Snowblind (30 page)

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.

The only thing he really knew—and over these few surreal days he had come to understand that it was the only thing that mattered to him at all—was that Isaac was back.

“Why don’t you come out of there?” Jake asked.

“Huh. No,” Isaac replied. “Why don’t you come in?”

Jake crouched in front of the closet. “Really, Ike. Look around. There’s a storm, yeah. But it’s just snow and wind. The banging you hear is a shutter. I’ll go out and secure it in a bit and we’ll—”

“No!” Isaac shouted, then clapped a hand over his mouth, obviously regretting the loud noise. He let his hand drop and Jake saw that his lips were quivering and his eyes looked on the verge of tears. “You can’t go outside. Promise you’ll stay in here with me until the storm has gone.”

Jake swallowed dryly, unnerved by the fear in those familiar unfamiliar eyes. “Okay.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Now come into the closet,” Isaac said.

Jake sat on the floor, leaning against the doorframe. He put out his hand and Isaac slipped his thin, pale one—the hand of Zachary Stroud—out of the shadows to clasp it. The fear and sadness in his eyes gave way to a single, urgent plea.

“You’re safe here, Ikey,” he said. “I promise.”

Isaac’s lips trembled again and tears began to well in his eyes. “You didn’t believe me that night. About the ice men.”

Jake had to look away, a nauseous twist in his gut. “I know. You have no idea how sorry—”

“Will you believe me now?”

With a shuddering breath, Jake pushed away his guilt and forced himself to look again at his brother.

“I’ve asked you a dozen times to explain it all to me. How you can be here and what
they
are and … everything. You just change the subject, and I understand that. I do. You don’t want to talk about it. But if we’re in trouble now, if we’re in danger—”

“They’re coming,” Isaac insisted, tugging on his hand. “Coming back for what’s theirs. We have to hide until the storm passes. We
have
to.”

Jake tried to imagine spending the rest of the day and all night in his closet, and what that would entail. Flashlights. Snacks. Comic books. Maybe a board game. Quiet time in which to tell his brother what had transpired in the twelve years since his death. They had mostly skirted the subject in the days since the boy had first appeared. Isaac resisted any discussion of his death and the fact that the world had gone on without him. But if he was going to stay, that would have to change.

Jake shuddered, closing his eyes and turning away. How could he stay? With everyone looking for the boy whose face Isaac now wore, a boy who might or might not even still exist somewhere beneath that face, how could Isaac stay here? How long could Jake keep him hidden?

An image swam up into his mind, a memory of icy fingers reaching through the screen of his childhood bedroom window and grabbing hold of Isaac. A current of fear swept through him, fear to the bone, fear to make him remember the terror of that night as if it had been last night. The idea that the ice men might come for Isaac made him feel like screaming. He had let his brother down once before and he refused to do so again.

“Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll hide with you. We’ll make a game of it. Though maybe the basement would be better—more room, more air to breathe. Or the attic—”

“Not the attic!” Isaac said sharply, shivering. “Too many drafts. Open spaces.”

“Okay. The basement it is. But you have to tell me everything you know about them, Isaac. Everything.”

Isaac nodded. “Whatever you want, Jakey. Just don’t let them touch me again.”

Jake gripped his hand tightly. A stranger’s hand. His brother’s hand.

“That’s not going to happen.”

For a few seconds, Isaac just held on. Then the boy let out a long breath and looked up at him.

“Y’know, maybe you should go out and fix that shutter after all,” Isaac said. “But don’t leave it open. Close it tight. Close ’em all tight.”

The snow fell so hard that the world outside the windows was nothing but a blur of white. Doug and Angela had been up late, and not woken until after nine. Now noontime had come and gone as he emerged from the shower and crossed Angela’s bedroom to peer outside. White, yes, but really the world had turned gray. Pressing his face against the cold glass, he looked up in search of some sign of daylight. Tomorrow—morning or sometime in the afternoon—the sun would return, the sky would be blue, and then the massive snowfall would attain the whiteness that nature intended.

Today, though … today he saw nothing but gray. It occurred to him that this was the true state of the world, endless gray, trapped between light and dark. He laughed at himself for even thinking it.

Now you’re a fuckin’ philosopher,
he thought, turning from the window and grabbing the overnight bag he’d brought in the night before. Clean socks and underwear, a fresh T-shirt, some deodorant, a toothbrush. He pulled on his clothes, including the jeans from the night before, brushed his teeth, and then left the bedroom, lured through the apartment by the delicious aroma of frying bacon.

“Something smells good,” he said as he walked down the short hall that opened into the large space that included the living room on one side, a dining area in the middle, and the kitchen tucked away on the other side.

Angela stood at the stove, hip cocked as she used a fork to flip the bacon slices. She had slept in a flannel pajama top and nothing else, but while he’d been showering she had located the bottoms and slipped them on. Though he’d have preferred her without them, he couldn’t deny that she looked adorable.

Jesus, there’s a word you’d never have tagged her with in the old days.

But then again, the old days were just that, and he was interested in starting over.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said, arching a playful eyebrow.

“Please. You slept just as late as I did. You just don’t have anywhere to be.”

Angela pointed to the small television on the counter with her fork. The volume had been turned down low, and soft voices emanated from it. On the screen, a reporter stood in the driving snow in heavy winter gear, standing with her legs apart to keep from being blown over by the powerful wind.

“Nobody has anywhere to be,” Angela said. “Schools are canceled everywhere. The governor has asked businesses to let people work from home to keep cars off the roads and let the plows and sanders do their jobs.”

She had cracked three or four eggs into a bowl and now began to beat them with a whisk.

Doug barely noticed, staring at the TV screen. “Perfect.”

A map of central New England showing snowfall totals appeared onscreen. For a moment he thought this was a forecast for the entire storm, but then he caught the words despite the low volume and realized that while they’d been sleeping, sixteen inches of snow had already fallen. He glanced at the clock about the stove—nearly ten
A.M.
Nearly a foot and a half in nine hours or so, and no end in sight. He felt a twist in his gut and wasn’t sure if it was fear or anticipation.

He retrieved a glass from the cabinet and turned back to Angela.

“If we’re doing breakfast for lunch, I’m going to have some OJ. Can I pour you some, or are you sticking with coffee?”

She poured the egg mixture into a large nonstick pan, focused on the work as if he hadn’t said a word. Doug frowned, watching as she added salt and pepper and then dumped a handful of shredded cheddar cheese into the eggs.

“Angie?”

“Get out some bread, would you?” she asked. “I forgot…”

Her back to him, she began to shudder.