The Christmas Wolf Read online

  THE CHRISTMAS WOLF

  A Short Story

  By W.D. Gagliani

  Author of Wolf’s Edge (Samhain Publishing)

  Published by W.D. Gagliani

  Copyright © 2011 W.D. Gagliani

  First E-Book Edition, December 2011

  Cover by ProGnosis

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contact:

  Tarkus Press LLC

  PO Box 214

  Oak Creek, WI 53154

  http://www.wdgagliani.com

  http://moodelevator.wordpress.com/

  Other books by this author:

  Wolf’s Trap – Nick Lupo Series, 1 (Samhain Publishing reissue; March 2012)

  Wolf’s Gambit – Nick Lupo Series, 2

  Wolf’s Bluff – Nick Lupo Series, 3

  Wolf’s Edge – Nick Lupo Series, 4 (Samhain; Ebook 2011, Trade paper January 2012)

  Savage Nights (Hard-noir Thriller)

  Shadowplays (Fiction Collection)

  Mysteries & Mayhem (with David Benton, Fiction Collection)

  Mood Elevator (with David Benton, Short Story)

  THE CHRISTMAS WOLF

  By W.D. Gagliani

  Northern Wisconsin

  December 23

  1

  The snowstorm had been predicted, but it rolled in faster than expected as most Alberta Clippers tend to do. Sweeping south from Canada, it drove freezing temperatures and wind chills into the northern Great Lakes, but because of the lakes’ proximity it also began to dump up to a foot of snow in a wide band that unfortunately encompassed the majority of Carl’s route to the lodge.

  “Maybe we should turn back,” Lynn suggested, from where she snuggled close to Carl. He was gripping the wheel tightly; she could see his fingers turn white where they grasped it. His very reliable xTerra was fine in the rapidly accumulating snow, but he was having trouble seeing the boundaries of the gently snaking road due mostly to the uneven drifting. “It’s only about an hour back to Eagle River,” she added.

  “More like two,” Carl said without taking his eyes off the road, or what he could see of it. If it wasn’t for the tree line past the shoulder on both sides, he would have had no idea where the concrete ended. Problem was, in many places the shoulder was a slice of gravel falling away to a steep ravine, and the snow was masking the delineations so well it might as well all have been the same. “I think we can make the lodge without too much trouble, and then we can hunker down and wait out the storm. There’s nothing for us to do the whole week…”

  “Nothing?” Lynn asked, cracking a wise smile. He couldn’t see it, but she knew he heard it.

  “We’ll be otherwise occupied. Let it snow, like the song says.” He chuckled. Her hand was in his lap. They were on the same page.

  An atypical winter vacation opportunity for him had led to this wild idea, staying a week at one of those log-cabin ski lodge style resorts in the middle of the Upper Peninsula, a couple hundred miles farther north than either of them had ever been. Eagle River was their normal playground, in winter a haven for snowmobilers and Nordic skiers, but this trip was taking them well north of Watersmeet, Michigan, which they had left behind just as the storm kicked in.

  Lynn didn’t want to show him how nervous she felt. She patted his jeans half-jokingly and half-seriously. But she barely wanted to take her eyes off the road, figuring two attentive pairs would be better than one under the circumstances. They’d already spotted several deer at the side of the road and one startled in mid-leap that Carl had barely avoided, almost skidding into the ditch they called a shoulder around here.

  Worse, now the falling snow was thickening by the minute, the flakes growing in size into cotton balls. Unfortunately, the rate of the snowfall also increased, so the beauty of the snow quickly tuned nightmarish. Visibility had been poor at the start of the storm, and now it was worsening. The high beams exacerbated the situation; the light bounced off the sparkly flakes and turned the area ahead of them into a glowing sno-globe with little visible beyond its borders. Trees beside the road, mostly jack pines standing in endless ranks, their branches already loaded with new snow, came into view and disappeared beside them like desert mirages.

  “Shit,” Carl whispered harshly. The snow seemed to grab the vehicle’s undercarriage as its depth increased almost visibly. They were raking the crusting top snow layer as they drove, and he turned now to face Lynn briefly. “If I slow down we might just get stuck, and if I speed up I can feel the wheel fighting me. We could end up in the ditch. They wouldn’t find us until spring.”

  He grinned and faced forward. It was like him to make a joke, but the seriousness of the situation was plain in his tone.

  They’d tried their phones repeatedly, to call the lodge, or back to Eagle River, but no signal was apparent.

  Things sure looked like they were getting worse by the minute. Running out of gas would be the clincher.

  Lynn suddenly realized they hadn’t seen another vehicle in an hour.

  “Somebody coming at us might not see us until it’s too late,” she said, aware that she was piling on.

  “Yeah, and they’d be sticking to the middle of the road. Like we are.”

  Her hand squeezed his thigh for a second. Moral support.

  “How about the GPS?” She tipped her chin at the bright unit set in the dash.

  “I think it’s working fine, but we’re not really lost – we’re just blind. Maybe radar would help.”

  She didn’t want to ask, but she had noticed that the GPS display wasn’t showing any cross streets, trails, or anything else. Just large white areas with occasional patches of impossible green, or ominous black. Carl had tried zooming in and out, with no real result. Either it was malfunctioning or there was simply nothing but the road they were on… for miles.

  He must have been reading her mind.

  “We’re in trouble, Lynn. There’s just not much chance we’ll make the lodge any time soon, and if we don’t find an alternative we’re screwed. We’ll run out of gas before the blizzard’s over. We’ll freeze.”

  “Thanks for keeping us entertained with the light jokes,” she said, but her hand gripped his knee in lieu of prying his hand off the wheel. She wanted to not worry, to trust his quiet steadfastness – a trait she loved – and she wanted to communicate her trust, and her love, through the thin layer of her hand’s skin.

  They drove on in grim, tense silence, the quiet of the snowfall contrasting with the crunch under their wheels.

  She knew he was avoiding her eyes, using the brief seconds during which they left the road to scan the useless display.

  2

  Carl kicked himself for the bad decision. He should have used his head. He’d lived in the North Woods long enough to know that sometimes you had to leave Nature to play its games alone. He knew that sometimes your human ingenu
ity and intelligence and intellect meant nothing in the face of the wild woods. He’d been shown by better men than he that you never should take Nature lightly.

  But Lynn had seemed so smitten with the idea of the lodge at Christmas. Hell, at first they’d bemoaned the possibility of going to all the trouble and then being drenched in a late-year rain storm. Her eyes had positively glowed with silver and gold at the mention of the place she’d found – Quiet Acres Lodge, All Major Credit Cards accepted – tucked away in the Upper Peninsula. He’d been satisfied with the Eagle River area, but she was right that sometimes the snowmobilers ruined everything with their irreverent and noisy (not to mention drunk) roaring up and down the trails. This place was a glorified bed & breakfast, from what he could see on their web page, and maybe only the lodge lobby itself was made of logs, but still, it sounded romantic enough… and certainly quiet.

  But the romantic part was important.

  Carl had a ring in a box he’d managed to keep hidden from her. It was a horrible Lifetime Channel cliché, he knew, but how could he not take the opportunity and move his plans up a week? He’d figured New Year’s Eve would be the night, but this sudden trip was much better. Sometimes a cliché is just what the doctor ordered, because then you can both reminisce and laugh about it years later.

  Shit, shit, shit. Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so easy a romantic fool.

  No, given the way the snow kept falling, the GPS showed nothing, and their phones refused to connect to any signal at all, he’d pretty well struck out.

  He gripped the wheel as hard as Lynn gripped his leg, and even though her nails were starting to make his skin numb, he was very grateful for the contact.

  He smiled at her, but she didn’t notice, because her head was swiveling so as to keep her eyes peeled for any sign of –

  3

  “Look, there’s a mailbox!” Lynn said. She pointed off to the right, barely within their circle of light. Not much else was visible.

  The mailbox was slightly tilted, which was probably why they were able to see it at all. The angle of tilt caused the gathering snow to slide off whenever its weight grew enough. There was a scratched off name and number on the box, but otherwise it seemed rusted and neglected.

  Still, it indicated that someone might be nearby.

  Someone with shelter, or at least a phone.

  Shelter.

  Such a simple word, yet it meant so much when you didn’t have one. Lynn considered that, like the cliché, Carl had become her shelter from all the bad things that had happened to her. The death of her parents. Her ex-boyfriend’s betrayal. Her descent into despair.

  When her co-worker Jackie had introduced her to Carl, she hadn’t held out much hope. He was good-looking, if a bit rough around the edges. He spent half his year in the North Woods, and he had seemed somewhat distant at first, maybe too intense. But he had surprised her by being funny yet serious, deep yet able to laugh at silly movies (he loved Abbott & Costello and Martin & Lewis, go figure). And he’d been loving, slowly allowing her to see his own hardships and how he had surmounted them, drawing them together because they shared similar family experiences.

  And she wasn’t even sure how they’d become lovers, but it had happened in the middle of some completely harmless activity that had led to their clothes being drenched… and it was like a stupid movie, after all, but there it was, life could sometimes seem like a dumb rom-com, except that things often didn’t actually work out with everyone happy ever after.

  Carl stopped.

  “Lynn?”

  He’d been talking to her, but her mind had wandered.

  “Sorry, I was daydreaming.”

  They’d crunched to a stop on the growing blanket of snow. “We have to decide,” he said. “Keep going, take our chances, or try for somebody who can put us up for the night. At least allow us to check our phones, or use a land line.”

  She nodded. “Doesn’t look well-traveled, exactly, this road – or driveway. Whatever it is.”

  “No, but once the blizzard’s over we can at least figure out a plan. Pay for a day or two, if we have to. If we keep going and that…” – he indicated the GPS – “is correct, and there’s just nothing ahead for miles, we could just end up frozen to death. For real.”

  She gazed into his striking green eyes. He was still calm, even though she was beginning to feel her stomach quiver, the beginning of what might turn into a serious trembling. Was she just cold, or were her nerves starting to act up? She appreciated his concerned look.

  “Okay, then, let’s pull in. Gotta be a house in there somewhere.” She eyed the snow-laden trees that almost hid the narrow track, creating an almost complete white tunnel effect. “I mean, you’re right. This snow’s not slowing down.”

  “Damn the lake effect,” he said. “We’re inside the bands, I bet. If we were just fifty miles to the west, there’s probably nothing but rain there.”

  “Well, we wanted the whole white Christmas thing,” she said, waving it off as trivial. It hadn’t seemed trivial when they’d decided. A fireplace, log walls, down comforters, brandy and rum (they had some in the back, along with a precious bottle of B&B) and hot chocolate.

  And sex, she admitted to herself, lots and lots of hot and romantic sex.

  Sure, we should have thought it through when we heard about the damn clipper.

  “All right, I’m going for it.”

  “Hope it’s not some serial killing backwoods clan,” she joked. “Like an X-Files episode.”

  He made a fake chuckle. “Right…”

  Then he gave the truck some gas and the wheels struggled to start moving, sliding uselessly as the heat melted the top layer of snow, but then the four-wheel drive bit and he turned the wheel and they nosed past the mailbox. The track – you couldn’t really call it a road – was narrow and snow slid off the trees continuously so that it lay in clumps over the smooth white layer that somehow fell through the covering trees.

  They made ruts in the thickening snow, leaving the mailbox behind. They could judge the width of the road only by keeping both sides in sight, walls made of straight pine trunks and occasional birches or oaks. The spaces between the trees were narrow and even though the air was white, those opposing slats were black.

  Amazing how little visibility there was, not only in front of them, but also to the sides. The woods seemed to be impossibly dense right up to the road. Lynn stared at the sides until she thought she was seeing things…

  “Hey, Carl?”

  “Yeah?” He was still gripping the wheel, but had relaxed a little. No semis to come barreling at them out of the whiteout here, at least.

  “You expect to see moving shadows in the woods?”

  He hesitated, concentrating on the slow going. In a minute he said, “I guess there’s probably deer and the like. Why?”

  “No reason.” Lynn looked ahead, where he was looking, but whenever she flicked her eyes to the side she thought she saw stealthy movement. “Deer. That sounds right.”

  They drove in silence for a minute, the road simply opening up in front of them but not very quickly. Then she added: “But wouldn’t deer be huddled in their nests or whatever, during a blizzard?”

  “I’m not sure, Lynn,” he said. “They have to eat, right?”

  She was watching something dark moving in the woody darkness just beyond the front rank of pines. Actually, it was more than one shadow. A couple, at least.

  Crap, now I’m seeing things.

  They’d been on the narrow drive for about ten minutes when she realized that it seemed to be getting narrower. She looked at Carl through the corner of her eye and he seemed to be more nervous. He licked dry lips and caught her looking.

  “Need to hydrate,” he said by way of explanation.

  She was about to respond, asking if he wanted a water from the back, when she saw movement in the woods.

  “There they go again!”

  “What?” he said, slowing so he could turn
and look. The heater was working hard, the blowers were keeping the windows mostly clear, but the snow seemed to have closed in behind them and to the sides, so it was like looking through milk. But she’d seen shadows flitting from tree to tree, she could swear it. She described what she had seen.

  “Rabbits, maybe. Playing in the snow.”

  She frowned. “Large shadows, Carl.”

  He blew out a frustrated puff of breath. “I don’t know, sweetie, but we’re in desperate need of finding something at the end of this road. Those shadows are probably a trick of the light. This is almost a whiteout, by the way I understand it.”

  No way.

  But she didn’t say it. She kept one eye on the front, and one eye wandering sideways. Didn’t see anything for a minute, two minutes, three – then, there they were again.

  “Here’s something!” he said suddenly.

  She almost jumped. “What?” The shadows stopped as the car did. No, not her imagination.

  “Look.” He pointed not quite to the front, but off toward her side.

  At first she struggled to pick out anything from the whiteness of everything, but then she slowly made out the lines of a building. A cabin, a cottage, some kind of one-story house. Covered in a mantle of white until it blended into the background, and dwarfed by giant snow pyramids that she assumed were drooping pines.

  “Oh, man, looks empty.”

  In fact, details were starting to come into focus. The structure sagged a little. There was a chimney, mostly buried. Cold. There was a porch with only a thin layer of snow driven into blank windows like staring eyes on both sides of a wooden door.

  Carl goosed the gas and they crunched forward. He maneuvered closer, until snow globes – they had to be fluffed bushes – stopped them. The snow was a folded mantle covering the wooden porch. She saw slices of the wood in places where the playful wind eddies swirled snow about.