The snow was coming down so hard that my headlights made me snow-blind and I had to pull over. I maneuvered my Wagoneer off to the side of the road and brought it to a stop. Rubbing the fog from my window with my mitten, I peered out onto the deserted, rural country road. It looked like one of those sorts of places where people from Hollywood would come to film a headless horseman scene. The trees were gnarled together over the top of the road in an arch, and the road snaked in a spooky, old-fashioned way. But that wasn’t slowing down the storm. The snow was coming from everywhere, and the wind was so intense that gust after gust shook my Jeep on its axles, same as if a whole line of eighteen-wheelers were passing me at eighty miles an hour. The road, already thick with new-fallen snow, shimmered in my headlights as snow snakes curled into the lights from the dark.
From my purse, my phone started to make a noise that it had never made before—a raa-raa-raa warning sound accompanied by a violent buzz. Like an Amber Alert, but more urgent. Tugging off my mitten with my teeth, I grabbed the phone from my bag. On the lock screen was a red-bordered warning from the National Weather Service, telling all travelers in PASSAIC, BERGEN, MORRIS, HUDSON, UNION, and ESSEX to “cease all travel and await help from the New Jersey National Guard.”
Awaiting help wasn’t my jam, but I also had no clue where I was. The day had started normally enough—at a bakers and candy-makers trade show in Philadelphia. And yes, of course, I knew there was a storm, but I also knew that weathermen in the Northeast sometimes got a little…excited about storms, which then fizzled out with all the glory of a soggy taco collapsing on a plate. So I’d hedged my bets and gotten on the highway after the show, heading home to Providence with a pounding headache from sampling so many kinds of frosting.
But I’d seriously misjudged Winter Storm Lola. A slowly disintegrating wet taco, she was not.
I’d gotten on this road because the highways were almost impassable, but I soon found out that the side roads were even worse, and there I was in Sleepy Hollow. Opening up my map, I unpinched my fingers over the dot where I was. And saw I was smack dab in the middle of the mess. The map was blinking red, too—slightly pixelated on one side because my signal was so weak. My battery was, as usual, a thin strip of red. Plunging my hand into my purse, I pulled out my spare battery and plugged it into my phone, turning it on with a freezing finger.
Dead.
A new set of alerts popped up. I saw the phrase snowfall at nine to ten inches an hour and also some word I’d never seen before, bombogenesis.
I dropped my phone in my lap and looked out at the flakes. The wind made an eerie whistle through the trees, and at the end of the branch-tunnel I saw that the sky along the horizon was a strange pinkish color. It looked like I was heading for a different planet. And here I was, stuck in a 1997 Jeep Wagoneer with a dying cell phone, half a bottle of water, and nothing but… I looked in my purse again. A snack pack of almonds to eat. And a smooshed Tootsie Roll.
I knew that I was, in a word, screwed. But suddenly I remembered that ages ago, I’d picked up one of those chargers that plugs into the lighter. I dug around in the glove box, through a stack of insurance cards—I never knew if I should throw them out or not—and found it. A little bright green thing shaped like an open frog’s mouth that I’d gotten at a gas station.
I plugged it into the lighter and hooked up my phone, praying that the lightning icon would appear in the corner of my screen. I jostled the plug, I blew into the lighter, I revved the engine.
Nothing.
I rubbed my fingers along the wooly edge of my hat on my forehead, the itchy strip where the yarn touched my bare skin. I was already freezing—my Jeep had never been very dependable, even in simple matters like heat. The snow was coming down at nine inches an hour. And the temperature was dropping.
Two words: totally screwed.
But there was no way in hell I was just going to sit there and wait for help. There was no way I was just going to bide my time and hope someone found me before I got buried. There was no way in the world I was about to shelter in place. So I put my Wagoneer in drive and got back on the road, heading north toward the glow of Newark. I cut my lights to give myself half a chance of seeing where I was going, and it helped a lot. The flakes no longer blinded me, and I made some good progress, keeping my eyes on the edge of the road and gripping the wheel at nine and three, like an old lady driving home from bingo. I could do it, I knew I could do it. All I had to do was keep moving, and one way or another, I’d get out of this thing. All I had to do was stay on the road, take it slow, and I’d make it out of this spooky, desolate place. But then I saw maybe it wasn’t so desolate. Out of the corner of my eye, something caught my attention. It was a big stone pillar with a mailbox set in the middle. My heart leapt. It meant I wasn’t all alone out here—that mailbox meant that there had to be a house nearby. And judging from the stonework, a big one. A fancy one. Maybe one that would take me in for the night before I got buried under ten feet of snow and Blizzard Lola turned me into a pudding pop.
While I was distracted by the mailbox, my Jeep hit something, and the whole cab rose and fell. Instinctively, I turned my lights back on, and my view was nothing but a wall of white. But then, through the snow emerged something dark. And craggy. And getting bigger every instant. It was a huge tree trunk coming straight at me. I slammed on my brakes.
And then everything went black.
3
Dave
A knocking woke me. I sat up in bed and listened. At first, all I heard was the roar of the storm and the whistle of the wind through the forest, but then there it was again. Thump-thump…thump. My first instinct was that one of the shutters had come loose and was banging on a window downstairs. But then I heard the doorbell.