Spirit (24 page)

‘She's
here
,' said Elizabeth, her voice white with panic.

‘That's no snowman,' he protested. ‘That's only a girl.'

‘I know it is. But they're one and the same.'

‘One and the same? Lizzie, I'm sure I don't know what the two-toned tonkert you're talking about. But I think your best course of what to do next is to put as much distance between you and this house as you possibly can.'

He started to run again, but Elizabeth didn't follow him. The Peggy-girl was gliding across the grass towards her, leaving no footprints whatsoever. Her hair was rimed with ice, her dress was stiff as frozen washing, her eyes were horrifyingly dark. Elizabeth took one half-staggering step away from her, but she couldn't make her legs work properly. All she could do was stare back at this apparition and pray that it wouldn't touch her.

The Peggy-girl came close, almost close enough to touch. ‘You remember the night you made the snow-angel?' she said, although her lips didn't appear to be moving.

‘I remember,' said Elizabeth, still aghast.

‘That was the night you kept me here for ever.'

‘I don't understand. You'll have to tell me what you want. I can't help you if I don't know what you want.'

‘You can't help .me anyway,' said the Peggy-girl. Elizabeth could scarcely hear her over the crackling and snapping of the trees. They sounded like a rifle-range.

Dan stopped halfway back to the tennis court. ‘Lizzie! Who is that, Lizzie? Come on, honey, I think it's best if I get back to Green Pond, and you get back in the house.'

Elizabeth ignored him. She didn't want to turn her back on the Peggy-girl. She had the strongest feeling that if she did, the Peggy-girl would jump onto her back and cling oh tight and freeze her to death. She didn't want to die the same way that the Reverend Bracewaite had died.

‘Come on, Lizzie!' Dan shouted.

But Elizabeth gave him nothing but a quick backhand wave, indicating that he should wait for a moment. ‘I have to know what you're doing,' she said to the Peggy-girl. ‘Why are you following me? Why are you here?'

‘Don't you want me to be here?'

‘Of course I do. But I have to face up to the fact that Peggy's dead. That
you're
dead. I've grieved, I've done my grieving, I've come to terms with it. And now you're here; and everwhere else.'

‘I'm here to protect you.'

‘I don't need your protection. I don't
want
your protection.'

‘Don't you think so?' said the Peggy-girl. ‘You don't know what you did.'

‘Lizzie!' Dan repeated. ‘I really gotta go!'

He came jogging back down the slope. His face was red but his eyelashes were white with frost, and there were icicles hanging from his cap.

‘Who's this?' he asked.

Elizabeth said, without taking her eyes off her. ‘I call her Peggy.'

Dan looked uncomfortable, but then he took hold of Elizabeth's arm, and tried to pull her away. ‘Come on Lizzie, I don't know what's happening here, but you'd be better off out of it.'

The Peggy-girl turned to stare at him with those smudgy eyes of her. ‘You mustn't touch her,' she warned him.

‘And who's going to stop me, missy?'

The Peggy-girl looked back at Elizabeth. ‘
You don't know what you did
,' she whispered, almost hissed it.

At that instant, the oaks splintered even more loudly. Dan lifted his head, and frowned, his hand still clutching Elizabeth's wrist. ‘Something coming,' he said, in the softest of voices. ‘Something very big.'

‘Yes, said the Peggy-girl, and her dead-white lips slowly pursed into a humourless, self-satisfied smirk. ‘Something very big.'

Even Elizabeth could hear it now: the steady crunching of footsteps through the frozen forest. It could have been a man, or a large predatory animal. Whatever it was, it was approaching them fast, very fast, and its progress through the trees was frighteningly noisy. It was breaking all the ice-petrified branches that stood in its way. Even saplings were cracking in half, and silver birches, and as it neared the treeline Elizabeth could see the branches shaking, and undergrowth exploding in bursts of ice.

‘For God's sake what is it?' whispered Dan.

But the second
it
burst out of the trees, a screaming wind started up, with such abruptness that Elizabeth thought at first that it was Dan who had screamed. The whole garden was instantly filled with thick, driving snow, thick whirling flakes of it, and Elizabeth had to raise her hand to protect her face. She saw the Peggy-girl's face for a few moments, with her smudgy
eyes and her mean little smile, and then the blizzard whited her out completely. White face, white dress – both were obliterated in seconds by a furious curtain of white.

Dan pulled violently at Elizabeth's sleeve and shouted, ‘Come on, let's get out of here!'

She resisted for a moment, trying to see where the Peggy-girl might have gone. She was desperate to find out what it was that the Peggy-girl wanted, why she kept on appearing so persistently.

But then a vast black shape appeared through the snow – so black that it was only visible because of the way in which the snowflakes flew around it. It was black as velvet, black as a casket with the lid closed. Night black: eye-shut black. And it was huge. It towered over them, fourteen or fifteen feet tall, shaped like a woman in a hooded cape, but a cape which was hunched up at the back.

Dan stood staring at it for a moment, his mouth open, his eyes blinking against the blizzard. The shape came closer and closer, and the only sound it made was the felted squeaking of feet on thick snow. The shape brought with it an aura of even more intense cold. Elizabeth saw Dan's eyebrows spangle with ice. His breath turned to dry crystals, and blew out of his nostrils like Christmas glitter. She felt her own hair crackle, and her forehead felt as if she had been pressing it against a cold metal door.

Dan released his grip on her sleeve and started, heavily, to run. Elizabeth tried to run, too, in the opposite direction, but almost at once she caught her foot on the bricks that edged the pathway, and fell onto her knees. She turned around. It was too cold to cry out. Every breath that dropped into her lungs was agony. She saw Dan stumbling back uphill through the knee-deep drifts, and close behind him, the huge black hunched-up shape. Dan didn't turn around. He kept on stumbling through the snow, his head bent in concentration, his arms stiffly
swinging to give him balance. He had almost reached the steps that led around the side of the house, but the shape was very close behind him – so close that it momentarily blocked out Elizabeth's view of him.

She couldn't think what it was. Bears could grow as big as this; but bears hadn't been seen in these woods for over a hundred years; and what bear brought its own blizzard with it? It was more like some grotesque kind of pantomime-horse; or the shadow of a pantomime-horse, black as the fabric of the night.

Dan Patrick managed to reach the foot of the steps; but here he stopped. The temperature around him was so low that the bricks in the steps split with a sound like pistol shots, and the rose bushes splintered into shards of desiccated twig. Dan managed to lift one arm. His hand was as white as a statue's hand, and just as rigid. Right in front of his eyes, his fingers cracked off, and dropped into the snow. Then his whole palm split apart, skin and blood and bone all frozen into lumps of human salts. He didn't cry out. His lungs were frozen solid. His coat broke, as stiff as a board, and then his dark blue sweater and his shirt.

The black shape circled around him in a fluid, threatening lope, the snow flying off it in all directions. Elizabeth knelt in the snow and watched in horror as Dan Philips broke into pieces – his ribcage splitting, his stomach dropping out like a big red stone, his lungs crushed into heaps of sugar-pink frost. His skull split with a terrible resonant crack, and his head broke into halves. One half dropped onto the steps and lay in the snow, staring at Elizabeth with one frozen, milk-white eye.

The black shape flowed around the remains of his broken-off stump of a body, which was frozen upright. Around and around it flowed, stirring the snow into whorls and eddies. There was a creaking, straining sound, like a shop window about to shatter. There was a single second of absolute frozen
tension. Then the remains of Dan's body exploded into thousands of fragments of ice. All that was left to show that he had been standing there was a few scattered fingers, a divided face, and a mauvish glittering stain on the snow.

Gasping, Elizabeth tried to climb to her feet. She was terrified that the black shape was going to come after her now. She was
sure
it would: it was so cold, so heartless, so predatory. She staggered six or seven steps across the lawns, but she was so cold that she could hardly bend her knees or her elbows, and her lungs felt as if they had been hosed out with seawater. She coughed, and choked, and had to stop, her hand cupped over her mouth. She was sure that she could hear the shape squeaking across the garden towards her, but she didn't want to look behind her to see how near it was. She knew that she was far too cold to get away from it. She was so cold that she almost didn't care.

She heard the air splintering all around her. Oxygen and hydrogen, actually freezing. She felt as if her brain were being clenched. She thought,
God help me
.

It was then that she saw something white moving towards her through the snow. It came closer and closer, and soon it was close enough for her to see that it was the Peggy-girl, in her white summer dress, with thick white burrs of snow clinging to her hair.

‘You're quite safe,' she said. ‘I said I was here to protect you.'

Elizabeth stared at her, and then wildly turned around. The black shape had vanished, the snowy garden was deserted, and already the blizzard was easing off.

‘What
was
that?' she said, her eyes still wide. ‘What was it, Peggy? What?'

‘Didn't you recognize it?' asked the Peggy-girl.

‘What do you mean? It's killed Dan Philips! It's killed him!'

‘He shouldn't have interfered, should he? He should have stayed at home.'

‘He didn't do anything! He only came to look at the snow-angel.'

‘Ah, yes . . .' said the Peggy-girl, wistfully.

‘What
was
that?' Elizabeth repeated. Her teeth were chattering so furiously that she could barely speak. ‘That shape, that thing in the snow?'

The Peggy-girl closed her eyes, and touched her lips with her fingers. It was a sign, it meant something, but Elizabeth couldn't understand what. She began to limp back towards the house, still shaking with cold, but by the time she let herself in through the front door, the snowstorm had died away, and a much warmer wind was beginning to blow.

 

 

The first thing she noticed was that all the clocks had stopped. The house was completely silent, except for the occasional lurching of a dying fire. She went upstairs, still wearing her coat, and hurried directly to her father's bedroom. The clock had stopped in here, too, but her father was still breathing. She kissed him on the forehead and he was cold. She would come back up and change him and give him a hot water-bottle; but first she had to call the police.

Sheriff Maxwell Brant arrived fifteen minutes later, with two deputies and a photographer. Almost immediately behind him came an ambulance, its red lights flashing through the trees.

Elizabeth switched on the floodlights that they once used when they played tennis on summer evenings, and Sheriff Brant and his deputies carried powerful flashlights of their own. They approached the steps where Dan had died, their beams flicking from side to side. Elizabeth stayed well back, and said, ‘There . . . that's all that's left of him.'

Sheriff Brant was a lean, grandfatherly rail of a man, with short-cropped grey hair and metal-rimmed spectacles and eyes that always looked as if they were focused on the far distance, just over your shoulder. His two deputies were young and callow. One had a wispy brown moustache that looked as if it had taken him a year to grow. The other was spotty, and kept blushing.

The ambulance had brought Dr Ferris from the hospital. He was Seamus Patrick's doctor, too, and he had been attending to Seamus when Elizabeth had raised the alarm.

The Sheriff looked quickly around the garden. All the snow
had melted away, but there was still a smell of chilly dampness in the air, a smell of thawing-out.

‘Cold here,' he remarked. Then he walked cautiously forward and examined what was left of Dan Philips.

The right half of Dan's head lay on the third step down, one eye still open. His face had spilt so cleanly in half that it looked as if the rest of it were buried in the brick. The other half, in fact, was lying split-side up in the rose bed, a cross-section of head, complete with reddened sinuses and teeth and a fat purple tongue that was seasoned with compost. There were fingers everywhere, and toes, too, and part of a ribcage. But the rest of Dan was nothing but a glistening, gelid pool, as if somebody had poured three or four bottles of cough syrup onto the grass. The smell of death, however, was just as strong as it always was, when somebody was freshly-killed. Sweet, musky and cloying – the kind of smell that stays in your nostrils for days and which affects everything you taste.

Dr Ferris came up, toting his bag, a cigarette dangling out of the side of his mouth. He hadn't worn the years too well: his face was deeply lined and his hair was stained with nicotine. He looked sicker than some of his patients.

‘How's it going, Maxwell?' he asked. He put down his bag and briskly rubbed his hands together. ‘Chilly here, isn't it? If I didn't know better I'd say that we're due for some snow.'