet. “Can just wait in the parking lot for another couple of hours. Who knows, maybe even get some sleep.”

  Greg blanched, but didn’t respond. This had been his home. Everything that represented safety and comfort and love and family. And now—he looked around at the trashed garage, at the snow glinting through the door into his house, at the elves still sinking in on themselves to leave precious little evidence of them being here.

  There was nothing safe here. Not now.

  Mandy knocked on the window. “Daddy?”

  Metal pinged and clanked as Taylor readjusted the duffel’s strap hanging off his shoulder. His voice grew gentle and his presence closer. His hand freezing as he pressed against Greg’s cheek, turning him away from the SUV so he was forced to look into Taylor’s face.

  “Hey, we did it. We’re safe. Christmas season is over.”

  For the year. For three hundred and sixty four days.

  “Go ahead and get in the car, warm your feet up. I’m going to fetch my jacket, then drive us out of here.”

  Greg obeyed jerkily, sinking into his own car. He fielded Mandy’s tired questions with even more tired answers. Then he stiffened upright the moment Taylor closed the driver’s side door, his jacket dripping all over the center console.

  “Going to all-wheel-drive this pile of snowmen refuse. Hold on to something, Mands, it’s going to get bumpy.”

  He gripped the back of Greg’s headrest and gunned the car, the wheels slipping on the pile of snow at first and then rocking up and over, tossing them about. The SUV whined slightly. Snowmen arms cracked and crunched under the tires, and then they were squishing layers of fresh snow. A white spray kicked up past their windows, reflecting the grayness of the dawn.

  The SUV lumped down into the asphalt of the clear road. Before them stood Greg’s snow-encased house, lumps of misshapen snowmen dotting the yard, flattened pools indicating a snow angel along the side of the garage near the window.

  He glared at it all, the pins and needles in his feet only just beginning to ache. Then Taylor put the car in drive and turned them down the road, headlights ghosting over neighbors’ brown lawns and past a salted sidewalk that hadn’t seen a speck of snow since last winter.

  From the backseat, Mandy’s snores drifted forward before they’d even left the neighborhood. Greg let his head rock toward Taylor. He had a bleeding scratch on his arm, a bruise purpling near his temple, reindeer fur clinging to the dampness on his white shirt and blue jeans. The look in his eye when he glanced over, Greg could describe in numerous ways: focused; driven; sexy; protective.

  “You know where Katie lives?” Greg asked.

  “I’ve driven by her place a few times, sure. Had to check on Mandy.”

  “Of course you did,” murmured Greg.

  Taylor glanced over questioningly, but Greg just let himself rock into a disheveled, exhausted stupor. His body relaxed. He had a momentary thought, a revelation, that maybe he didn’t need a house for safety. Not if he had a person who could provide it far more confidently. A person much more valuable than any house could ever be.

  “Oh no.”

  Greg pulled himself from his half-asleep state, thinking the SUV must be out of gas based on some weird dream about being chased down the highway by Santa’s sleigh. He was reaching for his pocket, patting for his wallet, before he realized he hadn’t grabbed it and hadn’t asked Taylor to either. It would be back at the house, probably buried under a foot of snow somewhere.

  That was fine. He had his phone and some cash, at least.

  The SUV puttered and then stopped completely in the middle of the road.

  “There’s some cash in the glove box.”

  He wiped a hand down his face and straightened up, but Taylor didn’t even acknowledge him, too busy staring straight out the windshield. With a sinking in his stomach, Greg followed Taylor’s gaze down the street, past the line of mailboxes and through the barren branches of a couple of tall oaks.

  There, at the apex of the cul-de-sac, stood an icy palace. The peak of the roof had extended toward the heavens and lifted into turrets. Crenellations sawed above the gutters. The angles of the siding contrasted with ice-carved stonework. The windows glowed with rainbow pinpricks. The door’s wreath had become a refraction of green. The porch, a drawbridge of chain-linked snow crystals.

  Strands of ninja star snowflakes looped from the tips of the turrets all the way down to the mailbox. And sticking out that open, glassy mailbox was a fluttering message made of flattened licorice and lumpy red and white gumdrops.

  “HO HO HO” the top portion read, with the M and the Rs and the MAS that suggested a “MERRY CHRISTMAS” where the message had folded over onto itself and become stuck with all its sticky, sugary fluttering.

  “Oh my God,” breathed Greg, the intensity of the reflecting sunlight stinging his eyes, causing them to water.

  Taylor advanced the car until it puttered hesitatingly in the middle of the road right in front of the once-normal house with its pristine snowy yard. He put the car in park with a jarring jerk. Grabbed his jacket. Then the driver door opened and slammed shut. The chilly breeze from outside competed with the heaters and was quickly smothered for its attempt. Greg sat there, as frozen as Katie’s house, and watched Taylor approach the driveway on foot. As Taylor reached the mailbox, Greg broke from his numb staring.

  “Mandy?”

  He twisted to check the backseat, but Mandy remained slouched over, her eyes closed and her mouth slack in sleep. He had the barest hint of relief that he wouldn’t have to explain, but it fell into a sense of dread immediately for what was to come. For what he’d have to find words to say, out loud, such that Mandy might understand.

  Such that he might understand.

  Outside, Taylor put his phone to his ear and Greg glanced at his, but no call came in. No text. Taylor’s mouth moved and only the barest hint of his voice could be heard over the rumbling of the engine. There was a certainty in the line of Taylor’s shoulders. A decision in the way his gaze locked onto Greg’s through the windshield.

  Beyond, the palace that had once been Katie’s house, once been one-half of Mandy’s whole world, shone and sparkled. It glowed in the morning sun. It stood in stiffened, glassy glory, melting one drip at a time. Each drip invisible to the eye, yet the smoothing of the corners, the growing icicles, the pooling dampness stretching across the snow, sunk the palace one lazy drip at a time. Greg could almost feel it, as if he could sense the drops sliding against his own skin.

  Though that might have been his clothes defrosting in the heat of the car.

  Taylor settled back into the driver’s seat, his phone gone from his hand. “The police are on their way.” He spoke matter-of-factly. Distantly. Wi
th an edge to his voice that reminded Greg of the first time they’d met. “I told them we’d been going to let Mandy see her mom for Christmas morning.”

  “The snowstorm wasn’t just around our house last night.”

  “I didn’t mention that to the police.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Taylor remained conspicuously quiet.

  “We should have warned her,” said Greg. “I should have told her about last year and everything that happened. Why I didn’t…”

  “You didn’t because you didn’t think she’d believe you.”

  “Mandy would have corroborated the story.”

  “And Mandy is in first grade. Kindergarten last year. We talked about this. She wouldn’t have believed you and it could have caused strain on your arrangement.”

  “Fuck!” Greg punched the dashboard, causing the vinyl to crack and the glove compartment to pop open. There was a rattle of metal on metal where one of Taylor’s knives bounced against a couple of caltrops. Greg raised an eyebrow at the weaponry stashed in his car, but neither of them said a word about it.

  In the back seat, Mandy let out a soft moan, causing Greg to flinch, then she quieted. He left the glove compartment open, the knife rocking. Click, click, click as it tapped a caltrop with each tap.

  Taylor put the car in gear and pulled them to the side of the cul-de-sac where he parked and shut the car off. The silence deafened Greg. It filled the spaces in between the ticking engine. In between Mandy’s quiet breaths. In between the crinkling of Taylor’s jacket as he sank into his seat. The silence grew loud, filling Greg’s ears until the world around him became too far away to reach.

  Then the cold began to seep in.

  “What’d the sign say?” he asked, his voice sounding as if it came down a tunnel.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Greg saw Taylor glance over.

  “’Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  They sat in the quiet, Taylor occasionally turning the car back on to warm up, but other than that, he left Greg to wallow in silence. To stare at the palace with its turrets and banners. To line up the words he’d say to Mandy when she woke.

  The police didn’t know what to do when they arrived. Bright-eyed, yet disillusioned to be working the holiday, the men and women in blue mingled like it was a Christmas day miracle and not an icy tomb before them.

  They questioned Greg on his relationship with the occupants—and on the fact that he wasn’t wearing shoes, which he pretended to dismiss with the explanation that he hadn’t actually been going to go anywhere else, that he’d just thrown clothes on straight out of bed. They wanted to know whether he knew if Katie Westmill was inside. Whether there might have been anyone else. A partner. A boyfriend.

  He told them he didn’t know. When his gaze kept getting caught toward the ice-encrusted house, one of the cops asked if Greg knew how something like this could have happened.

  Something like this.

  Elves, officer. Elves came down from the North Pole. They bided their time, officer. They struck on Christmas Eve, in midnight hours. A snow angel nearly suffocated and froze his daughter. An army of snowmen nearly crushed them. A team of elves nearly destroyed everything Greg held dear.

  “No,” he said, licking dry, cracked lips that remembered the way a snowflake throwing star had grazed them. “I don’t know how something like this could possibly happen. It’s unheard of.”

  When Mandy woke needing to use the bathroom, Greg knocked on one of the neighboring houses and begged to invade their Christmas for just a few minutes, and luckily they recognized Mandy. By the time he got back to the car, Taylor had disappeared. Keys left dangling in the steering column. Duffel gone from the backseat.

  “I’m hungry,” said Mandy as she pushed her knees into Greg’s too-big shirts and curled into a ball.

  “We’ll go run through someplace. Sure something is open…”

  He glanced around again, searching the street for Taylor. The cops milled about the cul-de-sac, hands on hips, each of them nodding sagely to one another about whatever theory they’d decided on for the magical encasement of a single, normal, cookie-cutter house in ice. Maybe one of them had seen.

  With a word to Mandy to let her know he’d be right back, Greg strode over to the cop he’d spoken to earlier, the man’s long face easy to recognize in the group.

  “Excuse me, did you see where the man I was with went?” Whether he’d cut through the yards, between the houses and if so, which way and how long ago, but Greg kept that rush of questions to himself.

  “Saw him by his car.”

  Except it wasn’t Taylor’s car. Taylor’s car was still stuck in Greg’s driveway, engine a solid block of fuck-you-I-might-never-turn-over-again. “Did anyone else see where he might have gone?” Greg lifted his voice so some of the other police glanced over, but no one had a good answer.

  So much for attentive officers.

  He muttered a thanks and moved to leave when a woman called, “Do you know a Taylor, Mr. Westmill?”

  Did he know a Taylor? Did he?

  He knew Taylor well enough to know he wouldn’t run from bloodshed or violence, would stand in its path, would confront it head-on, would destroy it. And he knew Taylor well enough to know his apartment was only just down the road. That he kept it to escape from the things he truly feared. The things that got in his head and couldn’t be persuaded to unlatch.

  But he certainly didn’t know why the police wanted to know any of that.

  “Why do you ask?” Greg shoved his fists into his pockets to keep his hands from betraying his nerves.

  “This message. Do you know if your ex-wife had a friend by that name?”

  The policewoman held up the licorice message left by the elves. The gumdrops had smeared, drooping Os and lopsided Rs and one I cascading in on itself. But below all that, where the sugar had stuck to itself, the candy had been flattened into squished remnants. But even as remnants, the message was entirely legible.

  HO HO HO

  MERRY CHRISTMAS

  TAYLOR

  Chapter Thirteen

  The world—outside of Greg’s and Katie’s homes—had that typical wintery air of deadness. Brown grass. Bare trees. Gray sky. Even the Christmas lights, that had shone so grandly in the darkest of hours, now sat dim and dull. The mars on inflatable Grinches and the graffiti on church nativities felt like a more real representation of Christmas to Taylor than any celebration.

  He strode quickly through the neighborhood, hands in his pockets, his duffel thumping against his back, the still-damp splotches on his jeans beginning to warm from the sun. Here and there he’d see trash overflowing cans, wrapping paper with sunglasses-wearing penguins or happy chibi-elves peeking from the tips of black trash bags or pressing against the inside of white ones. Boxes that had housed gaming systems, surprise dolls, computers, and gift-set alcohol sat in neat or chaotic piles.

  Christmas had come.

  Christmas had gone.

  And Taylor’s world was never going to be the same. Neither would Greg’s. Especially not Mandy’s.

  He cocked his head as he reached the main thoroughfare, listening. Always listening.

  For most of the morning, he walked. Strode down the highway, in and out of neighborhoods, through town, past where the gingerbread house had stood last year. He took a path that cut him into the back entrance of Greg’s neighborhood and for a time, minutes ticking by as his clothing dried, yet left damp, chafing places on his skin, he clung to those streets. Far from Greg’s house. Far from the damage, the wreckage of the life he’d stupidly thought he could claim with no repercussions.

  Then, slowly, he worked his way inward. Turned right on Oak Falls Lane, a left on Lake Side, another left on Wisteria, before a final slight curve where Wisteria morphed into Shady Barn Drive. Not a single barn in sight, but even from here, at the end of the street he could see the white glistenin
g in Greg’s yard.

  He stood at the end of the driveway, where the asphalt hadn’t been claimed by winter. The storm had passed, though there was a reminiscent linger of it every time a light breeze whooshed over the snow and sent it fluttering. It would be ice soon. A sheet of it across the freshly fallen snow as the sun melted it down, crushing whatever life was left in the angels, in the snowmen—and snowwomen.

  A layer of frost had claimed his crumpled car, but that couldn’t hide the deep grooves where snowman fingers had clawed across the paint and destroyed the metal. The driver’s window remained open and along the roof blackened scorch marks stood out starkly against the ice. Snow had piled on the door, likely sunk inward, spilling onto the seats, leaving a calling card from the North Pole.

  He wouldn’t be surprised if an angel hid in there. Escaping from the heat of the sun, hoping for a meal as it waited and prayed to its chubby, bearded god that a snow shaper would return to save it.

  On the roof of the house, he could clearly see the smear left from the reindeer dragging its bloodied head as it fell. The icicles that were beginning to form off the gutters on that stretch of roof would be tainted with it, a pinkish glow inside the ice to commemorate the death.

  He let out a hard breath. Fists clenched in his jacket pockets. The gun pressed against his back felt useless, a forsaken hunk of metal that couldn’t protect anyone or anything.

  There really was only one thing left to do.

  Taylor looked again at his car, where an angel might yet hide, and then waded forward into the snow.

  By the time he reached his apartment in town, the building old and worn, but not dilapidated by any stretch, he’d grown a massive headache from not eating. Or, more likely, from the distinct lack of caffeine.

  The electricity had still been out at Greg’s and though he’d called it in, he suspected it’d be a while before anyone came to investigate, which meant no caramel coffee. On the other hand, he had found dry clothes to change into as the snow hadn’t quite invaded all the way up through Greg’s dresser.