They both rose, and she showed him to the front door. That was when they heard a wailing like a harsh wind, followed by the heavy thud of footfalls on the porch.
Jilly came running in from the kitchen and clung to Ms. Harper. “What was that?” The panic in her voice was heartbreaking.
“Stay here, ladies,” Morris said. He went to one of the front windows by the door and positioned himself so that his body was next to the glass rather than in front of it. He drew his weapon and peered out the window. Outside, mere inches from the front door, three of those things like the one that had attacked Daniel Murphy were pacing the front porch. Occasionally they stopped in front of the door, swinging those massive heads back and forth, those needle-lined jaws gaping, as if they sensed the humans on the other side but didn't know how to find them. Often, they flickered or turned in such a way that they all but disappeared from view. In the next second, they would reappear several inches away. To Morris, it was perhaps one of their most unnerving qualities.
Morris gestured to Ms. Harper and Jilly to be quiet, and then he turned back to the window.
The creatures growled, nipping at each other and occasionally swiping at the front door. Behind him, he heard Jilly whimpering every time one of those large, taloned paws pounded on the relatively thin boundary between them.
He considered opening the windows a crack and firing at them from the house, but he feared it would make too much noise. They were closeâvery closeâand he suspected the key to killing them, if gunshots would even work, would be to have the upper hand, the element of surprise. Drawing their attention before he was ready would be an extraordinarily bad idea.
“Ms. Harper,” he said in a low voice, “do you have any other weapons in the house?”
“You mean like more guns? No, IâI don't. Just the one shotgun. I have kitchen knives, I guess. A baseball bat that used to belong to my husband.”
“Okay, okay good. Knives can be . . . messy, but the bat is good. What about, like, blow torches? Battery-powered tools?”
Ms. Harper looked flustered. Her mouth opened to answer, but closed again. She shook her head.
“Okay, no problem. How about nail polish remover?”
“Oh, that I have! But why?”
He turned back to the window. “I'm betting we can burn them.”
Ms. Harper and Jilly exchanged worried looks, but the woman said, “Whatever you think will kill the bastards.”
“Okay,” he said, keeping a wary eye on those things pacing outside. “We'll need the nail polish remover, some ragsâwhatever you have that we can tear up, uh, corks if you have them, a lighter, and . . . glass bottles. Beer bottles, Coke, whatever.”
“Gotcha. Come on, Jilly. You go through Frank's closet and get whatever T-shirts are in there. I'll get the polish remover.”
As the two climbed the stairs, Morris grimaced at the window.
Fire. It could work. He hoped to God it would work.
* * *
One of the things that Jack noticed about the snow as he drove out toward the west edge of town was its unnerving capacity to take the shape of forms and faces, even in broad daylight. Many of the roads to and from the outer parts of town were surrounded on either side by woods, and the way the wind swirled the snow between the tree trunks gave Jack the impression of being watched by pale faces with hollow eyes and crooked, slashed mouths. Tricks of light and shadow, maybe, but it was unsettling to Jack, who was already grappling with a growing certainty that the Hand of the Black Stars cult was a far more organized and well-informed organization than he had thought. He suspected they had eyes, human and otherwise, everywhere.
Or, to be more accurate, he supposed,
they
were now functioning as the eyes for something else, something that could, by unnatural means, root him out wherever he was and wherever he went. These things were, after all, here to level Colby to the ground, and they were just the grunts. Whatever was coming through to this world (if Jack and his team couldn't stop them) would be much worse. The devastation in Colby would spread, if it hadn't already. The whole state. The East Coast. The country, and beyond....
What was one little planet to beings who destroyed whole universes?
There was something so infuriatingly horrific about that idea: not just everything Jack was and had ever done, but everything the human race had ever been or accomplished since the beginning of civilization, would be gone. Not just humans but humanity itself would be erased, relegated to an old folk tale, a lost chapter in an endless book of tragedies.
And in that moment, as his car sped over patches of ice and cracked street pavement, Jack felt sick in his heart for his children. He couldn't bear the thought of their being afraid at the end, or worse, of them watching a world they had only a tentative grasp of so far just slip away from them before they found a good reason to fight for it. Children, in Jack's mind, were so newly minted from that pure place where beautiful little souls originally came from that they had less trouble letting go of life and physicality in this world. He had, unfortunately, seen it time and time again in his line of work. He'd seen it in the last seconds of Gracie Anderson's life when her little hand let go of his, just before the cold and blood loss made her blue eyes glaze over. It wasn't that children gave up life willingly; no, Jack thought, it was simply that children instinctively knew that there was some place to go after this world because they could still, on some subconscious level, remember that there had been a place from which they'd come before. It didn't make him any less enraged when children's lives were taken, but it allowed him to put that rage on a kind of mental shelf and do his job to catch their killers.
It wouldn't be possible for him to do that where his children were concerned. He wondered how easy it would be (or
had been? Oh no, no no
, he wasn't going to think like that, not now) for his children to give this world up.
And as for doing his job and hunting the killers in Colby? He frowned to himself. The worst murderers he had ever encountered in the course of his career had committed some pretty monstrous acts, but they were still human. Many people seemed to forget thatâ
wanted
to forget it, as if the thought of these killers being human somehow tainted others' humanity. People didn't like to believe that they could share any traits with child-killers and molesters, cannibals, necrophiliacs, rapists, serial murderers, and the like, because it meant that, deep down, they would have to acknowledge that anyone could be that kind of monster, even a loved one. Even oneself. To Jack, however, the fact that the worst criminals he had ever come across until now were still just human beings with human weaknesses and flaws was somewhat reassuring. He didn't want to chase phantom boogeymen. He wanted to catch bad human beings doing bad things and lock them up in a cage using irrefutable but utterly human forensic proof.
With this case, Jack wasn't sure anymore that even the cultists were human. Lord knew nothing else out there in the snow was.
He wondered where his children were right now. Were they in the house they had grown up in, the one Katie had gotten in the divorce? Had they gone over to Katie's on-again, off-again boyfriend's house? Jack didn't believe
that
guy was any great shakes as a protector. In fact, if he'd have allowed himself such an uncharitable thought, he would have hoped one of those spider things had already eaten the guy.
The kids wouldn't be at school, so he could eliminate searching there. Classes at the grammar, middle, and high schools had been canceled the last few days, and there was talk of cutting the year short and adding the missing time to the beginning of the next school year. That there was no promise that things would be righted by then had not been publicly discussed.
Around him, the faces in the snow looked like they were laughing.
Fixed? Not at all, sir! Oh, we have big plans for Colbyâbig plans! Come September, this little fleck of human loss will be an iceberg, and there won't be a school to go back to, or any children to attend it.
Jack shook his head to clear those thoughts from it. They didn't feel like his thoughts. It sounded crazy, even in the confines of his own head, but they felt like the
snow's
thoughts. Or maybe they were the projected ideas of the things in the snow. Still, he couldn't help feeling that the snow itself somehow had a mind of its own, that it was a thinking, calculating thing waiting to exploit the weaknesses of those who made the foolish attempt to trudge through it.
He was almost to Katie's house, and the tightness in his chest suddenly felt crushing. He was afraid, frankly and starkly afraid, of what he'd find there.
As quickly as he was passing them, the snow faces disassembled and reassembled between the next two trees, and the next, and the next . . . the snow was, indeed, following him, tracking him.
As he reached the town border, he slowed to a stop. No one else was on the road. The drifts of snow had formed an odd snow-fort kind of wall across the length of road just a few hundred feet beyond the town limit. It would have been, under normal circumstances, a fairly easy thing to plow, but Jack had doubts about making any attempts to drive over or through it. He thought briefly of the dashboard cam video of Aleski and Seeger that Teagan had told him about earlier. That hill of snow probably ran around the entire perimeter of the town, through the woods and everything. He could see beyond it now, and although the snow appeared to continue out toward the next town, Jack couldn't be sure if that was an illusion.
The left turn onto Maple, which ultimately led to Katie's street, was on his side of the border. He thought some of the subsequent roads might cross the town limits proper, but he had to try to navigate it. His kids needed him.
He tried Katie again on the cell, but was met with the same frustrating busy signal he'd been getting since yesterday afternoon. This close to the outside world, the snow was wreaking havoc with cell reception. He tried to text her for the third time that morning, and again, the text bounced as undeliverable.
“Dammit,” he muttered. He glared at the border. A gust of wind dusted up some of the snow and the faces were immediately there in bas-relief along the border. Indents the size of fists formed eyes, mounds formed sharply jutting facial features, and small, sharp icicles hung from sunken mouth areas in various sardonic smiles. Winter had always bothered Jack, but in that moment, he hated it with a renewed and seething passion. He was tempted to take his snow brush and beat those faces down to disfigured, half-melted lumps.
Instead, he stayed behind the wheel, feeling the feeble heat from the dashboard vents and listening to the idling engine growl low, like a threatened dog.
“You are not going to get in my way,” he told the faces in a steady, even voice. “You are not going to stop me.”
The aspect of the faces changed. Maybe clouds had shifted to cover the sun or the wind had shifted the shape of the bas-relief, but instead of wicked amusement, the expressions were now soaked in hatred. The carved, almost chiseled animosity was far clearer than just an impression. There
were
faces in the snow now, and they were snarling at him, baring those icicle fangs. Beneath the faces were the beginnings of iceâtaloned paws, as well.
Jack eased the car forward toward the turn, eyeing them warily. Could they move? Could they form bodies as well and pull free of that ice wall? And if so, how fast could they bear down on his car?
The faces watched but made no move to stop him. He gunned the engine, his tires kicking up an albescent spray, and peeled into the turn. In his rearview, the faces at the border and the claws beneath seemed to be reaching out of the bank toward the car, a chilling ice-and-wind effect of motion caught and frozen mid-reach.
He focused on the road ahead and pushed down on the gas pedal even harder, until he had put enough distance between him and that wall of snow that he couldn't see it anymore. He turned right onto Cloverlane Road and then made a left onto Piedmont. If he wavered back and forth over the town border, nothing hindered his progress, but those snow faces followed between fence posts, against tree trunks in backyards, or wedged between parked cars.
They were watching, but waiting.
Finally he reached the right turn for Katie's street, Shillham Drive. His body tensed as he rolled down the road toward the house. It was on the left, a white bi-level, and Katie's car was there.
The car doors were open, the interior silent and still.
Jack felt his chest tighten. He put the car in park, pocketed his keys, and took his gun from the glove compartment. As he got out of the car, the wind picked up, slicing across his face and biting his ears. In it, he thought he heard the whispering of many voices on the verge of forming discernible words. It felt invasive, having those voices so close to his ear, furtively pushing the suggestion, if not the statement, of mockery at him. He shook his head and strode purposefully toward his ex-wife's car.
He braced himself for blood. His heart pounded so hard he could hear the silent rush of his own blood in his head, even over the wind. He took a deep breath and looked inside the car.
The interior was empty. No ex-wife, no kids, no blood. He exhaled with relief. His attention turned to the front door of the house. It was shut, and looked undamagedâboth good signs . . . provided that Katie and the kids had made it inside.
He had a key to Katie's house on his key ring, and as he approached the door, he took it out of his pocket. Behind him, the wind blew snow at his back. The scratching of the tiny pieces of ice against the fabric of his coat felt like fingers clawing at him, trying to divert his attention.