T. G. drove home, glad not to be lugging the artifact around any more. Its size and weight made it an uncomfortable companion, and the fact that such an apparently valuable prize was locked safely away helped to put his mind at rest. One less thing to worry about, one less thing to keep him awake.
It had grown late and dark once again, and he knew he still had a bit of sleep left to catch up on. He shivered inside his long, heavy coat, for his car’s heater was still not working. Despite the warmth that seemed to pour from the vents, the inside of the car would not warm up.
It was Wednesday night, and as usual, the roads were deserted. This part of Ithaca always seemed to retire early, readying itself for another busy day of work and classes. Most students were huddled over their books this late at night, most likely, not out for pizza, studying like Jenni was and—
“Jenni!” he remembered. He banged himself in the forehead, angry with himself for forgetting to call her. “Stupid!” he muttered, cursing himself. It’s late … but I’ll call her as soon as I get home!
As T. G. pulled into the small lot next to the Brookfelder Building he was struck by the absence of other cars. Many of those that were there when he had left were gone now. Usually, he had a hard time finding a space, but the lot looked more like it might on a Thanksgiving weekend, when most of the students living there would be gone for the holidays. The building above was dark, more so than usual, towering into the icy night air like a brick-and-cinder-block memorial to days past and times forgotten.
He pulled into a parking space close to the main entrance. Snow had begun to fall again, and for a moment before getting out of the car he watched the large, wet flakes glittering in the beams of his headlights. He loved snow, and as he listened to the rhythmic beat of his wipers he thought back to other winters, absent friends, and family.
He thought again of David. Where was he? How long would it take him to get back to New York? Would he be angry? Only the winter before, during a heavy snow, T. G. and Jenni had inadvertently given her family and Dave a scare by taking a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Syracuse, where a weekend-long student film festival was taking place. It had been irresponsible to tell no one where they had gone, they had come to realize, but the hurt was unintentional. That did little to soothe the angered worries of Jenni’s mother and father, who had been ready to drag the river looking for the two. David had chewed T. G. out for disappearing like that.
“I’ll never smooth this over with him. Thanks loads,” he sarcastically commented to the absent artifact as he shut off the ignition. The car’s dome light came on as he opened the door, and for the first time since leaving the college its yellowed glare filled the car’s interior.
Just as T. G. turned to climb out, something caught the corner of his right eye. Startled, his body jerked and he dropped back into the driver’s seat, his gaze fixed upon the passenger’s seat next to him. His hands shook. His hair stood on end.
There, as if it had never left, rested the artifact.
He could only stare. He had seen it placed gently into the specimen vault. He had seen the lid lowered, the lock closed. He had seen the drawer slid shut and the steel mesh gate outside securely sealed. He had walked away, trusting it to the care of others. Then, after all that, it had silently and surely followed him home.
It had had the last word, apparently. Not so fast, pal. I’m all yours.
T. G. reached over and lightly touched it, as if to check its materiality. It was real enough. He fell limp in his seat, head back, eyes closed, and heart pounding, trying to sort things out. A fear swelled within him, but he told himself that if the thing meant to harm him it surely would have done so already. Time passed without his notice. The insides of the car’s windows fogged over then froze, obscuring his vision of the wintry world outside.
That settled it in his mind. There was definitely something other than human technology behind the thing, however advanced, whether it was earthly or not. There was something going on that could not be explained by scientific convention or physics or any rational theory anyone could come up with. He had a metaphysical tiger by the tail, he knew, and he was not going to be allowed to let go until the ride was over.
And he feared that it would be a very, very dark ride.
With renewed determination, T. G. grabbed the artifact by the strap and hoisted it up, stepping up out of the car in the same motion. Momentarily slipping out of his knee-length coat, he draped the object across his left side then put the coat back on, concealing the prize as much as possible. There was gold on it, after all, like none other, and there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks. He slammed the car door behind him, forgetting to lock it, and stepped heavily through the slush that had built along the curb. The biting wind had ceased, leaving behind a gentle snowfall and a cold silence.
T. G. tried to imagine the conversation he would have with Dr. Abelwhite once he got inside and phoned her. How could he explain to her that he still had the object and that logic had been cast into the wind? What would she believe? Possibly anything at that point, he hoped.
He made his way carefully along the snow-spotted sidewalk, avoiding the icy patches in his way. As he approached the old building, an indefinable apprehension began to fill him, one that intensified as the edifice loomed closer. It was so still, so quiet. He glanced up, thinking it odd that so few lights were on inside. Those that glowed were obscured by the glaze of ice and frost on all the windows, diffusing what light there was like the glass of a shower door. But he gave it little thought as he pulled the high collar of his coat closed with one hand and hurried toward the door. He failed to notice something that might have served as a warning, had he only looked closer.
The translucent layer of ice that had built up on the building’s windows had done so on the inside of each pane.
Climbing the last couple of steps, he chose his footing carefully. Ice remained upon them despite the fact that they had been sprinkled with rock salt, leaving white splotches upon the dry areas. He reached out to push on the worn brass door handle, but looked up to discover the door standing wide open. Just great, he thought, irritated that the cold had been allowed into the building. It’s been hard enough to keep it warm in here as it is.
Puzzled, he slowly entered the darkened structure. In the entry hall his feet found not polished tile, but a thick coating of ice.
What the …!
As he tried to push the door shut behind him he realized that ice had built up under and behind the door, along both floor and wall, pinning it open.
It was so horribly quiet.
No sounds of televisions playing behind closed doors. No Bing Crosby music. No voices. No rattle of the air ducts as they carried warm air into the hallway. T. G. took a few steps down the hall, toward the stairway, gazing in awe at the polar scene around him. Icicles hung from doorknobs, light fixtures, heater pipes, and anything else that protruded into the hall. Each of the yellowed fixtures that dangled from the hallway ceiling glowed dimly from within layers of ice and frost, which gave their light an unreal, dreamlike quality. A glistening layer of clear ice half an inch thick in places coated the floor, walls, and doors, leaving no surface bare. Did the pipes burst? Atop that, much of the bizarre, arctic corridor looked like a freezer that had not been defrosted for years. The air was still and frigid. His breath hung white before him. The place smelled like a slaughterhouse.
The cold burned his face and stung his eyes. It’s so much colder in here than outside!
T. G. paused at one familiar door and began to pound on it. “Mrs. Lucreia?” he shouted, knocking a shower of brittle ice flakes to the floor as his fist struck the old, hard wood again and again. “It’s T. G., Mrs. Lucreia … what happened in here? The front door’s stuck open … are you okay?” There was no answer, just the same, awful silence. Turning the knob, he forced his weight against the door and heard the crack of breaking ice as the antique oak gave way in its frame. With another push it yielded a little more, and T. G. peered through the narrow opening.
He saw nothing. The room was dark, save the meager glow from the street lamp outside, which managed to penetrate the hazy frost on the windows. “Mrs. Lucreia?” he repeated into the near blackness. Listening more closely, he could just make out a subtle noise from inside, a muffled buzzing of some kind that sounded over and over. He again put his weight into the door and it gave another foot, allowing some of the light of the hallway to spill into the room.
It fell upon a sight that made T. G. blink in shock.
The woman was seated in her rocking chair, still holding the phone to her ear, eyes open, lips parted as if in midword. She was glazed with an inch-thick coating of ice, a semitransparent cocoon that covered her completely, flowing over the chair and phone in a continuous, glistening blanket that melded into the glacial shroud that covered everything else in the room. The buzzing he had heard, muffled through the ice, came from the phone, which was crying out in the loud warning tone of a receiver left off the hook.
T. G. backed away from the sight, eyes wide, his breathing sharp and uneven. As he looked along the hallway, imagining the horrors that might await behind any one of the doors there, an odd wind began to build in the hallway, an icy airflow that carried back toward the door through which he had first entered. He had no explanation for it but was no longer interested in mysteries. His first instinct was to flee the building, fearing that the cause of the white, impossible death all around him might still lurk somewhere within.
Before T. G. could take a step toward the entry something appeared there, blocking his view of the door. He held his breath as that something moved, swaying from side to side as if staring back, planning its next move. It was as black as the depths of any pit T. G. had ever seen, a shape of absolute pitch that absorbed all light and heat, its outer contours obscured by the haze of a form-hugging event horizon. A shadow without a source, roughly man-shaped but much larger, horned, and grotesquely misshapen, filling the end of the hallway.
It took a step toward him.
T. G. struggled down the corridor and into the icy gale, away from the shadowthing, trying for his only exit—the stairway. Fighting the increasing wind on the glazed floor was arduous, forcing him to pull himself along by doorframes, pipes, or whatever else he could grab hold of. He bloodied his knuckles on the hard, jagged ice, but his quickly numbing hands did not feel the pain. He would have to go up, to try to make it to the relative safety of his apartment and the fire escape outside, where he could run for help.
The wind roared in his nearly frostbitten ears. Too terrified to look back, he bounded up the stairs two at a time, slipping on the ice as he reached the landing. His body twisted in a manner it was not meant to know, and his already injured knee came down hard against the edge of the step, the hard marble rim slamming like a blade against the bottom of his kneecap. He cried out in pain, sheer terror alone lifting him back to his feet. The third floor seemed miles away, and the pain in his leg begged him to stop, collapse, and rest.
Deep laughter reverberated from below. Supporting his weight on the handrail, T. G. felt the vibration of something grabbing it downstairs. He climbed again, forcing his way upward, his center of gravity thrown off by the heavy artifact.
He finally reached his floor and no longer had the rail for support. Almost at once, he fell hard against the ice as his feet again splayed at cruel angles. He came down in an awkward tangle, his left leg caught under him. His closed eyes filled with sparkles, his face contorted in pain, and he cried out. His original knee injury had occurred in the same manner, wrenched sideways and backward as muscles strained and ligaments tore. Lifting himself just enough to put his weight fully on the other knee, he managed to crawl, dragging his useless leg across the sea of white rust, toward his apartment door.
He looked back. The shadowthing had not yet appeared, but its depraved laughter still filled the rushing air, blending with the whistling roar. T. G. pushed himself up to a shaky standing position by leaning on the artifact and the door, and he fished in his coat pocket. With a welcome jingle, he pulled his key chain free and quickly found the one small piece of precisely cut metal that was his salvation. Reaching down, he focused on the keyhole.
It was covered with ice. He could not get the key in.
In sheer terror, he glanced back at the stairs. A deformed hand-like thing was sliding along, coming up the icy rail. The laugh grew louder, echoing from the walls of the frozen corridor.
T. G. began to panic. There was no other way out.
Staring, frozen in fear, words suddenly sounded in his mind. Something harder than any material we know of. Something that is there only when it needs to be …
He looked down at the artifact, then braced himself and drove it into the face of the doorknob again and again, like an ancient, priceless battering ram. The thick coat of ice that covered the keyhole fractured with each impact, felling away like glass dust. T. G. forced the key into the freed lock and turned it, and rejoiced in hearing the familiar click. He pushed the heavy door open, then turned to take one last look over his shoulder and down the hall.
It was almost atop him, scant feet away. T. G. felt a burning cold he had never imagined possible and a hunger in that cold that was beyond mere imagination.
He fell into his darkened apartment and slammed the solid oak door behind him, putting all his weight against it as he frantically slid the trio of deadbolts home. Listening intently over the pounding of his own heart, he heard nothing beyond the door, no sound in the hallway. He hobbled backward and into the opposite wall, his fearful eyes trained upon the doorknob. His unsure legs finally gave way and he collapsed, sliding down the icy wall—his entire apartment, like the hallway outside, was covered with frost. Its sterile whiteness sparkled in the dim light of the street lamp beyond his window. He sat, riveted with fear, his eyes fixed upon the door. Waiting.
It was common knowledge among the residents of the Brookfelder that the old building had been built sturdily of hardwood, concrete, and brick. Back in the early 1950s, T. G. had learned, its basement had even been designated a neighborhood bomb shelter. If that door will just hold, the walls will, too!
He tried to move, but his left knee, wracked with the same tormenting pain as on that rain-slicked football field six years before, would take no weight at all. Even the adrenaline filling his limbs could not dampen the agony he felt. Raising his bloodied knuckles to his mouth, T. G. looked across the room and toward the glowing, ice-sealed window where the fire escape was.
Someone … help …!
Knowing no deliverance would come, he tried to move toward the window. After getting one leg under him, his bad leg collapsed and he fell heavily against his icy glass-topped coffee table. The scream of brittle, violated glass filled his ears and shards filled the air as he slammed into the hard floor and rolled onto his back. He felt warmth coursing from the back of his right hand and looked over to find a jagged thorn of glass embedded there, a rivulet of blood flowing from the wound. Gritting his teeth and inhaling sharply, he pulled the small, sparkling dagger from his flesh and tossed it away.
Almost blind with pain, he sat up, pushing with his hands, and backed himself against the wall opposite the door. Still he waited, but there was only silence from the hallway. He began to breathe again.
Maybe it went away …
Reaching far to his left, he managed to wrest his phone from its icy cradle atop a lamp table. Who do you call for something like this?! He tried to dial, only to find the buttons were held fast by the ice encasing them.
No!
An explosion of noise came from the other side of the door, a roar of flailing claws and teeth and bone against the dense, hardwood barrier that was T. G.’s only protection. The merciless noise of the renewed attack shook him, knocking the frozen phone from his grasp. He covered his ears as the tumult increased, a horrible din like a thousand lions fighting to get in. T. G. screamed. All the while the deep, menacing laughter continued, building in intensity, becoming more and more maniacal as, outside, more and more of the door was ripped away. He saw a tiny hole appear near the center of the door, a hole that grew larger by chunks, a hole filled with the flurry of chaotic darkness beyond.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the assault on his door ceased. The silence was heavy and far too sudden, as if the plug had been pulled on an earsplitting stereo system.
In the dim stillness, T. G. stared in terror at the hole in the door. Something new was filling it now, an odd blue point of light that moved slightly before locking upon him—
An eye.
For a moment, he could not tear his gaze from the horror. Finally, he closed his eyes and covered his head, hugging the artifact tightly. He waited to die, knowing now that the door could not stop the thing outside. Then, after several moments of oppressive quiet, T. G. fearfully peered between his fingers and saw only the faint light of the hallway streaming through the hole.
He allowed himself a breath, closing his eyes once more in relief. In the intense silence, the pulse of blood rushing through his ears whined loudly and rhythmically, making him feel alone, isolated, somehow sheltered. He felt safer.
A sound of breathing not his own filled the room. Heavy and wet and very near. T. G. trembled and refused to open his eyes. The temperature of the already-frozen room plunged.
“Give … it … to … me,” a voice thundered from just above him, a foot or so away. T. G. jumped at the booming, raspy voice, but kept his eyes shut. The stench of rotted flesh filled the air all around him, nauseating him. Cold, dank breath splashed upon his face. Finally, trembling with cold and fear, he forced himself to look upward, an inch at a time.
It towered over him, filling the entire room, it seemed, an abomination eight feet tall and six wide, a cadaverous Goliath. T. G. looked up into a skull-cut face beyond words, beyond belief, beyond terror. It was the shadowthing given form and substance, absolute horror made flesh.
A deformed, inhuman beast of hair and talons and fangs and glowing blue eyes in deep black sockets, a thing of corrupted flesh, its tissue rotting from its huge frame as it stood there filling T. G.’s world with excruciating fright. Its clawed hands stretched toward him, only inches from his face. Wanting.
“Give … it … to … me,” the monstrosity repeated.
T. G. was petrified, unable to move.
It reached over to the shattered table and picked up a long, heavy shard of glass, then swung around and pressed it to T. G.’s throat. Always use the tools at hand!
T. G. felt the crystalline blade begin to dig into his flesh. He closed his eyes again, hard, his body trembling.
“Give me the Gift you carry, or I will take it and your head,” the thing said. T. G. opened his eyes and saw it smile. Its tone became one of mock concern. “We wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“This?” T. G. managed to ask the monstrous thing towering over him, shifting the relic slightly. “You want this?”
T. G. wanted to throw the artifact at the creature, but he could not will his arms to do so. The cursed, haunted relic was the cause of it all—it had to be. It had brought death upon his neighbors and then had brought the ghastly thing at his throat down upon him. Yet somehow, instinctively overriding his hatred and all else, he felt an inexplicable need to protect the artifact at all costs. It was as if it had become an extension of himself, as much a part of him as his arms or head and as precious as a child.
“Now!” the shadowthing ordered. It was not merely a voice but a cold, deep sea of anguished voices, all wailing and echoing, the sound swelling as if it were rising from some cavernous, stone tunnel leading up from a moldy and ancient torture chamber.
Trembling, T. G. waited to die. The shard pressed deeper. T. G. felt something warm—which quickly became as cold as ice water in the frigid room—coursing down his neck and onto his chest.
Then T. G. felt something else. In the midst of his terror, a warmth began to well up within him, an energy that somehow restored his wits. It was not a power from within, but one that was using him as a conduit, empowering him to act. A power that had been made manifest time and again in the face of impossible odds, in foxholes and burning buildings and dark alleyways, a strength that stood tall in the face of death and stared it down.
T. G.’s mind began to work again. He glanced down at the treasure held tightly to his chest, then back up into the unspeakable face above. “Forget it!” he shouted, clutching the artifact as a drowning man would cling to a life preserver.
“Give it to me … and I will let you live!” it lied. “Otherwise, you’ll die like all the others! I will devour you … I will suck the meat and marrow from your bones, here and now!” Its voice shook the walls. It leaned down, almost nose to nose with him, then finished slowly and deliberately. “And you will not die until I let you. You will watch as I consume you, swallowing your flesh, bit by bit …”
“I said no!” T. G. yelled into the grotesque face, his mind racing, a boldness flowing within him that he had never before known. He was suddenly filled with true anger toward the abomination, remembering the sight of the woman in the rocker downstairs. The shadowthing reached out and ran the threatening tine of a six-inch black talon down the defiant face, from forehead to chin and down his nose. T. G.’s heart pounded, threatening to burst his rib cage.
The increasing cold had grown painful. T. G.’s breath clouded into a sparkling snowfall of ice crystals before him. He was losing feeling in his face and hands.
“I can hear your heart,” the shadowthing gloated. “You are dying even now. Ish cannot help you. You are mine … finally!”
Then T. G. nervously smiled and spoke, staring into the luminescent, inhuman eyes so near his own. Eyes that, impossibly, he no longer feared.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, the cold soaking into his jaw, slowing his speech. “I’ve got … a bad leg … and you outweigh me by a ton.” He dared it, his body shivering. “You can’t, can you? You can’t … take it from me. I have to give it to you.” Had he been standing, he might have poked the thing in its chest with a defiant finger. “You’re not laughing now. What part of Hell … are you from, anyway? I mean really—don’t they have Listerine down there?”
The shadowthing, taken by surprise, reared back and roared, fists clenched. It saw that T. G.’s fear had vanished. Its primary advantage was gone. Blind terror had been its greatest weapon against the young man, but no more.
“Give it to me!”
“No!” T. G. shouted, his shaky voice firm despite the horrible death he was certain would follow. “Never!”
“Then die!” the shadowthing thundered, raising the huge glass blade high into the air. As its infernal limb arced downward in a razor blow that surely would decapitate him, the icy floor beneath T. G. swallowed him, and he dropped safely out of reach. He found himself falling through the same smothering, icy blackness that he had endured before as he had passed through the ceiling of his apartment.
He never heard the deafening, guttural bellow of frustration that shook his frozen apartment, a cry of rage powerful enough to echo across millennia.
T. G. quickly passed beyond the initial thickness and was able to breathe freely, still blind but feeling the increasing acceleration of his body. His equilibrium had again been thrown askew, and he found that there was no longer up or down, forward or backward, left or right—just escalating velocity. Then, without warning, the gelid thickness surrounded him again, and he held his breath for the final passage he knew must follow.
He landed hard on a lush hillside covered with thick, spongy growth that fairly absorbed his impact. He bounced once and rolled downhill a short distance before coming to a stop, face up. Disoriented, his sense of balance still scrambled, he could only lie still, the wind knocked out of him, his eyes closed, his thoughts random. His injured knee screamed, for it was twisted awkwardly beneath him. Biting his lip, he managed to pull it free.
His hands and face were nearly frostbitten. His fingers were sluggish, his cheeks numb. Slowly, as he lay there, they began to warm.
Despite a sharp soreness in his rib cage, he again caught his breath and found it increasingly easy to breathe. He moaned in pain, feeling as if he had just run a fifty-mile marathon while being pelted with stones. There was an uncomfortable pressure in his ears and T. G. opened his jaw wide. His ears popped, relieving the discomfort, and as he lay still, his panicked heart gradually slowed to normal.
He listened and heard no sign of the shadowthing. It had not followed him.
He slowly became aware of the cylindrical mass of the artifact beneath his coat, still clutched tightly against his bloodied chest, and he relaxed his clenched arms. Once more, the relic had made the trip with him. If only he could remember how their journey, their partnership, had begun.
Again and again he took the cleansing air into his lungs, as deeply as they would allow, until a slight lightheadedness set in. The ordeal had drained him, and all he wanted was to lie still and sleep. But curiosity overruled his physical needs. He reluctantly opened his eyes, stretching his arms to the sides. The backs of his hands found the luxurious softness of thick grasses and cool clover, and as T. G.’s blurred vision cleared he saw a sea of sparkling jewels suspended before his eyes, gems of every color and intensity. Brilliant blues, reds, whites, and yellows glittered like city lights in the crystal cold of winter. Look, David … the stars are so beautiful … but there’s no moon … where’s the moon?
Off in the distance, a bellow sounded, the call of a great beast. A deep, resonant cry, it drew immediate responses in kind from many different directions. T. G. could not imagine what creature had made the mournful call, but he knew he had never heard the sound before. Night birds sang high in the lush, distant trees, which glistened a brilliant green even in the subdued light of night.
Just before sleep engulfed him, T. G. realized that he had been looking into a night sky like none he had ever known. Instead of velvet blackness, a dark span of the deepest, purest magenta stretched above him. The shimmering rainbow of stars was set against it, glowing in more colors than he knew stars could have, and so much more brightly. Other lights moved quickly across the sky, swelling in brightness then dimming again, crisscrossing high above him. Aircraft of some type, perhaps? Or were they angels, coming to greet him …?
The sight took his breath away. I died, he concluded, his mind too weary to consider anything else. The last thought he had before passing out was that he was gazing into the sky that shone above Heaven.
He could not have been more wrong.