Word Count: 3000

Genre: Horror

Sub-Genre:

Story Synopsis: Winter's blanket hides all, but when spring brings the melt, what is in the field could be a problem for Bud Earl.

It was melting.

What in January was flawless white sheets of snow draped across fields, massive pale throw pillows hiding piles of brush and gathered under eaves, in March was considerably lessened. It looked like forever in January, but a good deal more tenuous as the calendar ticked over to spring. Bare patches of brown littered the areas that received the most sun.

At the kitchen counter, Bud Earl Bobson sipped his Irish coffee and grimaced. Lots of spring chores. Lots. Some so much worse than others.

#

Winter took its toll. Every year as it clawed its way back north, it left in its wake a bounty of destruction. Downed tree limbs to drag off and burn. Garage siding knocked off by a February blizzard to fix. Gouged sections of the washed-out driveway to fill in. Culverts to unclog before the spring melt really kicked in. Seedlings to start.

Granted, with much of this, it was still too early. The snow pack needed to recede some before he could really start knocking things off the list, but still, he could start. Instead, his schedule was remarkably consistent, day to day:

• Monday: Stare at the northeast corner of the field.

• Tuesday: Stare at the northeast corner of the field.

• Wednesday: Stare at the northeast corner of the field.

• Thursday: Stare at the northeast corner of the field.

• Friday: Stare at the northeast corner of the field.

#

The field melted from the center out to the stone walls and the tree line marking the start of the woods. Each day, Bud Earl watched the snow pack shrink and knew he couldn’t put it off much longer. Even the deep piles of snow lurking in the dark shadows of the field’s corners were visibly starting to shrink.

On Saturday, Bud Earl laced up his good pair of winter boots and set out across the field for its northeast corner.

Mid-field, the snow was gone, but not forgotten. Pools of water gathered in any low dip. Even ground that appeared dryer – and safer – bubbled up water around the soles of his boots.

While his eyes were mostly on the northeast corner – a compass point he kept coming back to – he was aware of spring, well, springing forth all around him.

Birds kept up a steady song in trees, nests half-built. Branches bare all winter sported the green fuzz of buds bursting forth all along their outstretched grasp. A robin hopped along, ear turned to the ground as it listened for the crawling slide of its prey.

Bud Earl loved the spring, most years, but this year he had been dreading it. The rebirth happening around him only reinforced the simple truth he walked towards: not everything came back.

He reached the shadows and the beginnings of the remaining snow. It gave way as he walked towards the corner pile, more slush than solid. Bud Earl slipped and slid a bit, but kept his eyes on the pile.

He reached it, stopped, looked down. It was cooler up here in the shadows, the deeper forest edge blocking out most of the day’s sun. It was a solid white still… but not quite. There, mid-pile, twigs poking out of the snow.

Bud Earl crouched for a closer look. It was just the tips of branches, one pointing straight at him. But… not branches? Bud Earl fumbled his reading glasses from a shirt pocket and slid them onto his face. He bent closer, squinting. No, not branches.

Fingers.

“Bud Earl!”

The voice was some distance away. It carried over the meadow, not quite echoing. Bud Earl shot to his feet, clawing at the glasses. They dropped into the snow at his feet as he focused on a large figure picking its way carefully across the wet meadow. The figure waved.

“Morning! It’s Sheriff Mitchell,” the figure called, quickening its pace. He was halfway across the meadow.

Bud Earl meekly returned the wave, then looked back at the pile. He gasped and dropped to his knees, scooping snow atop the exposed finger with one hand as he clawed in the heavy snow for his glasses with the other. As he frantically moved snow around with his bare hands, the heavy sound of footfalls grew louder.

“Whatcha doing there, Bud Earl?” the sheriff asked as he reached the edge of the snow and waded in. Bud Earl shot to his feet, a wet pair of glasses in his red hands.

“Dropped my fool glasses. I swear, I’m not sure what is getting worse as I age: my blindness or my clumsiness,” Bud Earl said. He wiped at the glasses with a shirttail, his eyes struggling not to flicker to the pile of snow beside him. “Have you heard anything, Sheriff?”

The sheriff frowned and shook his head slightly. “I was about to ask you a similar question.”

“Nothing here.”

Sheriff Mitchell sighed and started pacing a bit, a big man given to slight nervous energy. One end of his paced path took him right up to the rising mound of snow. Each footstep near it dislodged a small bit of snow that fell off the pile and into the footprint.

“That just… eats at me, you know? Did I tell you I went to school with your wife?” He stopped right in front of Bud Earl, smiling.

Bud Earl met the sheriff’s eyes, the corners of his mouth rising slightly.

“I think you mentioned it.”

“Yeah, well not to school school, really. I was obviously quite a few years older than her. But I was a school monitor when she was in the lower grades,” the sheriff said. Pace, pace. More snow fell in clumps from the pile. Suddenly the pile wasn’t quite so uniformly white. A single imperfection, black and the size of a quarter, marred its side a foot from where the fingers were buried.

“Hell of a girl, even then. Wouldn’t back down from nothing, for nothing, if she thought she was wronged. I remember one day these three boys…”

The sheriff droned on, a story he had told before, maybe a week or two after Bud Earl had called in the disappearances. His eyes tracked the sheriff, back and forth, back and forth. As the sheriff reached the pile and began his turn, Bud Earl’s eyes dropped briefly to the black spot on the pile. It was larger than a quarter now, and Bud Earl could see it wasn’t a solid black, like the end of a stump or the bottom of a pine cone, but more textured. Tufted. Like hair.

It was quiet, a low bird song from across the meadow the only sound. Bud Earl focused in on the sheriff, who stood watching him, waiting. The story must have been considerably shorter this time.

“Uh, I’m sorry, sheriff. This day… has me all distracted,” he said. The sheriff looked around him, nodding.

“I know. Gorgeous, right? Can’t wait for fishing!” He turned back to Bud Earl. “I said, do you remember anything else about that night they left. Just before Christmas, wasn’t it?”

Bud Earl nodded. “Yeah, the 12th? Just before that big snowstorm we got.”

“Yeah, that was a bad one all right. Two feet… probably closer to three up here on the hill!”

“Pretty close. I woke up, came down to fix breakfast – they all loved breakfast, their most favorite meal of the day. We’d have it for dinner sometimes. Uh, so I set the table, sat down to eat, and they never came down. I went up…” Bud Earl paused, cleared his throat, collecting himself. “I went up and they were gone. Ellen, Timmy, little Janice. Them, their suitcases. Just gone.”

“And you didn’t hear a car or anything like that during the night?”

“No, nothing.”

“And you weren’t drinking, fighting?”

The slightest pause. “No. Just the email from her phone saying she needed a change and was leaving, taking the kids.”

The sheriff nodded and resumed his pacing. “Yeah, I remember you forwarding that to us. It’s just odd, you know? Vanished into thin air like that. I mean, her parents are dead, no siblings, so nothing really was holding her here. Except you, of course. And then the no taxi, no Uber, no friend we could find that would have picked them up.

“The staties say her phone just vanished too, which I guess is pretty easy to do if you don’t use it and dismantle it, take out the battery, some card.” He chuckled. “I’ll have to take their word for it. I’m pretty old school. Still miss my beeper. Lordie, that used to get my heart racing when it went off.”

The sheriff stopped and looked out over the meadow. Bud Earl’s eyes went to the pile, the black matted knot sticking out of it. Definitely hair.

“All right, then. Just stopped by to ask if it was ok if we had the state lab boys up here in a week or so when the snow completely melts and the ground dries out a bit? Because of the storm, we didn’t really get a chance to look around up here.” He turned to Bud Earl with a smile. “I doubt we’ll find anything, but dot the I’s and cross the T’s, that sort of thing. That be all right?”

Bud Earl smiled, nodding. “Of course, sheriff. Anything that will help, no matter how remote.”

“Excellent,” the sheriff said, clapping him on the shoulder. “It’s sometimes the little things that figure these situations out, you know?”

Bud Earl didn’t look at the black tuft of hair coming out of the snowbank. “I look forward to it, sheriff.”

He walked the sheriff back down the meadow to his patrol car, his mind lost to chores.

#

He didn’t even know what had set him off. Not really. Bud Earl had been drinking, heavily – Daddy’s little hobby, she had called it – but he did that every night and didn’t murder his wife and kids. Maybe it was a word, a phase of the moon, a waypoint where things converged, an “undigested bit of beef,” as Scrooge would say. Upon reflection, there was no good answer.

He went from shouting at Ellen to strangling her, just like that. Rolling on the floor, his hands around her neck as her face turned red, then blue. Kitchen chairs toppling, cabinets rattling as they were kicked, the thrump of her heels on linoleum and his harsh breathing and her not really making much noise at all, outside of the heels. Thrump, thrump, thrumpthrump.

And then she was still, and he was staring at the children as they stood at the entrance to the kitchen, sleep long gone from their horrified eyes. And that should have ended it, should have drained the hate from him and replaced it with sorrow, shame, stillness. But it didn’t.

In the days and weeks and months to come he would tell himself that he had meant to grab a wooden spoon from the utensil jar on the counter, and not the heavy metal meat tenderizer. Would tell himself that he meant to just put a scare into the kids as he chased them screaming from room to room, first disposing of Janice with one well-placed swing of the tenderizer as it crushed her skull, before cornering Timmy between the worn couch and broken recliner. Would almost believe that it must have been insanity that caused him to swing again and again, his screams punctuating each strike, a rhythmic shrieking tone like something out of Psycho as the mallet tenderized, tenderized, tenderized…

He wrenched himself from the nightly dream and landed on the floor, the sweat-soaked sheets clawing at him like guilt. Bud Earl dragged himself to the nightstand, through the pulsing screams, and came down hard on the top of the alarm clock.

Silence. The sun was just setting, shadows deepening in the bedroom. Bud Earl sobbed in the still house until there was nothing left but dull ache and a humming despair that whispered of the night to come. And then he washed his face, dressed, and headed out to drink for the first time in three months.

#

The snow had been falling pretty steadily by the time Bud Earl returned from the bar three hours later. He pulled into the driveway and parked well – he wasn’t hit the garage drunk. He still had a trip to an open, remote quarry in his future, but he was certainly feeling less pain than he had felt for months. Bud Earl didn’t pause to think about it, just grabbed the three large tarps and the bundle of rope (picked up a couple of months ago an hour away in Burlington). As he headed out the garage door, he popped a flashlight into his pocket, just in case.

Bud Earl made his way carefully up the meadow, slipping often in the new snow. It was déjà vu time, much like the trips he had taken in December. Except it had been snowing much harder then. And he had been dragging bodies up the meadow, not down it. So it should be easier, gravity wise. Half-full.

There was a mostly-full moon up there somewhere behind the clouds, so it wasn’t completely black in the meadow. The clouds glowed slightly, along with the snow cover, so he could see fairly well once his eyes adjusted.

This changed quickly when he reached the shaded corner of the meadow. Here, he could barely see the snow, the pile that was his target. Bud Earl cursed as his toe caught a stick, and he nearly lost his footing. He dropped the tarps and rope, and fumbled the flashlight from his pocket. He had really hoped to avoid using it. There were no neighbors to speak of, just the road with its occasional vehicle going by some 300 yards away. Moving bodies though… discretion and all. Still, he had to see. Hands cupped around the end of the flashlight to limit its glare, he turned it on.

Bud Earl shone the light on the snow pile, and it took him a few seconds to realize what he was seeing. There was no pile. He walked up to it, kicked at it with his foot. Loose snow, sticks, rotting leaves. Kick. Kick. Bud Earl dropped and swept his arms through what was left of the pile, leaves and sticks flying. No Ellen. No Janice. No Timmy.

Bud Earl sat there in the snow, his buzz quickly fading. Did he put them in another corner of the meadow? Granted he was pretty trashed that night, and the snow had been coming down hard, but could he really have forgotten where he had dragged them, his temporary holding solution?

Then he remembered the fingers and hair from the other day. Nah, this was the place all right.

The next thought hit him so hard he had trouble drawing a breath: the sheriff and his lab boys had found them while he had been at the bar. A trial, the press, the glares, life in prison… All flashed before him before he realized that, no, he would have been arrested the second he pulled into the driveway.

So what, then? The flashlight was partially buried in the snow where he had dropped it, a slight orange glow under the snow. He picked it up and started walking around the area, shining the light across the meadow, into the forest, up the trees, traffic on the road be damned.

At the ground…

He had been walking in darkness, so he hadn’t seen it when he had headed up the meadow: a trail, wide, the snow torn up and scattered with rotting leaves, his own footprints beside it. The trail headed down the meadow. Bud Earl stated to follow it, the tarps and rope forgotten. He hadn’t gotten more than a few feet when he realized where it was heading.

Directly to the house.

He followed the trail down the meadow. At times it was narrower, solid footprints that showed a slow, measured pace. Big footprints, little footprints. At other times, it looked like something was being dragged. Or was crawling.

Bud Earl’s hand brushed his pockets, felt the mound of his keys. His mind was already behind the wheel, just driving anywhere, fast. Anywhere but here. But still, he followed the trail, like he had no choice, like it was a dream.

The trail reached the house, where Bud Earl found the back door open.

It crossed the dining room, bits of stick and rotting leaves, melting clumps of dirty snow marking the way.

Up the stairs to the bed room, the stairs creaking as Bud Earl took them, twigs snapping, snow pancaking under his tread.

His flashlight swept over the kids’ rooms. From the top of the stairs, through the open doors, he could see both their beds, the covers mounded up and pulled to the headboards.

There was not a sound, save for his breathing.

He moved down the hallway, to his own bedroom, THEIR bedroom. Like the children’s rooms, the covers on his bed had been pulled almost all the way up to the headboard, a mound underneath. As the flashlight played up the length of the bed, it found a tuft of black hair where the bedspread fell a bit short. A tuft of hair, behind which one iced-over eye glared just above where the covers ended. A thin layer of ice slid off the exposed eye and dropped out of sight under the covers.

#

Bud Earl sits at the dining room table as the night marches towards dawn. He listens for the first stirrings from up the stairs, the first sign that his family is finally coming down for breakfast.

Their most favorite meal of the day.

R. Wayne Gray is a Vermont-based writer who has published in a wide range of genres and formats. His short fiction has recently appeared in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Trembling With Fear, and the anthologies 666 Dark Drabbles and Bloody Good Horror.

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