WE TURN AROUND and follow the path that’s been cleared and trampled down by the Icelings, which thankfully leads us right to them—or the smallish speck of them, at least, because they’re so far ahead of us. From what we can see, they’re running up to this stacked-high pile of what looks like driftwood. But then the closer we get, the more shape and structure the wood pile takes on, and now I see that it’s probably not a pile at all but more like a shed. Except the shed looks like it’s . . . growing up and out of the ground. There’s no snow on it. The snow won’t even touch it. The wood looks old, but not at all rotted from the snow and wind like you’d expect. There are no windows. Just two broad gray boards for a roof and four gray walls made of smaller boards and then a small and asymmetrical opening that looks like it could pass for a doorway.
To say this structure gives me the creeps is a real and serious understatement. It’s straight out of a horror movie. All it lacks is a creaking door and a pile of fresh bones out back, and I actually can’t rule out that second detail just yet. I’m shivering, and it’s not from the cold.
I’m expecting this to be the Icelings’ first stop, but they breeze right past it—and I am in no way sad about this. I am in no way excited about coming back this way and seeing this place again either. Some of us linger here and check out the shed, but me, I’m going to keep going.
“What the hell was that?” says Stan, who’s a couple of footsteps behind me now, the shed having tripped him up a bit.
“Creepy as heck,” says Emily, and I just nod, because for some reason even I don’t know, I need to get that thing out of my mind. Pretend it doesn’t exist, not give language to it at all.
Finally, we’re past it; it’s nothing but a sinister dot behind my shoulder. We’re in the trees now, those tall, tropical-looking trees with the low-hanging branches forming canopies weighed down with ice and snow. Up close, they’re not exactly like palm trees, but I’ve also never seen real palm trees in person before, so the truth is I don’t know. They’ve got these long, broad, flat leaves, and they bend so low with the weight of the snow. I’m looking up at those leaves and the patterns they make in the sky, and my steps slow down, and all of a sudden I’m no longer moving. I can’t stop staring at the leaves, because whereas at first glance it seemed that the snow was weighing them down, I see that it’s not that at all. They’re sloping and drooping at this willful kind of angle, like if you brushed the snow off, they wouldn’t spring up. In other words, it looks like these trees are bending their branches and leaves low on purpose, for the purpose of holding the snow. It looks like they’re built for this strange job, all the way out here. Stan turns around for me and follows my gaze upward. I know he sees what I see, but he doesn’t say a word, just nudges my shoulder and guides me back on the path.
We keep walking under this weird canopy for at least half an hour, just following the trampled-down snow to see where our Icelings are going.
“Look!” someone shouts, the need to believe choking his voice. “A squirrel!”
We look, see nothing.
“Oh,” says the same voice, this time tinged with sadness. “It was just a gust of wind.”
My heart sinks, and I realize how desperate I am—how desperate we all are—to see something familiar. Because not only are there no squirrels around here, there isn’t anything. No birds, no animals, no lizards, no frigid-water fish. We can hear the water and the wind and the trees as they sigh and bend low under the weight of the snow, but no living things with eyes or minds or hearts. No life, aside from ours, have we yet seen here.
We follow the trampled path until we’re finally out from under the trees, and it turns out we were just tracing the coastline, but vaguely inland, and we’re approaching another dock. Two docks, actually, both of them newer-looking than the one we used to get on the island—either that or nobody bothered to make them look as weathered as the first one.
STRUCTURES THAT LOOK like storage sheds sit on top of each of these twin docks, and there are these tires that hang off their sides like bumpers. Affixed to one of the docks is an old-fashioned gas pump, painted a bright cherry red, with like what look like functional gauges.
“Huh,” says Stan. “This one looks like it might be a refueling dock. And look at all these slips on the other one. For smaller boats to, uh, park.”
“How do you know all that?” I ask.