Foreboding

It was all too much, really. The woman and the boy dragged their tired legs through the deep snow. Ahead of them, far off in the distance, lay the undulating, snow-covered hills where the log cabin they were heading for had been built, many years previously. The two could picture in their minds a blazing fire and hot chocolate with little marshmallows floating on the surface, and it was this that kept them going.

The boy, a young teenager, often had to support the woman and help her across fallen trees that hampered their progress. The woman was exhausted, and every few minutes she stopped, leaning heavily over her knees trying desperately to catch her breath. The boy stopped with her every time, but his eyes kept traveling, anxiously, across the vast expanse of land they had to cross to reach their goal. Being younger and fitter, he didn’t need as many breaks as the woman did, but he never complained. It was more important for him to bring the woman back alive than to force her to walk faster.

They set off again, the woman hanging onto the boy’s arm. The surface underneath them suddenly turned slippery. They had reached the frozen lake finally. There was still a long way to go, but at least there were no hills, or fallen trees to navigate.

The woman stopped again. Her breathing was labored, and she had trouble drawing a deep enough breath to regain some strength. She was crying from the exhaustion. The boy knelt down and held her. His face was worried and concerned. His hands shook somewhat as he gently patted the woman’s back.

A man walked past, in a sideways manner, like a crab. He waved at the pair, and smiled. The woman stretched out a hand towards the man, imploringly, and the boy gave him a surly look, but the man just smiled again and continued through the deep snow. He wore only one snowshoe, which explained his strange gait, but it didn’t seem to hamper his progress. He flattened the snow with his snowshoe-clad foot and hardly sunk through the snow at all with the other foot. The woman looked at the flattened snow, and then looked up at the boy. He smiled at her. At least there would now be an easier path for them to use.

The woman straightened up, and, sensing renewed vigor, pulled the boy to his feet. They hugged, took each other’s hand, and started walking again. Ahead of them, the man continued his crab walk, humming a monotonous tune that sounded more like a low rumble than anything else. He turned his head, saw them walking behind him, and motioned for them to follow, nodding his head encouragingly.

As the man forged ahead in front of them, the distance between them and him grew. The man was walking unnaturally fast considering the conditions and his unconventional gait, and the boy grew anxious. He tried to walk faster to keep up, and the distance between him and the woman increased unrelentingly. She called his name, but he seemed oblivious. He had his eyes firmly on the man who was now barely visible far ahead of them, and did not stop when the woman needed a break again. She called him feebly, but she had no strength to raise her voice. She cried again, cursing her tired legs and laboring lungs.

Once more she bent over her knees, trying to catch her breath. She wanted to scream, she wanted to beg the boy to wait, but no words could be heard.

A flutter on the wind, a change in the vibrations another human being causes when they disturb the air flow, caused her to look up. The boy was no longer visible from her vantage point, bent double over her knees. She straightened up quickly, her heart beating faster. Where was the boy?

Squinting to look in front of her, she suddenly saw his head pop up, arms flailing, and then disappear again. Her heart fell into her stomach. He had gone through the ice! Finding a strength she didn’t know she had, the woman ran.

The snow was deep, and felt like syrup. She screamed in frustration, and then called the boy’s name. As she got closer, she slowed down, walking fast but carefully towards the boy. He was bobbing up and down again, waving his arms, but he made no sound. The cold water had robbed him of his voice, and his open mouth – so poignant in his horrified face – only mimicked the sound he was trying to make. Suddenly he disappeared again, and only his hand was sticking up over the snow.

The woman, no longer trying to be cautious, threw herself down on the ice and found his hand, seconds before it would have disappeared under the water. She felt the boy grabbing the hand, and she pulled, the adrenalin and fear giving her more strength than she had ever had before. The boy’s head appeared again. He looked straight at the woman, and there was a panic in his eyes that scared her more than anything else.

She noticed that there wasn’t much room for his head, and with a jolt of fear she realized the fissure in the ice was closing up, and fast. The boy’s head disappeared under the water again, despite her holding on to his hand, and the hole kept closing. Now, there was no way the boy could get his head through the hole to draw breath again and she screamed in fear and panic.

With her free hand she started pounding on the ice around the hole. The ice was too hard, and her frail beating could not even chip away at the surface. Keeping a firm hold on the hand that still gripped hers convulsively, she tried bashing a hole in the ice with the heel of one boot, but the ice would not even crack. The boy’s hand started losing its grip on her hand and she wailed in desperation, stomping harder on the ice. Standing up to add weight to the pounding on the ice, she lost her grip on the boy’s hand, and it slipped below the water, the hole finally closing inexorably around it with a sucking sound.

Far away from the location in her dream, the woman woke up sobbing.

Sweat moistening her forehead, and shaking from head to toe, a pain in her chest so intense it brought tears to her eyes, the woman tried taking a deep breath. She was moaning and her heart was beating so rapidly it hurt. Next to her, her husband was snoring loudly, completely oblivious to her plight. This was nothing new, it would more than likely take an earthquake to wake him up at this hour, and she didn’t need him anyway. She gently pushed the blankets aside and slipped out of bed. She had to make sure he was safe. The dream had been so vivid, so real.

Tiptoeing across the hall, shivering slightly in the cold night air that permeated the house, she arrived in her older son’s bedroom. A soft snoring could be heard from the room. As she neared, a quiet meow greeted her. Looking into the room, the lamp-like eyes of their cat Brandy were staring back at her, and the animal meowed quietly again. Letting her breath out – she hadn’t even been aware of holding it – she tiptoed over to stroke the cat gently.

“Good girl. You stay with him, keep him safe for me.”

Looking down upon her teenage son, his mouth open and his wavy hair in disarray around his peaceful face, she felt her throat constrict slightly, and she had to swallow hard to stifle the moan that had almost escaped her mouth again. The dream was still so alive in her mind, and the sense of foreboding was making her eyes water, her chest aching so much she was afraid it would burst open. Wanting desperately to wake him up just to hold him, she instead stretched her hand out, stroking her son’s forehead gently, before retreating out into the hall again.

Feeling compelled to check on her younger son as well, she continued down the hall to the third bedroom.  He was sleeping on top of his covers, his little thumb securely lodged in his mouth. She could tell he was cold as he was curled up in a fetal position, and she carefully tugged the blanket out from under him, covering his little body and tucking it in around the sides of the bed.

There was no point in going back to bed now. She was wide awake, and in less than an hour and a half she would have to be up to help the kids get ready for school. She tiptoed past her husband, still in his bed snoring loudly, to grab her bathrobe, and then snuck downstairs to make a cup of tea.

Sunlight was forcing its way into her kitchen when she arrived back downstairs, penetrating dusty corners and pushing through a curtain of tiny dust particles that had been stirred up as she grabbed a tea towel to wipe the cup, and she sat down at the kitchen table carefully sipping a steaming cup of Earl Grey. She still felt cold inside, shivering slightly even as the warm liquid made its way to her empty stomach, the image of her son’s head disappearing under the ice in her dream still so clear in her mind it was making her shake her head repeatedly, as if to rid herself of an annoying fly. She was wringing her hands, moaning quietly every time she saw the hand disappearing under the ice in her mind’s eye. Would she ever be able to forget this dream?

Little tiny clicks on the kitchen floor told her that Brandy had decided to join her in the kitchen. The cat looked up at the woman as she rounded the kitchen island on her way to her food bowl, but seemed entirely intent on wanting to satisfy her hunger for food before satisfying other needs such as attention from her human owner, and she beat her regular path right over to her food bowl without stopping. The bowl was empty.

Accusing feline eyes locked in to hers. Brandy sat down, looked back at her bowl, and then up again at the woman. It was obvious that the cat was asking for food, but the woman, who was still feeling faint from her nightmare, seemed oblivious.  

A soft meow mingled with a purr escaped the tiny mouth as the cat stood back up again and sauntered over. Wrapping herself around the human legs, she began a relentless meowing until the woman finally surrendered and got up off her chair to feed the cat.

That’s when she saw it. Next to the canister where they kept the cat’s food, there was a pile of unopened - and unchecked - mail from the day before. On the top underneath a blue envelope apparently sent out by Publisher’s Clearing House (she was probably about to win 5,000 a week for life), was something white. She realized that she was looking at a picture of snow, and with trepidation and horrific foreboding, she pulled the catalog out from under the envelope.

It was a magazine on vacation cottages in northern Maine - her husband had been canvassing for this vacation for months and had obviously ordered the catalog - and on the front was a picture of a rustic looking cabin with snow drifts lapping the windows. In the background, a frozen lake could be seen. The woman caught her breath, and felt her knees buckle.

Next to the cabin, locking eyes with her from the picture, stood the man from her dream smiling benignly, holding his hand out towards the cottage. In his other hand, he was holding one snowshoe. Mercifully, darkness enveloped her and she escaped. For a while. It was all too much, really.