couple years on the job, he was barely able to wake up and get out of bed at all. Initially, he had figured that jogging five miles in the morning would only wear him down even more, but he had found out quickly that that was not the case. It energized him. He had quit smoking and devoted more time to his physical maintenance, jogging further and further every morning until he reached the five mile mark and basically ran out of time to run before he had to go to work.
Weekends like today were the best. He was able to jog as long as he wanted, pushing himself harder, knowing that Vanessa would allow him as much time as he wanted, so long as he was home with enough time to shower and change and get them to church by noon.
Bouncing down the stairs, his shoes squeaked on the linoleum in the entranceway as he disengaged the deadbolt and unlocked the door. He stepped out onto the porch. Icicles hung from the bottom of the gutter above him, the driveway covered with an untouched layer of white.
He grinned to himself as he watched the large flakes swirling about in front of him, piling atop the already thick layer of snow. It was a wonderful feeling making the first footprints in the snow. Maybe that was the kid inside of him, but it always made him smile.
Taking a few short, deep breaths, he exhaled a long sigh, his breath freezing in front of his face, lingering for a moment before dissipating into the early morning sky. The dim light of the moon peeked through the cloud cover only momentarily, the street in front of him glimmering as he began to jog.
The snow squished beneath his feet, piling atop the toes of his shoes as he bounded down the center of the street. His nose began to run as the cold nipped at it. Wiping it with the back of his gloved hand, he lowered his head and pulled the hood from his sweatsuit over his already-damp hair.
Turning left at the end of the street, he made his way up the steep slope of a barren culdesac. There were for sale signs every fifty yards to either side of the road, the faces of various Realtors smiling at him in an attempt to peddle the vacant lots. It was only a matter of time before they all were sold and had houses on them, forcing him to change his route, but until then, he was going to take full advantage of the opportunity.
Reaching the end of the street, he leapt over the curb and onto the thin path that wound through the forest straight ahead. He knew these woods like the back of his hand—even before he began his morning jogs— having grown up only about four miles from here. Of course, when he was a kid, none of these houses out here existed. It wasn’t until the huge boom in the economy within the last five years that the houses started appearing out of nowhere. It was one thing to say that they were building them way too fast and tearing down what had once been fairly pristine woodland, but on the other hand, he owned one of those houses.
He had spent a lot of time wandering through these woods with a BB gun as a youngster, bringing down magpies and starlings, leaving them laying on the floor for the coyotes to clean up. There had even been one exciting day when he had come across a rattlesnake. It had been late in the season and the cold fronts had already begun to move through, so the snake was far less than aggressive. He could remember blasting it repeatedly in the head, even lodging one of the steel balls in its gapped mouth so that it couldn’t flick its tongue. But that had grown tedious in a hurry as the snake didn’t ever move, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that he wasn’t doing any real damage.
Later in his teenage years, he and his buddies had hiked into these hills with tents and cases of beer strapped to their backs, setting up parties that would last the entire weekend. He could remember one trip in particular where they had parked at the end of the closest road and hiked for more than an hour to get to one of the most hidden and inaccessible spots that they knew of. That spot, as it turns out, is now buried beneath the recently paved culdesac he just jogged along.
Things had sure changed in a hurry, but he knew for a fact that these woods he now darted through would be here for a long time to come. It was part of a large sector of land owned by the folks who ran the nursing home. They had converted this old Catholic convent into a modern, state-of-the-art nursing home sometime about a decade ago, paving the thin dirt paths through the woods to give the residents somewhere decent to walk and exercise. And he took advantage of that each and every morning without exception.
Branches of trees flew past to either side, grabbing at the shoulders of his goretex-coated suit. The snow on the ground was only a couple of inches deep on the path as the majority of the snow piled in the upper reaches of the canopy, filling the needle-covered branches until they looked like puffy clouds. Gravel snapped beneath his padding feet as he wound past the rows of trunks, heading for the nice, cement paths just a quarter of a mile ahead.
Usually, Tim made two laps around the path that circled the entire acreage of the rest home before returning to the woods once again. There was rarely anyone else out on the paths at this time of the morning— especially in weather like this—so for just a brief moment in time, he felt like the only person on the face of the earth. The only sound was his own heavy breathing, and the birds and small animals darting through the underbrush. It was both his solitude and his sanity. It was his own personal Eden.
The trees peeled back slightly as he hopped up onto the cement path. There were wooden benches on the inside of the track every hundred yards or so, buried beneath a thick coating of snow. Small lumps in the path ahead betrayed the presence of buried pinecones. Small, three-toed footprints covered the ground from the foraging birds searching for anything to eat.
His heart pounded in his ears, his breathing even and paced as he ran through a constant cloud of his own breath. The air was still. Trees blocked nearly all of the wind that wrought havoc across the eastern plains, the snow falling straight down in clusters. Dense patches of scrub oak filled the gaps between the tree trunks, pressing all the way up against the path from his right, the bare branches reaching out like bony fingers. Long since dried out berries clung to a handful of the branches, ice cubes forming all around them.
The sky was still dark, the moon and stars blanketed by the low-lying deep-gray clouds. By the time he finished the first lap, he should be right back where he was right now when the sun began to rise, cresting over the tops of the azure blue, white-capped mountains directly behind him. He always stopped to gaze at the arterial-red sky around the slowly rising orb as it pressed back the blackened sky, every inch of the frosted ground shimmering like white capped waves on a placid sea.
His throat began to dry, his tongue clicking from the roof of his mouth. A dull ache filled his lungs, each inhalation of the freezing air tightening his chest incrementally.
Slowing to a walk, his footsteps hammering on the concrete and echoing in the silence around him, Tim placed his hands on his hips and leaned his head forward, allowing his pulse to slowly resume its normal pace. The cold air stung his teeth as he breathed with his mouth wide open, forcing oxygen into the deprived areas throughout his body. A gust of steam raced out from beneath his hood when he pulled it from his head, letting it fall onto his back so that he could cool down a little.
Slowly, his breathing returned to normal and he prepared to break back into a run. His brow furrowed as something suddenly seemed a little off. He had run this course so many times that he knew everything: every bush, every tree, and every little noise in the forest. But something wasn’t quite right.
He stopped and looked around, the woods completely silent around him. The only thing he could hear was the snow falling from the branches of the trees into clumps on the ground. There was no rustling in the underbrush, no chirping birds…
But there were always birds. He could count on that.
Suddenly, a cold wave of hackles ripped straight up his back, settling at the base of his neck. There was someone, something, out there in the woods with him. He couldn’t see it, but he could tell it was there, watching him from the dark forest, its eyes weighing heavily on him.
A gust of wind ruffled the pines around him, the piled snow on the branches blowing in wet clouds, filling the air all around him. It was cold, very cold, stabbing through his jogging suit and into his flesh. His eyes scanned the underbrush, looking for any sign of whatever was out there.
There was nothing but silence.
“This is stupid,” Tim said, shaking his head. “There’s no one out here.”
He snorted, mocking his own idiocy. Shaking his head, he brought his arms up to his sides and burst into a fast jog. His heart still pounded in his chest, his head throbbing at the base of his skull from the tension. It was all he could do to just focus on the path as he raced on, watching the line of trees straight ahead.
The path bent quickly off to the left, disappearing behind a thick blue spruce, giving the appearance of a dead end right in front of him. He knew the turn well. The path opened up to a straightaway, leading down the slight slope to the frozen lake just off the path and past a tall line of reeds to the right.
