Finally, it hit him.
An old Alice Copper song played through his head. It was a song he hadn’t listened to since he was maybe sixteen years old, yet still the words poured back atop the music in his mind as if he was listening to it at that very moment. The chorus echoed in his brain and he whispered it aloud.
“In my mind,” he said, his finger still tracing the words, “Blood drops look like roses on white lace.”
There was a dull splattering sound, like the sound of a leaking faucet dripping onto an open drain. Following the noise, he stared down on the small droplets, bright red circles in the virgin snow. Dabbing at one of them, he brought his dampened finger right in front of his face, inspecting the reddened surface of his fingertip. He rubbed his thumb over it, smearing the thick crimson fluid.
Throwing himself onto his back, he stared up into the canopy above, just as a loud crashing sound filled the woods. Brown needles fell in droves from the branches above as a shower of snow cascaded through the air. A dark shape appeared from the branches above, hurdling toward the ground at an enormous speed. The object landed with a sickening thump, a gut-churning groan emanating from the shape that was sprawled across the ground just past his outstretched feet.
Sitting up, Scott felt his heart begin to race. He reached for the object with his trembling hands. He could tell what it was, but beneath the darkened sky, he was unable to tell whom. His throat grew dry, his lips parting to dampen his mouth with the humid air.
Rolling up onto his knees, he shakily lifted the arm that was sprawled across the snow in front of him into the air. The skin was cold and dry, the flesh traced with the drying lines of blood that had run like small streams over the surface. Fingers curled into claws, elbow tightly straightened; rigor mortis had begun to set in. Allowing the arm to flop back down onto the snow, he leaned over the body and stared at the face, which was crusted beneath a mask of dried blood.
It was Jeremy, just as he had seen him only minutes prior in a heap on the marble floor of his shower stall. His peeled back eyelids exposed the bloodshot whites of his eyes, only the bottom crescent of his dark eyes visible as they had rolled back into his skull.
A gaseous groan parted his blue lips as the head slowly lifted from the ground.
Scrambling backward, his red hands buried in the thick snow, Scott hurriedly scuttled away. The body slowly rose from the ground. The head lolled back onto the shoulders, the arms and legs hanging limply, as the body floated into the air. The tips of the blue toes scraped at the crusted surface of the snow, tracing thin lines with the long, yellowing nails.
Unable to take his eyes from the body hanging in midair, he scrambled backward against the trunk of a tree, the jagged bark pressing deeply into his back. His feet continued to kick at the snow in an attempt to propel him further away, but to no avail. So he sat there, trembling against the base of the tree, helpless to do anything more than watch as Jeremy’s head snapped forward, the whitened eyes seeming to stare straight down at him on the ground.
Thin tufts of steam rasped from the mouth of the formerly lifeless body, the breath scraping audibly through the collapsed trachea. It just hung there momentarily, before finally beginning to move very slowly. It came toward him, the toes dragging in the snow.
Scott fought to close his eyes, to roll around the side of the trunk, to leap to his feet to sprint in the other direction, but nothing was going to work. His entire body was paralyzed with fear, even his breath growing stale in his lungs as only his hammering heart was able to function through the onset of the crippling numbness that raced through every inch of his being.
The body stopped, still dangling like a marionette on unseen strings from the mass of branches above. Falling to the right, the head rested on the shoulder, the eyes still appearing to be fixed directly on him. He watched in horror as the lips slowly began to move, the thin blue lines writhing like snakes as they fought to mouth words. A faint sound whisked through those lips, growing stronger and louder with each subsequent attempt until finally it found its voice.
“It’s been a long time,” the deep rasping voice said through the lips of the deceased, its breath visible against the dark night.
The voice seemed to reach right in through Scott’s ears and straight down into his chest, seizing his rapidly pumping heart within its cold grasp. He recognized the voice immediately, knowing that it didn’t belong to the body that floated in the center of the ring of trees around him. Trying to respond, he swallowed the ball of phlegm that blocked his throat, but still the words would not com. His eyes grew even wider, the brows raised nearly to the center of his forehead.
“Aren’t you going to say hello to an old friend?” the corpse mouthed, the voice seeming to come from all around him rather than from behind the swollen tongue of the chipped-tooth mouth.
It couldn’t be possible, Scott thought. Every rational part of his being fought in circles trying to grasp the concept of what he already knew to be true, but was completely unprepared to accept. And though much time had passed, he still recognized that voice as well as if it were his own. Wrapping his trembling arms around his chest in what resembled a self-embrace, he stared at the dangling feet of the body, his voice coming in little more than a muffled whisper.
“Matt,” he said, closing his eyes tightly. He felt the cold swell upon him from all sides, tearing through his clothing in an effort to freeze the skin beneath.
“Ahh,” the voice echoed from all around him. “I see you do remember, even after all of these years.”
“You… you’re dead. I watched you die,” Scott muttered, pressing his back as far as it would go against the trunk of the tree, unable to steer his gaze from the figure that hovered in front of him.
“For a while, I thought so too. In fact, there were definitely times when I wished that I had been, but apparently I was meant for something more.”
Scott’s hands shook violently as he held them in front of his face, the dangling apparition gliding slowly toward him in the small grove. There was a shadow to his left, muffled beneath the darkness of the trees. Barely more than a vague outline against the pitch black night, it seemed to generate its own blackness, the serpentine darkness writhing and twisting, a cold effervescence emanating from the heart of the shadow.
“What… how…” Scott stammered, unable to connect his scattershot thoughts.
“How did I survive? Is that what you’re asking?” the lifeless form mouthed. “After that car slipped beneath the ice on that lake, the freezing waters filling the inside of the car, I prayed for a swift death. I prayed for the water to rise up and fill my lungs. But there was to be no solace for me. When the weight of the car finally broke through the ice, it rolled, trapping a pocket of air within the vehicle. It landed on the roof of the car on the bottom of the lake. I broke free of the seat belt and swam out through the open window, but it was so dark under the layer of ice that I was unable to see anything at all. I couldn’t even see the hole in the ice where the car had fallen through. So I swam beneath the icy crust, pounding on it with my fists before the cold finally began to overwhelm me, numbing my flesh so that I could barely move. I watched the surface above me as I sunk deeper into the water, but before I knew it, my back was on the sloped bottom. The stale breath forming icicles in my lungs, I scrambled up the bank, kicking and scraping at the rough silt before finally slamming my head into the thin ice by the shore.
“Clawing up onto the frozen bank, I dragged myself forward. My body shook so violently that there was no conscious control of my faculties. I just crawled, my whole body trembling. Little did I know there was a river just off the far bank. Before I even knew that it was there, I had splashed down into it face first, the rapidly-running water ripping me beneath the surface. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a small, dark tunnel. I don’t know how I got there or why, but my entire body felt as though it was frozen and my muscles were beginning to atrophy. I could barely move as I was wedged so tightly into this tunnel. There was no wriggling free, at least not in the state that I was in. There was no water, no food. I just lay there, pressed tightly into a small cylindrical tunnel of packed earth, praying for death.
“Four days passed before the rats came. The water must have risen in the larger tunnel beyond, as the earth grew damp beneath me, the rats coming all at once in a screaming fit of squeals and clawing nails. They raced right up the tunnel toward my body, squeezing between the earthen walls of the tunnel and me. I was able to bait them with my own flesh long enough to keep them near enough to me to grab them, to snap their little necks. I feasted on those rats for as long as they lasted, buying me enough time to regain my strength, to claw my way through the soft ground, and into that house.”
“What do you want from me?” Scott asked in a meek whisper, his eyes scanning the shadows for the source of the voice, rather than the mere puppet that dangled in front of him in the freezing night air.
