Frozen by Jay Bonansinga Page A

bunched at his feet.
    Pale moonlight seeped into his motel room from somewhere off to his right. He shivered. The night-sweat dampening his sheets had chilled in an icy, inexplicable draft. He could still hear that keening sound from his dream, the horrible shrieking, and the beating of his own heart.
    He lay there for an awkward moment, waiting for blessed reality to drive the nightmare away. But something nagged at the back of his brain. He blinked. He stared at the darkness around him. Particles floated in the gloom. At first they appeared merely as spots drifting across his sleepy, compromised vision. Artifacts . Like specks on the backs of his dilated pupils. But the more he gazed at the darkness, the more he realized he was witnessing something far more corporeal than an optical illusion.
    Snow .
    It was snowing in his motel room. Grove swallowed dryly and clutched at the bedsheets. He glanced around the room and realized the walls had vanished. His heart quickened as he quickly registered several indisputable facts: somehow, in some spontaneous shifting of realities, his tousled bed now sat in a snowdrift on the side of a great primordial mountain, a sheer granite cliff rising up into the night sky behind his pathetic little veneer headboard.
    Grove sucked in a startled breath—the air icy in his lungs.
    A neolithic moon shone down on the alpine wilderness around him like a sinister, luminous face; and a gelid, angry wind swirled around Grove’s ludicrous, incongruous bed. His breath halted. The strangest part—the part that would be most difficult to explain to the uninitiated—was that Grove had experienced moments like this throughout his life, especially during times of great stress. Like the time when he was twelve and he saw a premonition of his best friend’s death by a hit-and-run drunk driver . . . or that time in basic training when he awoke one night to find himself chained to the lower deck of an eighteenth-century slave ship. Over the years, Grove had learned how to suppress the visions with little physical tricks, like a person with Tourette’s syndrome learning to bite his tongue or breathe more steadily.
    Without thinking, Grove suddenly did the one thing that he had always done as a child when such visions plagued him at night: he closed his eyes.
    In the blind darkness Grove felt—or perhaps sensed is a better word—a sudden, atmospheric whoomp, followed by a great inhalation of breath as the air pressure in the room seemed to return to normal. When he opened his eyes, he was back in his cheap Marriott single smoker, dimly illuminated by the predawn light coming through the dusty venetian blinds.
    Grove glanced around the room at the particleboard desk to his left, his suit neatly draped over the back of an armchair, the twenty-four-inch Sony mounted on a swivel to his right. He drank in all the insipid details like a seasick mariner gaping at the horizon line, clinging to the promise of dry land. He could see the tiny red night-light in the bathroom, and he could see his cell phone sitting in its charger near a tented pay-TV movie schedule. For some reason the sight of that little green dot glowing on his phone charger brought him back to reality. He let out a long, pained breath.
    He sat up. Clad only in his underwear, he noticed his entire body was rashed with gooseflesh. His teeth ached. His head throbbed, and needles of sleep still numbed his bare feet. He glanced over and saw the digital clock radio on the far bedside table.
    It said 3:11 a.m.
    He let out another long sigh. It had only been a couple of hours since he had stumbled back to his motel room from the Black Bear Lounge. But he felt as though he had been on a long, arduous journey since then. Now is not the time , he silently scolded himself. Put it away, forget about it. You got bigger fish to fry. You got a mummy with the same signature as an open case. Just stick with reality and do your job and forget