Chapter Twenty Seven
Tom Griffin struggled through the harsh blizzard. Though he was only a few feet from his front door, he felt like he had fought for hours. The swirling snow grasped at his feet, like ice cold hands reaching out of the ground. The howling wind kept forcing his thin body down, only his grip on the snow shovel kept him on his feet. The wind suddenly doubled its force, its shrieking fury sounding like the desperate screams of a million dammed souls. The swirling columns of snow that surrounded became a thousand phantom figures, men, women and children. Their faces were gaunt, lined with pain and despair. Their pale fingers reached past his clothing, ripping away pieces of his rapidly fading body heat. He desperately kept struggling, forcing his way through the specters until he slammed into his front door. Clumsily prying his numb hands off the snow shovel, he clumsily fumbled at the door. It took both of his hands to open the knob, and he fell inside. The wind followed him, the snow of the storm rapidly coating the carpeted floor around him.
Sam and Chris had heard the door slam open. Glancing at each other, they ran out of Sandi's room and stood at the top of the stairs, staring past their fathers prone, gasping form to the still open door, and the large glass window beside it. They were both crowded with a host of figures, only their dark, staring eyes really distinct against the swirl of the snow outside.
Sam stuttered, "Dad?"
Tom glanced behind him at the door and croaked out, "Sam! Chris! Stay up there! Don't come down!"
Chris almost screamed "Dad! What are those things?"
"I don't know, but for God's sake, don't come down here!"
Tom crawled painfully on his hands and knees back to the open door, shoving it closed with his shoulder until it slammed shut. Sharp pains shoot through his arms and legs from his almost frozen hands and feet. He looked up frantically hearing Chris cry out.
Chris had felt a cold hand painfully grip his shoulder, and the teenager shouted out in surprise, looking behind him. His mother Linda stood there, her empty hand falling back to her side. Her pale face was flushed. Her eyes were bloodshot, bright red veins crawling like snakes across their surface. She smelled strongly of liquor. Her hair was limp and straggly. She stumbled forward, and only Sam's quick grab at her arm kept her from falling down the stairs.
Linda tried to struggle away from her son's grip. Sam was in shock. He had never seen his total in charge mother like this before, out of control. Chris stared back and forth in horror, between his drunken mother and the door. Linda shouted, "Let go of me! I'm your mother, and I can take care of everything!"
"Mom! No!" Sam shouted back. "Don't go down the stairs! There's something bad outside! I don't know what it is, but it's hurt Dad!"
Linda stared groggily down the stairs. Tom had crawled as far as the foot of the stairs, but was unable to get any higher. Linda shouted, "Thomas Griffin! Get on your feet! A Griffin never crawls! Never! Not to anyone!"
"Chris, go downstairs and help dad!" Sam said.
"What! With those things down there!" Chris shouted back.
"They're outside, and Dad's hurt! I have to hold on to Mom! Please, Chris!"
It was the pleading tone in his brothers voice that decided Chris, and he slowly clambered down the stairs to his father's side. Tom bit his lip in pain as Chris helped him to sit up on the bottom of the stairs. The four Griffins stared at each other for a long minute. Tom was in shock, only the pain from his frozen hands and feet keeping him from passing out. Linda struggled in her alcoholic fog. Sandi and Patti Wells, Helen and Daria, Tom and her sons all swirling around in her hazy mind, ranting at her, blaming her for everything.
Sam and Chris held onto their helpless parents. Tom's long impotence in the Griffin household had led them to ignore him, and Linda's drunkenness left her a burden. Sam stared at the door, listening to Linda's raving with only half a mind. He jumped when something brushed his leg, and barely stifled a nervous cry. Looking down, he saw his sister's white Persian cat, Fluffy, was crouched at the head of the stairs, staring fixedly at the closed front door. The cat was trembling, every hair of its body tense. All four of them stared at the cat, they followed its gaze to the glass panes on the front door.
Very slowly, a pattern of frost started to form there. The delicate crystals grew, catching the lights inside the house, forming a dim picture. The temperature in the house grew colder and colder, and nobody made a move when the power failed again. The click of the lights as they started to cool, the whirr of the heating fan as it spun to a stop. The pattern on the front door was the only thing that mattered anymore. An eerie whitish glow slowly built up, coming from the swirling snow outside itself. The dim light lit up the Griffin household with its pearly incandescence.
The wind roared outside, shaking their house. The thick walls suddenly seemed so fragile, and the male Griffin's looked uneasily at all the wide glass windows. Linda just stood there in Chris's tight grip, staring at the front door, the pattern becoming more and more distinct, obscuring the throng of figures standing outside, staring in. Tom, Sam, and Chris all slowly realized something.
They were all staring at Linda.
Each male slowly turned as well, staring at the dominating force in the Griffin household like they had never seen her before. Linda was a pitiful sight, her hair matted and unbrushed, her face pale, her red eyes shining in the pale snow light coming in through the wide windows. Her face, normally impassive, was a sea of conflicting emotions. Self pity warred with pride, jealousy with fear.
Linda stared numbly back, trying to make sense of the frost patterns on the door, the most important thing in her life. She knew the phantoms were staring at her, but she knew something that her husband and sons didn't.
Sandi stared at her drunken mother through each eye, in accusation and worse, in pity. Her daughter, who Linda had thought of so long as nothing but a failed copy of herself, was gazing deeply into her, seeing all the failures, the petty fears, the cheap triumphs that defined her life. Linda screamed in fury at her daughter.
"Sandi! Alexandra Renee Griffin! Don't you dare look at me like that! I sacrificed everything for you!"
"Mom?" Sam said, struggling to hold onto his mother, "who are you talking to? I don't see Sandi. I just see those people, or whatever they are outside. Where's Sandi?"
Linda's kicking feet struck Fluffy. The tense cat didn't move or hiss, but just turned its emerald green eyes to meet Linda's. Linda froze, staring back. The cat's eyes were suddenly deep caverns filled with ice, sparkling in frosty glory. Dim phantoms slowly wandered through the empty spaces, staring sadly at the poor souls trapped in the ice, struggling to escape as they had for millennia.
Stacy Rowe stared back at her in despair, buried alive. She struggled, unable to move in her prison of frozen earth. Stacy's empty clothing blew erratically on the top of the massive snowdrift above her. Her brown hair was shot through with strands of black, and her eyes were large dark empty pools that drew at Linda, into the emptiness now at Stacy's core. She was able to see and hear all, though, and Linda felt her burning pain as Stacy saw into the cabin, and Linda saw with her, as Sandi's body swelled in agony, as Quinn's body twisted in its grotesque transformation. She saw Tiffany in the cabin, sitting in the corner, her back to her friends, crying as she brushed her long black hair. When Tiffany slowly turned and stared back at her with her ravaged face, the Griffin house shook with Linda's horrified screams.
Sam didn't see any of this, but held grimly onto his now hysterical mother. Linda tore at him, her nails cutting at his face. The fourteen year old boy was strong, but trying to hold onto his once feared mother while she attacked him confused him. Chris's desperate shout from below galvanized him, and he roughly shoved his mother away, Linda stumbled back down the hall.
Chris had one arm around his almost frozen father, struggling to get him up the stairs. A loud crackling, like breaking ice drew their attention to the front door and wide window besides it. The pale phantoms slowly passed through them, their ragged clothing and hair still wind tossed even inside the house. Fluffy snarled at them, his white fur erect in terror and rage, his sharp claws raked out at the slowly approaching specters. Sam stared down, terrified, before he swore and ran down the steps, helping his brother get their father up to the second floor. The phantoms never changed their slow pace, slowly moving forward toward the petrified family.
Helen's body shook in an icy passion as her life's breath tore out of her into the icy shell of the ghost stealing Daria's soul. Her own spirit mingled with her oldest daughters, thoughts and memories swirling into a confusing jumble. Daria gasped in sudden confusion as her mothers once fiery spirit blazed in fury around the dying sparks of her own soul, like a warm wind on the dying embers of a fire. The dying girl thrashed in confusion, her stiff body falling backwards, tripping over her fathers frozen corpse. Daria fell to her hands and knees, staring almost mindlessly at the sight before her. Her weak eyes peered through the frost-covered glasses still on her half-frozen face.
Her mother knelt in front of the spectral form of the Snow Woman. Their lips were locked together in an embrace of clashing energies. Helen's hands were half raised as if fending off Daria's attacker. Fragments of her mother's life roared through Daria's numb mind. She saw her father standing over her in tears, her mother exhausted as she saw her newborn daughter for the first time, and Daria knew she was staring at herself in her father's arms.
Daria dragged herself back to the present with difficulty. A swirling funnel surrounded the two women in front of her, bands of flame and snow mingling in an almost abstract pattern. But the flames were fading, dying down. Helen's eyes frantically sought out her daughters, and Daria could see the relief and desperation in her mother's eyes.
Daria struggled to make sense of everything, her mother's memories confusing her, the thoughts of what she had seen in the abyss slowly reforming, becoming clearer, it's cold elemental force gleaming deep inside of her reviving mind.
Ice and fire. Eons of darkness, but not lifeless. Thought was here, brooding in its isolation, unknowable, undefinable. All matter pressed together in an infinite darkness. And suddenly, the fire, a humble spark appeared, and a universe exploded in pain and fury. All matter flew apart in a titanic explosion.
And the fire thought as well. Cold and fire clashed almost mindlessly but awareness slowly grew in the two polarities. Daria saw how fragile what she had thought of life was, dwelling in almost a band of constantly melting frost, frail creations whose very life force slowly destroyed their own bodies. She saw the swirling pattern of energy the Earth was, the living being she lived on her entire life. The Earth stared back at her, the furnace of it's own life licking at Daria's fading spirit. Daria gasped in pain.
The Snow Woman stared deeply into Helen, feeling her sacrifice for her daughter. She pitied her, but many mothers had tried to sacrifice themselves for their children over the millennia. Helen felt her spirit fading, saw deeply inside the strange figure facing her, saw the trap which had caught her up into the lives of her family. She saw the other one, which had claimed Quinn, as it had also claimed the Snow Woman. The two mothers, removed from each other by two thousand years, stared deeply into each others eyes. The Snow Woman reached out, and pushed Helen away from her, the near frozen woman falling helplessly to the ground. Her deep sigh cut through the helpless Daria like a knife.
Daria suddenly didn't see a monster in her sister's room. She saw a lonely woman, trapped by hostile forces, seeking her own child against a hostile, uncaring, universe. They stared at each other, the Snow Woman's pain stark against her cold beauty. Then she once again looked at her parent's bodies laying stiff at her feet and screamed in pain.
Daria's small figure staggered erect, gripping one of her father's golf clubs she had brought as a weapon in her stiffened hands. The absolute cold pouring from the Snow Woman was a blasting wave of pain. Daria grimly struggled to put one foot ahead of the other. The ghost just stood there, staring at Daria's slowly approaching form.
The young woman couldn't even see thru her now ice-covered glasses, but she still pushed her slender body forward, dying with each step. Daria's thick auburn hair was a frozen clump matted on her head. She couldn't feel any part of her body at all now.
Mom? Dad? Quinn? I'm coming to get you. I'm coming too. Sorry, Jane, would have been nice to have been with you in Boston. But I've got to do this. I've got to at least try!
Daria clumsily swung at the softly gleaming figure before her. A pale, small hand reached out effortlessly caught the frosted-covered metal shaft of the golf club, and it shattered like glass. Daria fell to her knees, staring blindly at the floor.
Well, that's it, isn't it? It's all over, now. No last minute heroism here. No ultimate revelations, no neat wrap up. I'm going to die now, with mom and dad, by something I don't know anything about at all, and I won't even know why . . .
Daria's thoughts faded away as she stiffly fell to the snow-covered carpet of her sister's bedroom. Her glasses fell off, landing by the bodies of her parents.