Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

Rebecca rolled onto her side, drew her knees up to her breasts, and willed herself into a sleep fraught with dismal dreams.

The blizzard continued to gather strength as the night progressed, dumping huge quantities of snow on Hidden Valley and on the high, steep cliffs through which County Road 235-A passed down into the valley. The last two cars to traverse the road-crawling ten minutes apart shortly before 1 A.M., like yellow-eyed animals in the storm-belonged to Matt Hughes and Peggy Tyler, returning from the Whitewater motel. Both sets of tire tracks were obliterated almost immediately.

More hours passed, and still the blizzard remained relentless. Drifts built higher and higher along the cornice at the near, lee side of the western cliff crown, while the screaming wind dislodged other snow from unsheltered places and hurled it downward into the pass in lacy white spumes. Long since rendered impassable, 235-A had a covering of more than eighteen inches by five o’clock.

At five thirty the blow reached its ultimate savagery. The scattered lodgepole pines clinging to the top of the western cliff were bowed double like genuflecting pilgrims, and the swollen cornice collected ever-greater amounts of heavy snow. It went on that way for a time-and then, just before dawn, the low-hanging clouds that sailed continually eastward on the high-altitude currents began to develop fragmentation lines, like amoebas about to reproduce. The snowfall decreased steadily until it was a thin, fluttering curtain. Gray light filtered into the sky, lengthening visibility, giving substance to the bloated shadows along the crown of the western wall.

The blizzard was over; but the destruction it had fomented was only just beginning.

First there was a rumbling-a low-pitched, throat-clearing sound. The overburdened cornice shuddered, shaking whiteness as if a buried giant had awakened and were trying to rise; slender vanguards spilled free in frothy cascades. The rumbling grew louder, and louder still.

And the entire cornice gave way.

Billowing snowclouds choked the air like white smoke, and a massive tidal wave of snow and ice and rock flooded downward with a thunderous, vibratory roar that was as loud as a bomb blast in the early-morning stillness. Granite outcroppings were ripped loose as though they were no more than chunks of soft shale; trees were buried, uprooted, or snapped like matchsticks and carried along. And in a matter of seconds, the plunging mass filled a section of the pass the way a child would fill an excavation in the sand…

Lew Coopersmith sat bolt upright in bed. The deafening noise rattled the bedroom windows, reverberated through the big, shadowed room. He struggled out from beneath the bedclothes and moved in sleep-drugged motions to the window; but from that vantage point he could see nothing to explain the sudden explosion of sound, now lessening into small, receding echoes.

The door connecting his bedroom with that of his wife’s burst open, and Ellen rushed in. Her round, handsome face pale and frightened, silver hair braided into a long queue down her back, dressed in an ankle-length white nightdress, she was a ghostly figure in the semidarkness. “Dear heaven, Lew,” she said, “what is it, what is it?’

Cleared now of all vestiges of sleep, Coopersmith’s mind began to function normally, and he remembered what John Tribucci had told him in the Sport Shop Monday afternoon. He turned fully from the window. “I think,” he said grimly, “that we’ve just had an avalanche.”

John Tribucci knew instantly that they had just had an avalanche.

An early riser by nature, he was in the bathroom shaving when it happened. The magnitude of the noise startled him, caused him to cut his cheek. He put down his razor, tore off a strip of toilet paper, and blotted perfunctorily at the thin ribbon of blood. He could hear Ann’s voice calling to him from the spare bedroom adjacent, the voices of his brother and his brother’s wife in their room down the hall.

Ann was sitting up in bed when he came hurrying in. He sat beside her, took one of her hands. “You all right, honey?”

“Yes. But you’ve cut yourself…”

“Just a nick. I’ll live.”

“It was a slide in the pass, wasn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“It sounded like a bad one.”

He nodded. “I just didn’t think it’d happen this soon, before Christmas, before the baby came.”

“You’d better go have a look.”

“Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Our child is kicking the devil out of me, but I don’t think he’s ready to put in an appearance yet.”

Tribucci kissed her, went out into the hall, and met Vince on the stairs. Neither of them said anything as they hurried down and out into the cold, gray morning.

In the first moment of wakening, Cain thought it was an earthquake.

He had been born in San Francisco, and natives of that city are sometimes consciously, always subconsciously aware of the network of faults on which they live and of what happens when the pressure in those faults becomes too great and the earth begins to shift as if in orgasmic release. The deep guttural rumbling, the rattling, skittering vibration of windows and boards and bed which pulled him up out of sleep were sensations not new to him. Immediately, fuzzily, he thought: Quake, big one, Christ it’s finally happening-and flung the covers away from his body and rolled out of bed. He was without equilibrium and fell jarringly to his knees. Pain burst through his left kneecap, and the sharpness of it flooded his mind with abrupt reality.

He struggled to his feet and felt sweat icing on him in the cold room. The cabin was no longer trembling, and the sudden roar had given way to a strained quiet. He thought then, sluggishly: What the hell? and walked naked into the front room. Leaning against the windowsill, he peered beyond crystallike glass.

Lights on all over the village below. Sky clearing, lightening, and a gentle snowfall now; the storm was finished. To the north there was a sifting cumulus of what appeared to be snow, like a white dust cloud settling. It meant nothing to him.

He turned away from the window. His head had commenced to throb with hangover, and he felt vaguely nauseated; he was shivering from the cold. Maybe something blew up, he thought, but it was a dull speculation. He did not really care what it had been; it was over now, it was unimportant, it could have no bearing on his existence.

Cain went back to bed and lay waiting for the sleep he knew would not come again.

Matt Hughes said, “I’d better get down there. If that slide is as bad as it sounded, I’ll be needed in more ways than one.” He crossed to the bedroom closet, shedding his pajamas, and began to dress quickly.

Rebecca drew the blankets tightly against her throat and did not look at her husband. The sheets were sleep-warm, but she was still touched by the same cold as on the night before. The masculine odor of Matt’s body and the faint lingering perfume he had brought home with him were vaguely repellent in her nostrils.

The sound of the avalanche and the spasming of the house had startled her badly at first; but once she had known what it was, once Matt had jumped up and run to the windows and begun shouting about a pass-cliff slide, the apprehension had left her, and she was calm. He hadn’t seen that, though; with maddening condescension he had told her not to be frightened, that everything would be all right-as if she were the intrinsic child and not he.

He said now, as he buttoned one of his soft-wool shirts, “John and Vince Tribucci were right, after all. But there’s nothing we could have done; you can’t control nature or counteract the will of God.”