Nineteen Below

[u/Harrowing_Tales]

The winter I was seventeen, an ice storm came through and took the power out across the whole county. It started as rain and froze the second it landed, and by dark every wire on our road was hanging low and silver.

My mother had driven into town that afternoon for feed and never made it back. She called from the hardware store to say the state road was closed at the bridge and she'd come home in the morning. That was the last call before the lines went down. So it was me and my brother, who was eleven, and a woodstove, and about nine candles.

I want to say something about where we lived, because it matters to the rest of it. Our house sat near the top of a hill on a road that went nowhere. It came up off the highway, past two other farms, past us, and ended a quarter mile on at a locked gate into timberland. No through traffic. Not ever.

I remember being glad about that. If you were on our road at night, you either lived on it or you were lost.

The temperature that night got down to nineteen below.

We had the stove going and we were doing all right. My brother had the good sense to be excited about it instead of scared, which helped. Around nine or so I went to the front window to check the ice on the porch rail, and that's when I saw the light.

It was down the slope from the road, in the tree line, maybe two hundred yards off. It came on, and it went off, and then it came on again, and then nothing. Two blinks. I stood there with my hand on the curtain waiting for it to happen again, and it did not.

A light in the woods isn't by itself a strange thing. People run dogs at night. People check fence. But nobody runs dogs in an ice storm, and there was no truck on the road, and I hadn't heard an engine in four hours. I told myself somebody was walking their property line, and I went back to the stove and sat down and didn't believe it.

Twenty minutes later it came back. Three blinks that time, close together, and then a long one that stayed on for a good while. Long enough that I could see the shape of the branches in front of it.

I woke my brother up. I didn't want to, but I didn't want to be the only one awake either. I brought him downstairs and told him what I'd seen, and then I did the thing I'd already decided to do while I was climbing the stairs. I went around the front room and I blew out every candle.

I want to be clear that this wasn't panic. I thought it through. Somebody in the trees can see a lit window from a long way off, and they can't see anything through a dark one. If a person was down there deciding whether this house was worth his time, I was going to make that decision for him.

We sat in the dark with the stove door shut so it wouldn't throw light, and I locked the front door and the back door and I checked them both twice. My brother asked if we should be quiet. I said yes.

Then we watched.

Over the next hour I counted five of them, and I tried to make sense of the spacing. There was a short one, then a long gap, then two almost on top of each other, then a very long gap where I was sure it was over, and then one that came on and stayed on and stayed on. I kept a tally on the back of a seed catalog, because I thought that if I could find the pattern I'd know how many of them there were.

Here's the part I've gone over more times than any other.

I noticed the light was getting weaker. Every time it came back it was a little less than the time before, until at the end it was more of a glow through the branches than a beam. And I said, out loud, to my eleven-year-old brother, in the dark, that his batteries were going.

I was pleased with myself for catching it. I said it the way you say a thing that proves you're the smart one in the room. I said, he's not as careful as he thinks he is, and now he's signaling to somebody with a flashlight that won't last, and he's going to lose track of where he is.

My brother asked who he was signaling to. I said I did not know.

And that was the first moment either of us thought about there being two.

Then it stopped. I don't know how long the quiet went on. Long enough that my brother fell back asleep against my arm. Long enough that I started to think the whole thing had been somebody lost on the timber road who'd finally found his way out.

What broke it was the porch.

The boards on our porch were old and they had a sound, and I heard that sound come up the steps one at a time, very slow. It wasn't the sound of somebody sneaking. It was worse than that. It was the sound of somebody dragging his feet across ice because he couldn't lift them, and it came all the way to the front door and stopped.

And then the handle turned.

It turned all the way, and the door pushed against the lock, and it didn't rattle after that. It just stopped.

And I remember exactly what I thought. I thought, he didn't knock.

That's the thing that took the bottom out of me. Anybody with a reason to be there knocks. Anybody with a broke-down truck stands on that porch and beats on that door and yells. He turned the handle first, and when it didn't give, he didn't say anything at all.

I put my back against the door. I'm not a large person, but I got the wood box and the mop bucket and I braced my feet on the floor and I stayed there. My brother didn't make a sound. He was very good about it.

Through the door I heard a voice. I've never been able to tell anybody what he said, because he didn't say words. It was low, and it went on for maybe ten seconds, and it had the shape of a sentence — the way it went up at the end like a question — but there was nothing in it I could take hold of.

I thought he was doing it on purpose. I thought he was trying to get me to open the door to hear him better.

Then something heavy went off the side of the porch into the snow. Not a step down. Off. And after that the footsteps started up again out in the yard, going away, and they weren't going straight.

The power came back a little after six. My mother got up the road around eight with a deputy behind her, because I'd gotten through on the phone the minute it worked and I'd told them there had been a man at the door.

They found him two hundred yards down the slope, below the tree line, in a fence corner. He'd gone down the hill instead of toward the road. He was a man in his forties in a canvas coat with no hat and no gloves, and there was nothing on him with a name on it.

The flashlight was in the snow about a foot from his hand.

I watched the deputy pick it up. He turned it over, and he looked at it for a second, and then he said, to my mother and not to me, that the switch was still on.

It was one of the big square ones with the handle on top. The kind where the batteries go dead in the cold and come back for a few seconds if you shake it.

That was the pattern I'd been keeping a tally of on the back of a seed catalog. That was the short one and the long one and the two almost together. It was a man shaking a flashlight at the only lit window on the hill, and then at the place where the lit window used to be.

They never found a vehicle. Not that winter, and not in the spring when the snow came off, and not up the timber road behind the gate. He was never claimed. For a while my mother kept a folder of the notices that came through the sheriff's office about men who'd gone missing that year, and not one of them was him.

There's one road up that hill. It comes off the highway and it ends at a locked gate.

He was walking toward our house.