The June Editor's Pick writer is Neal Privett

Please feel free to email Neal at: nealprivett@gmail.com

THE SNOW CHILD
by Neal Privett

I first saw the kid back in the winter of 1953.

Every year since, when the snow begins to fall, I expect him to show…standing at dusk, on the edge of the woods, staring back at the house…looking at me. He doesn’t come every year, but he comes enough, appearing out of the snowy trees, almost beckoning with a pained expression on his little face.

It’s almost as if he wants to tell me something.

I was ten years old that winter, and had gone outside for a walk around twilight just as another front was coming through. The snow began to fall…the dark sky spitting out huge silent flakes that blanketed all of the fields and roads, giving everything a haunting, but inviting, glare. The whole world as far as I knew was an honest, soul-clearing white.

I bundled up and trudged through the frozen cornfields to the backwoods. I always loved walking through the woods during a good snow. Still do. It’s a tranquility that people in warmer climes can never experience. Snow is pure and silent. To be in the woods…while the snow is falling…is dream-like. It’s almost as if you are walking on the edge of another dimension…as if the veil is partially lifted when the snow settles into the night and worlds almost meet.

That evening, I nearly stepped into that other world. I saw the dog before I heard it, moving through the trees like a ghost. Its paws made no sound as it limped sideways across the snow and I knew right away that the dog was rabid.

I froze there, melting into the trees. I tried not to breathe. The creature took a few more sideways steps before it noticed me, then it came after me, growling like a hellhound. The diseased saliva spewed from its teeth and it shook its head uncontrollably as it bounded across the woods. The evening was transformed in an instant from a moment of innocent tranquility to an out-of-control vision of stark terror.

I tried to run away, but I tripped on a tree root that was hidden by the snow. Before I could get back up again, the beast attacked my leg, ripping my trousers and sinking its teeth into my flesh. My frightened screams echoed through the white trees and the searing pain in my leg felt overwhelming as my blood spilled on the cold white snow.

Even through all my fear, I felt a presence…something otherworldly that watched from a place deep in the woods.

I screamed again and managed to kick the dog in the teeth. I shook off the animal’s grip and escaped to the closest road. I flagged down old Mr. Guthrie, who was coming through on his Massey-Ferguson on the way to his barn.

Fearfully I looked behind me, but the dog must have been too sick to give pursuit. Still, I knew the damage had already been done. The old man took me to the doctor’s house and called my father. The men went hunting for the sick dog and found it in the final stages of death. They put it out of its misery.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t put me out of mine.

The doctor gave me the necessary treatment for the Hydrophobia and I hung someplace between life and death for many days while my folks hovered over my bed. I can only imagine the hell my folks went through that winter. My father had lost his brother in the First World War and he told me that seeing me there, lying on that bed, drenched in fevered sweat, not knowing if I would make it…was a million times worse.

In my delirium over the next few days, my mother told me that I spoke endlessly about a boy I saw in the woods that evening. I kept calling out to him…telling him to run from the impending danger of the mad dog…asking him who he was, and what he was doing out there.

When I regained consciousness, my father asked if it was a boy from one of the neighboring farms. It wasn’t. I had never seen the kid before. He was a hazy specter from my fevered dreams, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had been there in the woods with me. Everybody chalked it up to the high fever.

But it wasn’t the fever. This was just the beginning of a lifetime of strange sightings.

*****

My boots crunch in the powdery snow as I walk. I lean on a tree for support as I take a rest. Somehow over the years, I got old. And now I am dying…soon to exit this dimension, stage left, and run as fast as I can into the starry night beyond. Where there is no pain or loss.

He is out there. I feel his presence more intensely today than I have since that mad dog attacked me and I almost died. And now I know why. I was told today by a doctor with five diplomas on his office wall that my insides are all eaten up by cancer. In less than six months I will join my departed wife and son in that “undiscovered country,” as Shakespeare referred to it. Too many cigarettes, I suppose. 

I finally have figured out why the boy visits me.

I am no longer afraid, and I will no longer gaze at him from a distance. He wants something and I think I know what it is. So today, as the day grows short and the evening snow begins to fall, I put on my coat, toboggan, scarf, and boots and trudge through the white fields to the far woods, where I know he will be waiting.

It takes me a long time, but I make it to the tree line. I glance back over the fields my family has farmed for generations, and at the house my parents left me. The house I grew up in. It is a world I know well and love. The falling snow looks so peaceful over it all, falling gently on the fields…on the rooftop of the old house, on the old driveway.

I look all around for the boy, but I don’t see him yet. I look everywhere and even call out to him. My old man’s voice echoes over the silent woods and vanishes. The snow feels so good on my face and hands, despite the cold. I wait. He has waited for me all these years. It’s the least I can do.

Then, suddenly, I feel something beckon to me, and I walk a few more feet to a gigantic old beech tree…the one that everybody and their dogs used to carve their names into throughout the years. I find my name on there. W P. Douglass, Feb. 1955.

I read many names on there. All the boys that hiked through these woods hunting squirrel or bobwhite over the decades that have flowed away like water into eternity. I stand there, at the foot of that tree, thinking, smiling…when suddenly I glance down and see the earth that has been disturbed. Whether by an animal or something else, I don’t know.

I stand there as the snow falls faster, harder…almost blurring my vision. I fall to my knees and start to scrape the snow and leaves and frozen dirt away. I have to find out what lies there. But I stop digging for a moment. I glance around me, behind me and listen for a sound. There’s nothing. The woods are completely white and silent, like somebody turned the sound down on a television set. I can’t even hear my heart beating anymore.

A cold wind whistles through the treetops. Large flakes of snow blow sideways into my eyes and sting my face. And somewhere out there is the boy. He’s watching me. Waiting.

Ever waiting.

I start digging again, pulling large handfuls of earth away from the spot with my gloved hands. Something is there. Something I need to see. I’m shivering so hard now that my insides hurt. I am apprehensive about whatever waits for me there, but I can’t stop myself.

Finally I see something and I am wailing and moaning like a lost soul as the dark falls on the woods. Then I see what it is and I fall back in the snow, with ice cold fingers of fear scratching my spine.
I rub the snow from my burning eyes and try to fight off the waves of pain and nausea that bubble up from deep inside.

A body is partially buried under the tree…part of it is now uncovered. A face stares blankly upward at the snowy sky. I study its contours, its lifeless expression…the pale pallor of its sickly skin, which has not deteriorated despite being buried there in the elements and dirt for however long.

It takes me but a moment to realize that the face peering out of the cold earth is mine.

At first I scream and try to run, but the pain in my chest and stomach….the cancer that is eating me alive….bites into me and I collapse in the snow. The cool of the ground feels so nice on my fevered face and I can’t help but close my eyes.

And then it hits me.

That winter when I was ten years old. I should have died. The doctor said as much. I was attacked by a mad dog. I had a raging fever that would have killed any other boy. But somehow I survived. And maybe…maybe they were waiting for me on the other side of the deep snowy woods. And maybe they were disappointed that I didn’t come.

Maybe they’ve been waiting all this time.

For me.

One last burst of panic seizes me and I rise from the ground and I run as fast as my old legs will take me, stumbling through the darkening trees. My heart pounds as if it is trying to rip out of my chest and my breath comes in unmerciful spasms. Steam fills the dusky air as I cough and wheeze my way home.

Then I see the silhouette of the boy standing beside an ancient oak and I run the other way, falling once in the snow, then pulling myself up and trudging on. But the woods never seem to end.

Then I realize, to my horror, that I am no longer running from the boy. I am chasing after him. I see him ahead, sliding over the snow, as if he is weightless, and I am powerless to stop and go back. I follow the boy deeper into the woods because I can’t possibly do anything else.

The sun is vanishing into a lake of ice and the night crowds in. The snow fills my nostrils and mouth. My head is spinning and I collapse to the ground with the white flakes swirling all around me.

When I open my eyes again, I am standing…and the little boy is beside me, staring up at me with a million dollar smile. “I wondered when you were ever gonna show up,” he says to me with a voice that is not cold or aged, but young and full of snow cream and sleds and late night corn popped on hearths.

I smile back and he takes my hand, saying, “You ready, Mr. Douglass?”

“Call me William,” I say.

“William’s my name, too,” the boy laughs.

I breathe in the cool air. I am no longer cold, or scared. And I don’t hurt anymore. In fact, I feel fantastic. “It sure is a beautiful snowy evening...isn’t it?”

“The first of many,” the boy says. He leads me by the hand into the deep snowy woods, as the sun sets one last time on the fields and trees.

Neal Privett lives on a farm somewhere in Tennessee, where he writes furiously, drinks lots of coffee, listens to music, takes walks in the snowy woods, and avoids ghosts at all costs. He has worked as an archaeologist, actor, disability claims rep, and teacher, with a couple of brief stints in local bands. He is the author of several short stories of a fantastic nature, a ton of weird Beat poetry, and three novels that he is currently attempting to publish. Being included in The Horror Zine is a highlight.