Free Frost by Harry Manners

things. “Look at them. Look at your fate. Do they look dead to you?”
    Kitty tried to scream and fight her way back to her body, but all she managed was internal thrashing. The subway could have been the most distant memory of another life.
    That voice continued slithering in her head, an ugly, oily slick upon her mind. “I want at least one of you to know what’s coming. Congratulations, Katherine Genie Bates. You have a choice nobody else has: how to spend your last hours on earth.”
    “Dear Lord in heaven, hallowed is thy name,” Kitty muttered, drooling with the horror of it, the nauseating fear and cold—so cold.
    He knows my name. I pray thee, Lord, save me.
    The subway car crashed back into place around her, but those eyes remained. In desperation she searched her alcohol-obliterated Sunday school memories for more scripture, but came up blank.
    She spat, “Christ, help me!”
    That voice again, a sigh that brought her out in goose-flesh: “ What do you know of God? ”
    The demon held out his hand. For a moment she glimpsed foot-long claws protruding from the wrist that would have put Freddy Kruger to shame. He waved a hundred dollar bill in the air. “How fast can a person drink themselves to death, I wonder?”
    Kitty swayed on her feet, gurgled, and turned to grapple with the door to the next car. Crashing through into the midst of a fresh cigar-tube of marks, she tripped and stumbled her way along until she hit the next car, and the next, and the next, until at last she hit the end of the train, where she pressed herself against the rear door, hyperventilating.
    “Dear god, god, god. Help. Help.”
    He’s on his way to do it right now. Going to end it all.
    The train pulled into a station and she lurched out onto the platform, sucking lungs of air in an attempt to stay conscious. As the train pulled away, she couldn’t help glancing through the glass, and screamed aloud at the sight of him , splayed claws outlined in red tendrils of unearthly light. He waggled his fingers in farewell, and then the train pulled out and vanished into the dark tunnel, heading south towards Queens.
    But she knew where he was heading. Somehow she knew. In her mind’s eye she saw something, a long dark hole in the earth that led… somewhere else.
    When the tunnel behind her brightened, heralding the arrival of the next train, she stepped up to the platform edge and shook her head. “I’m not going there. Not to that place.”
    They were all going to be taken to that frozen darkness to work, to labour , to carry the weight of—what?
    Somewhere on the edge of her perception, a swinging shadow, a rhythmic tick-tock. A bob on a string, beyond any scale imaginable. They were being taken to carry the weight of that swinging behemoth, and free something terrible. The source of all the pain, cold and fear ever felt. A winged, shining whiteness, wide eyed and holy and beautiful, underneath all tar and blood and wailing agony.
    She tittered as the lights ahead resolved into two headlights, and she bobbed on the balls of her feet.
    The vanguard on the train, the demon, had been her saviour. He had given her a choice, an escape.
    Oblivion.
    “I choose,” she muttered, and cried a silent thank you as she threw herself forwards. She fell towards the tracks amidst wailing horns, screeching brakes, and all consuming, rancorous, black laughter.
    All the while she smiled, covered head to toe in flakes of ice.
     
     

11
     
    “You’re pretty spry for a guy full of holes,” Jack said.
    Barry spared him a glance. “A man with a plan always looks that way… even if he’s blagging every step of the way.”
    “What?”
    “Keep up, we’re almost there.”
    Jack didn’t bother asking where. There seemed to be no reason to Barry’s rapid twisting and turning, between blocks and through underpasses, none he would ever understand.
    However, he felt they were going the right way. Somehow they were going forwards despite roundabout