Snowblind(50)

EIGHTEEN





Miri found it difficult to focus on her father's words. If she did not look directly at him, didn't peer too deeply into the shadows, it was possible for her to listen to the rumble of his voice and pretend-for several moments at a time-that he was still alive. In the presence of his ghost she had found that she could barely breathe. Niko Ristani had died when she was only eleven years old, young enough that when she wanted to remember his voice she had to put on old family videos and just listen. Now he was right here with her. Right here in this very room.

She felt damp streaks on her face and was surprised to find that she was crying. Tears reached her lips and she brushed them away, tasting salt. Her chest ached as if her heart had swollen within her, near to bursting.

The ghost hesitated.

"Miri?"

She closed her eyes, not wanting to look at him. Miri had seen him strike out into the blizzard that night in search of help, already traumatized by Isaac's death, and the next time she had seen him he was lying dead in his casket, the funeral home not quite able to cover up the blue sheen left behind from lying dead in the snow for days before discovery. And now he was here.

Niko had been a great father. The best. When he and Miri's mother had gotten divorced she had been too young to truly understand that there was enough blame to go around for both of them and she had believed Angela to be completely at fault. Those years when she'd had her father to herself had been the best years of her life. He had always told Miri that he could never hate her mother, because Angela had given him the greatest gift anyone could ever have. Even at the age of nine or ten she would roll her eyes, but in her heart she cherished those words. Busy as he was, he would always find time to hug her, and when he had days off he would take her to the beach or just huddle with her in his living room to read a book together, taking turns reading to each other. When he died they had been halfway through the second Harry Potter book. Miri had never picked up the book again, couldn't bring herself to read the rest of the series.

For her eleventh birthday, he had taken her to the Grand Canyon and they'd ridden mules all the way down and camped at the bottom. That night, they had lain on some rocks and looked up at the stars framed between the upper edges of the canyon walls, and Miri had cried because it was all so beautiful, and because she wished things could have been different and her mother could have been there with them and her parents still in love. That had been the night that Niko had told Miri that he was falling in love with Allie Schapiro, and though it had been so strange to think of her father with her former teacher, and she had reached an age where she could not trust the prospect of happiness, she had let herself think that perhaps there would be a new family and to begin wondering how she would manage it, being around Jake so much without letting on how much she liked him.

The memories overwhelmed her. Niko hadn't been the perfect father-he could be short-tempered and often became too wrapped up in his work, and sometimes he said things about Angela that a child should never have to hear about a parent-but he had loved Miri and tried his best to show her that love.

"Hey," the ghost said, startling her.

Then Allie's voice. A human voice. Alive. "Miri, honey, please."

"Miri," the ghost echoed. She felt a chill and wondered if it had come from some draft in the house or off of him. "Honey, I'm really here."
     
 

     

Opening her eyes, she spun on him, hands shaking as she gestured at the air as if she might wave him away.

"No, you're not. You're not here, Daddy. You're dead."

She stared at him, forced herself to look at him and through him, to see the bricks of the fireplace that were visible through the gauzy nothing that her father had become.

Allie put a comforting hand on the back of Miri's neck, but she felt no comfort.

The sorrow in the eyes of her father's ghost broke her heart into even smaller pieces.

"Yes," the ghost whispered, and his voice seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. "I'm sorry that I left you that night. I would never have done it if I'd known that I wouldn't be coming back. But Isaac was dead and I couldn't stand to see you and Jake standing there by his body, to see Allie so broken. I went for help."

"It never came!" Miri shouted at him, shaking off Allie's hand.

The ghost rushed at her so abruptly that she let out a scream. Allie scrambled back on the sofa but Miri did not move as Niko came up to her, almost nose-to-nose.

"Listen to me. Awful things happened in Coventry that night and help never came for anyone. Well, now those things are going to happen again, but tonight can be different. You and Allie and I  …  we can help, and not just the living."

Miri stared at him, growing numb, as if so many conflicting emotions had simply overloaded her.

It was Allie who spoke up. "What do you mean? Are you saying … " Her voice lowered to a whisper. "Is Isaac here, too? Like you?"

"Not like me, but yes, I think he's here in Coventry. And if we can't warn him and the others … "

The ghost shifted away, retreating to the shadows as if he found solace in them. And perhaps he did.

"Dad?" Miri said. "I'm listening, now. Tell us what we need to do."

The ghost remained in the shadows. They gave him more substance, somehow, and Miri studied him at last, hoping to etch the details of her father's face more deeply into her memory. The slight curl to his short hair and high cheekbones and dark, serious eyes that could turn bright with laughter  …  only not now. Perhaps never again. Death had taken that from him.

"Jake called them the ice men," the ghost began. "I remember that. He got the phrase from Isaac and it's as good a term as any. The truth is that I don't know what they really are, though I have my suspicions. They live in the storm, but it's not just any storm. They exist in a kind of endless blizzard that is somehow its own place, a kind of frozen limbo. When it snows anywhere, this other, unnatural storm overlaps with our world.

"They killed me, of course. That night I was running toward the sound of the plow on the next street and two of them just plucked me up off the ground like birds of prey. I've never been so cold, not before and not even now  …  and then they dropped me. The fall did me in."

Miri shuddered and took Allie's hand.

"They strip the ghost right out of you-that's the only way I can express it-and then you belong to them, dragged along in their wake from storm to storm. They survive on something they take from us at the moment of death, and then after, too, like leeches. Heat or life or soul, I don't know what. When you're in the storm you can sense the living world, feel its warmth just out of reach. That's the worst part, knowing how close you are to love and light."

"I'm so sorry," Allie said.

Niko smiled softly and nodded to her. Miri wiped her eyes.

"I thought of you-both of you-during my time in the storm. I grieved for myself and at the thought of never seeing either of you again. Somehow I kept a little ember burning inside me, a purpose I held on to, and the last time it snowed here in Coventry, I could feel it. I willed myself toward it. That final ember gave me the strength to pull myself from their gravity and I found myself here, fully aware for the first time. When the snow falls, my thoughts are clearer.

"The others noticed. Isaac and the Newell boy and Cherie Manning and the rest from Coventry. I had left a trail for them and they slipped out after me, but none of them seemed to be able to focus the way I can. They decided that the only way to survive, to hide from the ice men, was to have a living body as an anchor."

"What do you mean, ‘anchor'?" Miri asked.

Niko's ghost looked at her. "They've taken over the bodies of living people."

"That's awful," Allie said, crow's feet turning to wrinkles as she frowned.

"Is it?" the ghost replied. "They're afraid, Allie. They're hiding. I think some of them just want a chance at a proper goodbye, but I wouldn't be surprised if others intend to run off and start new lives in those bodies. The one thing I know for certain is that they were all hoping that escaping meant they were free, but it isn't that simple. The ice men noticed. They had to wait for a real storm, something powerful enough for them to come through."

"And now it's here," Miri said quietly.

"And now they're here," her father said.

Allie tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "You said you had suspicions about what they are."

The sight of her father's ghost shrugging with uncertainty was the strangest thing that Miri had ever seen. The strangest thing she ever hoped to see.

"They could be the gods of winter, the tattered remnants of long-forgotten deities, left over from an age when people worshipped the elements."

Miri studied him. "But you don't think so."

"No, I don't. I think they're like me. I don't know how it started or who the first of the ice men might have been, but I think these things only look demonic. I think they're just hungry ghosts, searching for warmth. I think they're what will eventually become of us if we let them take us back into their storm."

"Oh my god," Allie whispered. "Isaac."

Niko's ghost nodded. "Exactly. Isaac, and the rest of us. But they have limits. They can only exist here for as long as the storm rages. Once it begins to die down, they'll have to retreat along with it."