Snow Day

It was the coldest winter in a decade. Frost licked its way over windowpanes, ice turned puddles in the street bone white. When you stepped outside your front door in the morning, the bitter air stung your eyes and nose, gnawed at any skin not covered up. And just outside town, under the tangled, naked branches of the winter trees, deep in the black waters of the frozen lake, something stirred.

It had lain asleep for long years, lulled by the warmth of milder winters, but now, the plunging temperature tugged it from its dreams, dragged it to wakefulness. Up it swam from the frigid, inky waters, up to the surface, glazed in ice. The creature was awake again, at last. And it was hungry.

It had gnarled, bark-like hide, and if you’d seen it break the lake’s cold, white skin, you might have thought it was only a rotten tree. Unless, that is, you’d happened to notice the claws that glittered like icicles, or been caught in the chill glare of its glacial eyes. If that had happened, you might not have believed what you were seeing. But something in your guts would have taken over anyway, and you’d have run. And maybe fear would even have made you fast enough to survive.

Ollie wasn’t fast, but he was plenty frightened. The other kids at the bus stop, lost in their conversations or their phone screens, didn’t notice the slow, crawling ripple of darkness under the trees, the sudden clamour, then muting, of crow calls on the sharp air, the rapid beat of retreating wings. Ollie, his voice filched by fear, stood gaping as he gradually made out the monstrous form at the edge of the woodland fringing the road. He watched, helpless as a fat grey tabby cat stalked something too small to see along a frost-bright fence, unaware it was being stalked in its turn.

There was a frantic scrabbling, hissing, growling, a terrible scraping of steel-hard teeth and claws, and a flurry of blood and fur, but the other children noticed nothing, because the bus roared up and snatched them away. Just in time. Ollie watched in dumb silence from the rear window of the school bus, and knew the cat was no more than an appetizer.

All morning he sat in school, his eyes on his desk, his mind roaming the frozen road by the bus stop. Unthinkable, what he’d seen. It couldn’t be true. He must have imagined it. Except he hadn’t. The churning in his stomach wasn’t about to let him believe that for a second.

“Miss Glover?” he plucked up courage to ask, mid-morning, when the ice on the playground forced an indoor recess that he, at least, was glad of, “we don’t have alligators here, do we?”

Miss Glover smiled ruefully. “I should say not, Ollie! Alligators are cold-blooded. A winter like this would freeze them stone dead!” She tilted her head to the window, where tiny snowflakes, hard as grit, were beginning to whirl against a steel grey sky.

“Are there any predators that like the cold?”

“You mean like polar bears? Snow leopards? Wolves?”

Ollie shook his head, and slouched back to his desk, Miss Glover watching him in mild amusement. Kids this age and their questions. The reason she loved her job.

Another reason came just an hour later. The miserly scatterings of ice fattened into thick, heavy, goose feather snowflakes, and a student from the year above went around all the classrooms, his face bright with the importance of his message. Due to inclement weather, school will close at lunchtime. Buses will be waiting on the carpark to take students home early, while the roads are still passable. There were whoops of joy and schoolbags hurled gleefully into the air. Ollie sat stricken with belly cramps, his head in his hands. Miss Glover made a mental note to ask him if things were alright at home. Above his head, a big plastic clock ticked down the minutes to lunchtime.

Meanwhile, the creature prowled, its appetite whetted by feline flesh. Memories stirred in its chilly guts; the quickening joy of hunting, the hot satisfaction of blood. Its sticky claws click-clacked on the frozen pavement, this way and that, scenting for scant prey. At first, it enjoyed the challenge, then hunger overmastered it, and it turned brutal, desperate. Nearer it got to dwellings, to the scent of humans that awoke more memories in its dim brain. Memories of caution, yes, but memories, too, of fat, bloody kills much more satisfying than cats.

As the snow began to thicken, the creature slunk along a cinderblock wall, found a dark space amongst junk piled under a canopy, and settled down to wait for whatever had created the delicious smell that clung there.

The last door slammed, the last bus revved and rumbled out of the car park. Miss Glover wiped the date off the whiteboard with a flourish, laying the pen down with a little smile without writing tomorrow’s. Outside the window, the snow was still swirling thickly. Perhaps she wouldn’t need to write it at all.

She had flicked all the lights off and was just about to leave when she glanced round one last time, and saw him, cowering in the coat cubby at the back of the class.

“Ollie?”

He flinched and shuffled guiltily forward.

“What are you still doing here? The buses are gone!” She bent down to smile sympathetically. “Don’t you want to go home?”

Slowly he shook his head.

“Is there something you’re worried about?”

A nod.

“Is everything alright at home?”

An emphatic little nod that she didn’t know how to read.

“Oh well,” she sighed, “Grab your things and I’ll drop you. You don’t live very far from me. You can tell me all about it on the way.”

Along the sides of the roads, the snow had drifted deeply, obscuring the edges of pavements, creeping waist-high up hedges and walls. The gloaming stole down, and thick flakes flickered ghostly in the beams of Miss Glover’s headlights.

“So, what is it that’s so scary you’d rather sleep in my classroom than go home?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the road. There was a long silence, measured by the soft swish of the windscreen wipers.

Eventually, Ollie took a deep breath. “There’s a monster,” he said.

Miss Glover let him talk. That was important. She was well-trained in more than just elementary math and literacy, and she knew how to listen between the lines. Children of Ollie’s age hadn’t quite separated reality from imagination, and that went double when they were describing something troubling. You had to learn to read the metaphors, interpret the symbols. By the time she dropped him at the corner of his street, she was already composing an email to the school counsellor in her head.

“Thanks,” said Ollie distractedly, his head snapping from side to side as he closed the car door. By the time she pulled away he was a small, running shape in the gathering dusk. Poor little boy. She’d write that email the minute she got home.

Ollie’s breath came fast and hot, puffing white clouds in air as cold as lake water in winter. His boots stomped deep into the snow as he half-ran, half-staggered the short stretch home, glancing around him all the way. Every shadow, every soft sigh of snow collapsing from overburdened branches had him jumping like a nervous cat. Almost there, he told his hammering heart, almost home. His fingers scrabbled in his pocket for the door key, while his other hand shoved the gate, then he was kicking it, cursing it open against the resisting drift of snow, all the while straining his ears for the hushed slither of that long, dry body through the deep, blanketing white that would silence any tell-tale scraping of claws.

The second of relief he felt as he closed the gate behind him evaporated in the frosty gloom of the front yard. Thick shadows loomed on every side, eating away the edges of a tiny scrap of lit snow. The path to the front door was a too-thin line. His ears ached from listening too hard, his jaw hurt from clenching. Frightened tears froze on his lashes, blinding him. Behind him, something stirred, like a breath of icy wind.

Fear propelled his legs to the front door, and in his panic, he forgot his keys, hammering on it with both fists.

The door swung open. He remembered to slam it securely before he fell into his astonished mother’s arms.

Miss Glover parked under a canopy heavy and sagging with snow. The security lights flicked on as she drove up, but her mind was too full of the delicate steps she’d be taking to tackle Ollie’s problems at home to notice the dark mass curled amongst the bins and packing crates.

Not until she locked up the car, and the creature sent them clattering.

Two streets away, Ollie heard dogs barking, the screech of a tripped car alarm, and a muffled, gargling scream. His guts twisted with the dull certainty that there would be no school tomorrow, whatever happened to the snow.