Earthblood

Mystic—Home of the Historic Seaport.

Pocked with bullet holes, the sign was leaning drunkenly to the left, a battered remnant from a different world.

The bike was beginning to cough, struggling under the wintery conditions. He blinked, then said slowly, barely getting out the word, “Melville Avenue. One hundred and eight. One zero eight, Melville.”

His lips were blue and his teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. The Norton was meandering from side to side, the back wheel barely retaining any purchase. Mac could see a tremulous vision of the house and where it was, locked into his memory. But in the whiteout conditions nothing made any sense.

Nothing was making… sense.

THE LEAVES WERE fire tipped, running a whole range of colors. Green shaded into gold into orange—the bright tints of death. It was a wonderfully balmy afternoon in late fall, with the sun beginning its slow decline. The water was tumbling in gentle white foam over lichen-coated boulders, down into dark pools.

All seven of Henderson’s children were playing happily together. He lay back on the soft turf and named them on his fingers, from the oldest through to the youngest.

“John, twenty. Paul, eighteen. Pamela, seventeen. Helen, nine. Jocelyn, seven. Jack, six. And little Sukie, just four.”

His first wife, Jeanne, lay on his right, wearing a skinny T-shirt in dappled colors of red and yellow. Though she was a couple of years past forty, she’d kept her figure well.

Angel, his current wife, lay on the other side, nibbling on a chicken leg. A can of beer stood open on a flat rock at her elbow, and beyond that was all the detritus of the big family party.

“We’ve done well,” she said, following his eyes, down to the river, rubbing her hand through her tangled blond hair.

“Yeah.”

The water was frothing, white… as snow as ice as ivory… as parchment—as death.

MAC KNEW that he was on Melville Avenue. The white frame houses, with balconies and turrets in the best Victorian Gothic style looked like houses on Melville Avenue.

The dead trees and bushes were weighed down with fresh-fallen snow, their pink color almost buried in whiteness.

The Norton wasn’t there anymore.

Mac shook his head, puzzled.

He had a vague impression, an image in his mind of a tumble, a sliding into the ditch, as if he’d been a spectator and it had happened to someone else.

“Did I?” he said, unable to catch the sound of his own whispering voice.

Now he was walking, the heavy pack dragging in the snow that rose to his ankles, leaving a meandering furrow up the side street.

The children were laughing, their voices blending and merging until they began to sound like the banshee howling of the blizzard wind.

There was ice up his nostrils, uncomfortable. His feet didn’t belong to him, nor did his hands. The cold had whipped the skin raw across his cheeks, and his eyes kept watering.

Watering and freezing, freezing and nearly closing, closing for good, maybe.

HE HEARD VOICES chattering around him, but Mac wasn’t sure if he was dreaming. If he opened his eyes he could find out, but that would involve a huge effort and he wasn’t quite ready for that.

Not yet.

“Lost a lot of weight.” It was a woman’s voice.

“Fit, though. Losing weight hasn’t made any difference to some parts of him, though…”

That prompted laughter. Two women.

There was a gap while he slept.

“Knew he couldn’t…walked. Paul and John backtracked and found the motorbike.”

“… hour and the snow would’ve buried it. Never thought we’d ever…”

A little girl spoke close to his ear. “Time to wake up, Daddy.”

“I know, Sukie. Any minute now.” Henderson McGill realized that he was home.

IT TOOK HIM four days to claw his way back to something like reasonable health.

His fingers and toes began to heal, though he lost most of his nails, blackened and dead. His sight was blurred by the cold and the whiteout, but that recovered on the second day, enabling him to see his family.

It had been two years, plus a few weeks.

Sukie had changed most. From a tiny child, barely toddling, she’d become an active little girl, rushing around the big fortress-house at a hundred miles per hour, a hundred questions in her wake.

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