Frostbitten: The Complete Series (34 page)

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
LOVE

With their fingers warmly and tightly wrapped together, Connor and Hanna walked through the snowy streets of Snowbrooke, underneath the warm glow of the amber streetlights.

As Christmas drew closer, the town of Snowbrooke began to embrace the Christmas spirit. More houses than ever before were beautifully decorated with contemporary sleek white and yellow Christmas lights, instead of the classic red and green ones. The orange glow from the private lives within each house glimmered against the deep white snow that buried the small town.

“You know—you really don’t have to walk me home,” Hanna said.

“I insist,” Connor replied.

“I always stay on the main roads where it’s light. If there is a deranged killer out there, he’s not going to attack me out here.” 

“I’m more worried about a mouse,” Connor joked.

Hanna playfully hit Connor in the arm. “You better hope I don’t find out what you’re afraid of.”

“Me? I’m not afraid of anything,” Connor said.

“Oh—Yeah right.”

“What? I’m not. I can watch any horror movie with all of the lights off, and I won’t even flinch.”

“What about The Exorcist?”

“Didn’t faze me.”

“You’re so full of crap!” Hanna laughed.

“It’s true—You can even test me.”

“Okay. I’ll go rent The Shining and we’ll see how you handle it.”

“Great. I look forward to it.”

The two arrived at Hanna’s old, decrepit house. Connor looked up at it as an eerie sensation crossed over him. He couldn’t help but notice the boards on the windows, and the door hanging on by a single hinge.

“So, are you renovating or something?” Connor asked.

“Um—Yeah,” Hanna said.

“You live with your parents?”

Hanna thought for a moment, trying to think of a believable response. “It’s complicated,” she said.

“I hear that.”

“Be sure to let me know how your mom is doing,” Hanna said.

“I will,” Connor said as he took a step closer to Hanna. He smiled as he looked into her eyes.

“I’m sure she’s doing great,” Hanna said as she stared back into Connor’s incredible blue eyes.

They kissed.

Connor gently tickled Hanna’s bottom lip with the edge of his front teeth before pulling his head back.

“You know, I could come over one day and quickly fix up that door,” Connor said, walking towards the house.

“It’s really not necessary,” Hanna said, running to catch up with him.

“No—it would be simple. I’ll just grab some new hinges from the hardware store, sand down the frame and stain it up. This door doesn’t even have a weather strip. A few bucks and a couple of hours and your house would be way warmer—and you’d save money on your heating bill.” Connor stepped up the porch steps and reached for the handle.

“That’s okay—really, Connor.” Hanna stepped between Connor and the house before Connor could open the door.

“Seriously—It would be easy.”

“I just—don’t want to make my dad angry. The house is kind of his baby.”

Connor looked up at the decrepit disaster zone of a house—remembering back to Andrew’s story about the murder of Hanna’s father. Hanna was acting strange, like she was hiding something.

“Is everything okay?” Connor asked.

“I’ll talk to my dad about it. Maybe he’ll say it’s okay. But really—don’t feel like you need to do it.”

Connor looked into Hanna’s eyes. Hanna looked down coyly. Gently, Connor placed his fingers under Hanna chin and softly lifted up her head.

“You don’t need to be shy around me.”

“I know,” Hanna said.

“Do you?” Connor asked.

Hanna smiled. “I do—really.”

“I like you. There’s nothing about you that I don’t like.”

“I like you too.”

“Whatever it is you are scared of me knowing—I want you to know that it won’t affect how much I like you.”

Hanna’s smile faded away slowly. “No one’s ever liked me before.”

“I can’t believe that. There’s just no way it’s true.”

“It’s true.”

“People are just hard to read sometimes.”

“No—People have never liked me. I know that it’s hard to understand, but it’s sadly true. I’ve been beat up, spit on, mocked and humiliated more times than I could possibly count—And I don’t mean metaphorically.”

“Who would do that?”

“Everyone.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never known. So it’s weird for someone like you to not see it…”

“See it? See what?”

“What other people see—What everyone else apparently sees in me.”

“I only see a beautiful and talented girl.”

Hanna blushed. Connor leaned in again and gave her another long and passionate kiss. Hanna’s heartbeat soared as her body became light.

“I love you,” Connor said.

Hanna’s heart stopped and everything froze. She’d never heard those words in her life—except for on television or in songs on the radio. Until that moment, that word love was mythical—never meant to touch her ears. She opened her mouth to respond, but no sound came out.

“Don’t stop being you,” Connor said.

“I—I love you too,” Hanna said.

They joined together for another, longer kiss. Connor wrapped his thick muscular arms around the soft shy girl. He held her tight as motionless snowflakes floated around them.

Connor leaned his head back. “Can I come inside?” he asked.

Hanna thought for a moment. “You’d better go see your mom before visiting hours are over,” she said.

“Right—I almost forgot. Maybe tomorrow I can come over, and you can show me your place.”

“Maybe,” Hanna said, forcing a smile.

“Cool. That would be fun.”

“I’ll see you later,” Hanna said, waiting for Connor to leave before she opened the door to her mysterious home.

“Bye,” Connor said as he stood smiling, waiting for Hanna to go inside before he turned to leave. Hanna nervously fondled the door handle with her hand.

The standoff lasted a moment, before Connor started to laugh. “Okay—Okay. I’ll go,” he said with a charming smile. “Good night, Hanna!”

“Good night,” Hanna said, waiting for Connor to reach the sidewalk before turning around.

Carefully, she slipped into her house and closed the door behind her. The inside of the house was dark and cold. Hanna reached for the old switch that controlled the foyer light.

The little dangling light bulb began to flicker for a moment before turning on and lighting up the entryway. On the wall adjacent from the front door were the words “Demon Child” spray-painted in large, red letters. It wasn’t the first hate-message that had been written on her wall.

Under the words “Demon Child” were various other words and phrases, including “Murderer”, “Killer”, “Die Satan”, and “Burn in hell”. Hanna had tried to clean each one off—but spray-paint didn’t exactly wash out of solid wood easily.

Hanna looked around the house. Her floor was littered with beer cans from the drunken college kids who came from time to time for a cheap thrill. Every window on the main floor had been smashed, and subsequently boarded up. The floor was covered in an inch of dirt, broken glass and mildew. The kitchen and the downstairs bathroom had been completely ravaged—not that Hanna used them anyway.  Upstairs was still mostly in tact, as kids rarely made it up the stairs before chickening out—but it was still eerily empty, dusty and neglected.

Hanna couldn’t let Connor see the house the way that it was. “Old, broken and out-dated” was one thing—but the “abandoned circus attraction” it was now would almost certainly send him running for the hills.

On her hands and her knees, Hanna crawled through the house and picked up every single beer can and broken bottle shard, stuffing it into a number of garbage bags.

Hanna went into the basement and dug through her father’s old tool-kit. She managed to find a sheet of old sandpaper. She made her way to the front entrance and started to scrape away at the years of humiliation and torment.

The most depressing part of it all was that all of her hard work was ultimately in vein. Within a week, the floor would once again be littered with bottles and cans, and the entry wall would once again mock and degrade her.

The job took hours—but eventually, the house resembled any other foreclosed dump.

Exhausted, Hanna retired to the attic. She sat down in her usual spot, and began to write a new poem.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
OUTCASTS

There had always been something about Hanna’s family that made people uncomfortable—something that no one could ever properly put into words.

Even before the controversial homicide, people made a point of walking on the other side of the road from the Wilkinsons. On a number of occasions, Hanna overheard other students, teachers and even total strangers saying, “There’s something wrong with that girl.”

Hanna could never figure it out. It was a plague that never ceased infecting her family.

Even people who didn’t know her father, or what he did for a living, found Hanna’s presence uncomfortable. It was an incredibly unfortunate part of Hanna’s life, which she sadly grew up with.

Hanna’s mother became fatally ill after she gave birth to Hanna. She was a very small, fragile woman—shorter than five feet tall, weighing much less than ninety pounds. She was a beautiful woman—no one ever denied that.

Olga was the daughter of two lower class Russian farmers—the Pytrovichs. She was born in Russia, but her and her family moved across the world, just outside of Snowbrooke before she was old enough to walk.

She was the quietest person you would ever meet. As a matter of fact, she never spoke a word to anyone. The only people who had ever heard the young beauty speak were her parents, and eventually her future husband.

She didn’t like going into town much. She was happy living out on the family farm, with her parents and their dairy cows. Like Hanna, Olga spent her time writing poetry. She would sit out in the field and just write for hours, every single day.

The neighbourhood boys were all obsessed with her. She was the definition of a Russian Bombshell. Her hair was long and soft, she always had a smile on her face, and she always wore the most beautiful dresses, which flowed down to her ankles. She would braid her hair and wrap it into a bun whenever she went into town. Women envied her marvellous perfection.

But whenever anyone spoke to her, she would just sheepishly look away. It didn’t take long for storeowners to learn to be quiet around her, and not make any eye contact. The only words that came out of their mouths were what was absolutely vital to the transaction. “Four dollars and ninety cents.” Anything more and Olga would become uncomfortable.

Her unfathomable shyness led people to believe that she just didn’t understand any English. Everyone just assumed that she only spoke Russian, which wasn’t true at all. She actually spoke very beautifully and articulately. Every sentence that came out of her mouth could have been a poem in itself.

But despite her reputation for being chronically quiet and shy, men couldn’t resist her beauty. Every time Olga went out into public, nearly every man would ask her out on a date. Supposedly, one man even asked her out in front of his own wife—explaining that he “couldn’t bare to be with his wife knowing there was a woman as beautiful as Olga.” Some men even skipped asking her on dates, and went straight for the marriage proposal. Olga never said no—nor did she say yes. She never said anything at all.

When Olga was seventeen, she encountered Francis Wilkinson for the first time.

Francis Wilkinson was a nobody—as in, nobody knew that he even existed. Like Olga, he never spoke to anyone except for his own parents. He spent most of his time in his old family home, listening to the radio and staring out the window at the mountains. He’d always loved the mountains.

He was a talented painter, but no one knew it. He loved painting mountains and landscapes. Whenever he finished a painting, he would wrap it up in an old sheet and hide it in the attic, so that no one would ever see it—despite it being breathtakingly incredible.

It wasn’t until Francis was a teenager that he really started to venture out from his home. He took a sketchbook with him and went from place to place, drawing different areas around town. If people asked him what he was drawing, he would swiftly shut his sketchbook and awkwardly leave. His awkward demeanour made people uncomfortable. They thought he was rude—and to an extent, he was rude. When people tried to see what he was drawing, he would snarl at them like some wild boar. He had the nasty habit of muttering things to himself—things he assumed no one could hear.

But he was wrong. People heard him. People heard him muttering how much he hated the town, and how “the cancer needs to wipe everyone out already.” He was always referring to some mystical cancer.

Eventually, Francis stopped sitting out in public. He found a beautiful view of the mountains in the gear room of the town’s clock tower, and started to spend his days there, drawing the mountains and the small town below.  He always left the people out of his drawings, because he hated people more than he hated plague infested cockroaches. At least the hypothetical cockroaches had the potential to wipe the people out.

People referred to Francis as “The Hunchback of Snowbrooke”. You could see him sitting in the window, looking out—day and night. Kids started to make up stories and rumours, which spread quickly around the town.

One day, while Francis was drawing the town from his favourite spot, he heard a noise. Someone was coming up the steps of the clock tower. Francis quickly closed his sketchbook and prepared to leave.

Olga Pytrovich emerged from the spiralling staircase. Without saying a word, or making a second of eye contact, she walked over to the clock tower window and sat down. Then, she started to write into her little poetry book.

Instead of leaving, Francis reluctantly sat back down, and continued to draw. The two said nothing to one another.

They simply sat in a peaceful silence.

The next day, they sat together in the tower again—and the next day, and the next day. For months, the two sat together, never muttering as much as a single word to the other.

Slowly, inch-by-inch, they sat closer together. One day, they sat right up against one another—still without muttering a single word. They never even looked over to see what the other person was creating. They understood one another at level no one else could possibly fathom—a peculiar connection of a peculiar magnitude.

Even on the coldest night, Olga and Francis sat together in that old clock tower. Olga would bring a warm blanket, and the two would share it as they stared out into the town, listening to Francis’ radio, and together, they silently scribbled into their books.

A year later, Francis decided to show Olga what he’d been drawing. It was the most breathtaking drawing of her—capturing her magnificent beauty. It was the only portrait Francis ever drew—the only portrait Francis would ever draw. In the picture, Olga was wearing an incredible wedding dress, and standing at a snowy altar. Underneath the image were the words: “Will you marry me?”

For the first time ever, Olga spoke to Francis. “I will,” she said with a smile.

“I love you,” Francis said, breaking his own chronic silence.

“I love you too,” Olga said.

The two got married to an audience of four—just their own parents. All of the men in the town were shocked and confused. The most beautiful of God’s creations had married The mumbling and grumbling Hunchback of Snowbrooke.