“Some protection,” she said. “In case you have to defend yourself.”
“There’s a hammer in the workshop, and a shovel out in the mudroom. But I’d have to get by it to get them.”
“Be careful,” she admonished from the bed. Tim looked back once to see her trembling, her hands clasped at the bunched cloth at her neckline. The bruise on her face pulsed like a siren.
The idea that he could move without a sound proved false from his very first steps. His weight made the pine boards squeak, but he could not shake the desire to sneak up on whatever was making noises in the bowels of the house. He tiptoed in his bare feet, an impractical cat burglar, and made his way around the bed to the door. The hall was dark and quiet. No light shone from Jip’s room, and nothing scurried out of the way as he walked along the runner that covered the corridor floor. Tim crept down the stairs, alert for any signs, but he met no one as he checked the rooms one by one. The house seemed undisturbed. Only the Christmas tree in the living room suprised him, and he laughed at his foolish reaction to its bulk looming out of the darkness. He checked the knobs and latches, even to the workroom down below, but the doors and windows were locked for the night. He found himself slightly disappointed by the lack of anything out of the ordinary. In the kitchen, he snapped on the lights and drank a glass of water to assert his authority over intruders real or imagined. His only cause for unease was the sensation that his wife was upstairs waiting for him and would continue to insist that she had heard something. But what could he do? He couldn’t conjure a visitor by sheer imagination.
Tim considered waking Jip to see if he had been the cause of the strange noises, but there would be hell to pay if he disturbed the boy and overturned the night any further than it had already been. He yawned, long and hard, fatigued by the lateness of the hour. Holly would not be placated easily, but he rehearsed his explanation. Birds on the roof, the house settling in the changing weather.
At the top of the stairs, his left foot landed in dampness, cold as ice. So cold that he yelped and withdrew his bare sole from the rug. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself and bent to feel the dampness with his hand, but it was not wet, just cold, and it seemed to be no larger than the span of his fingers. He blindly ran his palms along the borders of the spot and made it out as a footprint. On his hands and knees, he crawled along the floor and came upon another frozen patch embedded in the runner. A third appeared and a fourth, but he could not tell from the shape of the prints which direction they followed. He crabwalked along the trail to his bedroom door, and then he worked his way back down the hall to his son’s bedroom. A set of icy prints stopped in front of Jip’s room, and Tim squatted there, his eyes even with the doorknob. He grasped the frosted metal, icy as a school yard flagpole, and against his pressure, it turned in his hand, forcing his wrist to twist sharply, and all at once the boy was in the open doorway, backlit, looking down quizzically at his father.
“Feel this,” Tim said, and he pulled his son’s arm until the boy was on his knees, and he pushed the boy’s hand against the rug. Tim expected him to recoil against the strange temperature, but Jip knelt there implacable.
“What am I supposed to feel?”
Pressing his own palms against the corded fabric, Tim could no longer sense the icy prints. He waddled down the hall, testing the runner with his hands and bare feet, but it was warm and dry.
“It was stone cold just a minute ago,” he told his son. “Someone had been walking on it with frigid feet. Did you hear anything just now? Something on the roof?” He laughed at the absurdity in his own question.
“No, nothing, nothing at all.”
“And you’ve been in your room the whole time?”
The boy nodded and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
“And you didn’t feel the cold? Didn’t see a thing?”
“Probably in your head. I see things all the time.”
For a long time, his father stared at him, opening his mouth a few times as though to reply before reconsidering. Like a pale ghost, Holly emerged from the bedroom, anxious to find them both standing there. In her thin nightgown, she shivered as she stood, waiting for some explanation.
He thought to tell her about the icy footprints in the hall, but he was not sure that she would believe him without any proof, and he was not sure if it was not all some trick of the mind like that thing on Shore Road. Instead he put an arm around her waist and tried to reassure her with a hug. She trembled in his arms.
“It was nothing,” Tim said. “All in your imagination.”