“They found a way in,” Grace said. “A vent or someth—”
The attic had a hinged door with a drop-down ladder and as the three of them stared it began to shudder and bang with pressure from above. TJ stared in mute horror as the pull-string hanging below the trapdoor began to ice over.
The shrieking began again, but this time it wasn’t the gale outside but the howl of frigid wind whipping through the house’s eaves. TJ looked at Ella and Grace, saw the sorrow and surrender in their eyes, and knew he could not live if he lost them. He thought of all the times he had held Grace in his arms when she was a baby and even later, as she grew—thought of all the nights Ella had fallen asleep curled against him in bed with her head resting in the crook of his arm—and he moved.
Grabbing Ella, he shoved her to the bathroom. She careened through the open door and fell, sliding on the Italian tiles, scrambling to get back to her feet.
“No, TJ, don’t—”
He picked Grace up and went through the door, shouting for Ella to shut it even as he pushed Grace into the bathtub, thinking how absurd it all seemed, how wrong. How grimly mundane.
“It’s not going to work,” Ella said quietly, her breath fogging in front of her.
Ice crystals had formed on the vanity mirror. TJ refused to look at it or to think. He grabbed towels from the linen closet and jammed them under the door, pushing with his fingers, filling the gap there, ignoring the fact that there were thinner gaps all around the doorframe.
“Thomas,” his mother said, in the voice of his little girl, and TJ felt his heart seizing in his chest as he ignored her, pressing himself against the door, hoping to narrow the spaces around it.
Supposed to protect them,
he thought.
Mom. Ella. Gracie. You’re supposed to take care of them.
But he’d broken his word to his mother and she’d died as a result, and now the things that had killed her had returned to murder the rest of his family, to drag him into a hell constructed of his inability to love them enough. To be the man he’d always aspired to be.
He slumped against the bathroom wall and stared at the doorknob, watching as ice began to form around it.
Ella fell to her knees on the fuzzy blue throw rug, shaking her head as she stared at Grace, trembling with grief.
“Mrs. Farrelly,” Ella said, staring into the little girl’s old-woman eyes. “Martha. Please, you can’t let this happen.”
Grace stiffened, chin raised. “The storm is dying.”
“Not fast enough,” Ella said. “I don’t care what happens to me, but Grace—”
“We’ll be all right,” the girl replied, and for the first time TJ saw the selfishness in her, saw that in her fear she would say anything.
Ella slapped Grace so hard that it spun her back against the wall of the tub.
“Stop it!” TJ snapped.
The bathroom door began to tremble, and they heard long, icy claws drag along the wood.
Tears ran down Ella’s face as she turned to stare at her husband. “Don’t let this happen.”
TJ squeezed his eyes shut against the scratching noises and the anguish in his wife’s eyes. But even with his eyes closed, he felt the grip of the cold, the temperature still falling. His chest hurt as he inhaled the frigid air and opened his eyes, turning toward his wife and daughter—his “girls,” he called them.
He went and knelt beside Ella, nudging her aside as he reached into the bathtub for Grace, who stared back at him with the fearful, hurt, suspicious eyes of his dead mother.
“Mom,” he said, and Grace allowed herself to be pulled in her father’s embrace … Martha into her son’s.
TJ held her there, wincing at the rattle of the door in its frame, at the scrape of those icy claws on the wood. The gap was small but it had to be enough. Why weren’t they coming through? Were the creatures toying with them? TJ thought they must be and hated them for it.
He breathed in the scent of his daughter’s shampoo and felt her little heart beating against him. A thousand images of his mother crashed together in his head, memories that he cherished but that he had stored away like a much-loved photo album, there to be drawn out when he missed her most.
“Losing you was so hard,” he whispered to his mother. “Blaming myself made it even worse. But the living are the living and the dead are the dead.”
The scraping on the door grew louder and a gust of frigid air blew into the bathroom through the gap between door and frame, and he knew the evil that had come for them had decided to end it.
“TJ,” Ella said, and he heard her crying behind him, needing him.
He tightened his embrace on his daughter, shuddering with a sadness the likes of which he’d never known.
“I’ll always love you, Mom, but I can’t lose my Grace. She’s only eleven. She deserves to have a life. She deserves a
chance.
The Martha Farrelly I know, the woman who wanted grandkids so badly, she’d never put Grace at risk. I know you’re scared—”
He felt Grace relax in his arms, felt her breath on his cheek as she exhaled, nearly hanging from his neck.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
TJ couldn’t breathe. He jerked back, holding her at arm’s length, staring at his little girl. When he glanced over his shoulder he saw a gossamer shadow moving out through the door, passing through it as if it weren’t there, and he nearly called for her to come back.
“Gracie?” Ella said beside him. “Is it you?”
“Mom,” the girl said, almost impatiently, “I’m cold.”
Ella grabbed hold of her husband and daughter both and dragged them into a family embrace, Grace practically falling out of the tub on top of them.
“Oh, God, thank you,” Ella said.
TJ said a silent prayer of thanks as well, but his was not to God. He thought of all the things that he wished he’d thought to say to his mother and now never would. But he thought perhaps that was for the best.
“Hey,” Ella said, reaching up to caress his cheek, searching his eyes. “It’s gone quiet.”
And so it had.
The only sounds in the bathroom were the hum of the overhead fan and the quiet dripping of water as the ice on the doorknob began to melt.
TWENTY
“Jake. Wake up.”
Inhaling sharply, Jake sat up and found his head amid the clothes hanging in the closet. He gave an amused grunt and shook himself. Isaac shore a flashlight in his eyes and he squinted and turned away.
“I’m awake.”
“Listen,” Isaac said, nudging him. “Do you hear that?”
The boy might not have Isaac’s face, but his voice sounded so genuine, so right, that it made Jake shiver. He wondered if it was just his imagination—twelve years had passed, after all; how could he really remember what Isaac’s voice had sounded like back then? Maybe all ten-year-old boys sounded the same.
“I don’t hear anything,” he said.
But he frowned even as he spoke the words, because maybe he actually did hear something, a thumping noise that was not the sound of the shutter banging against the house. His heart skipped a beat, then began to race. He hadn’t been completely asleep but he had definitely been drifting off, despite that it was hours earlier than he usually went to bed. Now he couldn’t have been more awake. It felt like every cell in his body was on alert.
The sound stopped. He shifted, knocking over some shoes that he’d piled up to get them out of the way and tipping all the contents out of the open Monopoly box at his feet. His head hit the clothes again and some bare hangers jangled.
“Is that…?” Jake asked.
Isaac shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
The muffled sound of voices reached them, impossible to understand but clearly human. The thumping came again and Jake exhaled, realizing how stupid he’d been. He started to get up and Isaac grabbed his arm.
“No!” the boy said.
“Someone’s here. They’re banging at the door.”
“Don’t answer,” Isaac pleaded.
Jake hesitated, but he heard the muffled shouting again and thought whoever was out there didn’t seem likely to give up. A terrible thought occurred to him.
“What if something’s happened to Mom?”
Isaac glanced around the dark closet, forlorn, and then he nodded. “Okay, go. But don’t go outside. And if you see anything weird, shut the door fast.”
Jake smiled. “Promise.”
He took the second flashlight and climbed out of the closet, groaning as he stretched his legs and back. He was only twenty-four but already his body didn’t adapt well to being cramped in a closet for a few hours. Once upon a time he and Ikey could have camped in there for days, eating junk food and telling ghost stories. Now the idea of ghost stories made him nauseous. Fear had lost its entertainment value.
“Stay there,” he told his dead brother, and he shut the closet door.
Clicking on the flashlight, he hurried through the house, realizing just how loud the banging and shouting was. As he hurried to the front door, he recognized one of the voices as Harley’s, and then his other visitor identified himself.
“Jake, this is Joe Keenan, and this is your last chance. If you’re in there, open the door. Otherwise we’ll have to assume you’re in some kind of trouble and we’re coming in! I’ll give you a count of ten!”
A heavy fist hammered on the door.
Harley,
he thought.
“Open the damn door, Jake!” his friend shouted.
Outside, Detective Keenan began to count loudly down from ten. As Jake reached for the dead bolt his hand wavered. If something had happened to his mother, he wanted to know, but what if they were there for another reason? Detective Keenan had been instrumental in the search for Zachary Stroud.
“Shit,” Jake whispered to himself.
Harley shouted his name and banged again.
“Seven!” Keenan yelled. “Six! Five!”
Shit, shit, shit,
Jake thought, and then he slid back the dead bolt and turned the knob, hauling the door open. They were coming in one way or another; better that they did so without destroying his front door. He stood in his foyer and shone his flashlight in their eyes.
“You sound like you’re about to blast off,” he said, scratching his head and pretending to yawn.
Harley and Keenan looked surprised that he’d opened the door and he saw them straighten up. They’d actually been prepared to break in.
“Where the hell have you been?” Harley demanded.
Jake scowled at him. “Sleeping. In my house. The house of an idiot who did not buy a generator after the last two times he lost power. Not a lot else to do in the middle of a blizzard … except, I guess, for going around hammering on people’s doors when you should be home. What is
with
you guys? It’s kinda late, don’t you think?”
Detective Keenan visibly shifted gears, going from friend to cop in half a second. “Can we come in?”
Jake shrugged and stepped out of the way to admit them. “Of course. Sorry, still half asleep.”
As they entered, he glanced out the door, searching the snow-streaked darkness for inhuman things.
“What are you looking for?” Detective Keenan asked. “We’re alone.”
Jake’s heart skipped. He hadn’t thought about it, but that was a good sign. They’d come without the cavalry.
“Just wondering how you got here. Did you park out on the street?”
“Not like we could get into your driveway,” Harley said. “Even getting up your street wasn’t easy. If the plow doesn’t come by soon—”
“If the plow comes by soon, your car is probably going to get demolished,” Jake said. He gestured toward the living room and they followed his lead. “Wish I could offer you guys some coffee. I might have some beers, but—”
“We’re good,” Detective Keenan said wearily.
Jake could barely breathe as he picked up a matchbook from the coffee table and lit two candles he’d left there earlier, in preparation for the storm. There were also two empty mugs on the table, left from when he’d made hot chocolate earlier for himself and Isaac, and he saw Keenan eyeing the mugs. You didn’t have to be a detective to count to two.
From the moment Jake had let them in, Harley had been watching him with open curiosity, not quite accusatory but definitely suspicious. He hated to have his friends look at him that way, but the idea of trying to explain the truth to them seemed absurd.
“So, I assume you guys didn’t pay me a visit just because you were bored.”
The sarcasm didn’t earn even a smile, and that was when he knew he was in real trouble. These guys weren’t going to content themselves with asking him; they were going to want to search. Of course they were. He’d been stupid not to realize it right away. If they didn’t have strong suspicions, they would never have come all the way out to his house in the middle of a blizzard.
“We didn’t,” Detective Keenan said, sitting forward on the sofa and studying him, trying to look casual but ready for whatever Jake might do.
This is really happening,
Jake thought.
“Last time I was out here, you wouldn’t let me in,” Harley said. “The shades were all down. Most of ’em are still down. I had the idea you had a woman here, maybe a new girlfriend or something.”
Detective Keenan looked pointedly at the two mugs on the coffee table. Jake faked a smile and he knew they saw its falseness. Both cops stiffened a little, sensing his panic. He knew it, but he could not get the thin, fake smile off his face.
He struggled to think of some way to get rid of them. If they wanted to arrest him, to take Isaac away, they could do that, but only if they waited until the storm had passed. The idea of Isaac out there in the blizzard with the ice men hunting for him … Jake couldn’t let that happen.
“I know I must’ve looked like a wild man that day,” Jake said. “But I’ve been having trouble sleeping. That’s why I had the shades down. I didn’t fall asleep till dawn. I hadn’t even been up long when you—”
“Bullshit,” Harley interrupted.
Jake almost expected Detective Keenan to protest. He was the detective; he was the one who should have been asking the questions. But Keenan just watched.
“It’s not bullshit,” Jake said, allowing himself to look irritated. “Seriously, what the hell’s going on with you guys? Why are you here?”