into reverse, he backed out of the garage, closing the door behind him. He stared back at the empty house from the street momentarily before putting it in drive and racing down the white street.
He wasn’t sure exactly what he hoped to find where he was going, but something inside of him told him that he needed to go look.
Following the road as it wound out of the subdivision, he passed several clusters of cars parked in front of the model homes, the big “Open House” banners hanging above the garages. He paused at the stop sign on Woodmen Road, and then turned left, heading into the foothills at the base of the cloud covered Rockies. The windshield wipers batted back and forth, pushing the driving snow into thin piles to either side of the glass.
His neighborhood fell behind him as he accelerated, the road narrowing to wind up into the increasingly thick forest. He hadn’t been up this far on the road in a long time, but it appeared as though nothing had changed. Trunks passed like cornrows as the car rocketed down the slick road until he finally slowed and stared off the road to his left, intently looking for the gap in the trees that he knew still had to be there.
He hadn’t thought about that night in a long time. Repression was, indeed, a wonderful thing. It was amazing how the mind had defense mechanisms that could keep painful memories from haunting a man. His parents had tried to set him up with some therapy after the accident, but the psychologist had been far too concerned with his relationship with his mother, and the psychiatrist had wanted nothing more than to prescribe him pills. He had gone through the motions, obligingly attending the minimum number of sessions. Fortunately, his own brain had taken over, pressing the memory into a tiny little box that it hid in the recesses of his mind, only opening it once or twice a year when he made conscious connections with dates or associated memories. But he had never once, since that night, driven back up into these hills.
He slowed the car, pulling to the side of the road. There was a barren patch directly to his left, on the other side of the road. The scrub oak had grown up around the splintered trunks of the trees, the tops of the new growth of pines barely visible above. The ice-covered lake was barely visible in the field beyond, the powdered snow on the surface glittering beneath the weak light that permeated through the intense cloud cover.
Scanning the road, he pulled a u- turn, parking on the shoulder, the barren limbs of the scrub oak scraping against the side of the new car. He pulled the keys from the ignition and sat there for a moment, turning them over and over in his hands. A dull ache arose in the back of his head, his heart rate accelerating. Closing his eyes, he focused on his breathing, rhythmically drawing the air in and blowing it out, trying to soothe his nerves. Sighing, he opened his eyes and stared down the desolate road in front of him, his left hand pulling on the door handle.
The cold air raced into the car as he climbed out, dropping down into the thick snow. Shaking his keys a couple times, he thrust them back into his pocket and walked around the back of the car to the gap in the trees. He pressed through the rugged brush, the limbs snagging on his clothing as he forced his way through, clambering over the fallen trunks of the dead trees that littered the ground.
Passing through the last row of brush, he stepped out into the field. If he hadn’t known that there was a lake there, he may never have seen it. There was barely a dimple in the middle of the sea of snow that filled the opening in the trees. Trudging into the meadow, his right foot suddenly sunk a good foot into the snow and he tumbled forward, bracing himself on his right hand. Ice-cold water filled his shoe, instantly soaking into his sock and chilling the blood in his foot.
An image of car tires bending outward as they caught on the lip of a thin stream, tossing the car into the air, filled his mind. He could hear his own cries echoing in his head, and the metallic crunch of the crumpling car landing on its roof.
Rapidly shaking his head, he ran his fingers roughly through his snow-covered hair, looking down at his feet for a moment before turning his attention back to the lake in front of him.
They had never found Matt’s body. The car had been pulled from the water early the following morning, but there had been no one inside. Police had hacked the majority of the ice from the lake and had dredged it for four days. They had even sent divers down there, but they hadn’t come up with so much as an article of clothing.
The bottom of the lake consisted of a layer of mud atop thin silt, a very sticky, treacherous surface that would allow for anything to sink deep within it. Matt’s body had most likely fallen out of the car when it rolled onto its side before being pressed down into the soft earth. That’s what the cops said anyway. How the ground had stayed soft beneath the ice cold waters of the frozen surface was a mystery to him, however. But the decision provided him closure, and that was all he needed to begin the arduous process of getting on with his life.
He could hear the gurgling of the river at the far side of the lake as he stared across the sea of ice. Shaking his freezing foot, he began to walk again, moving around the edge of the trees in the nearly circular meadow.
His heart pounded as he fought with the memories that flooded his head. He could see Matt’s face, his eyes pleading, opening his mouth to cry for help, his lungs filling with that first mouthful of the icy water, the panic wrenching his face. He could see Matt reaching out, his fingers spread wide, trying to grab for him, begging for him to pull him from the car. His face disappeared into the darkness, the car slipping from the ice and disappearing beneath the surface.
Sniffing, he wiped a tear from the corner of his eye and continued his walk around the lake. The running water from the river was much louder now, the rippling waves appearing from out of nowhere right in front of him. Ice had formed in triangular shapes behind the tops of the large boulders that cracked the surface from beneath, small clusters of ice floating down the rough surface. It was an intense shade of blue, flowing thick like molasses from the crystallized water.
The river was barely twelve feet across, but it looked to be close to five feet deep. It was connected to the lake from somewhere beneath the ground, the water level of the lake being held static by the influx from the water table beneath.
Loud caws from a group of crows filled the air as Scott rounded the back side of the lake, treading the fifteen foot wide patch of ground the separated the frozen like from the ice-edged river. Lost in his own mind, he walked straight ahead, traversing the flattened buffalo grass beneath the packed snow on his way toward the line of trees ahead. The wind gusted through the open gap, blowing a mist of snow from the dancing branches at the upper canopy of the trees. Ducking his head, he held his hand up in front of his face to attempt to block the onslaught of flakes as he ducked through a thin opening in the trees. Pressing through the bare branches of the scrub oak, he appeared right in the center of a cement path in the middle of the woods.
The calling of the crows was far louder in the middle of the trees, echoing down the snowy path. Following the calls, Scott walked aimlessly, trying to make some sense of what he had seen that morning. He didn’t know for sure what he expected to find out here after all this time. Surely he knew that he wasn’t going to drive up there and find Matt’s body lying on the bank of the lake, or something completely obvious like that which the cops had somehow missed in their hurry to wrap up the investigation. It was gnawing at him from deep within: how had the hat turned up in his house after all of these years?
Whatever the answer may be, and he certainly didn’t have the slightest clue, even more troubling was how had it gotten into his house? He had been sitting right there at the table and had only moved from the paper long enough to start a pot of coffee. He had turned his back for maybe thirty seconds, if that. Who could possibly have skirted his security system and rushed into the kitchen without alerting him and exited before he knew that they were there? No one. And of that fact he was sure. But even more worrisome than that was the question that got to the root of the problem, the reason that he had driven up here and now wandered through the woods. Why?
There appeared to be close to twenty large-bodied, black birds bouncing along the path in front of him, right at the bend. They cawed and flapped at one another, fighting over what seemed to be chunks of food dangling from their long black beaks. Their glossy feathers glittered as they bobbed their heads, frantically trying to tilt their heads back and swallow their meals whole before another wrenched it from them. What looked to be a long dark shadow covered the ground, all of the crows staying neatly within its confines.
As he approached, the shadow appeared to take on depth, cutting through the snow. His brow furrowing, Scott could see that the legs of the crows were dyed a deep red, so dark that it bordered on black. The long strands of meat hanging from their battling beaks oozed with the red fluid, tiny droplets flying through the air as they swung the pieces around their heads in an attempt to gulp them down. As he grew closer the shadow took on the same color as the legs of the birds, the snow melting beneath the crimson stain.
His footsteps padded on the soft snow, startling the birds to flight. They landed in a cluster ten feet back watching him closely as he walked up to where they had been feasting. The red fluid had melted through the snow in a large patch covering the width of the sidewalk and back into the trees beyond. Shreds of flesh and the tattered
