The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,135

temperature down in the fifties, and Wolgast had set the woodstove going when they’d returned from the store. He took the paper now and folded it into quarters, into eighths, and finally sixteenths, and opened the door to the woodstove. Then he placed the paper in the fire, watching with amazement at how quickly it disappeared.

SEVENTEEN

Summer ended, and fall came, and the world left them alone.

The first snows fell in the last week of October. Wolgast was chopping wood in the yard when he saw, from the corner of his eye, the first flakes falling, fat feathers light as dust. He’d stripped to his shirtsleeves to work, and when he paused to lift his face and felt the cold on his damp skin, he realized what was happening, that winter had arrived.

He sunk his axe into a log and returned to the house and called up the stairs. “Amy!”

She appeared on the top step. Her skin saw so little sunlight that it was a rich, porcelain white.

“Have you ever seen snow?”

“I don’t know. I think so?”

“Well, it’s snowing now.” He laughed, and heard the pleasure in his voice. “You don’t want to miss it. Come on.”

By the time he got her dressed—in her coat and boots but also the glasses and cap, and a thick layer of sunscreen over every exposed inch of her skin—the snow had begun to fall in earnest. She stepped out into the whirling whiteness, her movements solemn, like an explorer setting foot on some new planet.

“What do you think?”

She tipped her face and stuck out her tongue, an instinctive gesture, to catch and taste the snow.

“I like it,” she declared.

They had shelter, food, heat. He’d made two more trips down to Milton’s in the autumn, knowing that once winter came the road would be impassable, and had taken all the food that was left there. Rationing the canned goods, the powdered milk, the rice and dried beans, Wolgast believed he could make their stores last until spring. The lake was full of fish, and in one of the cabins he’d found an auger. A simple enough matter, then, to set up fishing lines. The propane tank was still half full. So, the winter. He welcomed it, felt his mind relax into its rhythm. No one had come after all; the world had forgotten them. They would be sealed away together, in safety.

By morning a foot of snow had piled around the cabin. The sun burst through the clouds, glaringly bright. Wolgast spent the afternoon digging out the woodpile, cutting a trail to connect it to the lodge, and then a second trail to the small cabin he planned to use as an icehouse, now that the cold weather had arrived. By now he was living an existence that was almost entirely nocturnal—it was easiest simply to adopt Amy’s schedule—and the sunlight on the snow seemed blinding to him, like an explosion he was forced to stare directly into. Probably, he thought, that was how even ordinary light felt to her, all the time. When darkness fell, the two of them went back outside.

“I’ll show you how to make snow angels,” he said. He lay down on his back. Above him, a sky effulgent with stars. From Milton’s he’d recovered a jar of powdered cocoa, which he hadn’t told Amy about, planning to save it for a special occasion. Tonight they’d dry their wet clothes on the woodstove and sit in its glow and drink hot cocoa. “Move your arms and legs,” he told her, “like this.”

She got down in the snow beside him. Her tiny body was as light and agile as a gymnast’s. She moved her nimble limbs back and forth.

“What’s an angel?”

Wolgast thought a moment. In all their conversations, nothing of the sort had ever come up. “Well, it’s a kind of ghost, I guess.”

“A ghost. Like Jacob Marley.” They had read A Christmas Carol—or, rather, Amy had read it to him. Since that night in summer when he’d learned she could read—not just read but read expertly, with feeling and expression—Wolgast had merely sat and listened.

“I guess, yes. But not as scary as Jacob Marley.” They were still lying side by side in the snow. “Angels are … well, I guess they’re like good ghosts. Ghosts who watch over us, from heaven. Or at least some people think so.”

“Do you?”

Wolgast was taken aback. He’d never gotten completely accustomed to Amy’s directness. Her lack of inhibition struck him on the one hand as