Latham's Landing by Tara Fox Hall Page A

in pain at the impact and
disappeared.
    Getting the bullets blessed had
worked. Caroline let out a long breath.
    Helter looked at her. “Why did yours work and
mine didn’t?”
    “ Mine didn’t either,” Carolyn lied
darkly. “The isle’s just toying with us.” She produced a box of
matches, then walked onto a stone wall which stood near a wooden
enclosed porch. “Get back. It’s going to go up with a
bang—”
    “ You’re burning the manse down?” Helter
said, incredulous. “It’s stone—”
    “ The inside is wood, and so is most of
the porch,” Caro said, striking a match. “I just doused the outside
with ten gallons of gas. That should start things going, no matter
how damp the wood might be—”
    A sudden brisk wind came up, slapping the
match out of her hand. The sun ominously faded as a cloud shielded
its light, muting the sharp sunlight to a dim rosy glow.
    Caroline grabbed for a new match. “Damn it,
it was just afternoon, it can’t be sunset—“
    “ No,” Helter said, pointing to the
west. “A storm is coming.”
    There was a rumble, and then a rapid
lightening of air pressure, as if the tension had ceased. Then it
began to hail, the chunks of ice quickly becoming bigger than
quarters. They ricocheted off the snowmobile, denting the shiny
metal.
    “ We need to take cover!” Helter shouted
to Caroline.
    “ I’m not going inside a gasoline soaked
wooden house!” she shouted back.
    Helter grabbed her arm, then hauled her along
behind him as he ran to the porch. She shook him off as they
stumbled up the stairs.
    “ Are you crazy?” she said.
    “ Do you smell gas?” he
demanded.
    “ We go in there and it’s all
over—!”
    “ Do you smell gas!” he shouted at
her.
    Caroline took a deep breath, her eyes
widening as she took in the dry unstained porch that moments ago
had been wet and dripping with accelerant. “No.”
    Helter touched the weathered wood slats of
the porch. “Because there’s no gas on here anymore. It either was
somehow absorbed or it completely evaporated.”
    “ How do you know this?” she
yelled.
    “ Because that’s been tried before,”
Helter said in an ominous tone. “This house won’t burn.”
    Caroline stared at him, dumbstruck.
    Both of them stood, looking out at the
snowstorm that was rapidly becoming a blizzard. “We can’t go back
out across the ice in this,” Helter said. “We need to take cover
here.”
    “ We can’t go inside, either,” Caroline
retorted. “You know it wants us to go in.” She waited for him to
call her a liar, to tell her she was crazy for thinking Latham’s
Landing was alive.
    “ I agree,” Helter replied, to her
surprise. “But we need to stay near it, or risk falling through the
ice. Where’s your snowmobile? I’m assuming you didn’t walk out here
dragging ten gallons of gas.”
    “ It fell through the ice in the
shallows,” Caroline said, flushing.
    Helter stared at her.
    “ What?” she exclaimed. “I couldn’t see
where the ice ended and the shore began, with all this snow. The
pictures I saw were old, before the place had been
modernized.”
    Helter looked away. “Dig into the snow here
by that wall. We need to know if there is ground beneath it, or
just more ice.”
    Caroline began digging in the snow with her
hands. Helter took a long rope from his pack and tied one end to
the porch, then the other around his waist. He trudged out into the
now blinding whiteness, and was lost from view. A few minutes
later, a dull roar began, then his snowmobile crept slowly into
view dragging the sled, coming to a stop right near the porch.
    “ There’s earth here,” Caroline said,
showing him a bare patch of ground with dead brown weeds. “And some
kind of short wall in front of us.”
    “ Good. I was hoping for that.” Helter
untied the rope from his waist, then tied it to the sled before
dismounting. “Come on, I could use your help.”
    “ With what?” Caroline said still
digging.
    “ Pitching