Oscar’s breath rose in a pale haze, momentarily veiling his backyard from sight. Then the crystallized vapor receded, and there it was. Standing at the far edge of the yard, right up against the fence. A place where the unbroken whiteness of the ground reared up in a crooked pillar, flinging wide its slender, misshapen arms that ended in not enough fingers. Oscar looked back and forth, surveying the entirety of his fenced-in property, before returning his gaze to the snowman that newly occupied it.
“Kids,” he sighed, shaking his head. How they’d gotten in and out was a mystery he’d tackle later. However they’d done it, they’d done it silently, without disturbing his sleep. That tree, on the other hand…
It was rooted by the back corner of his house. A black, twisted growth that was mostly docile, except for that one explosion of branches that grasped at his bedroom window. All night long, they’d interrupted Oscar’s sleep with a tek tek tek like fingernails against the glass.
Oscar’s boots crunched across the snow—a sound at once shocking in its violation of the morning’s silence, yet muted beneath the low, gray clouds. The guilty branches quivered as Oscar approached: tek tek tek. Oscar hefted the pruning shears that had until now rested against his shoulder. The scraping hiss of the blades as they opened seemed to cause all of frozen nature to hold its breath. The first offending branch was laid between the shears, where it stilled in acceptance of its fate.
A swift, remorseless action. The twig hand fell away without a cry, and lay black and dead in the snow.
The blades opened again; more branches were offered up. The heavy air was filled with the singing of metal as wood was parted from wood. Fingers that had once clawed at Oscar’s window now jutted out of the snow at his boots. And then the amputation was complete. Oscar gathered up the dismembered branches—wincing as his back and knees protested—and carried them off to the woodpile behind his shed.
As he passed, he once more examined the snowman. It wasn’t right up against the fence, as he’d originally thought, but a couple feet forward. The ground around it was unbroken by footprints or other evidence of its creation. It must have snowed overnight to hide the kids’ tracks.
Oscar dumped his bundle behind the shed and paused to catch his breath, which blossomed around his head in a ghostly nimbus. It hadn’t been hard labor, but he could feel a film of sweat freezing across his face, causing the hairs of his beard to stiffen, tickling his chin. He craved a hot cup of coffee.
He passed the snowman once more as he put away his tools. Its eyes—small dark stones pressed so deep into the malformed face that they were almost lost—stared past him toward his house. Oscar shivered under a fresh gust of wind, and went inside.
At Oscar’s age, the cold clung to him like a needy thing. After making his coffee, he went to the living room and turned up the thermostat to soothe his aching joints. Then he settled down in a massive, sagging armchair that threatened to smother him in its dusty embrace. He sipped his scalding drink and gazed out the window. The street was so white it would have been blinding on a brighter day.
From somewhere not too distant, a deep rumble disturbed the winter stillness. A few minutes later, the source roared into view. A snowplow, blade set firmly against the road, gouged out chunks of ice and discarded them in a long cairn by the shoulder. In its wake, the road pressed weakly up through the remaining snow, ragged patches of blacktop made gray with frost and salt. Oscar noted that his driveway was now blocked by a dam of ice. No matter. He had no plans to leave, and the kind, young neighbor across the street would dig him out before the day was done, anyway.
The roar of the snowplow died away, to be replaced by the softer roar of the furnace. Flame-cooked air settled through the living room, dulling Oscar’s senses, pulling him deeper into his dusty armchair. The delicious weight of sleep became almost crushing—
Oscar caught himself, saving the remnants of his coffee from spilling into his lap. With a pained groan, he stood and made his way stiffly back to the kitchen. He set his coffee mug on the counter; a stray drop of brown liquid trickled down the side and spread, so that the mug bled a ring of brown over the countertop.
Oscar paused a moment to take in the view from the kitchen window: his backyard, white and barren—save for that snowman. Had it really stood that far from the back fence? Oscar thought for sure…but no, he must have misremembered, for there it stood, right where he could see it, with at least a couple yards of empty space behind it.
What started out as a dim morning turned briefly into a feeble attempt at a sunny afternoon. But the sun was weak, quickly choked out by thick, steely clouds that threatened a fresh smothering of snow. Oscar ate an early dinner. Then darkness won its victory, killing the sun entirely before its time. The house began to groan as winter’s fingers grasped and sought entrance. Yet Oscar noted with satisfaction—as he readied for bed and the thwarted wind howled in frustration—that nothing now tapped against his bedroom window.
The blizzard’s fury expired at a time when Oscar wasn’t conscious to mark it. The sun had rallied for a morning sortie, and Oscar, flinging open his curtains, had to squint against the brilliance of illuminated snow.
Once his eyes had adjusted, they were met first by the raw stumps of severed branches; the result of his work the day before. Beyond that, a field of purest white, marred only by a snowman’s crooked body. Its skeletal arms drooped under the weight of new snow. Its mouth—a lopsided gash not quite where a mouth belonged—seemed to scowl back at Oscar.
The snowman stood in the center of the yard.
Oscar frowned at this. Then he shook his head, muttering, “Kids.”
He dressed and went to the kitchen to make breakfast, which he ate in his armchair in the living room.
The plow’s work from yesterday was completely undone. The jagged walls of ice lining the road were softened by their fresh blanket, and Oscar realized his driveway was still blocked. The neighbor hadn’t cleared it. Not that it mattered, but it was unusual. Then Oscar noticed that the neighbor’s car was missing. So they weren’t home. Had they been home yesterday? How long had they been gone?
As Oscar cleaned up after breakfast, he studied the snowman in his backyard. It had to be kids, he told himself again. Their tracks must have been covered by the blizzard…
But that meant they must have moved it during the blizzard, in the middle of the night. Who would go to such extremes for a silly prank? And the more he looked, Oscar thought…hadn’t it been in the middle of the yard before breakfast? Was it even closer now than it had been just twenty minutes prior?
The snowman’s eyes, overhung with heavy drapes of sagging snow, were fixed on the kitchen window. Its mouth, neither smiling nor frowning, lent it an expression that gave Oscar a tight feeling in his chest. He hastily finished rinsing off the breakfast dishes, then threw on his boots and coat.
First, he circled the snowman to confirm: there were no tracks except his own, no other disturbance in the fresh coat of snow. To make certain, he repeated his circle several times, until he’d worn a deep trench all around the snowman. Then he stepped back, stared straight into those tiny eyes that were directly level with his own. “Let’s see you cross that,” he said. Then, careful to stay within his own trail, he returned inside.
Oscar’s ears were alert throughout the day, waiting for the babble of voices in the backyard. He kept the curtains at the back of the house drawn, in order to prevent himself from wasting the day watching. Watching for movement—for kids, he kept telling himself, nothing else. Certainly not the tall, ungainly thing that seemed to grow larger in his mind’s eye as the day wore on, larger and larger as if stalking toward him from the darkness. Every once in a while, he peered through the gaps in the curtains to comfort himself, to prove that it hadn’t moved. Each time it stood there, that still form with its thin arms tirelessly raised against his house. And yet, every time, after the curtain fell back into place, Oscar could not shake the impression of a shadow spreading toward him. With every timid peek, he felt sure that, this time, he would find something looking back at him. Eventually, he dreaded it so much that he gave up altogether.
The shutting of the curtains caused the house to darken dramatically after lunchtime. Evening fell early, even for winter, and passed in utter silence. No signal from the outside world.
At suppertime, Oscar finally worked up the courage to draw back the kitchen curtains completely. It took his eyes a moment to pierce through his own reflection and the darkness of the night beyond. Then he found it.
And gasped.
“Kids,” he repeated to himself aloud as he pulled on his boots. “It has to be kids.”
He hustled outside without a coat and ran to the backyard.
His well-worn track from that morning was visible as a dark ring against dim, pale blue. And within that circle, nothing but undisturbed snow.
A few feet away, closer to the house, rose the lumpy, precarious figure. Tiny nubs of ice hung from its arms where the afternoon sun had made a half-hearted attempt to melt the snow. Its misshapen head seemed to tower over Oscar.
Oscar rushed over to it, sweeping the ground as he went for any sign—a footprint, a patch of tousled snow—but finding nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. He searched the snowman itself, looking for dents or missing chunks that might indicate the rough handling required to move it—again, nothing.
His swift, investigating movements, combined with the frigid air, had winded him. Oscar stopped to catch his breath, feeling the night penetrate his lungs like countless knives. His vision blurred as clouds of vapor rose from his nose and mouth; he felt light-headed. The dimly glowing figure before him seemed to twitch—Oscar blinked furiously, banishing the illusion of movement, but not the conviction that he now shared the backyard with something else.
“No, no, no, no, no,” stammered Oscar as he backed away, turned, and ran inside. There had to be an explanation. Snow blindness, faulty memory, something else!
Back in the kitchen, Oscar tried to ignore it. He sat at the table to eat dinner. But every tasteless bite of food became a smoldering coal in his stomach. His muscles were taut, his head dizzy. He abandoned his plate halfway through and went to the living room where he paced until his legs grew tired. Then he moved to the bedroom, undressed, and hid himself under the covers.
Oscar woke to a dim, gray morning, too dark for the light to have woken him. No, it was something else. A sound. An irregular tek tek tek against the window.
Those branches again, he thought. Then, with a rush of ice through his limbs, But I cut them already!
Tek tek tek.
Oscar swung his trembling legs out from under the covers and set his feet on the floor. He sat like that for a few minutes, his ears so alert he felt they might fall off his head.
Tek tek tek.
Heart thudding between his ribs, he stood and took the few shaky steps required to bring him to the window. His hand rose. Hesitated. Quivering in the air in front of the curtain.
The sound did not repeat.
Taking a deep breath, Oscar thrust his hand forward, seized the curtain, flung it aside—
And staggered back with a cry.
A twisted, sagging white face stared back at him with shrouded stone eyes.
Oscar gaped at the snowman for several moments. Then the ice in his veins thawed, began to boil.
Enough of this.
Kids or not, this had to end. Oscar marched out of the bedroom, slammed on his boots, and blazed his way to the garage. He emerged again with an old metal snow shovel clenched in his bare hands. The blade was jagged and rust-tinged through age and abuse. Holding it before him like a battleaxe, he stormed into the backyard and advanced on the snowman. It was still fixated on the bedroom window, its back to Oscar. Its skeletal arms were suspended inches from the glass, quivering slightly in the winter breeze.
Oscar drew back his shovel, then thrust its rusty blade into the snowman’s midsection. The jagged metal sank a few inches into the snow with a moist crunch. He pulled it back out and attacked again, burying the shovel halfway up to the handle. Then, gasping, he shifted his grip and heaved his weight against it. The tightly packed snow groaned, then cracked. The snowman’s entire top half teetered, overbalanced, and tumbled to the ground where it shattered into a handful of frozen chunks. The head broke free of the torso and rolled a couple of feet before stopping, resting so that its inhuman face was locked on Oscar’s.
Oscar held its gaze for a moment, panting clouds of crystallized exertion. Then he turned his attention to the remaining trunk of the snowman.
His breath stopped.
As swirling vapors cleared, Oscar had a clear view of the damage he’d wrought. An outer skin of delicate ice, molded into irregular curves by the sun’s melting caress; curves suddenly terminated by a hard, flat break, revealing a softer whiteness within. Mingled with this, jutting out at odd angles: something dark.
Oscar bent closer for a better look. His eyebrows shrank together. Then a weak moan escaped his lips.
What exactly it was, he couldn’t tell in the dim morning light. Black feathers? Fur?
Hair?
It was too tangled and matted to tell. Small bits of snow clung to it like white brambles. It all seemed to protrude in half-frozen spines from a more solid mass buried deeper in the snowman’s torso. There was a slickness to it that made Oscar think of…
He looked down at his shovel. The blade was smeared with something that glistened weakly. Oscar’s stomach clenched. His numb fingers relinquished their grip on the handle. The shovel fell to the ground with a soft thud.
A sensation of motion and a soft crunch pulled Oscar’s attention back to the remains of the snowman. What was left of the lower half had collapsed, hiding the mangled object within. In the prescient glow of dawn, the remains almost vanished against the rest of the snow. Only the stick arms, clawing crookedly toward the sky, remained visible.
With shuddering breaths, Oscar backed shakily away. Then turned. Ran into the house. Locked the door.
A wind kicked up around midmorning, and gradually worked itself into a gale by midafternoon. It howled under the door and rattled the windows. The walls groaned in echo of what Oscar felt inside.
What was that thing?
His hands stung from the morning’s exertion. Dry, frigid air had sucked all the moisture from his ungloved skin, causing seeping, dark red cracks to open along his knuckles. The sight made him think of the odd slickness in the snow and on his shovel. He hardly ate anything.
The wind brought fresh snowfall—huge bundles of stuff that hurled themselves against the back of the house in a series of thumps. Oscar turned up the thermostat, but it did little to warm his nerves.
For beneath the incessant thumping of the snow, he now and then thought he heard—
No, it couldn’t be.
Tek.
No, he’d knocked it down. Killed it. Those fingers couldn’t reach—
Tek tek.
He was terrified to look, but look he must. He opened every curtain. By the orange glow that emanated from each window: nothing. Windblown snow over a field of white.
It’s only the storm, he told himself. Sleet against the glass.
Night brought absolute darkness and an even deeper chill. Oscar adjusted the thermostat one last time before going to bed. The furnace roared and pumped soulless heat throughout the house. It did nothing to thaw the ice that seemed to encase Oscar’s bones. He crawled into bed and wrapped himself in blankets. With his eyes closed, he sensed the night pressing in around him, and seemed to feel more than hear something moving out there, emerging from the darkness. Something mangled and mutilated and frozen. He risked a glance out from his covers. Saw nothing.
Tek tek tek.
Oscar shivered uncontrollably, even under his layers and layers of bedsheets and blankets; even as the furnace roared and howled like an angry beast. Why was it so cold?
From the direction of the bedroom window: tek tek tek.
Oscar squeezed his eyes shut again, forcing out tears that felt like they were freezing on his cheeks. He buried his head beneath his pillow and pulled the blankets tighter.
Tek tek.
This time, from the foot of his bed.
The temperature in the room seemed to plummet even further. The mattress shook beneath Oscar’s violent shivers.
Tek tek tek from the headboard directly above him.
Now it felt as if the window had been flung open, letting in the full measure of winter’s fury. It wasn’t the furnace he heard roaring in his ears; it was the freezing wind. It came slithering through the bedroom, raking its claws over Oscar’s body, enfolding him in a frigid cocoon and squeezing until he could feel it slipping between his insides, and then he could feel nothing at all.
Oscar’s neighbor, returning from a weekend trip, felt a burst of guilt when he saw Oscar’s driveway, buried beneath at least two feet of snow and walled in by the snowplow. He’d warned Oscar beforehand that he’d be out of town, so that the old man could find someone else to help dig him out, but clearly that hadn’t happened. So, as soon as he was unpacked, he fired up his snowblower. After clearing Oscar’s driveway, he tried knocking on the door. No answer.
Several days later, out of a growing sense of unease, he called the police to request a welfare check on his elderly neighbor.
The officer who performed the check reported that it was so hot inside the house that he immediately broke out in a sweat upon entering. A putrid smell led him to the bedroom, where he found Oscar, quite dead.
Most baffling to the authorities was the coroner’s report. In spite of the extreme heat that filled house, the only conclusion that could be drawn from the autopsy was that Oscar had frozen to death.