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As I drove Jimmy back to the foothills, only a quarter mile from the house I had been raised in, I thought about my father and his leading me up that path, speaking of leaves and of the coming Winter. I so vividly remember him standing before a low shrub and brushing his hands across its fronds, saying how very much we were like the leaves.

Jimmy chatted next to me, telling me he was an artist and only turned tricks to pay for his tuition. I'm sure I answered him respectfully and pleasantly, but my mind was twenty years in the past, thinking of the thing we called the SnowMan.

They never found the kids in those days. They just disappeared, leaving empty chairs in the school, one child every year for as far back as any of us could remember. Even the adults grew anxious as fall waned. People stayed in. Everyone was very quiet in the days before the first snowfall.

I didn't drive Jimmy back to my house. Instead, I drove up the pass half a mile and parked on a dirt road. There are no lights that high up the hill. Trees towered over the path. I found it all very comforting. After all, I had grown up in this forest; I knew every inch of the county and the National Park. The cold had grown serious so I left the engine running for the heater while he went down on me.

I suppose I enjoyed the sex, but it was more of a diversionary tactic. I suspected that if I played coy, Jimmy might get suspicious. Once the business transaction had been completed, he seemed to relax a little, thinking he was going to walk away with a good night's pay if he just humored me for a couple of hours.

None of them walked away. But you know that.

After the sex, I convinced Jimmy to dare the weather and take a walk with me. The place wasn't very far from where I'd parked. We were there in just under fifteen minutes. I didn't need the flashlight to help me through the trees, but it comforted my guest, so I took it.

"Who's Ralph Deerfield?" The fat cop asked, thumbing through the notebook. "His name shows up here a few times."

Outside, the storm had grown angry. Snow pelted the window. The wind gusted in raging waves. And something, the sound of wood splintering, the sound of a roof crushing under tremendous weight, groaned through the sounds of the blizzard.

"He's coming," Roger moaned.

"Just answer the question. Who is Ralph Deerfield? Did you kill him too?"

Jimmy and I stood in front of the shrub, shivering against the cold.

"You're a nut case, aren't ya'?" he laughed.

"Depends," I replied pulling aside the shrub to reveal the hole in the hillside just as my father had done twenty years before. I laughed loudly then, maybe too loudly because I could sense that my guest was getting nervous, fear had joined the cold in shaking the young man's body. "Some might just call me adventurous."

Jimmy saw the light inside the cavern, and he bent low to peer inside.

That's when I realized that toting the flashlight had been a good idea. It would be useful.

I brought its barrel down on the back of Jimmy's head, and he crumbled to the frosted ground, leaving a cloud of hot breath in his place at the face of the cave.

Instead of following me into the hole in the hillside, as I had followed my father, Jimmy was dragged into the mountain's mouth.

As I worked, tying his feet together and hoisting him towards the ceiling on the rigging my father had shown me, I thought about the man who had raised me, thought about the comforting smell of his pipe smoke and the warm cardigans he left hanging on the backs of chairs for me to try on when he wasn't looking.

"You see," my father had said, guiding me into the belly of the mountain. "Like those leaves, some of us have to fall. We nourish and in return we are allowed to thrive and grow."

Jimmy woke and found himself - I imagine much to his surprise - hanging upside down from a rope attached to the hood of a hollowed out rock. The illumination he had noticed in the cave came from a row of Christmas lights I powered with a small gas generator. Like Jimmy, they were strung from the ceiling. He started yelling at me, screaming for me to release him.

I'd never killed before, and I wasn't sure I could do it. Even though my father had told me what would happen if I didn't.

You see, my father explained it all to me that afternoon as we walked deeper into the cavern. The Sacred had wandered these hills for centuries. In ignorance men had settled on Its land to create cities while destroying Its peace. Anger at our presumption drove It to destroy until we displayed the proper respect. Our duty was to appease the Sacred, just once a year and nothing special. It didn't demand virgin or wealthy blood; any warmth would do. If we made the offering it would remain placid, feeding on the beasts of nature, until the next snowfall. If we failed, It would walk among us until It had expelled Its rage.

I didn't believe my father. I'm not certain that I ever believed him, not until I saw it.

"Would someone go outside and see who's making all that racket?" the fat cop yelled. "Christ, you'd think someone was tearing the town apart."

Roger didn't know to whom the fat man was speaking. He was yelling at a mirror on the far wall.

It mattered little. It was almost over.

As I watched Jimmy dangling from the ceiling, struggling against his binds, I nearly relented and lowered him. My father's story was impossible; I didn't believe in angels, demons or spirits. How could I?

But then the floor of the cave began to bubble. The shadow in the center of the room undulated and grew, reaching up towards Jimmy's hanging form. The Sacred emerged from the rock beneath the prostitute, resembling the fluid bodies of Manta Rays, stacked and skewered, rippling at the edges in a dance that frequented on hypnotic. Gray on gray, one tone lighter than the next, roiled over the stone floor. The form, one layer of billowing skin on another, like a stack of sheets blown by an unseen wind, drifted upward in arcing waves.

"You have to cut their throats," my father told me. "The heat of the blood soothes the Sacred until it is nourished."

Ralph Deerfield hung from the ceiling of the cave where twenty years later I would string up a young prostitute because I did not have the strength to draw offerings from my own community as father had. My father stepped forward with his buck knife and placed the blade against Ralph's neck. My best friend, the kid with the greatest comic book collection on the eastern slope of Colorado, thrashed against his binds.

My father said, "It's easy."

Ralph screamed. Jimmy screamed.

"Like this," Father said.

My knife cut smoothly through Jimmy's neck to release the warmth.

"What the hell is going on out there?" the fat cop roared. He pushed his colleague out of the way and stomped towards the door amid the grinding of timbers, the screeching of metal, the raging storm. "Would someone…"

Please don't open the door, Roger thought. Please don't.

Guns fired.

The fat cop screamed.

The snow simply fell.

The End