Chills (11 page)

His slippered feet hardly felt the snow on the front porch as he ran out. “Mrs. Mueller! You need to go back inside!”

The elderly woman looked up and waved. “Oh, hi there, Dominic! Some crazy weather, eh?”

“Mrs. Mueller,” he shouted, aware of how singularly loud and attention-drawing his voice was in the neighborhood's silence. He didn't see any blood, no bodies or prints or even snow-sloughed signs of struggle. There was just the eerie quiet, broken only by him and the old woman, and it made him feel exposed. Nevertheless, he risked raising his voice and speaking more slowly and clearly, but his gaze darted toward anything in his periphery that seemed like movement. “You need to go back inside. It's not safe out here.”

She paused, then waved away his concern with a gloved hand and a smile. “Oh, I'm fine, dear. Just getting the newspaper before the snow swallows it up. Got to keep up with what's going on in the world, eh?” And she made her slow and careful way down her steps.

If anyone in Colby was more of a morning person than Dominic or Mrs. Mueller, it was Mr. Chavez, their newspaper delivery man, and so it was not unusual for other early risers to find the tightly rolled and bagged paper waiting for them at six or even five in the morning. However, Dominic was fairly sure that given the circumstances, delivery service was probably suspended for the day.

“No paper today,” he shouted back. “Trust me. You need to get back inside.
Please
.”

“Oh? I guess it's this snow, then, is it? Okay, then. Thanks for letting me know, dear.”

Dominic was relieved when she waved a thanks and turned to climb up her stairs again. He was about to call out to her to stay safe and warm over there when he saw the spider things.

They were creeping across the length of front lawn next door to him, half obscured by the gray mounds of snow crowded between the houses. They were the size of small cars and reminded him of spidery hands. It was a crazy thought, he knew, even in the midst of the impression, but no other idea suited those things better. The bifurcated bodies looked like withered, emaciated palms. Each had five extremely long, segmented fingers, three shorter ones in front and two longer ones farther back. Each “finger” ended in a shining black talon, serrated along the edges like a ragged fingernail stabbing into the snow. The surface skin of the spider things was a dead white-gray, and looked rough and flaking.
Like chapped lips
was the crazy thought that came to his mind, though he supposed it was no crazier than the idea of giant spider hands. There were eyes, set between the knuckled joints where the finger-legs met the body, and these were also a kind of gray. At first, he thought they had the cloudy appearance of cataracts, but as one passed closer in its erratic path across his lawn, he could see a hundred, maybe a few hundred, pulses of dull red that could have either been irises or blood vessels. Either way, they seemed, so far as he could tell, to serve as the primary physical sensory organ of the things, and gave the distinctly disturbing impression of a constant awareness of several directions at once.

Dominic froze. He wanted to warn Mrs. Mueller, but he couldn't get his mouth to open. He'd never seen one of the snow creatures up close, and now that they were moving into the street toward the old lady's house, he was overcome with a terrible sense of awe and dread.

They moved fast. They moved so fast.

The pain finally seeping in from the cold snow in which his feet were partially submerged broke the paralysis. He hopped backward into his door frame, leaning into his front hall to grab his boots from the mud tray. As he kicked off his slippers and yanked the boots on, he heard the first of Mrs. Mueller's screams.

He swung back out onto the front porch in time to see one of the hand-spiders skewer Mrs. Mueller in the chest, knocking her to the ground. It seemed to make the spider-thing glow. The white was dazzling, almost blindingly so, and Dominic had to shield his eyes. When the glow subsided, he could see the bloody tatters of Mrs. Mueller's winter coat. At least, that's what he thought he saw, until those tatters moved feebly, deliberately, and a desiccated arm reached up and grabbed at the black talon pinning it down. Dominic blinked, bringing the scene into better focus, and saw what was left of Mrs. Mueller try to sit up around the talon. Her shriveled skin had turned a dirty shade of gray, her swollen tongue lolling out over shrunken lips. Her eyes were gone—the withered lids hung limply over empty sockets. Dominic couldn't imagine any life was left in the woman, and didn't want to imagine what was animating that husk. He sank back through his doorway, closed the door, and locked it, then bolted to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet.

He'd spent the rest of the morning leaning against his front door as if his bulk provided an added measure of security against the elements. He counted his breaths and tried not to think about anything at all. When he finally stood up, he tried 911 again. This time, instead of a busy signal, the line was dead. He was on his own.

From the front hall window, he could see his car in the driveway. The snow had piled up around it to the tops of the doors. He wasn't going anywhere that way. He considered walking to the police station for help, but it was at least a mile and a half in about four feet of snow, with God only knew what out there. He tried getting onto the Internet through his phone, and when that didn't work, he made a frantic attempt to log in on his computer. That didn't work any better; every time he tried, he got an error message saying his network couldn't connect to the Internet. He didn't know much about troubleshooting those kinds of things, and within fifteen minutes, he'd given up on the verge of tossing the damn thing out the window.

He'd have to stay holed up in the house, at least for the foreseeable future. He had plenty of food and water, and as long as the heat—

A heavy thump upstairs broke into his thoughts. He stood still, listening at the foot of the stairs. His heart pounding filled his ears with a rhythmic roar, but he could still hear dragging, a thump, more dragging, and a faint chirping on the floor above him. He went to the kitchen and got the biggest knife he could find, then made his way back to the stairs. He took each step slowly, one at a time, trying to step only on the parts of the risers that would creak the least. Above him, the dragging continued, like something heavy was being hauled across the bedroom.

By the time he reached the second-floor landing, he could not only hear but feel the movements in the bedroom through his tightly wound frame. Each jerk and drag caused him to flinch. His sweaty palms made the knife handle slippery, so that it no longer felt like much of a weapon. As he crept down the hall, the sounds in the bedroom got louder; it sounded to Dominic like the thing in there was knocking over furniture.

He had almost reached the door when the floor beneath his feet creaked. He froze, a wave of hot fear washing down over his body. The sounds in the bedroom stopped. It had heard him.

He counted out each second of silence. The thing did not appear in the hallway.

Dominic reached the bedroom doorway, and wiping his palms as best he could on his sweatpants, he clutched the knife more tightly and peered around the door jamb.

He was met with a blast of cold. Snow was blowing in through a ragged hole where his window and part of his wall had been, dusting his bed and hardwood floor with flakes that had begun to accumulate as the heat of the room dissipated. In the center of the room, with its front legs propped up on the bed and its back legs crowded against the closet door, one of the spider-things sat. It really was big, fully the length of the bed and at least twice its width. It must have been a feat for the thing to squeeze its bulk through the opening in his wall. And that close to it, he could smell it, the way packages of fish fillets smelled when left too long in the back of a freezer. That same paralyzing fear overtook his limbs, almost a palpable, physical thing.

It moved its bulk in awkward little shifts to maneuver around the furniture, and Dominic pulled back into the hallway. He entertained the hope that maybe it had wedged itself but good in the room. Maybe he could outrun it, down the stairs, and—

And then what? Run out into the snow with the rest of them?

Maybe he could get a good stab in, kill the thing before it could kill him. That seemed like the only real option. He took a deep breath, counted to three, and swung around the door frame to confront the beast.

He found himself within inches of a fleshy cluster of pulsating red eyes. The black slit-like centers of each gelatinous orb grew wider. Without thinking, he shoved the knife forward, plunging it into that mess of red and black right up to his fingers. A silvery fluid ran over his hand, biting into his skin with a terrible cold. The thing staggered back, letting loose a wail that shook the walls.

He turned and took off for the stairs. The pain in his hand was immediately enormous, the skin waxy, red, and swelling. He took the stairs two and three at a time, trying to wipe the silver stuff off onto his pants, but smears of blood and flaking flesh, now blue-black, came off instead.

When Dominic reached the first floor, three of his fingers fell off. A wave of nausea caused him to skid and nearly trip on his way to the front door, but he made it, his good hand closing on the knob. He was just about to pull it open when a sharp, cold pain in his back and a sickening tug on his spine yanked him backward. His legs went numb, collapsing uselessly beneath him. He fell to the floor, aware by slow degrees that something was in his back, something big, filling him with ice, freezing his blood, crystallizing all the water in his body. Then he felt that pulling everywhere, in his head, his chest, his limbs, like his insides were being drawn out. The front door swam in front of him, and his gaze fell on the crack beneath the door. He could see a bright line of white through it, and feel the cool air from outside. He tried to reach for it, but his arms wouldn't move. His jaw fell open when he tried to scream, but the sound had been sucked out of him. His vision blurred. Something burst, first warm, then cold, in his chest. It hurt at first, but then the pain was sucked away, too.

The line of white under the door faded to gray, then black, as the last of Dominic was drained into the spider-thing above him.

* * *

The following morning, Jack and Teagan came back to Jack's office to find an essentially empty bullpen, with abandoned desks stacked with papers and file folders, computers in sleep mode, and coffee mugs of cold, stale black ichor. It was eerie, seeing the department like that, when usually it was so full of animated chatter, ribbing, jokes, ringing phones, and detectives interviewing people or going over the details of various cases between each other. It was like a giant hand had come down from the ceiling and scooped them all up. The echoes of their work lives were faint and fading into non-being, but still present enough to put an ache in the hearts of the two men, who could only begin to wonder what had happened to their colleagues.

Perhaps because of their long hours at last night's crime scene, in the presence of the bulk of Colby's armed police force and in a location whose chaos had moved on to other parts of town, Jack and Teagan had been spared the true extent of the carnage of the night before. However, a lot of it was explained to them in a flurry of messages forwarded from Sherry at dispatch. Whatever information came back to her, she had sent it to Jack and any other available officer still out there. Apparently, those few officers who had made it to work in the snow had been run ragged all over town answering distress calls.

One voicemail contained the recording of an emergency call between Sherry and a stranded motorist. It began with wind blowing, followed by a tentative male voice speaking into the receiver, “Uh, hello? I think I need help.” When Sherry asked him what the nature of his emergency was, he told her, “I . . . I don't know. It's too dark to see under all this snow. I think . . . I think I've been buried alive. I can't see anything but snow, but . . . I can hear things. The most awful things. I think there might be . . . something. Something out here in the snow with me.” This had been followed by some incoherent mumbling to himself, which Sherry tried to clarify. She kept asking him for his location, but it was like he had forgotten she was there. He was talking to the terrible things making the sounds. He was talking to the snow itself. But he wasn't talking to Sherry. Eventually, he hung up.

In another call, a frantic woman kept screaming over and over into the phone about her kids. It was hard to make out. Her high-pitched cries were cracked and raw, and she was crying pretty hard. But it sounded like she said a snowman had eaten her children.

One caller reported a break-in at his address on 1741 Ashwood Road. On the recording, Sherry repeated back the address for confirmation and then asked the man to describe the intruder. He replied, “I—I can't. It's . . . I don't know what it is. It's big, though. It came through the window . . . crashed through. It's downstairs, in the kitchen now. Oh . . . oh no. No, no, no! I think . . . I think it's coming upstairs!” The man's voice dropped to a whisper on the recording. It was hard to make out everything he said, but it sounded like he kept asking, “What do I do? Oh God, what do I do?” until there was a loud crunching sound and screaming. Then the call got disconnected.

A man told Sherry that his girlfriend had disappeared. One minute, she had been there, walking home from the supermarket beside him, and the next, he turned to see why she was so quiet and found only one of her gloves in the snow a foot or so behind them.

The one that was perhaps the most unnerving was nearly all static. It sounded more like a broadcast than a phone call, with periodic moments of silence punctuating long crackles. About fifteen seconds in, when Sherry had evidently gotten tired of saying, “Hello, Colby dispatch, what is your emergency? Hello? Hello?” and was about to hang up, a child's voice, thin to the point of barely contained hysteria, said, “End the imagination game. Cover your ears and understand the thirteenth principle. Sixth of Nine is open. You cannot stop for bread or wine. You cannot write your name on the stones. You will not be remembered or saved.” The voice, as the speaker was talking, dropped from a child's to registers below human range, then rose again into an impossibly high falsetto, but it never faltered. The words, however chilling or nonsensical they were, remained perfectly clear. Then there was a tiny giggle, and the caller hung up.