Snowy
‘Snowy.’
The voice was right in his ear, snapping him out of the grey half-dreaming zone that he’d drifted into while walking. Her voice. It could have been a comment on the conditions – the snow, the moonlight, the woodland road flat white except for the single set of tyre tracks (he’d walked on the verge on his way out) – but he knew better. She hadn’t called him Snowy in ages. The sound of it brought back a memory, years ago, curled up in her single bed in the Catford flat, she stroking his hair, Snowy… Snowy… Snoowwyyy… softly, over and over. And then that little laugh she used to do: soft and private, barely exiting her body, sweet with tenderness and regret…
He must still be in the grey zone, because he could hear that laugh now, weaving in and out of the hawthorn and holly to either side of him. It would be spooky were it not so obviously her – ghostly, if he didn’t know for a fact that she was alive and well, sitting in the car, probably pissed off, surely less than a mile away now.
She was not going to be pleased with the news he was bringing. It verged on the alarming. He’d seriously underestimated the walk back to the petrol station – ninety minutes, and after all that it was closed. Nothing else for miles and miles. One in the morning already: hours of night still to go. It was very, very cold. The petrol tank was a quarter full when he’d left her: how long could they afford to keep the heater running? She had never done well in the cold. He remembered a Christmas Day in London, five, six years ago – walking down the Strand, she bundled up in layers, face squashed up in her scarf and hood with that tuft of orange hair sticking out over her forehead, a comic-book rendition of ‘child in winter’. Tintin and Snowy – the two of them treating themselves to the city centre – skating at Somerset House, tea at the Courtauld Gallery, an impulse to blow too much money on Christmas dinner at the Savoy, but of course it was all booked up… the narrow tip of her nose turning a delicate shade of blue…
‘Snowy…’
This time there was no question of being half asleep. The voice was right there, not in his head but right beside him, and his first thought was a pocket call, on speaker, a freak patch of reception amidst the black spot that covered this whole area. He fumbled one glove off and pulled out his phone, the screen lighting up at his touch. Zero bars. No record of a call. He tracked back, held his phone aloft. No bars.
‘Snowy?’ – and a stirring in the hedgerows, a rustling like the wind, although he felt no wind. He stood very still, heart beating hard, all of a sudden, with the sense that he was not alone out here. Out here, in the profound and now somehow listening quiet of deep countryside, deeper than anything back home – hedgerows was a misnomer, implying neatly tended fields behind them, whereas these were simply the place where forest met road, edgerows, with the American woods stretching wild beyond – out here, and not alone. He found that he was gripping his phone like a weapon. Blithe Brit honeymooner out in the woods in his trainers, feet cramping with cold, no bear spray, not even sure if that was a real thing…
There is no bear, he scolded himself. Nothing bigger or more fatal than a man roams these woods. He imagined the noise that even a man would make, moving through the bushes, and compared it to the sound he’d heard – soft like the wind, except he had felt no wind – and forced himself to breathe, relax his grip on his phone, keep walking.
It couldn’t be far now.
And the voice: it was interesting, he decided to decide. Some ancient part of his brain was coming alive, out here in this deep dark place: a primitive need to not be alone, conjuring up a comforting Other. The voice itself had not been scary at any point. It was her. She was on his side, and against the imagined bears and bogeymen – a hedge against the terrors of the night. The purely irrational terrors, and a purely irrational hedge. Good to have cleared that up…
It couldn’t be far now. He walked faster (although it wouldn’t do to run – would feel like an admission of something unwarranted), fast enough that snow was shooting up his trouser-legs and trickling down inside his trainers.
Soon he’d be back in the car, thawing out his feet over the heater vents.
Up ahead now was a darker stretch where tree branches met overhead. He remembered passing through this bit on the way out. First there’d been the deserted building – something between a shed and a barn, long-term abandoned – and then a minute later this dark tunnel. He remembered feeling a little spooked even then, first by the building which, he supposed like any ruin seen by night, must have triggered something irrational (watching: he’d felt it was watching him); and then the yawning trees, the darkness throatlike beneath them, not knowing how long it went on…
This time he knew the dark stretch was not long at all, and what lay beyond was a five-minute walk (past the ruin) to his new wife who would no doubt be disappointed, even angry; but the car would be warm and someone was sure to come eventually.
She’d wanted to stop, when they passed the petrol station, four hours ago in the different world before the accident. The suggestion had irritated him – fussing, back seat driving, typical. They had enough petrol, easily, to reach their destination. She seldom drove, and was over-cautious.
Then the blowout, the swooping loss of traction, two seconds that stretched out like pulled putty; the car coming to rest, hood thrust into the low-spreading roadside trees; both of them staring straight ahead at the branches spackled across the unbroken windscreen. She broke the silence: ‘I knew we should have stopped.’ He’d tightened his grip on the steering wheel and asked what difference it would have made. She said she’d had a feeling. He breathed in and out, once, and got out to check the damage. Both front tyres: even if he’d been able to fit a spare with the car canted up on the verge, they were a wheel short. He estimated a forty-five-minute walk back to the petrol station to get help – quicker if he went solo. The thought of staying alone with the car gave her a bad feeling. He pointed out that any passing saviour would be more likely to stop for a woman in legible distress – crocked car, hazard lights on – than a pair of traipsing vagrants. He did not share his suspicion that whatever had blown out the tyres probably was such a one-off that it would not in fact have happened if they had, indeed, stopped at the petrol station. It was irrelevant to the argument, he felt.
A thought that had been nagging for expression, ever since he passed the ruin on the way out, now broke the surface. One of those vaguely New Age dictums you might come across in fortune cookies, or on the paper tags of yogic herbal teabags. Something like: never set out on a journey leaving anger behind you, because any parting might be your last. Too long for a teabag tag, and it didn’t quite have that air of smug wisdom nailed down, the way he was phrasing it. Anyway, the walk to the petrol station and back didn’t qualify as a journey. And it hadn’t been a proper falling-out: just one of those moments. It was only because this was their honeymoon, and there had been a few too many of those moments – but then again, that idea of a honeymoon belonged to an earlier age. They’d been together for eleven years. A little bickering was perfectly normal.
He was at the point now where the light from the tunnel’s entrance was at its weakest and the other end had yet to heave into view. A very little light filtered through the branches above. Not much snow had made it through, either – a dusting of icing-sugar – and he had to squint to make out the ghostly tyre tracks in the dark.
‘Snowy-snowy-snowy!’ Something brushed against his face, making him yell out – the sound shockingly loud, scaring him more than her voice had done, more than the touch of the… cobwebs? Lighter than that: more like a puff of wind, although that wasn’t right either; that didn’t capture the sense of intention, like something struggling to gather itself out of thin air with a touch just for him.
‘Jesus,’ he muttered, trying for rueful, coming out with panicked. He started to run. Now he could see the end of the tunnel – the curving white line of road, the curving black lines of the tyre tracks – up ahead, the ruin crouched to one side. The sight of the ruin filled him with such dread that he almost stopped, but then–
‘Snowyyyyyy!’
It couldn’t be her real physical voice, the car was still too far away and this was quiet, right here – quiet, but nonetheless strained to the limit – and so very sad.
It was her. He could almost see her now, trembling in the air all around him – a desperate, effortful haunting. Drawing level with the ruin he saw a set of footprints, chunky big-man boots, coming out of the ruin and merging with the nearside tyre track. He ran – slipped, fell – up again, running. The car was round the next bend, hazard lights painting the trees and the road in a slow, sickly yellow strobe.
He saw it, beached on the verge – the passenger side door was open, the interior lights on – and then his right foot was impaled by a hot lance. He screamed, hopped and toppled. He clutched his foot, twisting it round to see the spindly tripod sticking out through the sole of his trainer, not understanding. A dazzling flash of pain as he pulled it out. A warm rush of blood inside his shoe. He was holding a tripod of three-inch nails, topped by another identical point, the one that had pierced him. A word came to him – caltrops – more of them scattered across the road between here and the car, top points stippling up through the snow, waiting to pierce a foot or a tyre.
If he’d been the right sort of person, he might have checked the flat tyres more thoroughly, found something, realised. If he’d been another sort of person, he might have listened to her before.
He’d left her alone. He’d left her alone in the dark. He’d left her alone in the dark, and nothing more fatal than a man roamed these woods; but what was more fatal than a man, alone, lying in ambush in the dark American woods?
He scrambled upright, gasping with the pain of each step, trying to imagine the sort of person who would… what? Grab a tyre iron from the trunk. Fight the monster. The car was empty, a chaos of shattered snow tracking from the open door into the black undergrowth, her scarf looped like a signature over the hawthorn. He opened the trunk, scrabbling beneath the luggage, sobbing. What even was a tyre iron?
He couldn’t feel her anymore. Whatever had lingered, it was gone now. In his head, that other sort of person located the toolbox, chose his weapon and followed the trail into the woods. His mangled foot began to flutter uncontrollably. He fell to his knees, forehead resting against the cold sill of the trunk. Overhead, clouds mopped up the moon and stars, and began to shed a thick new fall of snow.
"Clouds mopped up the moon" fantastic line!
bloody hell!