The Magic Circle, Katherine Neville [parable of the sower read online .TXT] 📗

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 extracted the mail that must have been building up all week. It was more than I’d imagined. So with my other hand I let go the door handle and reached for the duffel bag, unintentionally stepping slightly away from the car.

With that first step I sank into snow up to my waist, and I kept on sinking. I felt the fear clutching at me as I struggled to keep from panicking. I knew that thrashing about would only make me sink faster. I’d lived in these parts long enough to hear of many folks who’d been smothered, sinking into bottomless snow where they couldn’t move arms or legs to free themselves. And the second I started to sink, it also occurred to me that I’d departed for the funeral with little fanfare, only telling my boss there’d been a death in the family and leaving a cryptic note for my landlord. It was entirely possible, even though my car would be found, that no one would find me until after the spring melt!

I tossed the disabling pile of mail up onto the road—under the car so it wouldn’t sink into the drifts and vanish too. I managed to get one elbow propped on the solid surface, clawing with my other hand until I could twist enough to get both arms flat on the road. When I pushed myself up, it felt like vaulting from a swimming pool with fifty-pound weights on my legs: it wrung out every ounce of energy I had. I lay flat on my stomach on the road, shaking and hot with fear and exhaustion. It didn’t last long; soon the chills set in as the clinging ice from my full-body dip in that snowbank saturated my inadequately waterproofed clothes.

I staggered to my feet and yanked the car door open. Cold, soaked, thoroughly wiped out, I was furious with myself. Wasn’t Jack London’s To Build a Fire required reading for mountain children? About a chap who goes out in the tundra at sixty below, against all advice. He freezes to death. Very slowly. Not what I had on my agenda.

I pulled the cross-country boots from the car, laced them with stiff fingers in soggy gloves, snapped on my long, featherweight Nordic skis, stuffed the bundle of mail in the duffel, slung it over my shoulder, and slalomed down to the back door. Why hadn’t I tried that as my first idea, and bypassed Mr. Postman until morning?

The phone was again ringing as I shed my skis, threw open the door, and half tumbled—along with a mess of powder—down the steep stairway to my cozy dungeon fortress. At least, it had been cozy when I’d left it a week ago.

I flicked on the lights, and saw ice caking the inside of the windows and patterns of crystals formed on the mirrors and picture glass like something out of Dr. Zhivago. Softly cursing my landlord, who turned down my heat to spare expense whenever I left the building, I yanked off