An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

found they didn’t help very much. It took skill and a measure of luck to pull out of the parking lot and cross the southbound two lanes into northbound traffic, slow though all the traffic had now become. Snowdrifts seemed to be growing up right under the wheels; most of the pavement had completely disappeared.

    It was odd, she thought, but the storm itself gave her no concern for him. From the first time she had made it a habit not to think much about his strangenesses. But even without thinking she understood that his dangers and most of his problems were not the same ones that ordinary mortals had to contend with on most days of their lives.

    Being herself a member of a family of ordinary mortals, Judy was still concerned to find out what she could about the storm and its effects, and turned on the car radio. “The Little Drummer Boy” was playing. She changed stations, to a jock babbling about a repeat of the great Chicago blizzard of ’67. He managed to make it sound, as he managed to make everything in his world sound, like a prospect of nothing but infinite fun. But he conveyed no solid information.

    For a little while she forgot the radio, having to concentrate on steering and adjusting speed so as not to ram the red tail lights just ahead. The highway, when she could see it at all through the blinded air, did not look at all like the same thoroughfare she had traversed only a few minutes ago coming south. Here a drift, though still a shallow one, had established itself all the way across, resisting the continuous work of the wheels to cut a sideways segment of it into slush. At this point Judy passed her first genuinely stalled car of the night, which blocked part of what was rapidly becoming a single northbound traffic lane. She eased around it and kept going, at about ten miles per hour. Now she could once more spare a hand to switch the radio.

    After three more tries she found a station giving some substantive weather information. Travelers’ advisories had been changed to warnings…twelve or more inches expected tonight and tomorrow…wind from the east, the lake effect…again, the great blizzard of ’67. Judy’s memory held one vivid record of that event, a picture of a shoveled walk with walls of snow almost like those of a tunnel on either side, their tops level with her childish head.

    As long as she could keep her car going at all, it didn’t seem that maintaining a more or less steady five-to-fifteen miles per hour was going to be a problem. The lights ahead were not trying to go any faster than that, and those in her rearview mirror held their distance cautiously. She counted a few more stalled cars and then stopped cautiously. They were already everywhere, sometimes up to their fenders in drifts, angled onto the shoulder of the road, or in one case, right athwart an intersection and surrounded by futile pushing men. Yet still the single northbound lane kept moving, winding right and left among the fallen.

    Daddy would certainly be spending the night in town…he did that fairly often, usually, of course, because of business…and Mother would be stuck in Evanston tonight, Judy supposed, camping at some friend’s house if she could reach one, at worst settling into a chair in the hospital lobby. They would be phoning home by now, most likely, giving explanations.

    Luckily she reached the next intersection on a green light, so she was able to creep through without stopping. Once stopped in this, anyone without four-wheel drive might very well not get moving again. Now only half a mile more. Things wouldn’t be too bad now, even if she did get stuck. She would simply tuck her pants into her boots and make it home on foot.

    But minute after minute Judy’s luck held and her skill prevailed. She reached the home driveway in falling snow so thick that she almost missed the familiar turnoff when it came. Then she spun the wheel, gunned the engine, and her car lurched into the untracked drifts of the drive. Snow caught and held it, with a great feeling of finality.

    Let it stay stuck until spring; she was home. With a sigh of relief Judy turned off the engine, pocketed the keys, tightened her scarf, and got out into the blizzard.

    Looking toward the house, she saw at once that the front porch light had been turned on; Gran must be up, and would of course be worried about her, about all the family scattered in the storm. Struggling toward the light, squinting at it into the teeth of the storm, Judy was halfway across the drifted lawn before it struck her that something must be wrong. To begin with, there were huge tracks in the snow just in front of the door, and more of them than she could possibly have left on her departure. Worse than the tracks, a line of interior light shone out now at the door’s edge. Gran had a thing about drafts, about keeping the cold sealed out…

    Hurrying forward, gasping in the frozen wind, Judy tried to tell herself that what she saw were only signs that her father or mother had somehow managed to get home after all. The fantastic disasters of recent days were making her see perils and imagine monsters everywhere…it didn’t help at all that this scene reminded her inescapably of the other house she had so recently approached, walking alone through almost untracked snow.

    She reached the door and hurried in, gasping with sheer animal relief at the cessation of cold and wind. Automatically she made sure at once that the door was snuggly shut behind her.

    “Gran?” In the quiet of the house Judy could hear the television