Chapter Three
The snow that had accumulated by morning was a formidable sight, stirring a sense of unease in those who opened their doors to the blinding whiteness. That unease only grew with the afternoon’s accumulation as the sun made its way across the argent sky. Along with the heavy snow, an army of rough, dense stones of hail scratched at windows and thumped on cars as it fell.
The residents of Colby shook their heads in amazement and not a little wariness. Easygoing and hardworking people, the townsfolk of Colby generally held the belief that weather was a fickle friend, and what with the world as it was nowadays, it wasn’t outside their realm of limited imagination that global warming, bio-weapons testing, and companies dumping chemicals into the ground and water might cause a change in weather patterns. One couldn’t have something like the meltdown of those Japanese nuclear reactors into the surrounding ocean, they reasoned, and not think it might alter the chemistry of a sky composed of re-evaporated and re-absorbed water.
However, it was getting on toward the beginning of June, when the children ought to be getting antsy and excited about summer vacation. Parents had winter clothes to pack up. It was time for budgets to shift the household expense from heating to air-conditioning and electric fans. In town, the boutiques should have been putting out the last of their shorts and tank tops, swimsuits, and flip-flops. The pool stores should have been stocking up on chemicals and skimmers and filter parts. Targets and Wal-Marts had grills and Fourth of July picnic tablecloths and napkins to sell. The snow—and everything people needed to get through it—should have long been put away for the year.
But the snow was still here, and in thick, fluffy white abundance.
A fluke snowfall in mid-April was one thing—strange but explainable, perhaps, as winter’s last yawn before settling down. But four feet of snow and counting, a week and a half before June first, was not a fluke. It was a problem, and one that set the minds of those easygoing and hardworking people thinking. Not panicking—not quite yet—but certainly wondering just on the outermost edges of their minds if maybe there wasn’t something to those crazy conspiracy theories and apocalypse warnings that old man Wershaw shouted at people from the street corner outside the 7-Eleven.
It was one of these townspeople who passed Kathy Ryan’s car on Main Street in the pixilated blur of white quickly smearing away the finer details of Colby. As he did so, he was cursing the snow, his premature removal of the plow, and his replacement of the winter tires on his black truck. Damn strange weather was going to set him back months, possibly. He’d have to wait not just for the snow to melt, but for the ground to thaw and the grass to grow before he’d be able to work. He grimaced at the thought that Constance would have to keep clipping coupons and dipping into their savings. She’d never say it was his fault—not even imply it with a look—but it made him ornery, to say the least, to feel like he wasn’t able to support himself and his wife with good, honest work.
The side of the truck read H. CASPER, LANDSCAPING in grass-green lettering. It was an old vehicle, stubbornly strong and reliable, not unlike its driver. Riding the upward crest toward seventy years old, Casper was a mostly amiable guy. He liked his beer and ball games, he loved his wife, his son, and his little grand-baby girl, and most days, he thanked the good Lord he was still able-bodied enough to work.
Today, though, really seemed to beat all in proving that the Lord, good as He might be, worked in mysterious ways. That was if it was, in fact, the work of the Lord at all.
As he left Main Street in the rearview mirror, the maelstrom swirled against his windshield, blocking out a good portion of his view. He strained to see past the chunks of ice smeared by his windshield wipers, but could make out only streaks of gray road and the occasional telephone pole. If he could get back to the house, get to his shed, he could at least hook up the plow again. Plowing snow meant long hours of no sleep on little coffee (his doctor and his recent chest pains demanded he cut out at least some of his caffeine or stress or both) and cold hands and feet, but it also meant some decent pay to carry him and Constance through this last freak snowstorm.
A car passed him—Charlie Hines, he thought, but who could see a damn thing out there?—and honked a hello as he drove by. Casper returned the greeting, though he was feeling less and less neighborly by the minute. Folks better get their damned fool selves off the road before they got into accidents. That meant Charlie Hines of the well-oiled elbow as well.
A cold blast of wind blew by him, making him shiver. Then he frowned; all the windows were closed. Where was the draft coming from?
As if in answer, a clicking inside his dashboard preceded the heat kicking off again. It figured; if cold air could find any part of that truck as useless as tits on a bull, it was that damned heating system. In the sudden absence of warmth, a chill got in between his clothes and skin, almost between his skin and bones. He swore, giving the top of the dashboard a sound thump with the side of his fist. The heating system sputtered like a cough in a dying throat, but the heat did not come back on.
He looked up in time to see the telephone pole looming up out of the white, an impossibly large black form in the streaks of wetness that the wipers left in their wake. Casper cut the wheel sharply to the right and the car slid, the back end fishtailing into the other lane. He cut the wheel in the other direction and pumped at the brakes, but the car only wobbled, then slid suddenly into a snow bank on the side of the road. The impact jarred his bones, causing the arthritis in his knees to moan.
“Okay,” he muttered. He felt his heart pounding. “Okay.” He undid his seat belt and sat a moment, collecting himself. His breath was a hard knot in his chest that took a while to unravel and seep out of his mouth.
The oddly dry scratching of the snow against the windshield, as well as the jittery squeaking of the wiper blades, seemed unnaturally loud in the interior of the car—the only sounds in the whole whitewashed world.
No, he thought, motionless and listening. Not the only sounds. There, just to the left, out on the road . . . a low, dull crunching seemed to be moving toward the car. Creeping was the word that came to mind, though it seemed silly that the idea of someone creeping toward the car should send those shivers in little shock waves beneath his skin. Why shouldn’t someone move like that, slowly and carefully, easing over the ice and snow?
He rolled down the window and immediately felt a blast of cold wetness against his face. He squinted into the wind, trying to make out details of the figure—or were there figures?—approaching the car. At best he could see slivers of irregular dark shapes, possibly furry in places, trudging toward him.
“Hi! Hello there,” Casper called out somewhat sheepishly. “Slid off the road. No damage, I don’t think. Not sure how deep I’m b—” He stopped.
The figures—he could see now that there were two of them in thick, fur-lined, hooded black coats and heavy boots—had halted their trek and were standing stone still in the middle of the road. Their heads were bowed, ostensibly against the weather, so he couldn’t see their faces. Otherwise, they seemed remarkably unperturbed by the wind whipping all around them.
“Hello?”
The figures didn’t move and didn’t answer. The wind shifted some of the snow away, though, and he saw at least three more figures behind those in the middle of the road. The one closest to his truck had something long and glinting protruding from its glove that Casper couldn’t quite reconcile as a shovel.
“Well, yeah, I’d sure appreciate if you could help me maybe push this old heap out of this snow bank here?”
No answer. Seven of them now, he counted, still as ice.
“Okay, well, thanks,” Casper said, dismissing them with an exasperated wave. Their silence left him nettled. That was the world today for you. He could remember when a fella in Colby could reasonably expect young men to be neighborly and lend a helping hand if needed. He began to roll the window up when he suddenly became aware of their presences very close to him, just outside the driver door. He turned his head in time to see the glinting thing—a knife—and had a moment to gasp before the blade was buried in his throat. Coppery, hot liquid pain filled him up so he couldn’t breathe, warming him against the gust of cold as the driver door opened. He felt rough hands grab him beneath his arms and drag him out of the truck. He tried to speak, but the blade blocked the air, and the words drowned in his punctured throat. Awful pressure pushed against his chest and skull, and he fought the panic, making little choke-gasp sounds, sucking at the icy air. The effort gave no relief, but instead put an unpleasant chill on the pain.
Casper was dying. He’d been knifed and oh God, he was dying, and his body was being moved . . . where? Who were these guys? And what had he done to piss them off?
The edges of the world narrowed a little. He felt numb in his feet and hands, and that numbness was starting to travel up his limbs. He was vaguely aware of the heat inside him seeping out in longish red trails around his neck. He could also sense hard ground beneath him and an encroaching freeze from the snow drifts through which the rough hands were dragging him. Silver sky stretched endlessly across his limited view, dropping heavy flakes of snow in his eyes and down his throat to mix with and melt in the blood. Still, he sucked in greedily, fighting to take in whatever life, vibrancy, and alertness he could from the cold air. It was not enough. His lungs screamed, and his brain roared in his skull. His arthritic knees locked and throbbed, but he barely felt them. His heart pounded against his ribs, threatening to quit before his lungs could. Black haze in his vision ate into the canvas of sky.
He didn’t know how long he was pulled through the snow—four minutes, forty minutes—nor did he recognize the corner of the roof or the treetop that broke the limitless silver. A light, soft part of him didn’t much care. He thought of Constance, his grand-baby, his unlocked truck, the beer waiting for him at home in the fridge. Absurdly, it occurred to him that the last episode of that show he was watching on Netflix (the name escaped him now, but that Kiefer Sutherland boy was in it) had been a two-parter, and in his situation, it didn’t look like he’d make it home to see the second half. That summed up his situation, he thought, and struck him as both funny and tragic. The choke sound he made fluttered between a laugh and a moan.
A hand with a strange, complex-looking tattoo he hadn’t seen since the war passed over his face, momentarily blocking out the light. He was aware then of words above his head—low, chanted words he didn’t understand. He didn’t think the men above him were speaking in English, but it was hard to hold on to meanings of things. His brain felt weightless and empty. He found he wasn’t all that worried anymore.
In fact, Casper thought as he turned his head, even that thing they were calling over to him across the field didn’t seem so scary. Not all of his brain agreed—a sliver of his old strength and stubbornness, a sliver of his mind that had served him well in the war and out of it—was very worried about what was going on above his head. Mostly, it was because that thing, while big as a mastiff, was no dog, nor any kind of animal he’d ever seen. So far as his fading vision could make out, it was hairless and white, spindly, and it flickered in and out of his view, its substance one moment distinct from the snow and the next, a part of it. It made wind-chime sounds in its mouth as it crunched across the snow toward him. It bent over him, opening a gaping maw, a widening cavern lined with interlaced spindle teeth that parted like a fish bone curtain. Glassy living things, white and wriggling, moved inside its mouth. Casper couldn’t quite understand the thing his eyes were showing him; it made no sense by any animal law he knew. He couldn’t scream, though, and couldn’t muster up enough wherewithal to realize he should want to scream. The pain had settled into a non-thing through his body. The excruciating burn of airlessness in his head and lungs had gone to smoldering. The blade in his throat felt hard and awkwardly in the way, but otherwise insignificant.
Casper tried to hold on to the last thoughts and sensations from that sliver of his mind, the ones that made him real, kept him alive, but it seemed so much easier to let them go. He didn’t even choke out a cry when that odd gateway of teeth parted wider and that busy mouth closed over his face. His body twitched beneath it as his face dissolved, but by then, what had made Casper a living human being was gone.
The black-coated men continued dragging the body toward the tree. The wind howled, dragging sprays of fresh snow over the blood where Casper had been. There was a lot of blood, but there was more snow.
* * *
Across town, when Jason Houghton’s shift ended late that afternoon, the snow had begun in earnest. Already, a fluffy covering of white had accumulated over all the visible surfaces outside the factory. He recognized Ed’s and Carla’s cars still in the parking lot, as well as Liam’s Ford pickup, coated by a hardening sheath of ice onto which a new mantle of snow was steadily thickening.
Jason looked up into a cataract-clouded sky, blinking as flakes dusted his eyelashes. The cold felt good on his face. He’d been on the packing-and-stacking line today, lugging heavy boxes from the packing conveyor belts to stack on wooden pallets, and he’d worked up a sweat that the winds now cooled away. The work was nothing he hadn’t done a thousand times in the last fifteen years, but he’d been on forklifts the past three weeks, so he was out of practice. He liked to think that was the reason he had been so out of breath, and not his turning forty-three next month. Twenty-six of those forty-three years had been spent as a pack-a-day smoker, the import of which was not lost on him as he popped a Camel between his lips and sheltered its tip from the snow with one hand so he could light it. Jason was short but strong, thickly muscled and mostly tattooed, with rough hands used to working. He knew he wasn’t old, but some days he felt it. There were few, if any, wrinkles around his eyes but what peered out of those dark irises was an old enough soul, one that wondered more and more lately about where he’d been, and how that left him in terms of where to go next.
He made his way toward his car, a silver Hyundai nearly blotted out by the swirls of snow. He popped the trunk from the button on his key fob and took out the snow brush. It would take a while, he supposed, to clear enough snow off the car that he could drive it. He slammed the trunk lid down and trudged toward the driver’s-side door, fumbling with a gloved hand in his pocket to return his remaining pack of cigarettes to safety. Wind-driven clouds cast long, dark shadows over the car and the lot around it. It was in one of those shadows that Jason, who happened to glance up from his bracing huddle against the wind, noticed something duck out of sight around the front of his car. It was the movement he caught rather than any particular identifying feature, but some quality about it raised Jason’s hackles, and he frowned.
“Uh, hello?”
His boots crunched through the snow as he made his way to the front of the car. He was surprised to find that there were no footprints, no smudges of displaced snow along the bumper. Jason looked up, scanning the slope of grass and the wooded area beyond that cupped the eastern side of the factory building. It was tough to see through the snow, but Jason felt pretty sure there was no sign of movement, animal or otherwise. He glanced down at the front end of the car again.
Wait . . . there was a small spot at the far end of the bumper where small grooves had been imprinted into the fluffy snow. They looked like drag marks from thin, tapered fingers. Jason followed it around the far side of the car and crouched down to get a better look.
Up close, the marks struck him as even more puzzling. Not only had something dragged long fingermarks into the snow, but whatever it was had also carved thin furrows into the metal of the bumper.
“What the f—” Jason whispered, but let the final word trail off, muted by the dull, continuous thud of snowfall. There was a new shadow, suddenly darkening the grooves in his bumper. With it came a sound like glass being dragged over glass, a sound not much different in timbre from the wailing gusts of wind. This sound, though, seemed more substantial and much closer—right over his head, in fact.
Jason looked up and opened his mouth to scream, but the thing peering down at him from the roof of the car moved quickly. It was on his throat, tearing it open before the scream could surface. Still, though, the steam of Jason’s heat escaped the clawed-open hole with a small whine of breath that could have been a miniature cry. Or, it could have been the wind blowing over the jagged opening in Jason Houghton. Within minutes, small drifts of snow filled the glazing eyes and the slack-jawed mouth. The ragged hole in Jason’s throat still pumped a bloody spray that, against the snowy canvas beneath his body, blazed starkly crimson.
The argentine figure, ghost-like, seemed nearly translucent as it bent over the body, absorbing the blood. For a moment, it flickered a more solid outline. Had there been anyone else in the parking lot to see it, he or she would likely have thought it looked vaguely anglerfish-like, wide-eyed and scaly with serrated teeth swathed in fleshy, dull lips, big as a large dog with gangly arms and legs and taloned, three-digit hands and feet. Then it flickered out again, and was little more than the suggestion of movement as it bounded, print-less, across the ever-growing drifts of snow.
* * *
Jack Glazier was having a hell of a morning.
It had started with Katie. His ex-wife had called early, early enough to wake him. She knew he slept until six, so she’d called at 5:45, just to deprive him of those last fifteen minutes. It was one of those little passive-aggressive moves that had driven a wedge between them during their marriage and that had often swelled to flat-out aggression during the divorce. Jack didn’t hate Katie, but he sure as hell had come to dislike her. It had taken a while. She was Jack Jr. and Carly’s mother, and she had once been a woman he thought he could love and cherish for the rest of his life. But she liked to poke him with situational sticks, and her round refusal to ever take any share of blame or responsibility for the failure of their marriage left it squarely on his shoulders, a belief she worked into nearly every conversation. She’d been a stickler about getting what she deemed “her fair share from a neglectful, job-obsessed husband” and a marriage that, post-children, she had considered “largely a waste of [her] productive years.” She (wrongly) thought he’d had an affair with Kathy Ryan, and so she also found ways to work that into a conversation at least once in a while. Worst of all, she did little to hide her animosity toward him in front of the children, and for that, he found himself often fantasizing about slapping her silly. She could, at times, be warm and thoughtful, at times easygoing and even funny. But those times had grown few and far between since the divorce, and on good days, he still groaned when her number showed up on the caller ID.
She’d called to finalize the custody schedule for the summer. In the three years since the divorce, the kids’ schedule when they were out of school was to spend two weeks of every month with their dad and two with their mom, with alternating holidays. However, Katie wanted to talk at length about the snow and whether that should change their plans (he didn’t see why it should) and whether anyone in Connecticut outside of Colby had been contacted about the weather, like the National Weather Bureau or whoever in the federal government was in charge of such things (he had no knowledge of that, though he reassured her the folks in the municipal building were supposedly in contact with state officials regarding potential resource help). Jack expected a state of emergency would be called, particularly if the rest of the state was also affected, but he hadn’t heard anything yet in that regard. It was almost as if Colby was invisible to the rest of the outside world, and all attempts at communication in or out were being swept away by the snow. Jack didn’t tell Katie that, of course. He didn’t want her worrying the kids. Already she was driving him nuts, wanting to know how he was going to explain all this weather business to the children; he reassured her he would talk about it with them in an informative but non-frightening way.
It took forty-five minutes of such reassurances to finally get her off the phone, and promptly upon disconnecting, he spilled his mug of coffee across his desk. Half an hour later, he received word of Abe Maurner’s mother keeling over in the snow on her front lawn, Joe Bishop’s request for extended medical for his heart surgery, and Cali Richter’s report on freezing deaths a block away from the local homeless shelter on Trensfer Avenue. All throughout, the phone rang off the hook with concerned citizens demanding answers, not unlike Katie, about the weather and some downed power lines that appeared to be limiting cell usage and preventing Internet access altogether, and just what the hell were the police doing about it, anyway?
What he did not get, however, was anything useful from Cordwell’s preliminary autopsy report on the John Doe. He hadn’t even been able to identify the animal that had left those teeth marks, and there was no forensic evidence on the body whatsoever that could help identify the killer or killers.
Jack had a headache before eleven-fifteen that morning.
Then, around 4 PM, dispatch notified him of another homicide, a multiple this time. He and his team were being asked to report ASAP to Ormann Field at the end of Woodland Road. Texts had already gone out to the CS team, Morris, Teagan, and Kathy Ryan. Responding officers noted unusual circumstances.
“Unusual how?” he’d asked Sherry at dispatch when she told him.
“They didn’t say,” she’d replied. “They just said to get ahold of the task force on the ‘John Doe devil worship case’ right away. I’m guessing there are similarities between your JD and this scene, or something in this one that connects it to the last one.”
“Okay, Sherr. I’m on my way.”
“Hey, you be careful out there, huh? Don’t want to lose my favorite detective.”
“Yes, ma’am, I will. Wouldn’t want to disappoint my favorite dispatcher,” he flirted back, and he could hear her smile through the phone.
“Oh, one other thing—the ROs said to bring heat lamps.”
“Heat lamps?”
“Apparently, some of the evidence was deliberately frozen to the ground. They don’t think it can be chipped out without possible damage to the evidence. Jars, as I understand, though the ice surrounding has kept anybody from positively ID-ing anything in them so far. Mixed reports about the state of the bodies—you’re going to have a lot to sort out, I think. ROs just said there was ‘Kathy Ryan kind of stuff.’ You know how that goes.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause, and then Sherry added, “Uh-oh. Oh . . . oh no.”
“What?”
“Oh God, Jack,” she whispered. The change in her voice alarmed him.
“What? Sherry, what’s going on?”
“Calls coming in . . . ROs on two other scenes requesting your help. All multiple homicides in open spaces. All requesting your task force. You have to go, Jack. Go now. I’m texting you and your team all the info.”
Jack got up, setting his new mug of coffee to precarious wobbling. He barely noticed. He grabbed his keys and coat. “I’m on it, Sherry. Tell them I’m on my way.”
“It’s bad, Jack. Children, too, on these . . .”
An awful lump rolled over in Jack’s stomach. He hated when crimes involved children. It was really turning out to be a clusterfuck of a morning.
“What the hell’s going on out there, Sherry?” Jack’s question was soft, sad, and almost inaudible.
“Don’t know,” she answered, her voice wavering. “Maybe it’s the weather.”