Free The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville Page B

shook my hair around wildly in the whirling wind that was battering around inside the car, blowing bits of paper in its wake. By the time I rolled the window back up, I had returned to reality, greatly sobered. What the hell was wrong with me?
    Of course, I knew what was wrong. Sam was dead, and I was having trouble visualizing life on this planet without him. It was what a schizophrenic might call being “beside yourself” with grief. Though I hadn’t seen or heard much from Sam these past seven years, he was always there in everything I did. In a way, he was the only really close family I’d ever had. For the first time I realized that in his absence I had conversations with him in my mind. Now I had no one to talk to, even in my head.
    Still I wasn’t about to join Sam in the happy hunting grounds this moment. Certainly not by flunking an intelligence test out here on the midnight road. It was then that I noticed a glow in the distance that I could just make out through the thick lacy curtain of snow. It was large enough to be a town, and there weren’t that many out here in the high desert. It looked like home to me.
    But the adventure was not quite over.
    I pulled up on the road above the house that contained the charming root cellar I called home, and looked down in exhausted frustration. The driveway had disappeared, vanished in the whipped-cream snow that was drifted above the first-floor windows. It seemed that after miles of grueling combat driving, I now had to face a dig-in to reach the house at all, much less to uncover my fathoms-deep basement apartment. That’s what I deserved for living in a cellar in Idaho—just like a goddamned potato.
    I turned off the ignition and sat looking in gloomy silence down the steep hill where the drive used to be and trying to figure out what to do. Like all mountain folk, in the back of my car I carried emergency supplies in all seasons—sand, salt and water, thermal clothes, waterproof footgear, firemaking supplies, jump-starters, ropes and chains—but I had no shovel. Even if I had, I’d be incapable of moving enough snow myself to get my car down that drive.
    I sat there, mindlessly numb, watching the soft, sifting shroud of falling snow dropping silently around me. Sam would say something funny just now, I thought. Or maybe jump out and start dancing in the snow—a snow dance, as if he were taking credit for the handiwork of the gods.…
    I shook my head and tried to snap out of it. I heard the phone ringing in my apartment below. The lights were off in the main house, suggesting that my eccentric, if adorable, Mormon landlord had gone off to the mountains to catch the fresh powder for tomorrow’s skiing—or perhaps over to the temple to pray for the driveway to clear itself.
    Much as I hated mucking about in deep powder, I understood that the only way to traverse the steep gap between the house and the car was to ski. Luckily, my lightweight cross-country boots and skis were in the back of my hatchback with the other survival gear. Now if I could only manage to follow the line where the drive should be. Our yawning chasm of a front lawn, nearly invisible beneath the drifts by now, might seem as bottomless and lethal as quicksand if I fell in to it. Also I’d have to abandon my car up here on the road for the night, where it would vanish too if the snowplows came through at dawn before I could rescue it.
    I got out and yanked the skis from the back of the car, as well as my duffel bag and a few belongings I thought I could carry over my shoulder, and set them out on the flat road. I had slipped in back to rummage for my boots when, through the side window, I saw my mailbox—identified by the little flag rising like a gay beacon from a drift—and suddenly recalled I’d forgotten to stop my mail when I’d left so hastily for the funeral. Slamming the back car door shut and hanging on to its handle for balance, I swept the mound of snow off the box and