No one spoke when Orla got back inside. She didn’t know how Eleanor Queen might have explained the situation to Tycho, but his slightly dazed look of trauma matched theirs. Orla was glad they didn’t ask questions. Small blessings. She changed into dry clothes—clothes not stained with blood—and got the kids ready as best she could. Finally, they gathered at the front door and took a silent moment with their mittens, surgeons all, pulling on gloves for the most difficult operation of their lives.
They left everything behind. Orla didn’t even bother to lock the door. She brought a small backpack with their money, official papers, IDs, charged but nonfunctioning cell phones, and a bottle of water, which would probably solidify into ice before they reached St. Armand.
Tycho followed behind Eleanor Queen and Orla brought up the rear so she could keep an eye on both children. The sky was leaden and the snow whipped at their faces. They each kept a hand on the rope guideline, and Orla was grateful they’d constructed it. She didn’t trust herself anymore to even walk in a straight line. The fresh snow was deep enough to make walking difficult, especially for Tycho, but it had buried the blood by the time they left the house. His youthful energy kept him going forward, stretching his legs to plant his feet in his sister’s footsteps. And stalwart Eleanor Queen never faltered even as Orla wondered if they should have put on the snowshoes. Her daughter understood the seriousness of the mission—and hadn’t contradicted her plan—and Orla was counting on easier walking once they got to the more compressed road. Everything, she told herself, would be easier when they crossed the property line, away from this awful place.
The wind teased them and she sensed it wanting to play a cruel game—knock them, spin them, turn them around so they couldn’t leave. It’s just weather. Onward they traipsed. Tycho never asked, Where’s Papa? His silence bruised her heart.
The visibility worsened, and for a time Orla feared another whiteout would block their way. But while the whiteouts had come on suddenly, the current air grew denser by degrees as the sky seemed to gradually lower itself. She glanced upward from time to time, claustrophobia setting in as the heavy clouds sank. Would the clouds snuff them out? Murder them like a giant pillow held against their faces? She wanted to urge Eleanor Queen to go faster, impatient to reach the end of the winding driveway, but her daughter and son were already huffing out noisy gusts of exertion. Driven by their own anguish, they didn’t need to be urged on.
It seemed as if the driveway had stretched and twisted and would never end. “Almost there,” Orla called out, hoping it was true, desperate to give them something positive, a reward for the misery of their day—their mother would yet get them to safety. Even if they never forgave her for what she’d done to their father.
They rounded the last bend and Orla expected to see a rising hillside covered with austere sugar maples and beech trees, black trunks and a webbed canopy of bare limbs decorated with garlands of snow. The road that led to their house cut through a swath of forest, but that was not what she saw ahead of them. Instead, there lay a soupy fog. And an expanse of lumpy terrain that looked almost extraterrestrial.
Eleanor Queen abruptly stopped and Orla had to grab the back of Tycho’s jacket to keep him from plowing into his sister. He’d kept his eyes downward the entire time, fixed on his sister’s guiding footprints.
“No. No, no, this isn’t possible.”
“Mama?” Eleanor Queen’s quavering voice hid a terrible, unspoken question. She’d reached the end of their roped rail: the mailbox. But the world they’d once known beyond it had been smudged out, replaced by a plateau of fissured ice. It ran opposite of how the road should have been, the floor of ice rising on their right where it had once sloped downhill toward a larger thoroughfare. The plateau was too broad to see across, as if it lay between the peaks of a towering, clouded mountain range.
“Don’t let go of the rope. Step back and take Tycho’s hand.”
Eleanor Queen took Tycho’s left hand and Orla took his right as she let the guide rope go and walked forward to the boundary. They stood in a line, looking out at what should have been their road. The way out.
But I killed It.
“What is it, Mama?” Tycho asked in the same tone he’d once used when gazing at the northern lights, neither afraid nor awed. Simply confused.
Orla thought of Mount Everest first—she and Shaw had shared a love for edge-of-your-seat rock-climbing films. Sometimes the climbers had to cross vast fields of ice slit by perilous crevasses. They’d lay ladders over the fissures and step across the flimsy, bowing bridges like strange, bent-over animals with viciously spiked crampons instead of rear claws. The snow couldn’t always be trusted; sometimes, where it looked solid, it was only a thin veneer and walking on it meant falling into an abyss. A plunge into a deep crevasse meant almost certain death.
“Mama?” Eleanor Queen asked again.
“It’s a glacier,” Orla told them. An almost laughably matter-of-fact explanation for the impossible.
She wanted to collapse. Weep. Shaw had died for nothing. Whatever was happening in this place was far from over. All the more reason to get the children away. Maybe they’d gone back in time—as she’d prayed, but too far back—to when much of North America had been covered in glaciers. Shaw had mentioned in bed one night, while talking about his paintings, an interest in seeing a glacier before global warming made all the retreating ribbons of ice fully disappear. But they’d spent so much on the move; it was a fantasy. Something for his bucket list.
“Wonder what Papa would’ve thought,” Orla whispered without thinking. And immediately regretted it.
Tycho burst into tears. “We can’t leave! The monster’s gonna get us.”
When had he begun to believe there was a monster? Is that what he understood had happened to his father? How quickly Orla’s own fear had metastasized, infecting even her little boy: Something was out to get them.
Orla was tempted to barrel on past the end of the driveway into what should have been the road. Maybe the lane was really there and this was all a mirage. The bear wasn’t real. It was a bleak yet decidedly awesome possibility if the power at hand had no prescribed boundaries. No limitations. Were they dealing with an omnipotent force that she had tried, too late, to fathom? Or were Its powers limited to florid illusions? I’m the deadly one.
The part of her that wanted to show the children there was nothing out there to fear stepped onto the glacier.
“Mama, no!” Eleanor Queen lunged forward and tugged her back to the relative safety of the snow-covered driveway.
“It might not be real,” Orla said. Her voice sounded hollow, swallowed by the field of fissures. Nothing moved—no birds in the sky, no wind to scatter snow across the ice.
“I don’t think you can trust that,” Eleanor Queen whispered.
Tycho hung his head, whimpering.
Orla hesitated; she didn’t want to give up. She couldn’t relinquish the hope that if they just walked onward, turning right onto what should have been the road, it would lead them to safety. The monster would see they couldn’t be intimidated by displays of winter wonder. Maybe, if they all kept walking, the glacier would dissipate beneath their feet and they’d find themselves in familiar territory, between the tree-flanked hills of their road.
“Are you sure, Eleanor Queen? It might only look this way for a short distance.” Orla hated the desperation that engulfed her voice. And hated that, by questioning her, Eleanor Queen might think her mother still didn’t believe her. Orla was all too aware that she needed to heed more of her daughter’s cryptic words and advice. If Orla pursued what she wanted to be true, simply because she wanted it, they could become stranded on the glacier. Or worse. But she couldn’t turn back without Eleanor Queen’s acknowledgment.
“We have to go home,” she confirmed, almost as if she’d read her mother’s mind.
“I wanna go home,” Tycho cried, raising his arms for Orla to carry him. She knew he didn’t mean the place that awaited behind them, but there was nowhere else she could take him.
Resigned to defeat, Orla picked up Tycho, slippery in his winter gear. The weather improved as they walked back. The clouds lifted, revealing a strip of pale sky. That’s what It wanted. She hated even the perception that she was following commands, but if It heard them—tapped into their thoughts—could she find a way to outthink It?
She’d been right, in a sense, about everything, but they weren’t spiritual musings anymore; something was out there, more powerful than she could comprehend. And It had betrayed her. She’d wanted to believe in beauty, in nature, in the promise of the unknown. But it was a ruse, and a trap.
They walked on the trampled path, and the driveway delivered them to their house more quickly than expected. Could they try again tomorrow, maybe only with the intention of going as far as the mailbox to leave a note for the postman? Would It let them do that, or would It recognize the attempt to communicate with the outside world? Though the pool of blood lay buried, Orla switched Tycho to her right hip so he was facing away from the garage—away from the garish tarp, still bright blue beneath its dusting of snow, that hid Shaw.
One word pounded through her head.
Why.
Why.
Why.
Why did It want them all to stay? Did It plan to pick them off one by one?
It angered her, the pettiness of this force she didn’t understand. It teased, flaunted, threatened, made them unwelcome, then wouldn’t let them leave. Why? Had only Shaw pissed It off? Or had she angered It too? Was there something she could do, something to set things right? Or would It remain volatile and vengeful?
She opened the front door and the children slogged in, sullen, defeated. Exhausted. Orla locked the door behind them. Yanked the curtains across the windows. Ready to try a new plan, silly though it sounded: pretend they were somewhere else. As Eleanor Queen and Tycho stripped out of their coats and boots, Orla headed straight upstairs, indifferent to the melting snow puddling in her wake. She closed every blind, triumphant in her foresight to install coverings on every window.
Block it out.
Make it all disappear.
Convince the children the outside didn’t matter anymore, didn’t exist. She’d lead Eleanor Queen and Tycho—her imaginative, artistic children—on a game of creating a new reality. Maybe they could confuse the thing that was lurking at their door, eavesdropping on their thoughts. Let the thing read their minds and find no trace of the world It knew, or wanted. If they could forget about It, maybe their tormentor would forget about them.
How long might that take?
And did they have enough food and resources to outlast It?