by Tim Waggoner
THE WINTER BOX
Tim Waggoner
First Edition
The Winter Box © 2016 by Tim Waggoner
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com
Copy Editor: Steve Souza
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Other Books by Author
Broken Shadows
The Last Mile
The Men Upstairs
Eat the Night (forthcoming)
Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:
http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Tim-Waggoner/
This one’s for Charles L. Grant.
The winter wind is whispering…
Thanks to Shane Staley and
Dave Thomas, and as always, special thanks to my agent Cherry Weiner.
The wind swirls like a thing alive, and she thinks that maybe it is. No, fuck that. She knows it is. She’s heard people describe wind like this as howling or roaring, or if it’s especially high-pitched, shrieking. But this wind doesn’t sound anything like that. It’s shouting at her in words that she can’t make out. She can interpret the tone well enough—a fusion of anger and sorrow, laced with a deep sense of betrayal. She can detect voices as well, a pair of them, male and female. She desperately wants to believe that this is her imagination, but she knows goddamn well it’s not.
Snow and ice pelt her numb face, and she keeps her eyes squeezed shut to protect them. It doesn’t matter that she can’t see. The world around them is dark, so eyes closed or open, either way she’s equally blind. She dressed in layers of clothes—T-shirt under two sweatshirts, sweater, thick winter coat, jeans over Under Armour, three pairs of socks inside her boots, scarf wrapped around her neck and covering the bottom half of her face, winter hat pulled down over her ears, ear muffs for extra protection, fur-lined gloves with thick mittens overtop. And for all the good her protection does her, she might as well be naked. She’s numb all over, but that’s just on the surface. A deep cold has settled inside her, as if her bones have been replaced with ice. Her legs move as she struggles to push herself through waist-high snow, but she can’t feel them. She wonders if she only imagines that she’s moving, if in fact her legs have stopped functioning. As cold and numb as she is, how would she know if they did?
Breathing hurts. It feels like shards of ice tear her nasal passages whenever she breathes through her nose, and so she tries to breathe through her mouth, hoping the scarf will—if not warm the air—at least blunt its cold edge a little. It doesn’t work, though. The air hurts just as much going in that way. Her lungs burn and she imagines the cold air has scoured them like steel wool, leaving the insides raw and bleeding. Snot runs from her nostrils like water, soaking into the scarf and freezing, making the cloth even colder than it was before. She wonders if the entire section over her mouth will become covered with frozen snot, forcing her to try breathing through her nose once more. She hopes not.
She’s not alone. Her left hand is numb but her husband has been holding onto it ever since they left the house. No, fled is more like it. Soon after plunging into the storm, he’d grabbed her hand, and they’d held hands ever since, only being separated once by an especially strong gust of wind, and even then it had only been for a few seconds. But her hand has become even more numb since then, and if she can’t feel her own hand, how can she tell if her husband is still there? The wind is blowing so hard, she wouldn’t hear him if he lost his grip on her and yelled for her to stop and come back for him. She imagines him losing his balance and falling into a snowdrift, the hole he made rapidly covered by the drifting snow. He could be buried, freezing, maybe even dead already. And she’d be alone, soon to follow him down into darkness. Without his help, how can she hope to survive in this?
She tells herself she’s being foolish, that she’s allowing fear and fatigue to get to her. He’s still there, still holding her hand. She believes it, or at least wants to. But she needs to know, and so she opens her eyes. The sky’s lighter now, not much, but enough to let her know dawn’s coming. The snow’s falling harder than ever, and the wind whips it around, driving it into her like needles of ice. She squints her eyes against the wind’s assault and looks at her left shoulder. She moves her gaze down the length of her arm, sees how it hazy and distorted it becomes toward the elbow until it vanishes into white. She has the momentary thought that her arm is gone, that the cold has numbed her to the point where she didn’t feel losing it. She fears it became solid, brittle, and then shattered like glass, all without her knowing it. Impossible, she thinks, but after everything that happened this night, the word has lost its meaning for her.
She moves her right hand onto her left forearm—the motion taking an effort of will since her body is stiff and uncooperative. She can see a faint suggestion of her left hand now, and she continues sliding her right down her forearm, feeling what scraps of sensation she can. She can feel pressure, but little else. Still, it’s enough. She keeps sliding her hand until it passes the point where her other hand should be, and it keeps going, continuing to register pressure, as if there’s something solid beneath it.
Todd, she thinks. I’m feeling his arm. She tries to smile, but her facial muscles refuse to move, and the best she can manage is a tightening of chapped lips that splits the skin in several places. She feels that pain, but it’s so minor compared to what the rest of her body is dealing with that she barely registers it. Convinced Todd is there, she calls out to him, but her voice is lost in the wind’s roar. She then pulls, trying to bring him closer. At first nothing happens, and she fears she’s mistaken and he’s not there. But then she feels him come toward her, sees his silhouette through snowfall that’s finally, thank Christ, beginning to lessen. She watches him move toward her until he’s only inches away and she can see him clearly. His naked skin is dark blue, his eyes glitter like shards of ice, and when he smiles, he reveals teeth covered with frost.
She screams so loud that even the wind can’t muffle the sound.
* * *
“The performance is canceled.”
Todd disconnected the call and put his phone down on the coffee table. Heather sat on the couch near him, but not too close. They tended to keep some distance between them these days. At least a couple feet, usually more.
She frowned. “You don’t sound especially disappointed.”
He shrugged but otherwise didn’t answer. She hated it when he did that. They’d been together twenty-four years, married for twenty-one of them. And in all that time, she’d never been able to pin down just what that shrug meant. When they’d first started dating back in college, she’d thought it meant that he wasn’t sure what to say, that maybe he needed some time to think about the subject before answering. But when she’d realized that no answer ever came after one of those shrugs she’d revised her opinion and decided that he did have an answer, but for whatever reason didn’t want to share it with her. She’d stuck with that interpretation for over two decades, but in the last couple years, she’d come t
o a new conclusion. That shrug really meant Fuck off, Heather.
Well, he might not have given a damn about the show being canceled, but she did. She’d been looking forward to it for weeks. They’d both seen Phantom for the first time together back in college, and since it was in town now, she thought going to see a performance of it would be a wonderful way to celebrate their anniversary. She knew Todd didn’t like musicals as much as she did, but he’d always been willing enough to go to them with her in the past. Maybe, she thought, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to see the show, but that he didn’t want to see it with her, especially on this night.
She rose from the couch and padded across the carpet toward the living room window. She pulled open the curtains and peered outside. It was just before dusk, but there was scant sign of sunlight outside. The sky was dark, heavy with clouds. It had started snowing early that morning and it had kept up all day. The forecast had called for between six to ten inches total, but from the looks of things ten inches had come and gone, and still the snow kept falling. The flakes were huge, fat things that fell from the sky like white spiders, and there were so many of them it was hard to see the houses across the street. It was as if they were hidden behind a thin layer of white gauze, dim shapes that suggested the forms of houses without revealing any detail.
They might not be houses at all, she thought. They could be anything, really.
With a sigh, she released the curtains and let them fall closed. She then turned back around to face Todd. Nothing about him had changed since yesterday, or the day before that, but sometimes when she looked at him—like now—he seemed more like a stranger than her husband. He was a tall African-American man with a shaved head and no mustache or beard. He liked to joke that if he didn’t have hair on top of his head, he wasn’t going to have it on his face, either. He’d been slender for much of their marriage, but now that he was in his mid-forties, his metabolism had slowed down, and he’d put on some weight. Not a lot, but enough to make his face look puffy and to give him a bit of a belly hanging over his belt. He had what she thought of as a kind face. Deep brown eyes, an easy smile…But he didn’t smile much lately, and somewhere along the line he’d developed a vertical crease between his eyebrows. It was there even when his face was relaxed, like now. Faint, and not easy to detect, but she could see it. In fact, she couldn’t not see it. It jumped out every time she looked at him, as if it were some kind of disfiguring mark, an ugly scar, or infected cut.
The storm had brought arctic temperatures along with the snow, and even though they had the heat turned up and the gas fireplace going, a hint of a chill remained inside the house. Todd hated the cold, and he wore a gray wool sweater over a long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, a thick pair of socks, and slippers. She knew he’d wear his winter boots in the house if she let him. She gazed at him for several moments. He’d turned the wall-mounted flatscreen TV on the instant she’d gotten up to go look out the window, and he was browsing the channel guide. At least he’d put the TV on mute. She tried to recognize the nineteen-year-old boy she’d fallen in love with inside this middle-aged man. She saw hints here and there—the way he tilted his head to the side when he concentrated on something he was looking at, the way he bounced his foot when he sat, as if his body contained a bit too much energy and needed to let some of it out. But that was it. Otherwise, this version of Todd Redmond was like some sort of strange parasitic creature that had fed on his younger self over the course of years until finally devouring him completely and taking his place.
“Maybe we should just stay in and watch a movie,” he offered. “The news said the roads are terrible right now, and if the play was canceled, you can bet that everything’s going to be closed tonight. Restaurants, bars, the mall…Lights out and doors locked.”
She knew he was right. Her glance out the window had showed that none of the city’s snow plows had been by to clear their street yet. They were all busy battling the snow to keep “essential” roads and streets open, but there was nothing essential in their little neighborhood. It was tucked away from every main street, and no one but residents ever drove through here. So digging them out wasn’t high on the city’s list of priorities. They were, for all intents and purposes, snowed in. She hated it, but there was nothing she could do about it, so she sat back down on the couch next to Todd. But not too close.
“What a way to spend our anniversary,” she said.
Todd continued searching through the list of on-demand movies as he spoke, not turning to look at her.
“Oh, I don’t know. Being stuck in the house with a beautiful woman while snow piles up outside sounds kind of romantic to me.”
He paused to flash her a smile. It was a bit strained, but only a bit. Then he returned his attention to the TV and continued his search. Heather watched movie titles scroll by on the screen, but she didn’t pay any attention to them. Not for the first time she wondered what Todd saw when he looked at her these days. She was forty-four, one year younger than he, and she wasn’t the same skinny white girl with curly brown hair that he’d sat next to in Western Civ. She’d put on weight, just as he had, but much of hers had settled in her rear, and she’d developed a small pouch of saggy flesh on the underside of her chin, and to top it off, her hair was graying. She colored it to mask the gray, but sometimes it was still noticeable, especially when she forgot to touch up her roots. Did he still find her attractive? Sure, he’d called her beautiful just now, but had he really meant it?
She wore a navy blue turtleneck and jeans that were a touch too tight to be comfortable. Her feet were bare as they always were in the house, regardless of the time of year. She knew her tolerance for cold made her something of an anomaly among women, at least according to her friends.
I don’t get it, Diana had said to her one day at work. Why don’t you ever, and I mean ever, get cold?
She’d smiled and said, Because I’m so damn hot.
She didn’t feel very hot right now, though. Not only were her pants too tight, but the turtleneck was too. She hated looking at herself in the mirror, especially a full-length one. All she saw were lumps, bumps, bulges, and rolls. She couldn’t talk to Todd about how she felt. She’d tried once and all he’d said was You still look good to me.
At least he hadn’t shrugged.
So…twenty-fifth anniversary and no going out for sushi followed by Phantom. She supposed they’d just have to find another way to celebrate. While Todd continued perusing the movie choices, she went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine, and put together an hors d’oeuvres tray. Nothing fancy, some crackers and cheese along with broccoli, carrots, and dip. She got a pair of glasses from the cupboard and brought everything into the living room and arranged it on the coffee table. Todd didn’t say anything about the improvised spread, but he gave her a smile to let her know he appreciated it.
“If we’re still hungry later, I’ll pop a frozen pizza into the oven,” she said.
He nodded and returned his attention to the TV.
“I’ve been through the movie listings three times now, and I can’t find anything that sounds good. You want to take a look?” He held the remote out to her.
She shook her head. She didn’t like watching movies as much as he did. She’d rather read a good book. But this was their anniversary, and she wanted to do something together.
“Keep looking,” she said, and got up from the couch and headed down the hallway to their bedroom. She went into the closet, turned on the light, and took an old wooden jewelry box down from the highest shelf. It was a large one, about the size of a laptop computer. She looked at it for a moment, her hands trembling slightly. She wasn’t sure this was a good idea. In fact, it might turn out to be a spectacularly bad one. But she turned off the light, closed the closet door, and brought the box to the living room. Todd glanced at her as she entered the room, remote in hand and still pointed at the TV. His gaze fell upon the box and he frowned.
“Heather…” He only said her name
, but his tone spoke volumes.
She sat back down on the couch and placed the box between them.
“It is a tradition,” she said.
Todd sighed. He turned off the TV and put the remote on the coffee table. He didn’t turn to look at her, though. Instead, he continued facing the dark screen.
“We didn’t do it last year,” he said.
“I know. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop entirely.”
He didn’t respond to this. He kept looking at the screen.
She wanted to reach out and take his hand, but she didn’t. She sensed now wasn’t a good time to touch him.
“We decided to keep trying, didn’t we? Have you changed your mind?”
“Have you?”
She forced a smile that she hoped looked genuine.
“I brought out the box, didn’t I?”
He turned to look at her now, face expressionless. She had the impression that he was searching her eyes, looking for something there, but she had no idea what it might be. Whatever is was, he must’ve found it, for he smiled.
“Yeah, you did.”
They’d met the beginning of spring semester in college. It was his second year, her first. “Spring” semester started in January, and it was a bitterly cold month that year, with plenty of snow. They’d started dating soon after they met, although it hadn’t been anything formal or official. They just started hanging out and before long they became lovers. They had been one of those couples who just click right away, the kind who seem as if they’d been made for each other. They weren’t the same—far from it—but they complemented one another, fitting together like two puzzle pieces.
