The lights went out.

Sarah froze, the darkness crowding in on her like the dirt of a premature burial, constricting her throat until she couldn’t breathe. Eyes blind, the vision lingered in her mind, the last thing she’d glimpsed before the blackout, a subliminal flash of something moving in front of her.

Eli’s hands pinched her closer.

“Mommy,” his voice whispered, “what’s going on?”

She couldn’t speak.

“Mommy?”

Say something, for God’s sake.

“The power’s out.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did that man do it?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

She knew that it was her job as a parent to whisper reassurances to him, to tell him that everything was going to be all right. But at the moment, in such darkness, she didn’t trust herself to formulate those familiar old nostrums.

Turn. Just turn around. You have the railing. It’s right here…

But for one dreadful moment her hand was so hot and numb she wasn’t sure she could feel the railing anymore. Her other arm, locked around Eli, seemed to have absorbed all the feeling from her body. Her fingers groped and slapped upward until yes, there it was, and she clutched it, jerking herself around and upward, upward, toward where she knew the door must be.

18.

The power outage happened over a span of perhaps three seconds, the lights overhead dimming, sputtering, and then disappearing completely, burying Mike in a wave of blackness that passed through the entire hospital like the last gasp of a dying man.

He held his hand in front of his face and saw nothing. The tidal wave of disorientation was immediate and multisensory. All at once the stairwell, normally so familiar to his eyes, became some vast and unknown cave. His fingers groped and met the cement wall behind him, tracing the grooves between the cinder blocks. It felt cool, almost moist, in the dark.

What’s happening here?

Snow. He cut the power. And the backup generators, too.

Why? How?

But he knew the answer to that, too, didn’t he? At least the first part. Not logically, maybe, but on a deeper level, where truth bypassed the forebrain and went straight to the nerve endings. It took only a moment in the dark for the entirety of Snow’s purpose to take shape, the way the glow-in-the-dark constellations that Mike had glued to Eli’s bedroom ceiling would crystallize seconds after he switched off the light.

He’s hunting us.

The darkness was getting to him already, finding his weak points and snipping them like strings. It made him think about whatever it was that had grazed past him, back in the ER, on its way—

“Snow,” he murmured. “It was Snow, so why don’t you just call it that?”

What if he reached out for me now, here in the dark? What would I do? Where would I run?

Hysteria brushed close against him then, sleek as mink, leaving him momentarily ready to scream. Mike bit his lip until salty blood drifted over the tip of his tongue and his whole mouth throbbed. It helped, a little, but never in his life had he felt so confused and helpless, so absolutely broken in half by fear.