The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

“Yes, I suppose I ought. I’m an old man and I have a bad cold and I ought to get to bed. You’re right.”

  “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”

  “Take care,” he said tiredly. “And don’t forget to say your prayers.”

  “Which prayers are those, Arthur?”

  “ ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ That prayer.”

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll say it.”

  “Goodnight then, John.”

  “Goodnight, Arthur.”

  Sixteen

  I WAS SITTING AT THE desk making lists of what had happened since I’d arrived back in Cooper’s Falls, trying to make sense of it all. And it kept coming back to Austin Cooper’s papers in the boxes at the library. The papers had triggered Cyril’s decision to come home and he was murdered before he got to them. The papers made him wire me to come home and I had survived an attempted murder by sheer accident. And whoever had killed Paula Smithies had stolen the papers. Except for the metal box which Peterson was going to have opened.

  What could anyone have wanted in those papers? They referred to a period which was now purely historical, a cause which had been buried in the ruins of the Reich. And yet people were still dying.

  I don’t know how long I’d been aware of the sound outside. And then it stopped, leaving a void in the sea of sound. I noticed its stopping most of all.

  I went to the window. The lights from the house made the night too black to see clearly. Staring into that blackness, I was aware first of the sound of the windowpane shattering, chips of glass spraying across my face, and then I heard the brittle, echoing crack of the shot, heard wood splinter behind me on the opposite wall by the fireplace.

  Reflexively I ducked and crawled on my knees to the desk, reached up and turned off the light. There was no physical exertion in what I’d done but in a matter of five seconds I was out of breath and frightened. Somebody had just shot at me. As I knelt by the desk I fully realized what I should have known before, what Peterson should have known: just because they didn’t get me the first time there was no reason to think they’d give up on the idea. Whatever the reason, they wanted me just as dead as Cyril and Paula. I was a loose end and apparently they felt I was somehow a threat.

  And now they had me.

  I felt on the desk for the telephone. Lifting it off the receiver, I knew what I’d hear: nothing. They’d cut the line, some time since I’d been talking to Arthur. I was alone. I was cut off. And I was shaking with fear, fighting off the urge to vomit.

  I heard nothing but the wind outside. There was a disgusting sour taste in my mouth and, oddly, I began to feel shame. The longer I lay there, remembering the night’s dead, the more ashamed I felt. Cyril. Paula. Father. Mother. Little Lee. Paula’s husband. … We all have a death in store for us. Indeed, Arthur, I thought. And mine is waiting outside in the snow.

  I doubt very much that what I began to feel was courage. I am not a brave man. But lying on the floor in the library, I began to realize that I was tired of this, tired of people dying and people hitting me over the head and shooting at me and killing nice, decent people. I began to think that there was some miserable son of a bitch out there in the snow who was trying to kill me, who figured I was some goddamned pushover, nothing but a stupid target, scared shitless, somebody to be cut off from his protectors and methodically butchered.

  My hands were clenched into fists, shaking. Everybody else was dead, so what the hell difference did it make? The least I could do was make the son of a bitch work for it.

  So, like a child, I crawled across the library floor to the parlor door, reached up and flicked the light switch, sending the room into darkness, like a chess player, I began to look several moves ahead. Without leaving the darkness. I could crawl across several connecting floors, turn off all the lights, move from room to room. From the parlor I reached up and plunged the hallway into darkness; then, across the parquet floor to the dining room, the second drawing room, the music room, the gun room.

  The gun room.

  There was still no sound but the wind. Now that the house was totally dark, I could see that the clouds had broken, that there was a certain spotty moonlight. Cautiously I edged my way around the gun room to the window, which gave on a wide view of the front lawn. At first I saw only the black outlines and shadows of evergreens in clumps, the skeletal taller trees, the undulating surface of snow. There seemed to be nothing which could have been a man, but of course there was a man. Eventually I saw him.

  From behind a clump of something he rose like a specter, a tall man, a hundred yards away, and within an instant I realized what I’d heard: the clump wasn’t a clump at all. It was a snowmobile. I had heard its nasty little engine.

  I shuddered with anger. He was intent on killing me, this tall scarecrow man with his snowmobile, and I could either accept that fact, say my prayers as Arthur had suggested, and compose myself for eternity, or I could try to kill him. Escape had flickered across my mind for an instant and, in my anger, I had rejected it. If not now, he would find me later as he had found Cyril and Paula.

  There was no escape. But with nothing to lose, I could try to kill him.

  The entire situation began to simplify itself. I walked across to the rack of shotguns, picked out a Browning over-and-under with a pale stock which caught my eye in the dim moonlight, and opened the drawer where the shells were kept. I took a handful of the large paper-jacketed shells and went back to the window.

  He was still standing there in the snow. I could imagine his confusion. He should not have missed with that first shot: he had been careless and overconfident, seeing me silhouetted in the window. Obviously he had a rifle with a telescopic sight and he’d missed. And now he knew I’d been warned, put on my guard, but he didn’t know what I was doing. He didn’t know if he’d wounded me, he didn’t know if I was hiding in terror under some bed. He didn’t know I’d decided to kill him.

  I watched him staring at the house, straining my eyes to keep his shape clear against the shifting shadows, the snow swirling in the wind. I went back into the hallway and put on my sheepskin coat. When I looked again he was on the snowmobile and I heard it come to life. I watched it come closer to the house, moving in a faint zigzag line, leaving a wake of snow snaking out behind it. At fifty yards he stopped again and I watched him get off, fumble with the rifle. I watched him aim at the house and sweep the barrel of the rifle across the frontage.

  Then I heard another shattering of glass and the report of the shot, cracking flatly against the wind, finally smothered. He was worried. He didn’t know what to do.

  I opened the front door, slowly staying behind it, knowing in a peculiarly crazy way that I was controlling the situation. My heart was pumping wildly and I felt curiously lightheaded. I heard a bullet hit the stairway, heard another crack like a bullwhip.

  I knelt and crawled through the doorway into the cold. For some reason I wanted to be outside with him: I wanted him to know that I’d decided to play. The Lincoln sat between us and I didn’t know if he could see me. But I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to know I was there. I had about ten feet to go to reach one of the great square pillars, so I stood up, looked directly at him, and saw that he still had the rifle at his shoulder and was scrutinizing the house through the sight. He saw me and I stepped behind a pillar, peered cautiously out. The wind blew snow in my face. The gun had never left his shoulder and he squeezed one off and wood splintered off the pillar. At the instant I heard the report I broke the other way to the next pillar. We repeated the process one more time. He’d lowered the rifle and I walked to the end of the porch, stood watching him. He was tall and gaunt with squared-off shoulders and he regarded me in return. At that moment he was very possibly deciding whether or not he should turn tail and forget the whole thing. I desperately wanted him to stay, to come after me: once he committed himself I knew I might win. And I didn’t want
him waiting for me, waiting for another lonely night.

  Slowly he climbed onto the snowmobile and started it again. I stood utterly still, the shotgun concealed by my body. Then, suddenly and with a galvanic effect, the snowmobile surged forward: he was coming after me. I jumped down off the porch into the deep snow and shrubbery by the side of the house. For a terrifying moment I thought I couldn’t move in the deep snow, but I managed. I thrashed my way along the shrubbery and made the turn at the back of the house with the sound of the machine churning, gaining on me. I didn’t really have a plan. But I did want to confuse him: I didn’t want to just take a shot at him, miss, and have him ride me down. I didn’t want him to know I had that shotgun. I wanted that to be waiting at the end.

  I stood in the shadows as he swept by twenty yards away, curving in a great arc which took him beyond a stand of trees well behind the house. The clouds passed for a moment and the wind held its breath, the snow sparkled.

  I ran for the shelter of the evergreens growing along the driveway which led to the cottage. He was turning the machine. I saw it skimming along the snow’s crust, occasionally digging in and sending a breaker curling elegantly in the moonlight.

  Sucking at the cold air, I inhaled snow crystals, felt my lungs laboring as I lifted my legs high in the deep snow. Hearing the incessant roar of the machine gaining again, I lunged across the shrubbery which was still just visible behind and a few inches above the iron railing which followed the driveway. Panting, realizing I couldn’t run anymore in the snow, I watched him throttle down near the shadow cast by the house. The snow glittered. He waited. I had disappeared and he was looking for me in the puzzle of shadows and snow skimming along the surface.

  Looking in the direction of the cottage, I saw that the wind had blown much of the snow in the driveway across the lawn, lowering the level in the driveway which lay between us. The snow was deeper again as soon as it got to the railing, which was obscured in the shadow of the bank. The bank itself was now about a foot higher than the driveway.

  “You son of a bitch,” I yelled against the wind. Standing up, I stepped out of the shadows of the evergreen, holding the shotgun behind me. “Come and get me, you bastard!” And I began to stagger off, slogging, falling to my knees once, struggling back up. I headed off at a forty-five-degree angle from the curve of the drive.

  I heard the engine revving up again, looked back to see the skis knife down into the snow as he began to move toward me. I kept moving deliberately toward open ground—open ground where he could easily ride me down and kill me. But to reach me he had to cross that driveway. …

  I turned finally, gasping for breath, snow caked across me like a snowman. My eyeballs felt dry, frozen. But he was coming and I slid my hand along the stock, cradling the gun against my body.

  The snowmobile picked up speed as it reached the far side of the driveway. The tall man was standing, gripping the handlebars as he leaned into the dip of the driveway and I saw him begin to lean gracefully back to lift the front end, to take the snowbank.

  And with an awful splintering and grinding of metal the skis hooked under the iron railing, ripped away from the machine which stopped with a hideous finality, slid for an instant along the railing, and tipped across it, the engine churning, snow spewing away in a furious cloud. But the tall man was already gone, through the windshield that must have cut through his coat and on through the flesh on that gaunt frame, hurtling on through the blowing snow with a shriek that died on the wind.

  The motor cut out and it was quiet except for the wind and the faint rattle of snow on the frozen crust.

  He lay in a broken heap about fifteen feet from me, a black shape like a shadow on the snow. I brought the gun up and held it at my waist, leveled at him. I was terrified of the shape, my mouth and throat too dry to swallow: what if the shape moved?

  Eventually the black mass twitched, made a gagging sound, moved an arm, gagged some more, and I heard wet retching, a flood of something in the snow. Then the head moved, tilted back to look up, and then the torso began to rise too, snow sifting away, until the figure was weaving drunkenly on its knees in the snow, like Neptune rising from the sea.

  “Help me—”

  The shape gurgled at me, spit, reached up toward its face.

  “My face—” The words were mushy, indistinct, sounded like the rush of a sewer. “Something’s wrong—with my face.” The words were pushed past the gurgling, the product of an awesome effort.

  Immobilized I watched as its hands fluttered at its chest, then a leg pushed against the snow and the shape grew taller.

  And I pulled the trigger.

  The sound was like a bomb going off in my pocket and the recoil almost knocked the gun from my hand. The first blast blew quite a large chunk from the left side of what was the head: bits flew away in the moonlight, seemed to float. The second blast caught him lower and lifted the shape upward and back, out of the snow, until it settled back into the glare of moonlight, legs straight before it, the torso twisted at a peculiar angle.

  When I stopped shaking I felt more tired than I knew it was possible to feel and I dropped the shotgun in the snow and walked back across the wide snowy space, feeling desperately small, toward the house. I wanted only to go to sleep. I didn’t even look at the thing I had killed.

  Seventeen

  OLAF PETERSON WAS STANDING OVER me, peering down into my face, a contrail of blue smoke appended to his cigar. It took a minute to wake up. I was lying on the couch in the library and the night was howling outside. A draft penetrated the broken window. My head ached at the base of the skull and when I jerked my hand it knocked an empty scotch bottle onto the floor. I remembered: I’d gone off the wagon, passed out.

  “What time is it?” I asked. My tongue felt thick and furry.

  “About five thirty,” Peterson muttered, shaking his head. He retrieved the empty scotch bottle, held it upside down. “What the hell happened here, Cooper? How did the window get broken? Why did you leave the front door open? Why doesn’t your telephone work?”

  “They cut it after I spoke with Brenner,” I said. “Which wouldn’t have given them much time—” I sat up on the couch. Peterson was standing by the broken window: blue duffel coat, gray turtleneck, black cigar, snow melting on his hairpiece. “Why are you here?”

  “I worry about you, Cooper. I got to worrying about you tonight when I finally got home. I said to my wife, I’m worried about that dumb son of a bitch and she said which dumb son of a bitch is that and I said Cooper and she said why don’t you call him and that’s when I found out there was something wrong with your phone. I mean, everybody else is getting killed, at least everyone who is involved with you, so why not you—and why not Arthur Brenner? So I called Arthur, told him to make goddamned sure his doors were locked, told him to take precautions—he was asleep, naturally, sounded half snapped on toddies, but I felt better. But I wasn’t going to take any chances with you. It should have occurred to me right away.” He regarded me sourly.

  I told him what had happened. It came back to me in an unexpected rush of awareness, like a dream hitting you in rapid fire while you’re taking your morning shower. The telephone call, the shot, the terror and the crawling, the gun room, the stalking, the shape rising out of the snow, the shotgun going off. …

  Peterson sat staring at me after I’d finished. He said nothing, he smoked his cigar, he stared. I got up and went to the window. The eastern sky was beginning to get a little grayer than the night around it, which was still black. The moon was obscured, the wind ranted. The window was icing up at the edges. I felt sick to my stomach, cramped.

  Finally he sighed and stood up.

  “Let’s go find what’s left of this guy you killed.” As I buttoned my coat he said: “Jesus, I hope he hasn’t been buried in this fucking snow.”

  They say that when it gets sufficiently cold you can’t tell as it gets still colder. That’s wrong. It was forty degrees below zero out there and the wind was
gusting to thirty miles an hour and I can’t imagine ever having been out in such cold before. The sky kept easing toward morning and as it lightened it revealed what could have passed for another planet, long dead. The treeline was shrouded in snow and stood behind a mist of snow. The lawn was crusted and cracked like breaking ice underfoot. The bleak, broken snowmobile sat upended in the snow like the wreckage of a plane crashed thirty years ago in the Libyan desert. Snow driven across the crust eddied around it, hurried on.

  The man was just a hillock of snow but I knew where to look. Peterson went to work, scraping snow away, found a frozen hand bluish and brittle and naked. The snow was rust-colored and Peterson furiously continued to work. I joined him to keep from freezing to death. It was like unwrapping a particularly hideous present. I wasn’t even curious about the man. But I kept wiping snow away. Peterson was muttering to himself. The sky was almost completely gray when we finally saw him.

  Half of the head was gone, one whole side: no eye, no cheek, no ear, strings of frozen matter protruding stiffly from the stump of throat and the pellet-chewed shoulder. The half of the head that remained had been butchered as it went through the machine’s windscreen, but the contours were there, it was recognizable. His thick sheepskin coat had been blown to tatters by my second shot: it was caked with frozen blood and there were shreds of flesh stuck to the fur lining.

  “Incredible,” Peterson said, straightening up, shouting over the wind. “This is just an incredible mess.” The figure lay on its back, legs broken and canted at peculiar angles, like a marionette at rest, arms cruciform, its middle hollowed by one shotgun blast, its head half gone in another: blood in the snow, frozen crystals, random bits of flesh.

  “It’s the tall man who tried to kill me on the highway. There’s enough left of him, I can tell, I’m quite certain.”

  Peterson looked at me to make sure he was getting it all. Then he picked up the man’s rifle, which he had apparently clutched until the end. I went back and picked up the shotgun I’d used. We began to walk back to the house.