Shadow Year, The by Ford Jeffrey

Author:Ford, Jeffrey [Ford, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Novel, Horror
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-01-01T02:00:00+00:00

He’s Coming Up the Drainpipe

The next day, as soon as he could get through, the heating guy came and fixed the oil burner. It was good to get out of the kitchen. Jim was feeling all better, except he had a cold. He and I went outside in the frigid wind and sunshine to help my father, who had to get to work that night, dig a path to the street and free the cars. I waited for a chance to talk to Jim about what I’d seen, and my father finally went inside for a while.

“I know I was wrong about Barzita,” I said, “but now I know where the man with the white car lives.”

“Where?”

I told him about the house with the garage that bordered the woods.

“What if he killed Barzita and then dumped the body in the road during the blizzard?” Jim said.

“I didn’t think of that,” I told him. “I figured I was just wrong.”

“If you didn’t think of it, it’s probably right,” he said. “We’ll go through the woods, and you can show me the guy’s house, but we have to wait till the snow’s gone. Otherwise he can track our footprints back home.”

“I left footprints,” I said.

“Let’s hope the storm covered them.”

On the days left of our Christmas vacation, we went sleigh riding, had a massive snowball fight with armies of kids, and Jim and I walked to the bay one afternoon because Larry March told us his father said it was frozen solid. Jim said March’s old man’s head was frozen solid, but we walked out onto the bay, powdered snow swirling around us in the sunlight. There were eruptions of ice that stood a foot or so above the surface. Sometimes the ice was rumpled, sometimes patches were clear and smooth and you could look down into the murk below. If it weren’t for me being scared of falling through, Jim would have gone all the way to Captree Island. When I told him I was going back to shore, he turned to me and said, “I know why Mary won’t help us.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Pop and her aren’t working the figures for the races. He told me the other day, he’s waiting for the running of the pigs down at Hialeah. There’s no races for him to bet on right now. I’ll bet she thinks she’s on vacation like Pop.”

That night, standing before Botch Town, we asked Mary if Jim’s theory was right. She didn’t say anything but stepped forward to the board and scrutinized it. We stood there for a while until Jim looked at me and shook his head. He reached around Mary, picked up the prowler figure, and tried to hand it to her. She pushed his arm away.

“No,” she said, and looked around the board. She found the white car parked up the block by Mr. Barzita’s house and picked it up. When she put it down, it landed right in front of our house.

“When?” Jim said.

“Now,” said Mary.

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