Off Season - Jack Ketchum [93]
“You mean she sleepwalks?”
“No dad, she’s awake. I’m sure she’s awake. She goes to your room. And she hasn’t got clothes on. And she . . . does things. Down here.”
He glanced at me, saw where I was touching, and nodded. Then he looked back to the road. For a while he said nothing. He just watched the road ahead, thinking.
“I’ve never seen it,” he said finally. Then he patted my leg. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll keep an eye on her.”
That was all we said. I was relieved. Now it was up to him.
Aunt Lucy greeted us at the door and he stayed with us through coffee and Toll House cookies and then he said he had to be getting back and kissed her on the cheek and me on the forehead. We stood on the porch and watched him pull away and that was when I got my second premonition, the same as on that snowy night a year before, at the closing of the door.
It lasted only a moment. I didn’t let Aunt Lucy see me crying. Maybe I should have. Maybe it would have changed things. Maybe.
That night it snowed.
It snowed every day thereafter for the next four days and nights, straight through Aunt Lucy’s birthday. On the first two nights I was able to call him and he told me everything was fine and on the second night he whispered, “What we talked about, Jordy, in the car. I just wanted you to know she’s sleeping soundly. No problem. But it’s still real good of you to worry about your sister.”
My sister!
The third night the phones went out. The storm was even worse than the year before and lines were down over half the county. I cried myself to sleep. Aunt Lucy knew something was wrong with me. She was puzzled and upset. All I could talk about was when the snow was going to let up and wanting to get home. There was no way I could tell her what was really bothering me. And no way to get out of there either.
It was at some point on the fourth day that something clicked off inside of me and I went into a kind of stony silence, speaking only when spoken to and then in a low mutter that I can hear to this day. Overnight my voice had changed, become deeper, more adult. My walk changed too, got longer, looser, somehow more focused and certain. Everybody who saw me afterwards noticed and commented on it but only Aunt Lucy knew it had started there, at her house, the fourth day of the storm.
Before we knew.
Inside I was a total blank. I can’t remember actually thinking anything for the next two days until the snow finally stopped and the road-crews got to work clearing the roads. I was on the phone constantly all day long trying to get through. Nobody was answering. By three in the afternoon she’d enlisted the aid of a neighbor, Mr. Wendorf, to drive us out there in his pickup. By then she was worried too, and Wendorf, a thin balding man of about her age who had long ago worked at the phone company, spent most of his time trying to reassure us that no answer on the telephone didn’t necesserily mean nobody was home, not in this kind of weather.
The house looked much the same as it had the year before—big wide drifts against the house and barn and a silent, sleek white mass that covered everything so thoroughly that trees and house and barn seemed frozen in place, so heavy that the wind could get no real purchase on it but could only skim and swirl it lightly in our faces as we walked the fifteen feet from the car to the front door through a trackless, hip-deep waste.
We knocked and Aunt Lucy shouted but there was no answer. I heard the horses snorting in the barn. No smoke came out of the chimney. The house looked dead and silent.
There was a shovel by the door. Mr. Wendorf took it and scraped enough of the stuff away so that we could swing it open. Even he looked worried by then. I wasn’t. I was beyond that. I was empty.
The smell of the place hit us immediately and Aunt Lucy shoved me outside and told me to wait there while they went in. I opened the door very quietly and entered behind them. The dogs were missing. I’d seen no tracks outside around the house. We never