The Mist

Einar finally lost control of his temper.
Fervently, pointlessly, she wished that the stranger had never entered their house; that she could turn the clock back twenty-four hours. If she were given another chance, she would slam the door in his face this time.
Another chance …
Here she was on Christmas Eve, miles from anywhere. It was a white Christmas – a white Christmas all right, she thought, feeling the urge to laugh hysterically, but there was nothing magical about it. It was shockingly, brutally, cold but she kept going as fast as she could, away from the house, down the slope on what she knew to be the road, although the landmarks were blurred by drifts.
She had the feeling she was running to Anna, although she knew her house was too far off and that she’d never make it there alive, not in this weather, not dressed like this. Yet she felt compelled to flounder on, as if in a nightmare, her body sluggish, pitted against the blizzard, the chill piercing her to the bone, her breath coming in gasps. She wasn’t fit enough to keep going at this pace and yet she couldn’t stop.
She wasn’t going to give in until her body refused to go any further.
The thought flashed through her mind that she could actually die out here, but next moment it was gone and she had returned to obsessing about Einar and his terrible temper; about Anna, her beloved daughter, their only child. And about that stranger who had come to wreck everything; to ruin the life they had spent years, decades, building up for themselves. Maybe she wasn’t always happy, not every day, but it was still her life and he had no right – no right – to do this. To upset everything.
She slowed to a halt, exhausted, and peering round, her eyes screwed up against the stinging flakes, was shocked to realize how little ground she had covered. All her senses were muffled by the snow. Even though their house wasn’t far off, she could make out its shape only in the brief gaps between the curtains of white sweeping across the landscape. It looked drearily dark and inhospitable in the power cut, with no welcoming glow from the windows. Locked in winter’s icy grip.
Einar and the visitor were probably still yelling at each other in the attic, and she was glad to be away from the naked show of aggression. Blindly, she blundered forwards again, trying to catch her breath before the wind snatched it away, as if fleeing someone or something palpable.
She could feel the suffocating snowflakes filling her nose and mouth, and the cold spreading through her thinly clothed body, but she didn’t have time to think about that. Didn’t have time to brush the ice from her eyelashes; just kept stumbling on. She knew instinctively that she was following the road. As long as she did that, she couldn’t get lost. That absolutely mustn’t happen. She was going to turn back, of course, but only after Einar had solved the problem, as he always did. She knew she could count on him.
He could be determined. Stubborn, even angry, but, she kept reminding herself, he had never taken it out on her, let alone on Anna.
Erla was conscious that every step was bringing her closer to Anna’s house, although it was still impossibly far away.
She slowed down, unable to keep up the same pace, and halted for a moment, only for the cold to force itself on her consciousness again. Her fingers were numb, and she clenched her fists again and again to get the blood circulating, but it didn’t really help. She had to turn back; she couldn’t keep up this madness. It was then that she spotted the car.
There it was – their jeep, their old green jeep, hardly recognizable under its thick quilt of snow. Einar always left it parked some distance from the house in winter, since the last slope up to the farm was the most difficult stretch, where the deepest drifts formed.
She snatched a hasty glance over her shoulder, terrified that someone had followed her. Facing into the wind, she squinted against the snow, but couldn’t see any sign of pursuit, only a maelstrom of tumbling white flakes.
Erla didn’t have the strength to retrace her steps, not without a rest. Her whole body was racked with shivers, her teeth chattering. She started scraping frantically at the snow around the driver’s door of the jeep, then wrestled with the handle, her fingers painful with the cold, almost weeping with fear that the mechanism would be frozen. Thank God they never locked it. Finally, she got the door open, dragging it through the soft, piled-up drift until she could crawl in through the gap and get behind the wheel. It was dark in the car, with the windows crusted over with ice. She groped for the ignition, only to find that Einar hadn’t left the keys in it, as he usually did, so she wouldn’t be able to switch on the engine to get the heater going. Still, although the car was freezing inside, it did at least give her a respite from the storm. She sat there panting, getting her breath back, and closed her eyes for a moment, just to summon her strength, not to fall asleep – she knew she mustn’t succumb to the drowsiness that began to steal over her.

XX
Erla woke with a jerk to find herself sitting in the driver’s seat of the jeep. She must have dozed off, but had no idea how long for. Given the risk of hypothermia, she was lucky to have woken at all.
Had she heard a noise, or had that been part of her dream?
Stretching her cramped limbs, she peered out of the window to her left, only to come face to face with a pair of eyes staring in at her through a narrow gap that had been cleared in the ice.
She flinched away, breathless