Then—it was all over.

  The mirror fell from her hand, clattered on the rubber floor mats, and she leaned her head back against the passenger’s window and closed her eyes. Sweat plastered her face. Her cheeks weren’t red anymore, but a deep crimson, yet her lips were tinted blue and trembling. Even when you were burning up, you remained cold in this snow-ravaged world.

  “Mia? C’mon, talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything,” I urged. “Keep yourself distracted.”

  She opened her eyes; one of them was bloodshot, veins like lightning bolts branching in the whites. The look she gave me was classic Mia. Her I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit look.

  “Your childhood. Tell me about growing up in Canada.”

  “I played with Barbies, dressed up like a princess for Halloween, went to school and did finger-paintings for my mom, who hung ‘em on the fridge even though they were complete dog shit.”

  I glanced over and smiled.

  “Then I got wise and grew up. Realized how shitty the world was—can’t believe it’s even shittier now. I dropped out of school when I was sixteen. Mom got mad, disowned me—you know, the usual B.S.”

  “Okay,” I interrupted. “Let’s focus on the good things.”

  “There ain’t been much good.”

  “Your first kiss?”

  “A poster of Zac Efron.”

  “Can’t blame you there.” I laughed so hard I almost hit a buried car sticking out of the snow, and had to swerve to miss it by a hair. It didn’t help that the storm made it nearly impossible to see farther than twenty feet. Mia didn’t appreciate the sudden jostling.

  “Christ, Grady, you need me to drive? I’d probably do a hell of a lot better than that, and I currently have blood pourin’ out of my vagina.” She chuckled, but the pain hadn’t left her face.

  As awful as an image that was, I apologized and made a show of keeping my hands at ten and two. Besides the occasional buried object, there wasn’t much out here to crash into. Trees lined the roads. Sometimes a small building could be seen in the distance too. They reminded me of gravestones in a frozen cemetery.

  I didn’t like that train of thought, so I said, “C’mon, first real kiss.”

  “First real one? Hmm…” She tapped her chin. “A guy named John, at summer camp. He had silvery blond hair and sun-kissed skin. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, and he was a year older. We made out under a ping pong table while everyone was down at the lake. I thought I was in love with him.”

  This John fella sounded a lot better than the guy who got her pregnant. “What happened?”

  “Same shit that always happens. He only thought with his dick. I wanted The Notebook romance, and he wanted to bang me.”

  I cringed.

  “No, it didn’t happen,” she said. “I avoided him after he sent me the first dick pic.”

  “First?”

  “Of many. John was a capital ‘P’ Pervert. He sent me one on Snapchat not too long before all this happened.” She nodded toward the windshield, out at the falling snow. “The message said ’Still yours if you want it, babe.’ I sent back ‘Maybe…’ Of course, being the perv he is, he took the bait and asked me to send him a picture of my tits. So I sent him the most disgusting image of swollen cow udders a Google search could find, and that was the last I heard from him.” She cackled.

  “Should’ve called the cops. I’m pretty sure you can’t just send pictures of your dong to people. It’s sexual harassment or something.”

  “Weren’t you a cop?”

  “Fireman.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, if I called the cops every time I got a surprise dick pic on Snapchat or Tinder, they woulda blocked my number.”

  I shook my head. “I could never be a woman.”

  “Sure you could. Just put on a wig and tuck it in.”

  “Tuck it in?”

  She pointed below my belt.

  “That’s not what I meant, but you’re disgusting, Mia.”

  She laughed again, and I laughed with her, glad she was distracted. Her laughter, however, abruptly stopped and turned into a grunt of pain. Her body was gearing up for another contraction.

  Through her short, sharp breaths, she whispered, “I’m not gonna make it.”

  I barely heard her over the roar of the engine, which I had been pushing to its absolute limit for the better part of the hour we’d been on the road.

  “What?”

  “This…it’s going to kill me. I can feel it. It’s k-karma. OH…FUCKKKKKKK!”

  “Breathe, Mia. Breathe.” Those words had become our mantra—that, and “fuck.”

  “Karma for being a shitty puh-person. Karma for fightin’ with my m-mom and k-killin’ Billy.”

  I gave her my hand. As she squeezed, my knuckles ground together until I was sure the bones had fractured. “Keep breathing, it’s gonna pass. Forty-five seconds, that’s it, and then you’re home free.”

  I guided the snowmobile out from the cover of trees as the road curved like the map said it would, and that was when something in the distance caught my attention. I guessed it was only half a mile away, and easy to see in the darkness.

  It was a gray tower standing nearly two hundred feet on a rise of snow-covered land.

  A light shone at its apex.

  A beacon.

  Hope.

  I pulled my hand from Mia’s weakening grip and shouted, “Look!”

  She gave no reply. When I turned to her, I saw her eyes rolling to the back of her head. Her body had gone limp, and she was sliding to the floor.

  “NO-NO-NO! MIA!”

  I grabbed her arm and shook, thinking she was dead. The whole time, I hadn’t slowed down. Nor were my eyes on the expanse of white in front of us.

  “MIA, WAKE UP! MIA!”

  She jolted.

  “Mia, stay with me!” I shouted. “We’re almost there! Five more minutes!”

  She mumbled something. I had no idea what she said; her voice was too thick with pain and exhaustion to understand.

  I looked down at the seat. Blood. Even more than I’d seen earlier. Warm and sticky. Steam radiated from it in wispy white waves. My stomach dropped—not with sickness but with fear.

  That much blood… These conditions…

  Things were only getting worse.

  And worse.

  A loud clank rattled from somewhere beneath my feet. I had hit something. In the frosty rearview, I saw a metal object sticking out of the snow. I thought it was the roof of a covered bus stop waiting area, but I wasn’t sure. Whatever the case, the snowmobile shook and one of the skis cracked. At the same time, as we listed to the left, the headlights flickered, went out, and then came back on at about twenty percent power. A wire must’ve come loose.

  As I righted the sled with a few harsh jerks on the wheel, Mia began rolling off of the seat. I shot a hand out to grab her before she could land on her belly. All her weight (dead weight, my brain whispered) bent my elbow back, and I bellowed in pain.

  She wasn’t dead. I knew this because she turned her head and vomited. It was mostly frothy white spittle, but there were flecks of blood in it. Her head lolled as she moaned. I reached over and cleared as much of the sick as I could from her mouth. Meanwhile, the snowmobile dragged to the broken side again, and I snapped both hands back on the wheel.

  The lighthouse, I told myself. The lighthouse, the lighthouse, the lighthouse.

  It was growing closer, but at what seemed like an insanely slow rate.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it...” Mia murmured. “It was an accident, Ma. I promise…”

  Still talking. Delirious, but still talking. I thought that was a good sign. I didn’t want to lose either one of them, her or the baby, but if I lost both…I wasn’t sure how I’d find the strength to continue.

  The windows had fogged over. I could barely see through the windshield. I swiped away the condensation in a series of tiny arcs, moving as quickly as I could, still fighting with the steering wheel to keep us in a straight line.

  In the seconds before the glass fogged over again, the dimmed headlight illuminated the outline of a covered bridge. The covered bridge Ramsey had told me about before we fled, which meant that beyond the heavy curtain of snow, the City’s gates awaited us.

  Once you get through it, you’re just about home free, Grady. That is, if they even let your asses in…

  “Oh, they’ll let us in,” I whispered. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  The bridge was only fifty feet away. We could get there. Then when it was about five feet away, I eased off of the gas, and I squinted to see the best possible entry.

  Instead of completely choking up the entrance like Ramsey warned, there was a small hill just big enough, I thought, for the sled to fit through. But the darkness within was about as inviting as the mouth of a giant beast. It was a place that undoubtedly devoured light, which was something we didn’t have much of in the first place.

  I kept on the gas, yet part of me longed to stop and turn around, go back the way we came. I knew if we went in the tunnel, there was a large chance we weren’t ever leaving it.

  Still, it was a risk I had to take. For Mia, for her daughter.

  I hit the brakes as I eased the sled down the hard-packed decline. Within the tunnel was a dusting of snow, light powder the wind had blown in. It stretched as far as halfway, fifty or so feet, then grew thinner and thinner before the asphalt took its place. I wasn’t sure if I could ride a snowmobile on bare road, but at this point, I didn’t care. Even if it killed me, I was getting Mia into the City.

  The darkness pressed against the windows like a living thing. I gunned the engine, hearing the left ski scrape across the asphalt. Sparks flew from that side. The dark swallowed them up like it swallowed the headlights, and their brightness stretched all of about three feet, useless.

  Ahead, the roof had caved in under the weight of the snow. Large sheets of corrugated steel hung low, blocking our path. I didn’t bother slowing, and I shot through the gap on the left of the fallen piece. The snowmobile raked against the side.

  Goodbye, mirror. Goodbye, paint job.

  We somehow fit through, and although my eyes hadn’t adjusted to this new darkness, I thought I saw a crescent moon of gray another fifty feet away at what must’ve been the end of the tunnel.

  But in the foreground, my eye caught something else.

  Not something…

  Someone.

  The broken headlights hardly illuminated the stooped figure standing in the middle of the road. But I knew that posture. I knew it from the dozens of old pictures seared into my memory. My father kept them in the attic, in the same box he kept the notebooks full of short stories and poems.

  All I had to do was close my eyes and a mental photo album of my parents opened.

  Here they were on their wedding day, happy, smiling, young. Here they were kissing at the top of a Ferris wheel at the county fair. Here they were standing with their arms around each other at a Bon Jovi concert. Here they were sitting up in a hospital bed with a newborn baby boy cradled against my father’s chest. Here they were crowded around a birthday cake with a single candle sticking out of it, the baby boy between them now a little boy of one year.

  My mother and father.

  My mother’s shoulders were hunched together and over and her neck was slightly craned in each of these photographs. Dad said when the cameras were around, she’d get so shy, she collapsed in on herself.

  The figure in the road stood with that same posture. It had on a blue sundress like the one my mother wore at my first birthday party, and it also wore my mother’s face.

  Yet, it was not my mother.

  Only…my brain, in all its excitement and fear, failed to realize this.

  My mother smiled with both her mouth and her eyes. Eyes that looked just like mine.

  In that moment, she was as real as the snow.

  I braked and cut the wheel, narrowly missing her. The back of the sled fishtailed as I fought for control again and found none. The next thing I knew, the pile of snow at the end of the tunnel was rushing to meet us.

  I drove right into it.

  And the whiteness consumed everything.

  6

  The Tunnel

  It took crashing into the bank of snow to make me realize the figure standing in the road behind us wasn’t my mother. Call me stupid, or an idiot, or a dumbass—such names are probably justified—but put yourself in my shoes for a second.

  You see, I was the boy who grew up without a mom. When I awoke from a nightmare, I couldn’t seek solace in the comfort of maternal arms. There was no soft-skinned, long-haired woman to hold me and tell me everything was all right. I would stay in bed, my brow damp with sweat, my heart beating madly, and stare at the dark ceiling until sunrise. If I had woken my father and told him of the evil monsters that stalked my dreams, he would’ve told me to man up and go back to bed. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my father. He was a great man, a hard worker, and always funny and sweet at the right moments, but he was largely a no-nonsense type of guy. Like his father before him, he believed a boy became a man pretty much right out of the womb.

  I had no one to give macaroni pictures of houses and trees to. I had no one to make cards for, to cook breakfast and pick flowers for on Mother’s Day—a Sunday I didn’t look forward to, but rather dreaded because it was a reminder of what I didn’t have.

  I spent countless hours of my childhood upstairs in that cramped attic where my father kept my mother’s belongings. The insulation lay bare along the walls. Cobwebs hung from the rafters, waving in the stale air. Sometimes a spider would amble past, crawling over the notebooks, pictures, and papers splayed out on the hardwood. Sometimes those spiders would be big and fat and hairy—terrifying to a boy of seven or eight—yet I braved them as I read and reread my mother’s journals and notebooks until I could recite them to you verbatim.

  So, when the sled cracked the snow and my head cracked the dashboard, this knocked some much-needed sense into me. That is not my mother, I told myself. She’s been dead for almost three decades. That is a wraith. It wants to kill or eat or drain or do whatever it is they do to us.

  All kinds of lights were flashing on the instrument panel. Warnings of disconnected parts, of low fuel, of an overheated battery. A soft alarm played on a loop, losing strength each time it chirped. I pulled myself away from the wheel, and tried restarting the engine. No luck; it didn’t even grind. It was pretty much exactly what I had expected.

  I swiped at the blood that gushed from my nose with the back of my hand. It was warm against my upper lip.

  I turned. Mia had fallen halfway onto the floor. Her upper half remained on the seat. Her body was twisted, but by no means broken. If anything, she looked a tad uncomfortable—that is, if she could be more uncomfortable than she already was in her current condition.

  The sled had collided with the embankment at less than twenty miles per hour. I hit the brake at the last possible moment, but I hit it hard, which helped reduce the impact. The snow was packed tightly, but no match for our vehicle. Still, it had beat up the front end and broke what was left of the headlights, but mostly it just absorbed the blow. Had we hit the steel walls or a building, I don’t think Mia would’ve survived. For once, instead of killing us, the snow had done the opposite. It kept us alive.

  I grabbed Mia’s legs and lifted them back onto the seat. The blankets no longer covered her bare flesh, and dried (and fresh) blood coated her inner thighs. She stirred at my touch, opened her eyes, and mumbled, “What’s going on?”

  “Hang tight,” I said, not wanting to worry her. I took off my coat and threw it over her body just as her eyelids fluttered and closed again. A t-shirt beneath a sweater beneath a hoodie wasn’t enough to keep me warm in this terrible cold, but thankfully, the adrenaline helped in that regard. For a moment, at least.

  But when the monster called my name from the pitch-blackness behind us, fresh chills rippled down my spine.

  The alarms and lights on the dashboard had stopped. The wind no longer blew. The world had become graveyard-quiet.

  Except for the voice.

  “Graaaady! Are you all right, my sweet pea?”

  The voice of my mother, but was it my mother’s true voice? Had the wraith excavated it from my memory banks and used it to gain my trust? I can’t say for sure, but real voice or not, it took everything within me not to run to it.

  “Come here and let momma kiss your boo-boo.”

  “It’s not her,” Mia moaned. Her head rocked from side to side. “Whoever it is out there, it’s not them.”

  “I can’t believe how big you’ve gotten. A man now! But you’ll always be momma’s little boy, won’t you, Grady?”

  I didn’t realize I was crying until the freezing tears crackled on my cheeks.

  Footsteps echoed along the tunnel’s walls, slow and even.

  Labored.

  I searched for the bag Eleanor had packed. A can of bug spray, a lighter, and possibly a flashlight were inside. I knew that, but the crash had caused the contents to spill all over the floor, so I was reduced to slapping until my hand hit something.

  First the cold cylindrical can of Off!, and then the lighter.

  It was time to face the music.

  The footsteps quickened as I crawled out of the snowmobile. I sparked the lighter, and they stopped on a dime. The brightness from the small flame illuminated my mother’s face. My hands shook, the fire wavered, and I almost dropped the Bic. That face…it looked exactly the same as the face in the pictures. At first, I thought her red shoulders and slightly burned cheeks were also lifted from those images, but that wasn’t the case.

  “Grady, I know you’re a big man and all, but you know you’re not supposed to play with fire. Go on and put it out before you burn yourself, my dear.”

 

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