Chills (12 page)

And there were many more of the same. People from all over town had reported break-ins and murders, stranded motorists disappearing, people trapped in their homes, and general chaos. The common thread, Sherry had been careful to note, was the prevalence of reports involving claims of monsters in the snow—spider things, scorpion things, and some kind of ghastly faced demons that reminded the old folks at the tavern on Green Street of anglerfish. Morris and Kathy arrived to find the detectives screening voicemail message after message of screaming, crying, desperate people begging for help, while in the background there were sounds like splintering wood, rending metal, and howling winds. Many ended abruptly, as if something had swept away the callers.

Teagan noticed with concern Kathy's bandaged wrist, the bruise on her head, and the way she limped to a chair. He leaned over between messages to ask Kathy quietly, “Are you okay? You come across one of these things yourself, love?”

She nodded, trying to smile around a slightly bruised lip. “I'm fine. It looks worse than it feels. Nothing ruptured, broken, or sprained. No concussion. The rest is just . . .” She waved her bandage dismissively.

“Doctors said whatever happened to you, it was a miracle you weren't killed,” Morris said. “You better be okay, because I don't think they'll take you back now.” To the others, he said, “She gave the hospital admins hell when they tried to admit her for the night.”

Kathy waved him off. “If I was doing so badly that I needed to be admitted overnight, that orderly wouldn't have backed off as quickly as he did.”

“Well, a crazy woman waving a badge and flashing a gun will do that to a guy,” Morris said with a small smile. Kathy gave him a look.

“Well, I'm glad you're okay, Kat.” Teagan gave her a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder. Normally, she would have found such a gesture annoying, even patronizing, but from Teagan, it spread a pleasant warmth through her. A brand-new Camel cigarette seemed to materialize between his fingers, and he clamped it in his mouth.

“How you doing with that?” she asked, gesturing at the cigarette with her bandage.

He grinned around the Camel. Kathy found it both sexy and endearing. “Smoke-free three years last Thursday,” he offered proudly. She squeezed his shoulder back with her good hand.

“Glad everyone's living clean and mostly unbroken,” Jack said. “But there are more messages to wade through. I think we need to listen for anything that could identify any of the cultists.”

It took about forty-five minutes to field all the messages. When the last voicemail clicked off, they spent another two hours debriefing each other on what they'd experienced the night before, and what had been learned about the cult and the ritual and how it related to the snow. The growing picture, as each contributed his or her piece to it, implied terrible proportions and portents that none of them seemed quite ready to talk about yet. But it hung there among them, all the same: this was the beginning, not the climax of these horrors. These cultists were crazy—there was no doubt about that—but they weren't operating on delusions, not these people. They had brought their own horrible belief system of gods and monsters into the real world, a world of Netflix and cell phones, farmer's markets and local pubs, Kiwanis Club and PTA and potluck dinners and fourth of July fireworks and high school football. All of that—security, normalcy, the escape from the broader horrific through the mundane—was gone now. Kathy had never had much faith in those things as permanent fixtures in her life anyway. Her brother had seen to that. But she knew people—fathers like Jack, for one, and earnest do-gooders like Morris, for another—who still very much believed in them. Needed them. And it made that small part of her heart, where she let such things be felt, hurt for them.

“Jesus,” Morris said when the conversation had finally waned, each detective lost in thoughts of the coming days. “It's real. All of that end-of-days shit out there, it's all real. How the hell are we supposed to stop the apocalypse? A snow-pocalypse. For Christ's sake, what the hell are we supposed to do?”

No one answered him.

Teagan rolled the filter of his cigarette between two fingers. Morris stared out the window.

Jack tapped a pen absently on his desk. He was staring at a picture of his kids—little Jack and Carly, probably six and eight by now, Kathy thought—and she could tell he was worried about them. They had moved out of Colby proper to the edge of town after the divorce, and Kathy suspected that with all the increasing cell phone problems in the last day or so, Jack probably hadn't been able to get ahold of them and make sure they were okay. Kathy didn't think much of Jack's ex-wife, but she knew he loved those sweet little kids like crazy.

“Jack?” she asked.

He seemed to come back then from where his thoughts had taken him, and he looked up.

“I'm sure they're fine,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,” he answered. “Yeah, I'm sure, too. They're smart kids. And Katie's too bitter for one of those things to eat.” He tried to smile, but it faltered and fell off his face.

“Go out there. Check,” she said. “We can do without you for a few hours. In the meantime, we can work on this, a piece at a time. Identify the cultists. Identify their leader, and the ones specifically involved in the ritual that caused all this. Find a reversal spell. I'm confident there is one—any spell or ritual as monumentally big and complicated as this is likely to have a way to stop it or disrupt it at the very least. I have literature at home that might give us some leads.”

“I can't believe this is happening,” Morris muttered.

“I wouldn't believe it either, mate,” Teagan said, “if I hadn't've seen what I saw.”

Kathy cleared her throat. She had never been forthcoming about the things she'd seen in her line of work. Some were just too hard for the average person to believe and impossible for her to prove, and she'd come across nothing of the magnitude of Colby's current problem. Still, believing in evil was easy; what was hard was accepting that most of it could be attributed to humans not so different from anyone else. Kathy knew that better than even the men in the room. Having something supernatural, something monstrous, to blame Colby's evil on was, in a way, a kind of relief for her. At least it wasn't an aggressively indifferent father or a psychopath brother, hell-bent on destroying anything even vaguely reminiscent of their mother . . . or her.

The men looked at her with a mix of curiosity and expectancy. She hadn't ever shared her experiences of evil, the human or nonhuman kind, with any of them except Teagan, and he only knew very vague and limited details related to past cases she'd advised on. However, if she were inclined to share it all with anyone, these men would have been the limited few. It wasn't that she worried what they'd think, not exactly. Rather, she was well aware that she carried around so much of the world's ugliness inside, and it ate at her, scarred more than her face. She didn't want to heap that particular set of albatrosses on anyone she cared about. She wasn't afraid they would
not
share the burdens of evil with her; she was afraid that they
would
.

With this case, though, she thought with dismay, it was out of her hands. Not only was this world's ugliness everywhere she looked in this town, but other worlds' ugliness had burst through, as well, and it had touched every one of them in the room.

“Waiting on you, Jack,” she prodded softly.

“Okay. Kathy's right. We tackle this on multiple fronts. Kat, go see what you can find on reversing the ritual. Take Teagan with you. Morris, stop by and see Cordwell. Maybe he's finally got something we can use to hunt these bastards down. I'll go check on my family. We'll meet back tomorrow morning unless we get a break in the case first. Keep your cells on you. Local calls and texts seem to get through okay sometimes, so . . . you know, just in case. And any problems, you shoot first, got it?”

The detectives rose to go.

“I mean it,” Jack said softly as the others reached the door. He had on his coat. He held his car keys in one hand, and the other hand rested on the framed photo of his kids. “This is not your average criminal investigation. You run into any kind of trouble out there, you kill as many of those . . . those
things
as you can. Nothing standing.”

“Nothing standing, boss,” Morris said, and solemnly, the detectives made their separate ways out into the cold.

G
etting anywhere in the snow was going to be easier said than done. By the time Kathy and Teagan reached his car, it was half buried in a snow drift up to the bumper, and by the time they returned with borrowed shovels from the department, the snow had reached the hood of the car. All the cars in the lot were similarly buried, although the snow was not nearly so high in the empty spaces, nor in the street. It seemed the more they dug, the more tightly the ice clung to the car and the snow blew up to fill in the freed spaces.

Still, it was time spent with Kathy. Teagan had not been afforded many opportunities to be alone with her or to talk about anything unrelated to a case, but in the number of instances where he had, he'd come to find he very much cared for her. She seemed to relax around him, open up a little. He knew Jack had reservations about her bouts of maniacal and almost suicidal dedication to the job and her drinking habits, and Morris, well, he was afraid of her, but Teagan thought they saw what she wanted them to see—the scar, and the walls she'd built up around it. He, on the other hand, caught glittering glimpses of all the things behind that wall. She was beautiful, somehow even more so with the scar, as if what made her physically attractive had a power and shine all its own, unable to be marred. And when they talked, it was easy to see how witty, smart, driven, insightful, and charming she was. He learned more about her, though, in what she said
in between
the things she said, the words
under
her words, the whole vulnerable realness of her that he wasn't sure even she was aware of sharing. And that was what he had fallen in love with.

The current situation, though, had them both on edge. Neither spoke until they were in the car and pulling out onto the road. The silence in the lot—in that whole area of town—was eerie and all-encompassing, and neither was inclined to break it. It was something instinctive, something difficult to put into words—a vague but insistent feeling that the snow itself was watching them, listening, waiting for a chance to swirl up and bury them, too. In the car, they felt a little safer—not much, but enough to speak to each other in furtive, low voices.

They spoke of little things, stretched thin to the point of breaking over the big things just beneath. Then the silence fell there, too, for a time.

“You know,” Teagan said after a while of listening to the windshield wipers, “when I stopped by the bullpen while working the ID of the John Doe yesterday, I saw the oddest thing. Put a Santa hat on it and called it Randal, this.”

“Oh? You saw something weird in the last twenty-four hours?” She winked at him.

He chuckled, poking the Camel between his lips. “Yeah. ‘Tis the thing, I guess. But this . . . this was some shit. See, these two uniforms had picked up an eighty-four—two missing teens, a brother and sister, this was—out at the edge of town. Their mum said they were of a mind to leave Colby, that the snow was only here, and that if they could just make it over the border. . . .” He paused, remembering what Detective Owen Ford, the lad on the case, had told him about the sad state of the kids' mother. “So these two uniforms go looking for the kids before they catch their deaths out there. Two hours go by, and nothing. No check-in, no kids brought home to their poor, worried mum, nothing. So they send another two lads out to check on the first, and those find the first ones' patrol car, empty. Door open, snow blowing in. No footprints, no signs of struggle. No officers. And of course, no kids.”

He glanced at Kathy, but her gaze was fixed on the road ahead. There wasn't much to see; the sun reflecting off the icy patches in the road was blinding.

He continued. “The second pair radios in another eighty-four, then brings the car back to the station. They search it for some sign of what happened to the first lads—the slightest hair or fiber, a print, anything. Know what they find?”

“Nothing,” Kathy said.

“Not quite. They have, what do you call them here? The dashboard cam video. Caught the whole thing.”

Kathy looked at him, startled. “What was on the video?”

Teagan exhaled slowly. “Well, see, that's the odd thing. First, it shows the two officers riding up on the kids as they were walking.
Walking
, in snow like this. Had to be gone in the head, them. But our first set of heroes, see, had actually found the kids—so far, so good—and they pull up behind the kids and one gets out. It's dark and the snow is blowing across the camera, but you can mostly make out what's going on. That officer—the lads at the station watching the video told me his name was Aleski—approaches the kids. They're just trudging along in the snow, their backs to the car, and they don't appear to notice the police cruiser or Aleski at all until he taps one of them, the young lass, on the shoulder. The camera catches their faces when they turn around. The light isn't great, of course—headlights, scant moonlight, odd shadows—but Kat, I swear it, they look . . . poisoned. Like something . . . something gone
wrong
had touched them, tainted them, and it'd spread all throughout them. Or maybe like a shadow had passed over them, but . . . underneath their skin. And in the video, Aleski backs away from them, like he knows it.

“Now you could argue that it could have been a trick of light or a quality issue with the video. I thought the same thing, and so did the officers viewing the tape. After all, here are two kids practically half-frozen, probably hungry and tired. That they look off is probably nothing unexpected. But then there was the wall.”

“The wall?”

“Oh, aye, the wall.” He exhaled slowly. “When the kids stop, Aleski says something to them. There's no sound with those things, so no one knows exactly what he said, but you can imagine it was probably something like, ‘It's fucking freezing out here! Why the hell aren't you kids at home?' Anyway, he's talking and the other cop—Seeger, his name was—gets out and moves around the front of the car to join him, and as he does, the wind starts blowing and all these ice crystals start knitting together. When he moves out of the shot again, you can see in the video that there's suddenly a wall behind the kids. Time stamp says elapsed time was three seconds. Three seconds, and this ice wall was just . . .
there
. So Aleski stops talking and walks past them to examine it. He reaches out and touches it and his hand gets stuck. Freezes right to the wall. And the ice starts forming over his hand, don't you know, and around his wrist. Starts climbing up his arm. And it looks like he's screaming, thrashing around, and Seeger goes to help him, and . . .”

Teagan looked away, remembering what he had seen. It had been partially off-screen, but Teagan could see enough—the way the ice took hold and sank into the flesh of the officer's arm, freezing it, killing it, turning it black, and the soundless, frantic struggling, the desperate attempt of Seeger to pull Aleski free. It took less than a minute for the ice crystals to swarm over both the officers. It happened so, so fast. One minute they were tugging at appendages half-melded with the wall, and in the next, the wall surged out and devoured them.

“Reece?”

“Next thing,” he went on, “the wall swallows up Aleski and Seeger. The ice just . . . washes over them like a wave and pulls them into the wall and they're gone. And those damned kids . . . they don't look scared at all. They just stand there . . . watching. Just watching it all happen. They look more curious than anything. Aleski and Seeger, their faces were twisted and they were obviously screaming and trying to pull themselves free. They were even reaching out toward the kids, looking for help. And the two kids just
stand
there. It's a fucking awful sight. And when the cops are gone . . . the kids change. They get all wavery for a second, like if you try to look at something through heat waves and smoke. They get all shimmery and then they stretch and their hair falls out and their eyes roll back into their sockets and fer the love of Jaysus, Kat, they were snow, just
snow
, with just the right light and shadow to create the impression of faces, hair, clothes....

“One of them reaches out toward the wall and both the snow-figures and the wall turn to powder and blow away. The kids, the wall, the officers, they're all gone. Just . . . gone.” He shook his head. “Not one lad in that room, including me, could say anything. All we could do was stare at the storm of static at the end of that video, just like those kids stared. We just had nothing.”

Teagan stopped. Kathy wasn't looking at him with disbelief, exactly, but there was something there.

“Why are you telling me this?” she finally asked. It wasn't an accusation, but rather an earnest question.

He thought about it a moment, then replied, “Because this problem—none of us, except maybe you, have the faintest idea what to do about it. Because underestimating the scope of it is unwise, and communicating as many of their tricks as possible strikes me as a good idea. Because I couldn't bear keeping it to meself and carrying it around anymore. And because none of us have really talked about the very real possibility that we can't get out of Colby, and no one from the outside can get in. If, that is, there even is an outside anymore. We don't know how much area this storm has covered. We don't know if it's just Colby, or all of Connecticut, or all of the East Coast, or more. And none of those messages we listened to before mentioned any of that, either. We can't email, can't seem to make calls outside of local numbers, and can't access the Internet. I haven't gotten mail in almost a week now. It can't be that no one here has thought to leave, and I find it hard to believe that no one from the outside has tried to make it in here, even if just for deliveries or whatever. So . . . if no one has, maybe it's because no one can.”

Kathy was quiet a moment, then said, “Jack's family is just on the edge of town.” She didn't say more, but she didn't need to. The full implication of her words hung between them. Jack might not be able to make it as far as his family—if his family was even still there to make it to.

“Does Jack know about that, about the video?”

Teagan nodded. “He's going after them anyway.”

“Of course he is. Wouldn't you?”

Teagan looked her in the eye and said, “Aye. Aye, I would.”

They turned into the parking lot of Kathy's building and parked near the door of the place where she crashed when she was in Colby. It was a rent-controlled apartment complex, and one of three Kathy kept up the rent on, given her almost phobic distaste for hotels. It was the only one that anybody had ever heard Kathy speak of fondly, though she spent no more time there than anywhere else. It suited who she was; there was no place she could love and trust enough to call home.

Teagan pocketed his smoke again, and as he went to get out of the car, Kathy grabbed his arm. She had a second-floor apartment near the end of the unit, and she was staring warily at her illuminated bedroom window.

“What's the matter, love?” he asked, looking up at the window, too.

“I didn't leave the light on,” she said.

Both withdrew their weapons and clicked off the safeties as they got out of the car. Kathy tried the front door and found it open. He pointed to her apartment and gave her a nod, then silently followed her up the stairs.

The door to her apartment was slightly ajar, the lights inside all off except for the bedroom. Kathy gestured to Teagan to go in on three, then silently counted off. They slipped into the foyer and started searching the rooms, one by one. Teagan stood to the side of the coat closet door, braced himself, and flung it open, counting off a second or two before swinging around to search it. It was clear—just a few coats, a jumble of shoes, and some cardboard boxes marked D
AD'S HOUSE.

Across the apartment, he saw Kathy gesture him over to the den. Her desk, standing in the corner of the room, had been thoroughly rifled through, papers torn and scattered all over its surface and on the floor around it. The chair cushion had been cut and the stuffing pulled out. The lamp by the couch had been knocked over, and the couch cushions had been slashed and tossed off the frame. It was clear of people, though, and anything that might identify who had done the damage.

Kathy gestured that she was going to move on to the kitchen, and Teagan pointed to the open bathroom door. He squeezed her arm and mouthed out the words,
Be careful
. She mouthed back,
You, too.
Then they moved off to their respective rooms.

Teagan cautiously approached the bathroom, peering into the mirror from the hall before slipping through the doorway. The shower curtain was drawn back, and the shower was empty. He let go of the tight breath in his chest. He glanced in the mirror, and the face looking back at him was tired, a shade too sallow. He ran a hand through his hair, then moved back out into the hallway.

Kathy jumped when she saw him, and he mouthed,
Sorry
, then offered her a smile. She winked back at him, a tiny little return smile on her mouth, and gestured toward the bedroom.

The door to the bedroom was closed. They paused, listening. Teagan watched the sliver of light beneath the door for shadows of movement. After a minute or so of no sound or movement from within, Kathy turned the knob slowly and eased open the door.

The bedroom, too, had been trashed, the sheets pulled off the bed and tossed in a careless heap on the floor. The mattress had been upended as well, and had been left half-leaning against the bed frame. The drawer of the night table had been pulled out and thrown across the room, its contents—a notebook, an old issue of
Forensics Journal
, and assorted odds and ends—spilled across the floor.