Dead of Winter

Chapter 8

I don't know how long I sat on the floor, hugging my knees, and rocking back and forth to quell my fear. Shivers seared like errant bolts of electricity through my body. I don't know how many times I told myself that this couldn't be happening, or that this wasn't possible. Possible? Hell, it wasn't even logical! Lights didn't just turn on by themselves.

The next time I dared look up at the dollhouse, I couldn't believe my eyes. Its large front, now ajar, allowed a glimpse of the darkness that crouched like a living thing in every room within. Whatever lights I thought I'd seen were no longer there. 

Head shaking, I pulled myself up by the couch cushions. Had I imagined it? Even though my night hadn't been stress free by any stretch of imagination, a heightened level of anxiety alone didn't seem to account for this strange occurrence.

A low rumble overhead signaled more snow sliding off the roof. Enough to shake the table and force the door further open with a soft creak. That latch didn't catch when the dollhouse was new. Maybe I hadn't closed it tight enough. Still, I didn't want to wait around to see what freaky tableaux my imagination might have concocted this time. I'd filled my quota of inexplicable experiences for one night.

Without another look in its direction, I ran to my room, locked the door, and dove into bed, leaving all the lights on.

Barricading myself in my room and a long hot shower helped to quiet my racing heart. But my thoughts, whirling like snow, still hadn't received the serenity memo. To speed sleep's arrival, committing the night's events to paper would be my best bet. Writing about my feelings always wore me out. After bolstering the gaps in the bed's weathered barn board headboard with pillows, I reached for the small notebook and one of the colored pens I kept in a jar on the nightstand.

Besides, putting my thoughts down on paper, getting them out of my head before they could fester and mutate into insurmountable problems had always helped me gain clarity in the past. Tonight though, I hoped journaling, beyond putting the day's strange events into perspective, would ward off the inevitable nightmares. Correction: nightmare. To be honest, I couldn't stop thinking about my father's words, the strange rhyme I'd imagined.

I couldn't keep her from that place, couldn't keep her from her fate.

No, not imagined. I'd heard him say those words, as clear as day. As if he'd been standing in the room next to me.

Him or his ghost. While I didn't believe in those, there'd been such a heaviness in his words. One, all the whiskey in the world couldn't drown. Call it burning flesh or a breaking heart, it was guilt. The enormity of that onus—a decade's accumulation of self-recriminations—had driven him to his last act of self-destruction. A conflagration and single shot, his idea of penance, of restitution.

Was it worth it, Father, keeping secrets, bottling your feelings until they consumed you? Why didn't you ask for help? I was right there, right in front of you all along, sole witness to your slow descent into madness, but you acted as if I wasn't there at all. You retreated, and by distancing yourself, turned me into nothing more than a shadow. I lost someone, too!

More than someone: a part of myself: the other half of me.

Eyes streaming, I jabbed the ballpoint against the page.

After Nisha died, he never spoke her name aloud again, and we never spent another summer at Loon Lake Lodge. Refusing to sell, he let the lodge sit in Upstate New York, shuttered and abandoned—the reason, another secret kept from me—until that horrible night a month ago.

I slid back with a groan and stared at the ceiling, mind racing while my pen traced random patterns on the page. What changed? What levee broke inside him, coercing his return to Loon Lake? Was it the same compulsion that made him to set the lodge ablaze before turning the rifle on himself?

Any way I turned it in my mind, all roads led back to Nisha. Father must have known something—but what? Was this knowledge responsible for his death, or something else? And, once I knew, would the burden of this new knowledge, as Carville believed, change me in some horrible and unimaginable way?

My limbs grew heavy, and the blades of the ceiling fan soon blurred. Closing my eyes, promising myself it'd be just for a minute, I kept doodling away while listening to the night.

Wind pressed against the window panes, creating a hollow roar. Instead of swallowing sound, it seemed to amplify the snow's harsh whispers. Joining these sounds were innumerable though familiar creaks and groans: the house settling in the cold, the scrape of bare branches against its sides, and the intermittent drip of the faucet in the bathroom sink. As I listened, a curious weightlessness overtook me, and I followed the plop-plop of those droplets into darkness, spiraling down an endless tunnel.

Bang!

Sound shook me from sleep. Bolting up, damp hair clinging to the side of my face, I ran to the bedroom door, placed an ear against it, and listened.

"Ugh! What the—" Muffled thuds followed. Then, a muffled voice called my name.

"Rory!" Flinging open the door, I charged out through the living room and kitchen. Meeting him at the downstairs landing, I threw my arms around him. "Thank God you're—Ew!" Arm raised against my nose, I pulled back. "What's that smell?"

"Skunk, maybe?"

"That's no skunk! They hibernate in winter."

"Well, whatever it is, it's invaded the entire basement," he said, wrinkling his nose. "We were outside of town when dispatch toned out the call. Sorry I couldn't get here sooner. Looks like you guys had a rough night." He slipped out of his turnout coat, sending up a small racket with all its buckles. Landing on the stairs with a grunt, he pulled off his boots.

"You could say that. Delores will have a fit when she sees the door."

Rory's mother, Delores, a successful realtor, owned our house. The break she gave us on rent allowed us to live in one of the tonier—and until tonight, what should have been one of the safer—parts of town.

"We can replace doors." Rising, he pulled me into a long embrace. His kiss tasted like caramel and coffee, and his skin smelled like winter: sharp and clean. Nuzzling against him, I breathed in this essence of clarity and peace. Except for the still-awful smell that still permeated every other inch of air space around us, I could have clung to him forever.

"Have you heard anything about Taryn?" I asked when I broke our embrace.

"I stopped by the hospital on my way here. Someone did a real number on her. Not content with flaying her like a fish, he crushed her arm. Crushed it, can you believe it?" Linking arms, we started up the stairs. "She'll need surgery, but they have to transfuse her first. Ferrilyn's going to spend the night with her."

"Was she able to give a description of her attacker?"

"Not much, from what Ferrilyn told me. She's regained consciousness only a few times, but when she tries to speak, she doesn't make much sense."

We'd reached the landing. "What do you mean?" I asked, turning to him.

"Well, I didn't hear her say anything, but according to Ferrilyn, she's been repeating the same words over and over. One's a name, Wendy, but the other sounds like 'man-woo' or 'mana-woo,' something like that."

"I thought she'd just been making a scene, storming out of here the way she did, but now I wonder if it was all an act? She might have been planning to meet someone."

"Makes about as much sense as anything, I suppose," he said, shrugging. "Hey, I almost forgot. How did you make out in Saratoga?"

"My trip was equal parts interesting and disgusting." I snatched up the information packet on my way through the living room and waggled it at him. "You can read all about it later. Carville balked at doing the procedure, so I had to flash him a few credentials. They'll call me soon."

"That's my girl!" He headed for the bathroom, chuckling.

My journal had fallen on the floor. I picked it up and rifled through its pages, wondering what nonsense I'd written before falling asleep. Though never a believer in automatic writing—any of that pseudo-scientific crap—it was always fun to see what my hand had done while my brain was on autopilot. 

On the last page, scrawled in thick swipes of black ink, were not words, as I'd supposed, but a crude sketch of a face. A visage so elongated and emaciated, it no longer resembled anything human. Strands of hair, hanging in matted clumps from its balding head, framed sunken eyes the color of tar pits. Its lipless mouth, which reminded me of a hole in a rotten tree, was open in a scream.

Most disturbing of all were its hands. Fingers, so long and thin, they resembled slender branches more than appendages. Held up, as if in an attitude of warning, they ended in curved and lethal claws.