Chills (4 page)

“You look good, baby sister. Really good.”

Her hand clamped around his wrist like a vise, arresting both his touch and his smile. “We need to talk. You need to sit.”

They locked eyes for a moment, and Kathy was relieved to see that she'd garnered enough internal flint that even a predator like Toby recognized it and backed down. She let go of his wrist, and he retreated sullenly to his side of the table and sat.

“So let me guess,” he said, staring down at his fingers again. “You have a murder case you think the HBS is involved in. So . . . what? You come to pick the brain of your slavering, psychotic killer of a brother?”

“You know members of the Hand of the Black Stars. You mentioned them the night—you've mentioned them before. I need to know the meaning of a ritual—names, places, sigils.”

“Even though it's only business, it's still good to see you, Kat. Though I admit I'm surprised by this new cool serenity in you. Pleased, too. And with me in such close proximity to you. Self-help books, is it, or some kind of therapy?”

She leaned back in her chair. “I need answers, Toby. A man has been murdered.”

“Only one?” He chuckled dryly. “And I should care . . . why?”

She resisted the urge to sigh. “I don't figure you do care.”

“Well, you would know, wouldn't you, baby sister? Couldn't do what I did if any teeny-tiny part of me was capable of human feeling, right? But you and I both know there isn't anything so weak and pointless as sentiment in me, because the Hand of the Black Stars touched me and burned it right out of my core.”

“Look, I'm not here to help you process your feelings—or the lack thereof. But whatever goes on inside you . . . it's complicated. I know that.”

“Oh, do you? Well, how the hell is it, then?”

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and gave in to the sigh. She tried again. “It's like . . . wandering into a mirage. Or a memory. Some flat space, some echo of a moment that was or will be, but is never, ever where you are when you are. Everything—people talking and laughing, dancing, eating, working, fighting, fucking, moving along, moving through time and space—everything is happening around you and you're in the center of it, but you're not real, not really there. You're just . . . superimposed on the world. At first, you want to know the secret, why everyone seems to know how to blend in and become part of the mirage, to find and connect to its physicality, its smells and tastes and colors, and make it real. But no one seems to understand why
you
can't do it, and so no one knows how to tell you how it's done. So you watch and crudely imitate and hope you'll figure it out, but you don't—you can't—and it makes you angry. You stuff that anger down because it certainly isn't going to help you blend in, and you bury it under your own secret ideas about what life and love and happiness should be, ideas that can't help but be steeped in the anger in your head. With every social rejection, every reminder that you're just a shadow on a mirage, you accumulate more and more of that anger, which settles and compresses and turns to hate. And that hate is the only other real thing in your layer with you, just you and your hate pasted onto a world that isn't yours and doesn't want to be. And when you've spent enough time pasted into someone else's version of life with hate buoying you up most days, it starts to leak in little ways, to erupt sometimes. Whatever you were, the hate becomes what you
are
, what gives you definition and outline, and what ultimately simulates the kind of physicality you had been looking for all along. It isn't enough, though, and maybe you know it never will be, but you've tasted the world, smelled it, touched it, heard it, all through that hate, and you can't go back to being a ghost over a mirage, not ever again—not when you could be one more kill away from figuring it all out.”

“Stop,” Toby whispered. His eyes were wet with tears.

A cold, cruel part of her, a part that she supposed was just like him, said, “I'm good at what I do for a reason.”

“What do you want from me, Kat?”

“I told you—I want some information on the Hand of the Black Stars cult. Inside information that you have.”

“How do you know I have any information at all?”

She fixed a stare on him that betrayed nothing of her feelings except impatience. “They didn't make you what you are—
you
did. But they did get inside you. They validated you and your killing, facilitated it. They protected you. So you became one of them. It was a blood bond. They know your secrets, and you know theirs.”

Toby sighed, scratching at his elbow. He had many long, raw red scratches up and down his forearms, though his nails were cut short. Kathy didn't want to imagine how her brother had managed those marks, or why.

She glanced at the tattoo on his right bicep, a black symbol in a rounded hexagon surrounded by runes. She had seen it countless times as a teen but had never attached any significance to it until after Toby's arrest. It was not quite as complex as the one carved into the John Doe, but it was very, very close. It had many of the same occult significations, understood only by the initiated.

The Hand of the Black Stars had been mentioned briefly during Toby's trial, probably more for sensationalist reasons than factual evidence, as a possible influence in Toby's killings. Little was proven in that regard. Little was ever proven when it came to the cult, including solid evidence of its existence. But Kathy had no doubt that Toby knew and had always known more about the Hand of the Black Stars than anyone she had ever met. They had nurtured a killer in their midst, not just because it benefited Toby to be protected, but because it benefited them, too. He could be an instrument, if guided in their ways. Kathy thought that, on some level, Toby knew that; his loyalty to them, much like their loyalty to him, went only so far as the self-serving interests of a predator would allow.

Finally, Toby spoke. “What do you want to know?”

“Where I can find them.”

Toby leaned back, considering her request. “Well, there's a sect in Oregon, moved up from California. One in Maine. Alaska, Ohio, Oklahoma. There was one in Jersey, but they're all gone now.” He waved a hand. “They all vanished. Not even the priests know what happened. And . . . yeah, there's one in Connecticut, but I'm not sure exactly where. Colby sounds about right.” He smiled.

Kathy wasn't sure if her brother was being honest about what he didn't know, but what he did reveal matched with her own knowledge of the cult. She decided to push on. She produced the crime scene photo with the symbol that had been branded on the John Doe‘s back. Hesitant to give him the satisfaction of viewing death on glossy paper, she nevertheless slid the photo over to her brother.

“What does this symbol mean?”

Her brother leaned forward, studied it a moment, finger-traced it with a kind of reverence, and leaned back again, sailing the photo back across the table to her. “It's a key.”

“A key to what?”

“A door.”

It was maddening, letting Toby drag out the conversation like that, just to keep her there. Still, it was, frankly, the most productive conversation she'd had with him since they'd been kids.

“What door?”

“Look, baby sister. I don't think all the visiting hours in the world are enough time to explain the ins and outs of the Hand's belief system.”

“Try. We still have some time.”

Toby frowned. “Okay. So you found this on a dead body, and you came to me.”

“Yes.”

“It's a sacrifice, obviously. The symbol is the key. The incantations ask for guidance in opening the door. The blood defines the outlines of the door. The rest—the mutilations, I mean—are how the cult members know the door is open.”

“Okay . . . you'll have to walk me through this. First, what are they opening this door for?”

“You'd have to ask someone higher up in the Hand than me. It's not my place to say.”

“You mentioned the snow before. Why?”

Toby smiled.

“What does the snow have to do with the cult?”

He suddenly leaned toward her over the table. Her whole body tensed.

“You can't begin to imagine, little sister.”

“So enlighten me.”

Toby shook his head, that small smile still hanging on his lips, and looked away.

Kathy persisted. “Is there some significance to the cult that it's snowing this late in the season? Are they planning something because of the snow? What is it?”

Toby stifled a chuckle. “You have it all wrong. It's not that they're planning something
because
of the snow. What they planned
was
the snow. It's just the beginning. Another sign the door has swung open.”

Kathy frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about power. It's all the Hand understands, or cares about.”

“And you?” she asked before she could stop herself. “What do you care about, Toby?”

He studied her a moment, seeming to calculate the urgency of her need for information with . . . well, whatever Toby balanced human decency in his head with. He glanced around before settling his gaze on her again. “Write this down.”

She pulled her cell phone from her purse and opened the notepad app. “Shoot.”

Toby gave her a name and address.

Kathy looked up from the phone. “Who's this?”

“An insider with information. An insider, a former Hand low priestess, as a matter of fact, who . . . likes me. Heh. She should be able to tell you what you need safely, I imagine, if you tell her you're mine. My sister, I mean.” He grinned in an odd way. It would have been a boyish, charming gesture to anyone who didn't know him. “Like I said, you'd have to go higher up on the Hand food chain than me. My hands are tied, so to speak. She can give you truths. Some truths.” He offered her a wink that made her skin crawl. “You can tell her I sent you. But don't tell her you're a cop . . . or whatever you do now. Although it's probably a moot point. If they got as far as calling forth the snow, then it's already too late to stop it.” He stood up and signaled to the guard.

Before being led out, he looked at her with uncharacteristic softness. “You know, Kat . . . you were the only one who mattered. So much as anyone matters. And so I'll tell you this. Forget about investigating any of this. Just leave. Leave town now before you can't. Before the snow and its masters won't let you. Do that for me. Or if not for me . . . then for you. Colby is fucked, and you can't stop that.” When she didn't respond, his mouth twisted into that hateful little sneer, and the softness in his eyes went dark again. Kathy fought the urge to gag as the guard led him away.

With him gone, her hand shook as she slipped the phone back into her purse. Kathy let go of a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and stood up to go.

Kathy made it all the way back to her car before the tears blurring her vision finally spilled down her cheeks. The wind had picked up some, and as it blew across her face, the tears that had slid into the slender track of her scar grew cold to the point of biting. She wiped them away with a gloved hand and unlocked the car door. She grabbed her snow brush off the passenger seat, then methodically began working to clear off her car. She wanted to focus only on the mindless task, the simple necessity of it, but she found herself stabbing into the ice beneath the snow with ferocity that made the tears well up again.

Her eyes had dried by the time she had finally cleared the car and got it moving. She had work to do, and distance between her and Toby would bring clarity and focus. Besides, she had to see one Charlene Ledders, former HSB low priestess and another current resident of a psychiatric wing, this time of Colby's local hospital on the town outskirts, before the snow made travel impossible.

T
he snow that had accumulated by morning was a formidable sight, stirring a sense of unease in those who opened their doors to the blinding whiteness. That unease only grew with the afternoon's accumulation as the sun made its way across the argent sky. Along with the heavy snow, an army of rough, dense stones of hail scratched at windows and thumped on cars as it fell.

The residents of Colby shook their heads in amazement and not a little wariness. Easygoing and hardworking people, the townsfolk of Colby generally held the belief that weather was a fickle friend, and what with the world as it was nowadays, it wasn't outside their realm of limited imagination that global warming, bio-weapons testing, and companies dumping chemicals into the ground and water might cause a change in weather patterns. One couldn't have something like the meltdown of those Japanese nuclear reactors into the surrounding ocean, they reasoned, and not think it might alter the chemistry of a sky composed of re-evaporated and re-absorbed water.

However, it was getting on toward the beginning of June, when the children ought to be getting antsy and excited about summer vacation. Parents had winter clothes to pack up. It was time for budgets to shift the household expense from heating to air-conditioning and electric fans. In town, the boutiques should have been putting out the last of their shorts and tank tops, swimsuits, and flip-flops. The pool stores should have been stocking up on chemicals and skimmers and filter parts. Targets and Wal-Marts had grills and Fourth of July picnic tablecloths and napkins to sell. The snow—and everything people needed to get through it—should have long been put away for the year.

But the snow was still here, and in thick, fluffy white abundance.

A fluke snowfall in mid-April was one thing—strange but explainable, perhaps, as winter's last yawn before settling down. But four feet of snow and counting, a week and a half before June first, was not a fluke. It was a problem, and one that set the minds of those easygoing and hardworking people thinking. Not panicking—not quite yet—but certainly wondering just on the outermost edges of their minds if maybe there wasn't something to those crazy conspiracy theories and apocalypse warnings that old man Wershaw shouted at people from the street corner outside the 7-Eleven.

It was one of these townspeople who passed Kathy Ryan's car on Main Street in the pixilated blur of white quickly smearing away the finer details of Colby. As he did so, he was cursing the snow, his premature removal of the plow, and his replacement of the winter tires on his black truck. Damn strange weather was going to set him back months, possibly. He'd have to wait not just for the snow to melt, but for the ground to thaw and the grass to grow before he'd be able to work. He grimaced at the thought that Constance would have to keep clipping coupons and dipping into their savings. She'd never say it was his fault—not even imply it with a look—but it made him ornery, to say the least, to feel like he wasn't able to support himself and his wife with good, honest work.

The side of the truck read H. C
ASPER
, L
ANDSCAPING
in grass-green lettering. It was an old vehicle, stubbornly strong and reliable, not unlike its driver. Riding the upward crest toward seventy years old, Casper was a mostly amiable guy. He liked his beer and ball games, he loved his wife, his son, and his little grand-baby girl, and most days, he thanked the good Lord he was still able-bodied enough to work.

Today, though, really seemed to beat all in proving that the Lord, good as He might be, worked in mysterious ways. That was if it was, in fact, the work of the Lord at all.

As he left Main Street in the rearview mirror, the maelstrom swirled against his windshield, blocking out a good portion of his view. He strained to see past the chunks of ice smeared by his windshield wipers, but could make out only streaks of gray road and the occasional telephone pole. If he could get back to the house, get to his shed, he could at least hook up the plow again. Plowing snow meant long hours of no sleep on little coffee (his doctor and his recent chest pains demanded he cut out at least some of his caffeine or stress or both) and cold hands and feet, but it also meant some decent pay to carry him and Constance through this last freak snowstorm.

A car passed him—Charlie Hines, he thought, but who could see a damn thing out there?—and honked a hello as he drove by. Casper returned the greeting, though he was feeling less and less neighborly by the minute. Folks better get their damned fool selves off the road before they got into accidents. That meant Charlie Hines of the well-oiled elbow as well.

A cold blast of wind blew by him, making him shiver. Then he frowned; all the windows were closed. Where was the draft coming from?

As if in answer, a clicking inside his dashboard preceded the heat kicking off again. It figured; if cold air could find any part of that truck as useless as tits on a bull, it was that damned heating system. In the sudden absence of warmth, a chill got in between his clothes and skin, almost between his skin and bones. He swore, giving the top of the dashboard a sound thump with the side of his fist. The heating system sputtered like a cough in a dying throat, but the heat did not come back on.

He looked up in time to see the telephone pole looming up out of the white, an impossibly large black form in the streaks of wetness that the wipers left in their wake. Casper cut the wheel sharply to the right and the car slid, the back end fishtailing into the other lane. He cut the wheel in the other direction and pumped at the brakes, but the car only wobbled, then slid suddenly into a snow bank on the side of the road. The impact jarred his bones, causing the arthritis in his knees to moan.

“Okay,” he muttered. He felt his heart pounding. “Okay.” He undid his seat belt and sat a moment, collecting himself. His breath was a hard knot in his chest that took a while to unravel and seep out of his mouth.

The oddly dry scratching of the snow against the windshield, as well as the jittery squeaking of the wiper blades, seemed unnaturally loud in the interior of the car—the only sounds in the whole whitewashed world.

No, he thought, motionless and listening. Not the only sounds. There, just to the left, out on the road . . . a low, dull crunching seemed to be moving toward the car.
Creeping
was the word that came to mind, though it seemed silly that the idea of someone creeping toward the car should send those shivers in little shock waves beneath his skin. Why shouldn't someone move like that, slowly and carefully, easing over the ice and snow?

He rolled down the window and immediately felt a blast of cold wetness against his face. He squinted into the wind, trying to make out details of the figure—or were there figures?—approaching the car. At best he could see slivers of irregular dark shapes, possibly furry in places, trudging toward him.

“Hi! Hello there,” Casper called out somewhat sheepishly. “Slid off the road. No damage, I don't think. Not sure how deep I'm b—” He stopped.

The figures—he could see now that there were two of them in thick, fur-lined, hooded black coats and heavy boots—had halted their trek and were standing stone still in the middle of the road. Their heads were bowed, ostensibly against the weather, so he couldn't see their faces. Otherwise, they seemed remarkably unperturbed by the wind whipping all around them.

“Hello?”

The figures didn't move and didn't answer. The wind shifted some of the snow away, though, and he saw at least three more figures behind those in the middle of the road. The one closest to his truck had something long and glinting protruding from its glove that Casper couldn't quite reconcile as a shovel.

“Well, yeah, I'd sure appreciate if you could help me maybe push this old heap out of this snow bank here?”

No answer. Seven of them now, he counted, still as ice.

“Okay, well, thanks,” Casper said, dismissing them with an exasperated wave. Their silence left him nettled. That was the world today for you. He could remember when a fella in Colby could reasonably expect young men to be neighborly and lend a helping hand if needed. He began to roll the window up when he suddenly became aware of their presences very close to him, just outside the driver door. He turned his head in time to see the glinting thing—a knife—and had a moment to gasp before the blade was buried in his throat. Coppery, hot liquid pain filled him up so he couldn't breathe, warming him against the gust of cold as the driver door opened. He felt rough hands grab him beneath his arms and drag him out of the truck. He tried to speak, but the blade blocked the air, and the words drowned in his punctured throat. Awful pressure pushed against his chest and skull, and he fought the panic, making little choke-gasp sounds, sucking at the icy air. The effort gave no relief, but instead put an unpleasant chill on the pain.

Casper was dying. He'd been knifed and oh God, he was dying, and his body was being moved . . . where? Who were these guys? And what had he done to piss them off?

The edges of the world narrowed a little. He felt numb in his feet and hands, and that numbness was starting to travel up his limbs. He was vaguely aware of the heat inside him seeping out in longish red trails around his neck. He could also sense hard ground beneath him and an encroaching freeze from the snow drifts through which the rough hands were dragging him. Silver sky stretched endlessly across his limited view, dropping heavy flakes of snow in his eyes and down his throat to mix with and melt in the blood. Still, he sucked in greedily, fighting to take in whatever life, vibrancy, and alertness he could from the cold air. It was not enough. His lungs screamed, and his brain roared in his skull. His arthritic knees locked and throbbed, but he barely felt them. His heart pounded against his ribs, threatening to quit before his lungs could. Black haze in his vision ate into the canvas of sky.

He didn't know how long he was pulled through the snow—four minutes, forty minutes—nor did he recognize the corner of the roof or the treetop that broke the limitless silver. A light, soft part of him didn't much care. He thought of Constance, his grand-baby, his unlocked truck, the beer waiting for him at home in the fridge. Absurdly, it occurred to him that the last episode of that show he was watching on Netflix (the name escaped him now, but that Kiefer Sutherland boy was in it) had been a two-parter, and in his situation, it didn't look like he'd make it home to see the second half. That summed up his situation, he thought, and struck him as both funny and tragic. The choke sound he made fluttered between a laugh and a moan.

A hand with a strange, complex-looking tattoo he hadn't seen since the war passed over his face, momentarily blocking out the light. He was aware then of words above his head—low, chanted words he didn't understand. He didn't think the men above him were speaking in English, but it was hard to hold on to meanings of things. His brain felt weightless and empty. He found he wasn't all that worried anymore.

In fact, Casper thought as he turned his head, even that thing they were calling over to him across the field didn't seem so scary. Not all of his brain agreed—a sliver of his old strength and stubbornness, a sliver of his mind that had served him well in the war and out of it—was very worried about what was going on above his head. Mostly, it was because that thing, while big as a mastiff, was no dog, nor any kind of animal he'd ever seen. So far as his fading vision could make out, it was hairless and white, spindly, and it flickered in and out of his view, its substance one moment distinct from the snow and the next, a part of it. It made wind-chime sounds in its mouth as it crunched across the snow toward him. It bent over him, opening a gaping maw, a widening cavern lined with interlaced spindle teeth that parted like a fish bone curtain. Glassy living things, white and wriggling, moved inside its mouth. Casper couldn't quite understand the thing his eyes were showing him; it made no sense by any animal law he knew. He couldn't scream, though, and couldn't muster up enough wherewithal to realize he should want to scream. The pain had settled into a non-thing through his body. The excruciating burn of airlessness in his head and lungs had gone to smoldering. The blade in his throat felt hard and awkwardly in the way, but otherwise insignificant.

Casper tried to hold on to the last thoughts and sensations from that sliver of his mind, the ones that made him real, kept him alive, but it seemed so much easier to let them go. He didn't even choke out a cry when that odd gateway of teeth parted wider and that busy mouth closed over his face. His body twitched beneath it as his face dissolved, but by then, what had made Casper a living human being was gone.

The black-coated men continued dragging the body toward the tree. The wind howled, dragging sprays of fresh snow over the blood where Casper had been. There was a lot of blood, but there was more snow.

* * *

Across town, when Jason Houghton's shift ended late that afternoon, the snow had begun in earnest. Already, a fluffy covering of white had accumulated over all the visible surfaces outside the factory. He recognized Ed's and Carla's cars still in the parking lot, as well as Liam's Ford pickup, coated by a hardening sheath of ice onto which a new mantle of snow was steadily thickening.

Jason looked up into a cataract-clouded sky, blinking as flakes dusted his eyelashes. The cold felt good on his face. He'd been on the packing-and-stacking line today, lugging heavy boxes from the packing conveyor belts to stack on wooden pallets, and he'd worked up a sweat that the winds now cooled away. The work was nothing he hadn't done a thousand times in the last fifteen years, but he'd been on forklifts the past three weeks, so he was out of practice. He liked to think that was the reason he had been so out of breath, and not his turning forty-three next month. Twenty-six of those forty-three years had been spent as a pack-a-day smoker, the import of which was not lost on him as he popped a Camel between his lips and sheltered its tip from the snow with one hand so he could light it. Jason was short but strong, thickly muscled and mostly tattooed, with rough hands used to working. He knew he wasn't old, but some days he felt it. There were few, if any, wrinkles around his eyes but what peered out of those dark irises was an old enough soul, one that wondered more and more lately about where he'd been, and how that left him in terms of where to go next.