Chapter 3

3

The Madness

* * *

The time was 3:46 a.m. and I was tired as all hell, but after telling my story, there was definitely no chance of sleep. On top of that, the snow outside hadn't stopped. I stood as Jonas was yawning and talking about hitting the hay. I needed another drink. Didn't matter if it was beer, whiskey, or Kool-Aid. My throat was scratchy and my tongue felt like a desert.

"Yeah, I'm hitting the hay, too," Stone said. "Matter of fact, just wake me up when the snow's melted. I packed my Speedo, not my North Face."

I crossed the kitchen floor and gripped the refrigerator's handle. It felt like touching dry ice. I pulled it open. No light came on. I reached past a Silver Bullet for a bottled water, but before my hands closed around the can, someone banged on the door so hard I jumped and knocked over nearly everything on the middle shelf.

"What the hell?" I said. There was that bad feeling in the pit of my stomach again. Momentarily forgotten but never completely gone.

Stone, Jonas, and I all looked at each other, then Stone shrugged.

We were three grown men, three grown men that shouldn't have been scared shitless, but here we were.

"Seriously, what the fuck?" Jonas whispered.

The pounding came again, this time more rapidly. My blood pressure spiked to deathly levels. It sounded like whatever was outside wanted in badly, and no flimsy piece of wood would stop them.

Then a voice shouted.

"Please! Let us in! Help!"

I barely heard whoever it was over the wind, but I stepped toward the door regardless.

"What are you doing?" Stone hissed. "Are you crazy?"

Maybe, but as I got closer and the voice outside grew louder and more desperate, I recognized who it belonged to.

It was Eleanor.

"Please! Let us in! He's coming!"

* * *

I threw open the door, and Eleanor and Mikey spilled inside. I caught Mikey by the collar of his jacket, but Eleanor went onto the couch, knocking over a lamp on the end table. It didn't break, but it could've for all the use we were currently getting out of it.

I rushed over. "What's wrong?"

"Who's coming?" Jonas asked.

Stone added: "Yeah, what the fuck is going on?"

Eleanor looked up at me. Her eyes were damp with tears. There was dried blood at one corner of her mouth. She wiped at it but it stayed.

"My dad. I don't know—he's—something's wrong with him. He shot Mom," Eleanor gasped.

I heard her, but I wasn't sure I heard right. "What? Your dad did what?"

"He killed our fucking mom!" Mikey shouted.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Stone said. He was up on his crutches now, and he walked over to us. Jonas kept his distance, shakily raising a beer to his lips. I took it upon myself to latch the deadbolt and put the chain on the door. That bad feeling in my stomach had jumped from my gut and into my chest, where it spread out in painful branches.

Mikey was babbling and railing off a stream of frightened expletives; Jonas was talking about calling the police; Eleanor was crying; Stone was leaning one shoulder on the wall and frantically tapping his cell phone's screen; and I was just trying to understand what the hell was happening.

"Okay," I said. "Let's all take a deep breath and calm down. Then we can go over this slowly."

The shouting stopped. All eyes focused on me. For a while, I said nothing and just observed, not believing any of this.

Eleanor's hair stuck up in every direction. The dried blood on her face didn't seem to belong to any wound she had, and there were other spots on her clothes. It was Mikey who had it the worst. His shirt, which I originally thought was red, wasn't. It was actually white, but blood had soaked it and turned it a dark pink color.

"My dad," Eleanor said again. She bit her bottom lip and closed her eyes. I thought she was going to sob, but Mikey put his arm around her shoulder and the sob never came. "My dad, he went out into the snow. I don't know what happened, but when he came back…he was different. I could see it in his eyes."

"He looked rabid," Mikey said. "He started yelling and breaking stuff. I've never seen my dad do anything like that. He never gets angry, not even if he's had too much whiskey like he did tonight."

"I came downstairs," Eleanor continued, and this time the sob exploded from her like a gunshot. She covered her face with both of her hands.

No one said anything; we let her get it out of her system. Sometimes that's what a person needs, and it's all you, as emotional support, can do. After I heard the rest of the story, no amount of sobbing could fix what they'd gone through.

Eleanor spoke softly: "I came downstairs and he was holding one of his rifles—"

"The one from over the fireplace," Mikey added. It was a minor detail, but I had to suppress a shiver. Only a few hours earlier, Stone and I had admired that very rifle with Ed. A levelheaded Ed. And though I hadn't heard the rest of Eleanor's story at this point, I could've guessed what happened next. I'm sure you could, too.

There had been an angry man holding a gun, Eleanor and Mikey were covered in blood, and neither their mother or father weren't with us.

Eleanor hadn't said it yet, she had only said her mom had been shot, but I knew. We all knew.

Angie was dead.

* * *

"He hit her with the gun first," Eleanor said, "and she started screaming. I was right there and I couldn't do anything, but I should've stopped him. I should've hit him or— I don't know, something. It all happened so fast and I was frozen. I couldn't—"

I put my hand on her forearm and met her eyes. I didn't know the pain she was going through, not truly, but I knew what it was like to feel like you should've done more. "It's okay," I said, but it wasn't. Not really. What else can you say? I didn't completely understand what was going on. It was too early in all the madness.

"My mom is dead!" Mikey yelled. "It's not okay! It's not okay!" He doubled over and let out the sobs he had been holding in. I couldn't understand his pain, either. I mean, the boy was covered in his mother's blood, for God's sake. Seventeen may have been close to adult age, but Mikey was far from it. I knew how your age didn't matter when you went through something like that.

Eleanor wrapped her arms around him and he buried his face into her neck, his body shuddering. The sight alone was enough to break your heart.

"What happened then?" Jonas said, but Stone quickly hit him, and that made Jonas jump.

"Shut up, dummy," Stone hissed.

I gave them a warning glance that said now wasn't the time, then turned back to Eleanor. "We have to get a hold of the cops. Did you already do that? We're not getting any service over here. Were you—"

Eleanor shook her head. "Nothing. I don't even have my cell. I left it back at home. But we have a landline at home. We never use it, but it works."

That was surprising. It seemed most people ditched home phones years ago.

"Okay, we'll keep that in mind," I said, but I really didn't want to go out in this weather with the clothes I had on. "What about you, Mikey? Do you have your cell?"

Mikey's sobbing had lessened. Now he was weeping softly, but he nodded and pulled a Samsung from the pocket of his snow-crusted sweatpants. He kept his face against his sister as he handed it up. Eleanor took it, her hand shaking madly, and held it out for me.

I tapped the screen. The white light illuminated smears of blood. It was hard to look past, but I did, and I saw the service bar in the top right-hand corner. It showed no bars.

I hadn't expected any.

"No signal," I said.

"Fuck," Stone muttered, and it was Jonas's turn to hit him. "What was that for?"

Jonas shrugged. "Don't curse in front of women and children."

"I think this situation merits cursing," Stone replied. "Don't be an asshole."

Jonas went to hit him again, but Stone blocked it.

"Where's your father now?" I asked, ignoring the two across the room.

"I—I don't know," Eleanor answered. Mikey let go of her then and crumpled to the floor.

I went to him and offered my hand. He took it without looking. The poor kid was in shock. "C'mon, let's get you warm." I guided him toward the fireplace and sat him down on the bricks. Eleanor followed, sitting next to him. "Jonas," I said, "can you go in my room and get Mikey a clean shirt? Might be a little big, but I think it'll be okay."

Jonas nodded and disappeared down the dark hall.

I didn't know what to do. None of us did, really. All we knew was that we were stuck in the lake house for the time being. The cars weren't going to be able to plow through all that snow. The last time I looked out the window it had nearly piled up to the side-view mirrors, and chances were with the temperature plummeting so drastically, the engines wouldn't work anyway. Or they would've had a hell of a time turning over. Besides, cars were useless when you couldn't see the damn road. What we needed was an army tank, and that wasn't exactly in the cards.

All we could do was pray for the morning sun to rise and melt the snow away. Enough for us to get on the roads, at least.

Even then, I had a feeling it wasn't going to happen. This all seemed so…final. I was right, of course, but we had bigger problems at that moment in time, and I was about to find out about another of them.

Jonas came back with an old Cleveland Cavs t-shirt. He tossed it to me, and I gave it to Eleanor. I figured she'd have an easier time getting Mikey to change, but to both of our surprises, Mikey took it and walked on his own down the hall. As he left, the flames flickered in his eyes, showing the tears still streaming down his cheeks.

Eleanor watched him go, then she put her head in her hands.

I looked at Stone. He widened his eyes, nodding at her, and mouthed, Go on.

I mouthed back, What can I do? Because I honestly wasn't sure.

Like always, though, Stone was right. She needed comfort, not space. So I reached my hand out, about to set it on her shoulder and give her a reassuring squeeze, but then she looked at me, tears swimming in her eyes, and I made a move like I was stretching.

It wasn't very smooth, I'll admit.

"Grady," she said, and the fact she remembered my name actually surprised me.

"Yeah?"

She lowered her voice, speaking conspiratorially. "There's something…there's something else."

I leaned closer because she was barely audible at all.

"I'm probably crazy," she continued. "I don't know…it could've been stress and shock."

"It's okay," I said. "Go on."

I thought I was prepared for whatever Eleanor was going to say.

I wasn't.

"When we ran over here, I saw something…" She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hands. "I saw people. Like these shadowy figures. They were just standing there, watching us."

"What?" I said, raising an eyebrow. "People?"

"Yeah, but the thing is," Eleanor said, "they looked like people, but I don't think—I don't think they were people."

* * *

"People—or things—just standing out there? No one's crazy enough to do that," Jonas said unbelievingly.

Stone crutched toward the fireplace. "I'm a pretty open-minded dude—more so now that I've accepted the fact it's snowing in July—but that sounds…a tad unlikely."

"I know," Eleanor said. "But I saw them."

"They'd freeze to death in a matter of minutes," Jonas said. "And you know they sure as hell didn't have their winter jackets ready to go. Not when it was almost ninety degrees all week."

"If they were people, yes, but I don't know what they were," Eleanor replied. This made me think about the figure I'd seen out in the snow, or thought I'd seen. It looked like an animal of some sort, but after hearing what Eleanor said, I wasn't sure.

Just then Mikey came out wearing my Cavs shirt. It was a little baggy, and old and stained in various spots, but it was better than wearing a shirt soaked with your mother's cold blood.

"Did you see anything out there?" Jonas asked him.

"Jonas, leave it," I said. "Let's just focus on what we do next."

Mikey stopped and looked at us in the den with surprise. "People?" he said. He had a rag in his hand, and he wiped his arms with it. "No, I didn't see any people."

"There," Jonas said, "that settles it."

"Just because he didn't see something she did," Stone said, "doesn't mean they weren't there."

"I did see something," Mikey interrupted. "But not people. They looked like…spiders." He shuddered. "But it was probably just shadows, really."

Jonas laughed. "Now, that is crazy."

I shook my head, a queasiness heavy in my stomach. "Let's just move on." Everyone's eyes settled on me. We needed a plan. If Ed was really out there and out of his mind, we weren't safe here. "Jonas, you and I need to head over to the Harks' house."

"What? Go out in that? You're crazy."

"You're throwing around a lot of 'crazy' tonight, man," Stone said.

Eleanor was shaking her head. I saw a fresh gleam of tears in her eyes. "No, you can't go over there."

"We need to call the cops," I said. "And you have both a backup generator and a landline, right?"

Eleanor nodded.

Ed had thought a nasty thunderstorm was coming on earlier that night. He was worried the power might get knocked off. "If it does, y'all can come on over here. We got a generator. We can even tell scary ghost stories like we're at summer camp!" Ed had said, laughing.

"But my mom…" Mikey said now.

"And my dad," Eleanor added. "I don't know where he's at, but he has guns, lots of guns." She swallowed, which seemed difficult. "He could do to you guys what he did to Mom."

I hated saying it, but it was the truth. "If we don't get some sort of protection, cops or our own weapons, he could do it to all of us." I looked at Stone. "You'll be all right here, yeah?"

Stone nodded and gave me a thumbs-up.

"Jonas, are you in? I can go by myself, but I don't want to."

With a steady hand, he grabbed his mostly-full beer and tipped it back. It was gone in about two huge gulps. He crushed the can and tossed it into the kitchen, where it clattered loudly in the sink. Then he wiped the foam from the corner of his mouth with the back of his arm. "Fuck me. Let's go."

* * *

We didn't have much in the way of winter attire. The warmest thing I packed was a pair of sweats and a long-sleeve t-shirt that was riddled with holes and covered in dried paint from when I helped my dad put a fresh coat on the garage. I'm not big on shopping. I'll wear my clothes until they're nothing but thread. I have a whole closet full of winter stuff back home, but that wasn't doing me much good here.

We raided the closets in the lake house, hoping for left-behind jackets or snow pants or boots. The closest thing we found to that was a tweed suit coat with elbow pads. It fit me pretty well, but like the bear rug, it smelled like dust and old basements.

"There's some stuff in our house," Eleanor said. "Upstairs. My dad has heavy coats and jeans up there."

"Thanks," I said.

We were standing at the door, Jonas and me. I was wearing my long-sleeve tee under the tweed jacket with a dark pair of sweatpants, OHIO STATE written down the right leg. Jonas had a pair of jeans in his luggage, but nothing but tank tops for shirts. Stone suggested the bear rug, to which Jonas laughed. Then the wind had screamed worse than it had all night, and Jonas changed his mind pretty fast. He wrapped himself up in it, and I cinched a belt around his waist to keep it from flapping open.

It felt like we were preparing to brave the Arctic and not just going a football field's length down the beach. It was insane.

Eleanor grabbed my hand. I was wearing socks over each one, a sad replacement for gloves but better than nothing. I could feel the iciness of her skin through the cotton. The way she was trembling, too.

"Be careful," she whispered, then she let go and stepped back. In a louder voice: "Both of you."

I nodded.

"All right, let's go freeze our nuts off," Jonas said. "Some vacation this is."

I turned the handle. The others retreated to the fire, but its heat was nothing compared to the awesome power of the cold that rushed in. Jonas and I slipped outside and closed the door. The wind blew and did most of the hard work. It slammed shut hard enough for me to think the glass would shatter. It didn't. Not that it mattered much because nothing was stopping the cold in the end.

The snow was coming down harder than ever. From the porch, I couldn't even see the hunk of car-shaped white that was my buried Honda only a few feet away.

"Okay," I shouted, "stay close. Baby steps."

Jonas nodded. We each had wrapped t-shirts over our faces and around our heads. Snow had already crusted over Jonas's. Mine was sure to follow soon, if it hadn't already.

I took the first step down where I thought the porch ended. Jonas latched onto the back of my jacket. We went together. The snow was still fluffy, for the most part, which meant we sank and had to plow through it. It almost came up to my waist.

Moving was a hell of a workout, that was for sure.

The wind bit at the exposed flesh of my face and dried my eyes out, but we moved steadily onward. About three minutes into our expedition, I saw the lights of Eleanor's house through the white wall of snow. Just barely.

The generator was still working. That was good. The problem, besides the freezing temperature and the constant barrage of snow, was actually my own mind. I kept picturing shadows surrounding us. In the shape of people. In the shape of spiders and coyotes and wolves. On the surface, I knew it was insane, but deep down I had my doubts. The unexplainable had already happened, but where did it end and where did plausibility begin?

Believe me when I say I had not the slightest idea.

Jonas bumped into me. I lost my balance and started slipping—tennis shoes were my only option of footwear, unfortunately—but Jonas grabbed me by the waistband before I got lost in the snow, possibly forever.

"Why'd you stop?" he yelled.

"What?" I hadn't realized I stopped.

Jonas shook his head, the crusted snow falling around him, and pointed toward the house. "Keep going!"

I did, but it was only a few hard steps later that I stopped again.

"What?" Jonas shouted.

It was my turn to point, and I pointed to the right, down the embankment toward the freezing lake, which you could barely see because the snow filled in the gap, but there was a light there. Not made by electricity; it came from flames.

"Do you see that?" I asked.

"See what?"

"The fire."

I saw it clear as day. By that, I mean it seemed real.

"There's no fire, Grady! C'mon, I'm pretty sure I lost one ball already. I need both. If I go home missing a nut, Miranda's gonna kick my ass!"

Shit, Jonas had a wife and twins at home. He was probably an emotional wreck not knowing what had become of them. If God was good, they would be sound asleep, unaware of this monster blizzard, but whether this snow had touched down three hours away or not was something we weren't sure about. We knew it fell in South Carolina at this point, but that was it. Logic said it fell all over and Jonas, irrational as he could be sometimes, knew this, too, I'm sure. He had to, and that had to damn near kill him. Who wouldn't be torn up about their wife and kids' fate in a freak incident like the one we were living through? If Jonas was, he did a hell of a good job hiding it.

Maybe if he'd had lasted longer, that emotion would've reared its ugly head, I don't know. Doesn't matter because Jonas was the first to go.

The fire I was seeing burned brighter and came closer.

Or so I thought it did.

"Grady?" Jonas said. I barely heard him with the whipping wind and my mind focused on the encroaching blaze. I was hypnotized. Frozen.

A few seconds later, I saw the source of the flames.

It was the dead boy, the one I couldn't save. He was still burning, and he was coming for us.

* * *

I don't remember screaming. I heard the sounds, but I didn't think they came from me.

The fire had eaten away most of the boy's flesh, leaving only a skull, but his eyes were whole and I recognized those as easily as I'd recognize my own face in a mirror.

Fear throbbed through my veins, colder than anything outside.

"Why did you leave me?" the boy asked. "I didn't deserve to die. I had so much life to live, you said it yourself. Didn't you?"

I was stunned, unable to move my legs, though I wanted nothing more than to run as fast and as far away as possible.

A nightmare. That was what I thought it was. Jonas was saying nothing, but I felt his presence next to me. I managed to turn my head, neck creaking, and saw he was transfixed at something else in front of him.

I can't say exactly what it was—with the snow and the smoke from the burning boy all around us, it was hard to see much of anything. The best description I can give is the same one Eleanor gave me back at the lake house: a shadow in the shape of a person.

And this shadow reached toward him.

Jonas screamed.

The boy behind me kept talking: "I felt my eyes pop out of my head, Mister Fireman. Did ya know that? When the ceiling came down and crushed me, they popped right out! Then all that fire melted them into goo and I could feel it rolling down my cheeks—"

This is not real, I told myself. It can't be. This is beyond impossible. He is dead. I saw them pull his body from the wreckage. I saw three floors come down atop him.

I was both right and wrong.

I closed my eyes tight and said it aloud. "It's not real, it's not real, it's not real."

But when I opened them, the boy was still there, still talking. So was the shadow hovering around Jonas.

"And all this blood squirted outta my ears and mouth. It tasted super yucky!" the boy continued.

Jonas remained transfixed as the shadow began moving toward him, shrouding him like the Reaper's robe.

"Jonas!" I shouted. I don't know how I did it, I don't know how I tore myself away from the dead boy right in front of me, but I did, and I grabbed Jonas around the wrist. His body was stiff, corpse-like. He wasn't budging. I pulled with all the strength I had left, determined not to lose Jonas the way I lost the boy. The boy who was somehow right here.

No, I didn't understand what was going on then, and I'm not sure I entirely understand now, but all I knew then was we had to go. We had to go before this snow became our graves.

"Don't leave me, Mister Fireman! Don't leave—"

Finally, Jonas budged. He turned his wide eyes my way and we took off. I knew not to look over my shoulder, but I couldn't help myself.

The shadow thing was gone, but the burning boy was still standing in the same spot I had left him. The flames crackling all over his body melted a large circle in the snow. With the accompanying brightness, I saw that one of his eyes hung from its socket, dangling there. The other eye was goo, like this thing had told me, and it was running down his cheek.

My stomach clenched with fear and nausea. I nearly stopped running. Maybe I would've, had Jonas not been with me, but when I began losing my balance, he grabbed my arm and pulled me up before I face planted and whatever those things were caught me again.

We climbed up the short hill and on to the Harks' deck. My breath exploded out of me, leaving a white cloud of vapor hanging in the air.

Jonas was babbling. I only caught hints of what he said. "…what was that? I saw my—"

I pushed past him toward the sliding door. It was cracked open about six inches. A thick layer of ice had caked over the glass on both sides. On the inside, smeared but recognizable, was a bloody handprint. I wondered who it belonged to. Was it Eleanor's? Or was it Mikey's? Did one of them plant their palm against the door as they ripped it open in their mad scramble to get away from their insane, rifle-wielding father? Or maybe it belonged to Angie, their mother. Had she stood there when Ed shot her, clutched the wound in surprise, and tried to stay up by finding balance using the glass before she fell over and died? Was she still dead?

I didn't know, and I wasn't sure I wanted to. All I wanted was to get inside the house.

Like I saw earlier, the lights were still on. A jet of heat streamed outward toward us, an invitation if I'd ever known one. Jonas and I both felt it. He threw the door open, the track screeching as loud as the wind, and we both went in. I closed it half a second later. It was much warmer inside, yeah, and I didn't want any more of that heat to escape, especially when we didn't know how much juice remained in the generator, but it was more than that. Those shadow-things were fresh in my mind, and though I doubted something as flimsy as glass could stop them, I felt better with the door closed.

When you think about it, it was the adult equivalent to a kid hiding from the imaginary closet monster by pulling the covers over their face.

Now the monsters weren't imaginary.

"What the fuck was that?" Jonas said. "Did you see that? My stepdad was standing there in a wife-beater with a beer in his hand. He was yelling at me for not bringing up the trash cans. He started taking off his belt and wrapping it around his knuckles. Grady, I—"

I shook my head. "I-I don't know what that was."

"Grady, he's been dead for twelve years."

"I know," I said. "I didn't see him, not like you did, but I believe you…because I saw something, too. The boy I couldn't save. He was on fire, but alive and talking to me." I closed my eyes. I thought I was going to cry.

"What the actual fuck, man." Jonas leaned over the counter and dry-heaved. The booze wasn't the cause, I can guarantee that. "When I looked at you, there was like a big cloud of black smoke in the shape of a person just hanging around you." He heaved again. "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I feel like I'm in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Did we get drugged or something?"

"No, I don't think so." But I thought that would be much better than the truth. "This is real," I continued. "Whatever we saw out there in the snow, it was real."

Jonas began unwrapping the shirts from his head. I collapsed on a nearby stool. I had no energy. I was scared as hell, on the verge of either sobbing or screaming my lungs out. We didn't know what was going on, but we did know one thing: we were shit out of luck.