"Isaac? Is it really … "
She sank to her knees and embraced him.
"This is a goddamn madhouse," Keenan said.
Outside, the wind began to scream and they all stiffened. Jake spun around, staring at the windows. Had he seen something flit by out there? The fear that had been enveloping him wrapped itself around him like a shroud. Once upon a time, twelve years earlier, Isaac had watched the ice men dancing in the snow and made the mistake of thinking them harmless. Playful. They couldn't make that mistake again.
The house shook and a barrage of noise filled the air, beams creaking and glass rattling, and then they could heard a terrible sound, like a hundred iron hooks being dragged along the roof and outer walls of the farmhouse.
"They're here, Momma," Isaac cried, spinning around in terror, eyes wide. "Don't let them take me again."
Jake looked at Harley. "Get these goddamn handcuffs off."
"This is impossible," Detective Keenan said.
Miri snapped her fingers in front of his face twice. "Wake up, Detective. The impossible can kill you."
TWENTY-ONE
Keenan spun around, trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from, and then he realized they were coming from everywhere. His thoughts were a maelstrom of doubt-whom did he believe, here? Whom could he trust? Despite the icy air and the plummeting temperature in the room, he felt beads of sweat dripping down his back and wondered if he might be having a nervous breakdown.
Breakdown? It's not that simple. I'm losing my damn mind.
Losing his mind, because with every word out of the mouths of these people, he kept seeing the face of that rookie, Torres, in his head, and trying to tell himself that the young, seemingly unbalanced cop had not said the words Keenan thought he'd heard in The Tap the night before: "I'm betting you still remember what my skin smelled like when it burned." He'd thought Torres was having some kind of psychotic episode, convincing himself that he was Gavin Wexler. Hell, given his age, they might have gone to school together. Or so Keenan had told himself.
Now, he didn't know what to think.
The fingers of his right hand twitched and descended toward the gun he'd just holstered. He had to force himself not to draw the weapon, worried that he might pull the trigger. Instead, he stared at Zachary Stroud. The kid might be orphaned, but somehow he'd survived … if he was still even Zachary Stroud. The way he held on to Allie Schapiro-kids didn't clutch at strangers that way. He knew her, saw her as his mother, but if Keenan allowed himself to follow that train of thought it would lead him to things he simply refused to believe.
Harley had moved behind Jake and was taking off the handcuffs.
"What do you think you're doing?" Keenan demanded. He felt like he was floating, like the people in the room around him were retreating into shadows and he was starting to lift off the ground. "He's in custody, dammit!"
Harley froze and stared at him, eyes narrowing. Could the younger cop see how untethered from reality he had become? Keenan thought perhaps he could, and it was almost a relief when Harley hurried to him, moving between Allie Schapiro and Miri Ristani.
"Joe, snap out of it," Harley said, grabbing his arm.
The whole house shook with a massive gust of wind, boards groaning, and the Stroud boy cried out again, this time pointing at the window. Keenan glanced over and thought, for just a second, that he had seen a face at the glass, an obscene mask of ice with jagged teeth and eyes that were hideously, cruelly intelligent. He turned away, shook his head to clear it, and looked again to see that it had been only a pattern of snow stuck to the window screen.
Harley grabbed the front of his jacket and hauled him up onto the tips of his toes, so they were practically nose-to-nose.
"Detective Keenan!" he shouted. "Wake the hell up!"
Keenan flinched, inhaling sharply, as if Harley had struck him. He shook himself loose and for a moment he just stood there listening to the pounding of his heart. When he turned to look at Allie and the boy again, Miri and Jake were with them … and beyond them, in the shadows at the corner of the room, stood what could only be a ghost.
"There!" Keenan shouted, pulling his gun, knowing bullets would do nothing. "All of you get back!"
"No!" the Stroud boy said, looking at him with wide, desperate eyes. "He's here to help! That's Miri's dad!"
Gripping his gun so hard that his knuckles ached, Keenan watched the ghost drift to the boy and kneel in front of him.
"Hello, Isaac," it said.
Keenan's jaw dropped at the sound of its voice and a ripple of emotion went through him, some combination of wonder and horror that he had never felt before.
"You got away, Niko," Isaac said. "We all thought we could get out, too."
"I know, pal. I know."
Of all things, it was the sorrow in the eyes of a ghost, the regret in the voice of a dead man, that brought it all home to Keenan. He glanced around the room at the people gathered there and realized that they were a family. Allie had been in a relationship with Niko at the time of the blizzard that had killed Niko and Isaac, and here they were. Niko and his daughter. Allie and her boys. Keenan stared at Zachary Stroud and the boy's story came back to him, the firsthand account of a ghost who had watched a boy try to save his drowning parents and ended up nearly drowning himself, brain damaged by oxygen deprivation.
This wasn't Zachary Stroud at all.
Sound rushed in. It had been there all along, the scraping at the farmhouse's walls and roof and the rattling of the windows, but he had been lost inside his head for a minute or two. Now he felt as if he had woken from sleep to discover that the ordinary world had been a dream and this land of impossible things was reality.
"There are others," he said, looking at Jake. "How many are we talking about?"
"All of them, I think," Jake said, but he could barely take his eyes off the ghost in the room. "Either like Isaac or … I don't know, maybe like that."
"No," the ghost said. "There are no others like me."
"We found Gavin Wexler and his father," Allie said quickly, glancing around at the walls as if they were closing in. "They've possessed Eric Gustafson and a policeman named Torres-"
"Torres," Keenan said. "God, it all makes sense now."
"Nat Kresky was acting weird," Harley said. "Like he couldn't-"
Miri threw up her hands. "Solve the mystery later, guys. We need to get somewhere they can't reach us and right now. Allie and I have seen these things up close-"
"The cellar," Jake said, picking up Isaac-And now I'm thinking of him as Isaac, Keenan thought-and rushing out of the room.
"Move it!" Keenan snapped at Harley, but the other cop was already moving.
Miri and Allie raced after Jake and Isaac, each but the boy holding a flashlight, and Keenan and Harley brought up the rear. When Keenan glanced into the corner where he'd seen the ghost, Niko Ristani had gone. A flush of warmth went through him, relief that the dead man had abandoned them, but when he hustled into the corridor and saw the others rushing for the cellar door, which Jake held open, the ghost appeared again, standing just behind Jake and urging them on.
He forced himself to breathe, to just keep moving. To believe. These people were depending on him.
His teeth chattered. It had become so cold in the house, and so quickly, that the chill cut through his jacket and made the gun feel like ice in his hand. Miri went downstairs first, followed by Allie and Isaac, the little dead boy who held his mother's hand to keep from falling. Just move, Keenan told himself, trying not to be thrown by his thoughts.
"You think this door will hold?" he asked, looking past Jake at the ghost of Niko Ristani.
"If anything will," the ghost replied, his voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. "It's sturdy and secure and the weather stripping will lessen the chance of a draft. The storm is weakening; we just have to hope it spins itself out before they can get to you."
The whole house seemed to sway. It sure didn't feel to Keenan like the storm was weakening.
"Go," Jake said, nodding to him and Harley as he dug into his pocket and pulled out a jangling set of keys. "I can lock it from inside."
Harley patted him on the arm-all forgiven, apparently-took out his flashlight, and hurried into the cellar after the others. With the ghost looking on, Keenan paused.
"Jake … "
"Now's not the time."
Keenan nodded. "Lock it up tight."
He had his foot on the top step when they all heard a massive crack and a splintering of wood, followed by a crash.
"One of the vents. The attic or the bathroom," said the ghost. "They're inside."
Keenan felt like his heart shriveled up in his chest, felt the prickle of heat on the back of his neck even as the air filled with ice crystals, fogging their breath and frosting their hair, and he had the lunatic idea that it might snow inside the house. Jake came at him and Keenan turned, hurtling down the steps as Jake locked the door behind them. The darkened stairwell gave way to the eerie yellow glow of the cellar, flashlight beams crossing in the swirl of dust, picking out the gleam of cobwebs. The furnace had fallen silent, a metal monolith in the corner, and stacks of old boxes and two huge old televisions took up most of the wall space. A small, doorless entryway led into a smaller room, and Keenan saw the edge of a clothes dryer in the dim light.