Shadow ignored the warnings and scrambled down the bank. It was slippery-the snow had already melted, turning the earth to mud under his feet, and the brown grass barely offered traction. He skidded and slid, down to the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there he stepped down onto the ice.
The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed though the water as it covered his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, as if he were watching himself on a movie screen-a movie in which he was the hero: a detective, perhaps.
He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as water could be without freezing. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid. Several times he fell.
He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the ice, and he passed round holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had not frozen again, each hole filled with black water.
The klunker seemed farther away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake were vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could.
This is suicide, whispered a sane voice in the back of his mind. Can't you just let it go?
"No," he said, aloud. "I have to know." And he kept right on walking.
He arrived at the klunker, and even before he reached it he knew that he had been right. There was a miasma that hung about the car, something that was at the same time a faint, foul smell and was also a bad taste in the back of his throat. He walked around the car, looking inside. The seats were stained, and ripped. The car was obviously empty. He tried the doors. They were locked. He tried the trunk. Also locked.
He wished that he had brought a crowbar.
He made a fist of his hand, inside his glove. He counted to three, then smashed his hand, hard, against the driver's-side window glass.
His hand hurt, but the side window was undamaged.
He thought about running at it-he could kick the window in, he was certain, if he didn't skid and fall on the wet ice. But the last thing he wanted to do was to disturb the klunker enough that the ice beneath it would crack.
He looked at the car. Then he reached for the radio antenna-it was the kind that was supposed to go up and down, but that had stuck in the up position a decade ago-and, with a little waggling, he broke it off at the base. He took the thin end of the antenna-it had once had a metal button on the end, but that was lost in time, and, with strong fingers, he bent it back up into a makeshift hook.
Then he rammed the extended metal antenna down between the rubber and the glass of the front window, deep into the mechanism of the door. He fished in the mechanism, twisting, moving, pushing the metal antenna about until it caught: and then he pulled up.
He felt the improvised hook sliding from the lock, uselessly.
He sighed. Fished again, slower, more carefully. He could imagine the ice grumbling beneath his feet as he shifted his weight. And slow…and…
He had it. He pulled up on the aerial and the front-door locking mechanism popped up. Shadow reached down one gloved hand and took the door handle, pressed the button, and pulled. The door did not open.
It's stuck, he thought, iced up. That's all.
He tugged, sliding on the ice, and suddenly the door of the klunker flew open, ice scattering everywhere.
The miasma was worse inside the car, a stench of rot and illness. Shadow felt sick.
He reached under the dashboard, found the black plastic handle that opened the trunk, and tugged on it, hard.
There was a thunk from behind him as the trunk door released.
Shadow walked out onto the ice, slipped and splashed around the car, holding on to the side of it as he went.
It's in the trunk, he thought.
The trunk was open an inch. He reached down and opened it the rest of the way, pulling it up.
The smell was bad, but it could have been much worse: the bottom of the trunk was filled with an inch or so of half-melted ice. There was a girl in the trunk. She wore a scarlet snowsuit, now stained, and her mousy hair was long and her mouth was closed, so Shadow could not see the blue rubber-band braces, but he knew that they were there. The cold had preserved her, kept her as fresh as if she had been in a freezer…
Her eyes were wide open, and she looked as if she had been crying when she died, and the tears that had frozen on her cheeks had still not melted.
"You were here all the time," said Shadow to Alison Mc-Govern's corpse. "Every single person who drove over that bridge saw you. Everyone who drove through the town saw you. The ice fishermen walked past you every day. And nobody knew."
And then he realized how foolish that was.
Somebody knew. Somebody had put her here.
He reached into the trunk-to see if he could pull her out. He put his weight on the car, as he leaned in. Maybe that was what did it.
The ice beneath the front wheels went at that moment, perhaps from his movements, perhaps not. The front of the car lurched downward several feet into the dark water of the lake. Water began to pour into the car through the open driver's door. Lake water splashed about Shadow's ankles, although the ice he stood on was still solid. He looked around urgently, wondering how to get away-and then it was too late, and the ice tipped precipitously, throwing him against the car and the dead girl in the trunk; and the back of the car went down, and Shadow went down with it, into the cold waters of the lake. It was ten past nine in the morning on March the twenty-third.
He took a deep breath before he went under, closing his eyes, but the cold of the lake water hit him like a wall, knocking the breath from his body.
He tumbled downward, into the murky ice water, pulled down by the car.
He was under the lake, down in the darkness and the cold, weighed down by his clothes and his gloves and his boots, trapped and swathed in his coat, which seemed to have become heavier and bulkier than he could have imagined.
He was falling, still. He tried to push away from the car, but it was pulling him with it, and then there was a bang that he could hear with his whole body, not his ears, and his left foot was wrenched at the ankle, the foot twisted and trapped beneath the car as it settled on the lake bottom, and panic took him.
He opened his eyes.
He knew it was dark down there: rationally, he knew it was too dark to see anything, but still, he could see; he could see everything. He could see Alison McGovern's white face staring at him from the open trunk. He could see other cars as well-the klunkers of bygone years, rotten hulk shapes in the darkness, half buried in the lake mud. And what else would they have dragged out on to the lake, Shadow wondered, before there were cars?
Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in the trunk. There were scores of them…each had sat out on the ice, in front of the eyes of the world, all through the cold winter. Each had tumbled into the cold waters of the lake, when the winter was done.
This was where they rested: Lemmi Hautala and Jessie Lovat and Sandy Olsen and Jo Ming and Sarah Lindquist and all the rest of them. Down where it was silent and cold…
He pulled at his foot. It was stuck fast, and the pressure in his lungs was becoming unbearable. There was a sharp, terrible hurt in his ears. He exhaled slowly, and the air bubbled around his face.
Soon, he thought, soon I'll have to breathe. Or I'll choke.
He reached down, put both hands around the bumper of the klunker, and pushed, with everything he had, leaning into it. Nothing happened.
It's only the shell of a car, he told himself. They took out the engine. That's the heaviest part of the car. You can do it. Just keep pushing.
He pushed.
Agonizingly slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the car slipped forward in the mud, and Shadow pulled his foot from the mud beneath the car, and kicked, and tried to push himself out into the cold lake water. He didn't move. The coat, he told himself. It's the coat. It's stuck, or caught on something. He pulled his arms from his coat, fumbled with numb fingers at the frozen zipper. Then he pulled both hands on each side of the zipper, felt the coat give and rend. Hastily, he freed himself from its embrace, and pushed upward, away from the car.
There was a rushing sensation but no sense of up, no sense of down, and he was choking and the pain in his chest and in his head was too much to bear, so that he was certain that he was going to have to inhale, to breathe in the cold water, to die. And then his head hit something solid.
Ice. He was pushing against the ice on the top of the lake. He hammered at it with his fists, but there was no strength left in his arms, nothing to hold on to, nothing to push against. The world had dissolved into the chill blackness beneath the lake. There was nothing left but cold.
This is ridiculous, he thought. And he thought, remembering some old Tony Curtis film he'd seen as a kid, I should roll onto my back and push the ice upward and press my face to it, and find some air, I could breathe again, there's air there somewhere, but he was just floating and freezing and he could no longer move a muscle, not if his life depended on it, which it did.
The cold became bearable. Became warm. And he thought, I'm dying. There was anger there this time, a deep fury, and he took the pain and the anger and reached with it, flailed, forced muscles to move that were ready never to move again.
He pushed up with his hand, and felt it scrape the edge of the ice and move up into the air. He flailed for a grip, and felt another hand take his own, and pull.
His head banged against the ice, his face scraped the underneath of the ice, and then his head was up in the air, and he could see that he was coming up through a hole in the ice, and for a moment all he could do was breathe, and let the black lake water run from his nose and his mouth, and blink his eyes, which could see nothing more than a blinding daylight, and shapes, and someone was pulling him, now, forcing him out of the water, saying something about how he'd freeze to death, so come on, man, pull, and Shadow wriggled and shook like a bull seal coming ashore, shaking and coughing and shuddering.
He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, syrupy-slow.
"Just leave me," he tried to say. "I'll be fine." His words were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt.
He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just rest, and then he would get up and move on. Obviously he could not just lie there forever.
There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just needed a little rest-maybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much?-and he would be just fine. If they just left him alone.
He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head.