The small pool of green fluid pooling around his feet as he stared in horror told the fate of the car that had been held together mostly with hope over the years. The steam rising from under the hood provided an odd moment of noxious warmth from the surrounding frigid air. He closed the hood and looked up into the dark clouds. Only a faint blur of the moon could be seen in the cold Midwest sky. By now the frigid rain had nearly completed its metamorphic transition to falling ice.

Inside the car sat his worried wife and baby daughter, barely six months old. Out of the range of any available communication, there was not much choice. He would have to make the walk back for help to the last tollbooth they passed — two and a half miles back.

Climbing over the back seat so as to preserve as much heat in the car as possible, he grabbed his gloves and hat out of the back of the car. As he slunk back into the driver’s seat, he kissed his daughter on the forehead. For a couple of seconds he sincerely wondered if it would be the last time he ever saw her.

His wife reached back and brought the child into the front seat to help keep her as warm as possible. He kissed his wife and reached for the door handle. As he left, he turned on the emergency blinkers, hoping that the car’s battery would hold out and continue to provide a faint but definite beacon in the freezing darkness.

The door clasped shut with a cold thud. On his best day he knew he could cover the distance in about thirty minutes. But in the freezing rain and cold he knew that time would be nearly impossible to beat, and it would be even more so if he didn’t stop thinking about it and get moving. Weak flashlight in hand, he turned his body north, away from the car, and took the first of many steps.

Still relatively warm, he made the half mile to marker #125 with relative ease. He’d wave his flashlight at the passing cars, but none stopped. He wasn’t angry at them though. He knew they probably couldn’t see the small light in the rain and ice. He might as well been shining that light from the fuzzy moon overhead. He stopped getting his hopes up after the fourth car passed, not out of defeat, but out of acceptance that he wasn’t likely to be seen. Still he plodded along with one determined step, and then another, and then another.

By marker #126 his glasses had long since lost their benefit and were duly relegated to his inside coat pocket. He chuckled to himself as he wondered if these were not the conditions imagined by the coat manufacturer when it was advertised as being water resistant. Despite the double layered gloves and reasonably warm hat, his ears and fingers had already started to go numb. Still he plodded along, knowing he was over halfway there, but oblivious to the time it had taken him to reach this point.

The traffic was completely void now. His only companion now was the wind, the darkness, and the sleet. In between the bitter gusts from the north, he could hear his waterlogged shoes crunch through the ice collecting on the pavement below him. As if out of habit, or maybe hope, he turned for a moment to look back towards where the car should have been, but the distance and the weather had completely obscured that view long ago. He turned back north, switching the flashlight into his left hand in order to give the numb fingers of his right hand a momentary stretch.

As he passed marker #127, he could see the tollbooth a few hundred yards away up on the right. His goal was finally in sight. He stopped for a brief moment to take off his hat and shake the ice off of it, more to give himself a short break than anything having to do with the condition of the hat. By now the coat, the hat, the gloves, and the jeans were all only providing a modicum of protection, nearly soaked completely through from the drudging trek into the sharp teeth of the wind-driven frozen hell coming down out of the sky.

Barely able to keep his eyes open because of the whipping wind, he never saw the pothole in his path on the highway’s shoulder. He stumbled and collapsed to the rippled pavement, howling in pain into the darkness. Not even an echo was returned by the nothingness that surrounded him. He rolled over onto his back and winced again. From the surface of the rocky tarmac, the tollbooth mocked him silently as a lighthouse in the distance.

For a minute he thought about giving up, about rolling off the pavement into the ditch and admitting defeat. He never believed in guardian angels, and it was because of situations like this. A guardian angel would have held that radiator together long enough to get to family. A guardian angel would have stopped another traveler a mile ago. A guardian angel would have pushed him that extra half step it would have taken for his left foot to avoid that pothole. Common sense finally got the better of him, though. Soaked, cold, numb, and in pain, he had to keep going. He knew he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to see her walk, he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to see her walk to school, he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to walk with her down an aisle, he had to keep walking. If he ever wanted to see his grandchildren walk, he had to keep walking. He had to keep walking.

On one good leg he managed the will to pull himself upright and start again, limping and wincing at ever step. It was only a couple of minutes to the base of the hill where the tollbooth stood. The only question left was whether he could make it there before his left knee was completely drained of what remained of its usefulness.

He literally dragged himself up the last hundred feet of that hill as if he was reaching for the summit of Everest itself. A tollbooth worker dashed away from her post to help him the rest of the way. As he collapsed onto a couch in the small office shack next to the tollbooth, tears streamed down his face from the pain, diverting around the ones already frozen before they had a chance to fall off his jaw. Very soon a patrolman would be dispatched at high speed to rescue his wife and daughter from their sheet metal-thin shelter. Soon they would know his plight, his mission, was a success. Soon they would all be safe and sheltered from the storm. Soon his family would be there with warm drinks, dry clothes, and a towing trailer.

He reached his hands out gingerly towards the space heater placed in front of him. The feeling was slowly starting to return to his face as the kind tollbooth worker handed him a cup of hot chocolate and wrapped a dry towel around his neck. As she pulled away, he glanced at the name tag on her collar.

Her name was Angela.

The staccato of her father’s mantra tumbled through the mind of young Madeline Summers like acorns through the branches of the tall, sprawling tree behind her home several hundred feet away. Over the years, she heard it so many times she allowed it to pass over her without the effect it really should have. It had entered into the trite rotation of expressions drummed out every day to her.

“Eat your vegetables.”

“Wipe your feet.”

“Clean your room.”

“Don’t be outside the house after sundown.”

“Say your prayers every night.”

It was a set of commandments you would not forget under the roof of Pastor Summers for fear of spending your entire Sunday afternoon sweeping the church after service.

The door creaked open slowly, almost painfully, as if it was actively fighting the forces against its hinges. In front of her, just left of her center view, only a sliver of the protective yellow globe remained in the increasingly orange sky. The cramped interior of the woodshed didn’t allow Madeline to get a running start. She reached up and grasped the trinket hanging from her neck, squeezing it until she winced in pain. The one thing Madeline hoped for as she approached the threshold of the woodshed, more than anything, was an answer to her latest prayer. Without that, tomorrow afternoon’s church cleaning would be the least of her concerns. Under her breath, so soft she couldn’t hear herself, a final plea wispily fell away from her lips before she leaped over the stairs.

The land was flat, deceivingly so. The nearly level perspective often made things seem so much further away than they really were. She wondered if this was the case again here or if the house really was so desperately far away. She ran steadily but not at her best speed. She knew even though she needed to get to the house soon, but burning all her energy in the first third of the run would be a sure death sentence.

As if it had disconnected from the rest of her being, her mind started recalling scenes with her father when she was a little girl. She remembered being in her father’s loving arms but also remembered his stern warnings and frightening stories. He told her about how the darkness had been after the Summers family since they moved to this tiny, time-warped Midwest town nobody outside the county had heard of. He always reminded her there was and always would be safety in daytime, God, and family — in that order.

In a moment of reconnection, her eyes refocused, one on the house and the other on the setting sun. The thin dime in her pocket would have eclipsed the remaining rays of safety were it held flat to the horizon. Had she bothered to glance to her right she would have seen she the family well representing the halfway mark between the house and the woodshed. Such measurements of progress were not important — “she made it halfway” would be hollow and patronizing words on a tombstone. She pushed herself to pick up the pace a little, knowing well she had very little time left.

She remembered her father’s continuous and stubborn refusal to move away. He refused to move away despite the many nights they’ve gone without sleep from the tapping on the roof. He refused to move away after his cattle were slaughtered during the first winter. He refused to move away after the second year’s crop mysteriously died. He refused to move away when the parish offered him a way out of his commitment. He refused to move away after his wife Lynne was lost to the darkness four summers ago while gathering water from the well. He simply refused to yield to evil, even if it ended up costing everything dear to him.

She realized, without the need for markers, she was definitely closer to the house than the woodshed. Her chest could barely contain her heart, pounding from a combination of nerves and exertion. Her lungs burned, begging for more air than she was capable of giving them. Her legs ached, nearly numb from a run which she was not prepared for.

She didn’t need to look up — the shrieks coming from behind her, painfully frightening and yet very familiar, were all the notice she needed of the last rays of hope dropping below the horizon. Almost on instinct, she turned her head towards the horrors that were tearing the very air itself, losing her balance and tumbling to the ground. She got up, dazed by her own fall. Her left knee took the brunt of the impact with the hard soil and trickled blood as a result in a twisted random pattern down her shin — as if she needed something else further announcing her presence to the abominations already on their way.

She started her run towards the house again, this time with everything she had left. It wouldn’t matter if she tired before she made it. With the sun down, all that mattered was getting to the house before the darkness got to her. Less than a minute from the house, every last immeasurable ounce of energy she could muster went to her legs. She closed her eyes for a moment in the hope she could somehow channel the energy for her sight away to the movement of her legs. She knew they could outrun her, or rather outfly her, so she had to take advantage of what little head start she had.

She dared not turn her head to look at her pursuers, partially for fear of stumbling again and partially for fear of freezing in fright, but she knew they were close. Their shrieks were growing louder and closer together. By now they had definitely honed in on their prey and were racing to get it before it could get to safety. Only a dozen or so strides remained for Madeline to make it to sanctuary. She could hear flapping capes joining the chorus of shrieks behind her. The air behind her grew cold, almost freezing, as one of the purest forms of evil — evil so pure the Devil himself cowered from it, her father would tell her — made its way to within inches of her. For something that wasn’t alive, she swore she felt it breathing on her neck. The warm air to her front combined with the cold to her back was enough to make even the staunchest of men uneasy at the stomach.

As she hurled herself up the four steps to the Summers’ home, she looked up from the ground for the first time since her fall. In the full frame of her view was Pastor Summers. He was standing on the very edge of the porch with his right arm thrust outward defiantly and his eyes fixed, unwaveringly tracking her pursuers. Madeline could tell nothing would ever strike real fear into the heart of this man — nothing on this planet at least.

She collected herself from a collapsed pile of exhaustion on the porch in time to see the figures of shadowy evil flying away from the House of Summers, shrieking now in anger and disgust rather than anticipation. Her father turned to her with a look best described as a conflicted mix of anger, relief, and compassion, as if he couldn’t make up his mind which emotion to express. In the staunch iron grip of his right hand was something Madeline had not seen in over four years — her mother’s crucifix.

In his left hand was a broom.