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there was no light at all. Vehicles
hunched against the curbs wore scaled skins of white. For such a
change in the costume of the earth, noise was expected, but it was
as if silence itself fell in shreds from the darkness
above.
    Lenny was a rail-thin silhouette
against the gathering of lights at the head of Brennan Street, his
stride purposeful, shoulders tight, hands jammed into his pockets,
breath pluming.
    Jake squinted, hobbling through the
packed snow as fast as he could bear it, praying his knees wouldn’t
quit on him. The thought of ending up face down in that cold fluffy
mold was enough to send shivers rippling through him. “Lenny, slow
down,” he called at one stage but his cry went either unheard or
unheeded.
    Lenny moved on, Jake struggling to
keep up and wondering, as he guessed his friend was, what the hell
Baxter had to report and what he’d do when he found they’d left the
house rather than wait.
    He prayed Joanne was all right, though
a selfish part of him, a mindless, insensitive creature he kept
locked away in the foulest recesses of his subconscious, yearned
for her to be dead, so Lenny could share in his suffering. So he
would no longer have to face the nights alone. Lenny’s advice was
good, but it welled from a shallow pond in which his friend had
never washed, a source that sprung from sympathy, not
empathy.
    Only through his own loss could he
understand Jake’s and then, they could help each other through the
dark.
    Jesus , Jake thought, snapping back to himself, what the hell is wrong with you?
    He’d been friends with Joanne almost
as long as he’d known Lenny. She was a small, stout woman, full of
well meaning bluster but more than capable of adopting an evil
temper if it suited her needs. In many ways, she was her husband’s
polar opposite and in this case at least, the old saying about
attraction held true. Their love was as strong as Jake and Julia’s
had been, even if the Quicks' method of maintaining their
relationship was to feign indifference towards each other and to
trade sarcastic barbs as much as possible.
    Remembering that malevolent whisper
from the back of Jake’s mind brought a rush of guilt so strong it
was almost debilitating and only a quick glance at the seething
white mass engulfing his feet kept him moving.
    Six blocks did a respectable
impression of twelve before they reached Lenny’s house – a small
two-story stucco with sagging gutters and a crumbling chimney
electric heating made redundant. A television aerial, lashed to the
chimney, stood against the paler patches of wind-wracked sky like a
stitch in discolored flesh.
    Jake was somewhat surprised to see
that Baxter’s car was not parked outside. If he had already set out
for Jake’s house then they would have met him on the way here. The
vehicle he had initially mistaken as the police cruiser as they
approached proved to be Joanne’s Toyota. From what he could see of
it in the grainy light, it appeared undamaged.
    Lenny, who had not spoken a word since
they’d left Jake’s house, suddenly stopped at the foot of the
driveway and looked from Jake to the dark house brooding before
them as if it was an alien thing, a cold and indifferent
replacement for something he had loved. His face was
unreadable.
    “ Something’s going on. I
don’t like this one bit,” he said, just loud enough for Jake to
hear. “She always leaves a light on, even when she’s out.” He shook
his head. “ Always .”
    “ Maybe she’s gone to bed
already.”
    Lenny stared at Jake for a moment
before sidestepping a mound of dirty snow presumably left in the
wake of a plow, though the street certainly didn’t look as if
anything but the wind had traveled it in the past few
hours.
    Heart thudding and unable to shake the
feeling that there was something amiss out here, something other
than Lenny’s deserted house, Jake looked around, his breath
emerging as ragged ghosts the wind tore away from him.
    Quiet.
    Perhaps that was
it