Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  Keenan and Harley stared at him openmouthed, neither of them knowing what to say next.

  “I’m sorry,” Isaac said. “But I think he did something to his brain, going that long without breathing right. I can’t even feel him thinking in here with me.”

  “Holy shit,” Harley whispered.

  “Harley. Joe,” Jake said. “Meet my little brother, Isaac.”

  Detective Keenan backed up. “No. No way, man. Do you have any idea how crazy you both sound? You’ve had three days up here by yourself to mess with this kid’s head. His parents may be gone but he’s still got family.”

  Something in Keenan’s expression suggested that he doubted his own words, like he struggled with a memory he wished he could forget.

  “Joe,” Harley said quietly.

  Keenan shot him a hard look. “Don’t even think about it. Get your cuffs out.”

  “No!” Isaac shouted.

  Harley took out his handcuffs but he looked unsure.

  Jake put an arm around Isaac. “I can’t let you do this, Joe.”

  Detective Keenan pulled his gun. He didn’t take aim, but suddenly the weapon was in play, and Jake slid Isaac behind him, blocking his brother with his own body. Harley started toward him with the handcuffs.

  “Don’t make this ugly, Jake,” Harley said, obviously troubled. “Whatever this is, we’ll work it out.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jake snapped. “Keenan’s got his gun on us! What are you going to do, Joe, shoot a kid? If you guys don’t believe him, nobody will, and if you bring him out in that storm I’m going to lose my brother all over again!”

  “Jake,” Detective Keenan said. “You lost Isaac a long time ago. There is no ‘again.’ Nobody wishes there were more than I do, but there are no second chances.”

  Isaac stepped out from behind Jake.

  “There might be,” the boy told him. “Charlie Newell says you cried over him and Gavin. They weren’t much older than I was and they’ve been suffering all this time. We all have. Maybe it’s not really a second chance, but we don’t want to suffer anymore. We just want to rest. Don’t you think Charlie deserves to rest.”

  The gun shook in Detective Keenan’s hands. His eyes were wide and damp and he trembled with something that did not seem much like rage until he turned and looked up at Jake and sneered.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said, “putting this shit in the head of a ten-year-old. What is wrong with you?”

  “Joe—” Jake began.

  “You have to listen!” Isaac cried.

  Detective Keenan stared at the boy as if trying to see inside him. In that moment’s hesitation they all heard the storm blowing outside.

  “Officer Talbot,” Keenan said, “I swear to God if you don’t cuff him right now I am going to shoot you instead.”

  Harley swore under his breath but he moved toward Jake. When Isaac tried to interfere, Harley shoved him onto the couch and grabbed Jake by the arm, slapping a cuff on one wrist. Jake shouted and shot an elbow into his gut, got away for a second before Harley grabbed the back of his neck with one huge hand and slammed him to the floor, one knee on his back, forcing his other arm around. Jake fought against it until he thought his arm would break, and at last there was nothing he could do about it. The cuffs were on.

  “Stop!” he screamed. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  Jake twisted around, trying to get Harley off him, and saw Isaac beating on the huge cop’s back and arms and head until Keenan grabbed Isaac from behind, holstering his gun.

  Such was the brutal tableau on display when they heard the front door open, all of them turning toward the sound of a woman’s voice.

  “Jake?”

  Two figures stepped into the foyer, dusted with snow, and then stood at the living room entrance, staring inside with wide eyes. One of them was Jake and Isaac’s mother, but it was the other whose presence astonished him. Even then, in the middle of the chaos, he couldn’t help thinking how beautiful she looked.

  “Miri?” he said.

  Something shimmered in the air behind them and Jake wondered if they had brought someone else along.

  “Let him go!” his mother said, rushing into the room. “Harley, for God’s sake, what are you doing? You’ve had dinner at my house. What do you think you’re—”

  Isaac rushed at her, throwing his arms around her waist. He buried his face in her chest and began to sob, trying over and over again to speak to her but unable to get out the words. At last, breath hitching, everyone in the room staring, he spoke a single word.

  “Momma.”

  Allie Schapiro stared down at him, her eyes welling. She searched that unfamiliar face—the face of a stranger—and pushed the hair away from his eyes to get a better look.

  “Isaac? Is it really…”

  She sank to her knees and embraced him.

  “This is a goddamn madhouse,” Keenan said.

  Outside, the wind began to scream and they all stiffened. Jake spun around, staring at the windows. Had he seen something flit by out there? The fear that had been enveloping him wrapped itself around him like a shroud. Once upon a time, twelve years earlier, Isaac had watched the ice men dancing in the snow and made the mistake of thinking them harmless. Playful. They couldn’t make that mistake again.

  The house shook and a barrage of noise filled the air, beams creaking and glass rattling, and then they could heard a terrible sound, like a hundred iron hooks being dragged along the roof and outer walls of the farmhouse.

  “They’re here, Momma,” Isaac cried, spinning around in terror, eyes wide. “Don’t let them take me again.”

  Jake looked at Harley. “Get these goddamn handcuffs off.”

  “This is impossible,” Detective Keenan said.

  Miri snapped her fingers in front of his face twice. “Wake up, Detective. The impossible can kill you.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Keenan spun around, trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from, and then he realized they were coming from everywhere. His thoughts were a maelstrom of doubt—whom did he believe, here? Whom could he trust? Despite the icy air and the plummeting temperature in the room, he felt beads of sweat dripping down his back and wondered if he might be having a nervous breakdown.

  Breakdown? It’s not that simple. I’m losing my damn mind.

  Losing his mind, because with every word out of the mouths of these people, he kept seeing the face of that rookie, Torres, in his head, and trying to tell himself that the young, seemingly unbalanced cop had not said the words Keenan thought he’d heard in The Tap the night before: “I’m betting you still remember what my skin smelled like when it burned.” He’d thought Torres was having some kind of psychotic episode, convincing himself that he was Gavin Wexler. Hell, given his age, they might have gone to school together. Or so Keenan had told himself.

  Now, he didn’t know what to think.

  The fingers of his right hand twitched and descended toward the gun he’d just holstered. He had to force himself not to draw the weapon, worried that he might pull the trigger. Instead, he stared at Zachary Stroud. The kid might be orphaned, but somehow he’d survived … if he was still even Zachary Stroud. The way he held on to Allie Schapiro—kids didn’t clutch at strangers that way. He knew her, saw her as his mother, but if Keenan allowed himself to follow that train of thought it would lead him to things he simply refused to believe.

  Harley had moved behind Jake and was taking off the handcuffs.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Keenan demanded. He felt like he was floating, like the people in the room around him were retreating into shadows and he was starting to lift off the ground. “He’s in custody, dammit!”

  Harley froze and stared at him, eyes narrowing. Could the younger cop see how untethered from reality he had become? Keenan thought perhaps he could, and it was almost a relief when Harley hurried to him, moving between Allie Schapiro and Miri Ristani.

  “Joe, snap out
of it,” Harley said, grabbing his arm.

  The whole house shook with a massive gust of wind, boards groaning, and the Stroud boy cried out again, this time pointing at the window. Keenan glanced over and thought, for just a second, that he had seen a face at the glass, an obscene mask of ice with jagged teeth and eyes that were hideously, cruelly intelligent. He turned away, shook his head to clear it, and looked again to see that it had been only a pattern of snow stuck to the window screen.

  Harley grabbed the front of his jacket and hauled him up onto the tips of his toes, so they were practically nose-to-nose.

  “Detective Keenan!” he shouted. “Wake the hell up!”

  Keenan flinched, inhaling sharply, as if Harley had struck him. He shook himself loose and for a moment he just stood there listening to the pounding of his heart. When he turned to look at Allie and the boy again, Miri and Jake were with them … and beyond them, in the shadows at the corner of the room, stood what could only be a ghost.

  “There!” Keenan shouted, pulling his gun, knowing bullets would do nothing. “All of you get back!”

  “No!” the Stroud boy said, looking at him with wide, desperate eyes. “He’s here to help! That’s Miri’s dad!”

  Gripping his gun so hard that his knuckles ached, Keenan watched the ghost drift to the boy and kneel in front of him.

  “Hello, Isaac,” it said.

  Keenan’s jaw dropped at the sound of its voice and a ripple of emotion went through him, some combination of wonder and horror that he had never felt before.

  “You got away, Niko,” Isaac said. “We all thought we could get out, too.”

  “I know, pal. I know.”

  Of all things, it was the sorrow in the eyes of a ghost, the regret in the voice of a dead man, that brought it all home to Keenan. He glanced around the room at the people gathered there and realized that they were a family. Allie had been in a relationship with Niko at the time of the blizzard that had killed Niko and Isaac, and here they were. Niko and his daughter. Allie and her boys. Keenan stared at Zachary Stroud and the boy’s story came back to him, the firsthand account of a ghost who had watched a boy try to save his drowning parents and ended up nearly drowning himself, brain damaged by oxygen deprivation.

  This wasn’t Zachary Stroud at all.

  Sound rushed in. It had been there all along, the scraping at the farmhouse’s walls and roof and the rattling of the windows, but he had been lost inside his head for a minute or two. Now he felt as if he had woken from sleep to discover that the ordinary world had been a dream and this land of impossible things was reality.

  “There are others,” he said, looking at Jake. “How many are we talking about?”

  “All of them, I think,” Jake said, but he could barely take his eyes off the ghost in the room. “Either like Isaac or … I don’t know, maybe like that.”

  “No,” the ghost said. “There are no others like me.”

  “We found Gavin Wexler and his father,” Allie said quickly, glancing around at the walls as if they were closing in. “They’ve possessed Eric Gustafson and a policeman named Torres—”

  “Torres,” Keenan said. “God, it all makes sense now.”

  “Nat Kresky was acting weird,” Harley said. “Like he couldn’t—”

  Miri threw up her hands. “Solve the mystery later, guys. We need to get somewhere they can’t reach us and right now. Allie and I have seen these things up close—”

  “The cellar,” Jake said, picking up Isaac—And now I’m thinking of him as Isaac, Keenan thought—and rushing out of the room.

  “Move it!” Keenan snapped at Harley, but the other cop was already moving.

  Miri and Allie raced after Jake and Isaac, each but the boy holding a flashlight, and Keenan and Harley brought up the rear. When Keenan glanced into the corner where he’d seen the ghost, Niko Ristani had gone. A flush of warmth went through him, relief that the dead man had abandoned them, but when he hustled into the corridor and saw the others rushing for the cellar door, which Jake held open, the ghost appeared again, standing just behind Jake and urging them on.

  He forced himself to breathe, to just keep moving. To believe. These people were depending on him.

  His teeth chattered. It had become so cold in the house, and so quickly, that the chill cut through his jacket and made the gun feel like ice in his hand. Miri went downstairs first, followed by Allie and Isaac, the little dead boy who held his mother’s hand to keep from falling. Just move, Keenan told himself, trying not to be thrown by his thoughts.

  “You think this door will hold?” he asked, looking past Jake at the ghost of Niko Ristani.

  “If anything will,” the ghost replied, his voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. “It’s sturdy and secure and the weather stripping will lessen the chance of a draft. The storm is weakening; we just have to hope it spins itself out before they can get to you.”

  The whole house seemed to sway. It sure didn’t feel to Keenan like the storm was weakening.

  “Go,” Jake said, nodding to him and Harley as he dug into his pocket and pulled out a jangling set of keys. “I can lock it from inside.”

  Harley patted him on the arm—all forgiven, apparently—took out his flashlight, and hurried into the cellar after the others. With the ghost looking on, Keenan paused.

  “Jake…”

  “Now’s not the time.”

  Keenan nodded. “Lock it up tight.”

  He had his foot on the top step when they all heard a massive crack and a splintering of wood, followed by a crash.

  “One of the vents. The attic or the bathroom,” said the ghost. “They’re inside.”

  Keenan felt like his heart shriveled up in his chest, felt the prickle of heat on the back of his neck even as the air filled with ice crystals, fogging their breath and frosting their hair, and he had the lunatic idea that it might snow inside the house. Jake came at him and Keenan turned, hurtling down the steps as Jake locked the door behind them. The darkened stairwell gave way to the eerie yellow glow of the cellar, flashlight beams crossing in the swirl of dust, picking out the gleam of cobwebs. The furnace had fallen silent, a metal monolith in the corner, and stacks of old boxes and two huge old televisions took up most of the wall space. A small, doorless entryway led into a smaller room, and Keenan saw the edge of a clothes dryer in the dim light.

  “How do we fight these things?” Harley asked, drawing his gun as he turned to Miri and Allie. “Is this gonna do me any good?”

  “I have no idea,” Miri said. “But quiet down, will you? Maybe they won’t hear us.”

  “They don’t have to hear us,” Isaac said, reaching out for his older brother’s hand. “I feel them up there. I feel how hungry they are. And if I can feel them, I’m pretty sure they know I’m here.”

  The little boy turned to his mother. “You should go. You could get away if you left me here.”

  “I can’t,” Allie said, her voice quavering. “I lost you once. I’ll die before I let you go again.”

  Isaac’s voice got very small. “I don’t want you to die. I don’t want any of you to die.”

  Keenan tuned them out, focusing on the door lost in shadows at the top of the stairwell. It shuddered with the wind and he knew that whatever these ice men were, they were definitely inside, now. Cabinets and doors banged shut with the breeze of their passing and things fell over, crashing to the floor. He wondered where the ghost of Niko Ristani had gone, but he imagined the spirit had hidden itself away. If these things wanted him back, he’d be a fool not to hide.

  But he wouldn’t have gone far. Not with his daughter here. Keenan turned to look at Miri. Of all of them, she seemed to be the steadiest, as if none of this surprised her. It made him wonder how long her father’s ghost had been visiting her. Whatever happened, she would fight. They all would, because they all had something to fight for.

  He watched Jake and Miri exchange a loaded glance. Jake checked to be sure Isaac was safe with thei
r mother and then went to her, the two of them sharing a brief, powerful embrace.

  “Sorry I didn’t answer when you called,” she said. “Long story.”

  “I didn’t leave a message,” Jake replied, studying her. “And yet here you are.”

  “A story for another day,” Miri said. She pushed the ringlets of hair away from her face, reached out and caressed his cheek. “I’d say it’s good to see you—”

  “Let’s save it for tomorrow,” Jake said.

  Keenan heard the hope and the courage in Jake’s voice and read many of the unspoken words in the air. He looked back at the door at the top of the stairs and knew that none of them stood a chance. The only person with any possibility of getting out of this was already a ghost, and he had vanished.

  Pushing away from the bottom of the stairs, he went to the pile of old boxes and then started checking the shelves behind them. He holstered his gun and started digging through boxes.

  “Harley,” he said. “Look around for things to burn.”

  “Burn?” Miri said. “You’ll kill us all. There’s nowhere to run down here.”

  Keenan shot her a grim look. “Fire’s about the only thing I can think of to combat these things. If we can make it too hot in here for them, maybe we can outlast them.”

  “I don’t think that will work,” Isaac said. “They carry the winter with them. A fire…”

  The boy trailed off, but Keenan was barely listening. He couldn’t just sit and wait for death without fighting back. As Harley and Jake and Allie started to go through the boxes, he slipped his flashlight into his right hand and went into the laundry room. A workbench in the corner included a table saw and there were tools hanging over it. Any of them would have made an effective weapon against something made of flesh and blood.