“No offense, hon, but you’re not exactly a doctor. You could have glass in your eye and go blind. Or you might have swallowed some. You could be bleeding internally right now and not even know it.”
“I thought you said it didn’t look bad.”
He led her toward the living room, Bub right behind them.
“Yeah, I did. And it doesn’t. But what do I know? I’m not a doctor either.”
Warren ignored the sofa and the recliner, which were on the side of the room farthest from the fireplace and looked dark, cold, uninviting. They’d moved two armchairs next to the hearth on the first night of the power outage, and that was where he led Tess. She dropped into the nearest chair and leaned her head against the tall backrest.
The fire hadn’t died down completely, but the single remaining log was half gone and wouldn’t last much longer. Warren took two logs from the pile in the corner of the room, the pile he’d gone out to replenish, and placed them in the fireplace. It took them a moment to catch, but when they did, fresh waves of heat came rolling out.
Bub moved beside the chair and looked up at Tess. When he whined, she patted his head and scratched him under his chin.
“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “Why don’t you lay down on your doggy bed.”
He didn’t. Instead, he sat down and rested his face on the arm of her chair.
She smiled and told him he was a good boy.
Warren took a deep breath, and his body eventually calmed down. He used the poker to scoot the two new logs closer together until the flames had risen and the fire was roaring. In all his winter garb, he was getting hot. He pulled off some of the layers but then remembered he’d be going back out again soon enough. He turned away from the fire instead to go looking for some tweezers and antiseptic.
“Hey,” Tess said.
He stopped and turned around.
“I need to tell you something.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Before the glass broke, I thought I saw something. Something…” She looked down and scratched Bub’s head again.
Warren waited.
“Something like a hand,” she finally said, speaking the words so quickly they were practically one,
“A hand?”
She nodded.
“Like a human hand?”
Now she looked up at him. “I don’t know. The glass was frosty. It was just a shape. But it hit the window twice, and…and it looked like a hand.”
Warren ran his fingers across his mouth. “I was just out there, and I didn’t see anything. Definitely not a person.”
“I know it sounds crazy.”
He sat down in the other chair. “You might be a little stressed out right now, maybe even in shock, but I don’t think you’re crazy. If you say you saw something, I believe you did.”
She chewed at her lower lip.
“I doubt it was a person,” he said. “It was probably just a bird or a clump of snow blown out of a tree, but when I go out to start the truck, I’ll look for prints. Okay?”
She nodded and grinned.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just, if this was a movie, you wouldn’t have believed me. You’d think I was out of my mind until some psycho broke in in the middle of the night and raped us both to death.”
The fire crackled, and Warren let out a short huff of a laugh.
“First of all,” he said, “what kind of porno snuff films have you been watching?”
She gave him a ha-ha-very-funny half grin.
“And second, this isn’t a movie. If it was, I’d look like Robert Redford.”
Tess smiled, reached over and grasped his hand. “Redford’s got nothing on you.”
“That’s just the trauma talking.”
She patted his hand. “Probably.”
He shook his head, got out of the chair, and went looking for some medical supplies.
3
While she waited for him to come back, Tess curled her legs under herself and watched the fire.
She hadn’t taken off her apron after the
incident in the kitchen, but she did so now, balling it up and tossing it in the empty chair.
She leaned over and kissed the top of Bub’s head. “Do you believe me, too?”
Bub stuck out his tongue and licked the back of her hand.
“Well, I’m glad the two of you do, because I’m not so sure I believe myself.”
Bub said nothing.
“I was just imagining things, right? It was just snow or a bird. Like he said. Right?”
Still no comment from Bub. He left his chin on the arm of the chair and panted.
The fire hissed, popped, and…tinkled?
Tess frowned and stared at the flames.
The noise came again, fluctuating tones like the ringing of a cheap wind chime. But the sounds weren’t coming from the fireplace.
She turned toward the kitchen.
“Warren?”
Bub looked up at her, whined.
It wasn’t Warren in the kitchen. She knew that. She could hear him in the bathroom on the opposite side of the house, rummaging through drawers, looking for tweezers.
The tinkling sound came again. Bub lifted his head off the chair, turned toward the kitchen, and growled.
“Warren?”
“Just a second,” he said. “I can’t find the damn things…are you…wait, here we go.”
Bub’s growl had become a full-fledged rumble. His muscles rippled from his shoulders to his limp, unmoving tail and then tensed. For the first time ever, she was almost afraid of him. When she looked at the dog, she saw not a domesticated animal but a wild beast, a savage, wolf-like creature. She thought if she reached out and touched him, he might whip around and bite her hand clean off.
“Warren!”
“I’m coming,” he said.
Except he wasn’t. Not yet. She heard him returning items to the bathroom drawers, shoving them in all willy nilly probably, not that she cared about that right now.
Something moved in the kitchen. She watched it edge around the doorframe. Not a hand or an arm or any other body part, but a chunk of ice, like a horizontal icicle, forming on the trim while she watched.
Except, if she was imagining it, what was wrong with Bub?
The icicle on the doorframe elongated, thickened. The tinkling sound got louder than ever.
