Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  In the past they had taken art and small antiques when those things were given a special display in the house, but two-thirds of that stuff had turned out not to be worth the hassle. Since none of them was an expert and because they had four houses they wanted to hit during a single storm and they could steal only what they could transport by snowmobile, they had decided to forgo anything about which they were uncertain.

  Doug moved across the carpet in Ted and Paulette Harcourt’s master bedroom. He held a backpack in one gloved hand and had already dumped the contents of Mrs. Harcourt’s jewelry box inside. From the nightstands he had snatched a gold watch and several rings, and cufflinks that seemed forgotten at the bottom of Ted Harcourt’s sock drawer. Mrs. Harcourt would be wearing her wedding and engagement rings, but he had found an enormous diamond in an antique setting that he presumed had belonged to the woman’s mother. Guilt had plagued him as he slipped it into the backpack and he had considered putting it back—just that one item; the other guys would never know—but the clock was ticking and it would take too long to fish it back out.

  That was the only twinge of guilt he had felt since they’d hit the first house, well over an hour earlier. The Harcourts—and the owners of those other houses—were rich as hell. Doug would have bet that none of them had ever had to wonder where his next meal would be coming from, never worried about being fired from a job or having to find a new one. People who came from this kind of money would never understand how good men could be driven to burglary. Other kinds of theft, certainly—white-collar thievery on a scale so huge that it was hard for Doug to wrap his mind around it—but small-time robbery? Never.

  Fuck ’em, he thought.

  It had become his mantra today.

  The storm had hit so hard and so fast that a quarter of the city had lost power before noon, but still they had waited until sundown to get moving. The forecast showed the blizzard raging all night long, so they had plenty of time. Once he and the guys had reached the barn and borrowed the snowmobiles that were waiting for them there, they had ridden through the woods to take a closer look at their first target, the home of Sean Duhamel. The house had been pitch black, without so much as a candle flame inside. Without power or heat, the Duhamels had abandoned their home. Even if they had an alarm system hardwired to a security company, it wouldn’t be working unless they had a generator. And if they’d had a generator, they wouldn’t have bothered leaving home.

  Sean Duhamel kept four thousand dollars in cash in an envelope in his sock drawer. Franco had laughed as he counted it, almost giddy.

  The Nathansons house had been next. Mrs. Nathanson’s weakness was for diamonds. They had a decent safe, but Baxter had made short work of it. Inside, they’d found a diamond necklace that Doug figured must be worth tens of thousands of dollars, two stacks of rainy-day money, a handful of other jewelry, and a baseball signed by Babe Ruth. They’d argued over the baseball. Franco wanted to snatch it, but Baxter sided with Doug: it would be impossible to fence something so easy to trace without getting caught. Furious at having to leave such a valuable item behind, Franco had grabbed a Sharpie from Alan Nathanson’s office and blacked out Ruth’s signature.

  If Doug hadn’t already been nursing a profound hatred for Franco, he would have hated him after that.

  Now Doug entered the Harcourts’ walk-in closet and started digging through the clothes and pushing aside hanging jackets, looking for a safe. A black dress hung there, beaded and slinky and probably worth thousands, and he was filled with anger at the thought that Angela would never be able to afford a dress like this, that he had never been able to take care of Cherie the way he had always wanted to, and she’d died before he’d ever had a chance to spoil her.

  He found no safe or trick panel, so he reverted to the more reliable tactic of opening shoeboxes and hatboxes and upending them onto the floor, but he was only half paying attention to the task. All day his thoughts had been returning to the oddity of the conversation he’d had with Angela before he’d left her place that morning.

  I just got back to you.

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? Doug knew he shouldn’t let semantics bother him, but those words had been niggling at the base of his brain. Of course he knew what she’d meant to say—I just got you back—but the phrasing had been quite awkward and she hadn’t even seemed to recognize it. Even so, he doubted he would have noticed if not for the statement that had followed. Angela had said that she didn’t want to be “taken away” again.

  The more he thought about it, the more he began to believe that she really had been taken away somewhere. Until she had shown up at his door over the weekend, he hadn’t seen her for four or five months. Now he wondered if she had literally been taken away, either to rehab or into some kind of psychiatric facility. Either way, there were clearly some vital bits of information that Angela had not yet shared with him.

  “Anything?”

  Startled, Doug jumped a little as he turned to find Franco standing just outside the huge walk-in closet.

  “Nah. No safe. No more jewelry. No secret stash.”

  Franco scowled. “What the fuck were you doing in there, trying on the bitch’s shoes?”

  Doug shot him a hard look. “You fare any better?”

  “Not much. Stack of credit cards in the guy’s desk. Jeweled egg from a glass case—”

  “An egg?”

  “Like one of those Russian things,” Franco said. “Baxter figures the stones are real, so it could be worth a mint. If you’re done in here, let’s go. We’ve got all we’re gonna get.”

  Doug nodded. Franco hesitated for a second, as if trying to decide if Doug had challenged him somehow. Baxter was the ex-con, but Doug had come around to the opinion that Franco was the more dangerous of the two. If something went wrong with this job, he was sure Franco would be the source of the trouble. He bore watching, so Doug slid his foot through the mess he’d left on the floor of the closet as if taking one last look for valuables, and waited for Franco to turn around and lead the way out.

  Baxter met them in the corridor. He seemed to sense the tension in his partners and glanced from one to the other before gesturing toward the stairs.

  “I checked the windows. Still no power in any of the houses I can see. There’s someone home three houses up on the other side of the street—candles or flashlights or something—but other than that, the whole area’s deserted. Not even a goddamn plow.”

  Franco grinned. “I love it.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” Doug said. He shouldered his backpack and brushed past them, heading down the stairs.

  Franco swore at him, but he and Baxter followed a second later. They moved through the kitchen to the french doors that led out onto the snow-covered deck. Their footprints were clearly visible out on the deck and in the yard, but the snow kept falling and soon there would be only slight indentations in the white sprawl to mark their passing.

  Baxter held up a hand to caution them, took a second to scan the backyard, and then opened the door. In silence broken only by the crunch of snow underfoot, they hustled out into the blizzard. The wind shrieked around them. Doug had expected it to die down by now but it seemed only to have grown more powerful. Despite the biting cold, he smiled to himself. They were pulling it off. Hell, they had pulled it off. They could all go home now and come out way ahead. But they wouldn’t do that. Doug had one more key, and there was no reason for them not to use it.

  Franco and Baxter hurried across the yard. Doug followed, backpack heavier over his shoulder now, but he wanted it heavier still. They were out here freezing their balls off, getting tired from rushing through the ever-deepening snow. Only a fool would be out in the middle of this blizzard without a damn good reason, and they had the best reason of all.

  The shrieking of the wind grew so loud that Doug slowed down, glancing around in search of some other source for the sound.

  Ahead of him, Baxter stopped short and Franco ran into him from behi
nd, nearly knocking them both over.

  “What the fuck?” Franco grunted.

  Baxter ignored him, his attention diverted toward the elaborate wooden swing set in the middle of the broad backyard. The swings swayed back and forth with the ticktock creak of old metal hinges, but as Doug blinked melting snowflakes from his eyes, he realized that it wasn’t the swings that drew Baxter’s attention.

  “You see this?” Baxter asked aloud.

  In among the swings stood two figures, tall and thin and the same blue white as the storm. They stood there, silently observing, and for a second Doug wanted to run. Then he understood that they were only an illusion, that someone had built snowmen or that the children who lived here had made some kind of scarecrows that the storm had crusted with ice and snow.

  “Christ, they’re spooky,” Franco said. He nudged Baxter. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  They started for the woods again, headed for the snowmobiles, but Doug kept staring at the figures beneath the swings. His pulse quickened. Something about them drew his attention, made him give the swing set a wider berth. Whoever had built the snowmen had made icy scarecrows out of them. Not kids, he thought, a shudder running down his spine as he craned his neck to watch the things. Kids couldn’t have made them so tall and thin. And how the hell had the gleam on those eyes been achieved?

  Jesus, how did I not notice them before? Had the things been there forty minutes ago, when they had arrived? Of course they must have been. It wasn’t as if someone had sculpted them in the short time he and the others had been inside the house.

  Doug had just about convinced himself when the things began to dance.

  They swayed languidly from side to side, arms out, beginning to twirl and to rise, moving with each gust of wind.

  “Holy…” Doug began, taking two steps backward, his throat going dry. A cold deeper than the chill of the air dug into his heart. “I’m not … this can’t…”

  He couldn’t finish a sentence.

  One of them glanced slowly at him, ice-dark eyes upon him, and the frozen surface of its face cracked in a jagged smile of such malevolence that he felt a screaming terror awaken within him, a terror he hadn’t known since he’d lain in the dark as a little boy, unable to breathe for fear of the dark whisper that he believed he’d heard beneath his bed.

  The wind shrieked, snow stung his eyes, and as he blinked it away his terrified paralysis snapped. He turned to race after Baxter and Franco, and saw another one off to the left, in among the high, bare branches of the trees. It darted down through the branches toward Baxter and Doug felt fresh terror blossom in his chest. Impossible. It was all impossible.

  But somewhere in the primal core of his brain he believed what he’d seen, because his hands were already moving. He tugged off one glove and reached for the gun tucked into the rear of his waistband, shouting for Baxter to look up.

  Franco had stopped and turned, but he hadn’t seen the thing in the trees. He was staring into the sky … into the storm.

  Doug glanced up into the blizzard and saw others overhead, riding the wind, falling with the snow, moving out across Coventry like frozen angels.

  Off to his right, the swing-set hinges creaked, and he spun to see the things sliding toward him through the falling snow.

  Behind him, Franco began to scream.

  Isaac had gotten his way after all. Jake had tried to take him into the basement, where he had a stack of old board games like Life and Monopoly and Pictionary, but it was cold down there and growing colder now that the power had gone out. With flashlights and extra batteries and thick blankets, plus a goose-down comforter that had once belonged to their mother, the Schapiro brothers had retreated to the closet and bundled themselves up. When the games had grown too boring for Isaac, Jake had decided to read to his little brother. Now they were a third of the way through The Westing Game and every few pages Jake would forget what they were doing there, forget what they were hiding from, forget that Isaac was dead and his ghost possessing the body of a little boy for whom the whole town had been searching.

  Nobody was looking for him right now, of course. They had at least until the blizzard ended before they needed to worry about anyone continuing the search for Zachary Stroud. Tomorrow morning, when it had all passed and the cleanup begun, they would worry about what to do next.

  “You’ll love this part,” Jake said, smiling in the glow of his flashlight off the page. “Turtle is the best.”

  Isaac didn’t reply. Jake continued reading, but after a moment he heard a quiet sniffle and he looked up to see Isaac weeping in the yellow glow.

  “Hey, Ikey, no,” Jake said, putting the book aside. He reached for his brother and pulled him close. “It’s okay, little bro. I’ve got you.”

  Isaac shivered in his arms, as if the cold that had crept inside him could never be warmed. When he spoke, his voice was choked with tears.

  “You don’t understand,” Isaac said. “I missed so much. You’re so … you’re old, now, and I’m still just me, and I missed so, so much.”

  “Ssshh, it’s okay,” Jake whispered, as his heart clenched and his own tears began to flow. “It’s okay.”

  Isaac shoved him away and punched him in the chest, face red and twisted with anger.

  “It’s not okay!” he cried. “You’re not—”

  Eyes widening, Isaac cut himself off, glancing in terror at the closet door, visibly holding his breath and waiting for some terrible repercussion to come from his raising his voice. Seconds passed and Jake only stared at him, until at last he reached out and gripped his brother’s wrist and squeezed. Isaac met his gaze, eyes still wild with fear.

  “I told you. It’s okay. We’ll have time together now.”

  Isaac looked at him and for the first time Jake saw not only fear but real sorrow, aged and steeped in painful wisdom. They were the eyes of innocence lost.

  “I’m not afraid just for me,” Isaac whispered, cradling his flashlight against his chest as if he wanted to curl into a ball and pretend he could not be seen. “The ice men take all the heat from inside you. That’s what happens when they kill you, Jakey. It’s like they drink it all up, your heat. And then you belong to them, even after you don’t have a body anymore, and they keep drinking from you, like forever.”

  Isaac took Jake’s hands in his own, crying softly.

  “I don’t want what happened to me to happen to you,” he said.

  Jake could not muster a reply. Instead he shuddered and pulled Isaac to him again, the two of them under the blankets and comforter. They sat back against the wall with only each other for protection, both of them listening to the storm howling outside and staring at the closet door, hoping it would not come in.

  Allie regained consciousness on the sofa in her living room, damp and cold and with a headache that started between her eyes and radiated in branches across her skull. She had a few seconds to wonder why her blouse was wet and then she heard a rustling noise and gentle footsteps and she shot upright, turning to see someone coming toward her. Her heart jumped and then she exhaled as she recognized her visitor.

  “Miri,” she said. “It really is you.”

  “It’s me,” Miri replied. “I made you a cup of tea, Ms. Schapiro—”

  “Allie, please. And you didn’t have to…”

  Her words trailed off. Allie watched as Miri set the steaming mug of tea down on the coffee table and connections slammed together in her brain. She had seen Miri outside in the snow. That hadn’t been her imagination. Allie touched the front of her blouse and felt the damp fabric and an image fluttered through her mind, the snow rushing up to greet her, the sensation of falling.

  “I fainted,” she said, staring at the teacup.

  “Yes.”

  Slowly, she drew her gaze from the cup and studied Miri, the dark curls of her hair, her copper eyes like bright pennies, her tentative smile, hopeful, and full of worry.

  “I saw…” Allie began, and then she began to shake.
Her hands trembled and she pressed them together, lacing her fingers as if afraid the pieces of her—broken for so long—might fall apart after all these years. She pressed her eyes shut and fought the tide of confusion and fear and hope long enough to speak the words.

  “I saw Niko,” she whispered. “I saw your father, out in the storm. I think I’m going crazy.”

  She felt Miri settling onto the sofa beside her. The girl took her hand but she kept her eyes tightly shut.

  “You did,” Miri said. “And I’m so glad you did, because it means that I’m not going crazy.”

  Allie opened her eyes, turning to stare at Miri.

  “That can’t be. We both know—”

  “And we both saw. He’s here, Allie. Here with us, right now.”

  Allie scooted back on the sofa until she could retreat no farther, glancing anxiously around the living room at the floral drapes and the unused hearth and the doorways that led to the foyer on one side and the kitchen on the other.

  She let out a shuddering breath as a door slammed shut in her mind. The image she’d seen in the storm had to have been someone else.

  But he was transparent. The snow passed through him. He was—

  Her imagination.

  Allie glared at Miri. “Why are you doing this? What do you want? It’s hard enough for me when it snows like this. You know that. After what we all went through, I can’t believe you would—”

  Something shifted in the shadows near the old fireplace.

  “She wouldn’t,” someone said in a low rustle of air. “You know she wouldn’t.”

  Allie covered her mouth, eyes wide, trembling with the urge to scream or flee or weep with joy, or perhaps even all three. The thing in the shadows could not have been called a man; it was barely more than a silhouette. A phantom.

  “Oh my god,” she said behind her hand.

  She wanted to faint and yet refused to allow herself to do so. She feared even closing her eyes, worried that the ghost would be gone when she opened them.