Warmth
by Lee Thomas

"How many did you kill?"

Roger remained silent, staring blankly at the table, ignoring the two cops hovering over him.

"Did you write this?" The fat officer asked, waving a notebook over Roger's head.

Soon it wouldn't matter. That which was sacred, that which he had failed, would be revealed soon enough. He didn't want to waste his time repeating what he had already committed to paper.

"We got us a regular serial killer here."

But there was nothing regular about Roger, and if they'd read the damned confession instead of waving it around like a flag, they'd understand that his taking of life provided him no thrill, no ventilation for rage. In fact, his duty brought him only misery.

He did not have the killing instinct. Maybe the others had found excitement in the ritual, Roger didn't know.

"What about that kid in Evergreen?"

In the distance, he heard a car horn blare. The sound died quickly to be replaced by the grinding of metal on metal.

Tears ran down Roger's cheeks. His body trembled. Roger looked up at the two men interrogating him; one stared angrily, and the other slapped the notebook against his leg.

When I was ten my father took me into the woods above our house. He knew I was afraid because the weather was turning cold, and everyone knew that once the first snow fell, another kid would disappear. There would be another empty desk at school. That was how I marked winter in those days, by the kids whose seats were empty on the day following the first snowfall.

And the weather was turning cold.

My best friend in those days was Ralph Deerfield, a round kid with the greatest comic book collection on the eastern slope of Colorado, or at least what I imagined was the greatest collection since I had only seen his, and it took up five good-sized cardboard boxes.

"Do you know why the leaves fall?" my father asked. We stood in a broad stand of Aspen. The leaves had already turned golden with red veins. Though a few littered the ground at our feet, most still clung to the skeletal white limbs. Before I could answer his question, he said, "Leaves fall to help the tree live. They compost and draw insects that live and die there in the ground near the trees. The leaves return to the ground to provide food for the trunk and the limbs. That way the tree can make it through winter until new leaves sprout in the spring."

"Just tell us, what did you do with their blood?"

I followed my father through that stand of Aspen and began the long climb. The hillside was covered in frost. The ground looked like the skin of a decomposing dragon; leaves, like scales, dotted the crusted earth. We climbed nearly to the top of the hill and then my father stopped and held out his hand.

I noticed his shirt parted; I saw the nest of hair on his chest, and I wanted to curl up there and be warm and not hear anything else about leaves feeding trees. All I wanted was warmth and cartoons or one of Ralph's really good comic books.

"It's going to snow tonight," my father said, gripping my hand tight, tighter than he had ever grasped it before.

I trembled.

My father sensed my fear and smiled. "Don't worry, Champ. The Snow Man can't hurt you."

That's what we all called the guy who stole the kids, the guy who created the empty chairs in class. We called him the SnowMan. We believed that he snatched kids and then ate them up like a fairy tale troll, and in our mythology, any one of us could be next.

We stood on an outcropping of stone beneath a forest of evergreens. I gazed out to the west where the sky was still blue because I already knew what I'd see to the north. I'd see the clouds rolling in over the mountains; I'd see the snow coming.

I didn't want it to snow.

"We're a lot like those leaves," my father said, putting his hand on my head. He guided me down a narrow path, between the pine and the spruce sentinels on either side of the trail, until the trail ended at another steep hillside. "A lot like them," he said.

"The blood, you asshole… Did you drink it? Bathe in it? Shit, we're not getting anywhere with this guy."

My first one, his name was Jimmy, I found him in Denver at a bar on Ninth Street. He followed me around for about thirty minutes, a beautiful kid with longish red hair and one of those mouths you can't help but want to taste. He was very pale, so pale like a statue. Beautiful.

But I didn't kill him because he was beautiful, nor because I have some deep self-loathing or because I feel sexually inadequate.

I killed him, quite simply, because I had to.

We spoke for nearly an hour before he told me that his company would cost me a hundred dollars an hour. I laughed and assured him that money was not an issue. I'd pay him five hundred for the night if he'd avail himself to me. He leaned forward and kissed me, and as I'd expected, his lips were narcotic.

I asked him to leave the bar and meet me in twenty minutes by the Capital Building. I slipped a twenty into his palm as a token of good faith, while shaking his hand goodbye. I told him to bundle up against the cold; the weathermen had promised snow later.

After Jimmy left, I made a point of speaking loudly with the bartender and even hitting on a couple of men who showed not the slightest interest, at which point, I left for my rendezvous.

"We know you fucked them. We found semen in the throats of two of the kids and in the rectum of the others. Safe sex not big in your neck of the woods?"

Outside, the sound of crunching metal continued, but the officers didn't seem interested. Roger stared at the iron grate covering the window. Snow salted a black blanket of night. A scream rose and fell so quickly it might have been the wind whistling through a crack in the windowpane.

"You get off on cutting them up? Does the blood make your dick hard?"

Just read.

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

Story copyright Lee Thomas, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com