The Night Visitors

Chapter Twenty-Nine Alice

I GRAB OREN and turn. Behind me I hear a scream and then a gunshot, and a bullet thuds into the wood sideboard two feet to our left. I push Oren toward the foyer, not looking back even when I hear a door slam behind us.

Oren wrenches open the front door and a gust of snow blows into the house. I try to stop him—we should stay in the house, hide in the basement or the attic—but he’s already outside, barreling down the steps and into the snow. I am afraid we will both die out here like the boy in that story Lisa told us, but what choice do I have? I fling myself down the porch steps, landing in an open patch of ice at the bottom, stumbling to my knees.

When I look up I’m held by a sense of wonder. In front of me is the path Oren shoveled earlier today, impossibly free of snow. The howling wind must have blown the snow up into drifts that tower on either side, so that the path is like a tunnel carved out of ice. But what’s truly remarkable is that it’s lit up. There are little hollows scooped out of the ice where plastic figures stand—Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca—all the Star Wars heroes glowing as if they were lit by candles. But there are no candles. The light seems to be coming from the snow itself, from the ice walls and the swirling crystals.

I remember the feeling I had in the attic that Caleb was in the glittering snow, and I’m certain that he is here now, lighting the path that Oren shoveled to the barn. In fact, I can just make out a figure on the path ahead of me, flickering in and out of focus as the wind scours the snow. It doubles, turns into one, and doubles again until there are two boys on the path. Caleb is leading Oren to the barn.

I used to dream that the frozen boy came knocking at my window. I would look outside and there he’d be, his white face shining like a second moon, his eyes dark as the surrounding night, his lips moving in a whisper only I could hear. All I had to do was open the window and take his hand, and we would fly away like Peter Pan and Wendy. He would take me to my real home, to my real mother.

But in the dream I also knew that he was dead and that if I went with him I would be dead too. So I wouldn’t open the window, no matter how long he knocked or how many ice tears he shed. I’d wake up still hearing that knocking in my chest, the tears on my face chilling in the gray morning light.

Now Oren has taken the frozen boy’s hand and is following him into the barn. Take me instead, I want to call out, but the wind would only whip my words to the sky. The path is already closing around me, snow drifting across the shoveled tunnel. I put my head down and push against the wind. Take me, take me, I whisper under my breath, I’m ready.

I fight my way to the barn door, which gapes open like a rotten tooth. I catch the whiff of iron I’d smelled earlier and know it now for what it is: the stench of death. As I see Oren go inside I brace myself for one last push against the wind, but the wind shifts, comes around behind me, and pushes me forward, so that I fly through that black hole, like I always knew I would if I took the frozen boy’s hand. It’s easy to fly, he whispered to me in my dreams, all you have to do is let go.

I land in the dark. There’s no magical glow here, no Peter Pan pixie dust, just the smothering dark and the smell of death pressing in all around me. “Oren?” I whisper, afraid to shout in this place, afraid of what might answer back.

There’s only a creak, and then another, somewhere in front of me, and then a rustle high above my head. For a moment I imagine that floating boy, grown wings, roosting in the rafters above my head, but then I remember the loft. Oren has climbed up the ladder to the loft, which is the best place to hide, especially if we can take up the ladder.

“Oren,” I whisper again, this time a little louder, “I’m coming.” I put my hands out and walk forward, trying to remember the layout of the barn. There was a path in the middle that was relatively clear, and the ladder was at the end of it. I should be able to find it if I walk straight ahead.

I shuffle forward, hands out, testing the terrain with my feet. Newspapers rustle underneath my steps, the brittle old pages whispering like gossips’ tongues. What had that article said?

“Chief Henry Barnes discovered the body . . .”

But he was on the scene much earlier. That’s what the button behind the furnace meant, that’s what Mattie found out. Her cop friend’s father killed her father, her mother—and then he followed Caleb out here to the barn and killed him too. I can smell blood here, getting stronger with every step I take—

My hand grazes something hard and cold. I push it away and it groans and screeches and swings back at me, hard cold iron slamming into my chest. It knocks the wind out of me but I manage to grab it and it judders in my hand, the sound traveling up and across the barn. How could I have forgotten that awful iron hook hanging from the ceiling by heavy chains? Mattie said it was how they hauled hay into the loft, but holding it now I can smell blood coming off it. This is where the smell comes from.

I leave the hook swinging behind me and keep walking toward the loft, holding my hands out until I find the ladder. Thank God Oren has left it down for me. I climb up, each step sounding loud as a gunshot in the snow-covered barn. When I reach the top I feel a hand on mine. I nearly flinch away and fall backward, but the hand is warm and so is the breath whispering in my ear.

“We have to lift up the ladder before he comes. Quick!”

I scramble into the loft and pull at the top rung of the ladder. I feel Oren’s hands beside mine, but it’s too heavy . . . and then another pair of hands is beside ours and the ladder lifts up. We slide it across the loft floor, stirring old hay and dust, the smell welcome after the reek of iron and blood.

“Oren?” I whisper, needing to know it’s Oren here with me and not that other boy.

“Shh,” Oren says, pushing me down flat on the floor. “He’s here.”

Does he mean Caleb? But then I hear a noise coming from across the barn, a footstep in the doorway. A flashlight beam slices the dark, lighting up a hulking figure of a man in the doorway. It’s that policeman. When he sweeps the barn with the flashlight the light catches on all those brass buttons and the dull glint of a gun. Why is he here and not Mattie? Does that mean that Mattie is dead, that he’s killed her? That we’re all alone with this murderer?

The light travels across the barn, pausing on the hook, which is still swaying on its chain. Then the light moves swiftly upward toward the loft. I flatten myself down harder to the floor and reach out my right hand to squeeze Oren’s warm hand—and my left to hold the bone-cold hand of the other boy.