Lights Out

The rain had started at noon, and by dusk it had turned the whole world to glass.

It fell out of a low brown sky as ordinary rain, soft and steady, and the moment it touched anything it froze. Every twig on every birch along the Institute's drive wore a clear sleeve of ice, and the weight of it bowed the branches down until the smaller trees arched over the road like the ribs of a tunnel. The power lines sagged in long glittering loops. The gravel of the staff lot was a sheet of gray glass. Somewhere back in the woods, as Elias eased the car into a space, a branch let go with a crack like a rifle shot and came down through the other branches in a long shattering rush, and then there was only the hiss of the rain again.

Elias sat in the car with the engine running and closed his eyes for a moment. Just a moment.

When Elias opened them again the wipers had stopped and the windshield was frosted over with a thin skin of ice, and the clock on the dash had moved on four minutes.

That was all right. Four minutes. Elias had been awake since seven o'clock on Wednesday evening: a full night shift in the lab, and then all of Thursday downstairs running nap tests for the day tech, who had the flu, five naps two hours apart for a teenager who fell asleep in every one of them; and now, because the weekend tech had slid into a ditch on the county road an hour ago and was waiting for a tow truck, Thursday night too. Teddy was in St. Paul for his sister's wedding. There was no one else.

Four minutes was nothing. Elias got out of the car.

The cold hit like a slap, and the ice underfoot was so smooth that Elias had to cross the lot in a shuffling skater's walk, arms out, bag swinging. Above, the old sanatorium stood glazed from cupola to foundation, every brick and window ledge and gutter coated in clear ice, so that in the last gray light the whole building seemed to have been dipped in glass and set out to dry. Icicles hung from the long porches like organ pipes. The east wing, unlit, glittered faintly along its whole length, blind and cold.

From the side of the building came a steady scrape, scrape, scrape.