Galad Elflandsson was born in New York but has lived in Ottawa for a number of years. His tales of myth, legend, and strange horror have appeared in the magazines Dark Fantasy, Borderland, Beyond the Fields We Know, and Dragonbone, as well as in the anthologies Heroic Fantasy and The Phoenix Tree. He is the author of the excellent Lovecraftian novel The Black Wolf, published in hardcover by Donald M. Grant.
For those unhardy northerners who feel that there is nothing worse than being stuck on a highway in a blinding snowstorm, Galad’s present story is either reassuring or appalling. It demonstrates that no matter how bad things are . . . they can always get worse.
The storm is expected to drop over thirty centimetres of snow on the national capital region, accompanied by icy winds gusting up to sixty kilometres per hour. Driving conditions are becoming extremely hazardous in and around the city and motorists are advised . . .
Fred Wycinski snapped the radio off impatiently, his knuckles whitening around the steering wheel as he did some quick arithmetic in his head. Twelve inches of snow, thirty-mile-an-hour winds. And with seventy-odd miles between him and Ottawa, doing a steady twenty-five if he felt reckless . . . He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch and figured midnight was being optimistic.
“One hell of a way to spend Christmas Eve,” he said bitterly, not even hearing his words above the hot whisper of the heater and the frantic slapping of his windshield wipers. For a moment he considered getting off the highway at the Hawkesbury exit and spending the night there; then he remembered the jumble of brightly wrapped packages on the back seat and promptly filed the notion in a mental wastebasket. Margaret would understand, but Jenny would be heartbroken not to have her daddy home for her birthday and Christmas morning. The tension-held breath in his lungs came out in a tired hiss as he eyes strained to pierce through the swirling chaos before him.
Six hours ago, the hundred-and-twenty-mile stretch of Highway 417 between Montreal and Ottawa had been nothing more than a boring ribbon of asphalt under an ash-grey sky; now it was something out of an Eskimo’s worst nightmare. The road itself had disappeared under a treacherous blanket of snow that was rapidly turning to ice in the wind-chilled temperatures outside Wycinski’s ’87 Buick. Visibility ended about one yard down the length of his high beams, and the only thing that had kept him on the highway thus far were the intermittent blinks of reflectors that seemed to float out of the haze along the right-hand shoulder.
He pried a hand loose from the steering wheel, keeping his eyes fixed unwaveringly upon the road, and groped for the thermos of coffee beside him, propping it between his thighs as he unscrewed the cap, gulping the scalding liquid convulsively. The windshield turned dead white for a half-dozen pounding heartbeats, then cleared as Wycinski’s right hand jumped frantically back to the wheel. Another explosion of oxygen-drained breath whistled through his teeth.
“My God,” he whispered incredulously, “it’s like driving through an ocean of milk.” He saw his hands trembling in wan dashboard light and reached again for the radio.
. . . Ontario highway authorities report serious “white-out” conditions on the 417 between Ottawa and the Quebec border . . .
Fred Wycinski grinned feebly and said, “No shit,” twisting the dial through short bursts of static until a deejay chortled gleefully:
. . . Looks like even Santa’s gonna need Tiger Paws t’night, boys and girls. While you’re waitin’, here’s one t’ keep ya warm . . .
Wycinski gritted his teeth as a nasal-voiced halfwit taunted him with the glories of sun and sand and living in Marina del Rey. When Bing Crosby started in on “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” he swore off the radio for the duration and checked his odometer. Marg and Jenny were five miles closer. Ten minutes more and the Hawkesbury exit was behind him, with sixty-eight miles to go. A second white-out hit his windshield and stayed there, squirming like the soft underside of a huge slug.
Wycinski started praying as his hands clawed over the steering wheel and hundreds of images flickered through his brain—Jenny’s imagined smile when the reindeer-patterned paper came away from a matching set of scarf and mittens; Marg’s anxious face, waiting, close to tears, at the front windows of their house in Sandy Hill; Christmas lights winking out one by one . . . The wipers flailed ineffectually against the windscreen, beating time to the sudden pounding in his temples. His foot leapt from the accelerator and he nerved himself to do no more than tap at his brakes. Did the highway curve up ahead? He’d driven it a hundred times in the past, but now . . .
“I just don’t know,” he groaned, sickened by the waves of hot air pouring from the heater, waiting for one last glimpse of the reflectors before plunging off the road and into oblivion. And then he was free again, staring wild-eyed at the curtains of snow sweeping over the highway. The needle of the speedometer was unmoving at the far end of the register; his foot was pressed down hard against the brake pedal.
“You’re not even moving, Fred,” he laughed out loud, and the giddy relief in his voice frightened him. “Damn, you’re stopped dead in the middle of the 417 where anybody and his mother can knock the stuffing outta you.”
His foot came off the brake pedal and the Buick lurched forward. “You’ve got t’keep moving, Fred ole boy, got t’get home for Christmas. Jenny and Marg are waiting . . . Jenny and Marg are waiting for you . . . Jenny and Marg . . . waiting . . .”
He kept repeating the litany over and over again as the speedometer inched its way back to just over twenty miles an hour and the shifting shrouds of featureless grey snow began to move past him again. It was a small magic he had learned eight years ago when Jenny was newborn, when he was away from home and feeling tired or discouraged. Whispering their names made him ache inside, but somehow it also brought them closer, just within his reach, and after a while the only thing that mattered was the elimination of whatever it was that stood between him and his wife and daughter.
He scrubbed at his face with a hand, opened a vent under the dashboard, and came fully awake as cold air and an impossible vision hit him all at once—layers of snow peeling away in front of the Buick to reveal a small, slender shape staggering against the wind, arms upraised, in the middle of the highway.
Wycinski tore at the wheel, felt his muscles go taut as piano wires as the heavy car skimmed forward, closing fast on the tiny figure, with its wheels locked against the instinctive pressure of his foot on the brake pedal and the little girl running blind into the glare of his headlights. The Buick seemed to float over the slick pavement, left fender straining towards the child, ten metres away . . .
Damn, she’s not even wearing a coat out there!
. . . five metres . . .
Please God, don’t let me hit her.
. . . and the girl stumbled, was tossed like a rag doll in the wind, back and forth . . .
Please, God, don’t—
Then she was gone and the car was sliding sideways, headlights winking against reflectors, roadside gravel spitting up through the snow churned by his tires and the sickening lurch as the front end groaned into empty space.
There had been a time twice before—another storm along the same highway, on the Christmas Eve that Marg had given birth to Jenny—when he had swerved around a slow-moving car and seen the reflectors grinning Death at him . . . but the car’s own forward momentum had kept it on the road, that and his iron determination to be there when his first child was brought into the world. Groggily, he wondered if the past eight years had been a dream, if there was still some way he could get to the hospital in time—light flares, flag down a passing car . . . The Buick was dead metal beneath him, cold and silent. A 1987 Buick Century, white vinyl roof, only 27,000 miles (or 45,000 kilometres, the salesman grinned) at the right price. No dream at all, then . . .
Wycinski groaned and the enormity of what had or might not have happened (if he was lucky) came roaring into his returning consciousness. He readied a shaking hand to switch off the ignition, fumbled frantically with the clasp of the seatbelt, and shrugged into his parka. Disregarding the stiff clot of blood on his forehead, he wrenched at the door latch and then shouldered the door open, tumbling out into the snow-filled ditch into which the Buick had fallen lengthwise. Dead, half-buried.
The cold slashed across Wycinski’s face like a knife, and the wind howled in his ears like a wounded animal. Stiff-legged, he forced himself to move through thigh-deep snow, not daring to think, pulling gloves over numbed fingers that clawed into the steep slope leading up to the highway. He reached the top on hands and knees, snow-crusted trousers chafing against cold-sensitive skin and each sobbing breath a wreath of fire in his lungs as he sprawled over the twisted metal length of a road reflector. Using it as a support, Wycinski levered himself to his feet and staggered back along the highway.
He found her lying on the shoulder a thousand miles from the place where he had gone off the road—a small, unmoving bundle of dark wool and corduroy, face pale and crisscrossed with crusts of blood that showed black in the white witchlight of the blizzard. Wycinski fell to his knees beside her, slow death crawling around his heart as he reached to touch her.
“Jenny,” he moaned, a soft wailing cry in the teeth of the wind. “Oh my God, Jenny . . .”
For a moment he truly believed it was his daughter lying there, silver-haired and frozen into lifelessness. His gloved hand caressed the cornsilk hair, brushing away the snow, and the moment passed. Jenny was at home with Marg, waiting for him; the snow had tricked him cruelly into believing otherwise. Wycinski shivered, dizzy with relief—this girl was dark-haired beneath the film of snow—and then horror at what he had done to someone else’s daughter. His body spasmed with choking sobs as he bent over her and the wind crowed its derision, lashing a hail of snow and ice across his back.
“What were you doing out here . . . all by yourself . . . ?” he demanded of her silently. “Why . . . ?”
He heard a faint voice cry “Maman . . .” in answer, and looked up into two staring eyes that rolled sightlessly in the small battered face, found his right arm imprisoned by a pair of tiny hands.
Wycinski muttered a fervent “Thank you” into the storm and, unzipping his parka, gently lifted the girl into what small warmth lay trapped between it and his own body. Struggling to his feet again, he started back towards the car.
The girl moaned in his arms, thrashing feebly at the enveloping folds of the new fur-lined coat meant for Jenny. He stared bleakly through the windshield, holding her close to him, grateful that she had no broken bones, grateful for the shelter of the Buick and the dense pine woods that overhung the ditch. It was cold as hell, but not so cold as it had been outside, exposed to the wind. He took another swallow from his thermos of coffee—now liberally laced from the bottle of Seagram’s he had stripped of its red and green foil wrapping—and looked down at the shadowed bundle in his arms, wondering what to do next and how anything so small and thin and cold had stayed alive out there. Twin pools of dark light glistened up at him, wide and curious, alert.
“M’sieu . . .” she began, and the rest was an unintelligible babble of French.
When she stopped speaking, Wycinski shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he explained softly. “I can’t speak French, little girl. Je ne comprends pas français.” He sensed her frown of irritation.
“M’sieu, my mama,” she said, her voice high and urgent, body tensing in his grasp. “I promise her, m’sieu. She is hurt. She is waiting for me.”
Wycinski trembled in shocked comprehension, felt his skin growing tight with new horror—the little girl was not alone; her mother was out there, somewhere, another victim of the storm—and the little girl was on her knees beside him, her tiny hands tugging at the sleeve of his parka.
“We must go, m’sieu, please,” she cried plaintively.
Wycinski found himself nodding to her, teaching for the flashlight in the glove compartment. “Yes, yes, we’ll go in a minute,” he reassured her, snapping the flashlight on. “What’s your name, honey?” The beam was strong, spilling cold light over her anxious face.
“Marie. My name it is Marie, m’sieu . . . but mama is waiting . . .”
“I know, I know,” he said patiently. “What about your father, Marie? Is your father hurt, too?”
Her grip on his sleeve loosened for an instant, confused. “No, m’sieu, there is no one but maman and me. We are going home and she could not see. Something happened and she start to scream and then everything is fast and I hit my head, Maman was crying . . . please hurry . . .”
“All right, honey,” he soothed, hearing the tears in her voice. “We’re going now, Marie. You just button up real good and we’ll find your mother. Don’t worry, we’ll find her. Everything’s gonna be all right . . .”
And then he was lifting her off the seat and they were out in the storm again, buffeted by the wind, his flash cutting crazy swaths of light in the drifting haze. “Which way, Marie?” he shouted, looking up and down the line of the ditch. “Where did you leave your mother?”
“La bas, m’sieu!” she cried, disengaging an arm from around his neck. “Over there!”
Wycinski’s heart thudded as he followed the girl’s outstretched arm up, away from the highway, into the dark ranks of pine that marched northward into Carillon Park.
Christ, they went right over the ditch!
Marie squirmed in his arms, almost angrily, and he began wading through the snow, leaning against the car for support and pushing off from it when they reached the far slope. Wycinski slipped the flashlight into a pocket and scrambled on all fours to the brush line at its crest.
“This way, m’sieu!” she cried, pointing in the direction in which he had found her.
At the top of the slope he found the going easier, the snow reaching only to his knees and the near proximity of the trees cutting off most of the wind’s fury. He slogged ahead, feeling and hearing the rasp of brittle leaves and pine needles against the nylon of his parka, squinting against the clouds of powdered snow curling around them. Instinctively, perhaps guided by Marie’s nearness and a quiver of recognition, he knew that the small break in the wall of brush marked the place they were looking for. He turned into the woods. A tightening of her grasp around his neck told him he was right.
Once they were inside the outer fringe, the force of the wind dropped appreciably; yet Wycinski was forced to move more slowly, to pick his way carefully through snow that hid branches, roots, and winter-stiffened vines from his sight. Then too the cold here was insidious, creeping into the wood from without, a whispering of wind no less dangerous than the full-blown monster that had spawned it. His head began to throb beneath the clotted blood over his right eye, and his breathing became laboured as he fought to stay on his feet. Marie was quiet, her head lolling against the fur collar of his parka. He clenched his teeth in a grimace of pain, knowing it would not be much longer before he followed her into exhausted sleep.
It could not have been very far—forty or fifty feet at most. The car lay at the bottom of a deep declivity in the forest floor, front end up against and curled around the bole of a massive pine, all but buried in drifts and the snow it had shaken loose upon impact. As he tottered at the end of the drop, Marie came awake and wriggled from his arms before he could stop her, sliding down the slope in a flurry of white.
“Maman! Maman! I have brought him!”
Wycinski followed, first on his heels and then on the seat of his pants, bounding up at the bottom of the declivity to rescue her as she floundered in the snow. Yet when they reached the car she hung back, silent, and Wycinski felt a deeper chill stabbing through the one that embraced his body. The door on the driver’s side hung open, its window shattered, snow drifting over the frame and into the car itself. He swallowed hard, his breath slowing to a crawl as he leaned forward. He swallowed hard, his breath slowing to a crawl as he leaned forward.
“God in Heaven,” he murmured.
At once, he knew that she was pinned in her seat, the lower arc of the steering wheel thrust down impossibly into her pelvis, her left hand rigoured into a desperate, white-knuckled attempt at freeing herself. But it was the top of the wheel that drew his horrified gaze, for it simply was not there. Gone. Twin fountains of splintered fibreglass sprayed out from the crossbar of the wheel . . .
And the lower half of the woman’s face was a twisted ruin, an unrecognizable mass of blood and bone and splintered steering wheel, framed by dark hair grown lank and stiff in the dusting of snow through the rusted-out roof of the car. Wycinski’s stomach churned sour whiskey and coffee into the back of his mouth; he swallowed again, harder, stripping off one glove and reaching numbed fingers to touch the ice-cold throat, knowing the while he would find no pulse there to welcome them. Dimly, he heard Marie’s voice in the stillness.
“He is the one, maman?”
And suddenly the eyes in that dead, ruined face were glaring at him and two hands were taloned into the front of his parka and the broken jaw was moving, shattered lips writhing back over the sharp, gleaming points of broken teeth.
“Oui, ma petite, he is the one.”
Wycinski stared into the eyes, unbelieving, shaking his head, something inside of him boiling, pounding at the walls of his sanity.
“They never found us after you forced us off the road, m’sieu. There was no one to tell them . . .”
He backed away, tearing at the claws that would not come loose, his knees folding under him, pitching him sideways in the snow with the dead weight of her torso tumbling out on top of him, the wreckage of her face suspended only inches from his own.
“There is much strength in hatred, m’sieu. For eight years we are waiting . . .”
Wycinski screamed. “But I didn’t know! Marg and Jenny are waiting for me!”
“They will go on waiting, m’sieu,” she whispered, leaning towards him, smiling.
And Fred Wycinski knew it was Truth, even as his throat came apart in her teeth.