The Snowman Pact

Candi drove the last mile with the window cracked because Luke had insisted the truck smelled like gasoline, and Luke sat with the contest entry forms on his lap, tapping them against his knee.

"We are not doing the top hat," she said. "I'm serious, Luke. Everyone does the top hat."

"It's a classic for a reason."

"It's a classic because nobody has imagination. We're doing the antlers."

"Antlers on a snowman." He said it the way he might read a bad clause in a contract, flat and slow, as he checked the math. "Antlers."

"Forty-four years old and you've never once trusted me on a creative decision."

"I trusted you at a conference on subjunctive tenses, that's hardly the same thing." He grinned at her. "Fine. Antlers. But if Barney wins again, I'm blaming you in front of the whole lake."

"You'll blame me regardless. You love having a scapegoat." She pulled into the boathouse lot, gravel crunching under ice. "There's Moira. Number bibs out already. Look at her, she's got the clipboard and everything."

Moira stood at the bottom of the boathouse steps with a stack of paper bibs and a thermos she was clearly not sharing. She had been the caretaker up here since last summer, and she ran the contest like someone who needed the job, which she did. She waved them over with two fingers.

"Candi, Luke. You're team seven."

"Seven?" Luke took the bib and pinned it on crooked. "Last year we were four."

"Numbers go by sign-up order, love, and you signed up late because Candi couldn't find her gloves." Moira looked past them. "Barney's already on the ice, if you care. Third year running he's been first out here."

"He's been first out here because he retired and we have jobs," Candi said.

"He's been first out here because he's a menace," Moira said, and went back to her clipboard.

The lake was frozen hard enough that a dozen people were already scattered across it, rolling snow. The evening light was going that thin grey color it goes up here, where the sky and the ice end up almost the same shade and you can't tell where the world stops. The boathouse sat on stilts at the shoreline, its lower door locked, its upper window lit.

Barney was, as promised, out on the ice with a snowball the size of a beer keg.

"Well, well," he called, when they got close. "Team Seven. My favorite team to beat."

"Barney," Luke said. "Still doing your snowman of yourself, I assume?"

"It's called a self-portrait, and the judges loved it two years running."

"The judges are your drinking mates."

"They're objective drinking mates." Barney rolled the keg another turn. "How's the translation business, Luke? Still charging by the word?"

"Still charging enough that I don't have to stand on a frozen lake in January for money."

"You do though. You're here."

"He is here because of me," Candi said, "and because he's petty about losing to a fisherman."

"I'm petty about losing to anybody," Luke said. "It's a character flaw. Candi reminds me weekly."

"I do, and he improves yearly." She looked at Barney, and then she did the thing she did, the thing Luke both dreaded and admired, which was lean in. "Barney, sweetheart, tell me honestly. Is the self-portrait anatomically accurate this year?"

Barney laughed so hard he had to put a hand on his own keg of snow. "Oh, she's a wicked one, Luke. You keep her."

"I intend to," Luke said, and Candi felt that settle somewhere warm in her chest, the way it did every time he said something like that without performing it.

They picked their spot near the boathouse, maybe forty yards out from the shore, close enough that Candi figured they could run a power cord if they ever got ambitious about lighting. The snow out here was deep and clean, untouched. Luke dropped to his knees and started the base roll.

"Three tiers," he said. "Classic proportions. Then your antlers, which I still maintain will look like the poor man's been impaled."

"Then the judges will remember us, which is half the battle."

"And the other half?"

"Bringing a flask, which I did." She patted her coat pocket.

The first twenty minutes went well. The base got fat. Luke talked about a client in Inverness who wanted a Portuguese contract translated by Friday and how the man kept phoning him about commas, and Candi half listened and packed snow and thought about how strange and good it was, being forty-two and kneeling on a lake with a man she'd met three years ago over a debate about whether English even had a future subjunctive. It didn't. They'd argued about it for two hours anyway. She'd decided somewhere in that second hour that she was going to take him home.

Then the ice groaned.

It wasn't the usual groan. Candi had lived around frozen lakes long enough to know the normal sounds, the pops and the long slow settling creaks that happen all day when the temperature swings. This was lower. It came up through her knees and into her teeth, and it seemed to travel, rolling from somewhere out toward the middle of the lake and passing under them and continuing on toward the shore.

"Did you feel that?" she said.

"I felt it." Luke sat back on his heels. "Cold snap. Ice does that."

"It's not a cold snap kind of groan. That was a something-walking-on-it kind of groan."

"Candi."

"I'm just saying. That was directional."

Luke looked out across the lake. The light was nearly gone now, and the other contest teams had become a scatter of headlamps and lanterns, little yellow points floating on a black sheet. Somewhere out there, somebody laughed. The snowmen, the ones already standing, were dark shapes with lamps beside them, and Candi noticed, in the way you notice a thing you immediately tell yourself not to notice, that one of the shapes seemed farther from its lantern than it had been when they arrived.

She said nothing about that part. She packed more snow instead.

"There's a chill coming off the water," she said, working the seam of the second tier. "And I don't mean the weather kind."

"It's January in the Highlands. Everything's the weather kind." But he'd stopped rolling, and he was looking at the boathouse, at the lower door, the locked one. "That said. Moira keeps a pressure cooker on the shelf in there. You saw it when we signed up?"

"The dented one on the top shelf, yeah. Why?"

"Barney mentioned it last year. Said Moira uses it to boil the judges' mulled wine when the wind kills the outdoor burner. Said it's older than either of us and she refuses to replace it."

"Barney says a lot of things."

"He said it whistles wrong. Said it doesn't whistle at all, it makes a sound like the lake does." Luke looked out at the middle of the ice again. "Which I thought was drunk talk at the time."

Candi stopped packing snow. The chill she'd been feeling, the one under her coat that no amount of wool explained, had moved. It sat now at the base of her skull, and it had a direction too, and the direction was the boathouse, or possibly whatever was under the boathouse, in the black water between the stilts where nobody had ever put a light.

"Luke," she said. "Promise me you're not about to tell me a story about that pressure cooker."

"I'm not going to tell you a story about it. I'm going to suggest we win this contest quickly and go home."

"Antlers and all?"

"Antlers and all." He rolled the second tier over and set it, and it thumped down on the ice with a sound that got an answer from somewhere beneath them, a long low note, patient, almost polite, like something down there clearing its throat before it spoke.

Candi looked at her gloves. She looked at the flask in her pocket, which she now felt she'd earned the right to open.

"Well," she said. "At least the base is solid."

Candi was reaching for the flask when the boathouse door banged open and Moira came down the steps with a lantern in one hand and a clipboard in the other. "Team seven. You're not packed in yet?"

"We're pacing ourselves," Luke said.

"Pacing yourself loses contests." Moira shone the lantern over their two tiers and made a note on her clipboard. "Barney's already got three tiers up. Three. And his mates are judging."

"His mates are judging every year," Candi said. "That's not news."

"It's news to me and I run the thing." Moira clicked her pen twice, which seemed to be a habit rather than a punctuation. "I've got soup going in the shed for the break. Fifteen minutes, anyone who wants it. And if the burner goes out, I'll be using the cooker inside, so don't anybody touch it."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Luke said.

"Good." Moira looked at them a moment longer than she needed to. "You two look pale. Cold's getting into people early this year."

She went back up the steps, and the lower door, the locked one, stayed locked. Candi watched the lantern bob up the shore path until the trees took it.

"Fifteen minutes of soup," she said. "We could keep building and ignore it."

"We could also sit indoors for fifteen minutes with our hands around a warm mug, which sounds like a plan made by someone who likes her fingers."

"That does sound like me."

They packed the second tier a bit more, mostly to say they'd tried, and walked in. The boathouse upper room was small and honest about it. Woodstove, two benches, a shelf along one wall with clutter on it, and the dented pressure cooker up on the top shelf where nobody would accidentally take it down. It sat there the way a cat sits on a thing it knows you want.

Moira poured them soup from a pot on the outdoor burner and went off to argue with a judge's helper about bibs. The soup was good. The flask made it better. Luke had one swallow and handed it back, which Candi counted as a marriage-grade act of love, or whatever the unmarried version of that was.

"Third tier after this," she said. "Then the head, then the antlers."

"Then the win." She looked out the window at the ice. The lamps were still out there, little yellow points, and the snowmen were still dark shapes beside them, and one of the shapes still looked wrong, and she still wasn't saying so. "It's very quiet out there all of a sudden."

"The wind dropped."

"The wind dropped and everything got quiet and you think that's better?"

"I think it's January, Candi."

"January. Fine. January."

He rinsed the mugs. She watched the ice through the window and told herself the shape hadn't moved because shapes don't move, and then she stopped looking at the window and looked at him instead, which was the better view by any measure.

"Soup's done," Moira called from the doorway, all business, wind-flushed. "Back out with you. And Barney's asking whether team seven is scared of a bit of weather."

"Barney can ask his snowman," Candi said, and they went out.

* * *

The third tier went up without drama. The head was a good sphere, Luke's best work, and Candi was pressing the first antler branch into the snow with real confidence, actual belief in their cause, when Luke straightened up and slapped his gloves together.

"Soup," he said. "I'm still hungry. I'll nip in and heat the rest. Moira said the burner's out anyway."

"Take the flask."

"I'm leaving you the flask. One of us needs to be happy."

He went in. She heard the lower door, the locked one, thump twice, then his boots on the steps, then the upper door, and she kept working the antler, and the ice groaned again, that travelling one, middle toward shore, and she decided that if she heard it a third time she was going to say something official about it.

Inside, Luke found the soup pot cold and the burner dead, exactly as advertised. He looked at the shelf. The pressure cooker sat up there on the top shelf, dented, old, patient. Moira had said don't touch it. Moira had also said she'd be using it for mulled wine if needed, and she was twenty yards away arguing about bibs, and the soup was cold, and he was hungry, and, he reasoned, a pressure cooker is a pot. It is a pot with opinions. He was a grown man of forty-four who charged by the word; he could operate a pot.

He got it down. It was heavier than it looked and colder than it had any right to be, and the lid had a gasket around the rim that had gone hard and grey, like an old eraser. He filled it partway, set it on the woodstove, and waited.

It took a few minutes to come up to pressure, and when it did, it didn't whistle. It made a different sound. It made the sound.

He knew that immediately, the way you know a voice on the phone. It was the lake sound, the low travelling note, and it was coming out of a pot on a woodstove in a boathouse, and the pot had begun to shake.

"Right," Luke said, to the pot, to the room, to nobody. "Right."

The hiss came from under the lid, off-centre, and the lid rattled, and the whole cooker walked a half inch across the burner top, and Luke, who had never in his life felt true fear in a kitchen, felt the base of his skull go cold in a way he recognized from the ice outside, and the pot took another step.

"CANDI," he said, reasonably enough, and then less