Date: 2016-03-16 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; dark fiction; Dark Fantasy; Darkfuse; Novella
Description: It’s Todd and Heather’s twenty-first anniversary. A blizzard rages outside their home, but it’s far colder inside. Their marriage is falling apart, the love they once shared gone, in its place only bitter resentment. As the night wears on, strange things start to happen in their house—bad things. If they can work together, they might find a way to survive until morning…but only if they don’t open the Winter Box. **
Publisher: Darkfuse

THE WINTER BOX

Tim Waggoner

First Edition

The Winter Box
© 2016 by Tim Waggoner

All Rights Reserved.

A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com

Copy Editor: Steve Souza

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Other Books by Author

Broken Shadows

The Last Mile

The Men Upstairs

Eat the Night (forthcoming)

Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Tim-Waggoner/

This one’s for Charles L. Grant.

The winter wind is whispering…

Thanks to Shane Staley and

Dave Thomas, and as always, special thanks to my agent Cherry Weiner.

The wind swirls like a thing alive, and she thinks that maybe it is. No, fuck that. She knows it is. She’s heard people describe wind like this as howling or roaring, or if it’s especially high-pitched, shrieking. But this wind doesn’t sound anything like that. It’s shouting at her in words that she can’t make out. She can interpret the tone well enough—a fusion of anger and sorrow, laced with a deep sense of betrayal. She can detect voices as well, a pair of them, male and female. She desperately wants to believe that this is her imagination, but she knows goddamn well it’s not.

Snow and ice pelt her numb face, and she keeps her eyes squeezed shut to protect them. It doesn’t matter that she can’t see. The world around them is dark, so eyes closed or open, either way she’s equally blind. She dressed in layers of clothes—T-shirt under two sweatshirts, sweater, thick winter coat, jeans over Under Armour, three pairs of socks inside her boots, scarf wrapped around her neck and covering the bottom half of her face, winter hat pulled down over her ears, ear muffs for extra protection, fur-lined gloves with thick mittens overtop. And for all the good her protection does her, she might as well be naked. She’s numb all over, but that’s just on the surface. A deep cold has settled inside her, as if her bones have been replaced with ice. Her legs move as she struggles to push herself through waist-high snow, but she can’t feel them. She wonders if she only imagines that she’s moving, if in fact her legs have stopped functioning. As cold and numb as she is, how would she know if they did?

Breathing hurts. It feels like shards of ice tear her nasal passages whenever she breathes through her nose, and so she tries to breathe through her mouth, hoping the scarf will—if not warm the air—at least blunt its cold edge a little. It doesn’t work, though. The air hurts just as much going in that way. Her lungs burn and she imagines the cold air has scoured them like steel wool, leaving the insides raw and bleeding. Snot runs from her nostrils like water, soaking into the scarf and freezing, making the cloth even colder than it was before. She wonders if the entire section over her mouth will become covered with frozen snot, forcing her to try breathing through her nose once more. She hopes not.

She’s not alone. Her left hand is numb but her husband has been holding onto it ever since they left the house. No, fled is more like it. Soon after plunging into the storm, he’d grabbed her hand, and they’d held hands ever since, only being separated once by an especially strong gust of wind, and even then it had only been for a few seconds. But her hand has become even more numb since then, and if she can’t feel her own hand, how can she tell if her husband is still there? The wind is blowing so hard, she wouldn’t hear him if he lost his grip on her and yelled for her to stop and come back for him. She imagines him losing his balance and falling into a snowdrift, the hole he made rapidly covered by the drifting snow. He could be buried, freezing, maybe even dead already. And she’d be alone, soon to follow him down into darkness. Without his help, how can she hope to survive in this?

She tells herself she’s being foolish, that she’s allowing fear and fatigue to get to her. He’s still there, still holding her hand. She believes it, or at least wants to. But she needs to know, and so she opens her eyes. The sky’s lighter now, not much, but enough to let her know dawn’s coming. The snow’s falling harder than ever, and the wind whips it around, driving it into her like needles of ice. She squints her eyes against the wind’s assault and looks at her left shoulder. She moves her gaze down the length of her arm, sees how it hazy and distorted it becomes toward the elbow until it vanishes into white. She has the momentary thought that her arm is gone, that the cold has numbed her to the point where she didn’t feel losing it. She fears it became solid, brittle, and then shattered like glass, all without her knowing it. Impossible, she thinks, but after everything that happened this night, the word has lost its meaning for her.

She moves her right hand onto her left forearm—the motion taking an effort of will since her body is stiff and uncooperative. She can see a faint suggestion of her left hand now, and she continues sliding her right down her forearm, feeling what scraps of sensation she can. She can feel pressure, but little else. Still, it’s enough. She keeps sliding her hand until it passes the point where her other hand should be, and it keeps going, continuing to register pressure, as if there’s something solid beneath it.

Todd, she thinks. I’m feeling his arm. She tries to smile, but her facial muscles refuse to move, and the best she can manage is a tightening of chapped lips that splits the skin in several places. She feels that pain, but it’s so minor compared to what the rest of her body is dealing with that she barely registers it. Convinced Todd is there, she calls out to him, but her voice is lost in the wind’s roar. She then pulls, trying to bring him closer. At first nothing happens, and she fears she’s mistaken and he’s not there. But then she feels him come toward her, sees his silhouette through snowfall that’s finally, thank Christ, beginning to lessen. She watches him move toward her until he’s only inches away and she can see him clearly. His naked skin is dark blue, his eyes glitter like shards of ice, and when he smiles, he reveals teeth covered with frost.

She screams so loud that even the wind can’t muffle the sound.

* * *

“The performance is canceled.”

Todd disconnected the call and put his phone down on the coffee table. Heather sat on the couch near him, but not too close. They tended to keep some distance between them these days. At least a couple feet, usually more.

She frowned. “You don’t sound especially disappointed.”

He shrugged but otherwise didn’t answer. She hated it when he did that. They’d been together twenty-four years, married for twenty-one of them. And in all that time, she’d never been able to pin down just what that shrug meant. When they’d first started dating back in college, she’d thought it meant that he wasn’t sure what to say, that maybe he needed some time to think about the subject before answering. But when she’d realized that no answer ever came after one of those shrugs she’d revised her opinion and decided that he did have an answer, but for whatever reason didn’t want to share it with her. She’d stuck with that interpretation for over two decades, but in the last couple years, she’d come to a new conclusion. That shrug really meant Fuck off, Heather.

Well, he might not have given a damn about the show being canceled, but she did. She’d been looking forward to it for weeks. They’d both seen Phantom for the first time together back in college, and since it was in town now, she thought going to see a performance of it would be a wonderful way to celebrate their anniversary. She knew Todd didn’t like musicals as much as she did, but he’d always been willing enough to go to them with her in the past. Maybe, she thought, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to see the show, but that he didn’t want to see it with her, especially on this night.

She rose from the couch and padded across the carpet toward the living room window. She pulled open the curtains and peered outside. It was just before dusk, but there was scant sign of sunlight outside. The sky was dark, heavy with clouds. It had started snowing early that morning and it had kept up all day. The forecast had called for between six to ten inches total, but from the looks of things ten inches had come and gone, and still the snow kept falling. The flakes were huge, fat things that fell from the sky like white spiders, and there were so many of them it was hard to see the houses across the street. It was as if they were hidden behind a thin layer of white gauze, dim shapes that suggested the forms of houses without revealing any detail.

They might not be houses at all, she thought. They could be anything, really.

With a sigh, she released the curtains and let them fall closed. She then turned back around to face Todd. Nothing about him had changed since yesterday, or the day before that, but sometimes when she looked at him—like now—he seemed more like a stranger than her husband. He was a tall African-American man with a shaved head and no mustache or beard. He liked to joke that if he didn’t have hair on top of his head, he wasn’t going to have it on his face, either. He’d been slender for much of their marriage, but now that he was in his mid-forties, his metabolism had slowed down, and he’d put on some weight. Not a lot, but enough to make his face look puffy and to give him a bit of a belly hanging over his belt. He had what she thought of as a kind face. Deep brown eyes, an easy smile…But he didn’t smile much lately, and somewhere along the line he’d developed a vertical crease between his eyebrows. It was there even when his face was relaxed, like now. Faint, and not easy to detect, but she could see it. In fact, she couldn’t not see it. It jumped out every time she looked at him, as if it were some kind of disfiguring mark, an ugly scar, or infected cut.

The storm had brought arctic temperatures along with the snow, and even though they had the heat turned up and the gas fireplace going, a hint of a chill remained inside the house. Todd hated the cold, and he wore a gray wool sweater over a long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, a thick pair of socks, and slippers. She knew he’d wear his winter boots in the house if she let him. She gazed at him for several moments. He’d turned the wall-mounted flatscreen TV on the instant she’d gotten up to go look out the window, and he was browsing the channel guide. At least he’d put the TV on mute. She tried to recognize the nineteen-year-old boy she’d fallen in love with inside this middle-aged man. She saw hints here and there—the way he tilted his head to the side when he concentrated on something he was looking at, the way he bounced his foot when he sat, as if his body contained a bit too much energy and needed to let some of it out. But that was it. Otherwise, this version of Todd Redmond was like some sort of strange parasitic creature that had fed on his younger self over the course of years until finally devouring him completely and taking his place.

“Maybe we should just stay in and watch a movie,” he offered. “The news said the roads are terrible right now, and if the play was canceled, you can bet that everything’s going to be closed tonight. Restaurants, bars, the mall…Lights out and doors locked.”

She knew he was right. Her glance out the window had showed that none of the city’s snow plows had been by to clear their street yet. They were all busy battling the snow to keep “essential” roads and streets open, but there was nothing essential in their little neighborhood. It was tucked away from every main street, and no one but residents ever drove through here. So digging them out wasn’t high on the city’s list of priorities. They were, for all intents and purposes, snowed in. She hated it, but there was nothing she could do about it, so she sat back down on the couch next to Todd. But not too close.

“What a way to spend our anniversary,” she said.

Todd continued searching through the list of on-demand movies as he spoke, not turning to look at her.

“Oh, I don’t know. Being stuck in the house with a beautiful woman while snow piles up outside sounds kind of romantic to me.”

He paused to flash her a smile. It was a bit strained, but only a bit. Then he returned his attention to the TV and continued his search. Heather watched movie titles scroll by on the screen, but she didn’t pay any attention to them. Not for the first time she wondered what Todd saw when he looked at her these days. She was forty-four, one year younger than he, and she wasn’t the same skinny white girl with curly brown hair that he’d sat next to in Western Civ. She’d put on weight, just as he had, but much of hers had settled in her rear, and she’d developed a small pouch of saggy flesh on the underside of her chin, and to top it off, her hair was graying. She colored it to mask the gray, but sometimes it was still noticeable, especially when she forgot to touch up her roots. Did he still find her attractive? Sure, he’d called her beautiful just now, but had he really meant it?

She wore a navy blue turtleneck and jeans that were a touch too tight to be comfortable. Her feet were bare as they always were in the house, regardless of the time of year. She knew her tolerance for cold made her something of an anomaly among women, at least according to her friends.

I don’t get it, Diana had said to her one day at work. Why don’t you ever, and I mean ever, get cold?

She’d smiled and said, Because I’m so damn hot.

She didn’t feel very hot right now, though. Not only were her pants too tight, but the turtleneck was too. She hated looking at herself in the mirror, especially a full-length one. All she saw were lumps, bumps, bulges, and rolls. She couldn’t talk to Todd about how she felt. She’d tried once and all he’d said was You still look good to me.

At least he hadn’t shrugged.

So…twenty-fifth anniversary and no going out for sushi followed by Phantom. She supposed they’d just have to find another way to celebrate. While Todd continued perusing the movie choices, she went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine, and put together an hors d’oeuvres tray. Nothing fancy, some crackers and cheese along with broccoli, carrots, and dip. She got a pair of glasses from the cupboard and brought everything into the living room and arranged it on the coffee table. Todd didn’t say anything about the improvised spread, but he gave her a smile to let her know he appreciated it.

“If we’re still hungry later, I’ll pop a frozen pizza into the oven,” she said.

He nodded and returned his attention to the TV.

“I’ve been through the movie listings three times now, and I can’t find anything that sounds good. You want to take a look?” He held the remote out to her.

She shook her head. She didn’t like watching movies as much as he did. She’d rather read a good book. But this was their anniversary, and she wanted to do something together.

“Keep looking,” she said, and got up from the couch and headed down the hallway to their bedroom. She went into the closet, turned on the light, and took an old wooden jewelry box down from the highest shelf. It was a large one, about the size of a laptop computer. She looked at it for a moment, her hands trembling slightly. She wasn’t sure this was a good idea. In fact, it might turn out to be a spectacularly bad one. But she turned off the light, closed the closet door, and brought the box to the living room. Todd glanced at her as she entered the room, remote in hand and still pointed at the TV. His gaze fell upon the box and he frowned.

“Heather…” He only said her name, but his tone spoke volumes.

She sat back down on the couch and placed the box between them.

“It is a tradition,” she said.

Todd sighed. He turned off the TV and put the remote on the coffee table. He didn’t turn to look at her, though. Instead, he continued facing the dark screen.

“We didn’t do it last year,” he said.

“I know. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop entirely.”

He didn’t respond to this. He kept looking at the screen.

She wanted to reach out and take his hand, but she didn’t. She sensed now wasn’t a good time to touch him.

“We decided to keep trying, didn’t we? Have you changed your mind?”

“Have you?”

She forced a smile that she hoped looked genuine.

“I brought out the box, didn’t I?”

He turned to look at her now, face expressionless. She had the impression that he was searching her eyes, looking for something there, but she had no idea what it might be. Whatever is was, he must’ve found it, for he smiled.

“Yeah, you did.”

They’d met the beginning of spring semester in college. It was his second year, her first. “Spring” semester started in January, and it was a bitterly cold month that year, with plenty of snow. They’d started dating soon after they met, although it hadn’t been anything formal or official. They just started hanging out and before long they became lovers. They had been one of those couples who just click right away, the kind who seem as if they’d been made for each other. They weren’t the same—far from it—but they complemented one another, fitting together like two puzzle pieces.

It was Heather who had come up with the idea for the Winter Box. She’d found it at a flea market one weekend. Todd hadn’t been interested in antiques or nostalgia items. He was a practical person, an engineering student, far more interested in the future than the past. But Heather found old stuff fascinating. She loved to look at it, pick it up, turn it this way and that, and try to imagine who’d originally owned the item, what they had been like, how they’d lived and loved. There had been nothing special about the box to catch her attention. It was made of plain wood and possessed no decorative touches of any sort. It was 15 X 15 inches wide and four inches deep. No legs—it sat flat on the table—and its hinges were dingy and rusty. A round green sticker on the lid had the price written on it in pen: $5.00.

She’d bought it without even looking inside.

As they’d walked away from the table, Todd asked why—out of all the things for sale there today—she’d wanted such a plain, uninteresting object.

I don’t know, she’d said, looking down at the box in her hands. Its sides were smooth, as if the box had been handled many times over the years. It just felt…right.

She was a business major—eventually she’d end up working as a loan officer in a bank—but she had an intuitive side to her personality, and when it spoke up, she usually listened. That day it had chimed in loud and clear, urging her to buy that box, so she did. That had been at the end of January, but it wasn’t until Valentine’s Day that she came up with a use for it.

Let’s each pick one object—something small—that represents our relationship. The other person will have to guess why he or she chose it, and then we’ll put them in the box and save them.

Todd had frowned when she said this.

What for?

She thought it was kind of a stupid question, but she didn’t say so.

So we can look back and remember.

She’d almost added And every year we can add two new objects. She’d kept her mouth shut, not wanted to scare him off, but even at that point she knew they would spend the rest of their lives together. That first year she’d chosen a freshly sharpened pencil to represent the story that they would write together as their relationship grew and deepened. Todd chose a sticker with a cartoon sun on it, the kind of thing a child might receive after a visit to the doctor or dentist. It’s because you shine like the sun, he’d said, embarrassed. For a couple years they’d continued to add objects to the Winter Box, as Heather had dubbed it, on Valentine’s Day. But when they decided to get married, they picked a date in January—the same date as the Western Civ class had started—and the next year Heather decided they’d switch the Winter Box to their anniversary, and it had stayed there ever since. And every year they’d each added a new item to it. Except last year.

“I don’t have anything to put in it,” Todd said.

She tried not to take his comment for more than it was, but she couldn’t help thinking there was a deeper meaning, that he didn’t have any emotional energy left to put into their relationship.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t either.”

This was a lie. Last week she’d stopped at teacher supply store, and in the science section she’d found a display of rocks. She’d chosen one with quartz in it to represent the fact that while things might have been hard for them lately, there was plenty of good left in their relationship. She’d put the rock in her nightstand, intending to add it to the box when the time came. But now it would stay there. Better to leave it there than bring it out and make Todd feel bad that he hadn’t chosen anything. Or resent her for having done so.

“But even if we don’t have anything to add this year,” she said, “it doesn’t mean we can’t take a stroll down memory lane, does it?”

She tried to keep her tone light, not wishing to put any more pressure on the moment than there already was. Todd didn’t look happy about her suggestion, but he didn’t object, and she took that as an encouraging sign.

She removed the lid from the box and set it aside.

To anyone else, the contents would’ve looked like so much junk. But she remembered the significance of every item, both the ones she’d contributed and the ones Todd had. As much as she loved adding new items, she loved looking at the old ones—and remembering—even more.

She selected an object at random, an empty thread spool, and lifted it out of the box.

“Do you remember when you put this one in?” she asked.

Todd glanced at the object without a hint of recognition in his eyes.

“I really don’t think this is a good idea right now,” he said. “I don’t think we should force this.”

She wanted to argue, to tell him that they should force it, that it had been too long since things had been right between them and it was high time they did something about it. But she nodded, returned the spool back in the box and replaced the lid.

“Okay,” she said, although it wasn’t. Not even close.

Thirty seconds later, the power went out, plunging them into darkness.

* * *

The power outage had no effect on the gas fireplace, and they ended up sitting in front of it, wrapped in blankets, keeping a foot of space between them. When the power had first gone, Todd had looked out the front window to see if everyone on the street had lost power as well. But the snowfall had intensified to the point where it was impossible to see more than a few feet, and the wind had become more intense, blasting the house and making the windows rattle. Todd knew the windows were sturdy—they were double-paned storm windows—but this storm might prove more than a match for them. He checked all the doors and windows in the house. Not because it was a necessary precaution, but to give himself something to do away from Heather.

He turned on all the faucets in the house at a slow trickle and opened the cupboards doors below the sink to expose the pipes. He wasn’t sure how cold it would get in the house. It was cold as fuck outside, but they had the fireplace going. It wouldn’t make the entire house toasty, but it would hopefully help keep the pipes from freezing. When he’d finished with that chore, he couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he reluctantly rejoined Heather in front of the fire.

They sat silently for a time, and Todd could feel Heather building up to something. She exuded a nervous energy when she was getting ready to bring up a difficult subject. There were periodic tremors in her body, and she would sigh softly from time to time, although she showed no sign of being aware of it. She thought she was able to mask her emotions from him with relative ease, and he’d never disavowed her of the notion. He sometimes thought that’s what love really was: helping to maintain your partner’s illusions.

“What happened to us?” she finally asked.

He did not want to get into this now. Not on their anniversary. But he knew Heather wouldn’t be put off. When she was ready to discuss a problem, she went after it like a starving dog with a bone.

“You know what happened.”

“I don’t mean all that. Yeah, it all put a hell of a strain on our marriage—on both of us. But I’m talking about something more important than that. Something deeper. We used to be so connected, Todd. I thought of us as soul mates. I thought nothing—absolutely nothing—could change that.”

He wanted to tell her that there was no such thing as soul mates, that the idea was nothing more than a childish romantic fantasy. There were only people who entered into relationships. Sometimes those relationships worked and sometimes they didn’t. And it had become clear to him that their relationship was one that no longer worked, and it had been that way for some time now.

Instead, he said, “I think all that, as you put it, is important. I don’t know if you’ve really forgiven me. I know you think you have,” he hurried to add. “But maybe subconsciously you’re still angry with me. I always feel a distance between us now. I feel like you’re trying too hard to pretend like everything’s okay, when it isn’t.”

A year-and-a-half ago, he’d fallen into an affair with a woman he’d met at a coffee shop. Tina Beckman, a dental hygienist who’d been divorced for six months. She’d come on to him first, asking to join him at his table, and he’d said yes. She’d been pretty enough, if not especially attractive to him. But she possessed a charming self-confidence that he’d found alluring, He still wasn’t sure why they’d ended up sleeping together. He hadn’t stopped loving Heather, and while they didn’t have sex as often as they’d used to, it was still good between them. The affair had just happened. It hadn’t lasted long, and he’d managed to keep it a secret from Heather, and he supposed he could have—and maybe should have—gone on like it had never happened. No harm, no foul. But he’d come to think of the affair as a sign that something was wrong in their relationship. A symptom of a deeper problem. Plus, every time he looked at Heather, he felt guilty, and he knew that if he didn’t tell her about the affair, the guilt would build and fester until it began affecting their relationship.

So he’d told her. It went exactly like he thought it would. Tears, shouting, resentment, blame-throwing—on both their parts. There had been no talk of divorce, though, not from either of them. Even faced with the ultimate spousal betrayal, Heather was still dedicated to their marriage. Her attitude was mend it, don’t end it, for which Todd was deeply grateful, especially since he knew he didn’t deserve it. He was, however, not prepared for Heather’s suggestion for how to get past the problem. He thought she might suggest marriage counseling, something he’d be more than willing to do. Every marriage needed a tune-up now and again, right? But Heather had a different idea. Several days after his confession, when they were getting ready for bed, she’d started talking.

“I’ve been thinking about Adam and Deana lately.”

Adam and Deana were friends of theirs from college. They’d moved to Baltimore several years ago, and Todd and Heather saw them rarely, although they stayed in touch through email and Facebook.

“What about them?” Todd had asked.

Heather sat on the edge of their bed, wearing her favorite robe. Todd was under the covers, wearing only a pair of boxers. He felt too constrained at night if he tried to sleep in anything more.

“Maybe we should try what they do.”

It took him a moment to realize what she meant. Adam and Deana were married—happily so—but they were polyamorous. They had an open relationship in which lovers were not only tolerated but encouraged, as long as both partners knew what was happening and were okay with it. When Todd had first learned about the concept in college, he’d thought it was simply a way to have your cake and eat it too. That, or it was a sign of a relationship on the verge of falling apart. But Adam and Deana seemed to have made it work for them.

It was foolish, considering that Todd had just had an affair, but the thought of Heather having sex with someone else made him feel jealous as hell.

“Is this some kind of way to get back at me?” he asked.

“Not at all. Every once and a while Deana sends me links to articles on polyamory. Stuff about how it’s not natural or healthy for humans to be completely monogamous.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s true. You still love me as much as ever, right?”

“Of course.”

“But you still had an affair. And you don’t know why.”

It was true. He still had no idea why it had happened.

She went on. “So maybe we should try it and see if it works for us.”

By us, he really thought she meant him. It had taken him a few days to think about it. Could he really deal with Heather sleeping with other guys—or women—especially when he knew she was? He tried to convince himself that he possessed a typically male double-standard when it came to sex. It was okay for men to have more than one partner while in a relationship—as long as they didn’t go too overboard about it—but it wasn’t okay for women. He knew he was being a sexist jerk, but he couldn’t help it. But in the end, despite his reservations, he told Heather he was willing to give it a try.

The “experiment,” as he came to think of it, lasted a little over four months. In that time he slept with only one other woman—a colleague at work—and it had ended up being a one-time thing. Heather had slept with two men and one woman, and she’d had a foursome with all of them a couple times. He found it difficult to separate his feelings for Heather from his feelings about having sex with other people, but it turned out that Heather had no such trouble. She loved Todd and was completely dedicated to their marriage. She viewed extra-marital sex as something completely separate from her relationship with Todd, something that had no impact on it. And when he told her that he was no longer comfortable with the two of them seeing other people, Heather was happy to stop, and they became a wholly monogamous couple again.

But Todd had a hard time going back to the way things were. When they’d first started the “experiment,” he’d thought he’d be unable to get past his jealousy at Heather being with someone else. But while he wasn’t thrilled with that part, he found her casual acceptance of the lifestyle—coupled with her equally casual release of it—to be near maddening. He’d been wracked with guilt over his affair, and his one-night stand with the woman from work had been totally unsatisfying on every level. He’d gone through emotional torture during that time, but Heather seemed unaffected, as if she could take it or leave it. If she loved him as much as she claimed, wouldn’t she have been at least a little bothered with sleeping with other people?

Evidently not.

So, yeah. All of that was part—a big part—of what had happened to their marriage. But he understood what Heather was getting at. More was wrong, maybe a lot more, and neither of them seemed to be able to identify it.

He gazed at the flames in the fireplace. They made no noise, aside from the hissing of gas. The “log” they danced around was artificial and didn’t burn. There were no pops or crackles, no sounds that made a fire feel homey and comfortable.

“I don’t know what happened,” Todd said, his voice weary. “I really fucking don’t.”

* * *

Since they couldn’t turn on the TV to check the weather, Heather used her phone. The connection was slow, maybe because of the storm, although she’d never heard of snow interfering with cell signals. The weather report had been updated since the last time she’d checked. They were now officially in a state of emergency. Blizzard conditions. Three feet of snow expected, maybe as much as five. Travel was extremely hazardous. Only emergency vehicles were permitted to be on the road.

While she checked the weather, Todd called the power company to check on the outage. He’d already called in to report it, but he could get impatient when something wasn’t fixed fast enough to suit him. As an engineer, he specialized in problem-solving, and he hated it when he had to rely on someone else to fix something for him. Almost as much as he hated being unable to fix a problem himself.

They got off their phones almost at the same time.

“Just another goddamned recording,” he said. “‘An outage has been reported in your area and crews are working to repair it.’”

Heather told him about the weather report.

“Great,” he said. “Just fucking great.”

He shrugged off his blanket and rose from the carpet in front of the fireplace. Using his phone as a flashlight, he headed through the living room and into the foyer. Heather didn’t follow him. He opened the coat closet, and she heard a rustle of cloth and the sound of a plastic hanger clacking against the wooden rod. She heard more rustling, and then the door closed and he returned to the fireplace. He carried his heavy winter coat, a scarf, and a pair of boots. Heather watched as he put them all on and then pulled a beanie from his coat pocket and slipped it over his head. He then removed a pair a black gloves from his other pocket and put them on too.

“Going somewhere?” she asked. She tried to make the question sound light, but it came out snarky.

“I’m going out to clear the driveway,” he said. “And before you say anything, I know it’s still snowing. But if I wait until all the snow piles up, it’ll be that much harder to clear. Better to do it now, when it’ll be easier, and do it again later rather than wait.”

She couldn’t argue with his logic. There’d been a time when she might’ve asked him to stay inside and cuddle by the fire with her, said cuddling perhaps leading to more pleasant physical interaction. But now all she did was nod and watch her husband go to the door to the garage, open it, step through, and close it again. She didn’t feel sad. She didn’t feel much of anything. She couldn’t decide which was worse.

* * *

They didn’t have any children. The subject had only come up a few times in their marriage, and they’d discussed it, but not for very long. Neither of them had any moral objections to having kids. No “Why bring new life into a world that’s already overpopulated?” They didn’t have any personal objections, either. At least, none they could put a name to. Heather wasn’t afraid of going through childbirth, and they weren’t worried about children cramping their lifestyle. For whatever reasons, they just didn’t take to the idea. Once, ten years ago, she was late for her period and stopped at the pharmacy after work, bought a home pregnancy test, peed on the stick, and discovered she wasn’t pregnant. She’d looked at the stick for a long time, trying to feel something, anything, but she didn’t. She’d thrown the stick and the box it had come in away, and she never told Todd about it.

Now, sitting here alone in front of the fireplace in an otherwise dark house, listening to the sound of Todd lifting the garage door—the power was out so he had to open it manually—as he prepared to do battle with the snow, she wondered if their lack of feelings toward having children, whether positive or negative, wasn’t another symptom of whatever it was that was wrong with their relationship.

She lowered her head, brought her hands to her face and tried to cry, but no tears came.

* * *

In the living room, the Winter Box shifted slightly on the couch, its lid opening a crack. Heather didn’t hear it over the hissing of the gas fireplace, but even if she had she wouldn’t have understood what it meant. How could she? How could anyone?

* * *

The garage was dark and cold as fuck. Using his phone to light the way, Todd found the pull rope that would disengage the opener and allow him to raise the door by hand. He pulled it, then opened the door. As it began to rise, the air that blew in was absolutely fucking freezing. It felt like tiny ice daggers slicing into the exposed flesh of his face. He almost decided to shut the garage door, go back inside, and spend the rest of the night in front of the fire. But he didn’t want to be around Heather right now. The whole anniversary thing had angered and depressed him—especially when she’d brought out the goddamned box. He’d thought it was kind of a fun idea when they’d first started it all those years ago, but he’d never been into it as much as Heather. Now the ritual struck him as childish. Besides, being outside and working to clear the driveway would make him feel better. The snow blower was something he could control. The machine came with clear operating instructions and was easy to maintain—unlike a marriage.

He stepped back from the opening and gazed out into the storm. The street lights were out, and the cloud cover was too thick for any moonlight to get through. Nevertheless, he could make out the white snow on the driveway and yard, almost as if it glimmered with a subtle, almost undetectable light. Snow fell—no, plummeted—from the sky in flakes the size of half dollars. The wind whipped them around, and they darted and swirled, almost as if they were alive.

The snow blower was a small gas-powered one, and its size was another reason he wanted to clear the driveway now. It could only handle so much snow at a time. He took the blower to the end of the garage and turned it on. The engine sounded pathetically weak, especially when compared to the sound of the wind. It was blowing so hard that for a second time he considered giving up before he started. How in the hell could he hope to get the driveway clear with the wind blowing like this? But he reminded himself his goal was just to get enough snow off the driveway to make clearing it tomorrow easier. So he pushed the blower forward, it struck the snow with a loud chuff, the rotor began chewing, and a shower of snow shot out of the chute, arcing through the air like a spray of ivory-white water.

But the wind shifted direction and the snow was blown back into his face. The cold came as a shock to him, and he took in a gasping breath. He sucked in a mouthful of snow and he started coughing, almost as if he’d drawn water into his lungs. But then, snow was water, wasn’t it? He wondered if it was possible to drown in snow. Maybe when there was so goddamn much of it.

He’d released the snow blower’s switch when he’d started coughing, and the machine had stopped chewing and spitting snow. He coughed a couple more times—the cold air burning as it went down his throat and into his lungs—and then he drew his scarf up over his mouth and nose, gripped the blower’s handle tight and started it up again. This time he was more careful to direct the snow spray with the wind instead of against it, and while he still got hit by the spray a couple more times, as least he saw it coming and was able to turn his head and avoid the worst of it. He only had a narrow strip of skin exposed now—his brow, eyes, and the bridge of his nose—but his skin was wet with moisture from the snow, and the wind sliced into him like ice-cold razors. He squinted his eyes in a useless attempt to protect them, but they ached and watered, and as the tears welled, he thought he could feel them immediately freeze to his cheeks. How fucking cold was it out here?

He struggled along for several more minutes, snow falling and blowing, before realizing that Sisyphus had a better chance of keeping that rock of his on top of the mountain than he had of clearing away any significant amount of snow. Frustrated and cold as hell, he took his hand off the snow blower’s switch and the device shuddered and fell silent. He started to wheel it back toward the garage, but he stopped when a strange sound came to his ears, carried on the turbulent wind. At first he sensed more than heard it, and he paused to listen. It sounded like someone talking, but the wind was so loud he couldn’t make out any of the words, couldn’t even tell what direction the voice was coming from or how close or far away it was. Sound traveled differently at night, and it did so even more during a snowstorm. Was someone else out trying to clear their driveway? He supposed it didn’t matter. His exposed skin was burning now, and he knew he should get back inside if he didn’t want to get frostbite. But still he listened, unable to shake the feeling that the voice—wherever it came from—was somehow speaking to him.

Snow swirled near him in a spiral pattern, like a dust devil. Snow devil, he thought. It grew larger as he watched until the column was nearly as tall as he was. The snow drew inward, coalesced, and formed the figure of a woman. She was naked, her skin bluish-white, and her curly hair was coated with frost. He recognized her, of course. How could he not? It was Heather, but not as she was now, a woman in her forties. This was the Heather he had first met and fallen in love with, a woman still in her teens—barely—so young that he could still see the girl within her. Had his wife ever been this young? Had he?

She smiled at him and he wondered what was really happening. Was he having some kind of hallucination, a winter storm version of a desert mirage? Or had he suffered a heart attack or stroke—both ran in his family—and was lying in the snow, his malfunctioning brain conjuring a fantasy to entertain him while he died? If so, at least he’d done a good job of creating her. She seemed so real…

She started toward him, moving through the snow as if it wasn’t there. It rose to the level of her knees, but not only didn’t it impede her progress, the snow behind her remained undisturbed, leaving no sign of her passage. He stood still as she approached, no longer feeling the cold, no longer hearing the wind. Her lips moved as if she were speaking, and he heard her voice, but it was no more intelligible than before, her words remaining maddeningly indistinct. He felt as if they were just beyond the grasp of his consciousness, and if only he could concentrate hard enough, he might finally get what she was trying to say to him. But how could he concentrate with her coming toward him like that, naked, advancing with smooth, languid, almost seductive motions, as if she were perfectly comfortable with the cold, as if she were somehow part of it?

He let go of the snow blower’s handle and stepped forward to meet her. She held out her arms as if to embrace him and he reached out to her. Then she exploded in a sudden gust of wind, becoming a burst of snow that struck him so hard that it sent him tumbling backward. He lay there, surrounded by snow, looking up at a dark sky, snowflakes falling down upon him like frozen tears.

* * *

When Heather heard Todd activate the snow blower, she decided she’d sat in front of the fire long enough. It didn’t look like the power would be coming on again anytime soon, so she might as well gather some flashlights and candles. It would give her something to do, anyway. She removed the blanket from around her shoulders, dropped it to the floor, stood and, using her phone to light the way, she headed for the kitchen. She went to the junk drawer, opened it, and began rooting through the odds and ends inside. This drawer was entirely hers. Todd refused to have anything to do with it. He liked things neat and orderly, especially when it came to tools or useful household items. She wasn’t big on organization, though. She liked putting things in a single place and then going through them whenever she needed something. Despite how Todd viewed her preference, she found it—if not exactly organized—to be focused. No trying to remember where in the house or garage an individual item was kept. One drawer, one place.

She found matches without any problem. They were in a large cardboard box with a striker strip along the side. She found a couple of tea light candles, neither of which had been used before and wouldn’t produce much light, but they were better than nothing. She lit one, got a saucer from the cupboard and set the candle on it to catch the dripping wax. Then she placed the saucer on the counter and resumed her exploration of the junk drawer. She was certain she’d put a penlight in here at one point, but for the life of her, she couldn’t—

A wisp of cold air caressed the back of her neck, making her shudder. An instant later fear surged through her as she realized she was no longer alone. The air had been a breath. Someone was standing right behind her. It had to be Todd. Who else could it be? But she hadn’t heard the door to the garage open, hadn’t heard it close, hadn’t heard Todd’s boots thumping on the carpet as he moved through the house.

His boots would be wet from the snow, she told herself. He’d take them off in the garage before coming back into the house.

But that wouldn’t explain why she hadn’t heard the door. Or why right now she was hearing the muffled sound of the snow blower out front.

Hands came down on her shoulders then, their touch so light she wasn’t sure at first that she really felt them. The cold came next, seeping through her skin into the meat and bone beneath, the sensation pleasant and painful at the same time. It’s Todd. It has to be. His hands were cold because he’d been outside working on the driveway. They’d warm up soon.

A part of her pointed out that the snow blower was still running—and that it couldn’t function without someone holding down the trigger switch attached to the handle. If Todd stood behind her—and it had to be him—then someone else, she didn’t know who, but someone, had taken over the blower’s operation.

She felt cold breath again, this time tickling her right ear. That sensation was followed a second later by the feeling of lips cold and hard as marble brushing against her earlobe. If someone had described the feeling to her, she would’ve said it didn’t sound pleasurable in the least, but she felt a warm flush in her stomach. It traveled down to her sex and she felt herself moisten. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d responded to Todd’s touch like this, so fast and intense. Not since the early days of their marriage, she thought. His grip on her shoulders tightened, and she felt his lips touch her ear again, but this time he whispered four words.

“Why did you change?”

And then, before she could react, she felt teeth cold as ice touch the back of her neck, felt pressure as they pressed into her flesh. There was a bright flash of pain, and she clapped her hand to the back of her neck and spun around.

No one was there.

She pulled her hand away from her neck and held it close to the tea candle’s meager light. There was blood on her fingers. Not a lot, just a smear, but it was real. She thought of the voice that had whispered to her. Not so much about the question it had asked—although that had been strange enough. She’d recognized the voice as Todd’s.

She stared at the blood on her fingers, remembered the feel of those cold teeth on her skin, and she shivered.

* * *

Todd shucked off his wet coat, boots, and socks in the garage. Once inside he went to the bedroom—which was cold as fuck with the power out—and removed the rest of his clothes in the dark. He tossed them on the tile floor of the master bathroom to be dealt with later, and then he went to his dresser and pulled out a fresh pair of underwear, socks, and jeans. He put them on, then went to the closet to grab a turtleneck. He slipped it on and then grabbed and donned an Ohio State sweatshirt for good measure. As he dressed, the wind outside rattled the bedroom windows, and he thought he could hear words on the wind, and this time he could make out what they were saying, if barely. It was a single word, repeated over and over.

Why? Why? Whyyyyyyyy?

He told himself it was imagination combined with stress, nothing more. He was a practical, pragmatic, and above all logical man.

“Fuck you,” he said softly. It might not have been logical to cuss at the wind, but it made him feel better. A little, anyway.

He left the bedroom, ignoring the sudden violent burst that slammed into the windows like angry, frustrated fists.

* * *

Heather had been sitting in front of the fireplace when he’d come in. She hadn’t looked at him then, and she didn’t look at him as he approached now. If the power hadn’t been out, he would’ve gone somewhere else in the house to get some space from her. Hell, if the roads hadn’t been so shitty, he’d get in his car and go somewhere, anywhere, just to be alone. But his practicality—which he thought could be a real pain in the ass sometimes—told him that the wisest move was to remain by the fire, and if that meant he had to tolerate Heather’s presence, then so be it. Besides, she had to tolerate him, so that made them even.

He sat once more, not too close to her but not so far that she might comment on it, pulled a blanket over his shoulders, and stared at the flickering flames. Several minutes passed in silence, and when Heather spoke, her voice startled him. For an instant, he thought it sounded like the voice in the wind.

“At first glance, it looks like a real fireplace, doesn’t it?” she said. “But the longer you look at it, the more you realize that it’s an illusion of a fireplace.”

“The fire’s real,” he said.

“It’s a type of fire, but it’s not the kind you feed and tend. The kind that you have a true connection with. This is an impersonal fire, one that turns on and off with the twist of a dial and the flick of a switch. It may put off heat…”

“But it’s still cold.”

She nodded.

He thought she might take it further, might ask What happened to our fire? But she said no more, and was grateful.

* * *

He tries to move, but his arms and legs won’t cooperate. Something binds them at the wrists and ankles. He opens his eyes, but it’s dark and he sees nothing. He’s lying on a mattress, no sheet beneath him. When he tugs at his bonds, he can hear the headboard and footboard rattle. He twists his wrists back and forth. He’s not in handcuffs. The material is rough but it yields more than metal. Rope, knotted tight. He’s naked, and the room—the bedroom, he thinks—is so cold it feels as if his entire body is covered with frost. But the strange thing—okay, one of the strange things—is that he’s not shivering and his teeth aren’t chattering. In fact, the cold feels almost pleasant in a way. Soothing, even stimulating, after a fashion. His skin tingles and he’s surprised to realize his cock’s half-hard. Cold this intense should be a real ball-shriveler, but it seems to be having the opposite effect on him.

He hears movement, and a moment later a soft blue light begins to glow. It comes from one of the nightstands—Heather’s, in fact—and he turns his head toward it. At least he can still move that much. The light comes from a smooth orb the size of a golf ball, and it manages to provide enough illumination for him to confirm that yes, this is his and Heather’s bedroom. Except it isn’t, not completely. Aside from the bed and nightstands, the room is empty. The dressers are gone, the surfaces of the nightstands clear of reading lamps, paperbacks, magazines, water glasses, boxes of facial tissues…There are no curtains over the windows, no art on the walls, and no carpet on the floor. But he’s not alone in this near-empty room. A figure stands in one corner, only partially concealed by shadow. Heather steps forward, naked and younger-looking, as young as she was when they’d first met. She starts toward the bed, moving slowly, keeping her gaze fixed on him as she approaches. Despite himself, he feels his cock stir. The blue light makes her skin look unearthly, almost as if she were made of—

A memory comes to him, of being outside in the cold, trying in vain to clear snow from the driveway. He remembers Heather—young Heather—coming toward him, remembers the glittering frost clinging to her skin.

Ice, he thinks. She looks like she’s made of ice.

She stops at the edge of the bed and regards him for a moment, features impassive, eyes unreadable. She reaches out and with surprising gentleness, touches an index finger to his lips. Her flesh is hard and so cold it burns. She allows her finger to remain on his lips for a bit, gazing down at him with eyes that reflect blue light and nothing else.

His cock is almost all the way hard now.

She traces her finger past his lips, across his chin, his throat, chest, and abdomen. His cock is rock-hard now, harder than he can remember it getting in a long time. Maybe not since he and Heather had first started seeing each other. His skin burns where she touches it and although he fears how strong that sensation will feel on his erection, he can’t help hoping she’ll wrap those blue-tinted fingers of hers around his stiff dick and begin working it. It’s been so long since the sex between them has been anything but routine—when they have sex, that is—and while this situation is weird as hell, it’s different. Bizarre and exciting. But she pulls her hand away after the finger trails through his pubic hair. Then, in a single fluid motion, she climbs onto the bed and straddles him. Her vagina envelopes his erection, but she’s dry inside, and cold, so very cold. It feels like his cock is wrapped in frozen sandpaper, and he draws in a gasping breath. He expects her to begin easing up and down, writhing and grinding. If she does, he fears she’ll rub his dick raw, but he wants her to start moving anyway, needs her to.

Instead she leans forward, still holding him inside her, until her face is only inches away from his.

“We’re going to play a game,” she says. Her breath is cold on his face, so cold he wouldn’t be surprised if frost crystals form on his skin. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and for every wrong answer, you will be punished. Do you understand?”

He wants to say something glib in reply like “Sounds kinky” or “Do your worst” or “I’m a big boy, I can take it.” But her tone is deadly serious and there’s nothing playful in her expression, and her eyes are as cold and empty as a doll’s. In the end, he merely nods once.

“Good,” she says. Then without any explanation of what she intends to do, she jams a hand into his mouth. He struggles but she grips the side of his head with her other hand to hold him steady. He doesn’t remember her ever being this strong. She slowly pushes her cold fingers past his tongue and into the back of his throat. The cold burns, he starts to gag, and he feels a surge of panic. For the first time since waking to find himself tied to the bed, he realizes that he’s entirely at Heather’s mercy. She can do whatever she wants to with him, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it.

He feels the tips of her fingers probing before finally taking hold of something. She withdraws her hand and holds a small object before his eyes. It’s a small plastic whistle, the kind of thing you might get as a prize in a box of Cracker Jack. The whistle is coated in mucus and saliva, and thin ropy strands hang from it.

“Why this?” she demands.

At first he doesn’t understand the question, but then it hits him. He’s seen this whistle before. It’s one of the items from the Winter Box. Not one that he contributed, though. This is one of Heather’s, and she’s asking him why she chose it and what it represents to her. It’s one of the earliest objects she contributed, sometime in the first few years of their marriage, so long ago now. How in the hell is he supposed to remember? If their roles were reversed and he was holding one of the items he chose and interrogated her about it, would she remember what it symbolized to him? He knew the answer to this question. Of course she would.

As he wonders these things, he doesn’t question how she pulled the whistle from his throat or how the damn thing got there in the first place. It doesn’t even occur to him that there’s anything all that strange about it. No more so than everything else that’s happening, that is.

“Answer,” she says. When he doesn’t respond, she grabs one of his nipples between thumb and forefinger and gives it a vicious twist. It hurts like hell, and he can feel himself softening inside her.

“I…don’t remember.”

She draws her hand back and then brings the whistle down hard on his forehead. The plastic breaks and one of the jagged edges cuts his skin. The blood that wells forth from the wound is hot on his flesh, and he thinks, Just how fucking cold is it in here, anyway?

Despite what she just did, there’s no anger in her expression, not even a hint. Her eyes are still as unfeeling as glass.

“I added it to the box on our third anniversary. I told you that it symbolized the fact that I’ll always be there whenever you need me. All you have to do—”

“—is whistle,” he finishes. He remembers now. Not the specific details, though. Not how her face looked at the time, not the tone of her voice as she originally spoke these words. He wishes he did, but he doesn’t, and he knows he never will. This realization should sadden him, but right now he’s too goddamn scared of what his crazy-ass wife might do next.

“You’ve made your point, Heather. Now free me, please.”

He keeps the fear from his voice as he speaks, but he also tries not to sound as if he’s issuing an order. He wants to sound rational, one adult speaking to another. Blood trickles from his forehead wound, down the bridge of his nose, sliding off to the right then continuing down his cheek. He can’t help it. He starts trembling. His penis has become a tiny shriveled snail-like thing inside her.

For the first time since he awakened, she smiles. It’s not much, a small uptick at the corners of her mouth, but it’s there. It’s not a comforting smile, though. Far from it.

“We’re not done playing yet. If you want me to let you go, you have to answer one of my questions correctly. But be warned: three strikes and you lose. And you already have one strike against you.”

She reaches into his mouth again, and he thinks about biting her hand. He doesn’t, though. Not because he doesn’t want to hurt her, but because he fears it will only make things worse for him. He gags again as her fingers wiggle around in his throat, but he endures the sensation. She pulls out another object and holds it to his face for inspection.

It’s a paperclip.

An innocuous, ubiquitous, mundane-as-all-hell paperclip. He doesn’t remember it being in the box, let alone what it represents.

“Second verse, same as the first,” she says. “Why this?”

He stares at the paperclip, its metal tinted blue by the eerie light on the night stand. Since he can’t remember anything about it, he’s going to have to bullshit his way through this round. What the hell could a paperclip represent? It’s such a utilitarian object, so simple and basic that there doesn’t seem to be any possibilities for metaphor or symbolism in it. For fuck’s sake, all it does is hold papers together, he thinks.

Together.

He breaks into a triumphant grin. “It symbolizes our love, which holds us together.”

It has to be that, he thinks. What else could it be?

She looks at him for a moment, then she begins reshaping the paperclip, bending it into a straight line. She speaks as she works.

“Sixth anniversary. I brought it home with me from the bank. I’d only been working there for three weeks. I’d been too afraid to apply for the job, was worried that I might not be as qualified as some of the other applicants. But you encouraged me to apply. You said I was just as good as anyone else, if not better. I chose the paperclip to represent how I could always count on your support.”

He remembers her being afraid to apply to the bank, remembers encouraging her to do so. But he doesn’t remember the goddamn paperclip.

She moves so fast this time that at first he doesn’t realize what she’s done. But then fiery pain erupts in the corner of his left eye, and he feels hot blood well. He realizes she’s used the paperclip to stab him in the tear duct. It hurts like a motherfucker, and his back arches. He lets out a loud cry that isn’t quite a scream, but it’s damn close. He pulls at his restraints, thrashing back and forth. Heather clamps her thighs to his waist to avoid being dislodged. There’s a lot more blood this time, and it runs down the side of his face and soaks into the mattress. His body goes limp and he lies back, breathing harshly, blood flowing from one eye, tears from the other.

Heather tosses the straightened paperclip aside.

“Strike two,” she says. “One last chance. I hope you get this one right, sweetie. I really do.”

He clamps his mouth shut this time, but it’s a futile gesture. All she has to do is pinch his nostrils together, and he eventually opens his mouth to breathe. He hopes to pull in a quick gulp of air and then close his mouth before she can jam her hand inside him again, but he isn’t fast enough. In goes her hand, her fingers feeling around inside his throat. He does bite her hand this time, but all he gets for his effort is a chipped tooth. Her flesh is hard as a rock, cold and unyielding. He doesn’t gag, and he supposes a person can get used to almost anything, given enough time.

She withdraws her hand from his mouth once again, and this time she holds an object that he recognizes immediately. It’s one of his contributions, the last one he added to the box. It’s an adhesive bandage, still in the wrapper. Relief washes over him. He’s going to get this one right, and when he does, Heather will release him. She promised.

“I chose it to symbolize how a strong relationship can help a person heal—even from wounds caused by problems in the relationship.”

He smiles in triumph. He’s got this one right, and now she’ll stop playing this sick game and let him go.

Her lips stretch into a smile of her own, but her eyes are colder than ever.

“That’s what you told me. But that’s not why you chose it. You lied. The real reason you chose it was because you thought our marriage had become irreparably damaged and all our efforts to fix it were like putting tiny bandages on deep, gushing wounds. Too little, too late.”

As cold as the air in the room is, her words make him feel colder inside. He didn’t tell her any of that, so how could she know? He supposes she knows the same way she can withdraw objects from his throat, the same way her skin is cold and hard as stone, the same way her touch is frozen fire. Right now, this is simply the way of things.

She tears open the wrapping and pulls the bandage out, lets the paper fall to the mattress. She removes the plastic backing from the sticky part of the bandage, takes hold of both ends between thumbs and forefingers, and pulls. The bandage lengthens and widens it as if it’s made of putty. She continues to stretch it until it’s ten inches long and five inches wide. She smiles the whole time she does this, and when she’s finished her smile grows larger, stretching past the point of what a human face should be capable of.

“Strike three, sweetie. You’re out.”

With gentle, almost loving movements, she places the overlarge bandage to the lower half of his face, covering his mouth and nose. She presses it to his flesh, smoothing the bandage until it adheres to his face like a second skin. The seal is airtight, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t pull in even the smallest of breaths. His lungs begin to burn almost immediately, and panic ignites inside him like wildfire. His starts to thrash, desperately trying to break free so that he can remove the bandage and get the air his body needs. Heather grips him with her thighs once more and grabs hold of his shoulders to prevent him from throwing her off. She leans her face close to his and kisses him on the forehead, right on the spot where the broken plastic whistle cut him. When she draws back he can see his blood smeared on her lips.

“You know what it says in the contract, Todd: Til death do us part.”

He struggles for a few more moments, his exertions lessening as the oxygen in his bloodstream is used up. Darkness creeps in from the edges of his vision, and the last thing he sees is Heather smiling at him with blood-slick lips.

* * *

Heather looks around, trying to orient herself. She’s in a dark place—Literally and figuratively, she thinks—and it’s hard to see. There’s dim light above, but it does little to illuminate her surroundings. Everything is draped in shadow, and she can only make out hazy, indistinct forms. She stretches out her hands before her and comes in contact with something. It’s large, and its surface is smooth and flat. Some kind of plastic, she thinks. She continues exploring it with her hands, finding sharp corners and raised round areas on one side. She frowns. It almost feels like…

Bright light floods the area, and she squints her eyes against the glare. When her eyes adjust she looks at the object she examined with her hands and sees that it’s a bright red plastic brick, almost six feet in length. It stands upright, held in place by other objects surrounding it.

It’s a toy building block, she thinks. A giant one.

She looks at the other objects in her vicinity, turning around in a slow circle to see them all. She stands amidst a jumble of odds and ends, all blown up to gigantic proportions. A button, a torn movie ticket, a beer bottle cap, a length of twine, an acorn, and more. They’re packed together so tightly that there’s almost no room to move, and she feels a sudden overwhelming sensation of claustrophobia. She knows these objects, half of them she chose herself. They’re from the Winter Box, but how did they get here and how did they get so huge?

She doesn’t pause to consider whether or not this is real. It feels real, and that’s all that matters to her. She’s more concerned with how she’s going to get out of the box. She doesn’t know how it’s gotten so large, but based on her size relative to the objects around her, the sides of the box—she supposes she should think of them as walls—are too high for her to climb. . . that is, unless she can find a large enough object close to one of the sides to use as a ladder or ramp. Or maybe she could put a pile of objects together that will allow her to climb out. So the first thing she has to do is find a side. She knows she’ll eventually find one regardless of which direction she goes, but she would rather take the shortest route if she can. She might be close to a side without knowing it, and she might start walking away from it only to end up heading toward the other side of the box. None of the objects in here are dangerous, at least not at their normal size. But now they are large enough that some of them—like the toy building block—can hurt her if they fall on her. Maybe she can find something sturdy, climb up on top of it, and take a look around. There’s plenty of light now, and she should be able to see well enough to tell if she’s close to a side or not.

Now that she has this settled, she starts looking around for something sturdy enough to bear her weight and braced well enough by the other objects around it that it won’t move too much when she attempts to climb it. But before she can find something suitable, a sound like thunder issues from high above her.

“You’ve always been a problem-solver.”

It’s Todd’s voice, amplified to a deafening volume. She grimaces and claps her hands over her ears. The bite mark on the back of her neck begins to throb.

“That’s something we share. We’re both problem-solvers, even if we go about it differently. I’m more dispassionate. Typical engineer, right? You’re more emotional. But that’s what works so well about us. We balance. We’re symmetrical.”

His voice is so loud she can feel it thrum throughout her body, the cadence of the words conflicting with the rhythm of her heart, making her pulse—which pounds in her ears—sound erratic. A shadow—deep, dark—falls over her then. She doesn’t want to look up, is terrified to do so. But she does.

She can only see a vast silhouette looming over her, one that resembles a human head. A giant’s head. The sight is terrifying enough, but she’s grateful that she can’t make out any real detail. If she could see his face clearly—his eyes, his mouth, every feature increased to monstrous size—she might go insane.

“That’s the one thing I don’t get. If the two of you are such problem-solvers, how come you haven’t been able to make things right between you? How could you let things get so bad?”

She doesn’t understand what he’s saying. Is he talking about them? If so, why is he referring to himself in the third person? But that’s the least of her worries right now, and the thought drifts from her mind almost as quickly as it’s born.

“We’re going to play a game, Heather, the symbolism of which won’t be lost on you, I’m sure. You’re in the exact middle of the box. If you want out, all you have to do is find your way through the maze of objects and reach this light.”

As if in response to his words, a pinpoint of blue-white light glows into existence to her left. It looks something like a star, a solitary one hanging low in a very dark sky. She assumes it’s positioned atop one of the box’s sides, which means her goal is essentially unchanged: get to the side of the box and find a way to climb out. Only now she has a specific direction to follow and a light to guide her.

She’s afraid to speak to the gigantic thing she senses both is and isn’t her husband, but she forces herself to do so. She shouts to make sure she’s heard.

“And what happens when I reach the light?” She almost says if I reach the light, but she corrects herself in time. She’ll make it. She has to.

Todd pauses before answering.

“You’ll be free,” he says.

That sounds more than a little ominous to her, but what choice does she have? She starts moving toward the light, carefully wending her way around and between the oversized objects, all of which she recognizes and remembers. She hasn’t been aware of it before now, but she realizes how cold it is in the box. She’s dressed, but not too warmly—a thin blouse and slacks—and her clothes do little to keep the cold out. She does her best to ignore it as she makes her way through the box’s maze, but she eventually begins to shiver, and she sees her breath mist the air.

It’s getting colder, she thinks.

The temperature decreases with each step she takes toward the light. If it keeps up like this, she fears she’ll freeze before she can reach it. She continues on, sometimes having to squeeze between objects, which have also grown cold. It’s like shoving past ice sculptures, and before long her body becomes numb. Still she perseveres, moving past a giant postage stamp with the image of Betty Boop on it, an old-fashioned key the length of a bus, a smiley-face button grown so large that the backing pin looks like a javelin, and more. Some of the items shift as she makes her way through them, some more than others. They come crashing down, starting a chain reaction and causing more objects to shift violently. Her left hand gets caught between a metal thimble the size of a Volkswagen and a hoop earring as wide as a door. It’s one of the earrings she wore back in college, on the night she and Todd first had sex. The recognition of this does not make her hand hurt any less. She pulls it free of the two objects, and checks to see if it’s broken. She can’t tell, though. She only knows it hurts like a motherfucker.

She continues more carefully after that, but she still manages to sprain her right ankle when her foot gets wedged beneath a gigantic corkscrew they used to open the bottle of wine they shared on their tenth anniversary. But she makes steady, if circuitous, progress toward the light, and eventually—after traveling how long she can’t say—she reaches the box’s side. She presses her body against it, palms flat, head turned to the side, cheek flattened. She closes her eyes and stands there for a moment, breathing and doing her best to ignore the pain in her hand, foot, and especially on the back of her neck where Todd bit her. The wall—for at this size, it seems like one to her—is cold as ice, but she doesn’t care. Not only because she’s so happy to be here, but because she’s half-frozen already.

She’s made it.

A loud blast of shattering thunder startles her, and she flings herself away from the wall and huddles in a ball on the floor, shivering with terror. It’s followed by a second burst, then a third.

“Congratulations!” Todd’s voice booms. “You did it!”

She looks up and sees his giant silhouette. She supposes it hovered above her the entire time she worked her way through the maze of objects, Todd watching her every move, maybe even taking delight in seeing her hurt herself. She did her best not to look upward while she traveled, and although she hadn’t forgotten about him—how could anyone forget that a Godzilla-sized version of their spouse was looking down at them?—she was able to keep her focus on moving forward. But now she isn’t moving, and she has nothing to distract her from the behemoth above.

Clapping, she realizes then. That sound was him clapping, three slow, sarcastic claps, as if he were making light of her accomplishment. Anger explodes within her and she jumps to her feet, ignoring her ankle’s protests and turns her head to the sky.

“Fuck you!” she shouts. “If you think it’s so easy, you come down here and try it!”

He chuckles, the sound like distant rolling thunder.

“I don’t think I’d fit.”

She’s so furious all she wants to do is scream obscenities at him, but she restrains herself. She needs him if she wants to get out of the box.

“I did as you asked,” she says, her voice surprisingly steady. “Let me out.” She pauses, then adds, “Please.”

“You’ve got plenty of stuff to stand on and help you climb out. You don’t need me.”

He speaks these last four words in a softer tone, one that she would describe as almost pouty. She recognizes that tone. She’s heard him use it often enough over the years. She thinks of it as his Little Boy voice, and he uses it whenever he’s feeling needy but doesn’t want to come out and say what he wants. And she knows exactly how to respond to it.

“I’m so tired, Todd. And I hurt myself, too. I sprained my ankle and maybe broke my hand. I don’t think I can drag objects around and pile them on top of each other and climb out. I need help.” And then she speaks the three words she knows he’s waiting to hear. “I need you.”

Nothing happens for a moment, and then the silhouette shifts. A length of darkness separates from it and begins coming toward her, details sharpening as it draws near. It’s Todd’s hand, and it’s the size of a small house. She knows she shouldn’t be afraid. This is her husband, and despite the recent troubles between them, she knows that he would never, ever, do anything to hurt her. But she is afraid, absolutely fucking terrified to the core. She imagines this is what a small animal—a baby bird or rabbit—must feel like when a human tries to pick it up. Her heart pounds like a rapid drumbeat in her ears, and she can feel pressure building in her chest. She wonders if her heart will explode like a blood-filled balloon. If it does, will she feel it when it happens, or will she die instantly, her consciousness extinguished as easily as someone blowing out a candle? She decides it’ll probably hurt like a bitch. If life is so hard, why should death be any easier?

His thumb and forefinger slow as they get closer, and he takes hold of the back of her blouse with surprising gentleness. He lifts her into the air slowly, and she watches the box and the items it holds dwindle in size the higher she rises. Todd moves his other hand under her, palm up, and gently sets her down. He raises her toward his face then, and instead of being frightened—at least, any more frightened—she’s confused. Maybe it’s because of their vast size difference, but he looks younger. Much younger, like he did when they first met, when he was barely a man and she barely a woman. Were they ever really that young? She finds the thought nearly incomprehensible, and this saddens her for reasons she can’t quite understand.

“We belong together,” Todd says. He whispers, but his voice still sounds loud, like rushing wind, and his cold breath envelops her like winter’s chill. “Just like we used to be, back when we were so close it was like we were one person. You killed us, Heather. You and him. Killed our love. But it’s not too late to make things right. We can be one again, all of us. You just have to stop fighting.”

She has no idea what he’s talking about, but there’s an edge to his words coupled with a disturbing gleam in his eyes that she thinks might be madness, or something close to it.

“You’re so sweet, Heather.” His mouth stretches into a fifty-foot-wide smile. “So sweet you’re good enough to eat.”

He opens his mouth and tosses her inside. She doesn’t have time to scream.

* * *

She sat up abruptly and looked around for a moment, unsure who she was, let alone where she was. A fire burned in front of her, but it did little to warm the air around her. She’d been wrapped in a blanket, but it had fallen off of her when she sat up. She grabbed it and drew it around her shoulders once more, but it didn’t help. The fabric felt as if it were suffused with cold and would never be warm again.

She looked to her left and saw Todd. Like her, he was sitting up, and he had a confused, almost wild look on his face, like a feral animal who feels trapped.

“You had a dream,” she said.

He nodded slowly. “More like a nightmare. You?”

She nodded. “Mine was about the Winter Box.”

“Mine too.”

They looked at each other for several moments, neither speaking. Finally, Todd said, “Something happened when I was outside earlier. I…thought I saw you. A younger version of you. In the snow…almost part of it somehow.”

“Something happened to me in the kitchen when you were outside. Someone came up behind me. Spoke to me in your voice. He…” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the bite mark on her neck. “Touched me,” she finished, then realized that sounded almost as bad as He bit me. “He sounded younger than you. He was in my dream, too.”

“And you were younger in my dream,” Todd said. “What the fuck is going on, Heather? What are we experiencing? Hallucinations caused by extreme cold?”

She wished it were that simple.

“No. This is different. Some of the things you—younger you—said in my dream made it sound as if he was separate from the present you.”

He thought for a moment. “The other you said similar things in my dream.”

“He was angry. He said he wanted to know why—”

“Our relationship had changed,” Todd interrupted.

She nodded. “And why we’d changed. Almost as if by changing, we’d betrayed them somehow.”

“Yes.”

If this had been any other time, she would’ve found it ludicrous—if not downright insane—that they were talking about apparitions and dreams as if they were real. But now, with the power out, the house cold inside, the winter storm raging outside—and especially the throbbing bite mark on the back of her neck—it didn’t seem ludicrous at all.

She’d noticed that Todd’s voice was a little raspy and he kept swallowing and occasionally touching his throat. His left eye, too. She wondered if he’d been marked as she had.

“They’re like ghosts, aren’t they?” he said. “Our ghosts. Except we’re not dead.” He let out a bark of a laugh that sounded more than a little unhinged. “Unless we are dead and don’t know it.”

Something about what he said struck a chord in her.

“What if they are ghosts, not of us, but of our marriage?”

He looked at her as if she was crazy, which at this point, she admitted to herself, was a real possibility. She went on.

“Our relationship has been on life support for a while, let’s face it, and now it’s pretty much dead. We haven’t spoken the D word aloud, either of us, but we’ve been thinking about it. I have, and I bet you have, too. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

He said nothing.

“Maybe love has a life of its own. It can be born and grow, so why can’t it wither and die? And why can’t the ghost of it return to demand answers of those who let it die? Who killed it?”

He shook his head. “That is absolutely insane, Heather. Love is an emotion, and emotions are chemically generated in the brain. They don’t have independent life of their own.”

Despite his words, his tone was uncertain, as if he were trying to convince himself just as much if not more than her.

A new thought occurred to her. “You said the box figured in your dream?”

He touched his throat again. “Yeah, kind of.”

“Maybe that’s the focal point of all this. Think about it. In ghost stories, spirits always have some kind of link that ties them to the physical. A place where they died, or some kind of object that was important to them when they were alive.”

“And the Winter Box isn’t just an object,” he said slowly, as if thinking this through. “It’s also filled with other objects. Dozens of them.”

“Bits and pieces of memories and emotions, all connected to our relationship.”

They looked at each other for several moments, alone with their thoughts. Finally, Todd said, “Let’s assume your theory is correct. What the hell can we do about it?”

Her answer was immediate.

“Destroy the box and everything in it.”

“Are you serious? You love the box and what it represents. It’s an important tradition to you. Even if…when we divorce, I figured you’d still want to keep it, kind of like a 3-D version of a photo album or something.”

The bite mark on her neck throbbed anew.

“Not anymore.”

Without waiting for Todd’s response, she shrugged off the blanket, stood, and went into the living room. The Winter Box sat closed on the couch, and she picked it up and carried it back to the fireplace. Its smooth wooden surface was so cold, it stung her fingers, but she didn’t care. She put the box on the floor in front of the fireplace, knelt, removed the grate and set in on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Todd asked. “That’s a gas fireplace, remember? There’s no flue. If you put the box in there, smoke will pour into the house.”

“Fuck the house.”

She picked up the box, placed it atop the fake log inside, and pulled her hands back quickly so she wouldn’t get burned. Other than remind her about the lack of a flue, Todd did nothing to stop her. The box caught fire at once, and black smoke curled upward from the wood. Since it had no place to go, it coiled outward and rose toward the ceiling where a large soot mark began to form.

Heather and Todd stood, moved back from the fireplace, and watched the box burn. Heather half-expected there to be some kind of dramatic reaction from the box. Unearthly screaming voices, an explosion of eerie green light, maybe even a manifestation of the ghosts—or whatever they were—materializing so they could try to stop the box’s destruction. But none of those things happened. The box simply continued to burn and slowly fill the room with smoke.

“We should turn off the fire and douse the box with water before it gets any worse,” Todd said, although he didn’t sound particularly worried.

She thought she understood his reaction, or rather lack of one. This whole situation was so unreal, it numbed you, made you feel disconnected from what was happening, as if you were only an observer and not a participant.

“We have to wait until the box and everything in it burns,” she said. “It’s the only way to be—”

At that precise instant, every window in the house exploded inward.

* * *

There was a bay window in the room where the fireplace was located, and when it exploded, Todd dove toward Heather. He managed to get his arms around her just as a torrent of wind, glass, and snow struck them. Despite his attempt to shield her, glass shards struck them both, and then the wind slammed them into the wall next to the fireplace. They fell to the floor, and Todd lay there, Heather sprawled on top of him. He tried to ask her if she was okay, but he’d had the breath knocked out of him and couldn’t speak. He glanced at the fireplace and saw the box no longer burned. The outside was charred and blackened, but for the most part, the box appeared intact. A couple small flames clung stubbornly to the box’s surface, but as he watched they flickered in the wind that still rushed through the broken window, diminished and died, taking the last of the light with them.

He felt fiery stings of pain on his arms, back, neck, and scalp from where glass had struck him, but the cold was the strongest sensation by far. The sudden plunge in temperature hit his system like an electric shock, and he wondered if this was what those lunatics who jumped naked into freezing water felt like. He’d read somewhere that the shock of hitting water that cold could stop your heart. He believed it.

With the fire out, it was dark in the house and he couldn’t see Heather’s face. She hadn’t moved since she hit the wall, though, and he feared the worst. He was still having trouble drawing in enough air to speak, and it didn’t help that the air inside was now so fucking cold it felt like ice crystals seared his nasal passages and throat when he tried to breathe. Still lying on the floor, snow gusting in from outside and starting to form drifts around them, he shook Heather. Gently at first, and then more vigorously. He knew that you weren’t supposed to move an injured person, but right now there wasn’t much choice. If the two of them didn’t get up and do something fast, this intense cold would kill them. That is, if something else didn’t do the job first.

Heather stirred, and he thought he heard her moan, but the wind blowing in from the broken window was so loud, he wasn’t sure. He moved out from under her and helped her into a sitting position. He leaned close to her ear and spoke loudly to be heard over the wind.

“Try to stand!”

Without waiting for her reply, he stood and pulled her up with him. She shivered violently, but he couldn’t tell if it was due to the cold or her injuries. Probably both, he decided. She was up, though, and that was what mattered. Holding onto her arm, he led her into the living room. The window in there was broken as well—he assumed every window in the house was—and snow covered the floor, with more coming in every second. It was like instead of a snowstorm outside, there was a flood, and water was pouring into their house by the gallon. He led Heather into the foyer, groped for the coat closet knob, found it, and opened the door. The two of them had already been dressed in several layers of clothes and were wearing shoes, but that wasn’t enough to protect against this cold. Moving as quickly as he could, Todd found a pair of winter coats and helped Heather into hers before donning his own. His coat wasn’t as heavy as the one he’d worn to clear the driveway, but that one was still out in the garage, and he didn’t want to go back for it. Same for his boots. He’d just have to make do with shoes.

Heather was moving better on her own now, and he hoped that meant she wasn’t as badly injured as he’d feared. Once they had their coats on, they donned hats, scarves, and gloves. Todd still felt cold as hell, and the wounds he’d suffered when the bay window exploded stung like hell, but his coat blunted the worst of the wind that tore through the house, and at least that was something.

“What do we do now?” Heather shouted. Her voice sounded stronger than he’d expected, encouraging him further. “Go down to the basement?”

There were no windows down there, and because of the earth around them, basements tended to remain at a steady temperature year round, never too hot or too cold. But he no longer believed that this was a natural snowstorm—not around their house, anyway—and he wasn’t confident the intense cold wouldn’t reach them down there. It was a like a living creature, and he feared it would find them wherever they went. Plus, there were other things out to get them. A pair of them, in fact. If they could attack Heather and him in their dreams, then a locked basement door wouldn’t prove much of an obstacle for them.

He remembered what Heather had said about ghosts being bound to something physical. Maybe they hadn’t been able to destroy the box completely, but if they left the house, the box—and presumably the non-ghosts that it had brought into whatever sort of strange existence they possessed—would remain here, too. And if the storm was only this violent because the spirits were somehow making it so, once they got far enough from the house, they should be safe. It was a logical plan—if logic had any kind of place in the fucked-up nightmare they were currently living—and he quickly told Heather what he was thinking. She agreed, and they turned toward the door.

The door was made of thick wood and had no glass to shatter, so it had withstood the assault of the wind and snow. Todd groped for the knob in the dark, found it, and was about to turn it. But he could hear the wind outside pounding at the door, felt the knob vibrating in his hand. If he tried to open the door, the wind and snow would blast inside and slam both him and Heather to the floor. Better to go out one of the windows. They’d still have to fight the wind, but it would be easier and safer. Although at this point, he knew safer was a relative term.

“Let’s try a window instead!” he shouted.

Heather agreed, and they headed back into the living room. The wind continued driving snow through the opening, but most of the glass was gone, so they wouldn’t have to worry about cutting themselves. Heather was more slender and weighed less than he did, so Todd helped her through the window then followed after. It took some effort on both their parts. Pushing against the wind and the biting snow was like trying to walk upstream through rapids. But they made it, and once they were outside, the wind—while just as strong—wasn’t confined, and they found its force dissipated somewhat, making it, if not easy to walk, at least possible.

Between the dark and the roiling snow, visibility was almost nonexistent. Todd took Heather’s hand and they trudged in the direction of the street, making their way as best could through drifts that sometimes rose as high as their waists. Todd told himself it didn’t matter what direction they went, as long as it was away from the house. Once they were far enough away to be safe—although he had no idea how they would know when they reached that point—they could try to seek shelter in one of their neighbors’ houses. Even if the house they reached belonged to a stranger, Todd was hopeful they’d let him and Heather in. No one would turn them away, not in this weather. The biggest problem would be surviving long enough to reach shelter. Their winter clothes were just the normal variety and only did so much to protect them from the cold. Their progress was torturously slow, and after a while, Todd began to fear that he’d made a terrible mistake, that they never should’ve left the house, that they should’ve remained there and faced their other selves, whatever the hell they really were. But it was too late to go back now. They had to keep moving forward if they were to have any hope of survival.

One good thing about this cold, he thought, was that it should slow the bleeding from their cuts, maybe even freeze the blood into makeshift bandages. The thought wasn’t much of a silver lining, though. They might not be in danger of bleeding to death, but the cold would kill them just as effectively, and probably a good deal faster. What the fuck was the wind chill, anyway? Minus a hundred? Sure as hell felt like it.

As they walked, he thought the sky was beginning to lighten, and for the first time since all this began, he felt a spark of hope. Evidently he and Heather had slept longer than he thought and dawn was approaching. The storm raged on, so he doubted visibility would improve tremendously, but he’d take any advantage they could get. Even a little light might prove the difference between life and death for him and his wife.

Wife.

He and Heather had been married so long that the word had almost lost its meaning for him. But now, holding her hand—although he could hardly feel it—and fighting for their lives, he understood what it meant. What husband meant, too. The words were promises. Of love, yes, but much more than that. Of partnership. Of support. Of a bond that only seemed deep at the beginning, but which could grow far deeper in time. If tended to, cared for, and honored. It had been a long time since he had done any of those things, and the realization filled him with shame, sorrow, and regret. It wasn’t just him, though. The same thing had happened to Heather, if to a lesser degree, but that was no excuse. Each partner was expected to do his or her share of the heavy lifting in the relationship, and neither of them had done any for a long time, him more so than her.

But they were together now, weren’t they? Working as a team, fighting for mutual survival, all the petty day-to-day bullshit that built up over the years of a marriage stripped away, meaningless and forgotten. If they made it out of this alive, maybe things would change between them. Maybe they wouldn’t. But right now, right here, for this moment, they were truly husband and wife again, and for that he was grateful.

The light had continued to increase, and now he could make out Heather as a grayish silhouette at his side. He turned to her, intending to tell her he loved her, when a sudden violent gust of wind and snow hit them from behind. He lost sight of her and felt her gloved hand slip from his. He experienced a moment of panic, fearing now that they were separated, he would lose her, but then the wind diminished, the blowing snow lessened, and he could see her again, more clearly this time. He reached out to take her hand and drew her close to him.

“I love you,” he said.

She stood naked before him, her young skin bluish-white. Her eyes were like ice chips, and when she spoke her breath coated his face with frost.

“I know.”

* * *

Heather started to shout for Todd, but he reached out and took hold of her hand once more, and the panic that had begun to build in her died before it could be fully born. It wasn’t that she was afraid of trying to make it through the storm on foot alone—although that was part of it—but she didn’t want to lose him. She wanted him to live, for his own sake, for hers, and for the two of them. Before this night, she had all but given up on their marriage. But now, after everything they had been through tonight, she was willing to keep fighting for it, for as long as it might take. They’d had something good once. No, something fantastic, and if they could bring it back to full life, she thought it could be far stronger than it ever had been before. Maybe they could make it work, maybe they couldn’t. But they had to try.

They continued trudging on, fighting the storm, and Heather became lost in her thoughts. She was heartened by the approaching sunrise, and even more so when—worried that her hand had become too numb to feel his and they might have been separated—the snowfall lessened, and for the first time since they’d left the house, she could see Todd. But what she saw made her scream.

He reached for her with blue-tinted arms, enfolded her in his frozen embrace, and pulled her close.

* * *

The storm is over now. The sky is clear and the sun shines bright. Its light brings no warmth, though, not to this frozen landscape. But light is like that sometimes. It reveals but doesn’t comfort.

There are no houses here. No trees, no vehicles, no anything. Just snow—ivory-white and glistening—stretching outward in all directions. No, that isn’t altogether true. There is something in the midst of all this white. Two somethings, a man and a woman. They’re kneeling in the snow, arms wrapped around one another, faces close, foreheads touching. Their skin and clothes are coated with a thick layer of ice, and while they do not move, do not breathe, they are at least together. And they shall remain this way forever.

A gentle wind swirls around them, and although they cannot hear it, along with this wind comes the happy laughter of a young couple, very much in love, and deeply content.

About the Author

Shirley Jackson Award finalist Tim Waggoner has published over thirty novels and three short story collections of dark fiction. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. His most recent novels are Eat the Night and Supernatural: Mythmaker. You can find him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com.

About the Publisher

DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.

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THE WINTER BOX

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