"I know." Janet felt the need to say more, but after the long afternoon at the widow's house, words failed her.
"Will you be back tomorrow, Jan?"
"Yes, but now I need to get home before dark. My girls are waiting for me."
"At least it's clear out there."
Clear and pale above the gently-stirring moire network of the pines and the white clutch of the aspens, the western sky was a calm pool of late November light. But as her bicycle clattered over the pebbles of the Lindstrom driveway, the northern sky came into view beyond the trees; by the time Janet reached the dirt road, she could see the broad expanse of the Gatineau Hills, the rounded peaks of granite and evergreen tinged with amber from the lowering sun.
This would have to be a fast ride. Home was in a valley far away, and she wanted to avoid the increasing cold of nightfall.
At first, her eyes watered from the sting of rushing air, and she could feel the ache of that air on the circle of her face unprotected by the hug of the ski mask; but soon the warmth of exertion took away the chill, and she began to enjoy the sense of motion.
A tough bike for tough roads: it kept her sane. Every day, after all the farm chores and housework, she had to escape from routine; and every year, after the snow-melt in April to the first blizzard of December, she escaped on her bike. It brought her back to childhood, to the sense of freedom and exploration that she had known during long summer twilights, in years long past.
Thanks to Bryden --
She winced at the memory, but set her jaw, squeezed the handlebars, and allowed the line of thought to continue.
Thanks to Bryden. He had once asked her if she felt regrets in choosing a life that was far away from their old one of city commutes, lab work, and the labyrinth of faculty politics; but no, she loved the farm, she loved these hills, and she was glad they had chosen to get away together. If she missed anything, it was the freedom of those long summer bike rides, and she described them in warm detail.
Then, one morning less than a week later, she had found a bicycle helmet on the kitchen table, and a note that mentioned something new in the tractor shed.
How he had managed to scrape up the money, she never asked; but from that day onward, she rode whenever she could. For her, it was a private joy, but Bryden had smiled whenever she set out, smiled even more when she returned after dark. That was Bryden: always generous, always happy with her happiness.
She took a deep breath of air, held it inside until she felt its cold sting fade, then exhaled slowly until she felt empty again.
Bryden was gone.
And now Ryan Lindstrom was gone, and Rita would mourn for him, just as Annie Seidel had mourned for Piter, just as all the other wives had mourned for their dead husbands.
So many widows.
Cedars passing, now, on each side of the road. Grey, twisted pods of milkweed, shrivelled in the cold air. Blackened flowerheads of dying clover.
Everything died, eventually; she knew this in her bones. Death was merely the cost of having lived, of having built and maintained a tough cell wall against entropy. No life could be permanent, in this universe. Perhaps, in a few billion years, the universe itself would die. How could she resent a universal pattern? And so she felt no resentment.
But she did feel a very human sadness, a very human sense of loss. It was the price that humans paid for belonging in a universe where everything died. Love itself, cooperation, caring and compassion, were successful byproducts of that struggle against a harsh, impersonal universe, and her own love for Bryden, for her daughters, for all the neighbours around her, was a living sign of that old, evolutionarily stable strategy. Love was part of her birthright, coded within every cell of her body, and it showed just how clearly and how fully she belonged in this cold and hard yet beautiful, wonderful place.
Breathing in the chill air, facing the pale blue sky, she felt that it was good to belong here, even if belonging meant death.
She was glad that she had loved. Even if nothing in the universe lurked beyond humanity to care for human beings, humans cared. And so they loved, as fiercely as the years would allow them; and then they lost.
They became widows, all of them.
So many widows.
She was thinking in circles, but she made no effort to stop herself. Perhaps it was a kind of mourning.
On her left, the cedar forest gave way to a long hillside green with tough, late-season grass. The road in front of her dipped leftward to follow the long contours of that hill into a narrow valley far below. But something down there blocked the road and concealed the fenced-in meadows: it bulged on the valley floor like a solid patch of cloud, and it shone with a deep orange hue like a warning flare.
With a slight pressure on the rear brake handle, she coasted down the hillside and stared at the well-defined outlines of the fog as it loomed in the clear light ahead. It looked like a solid form, a deep orange mass, and it was odd enough to make her slow to a halt. She braced herself with a foot on the road, and stared at something she had never seen before.
Was it a cloud, or a barricade?
She would have expected that deep orange hue in sunset clouds far overhead, but never on the ground like this, and never in a deep valley hidden from the sun.
To the right, northward, she had a clear view of the sky, and for the first time she noticed two similar clouds high above the rounded hills: equally defined, equally striking in their deep orange colour. At this time of day, they seemed perfectly normal.
She turned back to face the barricade of cloud.
It's nothing, she thought. Just an odd effect of the light, that's all.
She raised her foot back to the pedal and pushed herself into motion.
But when she entered the cloud, she found herself in a whirling storm of snowflakes. Almost black against the deep orange light, thick and heavy, they swarmed from all directions and struck her with a barrage of soft, wet impacts.
Blinking, struggling to see, she almost fell off the bike in her effort to maintain balance. Then she braced herself on the road, wiped the dripping slush from cold eyebrows, and cupped her hands to protect the naked circle of her face, to gain a better view. But that made no difference: beyond her own body and the limits of her bicycle, she could see nothing but the orange light and the swarming insect spirals of the snow.
She dismounted from the bike, took a firm grip on the handlebars, and pushed forward. With her head down to protect her eyes, she could see how thoroughly coated with soft wet flakes the road had become; every step was now a sliding, fumbling struggle, and the bike resisted every tug.
Again she wiped her face, then glanced forward. The road was invisible; she could only see the rapidly fading lines of a barbed wire fence on the right-hand side, her only clue for direction.
She pushed ahead -- then stopped.
Two figures waited by the fence. Tall and vague, they were almost concealed by the orange light and the tumbling snow... but she could see them.
By reflex alone, she called out, "Hello?"
The figures waited in silence.
She gripped the handlebars, ready to flee. "Who's there?"
No reply.
Squinting her eyes, she tried to peer beyond the rushing pattern of snow, until she suddenly understood what lurked in front of her: a pair of tall wooden posts, thick and strong enough to support a wooden gateway leading to a field... a gateway without a gate.
She released her breath in a sigh that became an awkward burst of laughter -- at the snow, at the light, at herself.
I have to get home, she thought. My girls are waiting for me.
Again, a firm grip on the handlebars, a steady push, a few more sliding steps in the snow. And then she walked out into the final, clear light of day's end.
The road, the fields, the trees that blocked the western view ahead of her, were completely free of snow, and the sky was the palest of pale blues. Behind her, the wall of cloud seemed as completely solid as ever, b
ut its colour was fading. She stood and watched the orange glow turn to stormcloud grey while she brushed the snow from her jacket, then she looked at the northern sky and saw more clouds in the distance, edged with scarlet in the last high rays of the hidden sun, trailing thick veils of snow upon the black hills.
A trick of the light, she thought. Local weather conditions. Nothing unusual.
But she had a long trip ahead, and night was on the way.
~
Within a few kilometres of home, the night caught up with her.
The full moon became an opalescent smear upon the sky, then darkened into black. In the beam of her headlamp, a few random snowflakes drifted and gleamed like dustmotes, then increased to block her view in a blinding tunnel of cold stars.
She stepped down from the bike, turned off the headlamp, and found herself in a bone-grey world with a hint of solid darkness on the left, where the mountainside formed a rampart of ghostly aspen trunks. To the right, open fields vanished into nowhere. The only sense of life and motion came through the trudging of her boots, the sliding unsteadiness of the bicycle at her side, the cold melting kisses on the unprotected circle of her face.
Soon, like a faded sketch in charcoal, a stand of pine and cedar loomed ahead on the right, a sign that she had finally made it to the route leading home.
Every time she followed this road, she thought of steps. From the mountainside, the land extended westward beyond the trees into slanting meadows, then dipped suddenly to reach more level fields, then fell into a region of hills and deep valleys: three steps, with her farm and her daughters on the second.
She was out of the woods, now, on step number one. The snowflakes increased in size and number, and their fumbling touch on her face made her think of wet cobwebs.
At last the roadway dipped in front of her, and she could vaguely sense the level fields that spread themselves below. From this vantage point on a clear night, she would have seen the lights of her house, but now the vaguely phosphorescent greyness concealed everything down there.
Yet far beyond the concealed house, on what should have been the horizon, a flickering in the powdery grey suggested a last orange beam of sunset, half seen beyond the racing clouds. But that was impossible: by this hour, the sun had long vanished.
At any rate, she could hardly trust her eyes. They were stinging from the wet barrage of snowflakes, and thoroughly tired of this pale substitute for light. But home was now fifteen minutes away, or less. She held the bicycle firmly and half walked, half slid to the level ground of step number two.
The open field on her left was a vaguely luminous grey zone without limits, but on the right, a wire fence gave her some hint of geography in this bone-coloured void, some reassurance that the world remained a place where she belonged.
There it was again, that flickering. This time, she could see a pale tower of flame-coloured light, moving slowly but steadily on what should have been the rim of this level step. Perhaps it was a headlight beam from a truck down there, concealed in a valley of step number three.
The beam sank like a guttering candle flame, flickered and faded, then reached toward the sky on the road ahead. At last, the world had a visible boundary, and something was down there, coming up the hill.
A snowplow? She could always hope. Pushing the bike toward the wire fence, she peered at the rising beam. Sometimes, at night, she had encountered vehicles on this road, and she always loved to watch the beams of their headlights rise and then fall, to spread outwards like a fan of light as the cars reached the top of the hill and came into view.
But this time, instead of collapsing to reveal a pair of distant headlights, the orange beam rose higher like a warning flare. It rose into the sky, an impossible height that increased impossibly, and against that ray of light the snowflakes whirled like the burnt-out stars of a dead galaxy.
And then, in a shout of light, a dazzling sunset flamed into being on the road ahead. It lengthened, reached into the sky, became a blinding orange pillar that bent in the middle and pressed itself down upon the road, where it bulged and flexed as another pillar rose into view beside it.
Suddenly, Janet recognized these forms, and knew that she was looking at a pair of huge arms, gnarled and swollen with straining muscles of light. There were no hands: gouts of light resembling drops of molten steel seeped from the ragged stumps.
A third form burst into view, became a scarred, faceless head, extended further to reveal a pair of thrusting shoulders. Like a severely-deformed and wounded child struggling through a tiny window frame, this gigantic being of light reached forward and tried to heave itself onto the road.
At her side, the bicycle fell and hit the snow: a muffled sound that registered vaguely in some tiny, unterrified portion of her mind.
The seeping stumps fumbled against the ground, swept back and forth, until one rose like a tower, toppled like a club, and crashed against the road with a soundless impact, but one that sent the fallen snow leaping and surging towards her. She flinched away, but the shockwave knocked her against the wire fence and whipped overhead, a brief, howling blizzard suddenly there, suddenly gone.
She writhed in the snow, staggered to her feet, looked up in time to see the other monstrous arm crash down upon the road. This time she threw herself to the ground and hid her face from the blast of snow that gusted like a sandstorm above her and beyond her.
Then she stood, ran across the road, stumbled and fought her way through drifts of snow to reach the open field. She looked back in time to see the blinding figure brace itself with both arms and heave itself further onto the rim of the world.
The flame colour was gone, replaced by an intensely painful white bordered with violet: she could feel it like a torch against her face. The source of that pain was bloated and vast, several storeys tall at the shoulders, casting a light that sent wild shadows coursing along the low streaming clouds, yet something that pulled itself along the road like a desperate, crippled child emerging from a pit.
She turned away and staggered over snow, felt the impact of an arm upon the roadway, felt herself hurled to the ground by the shockwave.
Shaking her head, she tried to throw off the dizziness of that impact, struggled to stand in the shifting snow. Then she looked up and found herself in a field crowded with people.
No, not people -- sculptures. They had to be sculptures.
Formed of glittering snow and ice, hundreds of figures stood and faced the aching, blue-haloed light from the roadway. All were perfectly detailed; the closest figures gleamed against the flickering shadows that concealed the rest.
She looked at the nearest faces, and with a jolt of recognition, she knew them.
Ryan Lindstrom.
Piter Seidel.
She recognized others, too: the lost husbands of local wives, their faces paralyzed in stark fear. They seemed to be frozen in mid-scream, in a silent, extended agony of dead time.
Shadows groped across the faces. She turned and saw the bloated arm reaching from the roadway, the ragged stump twisting in the air and dripping hot light.
She dodged and lunged into the shadows between the men. In the sudden darkness, she veered too late and crashed into a solid block of snow. She clutched at the statue, felt the cold outlines of a head, braced herself to run again; but the shadows fled and exposed the face beneath her hands to sudden view.
"No!" she whispered.
She recoiled and fell backwards, fought against the sliding snow to push herself away. She had never seen that degree of terror on a human face, and it was more than she could witness, more than she could bear, to see it on the face of Bryden.
Light exploded in the sky. She glanced up to see the bloated arm plunge like a dynamited tower. A scream rang out, but not her own: the scream of many voices combined into one, that burst from the gaping, paralyzed mouths of all the men around her, from the frozen and the dead, from Bryden.
She rolled over, clutched the back of her head, felt the gr
ound leap at the impact.
And then the snow felt very still, the snow felt very soft.
~
In the long silence and darkness, something began to whisper: "Get up you'll freeze to death get up." It was her own voice, cold and far away within her skull; it was nothing of importance.
Yet all the same her body stirred, and sat up.
The light, the men, the faces hard with agony, were all gone. Even the snow on the field was gone, blasted away by that final impact. The flakes that drifted around her would soon replace whatever had been lost.
When she could finally stand, she limped over the dead grass towards the roadway. In the bone-coloured twilight, the fence came into view, and she could see that her bicyle had been hurled against the wire like a toy tossed aside. Absently, she pulled it upright and then wheeled it beside her down the almost-bare length of the road.
The snowfall was diminishing, and soon the lights of her house broke through the greyness around her. She left the bicycle in the tractor shed, where Bryden had left it, so many years before, and then she walked the few dreamlike paces to the house, feeling nothing at all, nothing within herself but the night and the cold.
She opened the door and blinked in the sudden light, the sudden warmth of her kitchen. Sitting at the table was her eldest daughter -- seventeen, already, no longer the tiny girl that Bryden had lifted and held within his protective, steady arms.
Her daughter glanced up at her, then stared.
"Mom? What happened to your face?"
"My face?"
Janet pulled off the ski mask and felt a sharp sting as the fabric brushed against her skin. She touched her lips and yanked her fingers away at the sudden flaring pain.
Then she turned and looked at the mirror hanging on the wall above the counter, saw the red, blistered circle of skin on her face, the bloodshot scarlet of her eyes.
"What happened, Mom?"
"Did you... see anything, while I was gone?"
"See anything? Where?"
"Outside. Out there."
"No, nothing. What's going on?"
Janet closed her swollen eyelids and saw the night, the snow, the bloated child, Bryden's frozen terror.
"I don't think..." she said, struggling to find the words, "I don't think I belong here any more. I don't think I belong anywhere."