Freeze

8

On the southern side of the house, Warren had buried a yardstick in the snow to measure the accumulation. He hadn’t been around to see it in over a day, and he wasn’t here now, but as the sun slipped behind the mountains (not that anyone could have seen this happening through the blizzard, of course), a fresh batch of snow blew in and covered the 24" mark.

An outdoor thermometer hung from a nearby tree, angled so you could see it from the house. The storm had covered it with uneven layers of ice, but the dial was still barely readable. If you’d looked closely right then, and for long enough, you could have seen the needle slide past the -10 degree mark (not labeled, but there all the same, a thick, black line between the 0 and the -20) and toward the negative teens.

In the branches above the thermometer, a cloud of snow lifted into the air and wafted away from the tree, floating improbably against the wind. Chunks of ice slid across the branches and the trunk, melting, re-solidifying, forming long, serpentine tendrils. Some of these appendages wrapped around one another, braiding together, melding into larger, thicker structures. One of these larger tendrils pulled away from the tree, wavered for a second, and then whipped out and knocked the thermostat from the tree. The instrument fell to the snow below, sent up a puff of white powder. Two small tendrils slithered down the tree after it. They fell on the dial like predators on injured prey. One of the things lifted into the air and slammed back down into the thermostat’s face, cracking the plastic and burrowing into the space beneath. Several more tendrils dropped out of the tree and joined the first two in their attack.

When they had all but pulverized the thermostat and most of the pieces of plastic had disappeared beneath the ongoing snowfall, the tendrils slid back up the tree and merged together. A mess of protrusions formed at the end of this new grouping, like a dozen jointless fingers. They clacked against one another, snapped and clicked and cracked. The tentacle curled up on itself, sprang into the air, and grabbed hold of a branch higher up the tree. It curled around this branch and stayed there for a long time. When another tendril slid out the branch to join them, the larger tentacle grabbed it and crushed it into a dozen little bits.

These shards of ice fell to the snow below, writhed there for a moment, and then stilled.

The tentacle above wrapped itself back around the branch.

And waited.