“It wasn’t us,” Nick said.
The pencil sounded like a woodpecker hammering on an oak. Tim grabbed his son’s wrist, the boy’s pulse racing in rhythm to the tapping. By tightening his grip, Tim forced him to stillness. “Dammit. Just quit, Jack. Who did it then? Who let the cold in?”
“Him,” he growled. “The monster.”
“The what?” He looked carelessly at the drawings on the table, fabrications of the ten-year-old mind. “Don’t be silly.”
His son refused to look him in the eye.
“What is he talking about, Nick?”
“Maybe Mrs. Keenan left it open before she went out. Or maybe you forgot. It wasn’t us, I swear.”
With a sigh, Tim loosened his grip around his son’s thin arm, and Jip wriggled free like a bird from a snare and skittered from the table to a chair in the breakfast nook. He turned his back on his father. There was no reasoning with him when he was so angry, Holly would say. Leave him be.
A bolus of air, cold as the December sea, tumbled across the room and wrapped itself around his legs and lower body. He whispered a curse and searched for the source of the sudden gust, but the windows and doors were shut fast. The boys seemed unaware of the lump of winter sitting in the room. At the dining table, Nick contemplating the space between his two hands against the wood. Jip remained at the window, chanting barely audible nonsense like some mad monk at prayer. Seeking forgiveness and the restoration of equilibrium, Tim carefully approached his son, and bent down so their faces were on the same plane.
“Why is it so cold in here?” he asked.
Jip stopped muttering and leaned forward to tap his finger against the glass. “Him. He’s trying to come inside.”
“Who him?”
“The man, the monster.” He spoke quietly, glaring at his father. “Don’t you know anything?”
He reached out to his son, but stopped his open palm inches from the boy’s hair, afraid that Jip would flinch and withdraw from the touch. A wave of helplessness nearly overcame him. “There are no monsters.”
The boy faced him, a baleful expression in his eyes. “Just look, Daddy. He’s out there now.”
The green ocean filled the window frame in a band across its width, and above it only sky, thick with gray clouds stretching to the far horizon. To see the shoreline, Tim had to come closer and nearly press his nose against the pane, his breath leaving a fog on the glass. To the right, the rocks wandered in the sand, and directly below the window he could make out the bow of a small wooden boat stored beneath the house. To the left, the headlands rose gradually to the lighthouse, and he worked his gaze back from that landmark to the irregular granite. He would have surely missed the figure crouched in the ledges had he not been expecting to find something. Straining to get a better look in the dim light, he bumped his forehead against the glass. He pushed ever so slightly, as if that slight pressure might burst the seam between the inner and outer worlds. The figure on the rocks moved, shifting in its crouch, and it cocked its head toward the house. Tim could not be sure, but it appeared to be a man, a figure that reminded him of the strange thing he had seen that night on the road. White as winter, the hair a clot of whirls, a mangy beard. A wild and lonesome thing.
“What the hell is that?” He peeled himself from the window and went straight to find his boots and coat.
“We didn’t do it,” Nick said from the table.
“You boys stay here. I just want to see what that is.”
On the mudroom floor, a trail of sandy clumps led from the kitchen to the outer door. Tim left his boots untied and coat unbuttoned and hurried round to the back of the house, scrambling to the shore. Where the man had been, there was nothing.