Outside the open door of the mill building, early evening drew closer to night, and the snow still fell, already beginning to cover the bloodstained figure on the ground. David ran from building to building, carrying his daughter in his arms and shouting Helen’s name. He got no response; the huge and ghostlike compound was silent except for the wind. Finally, after what seemed like hours of searching, he felt the tears come again, and they burned hot tracks down his cheeks like furrows in frozen ground. He had searched everywhere and could not find her, not a single mark or sign. Jessie stayed limp in his embrace, but he held her tightly to him like a child might hold a favorite doll.

The only thing they could do was return to the house, or freeze to death.

David walked past the bloodied corpse on the ice as quickly as he could, refusing it even one glance, knowing what could happen if he allowed himself to feel anything for the man. Quick dark path out of my mind, the men in white suits coming to take me away. He concentrated on following the footprints back to the snowmobile before they were covered by the snowfall or blown away. They were fading so fast.

Once he entered the thicker trees, it became harder and harder to see, and the tree trunks loomed out of the dark like floating ghouls. Their footprints were faint shadows against the deeper snow that lined the ground, and several times he lost the trail only to find it again a moment later, his heart pounding in his chest. He heard many things, whisperings that ran along the tree branches and down around his head, moanings of pain and fear. He tried to dismiss them all as the wind.

As the trees became thicker and closer together, he felt the familiar disorientation that had attacked him in the woods around the yard. Shadows leapt out at him and then sank back to disappear in the false twilight. As he rounded a thick trunk, something stood in front of them—a dark, huge form with vacant black holes for eyes, and a long, pale face that grinned hugely among the moving shadows. A creature holding a giant silver knife that shone with slick, red blood.

And then it was gone, and he realized that it had been a trick of the fading light and the swaying branches. Nothing but a trick of the mind. Where the creature had stood, he now saw a gap in the trees opening out to the river, and he struggled towards it as quickly as he could, sweeping the final heavy branches aside. The snowmobile sat before them, its plastic seat already covered with half an inch of new snow. He wiped it off awkwardly with his left arm while holding Jessie with his right, then set her down on it and searched for the keys in the rubber track.