Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  Other patrons at the bar shuffled away from them, but the cops who’d been drinking there moved nearer, all of them ready to step in if things got out of hand. One of them was Ted Finch, who gave Keenan a conspiratorial grin.

  “Didn’t think you had it in you, Joe,” Finch said.

  Keenan felt all the fight go out of him. If Finch approved, he knew he had crossed a line. He stared at Torres, who stood in a kind of defensive crouch, eyes wide with what looked more like sadness than fear. A chill went through the detective, a crawling, icy thing that spread through him with a shiver. Something about the way Torres looked at him made his stomach knot with unease.

  “Why me?” Keenan demanded. “Yeah, I want to find the kid. It’s killing me. But why the hell do you put this just on me when there’s a whole department—a whole goddamn city—that should still be out searching?”

  Torres straightened, his eyes narrowing angrily. His lips were a thin white line until he took a single step nearer and spoke so quietly that even Keenan could not be completely certain what he said.

  Then Torres bolted, running for the exit and slamming out the door.

  A lot of chatter filled the wake of his departure, patrons reacting to the scene and cops muttering about rookies coming unraveled because of the job. Finch came up beside Keenan and offered to buy him a beer as soon as he’d drained his glass.

  “Another night, Ted,” Keenan said, drinking half of his beer in a couple of gulps and then dropping a ten on the bar. He glanced up and saw Brenda watching him. “Tell the owner he can reach me at the department about the glass. I’ll cover it.”

  His voice sounded as if it were coming from somewhere other than his own lips.

  Keenan ignored Finch’s exhortations to finish his beer, to stick around and join the other cops in the bar for another round, and headed for the door. He stepped outside into the frigid February night, the wind cutting through his jacket, the air heavy with the threat of the coming storm. He shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced around for any sign of Torres, but the rookie had gone.

  The last thing Torres had said had been spoken so quietly that even Keenan, who had been the closest to him, wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. But he knew what those words had sounded like.

  “Because I’m betting you still remember what my skin smelled like when it burned.”

  Miri sat in her rental car, bathed in the green glow of the dashboard lights. Hot air blasted from the vents and yet she could not get warm inside. There were only two possibilities. Either she had seen her father’s ghost standing on the sidewalk across the street from The Vault in the middle of a snow flurry … or she had lost her mind. Such thoughts made it almost impossible for her to breathe.

  She had loved her father deeply and still missed him so much that it hurt every day, so the idea of being able to see him and speak to him caused a flutter of anxious joy in her heart. But the existence of ghosts, the possibility that the dead lingered on and might be around her even at this very moment, made her shiver. What did they want, if they were there at all? Were they merely sorrowful, or jealous and spiteful of the living? The mere thought made her uneasy, and cold despite the car heater as it fought the winter chill. Miri sat behind the wheel as the car shuddered with every ominous gust of wind, and glanced anxiously out at the darkness, fearful of the silent yearning of the dead.

  “Where are you, Daddy?” she whispered, her voice barely audible above the groan of the heater and the purr of the engine.

  What the hell am I doing out here?

  Miri glanced out the windshield at the house diagonally across from the spot where she’d parked. She remembered it well, had seen it both in dreams and in nightmares. As far as she knew, Allie Schapiro still lived there, and judging by the warm lights inside and the car parked in the short, narrow driveway, the woman was at home. Though Miri had stayed friends with Jake all through middle school and high school, she had not set foot inside that house since the night of the blizzard that had claimed her father’s life, the night that Isaac Schapiro had fallen to his death.

  How hard is it? Just go up to the door and ring the bell.

  Jake was the only person in the world with whom she felt she could talk about what had been happening to her. The only person who would not outright dismiss her. But at some point she would need to talk to Allie as well. The blizzard had changed the course of all their lives. If not for that storm, Miri had no doubt, Allie would have been her stepmother. They’d have been a family. If her father had a message for her, Miri was sure he would want her to share it with Allie as well, but this was premature. She wouldn’t know where to begin.

  Miri shivered, still unable to let the warm air penetrate the chill inside her. She turned on the headlights, put the car into Drive, and pulled away from the curb, following a route she could have navigated with her eyes closed. As long as she had been away from Coventry, its streets were ingrained in her subconscious like the lines she’d memorized for her eighth-grade play. Discovering just how deeply Coventry was rooted inside her made her wistful and yet depressed her as well. In some ways it would always be home, and yet she hoped that once she put it behind her for a second time, she would never have to come back. All her ghosts were here, real and imagined. And now she found herself driving toward them, instead of away.

  Her mother had an apartment in Hamel Mill Lofts, less than a ten-minute drive from Allie Schapiro’s house. Her childhood home had long been sold and her mother could be a total bitch, but that ninth-floor apartment at the Lofts was the closest thing she had to a home in Coventry these days.

  “This should be fun,” she muttered to herself as she turned into the big lot behind the Lofts, a complex of old mill buildings that had been converted into some of the best apartments in the city.

  The old smokestack, now nothing but a giant accent piece, loomed against the low, winter storm clouds. She craned her neck to glance at it, but pulled her attention away in time to notice a parking space halfway across the lot toward the center building. Miri had never visited her mother here, but she knew from talking to Angela that this was the right spot, and had the apartment number written down. Once she’d parked the car, she consulted the strip of paper she’d stashed in her tiny purse.

  921.

  Shouldering her duffel, she locked up the rental and crossed the lot to the door. A big, scruffy guy with glasses came out as she approached, leading a tiny dog wearing a red snowflake-pattern sweater. He held the door for her and Miri smiled and thanked him, thinking that this was better, that seeing her mother face-to-face when she opened the apartment door would somehow be less awkward than talking to her over the intercom from the building’s foyer.

  She could not have imagined how wrong she’d be.

  The elevator whirred up to the ninth floor and she found herself wishing for the distraction of Muzak. Alone on the elevator, it was too quiet, with too much room for ghosts.

  The long, turning corridor surprised her, with its freshly scrubbed brick and exposed wooden beams left over from the original mill building. At the door to apartment 921, Miri paused and took a breath, wondering if she really wanted to do this. She could always go to the shitty little Best Western on the north side of the city. She exhaled, realizing the truth. No way would she tell her mother about seeing her father’s ghost, not just yet. But if this was real, and not just some breathless, fevered wish come to frightening life, she would need to tell them all in time. Jake and Allie Schapiro, and her own mother. Although Angie and Niko were divorced, they had loved each other once. His death had scarred Angela deeply, especially coming on the same night as her best friend, Cherie Manning, had died.

  The worst night, Miri thought. Ever.

  Shifting her duffel to the other shoulder, she rapped on the door, then waited through twenty seconds of silence before she knocked again, louder this time. She had just started to wonder if her mother might not be home when she heard low voices behind the door.

 
; “Who is it?”

  So strange hearing her mother’s voice in person after years away.

  “It’s me,” she said. “It’s Miri.”

  More talking inside, and Miri began to get a terrible, sinking feeling. Her stomach dropped and she swore softly, wincing with awkwardness as she heard the lock thrown back, and then her mother was opening the door.

  Miri wasn’t prepared for Angela’s pleasant smile or the way her mother stared at her as if in discovery, looking her up and down as if it had been forever since they’d last seen each other. But she supposed that, in a way, it had.

  “God, it’s really you, isn’t it?” Angela said, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  Miri took in the unruly hair, the pink flush of her mother’s cheeks, the hastily tied bathrobe, and any hope that her suspicion might not be warranted went up in smoke.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Several awkward seconds passed before Angela seemed to notice the duffel, and then realization lighted her face. She gave a kind of sad smile and stepped back to let her daughter in, opening the door wider, which gave Miri a glimpse of Doug Manning farther inside the apartment, hastily buttoning his shirt. Though it had been years, Miri recognized him immediately. Doug had been the husband of her mother’s best friend, and he’d always been kind to young Miri, teasing her about boys and ruffling her hair. At the city’s memorial for those killed in the blizzard, with Doug grieving for Cherie and Miri for her father, he had stood beside her while Charlie Newell’s sister sang “Amazing Grace” and put a protective arm around her, both of them quietly weeping.

  “Hey, kid,” Doug said now, the way he always had, as if no time at all had passed.

  As if it made all the sense in the world for her mother to be screwing the husband of her dead best friend. And probably it did—Miri was no expert—but in that moment it made her want to throw up.

  “Come in, sweetie,” her mother said, oh so tenderly—so carefully. “It’s so great to see you.”

  Angela’s smile seemed almost sincere, but the sweetie sickened her. In her whole life, her mother had never called her sweetie. Girl, sometimes, or babygirl, as if it were all one word. Mirjeta, her full name, if she was angry. Bitch, more than once. But never sweetie.

  An image of Doug and her mother having sex swam into her mind and it was too much for her to take.

  “This was a mistake,” she said, shaking her head and taking a step away from the door. “I’m sorry. I should have called. I should have…”

  The thought left unfinished, she turned to walk away. Her mother stepped out into the corridor and called after her, voice cracking with a plaintive sadness, a vulnerability that Miri never would have associated with Angela Ristani, and it very nearly stopped her in her tracks. But sweetie rang in her ears and the image of the pink, mid-sex flush in her mother’s face made her rush down the hall to the elevator.

  Only when it had arrived and she’d stepped in did she allow herself to look back down the hallway to confirm that her mother had not given chase. The combination of relief and disappointment confounded her.

  The doors slid shut and the elevator hummed as it began its descent.

  Shitty little Best Western it is.

  Sometime after one A.M., Allie Schapiro woke from a dream in which Isaac rushed into her room and slid into bed with her, afraid of the rattling of the windows caused by the storm and the whistle of the icy wind. It was the sweetest of dreams, lying there under the covers, whispering assurances to her little boy in the dark, and when some noise or other roused her from sleep, she still felt him in her arms, felt the softness of his hair against her cheek. The dream dissipated like smoke and she tried so hard to hold it inside her heart and her memory, but like all dreams, it had never been meant to keep.

  Outside her window, it had begun to snow in earnest. This was no little flurry but the beginning of the blizzard that forecasters had been warning about for days. The wind gusted and the window rattled and the frigid air howled in through the single inch that she had left it open.

  Allie rose tiredly and went to shut it, closing out the wind and the chill and turning the lock to secure it.

  Out on the corner, just at the edge of a pool of golden light from a streetlamp, she saw the ghost of Niko Ristani staring up at her.

  With a small cry she backed away, her hand over her pounding heart. She shook her head, not understanding. Pinched her arm to make sure she was awake. Looked around the room to see if somehow she might still be dreaming.

  When she returned to the window, the street below was empty.

  It would have been so easy for her to tell herself that it had been a stray thread of her dreaming mind that had shown her something impossible, but Allie could not do that. She was awake, and she knew what she had seen. If she hadn’t seen Niko’s body herself, hollow and forlorn in the casket on the night of his wake, she would have thought that somehow he had faked his death. But she had loved him, and so she knew that her love had died.

  Niko, she thought.

  Ghost or not, it would have made her happy to know that somehow his soul still endured, but she had seen the tortured look in his eyes, the worry there. The fear in the eyes of a dead man.

  And it terrified her.

  SIXTEEN

  On Wednesday morning, the banging of a loose shutter roused Jake from a deep sleep. He came awake with barely conscious irritation, his brain trying to make sense of the sound as he took a deep breath and forced himself to open his eyes. Gray light filtered through the bedroom windows and thick, wet snow pelted the glass. So much had already built up on the sill that a diagonal slash of white covered the bottom quarter of the window.

  The banging drew his attention again and he frowned for a moment before putting it together. Shutter. Right. On this side of the house’s exterior, the previous owner had left the original old-world shutters intact. In an era when the fear of Indian attacks was still fresh in the minds of settlers, such heavy wooden shutters were typical, useful as they were for stopping arrows. Later, they became a common architectural feature, even when the prospect of Indian attack was a distant memory. Though their hinges were rusty and they had probably not been closed in decades, the old shutters on the east-facing side of the house remained. Something else he hoped to rectify someday.

  The hinges squealed as the shutter banged against the house, the blizzard gusting as if its winds were the breath of some icy billows. As the sleep-fog retreated from his mind, it occurred to him that he would have to go outside and secure it, and he swore under his breath and turned over, burrowing his head into his pillow.

  Then he went rigid as true wakefulness returned.

  “Isaac,” he said, his voice muffled by the pillow.

  Jake glanced at the clock on his bedside table to find that it was nearly eleven A.M. They had stayed up until almost three o’clock in the morning, talking and watching superhero movies. Isaac had always loved comics and Jake had remembered how they had fantasized about what it would be like if Hollywood ever managed to make a movie of The Avengers. Last night, Jake had helped make that fantasy come true for his little brother and had been content to let the movies fill the quiet that had fallen between them as the hour grew first later and then earlier. Just when he had begun to think that Isaac would never sleep, he had heard the soft snoring of the little boy and realized that—ghost or not—his physical body had passed its endurance threshold. He had slept, and Jake had done the same.

  Still tired, eyes gritty with sleep, he sat up in bed. Small stacks of comics shifted on top of the bedspread as he moved beneath the covers.

  “Isaac?” he called, glancing at the bedroom door, which had been tightly shut.

  A tiny voice at the back of his mind suggested that he’d dreamed or hallucinated all the events of the previous two few days, but that was ridiculous. Here were the comics, after all, and he knew that if he went into the living room he would find stacks of DVDs, open board games, and the little white boxes of
Chinese food they’d eaten the night before and which he now realized he’d forgotten to put into the fridge. The food would have stunk up the living room and the kitchen, but he could not bring himself to care.

  All that mattered was Isaac.

  Jake threw back his covers and climbed out of bed, discovering that although he was barefoot he still wore the rest of his outfit from the night before. He’d fallen asleep in jeans and a thin cotton sweatshirt—not the most comfortable pajamas.

  “Ike?” he called toward the bedroom door, which stood two-thirds of the way closed.

  “Here,” a small, frightened voice replied from Jake’s closet.

  He spun toward it, heart thundering. The door hung halfway open and he heard the sound of Isaac shifting on top of the shoes and sneakers arrayed on the floor of the closet. Jackets and shirts moved as Isaac poked his head out, a wary look in his eyes.

  “I’m hiding,” the boy said, as if that needed to be explained.

  “What are you hiding from?”

  Isaac looked disappointed. Almost hurt. “You know what.”

  The gray storm light barely illuminated the shadowy recesses of the closet, so that Isaac’s face seemed to float there, suspended amid the hanging clothes. Staring at his features, Jake felt the world shift underfoot. The eyes belonged to his brother, or at least he thought they did. He certainly saw Isaac there. But the other features had been unfamiliar to him only days ago. Jake had turned on the television each day after his shower, with Isaac in another room, and watched the local news just long enough to get an update on the search for Zachary Stroud. This face that floated out from the darkness of his closet belonged to that missing boy, but to Jake, it was fast becoming his brother’s face. Somehow, Isaac’s spirit had returned and had slipped inside this lost boy, this boy whose parents had died and made him an orphan. It might even have been that Zack Stroud had died and Isaac now inhabited his body in some peculiar resurrection. Jake’s life had left him equipped to look upon death without flinching, but it had not prepared him for this.