Snowed In

Jon sits in his chair, his shotgun clutched tightly in his hands.

She’s making noise again, louder this time. He stares up at the ceiling. It sounds like she’s rolling around on the floor, limbs smacking the ground, lifeless. He squeezes his eyes shut and holds the gun closer.

Blue light filters through the snow-choked windows. It’s been nearly a week since the blizzard buried them, digging them into a grave more than ten feet deep. Jon was able to clear a path to the woodpile in the early days of the storm and bring it inside, so he’s managed to keep a fire going most days—but the supply is dwindling. The pantry is still largely stocked and there’s no shortage of water, though. Jon estimates he can live in the cabin for another few weeks at least. He’ll be cold, but he can survive. Shelly on the other hand…

Moaning. She’s moaning now. Her voice sounds sharp and strangled, metallic. It’s so far from human that he finds himself shaking, gun rattling and he has to take his finger away from the trigger in case it slips.

“It’s not your fault,” he mutters feverishly. “It’s not your fault.”

How was he supposed to know this was going to happen? It was his time with Shelly, legal and everything. Months of begging to Nicole to let him have her for the week, talking through lawyers, groveling, keeping his temper in check. He was pushing his boundaries, Nicole said. Shelly wasn’t under his custody anymore, she said. He couldn’t just do what he wanted anymore, she said. But he never lost control of himself, never once.

And then, finally, she relented. It was a hard won battle, but that was what mattered in the end: He won.

It was his grandfather’s cabin. Some of Jon’s earliest memories are out here, halfway up the mountain, deep in the forest, no civilization for miles and miles. But then his grandfather got sick—prostate cancer—and they stopped coming here. Jon still misses those days, even now.

His grandfather was always obsessed with this cabin—he loved it perhaps more than anything else—or anyone else for that matter. So when Jon’s father inherited it after his grandfather’s death, he let it rot. Jon was certain it was his father’s last “fuck you” to the old man.

But when Jon’s father died, suddenly, in the middle of the night, the cabin finally passed to him. It was in a sorry state when he drove out to see it again after—what, close to twenty years? Windows smashed, holes in the roof, rotted food and floorboards. Everything was ruined. But he put years of his life and thousands of dollars into putting it back together again.

And then, when he was finally finished, the divorce papers showed up.

He wouldn’t rest, he vowed, until he brought Shelly to the cabin. He didn’t care who had custody and who didn’t. He wanted his daughter to have some memory of him to cherish as she got older. He wanted her to experience the same sense of awe and remoteness that he had out here, so far away from the rest of world.

How was he supposed to know that the snow wouldn’t stop? It was October and no one had predicted such a freak storm. And how was he supposed to know that when Shelly said someone was walking past her window every night, that she wasn’t lying?

But that was how it started:

“Daddy,” she said. “There’s a man. Or he might be a lady. I don’t know. But he keeps coming to my window every night. I can hear him outside.”

“It’s probably a branch,” he said, hunched over the fireplace. “There’s a tree right outside your room, honey. Besides, how would anyone walk past your room? It’s on the second floor.”

“He walks on top of the snow,” she said.

“That’s impossible, honey.” The fire finally took, spreading from the newspapers to the kindling twigs. “If you tried to walk on top of the snow, you would just fall in,”

She didn’t say anything else, but Jon caught her staring at the windows, at the solid wall of snow.

Later, that night, she came screaming into his room where he lay shivering beneath a pile of blankets.

“My window!” she screamed, shaking him by the shoulder. “He tried to open my window!”

At her behest, Jon crawled out of bed, bitter cold seeping into his bones, and checked her room. It was empty, of course. No footsteps in the snow, no sign of claw marks at her window.

But she’d slept with him that night anyway.

The temperature dropped overnight. It was so cold the next morning that Jon decided to close off the rest of the house and keep them both inside the living room with the fire. Shelly would sleep on the couch, Jon would take the rug in the middle of the room.

During the day, they kept themselves occupied by playing board games that Jon kept stashed in the ottoman. After that, Shelly lay on the ground next to the fire and drew on printer paper while Jon went upstairs to watch the storm. He imagined that Nicole, after getting word of the weather, had sent someone to try and rescue them, but Jon couldn’t see how anyone could get to them, not through the feet of snow piled over miles and miles of unpaved roads that someone would have to take to get here. Not to mention no one knew they were trapped. The phones didn’t work and they were only a few days into Jon’s allotted time with Shelly. So until someone realized they were missing and sent a helicopter, they were in it for the long haul. It would probably be quite some time before they could make it out of the woods, back to civilization.

It was getting dark outside, so he went back downstairs. Shortly, Shelly fell asleep on the couch and he did the same on his makeshift bed on the floor.

But in the middle of the night, like no time had passed at all, he was awakened by the sound screams. The fire had gone out and the living room as dark as a cave. He groped around for his glasses and sat up. It was Shelly. She was upstairs screaming.

He jumped up and tried to sprint for the stairs, but he tripped, smashing his face against the coffee table. A brilliant burst of pain and the feeling of blood welling from his lips, running down his neck. But he kept going, scrambling upstairs on all fours. She was in her room. The door was open and she was on the floor. Something was standing over her, silhouetted by the moonlight. Something clearly not human. Its eyes flashed as it turned towards him and it flowed like a snake just out of his grasp, slithering through the open window as he ran for it. He screamed in rage, watching it disappear into the darkness below. It was running on top of the snow on all fours.

He dropped down to Shelly’s side. Her breath was coming in short, ragged breaths and she clutched at something in the side of her neck. It wriggled like a maggot, white and glistening. Jon tried to grab at it, but it slipped through his fingers and burrowed deep into Shelly’s neck, disappearing into the muscle and sinew. She stopped breathing for almost a minute while Jon gave her CPR, blood trickling like black sludge from the ragged, quarter-sized hole in her neck. But in the end, she did start breathing again.

She was unconscious for untold hours while Jon paced back and forth. He’d carried her down into the living room and now all he could do was stare at her, frozen to the spot where he stood.

When she finally woke up, he blinked, like stepping out of a trance.

“Daddy,” she said, eyes hardly open, voice like sand, “Daddy, can I have some water?”

“Of… Of course, sweetheart,” he said. His legs creaked as he took his first steps in hours. He melted a couple handfuls of snow in a pan over the fire and poured it into a cup for her. She drank greedily.

“What happened?” she asked, fingering the bandage on her neck. “I remember going to sleep and then suddenly I was upstairs and you were shouting something. And then I was down here with you,”

“You… You were sleepwalking,” he said, his lip trembling. “Just sleepwalking.”

She smiled at him weakly and attempted a laugh. “Really?”

He nodded, biting back tears.

The first effects didn’t appear until the next day. He walked into the room, arms laden with two plates of food and found her peeling off the bandage.

“No!” he shouted, dropping one of the plates. “Wait!”

She turned to look at him, surprise on her face, as the bandage came off. The hole was gone. In its place was a thin, white scar. Or at least it looked like a scar, but Jon watched the scar lift itself from her skin and unfold like an insect leg. Chitinous. It twitched and kicked, squirming like an upturned cricket. Jon felt like he was going to throw up, but Shelly just laughed.

Hours later she began to vomit black fluid the viscosity of petroleum jelly. Piles of the stuff, everywhere. While Jon was feverishly trying to clean up after her, she licked at one pile experimentally.

“Stop that!” Jon shouted and grabbed at her arm. Her skin came off like a sleeve revealing tight red muscle beneath. He screamed, dropping it to the floor. Oblivious, she crawled over to the skin and began to eat it, like an animal, eyes wide and unseeing.

But she was docile when Jon carried her up to her room. He stood in the doorway and watched her writhe and spew waves of white spittle and black tar. Watch as her arms cocked in the wrong direction and as her neck begin to stretch, as her skin began to bristle with tiny arms and her hair fell out. Her face grew taught and all the while she stared at him, as if gauging his reaction.

This was only yesterday, but it feels like thousand years ago to him now. His entire life has been spent sitting in this chair, the weight of the shotgun in his hands, waiting for the creak of footsteps on the stairs.

That dripping sound again. He looks up. There’s a dark stain on the ceiling that he hasn’t noticed before. A dark red circle seeping through the white paint. It’s dripping onto the floor and there’s already puddle there, frozen around the edges. How has he not noticed this puddle? But he can’t focus on that.

“Daddy?” a voice says.

A shadow on the stairs. It’s too huge, squirming like a mass of centipedes.

He’s been waiting for this moment for a thousand years.

He raises the shotgun and puts it into his mouth.